A Certain Slant of Light (5 page)

  
"It's Deardon," he said, "but it would be a crime for you to
call me anything but James."

  
He'd left me speechless again. He was truly exasperating.

  
"Please," he said.

  
"James..." The word felt strange. "Why did you—" I
stopped myself. "How did you take Mr. Blake's body?"

  
"He vacated it," said James. "He left it, mind and soul, like an
empty house with the door open." He seemed excited to tell me
his strange adventure.

  
"When his spirit left his body, why didn't he die?" I wanted
to know.

  
"His body didn't die," he said, still fascinated by his own luck.
"His spirit chose to leave. It's difficult to explain. Instead of the
ship going down taking the crew with it, the crew abandoned the
ship, but the ship was still seaworthy." Now he looked embar
rassed. Something in my expression had shamed him.

  
"It seems wrong," I said. "Like stealing."

  
"Better that
I
have him rather than—"An untold and eerie
story flashed by behind his autumn eyes.

  
"Than what?"

  
"Well, left adrift, something evil might pirate him away."
James had let the phone slip down again. I raised my hand to my ear, and he smiled and raised the receiver again.

  
"How long have you been inside there?" I asked.

  
"Since September ninth."

  
That was a fortnight. "Then how is it you saw me only last
Monday?"

  
"That was my first day back," said James. "Billy's body was so sick, I was in bed for a week."

  
"What was wrong with him?" I asked.

  
James looked sorry to tell me. "He took so many drugs he al
most died."

  
"But how could you tell he was empty?" I wanted to know.
Plenty of the students in Mr. Brown's classroom looked fatally
bored.

  
"It was the way his body resonated when he left it. It sort of
rang."

  
"It rang? Like a bell?"

  
"No." He thought for a moment. "Bodies with souls in them
are solid, like a beam in a house. And bodies that are empty make
a very small vibration, the way the wind can blow past the gutter on the roof and make the rain pipe hoot like an owl."

  
"You heard this boy hooting?" I was sure he was teasing me.

  
"I noticed that he sounded hollow. Like holding a seashell to
your ear," he said. "I doubt that anyone who wasn't Light could
hear it."

  
This was becoming as curious as Wonderland. "How is it that
I have seen more years than you, but you know all these things
that I don't?"

  
James laughed. "It's being in a body again," he said. "For once
I saw through a glass darkly, but now I see the world clearly."

  
"How did you find this body?" I sounded more demanding
than I intended.

  
"I saw him almost every day. He came to my haunting place to hide from his friends or take pills or smoke." James watched a stu
dent thump past the booth, his shoulder rattling the glass door. "I
knew there was something wrong with this boy, that he sounded
empty sometimes. I wasn't sure what it meant. He seemed hol
low, but he was living, not Light," said James. "I was held to my haunting place, but I felt responsible for this boy because I could
tell he was in trouble, and yet I couldn't warn anyone." James
took a deep breath, remembering. "Sol followed him home that
afternoon. On other days, I'd seen the way he came in and out of
his flesh when he put poisons in his blood. His spirit seemed to go
to sleep for an hour or two and he'd start to ring empty. But this
day, he closed himself in his room and took pills and sniffed pow
der and even inhaled fumes from a bag. This day, when his spirit
left his body, it didn't come back."

  
I felt a chill encircle my heart.

  
"I watched for seven hours," said James.

  
The pathways outside the phone booth quieted. Students and
faculty had migrated to the parking lots. I was running out of
time before I would have to leave with Mr. Brown.

  
"Then I felt something wrong pulling at the body, something
evil," said James. "I tried to wake him up, but his spirit wouldn't
come back, so I went inside him, and I tried to scare away the evil. The trouble was, it wasn't afraid of me. I couldn't drive it
away; I couldn't even open my eyes or move, the body was so sick.
The evil didn't quail until Billy's brother came in and called for
an ambulance. Then it disappeared." He sounded as if he had
finished the story.

  
"What happened?" I said.

  
"We went to the emergency room, Mitch punched a hole in the waiting room wall, and I stayed in Billy's body while they
flushed the poisons out. It was frightening."

  
I must've looked horrified.

  
"It wasn't that bad," he said. "We're all right now."

  
"Did the evil that tried to get Billy look like a person or a
creature?" Perhaps I had read too much about Middle-earth over
Mr. Brown's shoulder, but I thought it was important to know the shape of the enemy.

  
He shook his head as if he'd never want to describe such a
thing to a lady. I was fascinated by his adventures, but they still
seemed so unreal.

  
"Do you have any of Billy's memories?" I asked him.

  
"No, I don't. And that does make life in a stranger's body
rather tricky."

  
"Where is your haunting place?" The more I heard, the more
I wanted to know.

  
"It's a park a few miles from here. There used to be a two-
story house there. That's where I was born."

 
 
"You remember your life as James Deardon, then?" I said.

  
"Not at all, when I was Light," he said. "But since I've been
inside a body again, some things have been coming back to me. I
don't know why."

  
"Do you remember how you died?"

  
"Not yet," he said. "But I remember more things every day."

  
"But you must've been with your family at first," I said, "if
you were haunting their house."

  
"The house had burned down long before I was haunting that
land. Before I was in Billy's body, I didn't even know why I was
stuck there. I just knew I couldn't get more than a hundred feet
away."

  
"How did you know you were stuck?"

  
"If I tried to walk more than a hundred feet down the sidewalk
..."
He thought for a moment and shortened the descrip
tion for me. "It hurt too much. I'd have to go back."

  
A queer recognition shook me. "Is it like black icy water
crushing you?"

  
He gave me an odd look. "Mine's more like a light that burns and a wind that cuts you."

  
We looked into each other's eyes, picturing each other's hell.
What a strange goblin God must be,
I thought,
to torment James.
He was just to punish me, for I sensed that I had truly sinned. But
not James.

  
"You spent almost a hundred years on an acre of land by
yourself?" I asked.

  
"Well, after a few years, they built a park," he reassured me.

  
I suddenly felt like crying. "You didn't have lamps at night or
books."

  
"Some
people read in the park," he said. "Horror stories
mostly."

  
"No poetry," I said. "No Shakespeare. No Austen."

  
As if to cheer me, he said, "I read a comic book of
Franken
stein
sitting next to a ten-year-old girl once."

  
"That's too awful."

  
"It's all right now." James saw that I was on the verge of
weeping and fumbled in his pocket. Then he smiled. "I was go
ing to offer you a handkerchief, but I haven't got one and even if
I did..."

  
That made me laugh.

  
"What do you recall about life as James?"

  
He straightened up as the janitor walked by our glass booth.
"Very little. We had an almond orchard and a weather vane of a
running horse." He thought for a moment. "When I was small, I
had a rocking horse named Cinder because his tail got burned off
when he sat too near the fireplace."

  
I felt cold and thin as tin for a moment, made fragile by a half
memory of a child at play. A blonde head bent over a little
wooden lamb on wheels.

  
"My dog was named Whittle," he told me. "My cousin taught
me to swim in the river. One year we made our own raft and
nearly drowned." He laughed, then saw something that worried
him in my face. "What's wrong?"

  
"What else?" I didn't want to hear about swimming.

  
"My father carved me soldiers out of bass wood." He switched
the receiver to his other ear. "That's all that's come back to me
so far."