Chapter 5
GERI
Oh hell no.
Geri grabbed her bag and hauled her behind to the hospital.
Yeah, her brain was definitely bleeding again. As much as she liked her primary—who never suggested that losing twenty pounds would magically solve her clotting disorder—she couldn’t wait until the office opened in the morning for an appointment.
A thoughtful sister would have called Molly, but it was after ten.
Molly and Anh would be headed for bed if not already asleep.
If Geri called now, they’d sit in the hospital with her all night, not sleeping, and would have to take a personal day.
Again. Geri didn’t want her sisters to miss another day of work on her account.
If it were serious, she’d call in the morning. If not, then the only night she ruined was her own.
A CT scan showed that everything was normal. No swelling. No bleeding.
“Nothing?” Geri asked.
“You seemed surprised,” the doctor said.
“I’ve been seeing things,” she admitted.
“What kind of things?” the doctor asked.
The grim reaper.
The grim reaper in question stood beside the doctor, making the room’s population five. His hood tilted and his hand flexed, as if expecting to hold a tool. He said, “Tell him about me.”
“Lights and colors mostly,” Geri said, ignoring the reaper.
“Your concussion was a week ago. Some lingering effects are not out of the ordinary.”
The doctor meant well, but his tone irritated her.
“Please don’t talk down to me.”
He glanced down at the chart. “I see we kept you for three days and ran scans. No bleeding detected. Were you seeing lights and colors before you were discharged?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “I was told it was to be expected. I was also told to come back if it got worse. Tonight I saw… something.”
“Something,” the doctor repeated.
“A shadowy figure outside. I thought it was my ex-boyfriend, but then I saw it in my apartment.” Geri took a breath, forcing herself to slow down as she spoke.
Bazel took it upon himself to investigate the equipment in the room.
“It looked so real. Sounded real. It frightened me. I thought my brain broke.”
The doctor followed her gaze. “Are you continuing to see it now?”
“No,” she lied. She didn’t like this guy.
His vibes were off. She wasn’t going to tell him about the reaper because if a physical cause had been ruled out, then the only other option was psychological, right?
A mental breakdown. He seemed exactly the sort to decide she was a danger to herself and place an involuntary hold on her for observation.
“What are you seeing now?” the doctor asked.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Just remembering. Maybe it was a trick of the light.”
The doctor did not look convinced. “Does this figure tell you to hurt yourself or another person?”
“No. Nothing like that. It just scared me.”
He quizzed her about any drug use—none, she was a square like that—and her sleeping habits—terrible. She hadn’t slept well since the accident. Her body hurt too much.
“I’m ordering a urine test to rule out a possible UTI.” The doctor flashed his badge at a computer terminal and entered the orders.
“He doesn’t believe you about the drugs,” the reaper said.
“It’s not drugs,” she said.
“We ruled out the most serious concerns. Now we’re investigating other physical causes,” the doctor said.
Vibes. Off.
She could practically see the thought bubble over his head deciding that if it wasn’t a UTI or drugs, then she was having a psychotic episode.
An hour later, results came back negative for a urinary tract infection. Which she knew. Nor was she out of her mind on whatever drugs the cool kids did nowadays.
Geri sighed with relief when the doctor announced, “I suspect lack of sleep is causing visual hallucinations. I’m sending a prescription to the pharmacy for something to help you sleep. Someone will bring them by when they’re ready and you can go home.”
Geri nodded. No breakdowns today, just old-fashioned sleep deprivation.
“Your body’s had a major trauma. It’ll take some time to heal before you feel like yourself again,” he said.
She doubted it would be as simple as that.
* * *
Geri shuffled into her kitchen. Fiddlesticks trotted at her side and froze, tail puffed.
“How did you sleep?” the reaper asked, sitting at her table like he had been there before. A dog—large, black and familiar—sat next to him.
“Like the dead,” she answered.
The reaper laughed. The dog thumped its tail. Fiddlesticks did her thing and ran away to hide.
“That’s not funny,” Geri said with a frown. Her head felt fuzzy from the sleeping pill and she hadn’t intended to make a smartass comment. Must have been her natural talent shining through.
“Incorrect. It is mildly amusing,” the reaper said.
“You’re not real.” Geri shuffled her way toward the kitchen table. Released from the hospital a few hours before dawn with a fistful of prescription meds, she went straight to bed.
Her stomach rumbled. “What time is it?”
“Supper. Your neighbors are having tacos.”
“Tacos sound good but that involves a trip to the store, which isn’t happening. Also, you’re not real.” Geri poured herself a glass of orange juice and grabbed a box of crackers. She slept the day away and her hallucination was still there, as robust and vivid as anything.
“That is not a proper meal.”
Robust, vivid, and judgy.
“Oh, sorry my dinner offends you. It’s the cook’s night off,” she said, munching into a cracker. Crumbs landed on the front of her nightshirt. The dog moved next to her, as if pleading for a snack.
“You must have adequate nutrition while you work off your debt to me.”
The dog wore a pleading expression and placed a paw on Geri’s thigh.
“Sorry, I’m not throwing crackers on the floor for a hallucination,” she said around another mouthful. “You look like the dog from the trail. Bones.”
The dog’s ears perked and her tail wagged.
“Are you Bones?”
Both paws were now on Geri’s thigh.
“Fine. Have a cracker.” She tossed one toward Bones and it vanished immediately. She’d have to remember to sweep the floor before she went to bed lest she get mice. Fiddlesticks was a good hunter but Geri wasn’t leaving garbage on the floor.
Bones looked so real. Her tongue as she licked her chops. Her eyes, asking for another treat. It made sense in a twisted way that she was hallucinating the dog she saw moments before her fall, as if her brain were repeating the last minutes before being injured.
“You’re not the doll man, though,” she said, looking at the reaper.
He pulled back the hood and a skeletal face grinned back at her. “Doll man?”
“Bones’s owner. He looked like he was suffering from a Victorian wasting disease and also like a haunted doll.”
The reaper laughed again. It was disturbing, a rattling dry sound of twigs and leaves scattering over pavement on a desolate, moonless night. “I have never been described so evocatively.”
“Yeah, well—” She didn’t have a snappy comeback. “Do you have a name?”
“I’ve had many names. Atenro. Nitis. Nekaanah. Awaheya. Leimannen. Grimmige reaper,” repeating what he said the night he invaded her apartment. “You may call me Bazel.”
“Bazel,” she repeated, ignoring the warning in her gut that naming her delusion was a bad idea. “I’m too conscious for this shit.”
She finished her orange juice and wished she could take another sleeping pill. Being unconscious was better than arguing with herself as her sanity unraveled.
* * *
The bike was remarkably crowded considering one of the riders only existed in her mind. The dog trotted alongside, oblivious to people on the sidewalk and cars on the street. The reaper, however, just hovered behind her, not exactly sharing the seat but clearly along for the ride.
“So,” Geri said, taking on a teaching tone, “you might know this as a velocipede, but we call it a bicycle.”
“I am from the seventeenth century. I did not recently arrive from then,” her reaper said.
Paused at a traffic light, Geri planted both feet on the pavement. Bones took the opportunity to shove her head between Geri and the handlebars, demanding pets.
She obliged, marveling at how an imaginary dog’s fur felt as soft as a cloud, and said, “Fine. Not a time traveler, just the immortal personification of death.”
“I am mortal. My life will end the same as yours—it is merely longer. From your perspective it may seem like immortality, but that is only because your life is too brief to perceive the effects of time upon my person. You are like a mayfly to me,” he said.
He then added, for some reason, “I imagine it is how your cat perceives you.”
Wow. Just wow. This figment of her injured brain managed to be both rude and depressing.
“Don’t drag Fiddlesticks’ good name into this,” she said, pedaling off as the light changed and determined to stop arguing with herself.
Her calves protested from the exercise but she knew that the benefits outweighed temporary discomfort.
Besides, riding a few blocks to the market for milk wasn’t the same thing as doing a century— a 100 km— whatever extreme shenanigans cycling enthusiasts did for fun.
“You forgot your phone,” he said. The phone in question sat in the front basket.
“Let me take care of that.” Geri reached forward and flung it into traffic. “Look at that, it’s been handled.”
* * *
The phone had not been handled. Bright and early the next morning, Bazel and Bones were waiting in the kitchen. The blasted phone sat on the table.
Bones crouched down into a playful pose, tail wagging, and crawled forward toward the cat until they were nearly nose to nose.
Fiddlesticks hissed and swiped at the dog’s nose before running away, likely to her preferred hiding spot in the bedroom closet.
“Your cat has a nervous disposition,” Bazel said.
“She’s shy and you’re strangers in her territory.” Geri headed toward the coffeemaker. Hot brown juice waited for her as she remembered to set it up the night before. “Don’t you have a home? Why are you always at my place?”
“Interesting that the cat reacts to beings you claim are hallucinations,” he said, not answering her question.
She paused, carafe poised over her mug. That was an annoyingly good point. She said, “Must have been picking up on my body language. I freaked out, therefore she freaked out.”
The reaper made a doubtful noise.
“You know what?” she asked, grabbing the creamer from the fridge and shutting the door a bit too hard. “For being a grim reaper and not the grim reaper, you’re very Eurocentric, Bazel. Seems limiting when there are so many other, more interesting reapers in the world.”
“My physical appearance is based on your own cultural paradigm,” he replied with ease. “If you find this manifestation uninspired, that says more about you than about me.”
Damn. That was savage, although she had no idea where her subconscious dragged cultural paradigm from.
She finished making her coffee palatable and put bread in the toaster. “Can we have a truce? No bothering me when I have dinner with Molly and Anh tonight. We can argue about you being real or a hallucination tomorrow. I need to focus and not freak people out by talking to myself.”
His bony fingers drummed on the tabletop. “Very well, but I will no longer be able to delay your obligations. The work begins tomorrow.”