Chapter Nine
The living world faded the further that Hill got from Davy.
Or more accurately, he supposed, the more distance he put between himself and his living body.
It was still there, but as background noise and shadows.
The Beyond was where he had to step sideways to dodge around commuters who managed to be sour-faced over dog muzzles or twitching hare-whiskers and split noses, or jump back out of the way to avoid being run down by a cab with a skull-faced driver.
Company men.
And women, Hill supposed. Davy made no such corrections, but he’d been dead thirty years, and most of Beyond had probably been dead longer. It was probably a safe assumption that being politically correct was a few years behind the living world.
Man or woman, though, most of the spirits on the street wore masks of some kind.
Muzzles, the correction nudged at his brain in that pointed voice that Davy used when he wasn’t going to say anything. Hill tried to pretend he’d not heard it. There was too much implied in that word for him to unpack right now. The less-weighted “masks” moved on more easily in his head.
That left him room to wonder why the only person he saw with stigmata like Davy’s was a ragged beggar, his disorientingly lumpy body hidden under rags and cut-up blankets.
Instincts of a city kid told Hill to avoid eye contact and keep moving. He hesitated, but stopped instead.
“Do you know—” he started to ask.
The man raised his head, and Hill inwardly recoiled. Runnels of loose flesh covered the man’s face like lumps of melted plastic, sealing his eyes shut and twisting his mouth into a tooth-baring grimace.
“Change?” the man slurred, his voice rough and clumsy. The blankets slid back from his body as he stuck his hand out, a jar of thin tin coins clutched in fingers that looked like warmed wax. “Have some pity, man.”
Hill patted himself down out of habit. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t…”
The beggar reached up and dug his fingers into the skin over his eyes to claw it back. A sharp blue eye peered out at Hill for a second before the skin dripped back over it.
“Fuck sake,” the man said. His voice was still thick, but it was harder now. “The wet dead walking the streets. Get the fuck away from me. Go on. Piss off.”
He kicked at Hill with a booted foot and then spat at him when Hill didn’t move on fast enough.
“I don’t…what?” Hill spluttered as he backed up. “Sorry?”
A hand caught his arm and tugged him away.
“Pay no attention to him,” the woman said as she tossed a distasteful look toward the beggar. “The Hounds will move him on soon enough.”
Hill looked back over his shoulder. “Why?”
“Nobody wants to come out of work and see that,” the woman said. She gave a delicate, mannered shudder as she glanced back over her shoulder. “We’re all dead. Some of us just still want to better ourselves.”
The question “for what” was on the tip of Hill’s tongue. He took a proper look at the woman before he asked and completely forgot what he’d been about to say.
“I…Aunt Hen?” he asked, his voice stuck halfway between surprise and uncertainty.
The tall brunette chuckled and squeezed his elbow with something like affection.
“And there I thought you’d forgotten me,” she said through the short, pointed beak of her pre-death namesake.
The fleshy lobes of bright red wattles swung against her neck as she looked up at him.
She still wore glasses, Hill noticed with distant interest, and her eyes crinkled around a smile her beak couldn’t form.
“Last time I saw you, you were only six or seven? Now look at you, all grown-up and dead already.”
“Do you want a coffee?” Hen asked as she pulled her purse around to the front of her body and stepped into the queue for the small kiosk.
Hill glanced at the menu. A Depresso Espresso was four scrip. An In Love Latte was six.
“I don’t—” he started to demur, with Davy’s tossed-off directive not to touch the food at the forefront of his brain. Except he’d already broken that, hadn’t he? So… “A Latte, please?”
“Iced?” Hen asked as she pulled a thin metal card out of her wallet. The logo on it was of a pair of scales and a feather.
“OK,” Hill said.
He thought better of it immediately, or at least doubted himself, but it was too late to change his mind as Hen stepped up to the counter. As she put the order in and scanned her card, he just hovered awkwardly next to her and looked around.
Everyone in the shop was masked. Some of them didn’t have the grafted muzzle like Hen and Seb. They just had static masks in wood or cloth. One man had a skeletal hand tattooed over his mouth.
“So, how have you been?” Hen asked. She pointed at a donut through the glass screen and nodded approvingly when the barista picked it up with a pair of tongs. “What are you up to these days?”
It was strange to interact with someone you’d last seen dying in a hospital bed. She’d called him a slur then, in the same upbeat tone, and his mom had dragged him out. She’d covered his ears, although it had been far too late, and told him Hen hadn’t meant it.
She’d been sick.
Hill wondered what that meant for her spirit. Davy was who he’d been when he died. Hill felt the same. Was Hen still the person the cancer had turned her into, or had death undone the tumor’s work?
“Being dead is taking up a lot of my time,” Hill said. “How did you find me?”
“I was looking for you,” Hen said. She tucked the card back in her wallet and shooed him toward a table by the window. “You’re a person of interest for the people I work for.”
“The Company.”
She clucked her tongue. Hill stared at her over a napkin dispenser and tried to work out if that was meant to mean something or was just a noise she made.
“They’re the only game in town worth playing,” she said. “I know it sounds pretentious, but it could be worse. Back in Europe, so I hear, they still have Courts. Well, not over here. We’re dead, but we’re still American.”
She chuckled, wattles wobbling with amusement.
Hill really wanted to ask whether her lifelong nickname had influenced her choice of animal, or did she get a vote.
He wasn’t sure if it would be rude or not.
The decision tree he usually ran through to work that out didn’t have the options he needed for his current situation.
Hen was done with the joke, anyhow. She wiped the corners of her beak with her thumb and forefinger.
Hill was surprised at how familiar the gesture was, the memory of a dozen lunches he’d sat through with his mom.
Although before, the gesture had always been accompanied by a crustless sandwich and a smudge of her signature red lipstick left on her fingertips.
“But yes,” she acknowledged. “I work for the Company, and while you’re still weighing up their offer, they want me to help show you some of the advantages. A familiar face, and all.”
She caught the edge of an order being called and turned to look. When the man with the skeleton hand shushing him picked it up instead, she heaved an annoyed sigh.
“How did they know you knew me?” Hill asked.
Hen shrugged. “They’re the Company,” she said, as if that was answer enough.
“Have you seen my dad?” Hill asked.
The ache in his voice made his chest hurt and flicked the living world briefly back into hi-res around them.
Instead of a coffee shop, they were perched on the windowsill of a daycare.
One of the kids playing on the ground nearby shivered abruptly despite his “Santa’s Favorite Helper” sweater and started to cry.
Hen looked alarmed as she pressed both hands flat on the faded-out sketch of the Beyond’s table.
“Who?” she said.
“My dad?” Hill said. “Albie. Albert Rosen. Your best friend’s husband?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Hen said. She looked around, the jerky movements of her head starkly birdlike. “What is this? Who are they?”
An elf on the shelf fell off its perch and bounced off the ground.
Its plastic face grinned maliciously at the ceiling as the rest of the toddlers joined in with the first one.
As the daycare providers ran over to calm them down, the living world faded back to sketch lines and background noise as Hill stared at Hen.
“You remember me?”
“Of course,” Hen said. She smoothed her hair fretfully with one hand, preening it tidy with her nails. “You’re my godchild.”
“You remember my mom?”
“Lisa?” Hen gave him a bewildered look. “Why wouldn’t I? She’s my best friend. I can’t wait for her to die so I can catch her up on everything. Oh…tell me…”
She reached over the table and put her hand on Hill’s. It felt odd. He could feel the weight of it, even though he supposed that was just imagination,
“Does she still look good? It can be fixed, but it’s better to die looking…well…in your prime. Like me.” She gestured at her face, fingers brushing the sharp edges of her beak.
“You didn’t look like that when you died,” Hill corrected her. “You’d been sick for months. You were bald.”
She stared at him and then reached up to touch her hair. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I spent a fortune at the hairdresser’s. One thin spot and she’d have had me upside down applying the best treatments from Europe.”
Hill bristled, ready to argue, but…
He’d expected Davy to remember his dad, but it had also seemed in character when he didn’t.
Aunt Hen, who’d lived with them for two months with her Yorkie after a spiteful ex had flushed Orbeez into her condo’s plumbing, didn’t have that excuse.
And she’d not died suddenly. It had been months of illness and hospitals.
She could just be in denial, but it wasn’t that. It was like when he’d asked what Davy’s real name was, like the answer should be there but wasn’t. The hole had to be papered up with something.
“It doesn’t matter,” Hill said.