Chapter 8
GERI
It was entirely too crowded in her apartment.
Bazel spent the day lurking and she spent the day ignoring him.
Bones took up the entire couch, happy to lounge.
Fiddlesticks kept standing in front of Geri and expressing her disappointment with the arrangement—and could management please do something about the ghost dog?
It was too much. Her unwelcomed guests got under her skin, her cat was unhappy, and the whole thing set her teeth on edge. She needed breathing space.
Geri grabbed her phone and her keys.
“Where are you going?” Bazel asked, because he was a nosy bitch.
“I’m taking a walk,” she snapped. All day he never spoke and lurked. So much lurking. “Is that allowed?”
Bones was at the door, tail wagging furiously. Her feet pranced.
Geri’s irritation melted away. How could she be grumpy when Bones was so excited to take a walk?
“Come on, Bones. We could use some fresh air.”
Her apartment wasn’t fancy. The location was, though.
It was directly across from Washington Square, in the heart of Center City Philadelphia.
Built in the mid-twentieth century, the highrise building had been part of an effort to rehabilitate the neighborhood.
It was gloriously modern—for certain values of a very dated 1960s modern—amid colonial era buildings and cobblestone streets.
Geri loved her simple one-bedroom apartment. She loved the blue tile bathroom. The balcony that overlooked the square. The sound of traffic and people drifting up on warm days. The way the snow fell over a silent city in the winter.
The building had been undergoing renovations for the last few years, which meant there was always noise during the day.
She could deal with it. The building controlled the heat and had the furnace on full blast all winter long.
With the afternoon sun, her apartment was a sauna. Bad for Geri. Good for the cat.
The rent was reasonable. Not cheap. Geri didn’t think cheap rent existed anymore, anywhere. Renovations had somehow eluded her apartment, which meant she could afford it. The worst thing she had to complain about was that it was too warm in the winter. Boohoo.
The neighborhood, despite being central and near the historic landmarks, was quiet.
To the east were very expensive eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes and exactly what one pictured when anyone mentioned Colonial-era Philadelphia.
Trendy clubs, restaurants, and shops lay to the west. Everywhere she wanted to be was within walking distance.
She could ride her bike to work, weather permitting, and bus when not.
It was vibrant and alive, exactly the kind of place she always wanted but her ex-husband convinced her that they needed a car to move his photo equipment.
Renting a parking spot was too expensive, so it made sense to live in the suburban northeast section of the city.
He was right about parking. The cost for a spot in the garage was outrageous.
With the annual fee to the bike storage room less than a hundred dollars, she’d take her bike, thank you very much.
The small inconvenience of having to lug her groceries home a few blocks was a price she gladly paid for city living. And delivery was a thing.
The sun was out; the leaves were on the verge of turning. Going outside would do her good. A walk would let her work out her frustration and she had a lot to be frustrated about.
Reason number one walked alongside her. Bones trotted along, too, occasionally darting away to follow an interesting scent but that was okay. When she returned, she nosed Geri’s hand which felt like a Hey, I’m back. She was a good girl.
“So who’s Management?” Geri asked.
“Pardon?”
“Management. They sent me a message last night on my ghost phone.”
“I do not know.”
Geri wasn’t buying his baloney and made a humming noise. “Really? They haven’t sent you a to-do list in your ghost book?”
“It is not a ghost book. It is The Handbook.” Somehow he managed to say it capitalized.
The square had a decent number of folks enjoying the weather. Tired tourists resting their feet. Office workers eating their lunches. A few people sprawled on blankets on the lawn.
Bones abandoned her and darted across the lawn toward a woman walking a tiny dog on a leash. She ran circles around the oblivious woman, the little dog giving a warning bark. Bones barked back, clearly thinking this was a game.
“Cinnamon, what is up with you? You love the park,” the woman said, picking up the dog and tucking her against her chest.
A couple stopped Geri and asked her to take a photo in front of the fountain, and suddenly she remembered the main reason why she joined the gym and forwent walks around the square. She couldn’t get very far without people stopping to talk.
She took the photo with the couple’s phone, returned it, and headed to a less central path.
“How old are you? And don’t dodge the question this time. That’s a nasty habit of yours,” she said.
“Old.”
“Yeah, but how old is that exactly? Knees hurt when it rains old or time immemorial?”
He remained silent, as if considering his response. “Not quite that old. I have existed for a little more than four centuries.”
So old old. He did say he was from the 17th century, after all.
“Four centuries. Does that mean you were here when—”
He sighed and even though she couldn’t see it, he rolled his eyes, which was quite the feat as he lacked eyeballs.
“Through a process I cannot explain, reapers arrive in the world fully formed. We possess all the skills and knowledge we need to perform our duties. And for reasons I cannot explain, a new generation of reapers appear before major historic events.”
“So you were here—”
“I was ready and waiting when the first European colonists arrived,” he said, his voice taking on an ominous tone.
“I watched the slaughter of the indigenous people and their slow, systematic eradication. Colonists came. They murdered and stole land. Sometimes they died from disease or violence. Malnutrition. Weather they were unprepared for. A bad tooth. There are infinite ways to die in the new world, Geraldine, and I relished every soul I took.”
“Oh.” She struggled to find her next words. “That must have been difficult.”
“A reaper should not be emotionally attached to mortals,” he said. Geri recognized the words from the handbook. “From my perspective, you are a mayfly. Your life is a pleasant diversion but it is brief. When you are gone, I shall be as I have always been.”
That sounded lonely. Springing into existence, knowing you were only there because a of an oncoming genocide and helpless to save any of the souls around you. All you could do was watch and be there when people died.
They walked in silence. Well, she walked. He sort of floated along.
“Why me?” she asked, breaking the silence and asking what she most wanted to know.
They were near Walnut Street. She leaned against the brick wall that separated the park from the street. Absolutely no one seemed to notice or care that she was talking to herself. It was weird, like their eyes just slid over her.
Or maybe their eyes slid over Bazel. Fear of confronting their own mortality perhaps or some sort of reaper hocus-pocus.
“You have been close to the veil your entire life,” he said.
She turned that over in her mind and decided it was bunk. “Yeah, that sounds ominous but that doesn’t mean anything. If humans are mayflies like you said, we’re all close to the veil. Now, please stop insulting me and tell me why me, specifically.”
His shoulders tensed and then sagged, as if admitting that there was no point in evading the question or fudging the truth. “When you were a child, you broke your arm.”
“I remember.” She had been riding her bike in the neighborhood, wearing her helmet and knee pads.
A truck turned the corner and clipped her bike.
Whether the truck saw Geri was unknown. It didn’t stop.
A neighbor saw the whole thing and called her parents.
Meanwhile, Geri bled profusely from a fracture that poked through the skin on her right arm.
“If you had not worn a helmet, you would have died from a brain bleed,” he said.
“Were you there? Do you just lurk, hoping an accident will happen? Have you been stalking me since I was a kid?” The idea that Bazel had been there, observing her for years, unsettled her.
Her sense of privacy vanished and that was mortifying.
She had done plenty of awkward and embarrassing things, not to mention the naked adult things.
To imagine that she had an audience… Her mortification levels were off the chart.
“I was not present. That was another reaper.”
The mortification levels dropped back to a tolerable level. “Still weird that reapers hang around just waiting for accidents to happen.”
Bazel didn’t try to deny it. In fact, he said nothing.
“So I almost died once,” she said. “That’s it? That’s your reason? That explains jack shit.”
The hood turned slowly to face her. Shadows covered his skeletal face, his eyes were nothing but black pits, and yet they burned. Geri gasped. Those eyes were inescapable.
“You have always been close to the veil,” he said, his voice taking on that echoing quality he employed when he wanted to drive home a point.
“I am a being of another dimension. You are the closest a living mortal can be to that dimension without dying. I spared your life at great personal expense to act as my agent in this world.”
That seemed like half an answer. Why go through the trouble of resurrecting her if it came at such a high cost for himself?
Geri turned over his words, looking not for the reason why she was chosen but why he bothered.
“Where’s your sickle?” she asked.
“I do not have a sickle.”
“Grim reapers have sickles.” She mimed swinging a blade in a semicircular motion like she was cutting grass.
“A scythe,” he said, sounding annoyed. “A sickle is shorter. I have a scythe.”
“Yeah, that. Where is it?”