Desolate Angel (2 page)

In truth, I never was.

I have been dead for six months now and my passing has caused barely a ripple in their lives. Connie continues to work each morning at the department store; the boys continue to rush home from school to her embrace. I have seen them come together each evening now, time and again, without glimpsing an acknowledgment that I was ever there.

Perhaps I never really was.

It is this evidence of my failure that causes me to ponder my other regrets. You see, I failed others, too—and not just the victims, whose morgue photographs left a never-ending trail of human catastrophe winding through my unsolved files. I failed those they left behind as well. I think of them often, the surviving loved ones who came to me, seeking justice, and left with little more than despair. For, all too often, I used their tragedies to satisfy my craven need to fail, turning their calamities into excuses to drink away the hours, hoping to find that lost place where, at last, I could let myself care too little. I stared the other way when confronted by their misery, unable to meet their eyes. Eventually, I even avoided my own eyes in the mirror and grew too ashamed to ever look back on the overwhelming condemnation of my failures.

Now, looking back is all I have.

I am a ghost haunted by my regrets, doomed to walk through a world that is neither here nor there, tasting my fate in my solitude, seeking a redemption I fear will never come.

My name was Kevin Fahey. I do not know what to call myself now.

I walk among the living, unseen and unheard, unsure if my continuing existence is evidence of Hell—or if I have somehow scraped my way into Purgatory. If so, if this is Purgatory, it is by the mercy of a forgiving universe, and through no effort of my own, that I am here.

I have tried to transcend my boundaries, but my translucent prison holds firm. I have stood at my wife’s side as she lies in bed at night, murmuring to her of our time together before my surrender to eighty-proof despair, hoping to make myself heard. Hoping to make myself, at the very least, a memory.

It has all been in vain. I can feel no indication that Connie cares to remember what her life was like when I was in it. In fact, I can see no sign that anyone in my former world knows I am still here. I can perform wild fandangos across busy streets and cars don’t even slow to avoid me. I can walk the sidewalks for hours, shout at the top of my lungs, jump up and down, waving my hands in faces: no one ever sees me. All I have earned for my desperate labors is the occasional quizzical look on a face, as fleeting as a twitch, or a sudden turn of the head, as if someone has glimpsed me out of the corner of an eye, only to lose me under full scrutiny.

Except once, just once, when a young boy saw me. That single incident gives me hope that I will not be alone forever. That hope keeps me wandering.

It happened two months after my death, when my ere mitic existence was bitterly new. I was standing at the edge of a playground, watching my boys swing up against the brilliant blue of a cloudless June sky. They’d hang at the crest of their arc for a single, glorious second before dropping back to earth in a stomach-churning swoosh. The purity of their joy entranced me. I was transfixed—and so accustomed to being the watcher that it took me a moment to realize that I was being watched. It was not until an odd heat overcame me that I realized my solitude had been penetrated. I looked down to find a small boy staring up at me, his eyes drawn to the gold badge pinned to my lapel.

“Is that real?” he asked. He was a pale child, sickly-looking, with deep shadows stretching like purple half-moons beneath weary eyes. His hair stuck up in odd clumps about a partially bald head. His legs were dusted with sand.

“Sure.” I knelt so he could get a better look. “I’m a detective.”

“Can I touch it?” he asked, his fingers inching toward my badge.

“Go ahead.”

Had he also passed to the other side? He was, undeniably, close. I could see it in his pallid eyes.

No. The boy was alive. His mother rounded the corner of a nearby storage shed and grabbed one of his hands. “Talking to trees?” she asked, shaking her head in exasperation as she dragged him away.

The boy stared after me, his face clouding over with a resigned recognition, as if he had realized what I must be—and understood that he, too, existed along the edge of two worlds. I waved my farewell, overcome with pity for what his future held, hoping that his mother’s fierce love could somehow save him from the loneliness of an existence like mine.

I never ran into the boy again, though I looked for him often among the faces of the children I passed. I felt such overwhelming love for him and I clung to this shred of humanity. Once I stood an entire week’s worth of afternoons by the playground sandbox, hoping to see my little friend again. But it was not to be. I do not know what happened to him. But he taught me the two things I have learned so far in my desolate wanderings: I am not the same man I was when I was alive, I have changed for the better, and that there may be some among the living who can, indeed, see me. They are my proof that I still exist and still have a chance at salvation. I just have to find them.

Those are the ones I seek.

This knowledge has kept me searching through the hallways of my former life, hoping to find a way back to the world of the living, a door to redemption or even just a passageway to what lies beyond.

Indeed, finding a way out of my solitary prison was my sole purpose for months upon months—until she came to me.

Chapter 2

The evening was cold, at least to the living. I was standing in my yard at dusk, watching my boys leap into piles of autumn leaves. Their squeals filled the air with a contagious glee that went unnoticed by neighbors who were carting groceries, parking cars, and flicking lights on in their houses as a talisman against the coming darkness. No matter. I was there and I understood: the abandonment of their laughter was exquisite, as integral to the universe as church bells pealing across a meadow. No one heard it but me.

I was too distracted by my private joy to notice the girl at first. She appeared as little more than a glimpse of white in the dusk that was gathering behind the house next door. She emerged from the shadows as a young woman clad in a yellow sundress too flimsy for the cold October air. She came straight at me and I had not yet absorbed the shock of being seen when she raised a palm, as if ordering me to stay put, then moved forward with a languid grace as flowing as a brook over boulders.

Who was she and how did she know me? How was she able to see me? I felt the world shift beneath my feet, as if vast tectonic plates had clicked into place. A wild hope rose in me—had I, at last, found someone else among the living who could see me? Or, and my hope faded at the thought, had I found someone just like me?

She drew closer. I saw that she was barefoot, though the grass was touched with frost. Sure, the cold didn’t bother me. But I was dead. Her feet had to be numb. Unless she was like me.

She kept moving forward, each step as ethereally precise as a ballerina’s. She looked so frail I feared she might evaporate into a thousand wisps of smoke and be gone to me forever. She made no sound, and as her face came into view, I saw that she had been badly maimed, her beauty horribly marred by violence. Bruises bloomed in ugly purple splotches across her face and shoulders, both of her eyes were blackened, and a trickle of blood ran from a corner of her mouth. Her yellow sundress was torn and drooped from her shoulders, yet she made no effort to rearrange it. Slowly, inexorably, she stepped closer until she stood only inches from me.

She stared into my eyes and I felt a darkness rise within me. It was an internal river so black and so deep and so terrible it threatened to flood my very soul with overwhelming hopelessness.

Somehow it came from her.

I was stunned at her closeness after so many months of solitude. Her eyes were unreadable, lost among the bruises. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. She turned her head to look up at the sky—and that was when I saw the scar: a half-moon-shaped sliver of white at the corner of her right eye.

An almost electric shock ran through me as a wave of fear pulled me deep into the river of blackness. Alissa Hayes had been one of my rare successes in the last years of my fading career. One of the few cases I had actually solved.

“Alissa,” I whispered.

She turned back to me, examining my face with an intensity I could not read. Then she took my hand and I actually felt her touch, the first physical sensation I’d had in months. Her hand wasn’t quite tangible, it was cold and without true substance, but it was undeniably
there.

She pulled me forward and I followed as she led me, her hand in my hand, through yards and woods, parks and thoroughfares, fences and ponds. Barriers that stopped the living were nothing at all to us, for Alissa, too, had moved beyond the physical world. I knew because I had seen her sprawled among the weeds, body broken and drained of blood. I had seen her displayed on the cold steel of the coroner’s table, body reduced to meat. And I had been at her funeral, scanning the rows of the mourners with my partner, halfheartedly hoping that her killer might be discovered among them, thus granting us a rare victory.

And, indeed, we had solved her murder within a week.

I had not failed her, not like I had failed the others. What could she want from me?

I kept following her, unwilling to relinquish the touch of another. Within minutes, without ever seeming to hurry, we were miles away, just beyond the small college whose campus encircled the north end of my town. We passed a pile of boulders and made our way up a hill that crowned the northern half of the county. It overlooked an abandoned canyon gouged into existence a hundred years before by quarrymen seeking granite. She led me still further up the hill, to a deserted field several hundred yards below the crest. A thick tangle of bushes gave way to forest above it. Few people ventured beyond the field.

I saw why we had come.

There, discarded among the weeds, a young woman was sprawled faceup, still and naked. Her slender body was as pale as bone in the moonlight; her delicate face bruised by both man and shadow. Her long brown hair had been arranged around her head in thick strands so that it flowed through the grass like seaweed undulating in a current. One of her arms was outstretched, as if in supplication, but her blue eyes were lifeless, reflecting the moon above her with a dull patina. The lower half of her body curved gracefully in a single arc, the feet bound together by a rope of twisted weeds, as if she were a mermaid caught in dry dock, left behind when the seas receded.

The air about the body was thick with a miasma I had never felt before, not in life and not in death. Whatever beauty had prevailed in this hidden spot was gone—and something ugly lived in its place.

Alissa and I stood staring down at the body. Welts had been cut into the pale skin of the young woman’s stomach and thighs, as parallel and precise as gills. Alissa did not need to tell me what I now knew: I had been wrong about her death. I had been wrong about her killer. I had failed Alissa Hayes, after all. I had failed the young man in jail for her murder, too. And I had failed the brown-haired girl sprawled in the weeds before me.

Chapter 3

I stood by the body as night deepened. Alissa had disappeared, but I was unwilling to leave the dead girl alone. I could feel no sense of her spirit, only the presence of a lingering evil that hovered over the clearing, its power so tangible it was almost as if it murmured to me, daring me to listen more closely. But I was not cowed. An unexpected power had filled me as I stood watch, a certainty that I had not been brought here to regret. I had been brought here to atone. I don’t know what sent me the knowledge, or why it chose that moment to come into being, but a faith flowed through me as I stood watch in the night. I knew that I was supposed to be there. I knew that I had been called upon to bear witness to this cruelty for reasons I did not yet know. And I knew what I had to do next.