Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [79]
“I know it sounds crazy, Joe. But you believe in this stuff. What if he had psychic talent to draw me to him? I mean, what is the extent of this kind of thing?”
“It sounds like something I’ve never heard of. I mean, if I believed that…”
“What about the burns I saw? In the mirror?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and for the first time ever in their friendship, she thought she detected a flicker of distance in him. As if he were looking at her in such a way that he needed to see her as damaged. As deranged.
“Joe, I’m not crazy. I know I’m not. I saw him. I think he did what he said—he streamed into me. And when I came out of it, too suddenly, I saw him for a split second. He told me that I couldn’t be inside him unless he first opened me. He said it. And that’s what it was. I saw inside him. That’s what I saw with the burns. But…if he were burned as a kid, how could he look so…normal?”
Joe thought a moment, and said, “I worked with a woman once who had been in a car crash. Eighty percent of her body had burned. Five years later, with a lot of surgery, she looked better than she ever had. I guess, maybe if you saw him naked, you’d see the burn. If…if you really saw something that was real. Julie, now don’t get pissed off at me or anything, but if you saw this for just a second, couldn’t it maybe have been some kind of hangover from what he did to you? Like waking too fast from a dream?”
“Joe,” she said. “I saw things. Things I’ve forgotten. Things that…he unlocked inside me. And then, I thought I heard him. Inside me. But not from me. Maybe it was crazy. Maybe it was my mind on hyperspeed. But I saw him.”
“Diamond?”
“No,” she said. “Hut.”
4
Julie finally opened up about the apartment on Rosetta Street.
“I know that block. It’s creepy already. I had to walk through there at night one time, and I swear the ghosts of all the cows they killed down there are wandering.” He grinned. “You still have the key to the place?”
Julie nodded.
“Let’s go,” he said.
5
This time, to get through the building’s security door, Joe buzzed one of the first floor apartments and pretended to be the son of an old lady on the sixth floor. It took three tries before he got buzzed in—“It’s not the nicest way to sneak into a building, but it works sometimes,”—and when they got to 66S, Julie reached for her handbag, but Joe said, “I guess we didn’t need the keys after all.”
The door was ajar.
“What if someone’s in there?” she asked.
He smiled. “We say we had the wrong apartment
and we back out slowly. Gee, makes me feel like I’m one of the Hardy Boys.”
6
Inside, the light switch didn’t work. It was growing dark outside, but there was still some light from the large factory-style windows of the apartment.
“Hello?” Joe asked, his voice booming. He turned back to her, “Open the door wide so we can get more light in here.”
She pulled the door back, and a rectangle of white from the hall light illuminated the foyer.
“Stinks,” Joe said, holding his nose.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“There’s bound to be another light around the corner,” he said, talking completely through his mouth as if trying to close off his nose from the smell that emanated from within.
She watched his silhouette as it melted into the grayness.
Then, a light flicked up in the next room. She went down the hall, and into the living area. It was now completely empty of furniture, as if someone had moved.
There was one high-backed wooden chair at the center of the room. It reminded her of a chair she had seen in a dream. Somehow she’d seen it, but she didn’t mention this to Joe.
“I guess they got evicted,” Joe said. “Nobody home.”
Then, he went to check in the bedroom. She waited, remembering seeing the man standing there. The man who had