We need Death to be a friend. It is best to have
a friend as a traveling companion when you
have so far to go together.
—attributed to Jean Cocteau
She was sitting in John’s living room when he got home from the recording studio that night, comfortably ensconced on the sofa, legs stretched out, ankles crossed, a book propped open on her lap which she was pretending to read. The fact that all the lights in the house had been off until he turned them on didn’t seem to faze her in the least. She continued her pretense, as though she could see equally well in the light or dark and it made no difference to her whether the lights were on or off. At least she had the book turned right-side up, John noted.
“How did you get in?” he asked her.
She didn’t seem to present any sort of a threat—beyond having gotten into his locked house, of course—so he was more concerned with how she’d been able to enter than for his own personal safety. At the sound of his voice, she looked up in surprise. She laid the book down on her lap, finger inserted between the pages to hold her place.
“You can see me?” she said.
“Jesus.”
John shook his head. She certainly wasn’t shy. He set his fiddle-case down by the door. Dropping his jacket down on top of it, he went into the living room and sat down in the chair across the coffee table from her.
“What do you think?” he went on. “Of course I can see you.”
“But you’re not supposed to be able to see me—unless it’s time and that doesn’t seem right. I mean, really. I’d know, if anybody, whether or not it was time.”
She frowned, gaze fixed on him, but she didn’t really appear to be studying him. It was more as though she was looking into some unimaginably far and unseen distance. Her eyes focused suddenly and he shifted uncomfortably under the weight of her attention.
“Oh, I see what happened,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
John leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees. “Let’s try this again. Who are you?”
“I’m your watcher. Everybody has one.”
“My watcher.”
She nodded. “We watch over you until your time has come, then if you can’t find your own way, we take you on. They call us the little deaths, but I’ve never much cared for the sound of that, do you?”
John sighed. He settled back in his chair to study his unwanted guest. She was no one he knew, though she could easily have fit in with his crowd. He put her at about twenty-something, a slender five-two, pixy features made more fey by the crop of short blonde hair that stuck up from her head with all the unruliness of a badly-mowed lawn. She wore black combat boots; khaki trousers, baggy, with two or three pockets running up either leg; a white T-shirt that hugged her thin chest like a second skin. She had little in the way of jewelry—a small silver ring in her left nostril and another in the lobe of her left ear—and no makeup.
“Do you have a name?” he tried.
“Everybody’s got a name.”
John waited a few heartbeats. “And yours is?” he asked when no reply was forthcoming.
“I don’t think I should tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Well, once you give someone your name, it’s like opening the door to all sorts of possibilities, isn’t it? Any sort of relationship could develop from that, and it’s just not a good idea for us to have an intimate relationship with our charges.”
“I can assure you,” John told her. “We’re in no danger of having a relationship—intimate or otherwise.”
“Oh,” she said. She didn’t look disappointed so much as annoyed. “Dakota,” she added.
“I’m sorry?”
“You wanted to know my name.”
John nodded. “That’s right. I—oh, I get it. Your name’s Dakota?”
“Bingo.”
“And you’ve been . . . watching me?”
“Well, not just you. Except for when we’re starting out, we look out after any number of people.”
“I see,” John said. “And how many people do you watch?”
She shrugged. “Oh, dozens.”
That figured, John thought. It was the story of his life. He couldn’t even get the undivided attention of some loonie stalker.
She swung her boots to the floor and set the book she was holding on the coffee table between them.
“Well, I guess we should get going,” she said.
She stood up and gave him an expectant look, but John remained where he was sitting.
“It’s a long way to the gates,” she told him.
He didn’t have a clue as to what she was talking about, but he was sure of one thing.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said.
“But you have to.”
“Says who?”
She frowned at him. “You just do. It’s obvious that you won’t be able to find your way by yourself and if you stay here you’re just going to start feeling more and more alienated and confused.”
“Let me worry about that,” John said.
“Look,” she said. “We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot—my fault, I’m sure. I had no idea it was time for you to go already. I’d just come by to check on you before heading off to another appointment.”
“Somebody else that you’re watching?”
“Exactly,” she replied, missing, or more probably, ignoring the sarcastic tone of his voice. “There’s no way around this, you know. You need my help to get to the gates.”
She sighed. “You’re really in denial about all of this, aren’t you?”
“You were right about one thing,” John told her. “I am feeling confused—but it’s only about what you’re doing here and how you got in.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“Me neither. So maybe you should go.”
That earned him another frown.
“Fine,” she said. “But don’t wait too long to call me. If you change too much, I won’t be able to find you and nobody else can help you.”
“Because you’re my personal watcher.”
“No wonder you don’t have many friends,” she said. “You’re really not a very nice person, are you?”
“I’m only like this with people who break into my house.”
“But I didn’t—oh, never mind. Just remember my name and don’t wait too long to call me.”
“Not that I’d want to,” John said, “but I don’t even have your number.”
“Just call my name and I’ll come,” she said. “If it’s not too late. Like I said, I might not be able to recognize you if you wait too long.”
Though he was trying to take this all in stride, John couldn’t help but start to feel a little creeped out at the way she was going on. He’d never realized that crazy people could seem so normal—except for what they were saying, of course.
“Goodbye,” he told her.
She bit back whatever it was that she was going to say and gave him a brusque nod. For one moment, he half expected her to walk through a wall—the evening had taken that strange a turn—but she merely crossed the living room and let herself out the front door. John waited for a few moments, then rose and set the deadbolt. He walked through the house, checking the windows and back door, before finally going upstairs to his bedroom.
He thought he might have trouble getting to sleep—the woman’s presence had raised far more questions than it had answered—but he was so tired from twelve straight hours in the studio that it was more a question of, could he get all his clothes off and crawl under the blankets before he faded right out? He had one strange moment: when he turned off the light, he made the mistake of looking directly at the bulb. His uninvited guest’s features hung in the darkness along with a hundred dancing spots of light before he was able to blink them away. But the moment didn’t last long and he was soon asleep.
He didn’t realize that he’d forgotten to set his alarm last night until he woke up and gave the clock a bleary look. Eleven-fifteen. Christ, he was late.
He got up, shaved and took a quick shower. You’d think someone would have called him from the studio, he thought as he started to get dressed. He was doing session work on Darlene Flatt’s first album and the recording had turned into a race to get the album finished before her money ran out. He had two solos up first thing this morning and he couldn’t understand why no one had called to see where he was.
There was no time for breakfast—he didn’t have much of an appetite at the moment anyway. He’d grab a coffee and a bagel at the deli around the corner from the studio. Tugging on his jeans, he carried his boots out into the living room and phoned the studio while he put them on. All he got was ringing at the other end.
“Come on,” he muttered. “Somebody pick it up.”
How could there be nobody there to answer?
It was as he was cradling the receiver that he saw the book lying on the coffee table, reminding him of last night’s strange encounter. He picked the book up and looked at it, turning it over in his hands. There was something different about it this morning. Something wrong. And then he realized what it was. The color dust wrapper had gone monochrome. The book and . . . His gaze settled on his hand and he dropped the book in shock. He stared at his hand, turning it front to back, then looked wildly around the living room.
Oh, Jesus. Everything was black and white.
He’d been so bleary when he woke up that he hadn’t noticed that the world had gone monochrome on him overnight. He’d had a vague impression of gloominess when he got up, but he hadn’t really thought about it. He’d simply put it down to it being a particularly overcast day. But this . . . this . . .
It was impossible.
His gaze was drawn to the window. The light coming in was devoid of color where it touched his furniture and walls, but outside . . . He walked slowly to the window and stared at his lawn, the street beyond it, the houses across the way. Everything was the way it was supposed to be. The day was cloudless, the colors so vivid, the sunlight so bright it hurt his eyes. The richness of all that colour and light burned his retinas.
He stood there until tears formed in his eyes and he had to turn away. He covered his eyes with his hands until the pain faded. When he took his palms away, his hands were still leached of color. The living room was a thousand monochrome shades of black and white. Numbly, he walked to his front door and flung it open. The blast of color overloaded the sensory membranes of his eyes. He knelt down where he’d tossed his jacket last night and scrabbled about in its pockets until he found a pair of shades.
The sunglasses helped when he turned back to the open door. It still hurt to look at all that color, but the pain was much less than it had been. He shuffled out onto his porch, down the steps. He looked at what he could see of himself. Hands and arms. His legs. All monochrome. He was like a black and white cutout that someone had stuck onto a colored background.
I’m dreaming, he thought.
He could feel the start of a panic attack. It was like the slight nervousness that sometimes came when he stepped onto stage—the kind that came when he was backing up someone he’d never played with before—only increased a hundredfold. Sweat beaded on his temples and under his arms. It made his shirt clammy and stick to his back. His hands began to shake so much that he had to hug himself to make them stop.
He was dreaming, or he’d gone insane.
Movement caught his eye down the street and he recognized one of his neighbors. He stumbled in the man’s direction.
“Bob!” he called. “Bob, you’ve got to help me.” The man never even looked in his direction. John stepped directly in front of him on the sidewalk and Bob walked right into him, knocking him down. But Bob hadn’t felt a thing, John realized. Hadn’t seen him, hadn’t felt the impact, was just walking on down the street as if John had simply ceased to exist for him.
John fled back into the house. He slammed the door, locked it. He pulled the curtains in the living room and started to pace, from the fireplace to the hallway, back again, back and forth, back and forth. At one point he caught sight of the book he’d dropped earlier. Slowly, he walked over to where it lay and picked it up. He remembered last night’s visitor again. Her voice returned to him.
If you change too much . . .
This was all her fault, he thought.
He threw the book down and shouted her name.
“Yes?”
Her voice came from directly behind him and he started violently.
“Jesus,” he said. “You could’ve given me a heart attack.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn last night except today there was a leather bomber’s jacket on over her T-shirt and she wore a hat that was something like a derby except the brim was wider. There was one other difference. Like himself, like the rest of his house, she’d been leached of all color.
“What did you do to me?” he demanded.
She reached out and took his hand to lead him over to the sofa. He tried to pull free from her grip, but she was stronger than she looked.
“Sit down,” she said, “and I’ll try to explain.”
Her voice was soothing and calm, the way one would talk to an upset child—or a madman. John was feeling a little bit like both at the moment, helpless as a child and out of his mind. But the lulling quality of her voice and the gentle manner of her touch helped still the wild drumming of his pulse.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t know what you’ve done to me—I don’t know how you’ve done this to me or why—but I just want to get back to normal, okay? If I made you mad last night, I’m sorry, but you’ve got to understand. It was pretty weird to find you in my house the way I did.”
“I know,” she said. “I didn’t realize you could see me at first, or I would have handled it differently myself. But you took me by surprise.”
“I took you by surprise?”
“What do you remember of last night?” she asked.
“I came home and found you in my living room.”
“No, before that.”
“I was at High Lonesome Sounds—working on Darlene’s album.”
She nodded. “And what happened between when you left the studio and came home?”
“I . . . I don’t remember.”
“You were hit by a car,” she said. “A drunk driver.”
“No way,” John said, shaking his head. “I’d remember something like that.”
She took his hand. “You died instantly, John Narraway.”
“I . . . I . . .”
He didn’t want to believe her, but her words settled inside him with a finality that could only be the truth.
“It’s not something that anyone could have foreseen,” she went on. “You were supposed to live a lot longer—that’s why I was so surprised that you could see me. It’s never happened to me like that before.”
John had stopped listening to her after she’d said, “You were supposed to live a lot longer.” He clung to that phrase, hope rushing through him.
“So it was a mistake,” he said.
Dakota nodded.
“So what happens now?” he asked.
“I’ll take you to the gates.”
“No, wait a minute. You just said it was a mistake. Can’t you go back to whoever’s in charge and explain that?”
“If there’s anyone in charge,” she said, “I’ve never met or heard of them.”
“But—”
“I understand your confusion and your fear. Really I do. It comes from the suddenness of your death and my not being there to help you adjust. That’s the whole reason I exist—to help people like you who are unwilling or too confused to go on by themselves. I wasn’t ready to go myself when my time came.”
“Well, I’m not ready either.”
Dakota shook her head. “It’s not the same thing. I wasn’t ready to go because when I saw how much some people need help to reach the gates, I knew I had to stay and help them. It was like a calling. You just aren’t willing to accept what happened to you.”
“Well, Christ. Who would?”
“Most people. I’ve seen how their faces light up when they step through the gates. You can’t imagine the joy in their eyes.”
“Have you been through yourself?” John asked.
“No. But I’ve had glimpses of what lies beyond. You know how sometimes the sky just seems to be so big it goes on forever?”
John nodded.
“You stand there and look up,” she went on, “and the stars seem so close you feel as though you could just reach up and touch them, but at the same time the sky itself is enormous and has no end. It’s like that, except that you can feel your heart swelling inside you, big enough to fill the whole of that sky.”
“If what’s waiting beyond these gates is so wonderful,” John wanted to know, “why haven’t you gone through?”
“One day I will. I think about it more and more all the time. But what I’m doing now is important and I’m needed. There are never enough of us.”
“Maybe I’ll become a watcher instead—like you.”
“It’s not something one takes on lightly,” Dakota said. “You can’t just stop when you get tired of doing it. You have to see through all of your responsibilities first, make sure that all of your charges have gone on, that none are left behind to fend for themselves. You share the joys of your charges, but you share their sorrows, too. And the whole time you know them, you’re aware of their death. You watch them plan, you watch their lives and the tangle of their relationships grow more complex as they grow older, but the whole time you’re aware of their end.”
“I could do that,” John said.
Dakota shook her head. “You have always been sparing with your kindnesses. It’s why your circle of friends is so small. You’re not a bad person, John Narraway, but I don’t think you have the generosity of spirit it requires to be a watcher.”
The calm certainty with which she delivered her judgment irritated John.
“How would you know?” he said.
She gave him a sad smile. “Because I’ve been watching you ever since you were born.”
“What? Every second of my life?”
“No. That comes only at first. It takes time to read a soul, to unravel the tangle of possibilities and learn when the time of death is due. After that it’s a matter of checking in from time to time to make sure that the assessment one made still holds true.”
John thought about the minutiae that made up the greater portion of everyone’s life and slowly shook his head. And what if you picked a person who was really dull? Everybody had slow periods in their lives, but some people’s whole lives were one numbed shuffle from birth to death. And since you knew the whole time when the person was going to die . . . God, it’d be like spending your whole life in a doctor’s waiting room. Boring and depressing.
“You don’t get tired of it?” he asked.
“Not tired. A little sad, sometimes.”
“Because everybody’s got to die.”
She shook her head. “No, because I see so much unhappiness and there’s nothing I can do about it. Most of my charges never see me—they make their own way to the gates and beyond. I’m just there as a kind of insurance for those who can’t do it by themselves and I’m only with them for such a little while. I miss talking to people on a regular basis. Sometimes I see some of the other watchers, but we’re all so busy.”
“It sounds horrible.”
She shrugged. “I never think of it that way. I just think of those who need help and the looks on their faces when they step through the gates.” She fell silent for a moment, then gave him a smile. “We should go now. I’ve got other commitments.”
“What if I refuse to go? What happens then?”
“No one can force you, if that’s what you mean.”
John held up his hand. He looked around himself. Okay, it was weird, but he could live with it, couldn’t he? Anything’d be better than to be dead—even a half-life.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “And no, it’s not because I’m reading your mind, because I can’t.”
“So what’s going to happen to me?”
“I take it you’re already experiencing some discomfort?”
John nodded. “I see everything in black and white—but only in the house. Outside, nothing’s changed.”
“That will grow more pronounced,” she told him. “Eventually you won’t be able to see color at all. You might lose the clarity of your vision as well so that everything will seem to be a blur. Your other senses will become less effective as well.”
“But—”
“And you won’t be able to interact with the world you’ve left behind. In time, the only people you’ll be able to see are others like yourself—those too willful or disturbed to have gone on. They don’t exactly make the best of companions, John Narraway, but then, by that point, you’ll be so much like them, I don’t suppose it will matter.”
“But what about all the stories of ghosts and hauntings and the like?”
“Do you have a particularly strong bond with a certain place or person?” she asked. “Someone or something you couldn’t possibly live without?”
John had to admit that he didn’t, but he could tell that she already knew that.
“But I’ll still be alive,” he said, knowing even as he said the words that they made no real sense.
“If you want to call it that.”
“Don’t you miss life?”
Dakota shook her head. “I only miss happiness. Or maybe I should say, I miss the idea of happiness because I never had it when I was alive.”
“What happened to you?” John wanted to know.
She gave him a long sad look. “I’m sorry, John Narraway, but I have to go. I will listen for you. Call me when you change your mind. Just don’t wait too long—”
“Or you won’t be able to recognize me. I know. You already told me that.”
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
This time she didn’t use the door. One moment she was sitting with him on the sofa and the next she faded away like Carroll’s Cheshire cat except with her it was her eyes that lingered the longest, those sad dark eyes that told him he was making a mistake, those eyes to which he refused to listen.
He didn’t move from the sofa after Dakota left. While the sunlight drifted across the living room, turning his surroundings into a series of shifting chiaroscuro images, he simply sat there, his mind empty more often than it was chasing thoughts. He was sure he hadn’t been immobile for more than a few hours, but when he finally stood up and walked to the window, it was early morning, the sun just rising. He’d lost a whole night and a day. Maybe more. He still had no appetite, but now he doubted that he ever would again. He didn’t seem to need sleep, either. But it scared him that he could lose such a big chunk of time like that.
He turned back to the living room and switched on the television set to make sure that all he’d lost had been the one day. All he got on the screen was snow. White noise hissed from the speaker grill. Fine, he thought, remembering how he’d been unable to put a call through to the recording studio yesterday morning. So now the TV wouldn’t work for him. So he couldn’t interact with the everyday mechanics of the world anymore. Well, there were other ways to find out what he needed to know.
He picked up his fiddlecase out of habit, put on his jacket and left the house. He didn’t need his shades once he got outside, but that was only because his whole street was now delineated in shades of black and white. He could see the color start up at the far ends of the block on either side. The sky was overcast above him, but it blued the further away from his house it got.
This sucked, he thought. But not so much that he was ready to call Dakota back.
He started downtown, putting on his sunglasses once he left the monochromic zone immediately surrounding his house. Walking proved to be more of a chore than he’d anticipated. He couldn’t relax his attention for a moment or someone would walk into him. He always felt the impact while they continued on their way, as unaware of the encounter as his neighbor Bob had been.
He stopped at the first newsstand he came upon and found the day’s date. Wednesday, he read on the masthead of The Newford Star. November tenth. He’d only lost a day. A day of what, though? He could remember nothing of the experience. Maybe that was what sleep would be like for him in this state—simply turning himself off the way fiction described vampires at their rest. He had to laugh at the thought. The undead. He was one of the undead now, though he certainly had no craving for blood.
He stopped laughing abruptly, suddenly aware of the hysterical quality that had crept into the sound. It wasn’t that funny. He pressed up close against a building to keep out of the way of passing pedestrians and tried to quell the panic he could feel welling up inside his chest. Christ, it wasn’t funny at all.
After a while he felt calm enough to go on. He had no particular destination in mind, but when he realized he was in the general vicinity of High Lonesome Sounds, he decided to stop by the studio. He kept waiting for some shock of recognition at every corner he came to, something that would whisper, this is where you died. This is where the one part of your life ended and the new part began. But the street corners all looked the same and he arrived at the recording studio without sensing that one had ever had more importance in his life than the next.
He had no difficulty gaining entrance to the studio. At least doors still worked for him. He wondered what his use of them looked like to others, doors opening and closing, seemingly of their own accord. He climbed the stairs to the second floor loft where the recording studio was situated and slipped into the control booth where he found Darlene and Tom Norton listening to a rough mix of one of the cuts from Darlene’s album. Norton owned the studio and often served as both producer and sound engineer to the artists using his facilities. He turned as John quietly closed the door behind him but he looked right through John.
“It still needs a lead break,” Norton said, returning his attention to Darlene.
“I know it does. But I don’t want another fiddle. I want to leave John’s backing tracks just as they are. It doesn’t seem right to have somebody else play his break.”
Thank you, Darlene, John thought.
He’d known Darlene Flatt for years, played backup with her on and off through the past decade and a half as she sang out her heart in far too many honky-tonks and bars. Her real name was Darlene Johnston, but by this point in her career everyone knew her by her stage name. Dolly Parton had always been her idol and when Darlene stepped on stage with her platinum wig and over-the-top rhinestone outfits, the resemblance between the two was uncanny. But Darlene had a deeper voice and now that she’d finally lost the wigs and stage gear, John thought she had a better shot at the big time. There was a long tradition of covering other people’s material in country music, but nothing got tired more quickly than a tribute act so far as John was concerned.
She didn’t look great today. There was a gaunt look about her features, hollows under her eyes. Someone mourned him, John realized.
“Why don’t we have Greg play the break on his Dobro?” Darlene said. She sounded so tired, as though all she wanted to do was get through this.
“That could work,” Norton said.
John stopped listening to them, his attention taken by the rough mix that was still playing in the control booth. It was terrible. All the instruments sounded tinny and flat, there was no bass to speak of, and Darlene’s voice seemed to be mixed so far back you felt you had to lean forward to be able to hear it. He winced, listening to his own fiddle-playing.
“You’ve got a lot more problems here than what instrument to use on the break,” he said.
But of course they couldn’t hear him. So far as he could tell, they liked what they were hearing which seemed particularly odd, considering how long they’d both been in the business. What did they hear that he couldn’t? But then he remembered what his mysterious visitor had told him. How his sight would continue to deteriorate. How . . .
Your other senses will become less effective as well.
John thought back to the walk from his house to the studio. He hadn’t really been thinking of it at the time, but now that he did he realized that the normal sounds of the city had been muted. Everything. The traffic, the voices of passersby, the construction site he’d passed a couple of blocks away from the studio. When he concentrated on Darlene and Norton’s conversation again, listening to the tonal quality of their voices rather than what they were saying, he heard a hollow echo that hadn’t registered before.
He backed away from them and fumbled his way out into the sitting room on the other side of the door. There he took his fiddle out of his case. Tuning the instrument was horrible. Playing it was worse. There was nothing there anymore. No resonance. No depth. Only the same hollow echoing quality that he’d heard in Darlene and Norton’s voices.
Slowly he laid his fiddle back into its case, loosened the frog on his bow and set it down on top of the instrument. When he finally made his way back down the stairs and out into the street, he left the fiddle behind. Outside, the street seemed overcast, its colors not yet leached away, but definitely faded. He looked up into a cloudless sky. He crossed the street and plucked a pretzel from the cart of a street vendor, took a bite even though he had no appetite. It tasted like sawdust and ashes. A bus pulled up at the curb where he was standing, let out a clutch of passengers, then pulled away again, leaving behind a cloud of noxious fumes. He could barely smell them.
It’s just a phase, he told himself. He was simply adjusting to his new existence. All he had to do was get through it and things would get back to normal. They couldn’t stay like this.
He kept telling himself that as he made his way back home, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. He was dead, after all—that was the part of the equation that was impossible to ignore. Dakota had warned him that this was going to happen. But he wasn’t ready to believe her either. He just couldn’t accept that the way things were for him now would be permanent.
He was right. Things didn’t stay the same. They got worse. His senses continued to deteriorate. The familiar world faded away from around him until he found himself in a grey-toned city that he didn’t always recognize. He stepped out of his house one day and couldn’t find his way back. The air was oppressive, the sky seemed to press down on him. And there were no people. No living people. Only the other undead. They huddled in doorways and alleys, drifted through the empty buildings. They wouldn’t look at him and he found himself turning his face away as well. They had nothing they could share with each other, only their despair, and of that they each had enough of their own.
He took to wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets, the high points of his day coming when he recognized the corner of a building, a stretch of street, that gargoyle peering down from an utterly unfamiliar building. He wasn’t sure if he was in a different city, or if he was losing his memory of the one he knew. After a while it didn’t seem to matter.
The blank periods came more and more often. Like the other undead, he would suddenly open his eyes to find himself curled up in a nest of newspapers and trash in some doorway, or huddled in the rotting bulk of a sofa in an abandoned building. And finally he couldn’t take it anymore.
He stood in the middle of an empty street and lifted his face to grey skies that only seemed to be kept aloft by the roofs of the buildings.
“Dakota!” he cried. “Dakota!”
But he was far too late and she didn’t come.
Don’t wait too long to call me, she’d told him. If you change too much, I won’t be able to find you and nobody else can help you.
He had no one to blame but himself. It was like she’d said. He’d changed too much and now, even if she could hear him, she wouldn’t recognize him. He wasn’t sure he’d even recognize himself. Still, he called her name again, called for her until the hollow echo that was his voice grew raw and weak. Finally he slumped there in the middle of the road, shoulders sagged, chin on his chest, and stared at the pavement.
“The name you were calling,” a voice said. “Did it belong to one of those watchers?”
John looked up at the man who’d approached him so silently. He was a nondescript individual, the kind of man he’d have passed by on the street when he was alive and never looked at twice. Medium height, medium build. His only really distinguishing feature was the fervent glitter in his eyes.
“A watcher,” John repeated, nodding in response to the man’s question. “That’s what she called herself.”
“Damn ’em all to hell, I say,” the man told him. He spat on the pavement. “ ’Cept that’d put ’em on these same streets and Franklin T. Clark don’t ever want to look into one of their stinkin’ faces again—not unless I’ve got my hands around one of their necks. I’d teach ’em what it’s like to be dead.”
“I think they’re dead, too,” John said.
“That’s what they’d like you to believe. But tell me this: If they’re dead, how come they’re not here like us? How come they get to hold onto a piece of life like we can’t?”
“Because . . . because they’re helping people.”
Clark spat again. “Interferin’s more like it.” The dark light in his eyes seemed to deepen as he fixed his gaze on John. “Why were you calling her name?”
“I can’t take this anymore.”
“An’ you think it’s gonna be better where they want to take us?”
“How can it be worse?”
“They can take away who you are,” Clark said. “They can try, but they’ll never get Franklin T. Clark, I’ll tell you that. They can kill me, they can dump me in this stinkin’ place, but I’d rather rot here in hell than let ’em change me.”
“Change you how?” John wanted to know.
“You go through those gates of theirs an’ you end up part of a stew. Everythin’ that makes you who you are, it gets stole away, mixed up with everybody else. You become a kind of fuel—that’s all. Just fuel.”
“Fuel for what?”
“For ’em to make more of us. There’s no goddamn sense to it. It’s just what they do.”
“How do you know this?” John asked.
Clark shook his head. “You got to ask, you’re not worth the time I’m wastin’ on you.”
He gave John a withering look, as though John was something he’d stepped on that got stuck to the bottom of his shoe. And then he walked away.
John tracked the man’s progress as he shuffled off down the street. When Clark was finally out of sight, he lifted his head again to stare up into the oppressive sky that hung so close to his face.
“Dakota,” he whispered.
But she still didn’t come.
The day he found the infant wailing in a heap of trash behind what had once been a restaurant made John wonder if there wasn’t some merit in Clark’s anger toward the watchers. The baby was a girl and she was no more than a few days old. She couldn’t possibly have made the decision that had left her in this place—not by any stretch of the imagination. A swelling echo of Clark’s rage rose up in him as he lifted the infant from the trash. He swaddled her in rags and cradled the tiny form in his arms.
“What am I going to do with you?” he asked.
The baby stopped crying, but she made no reply. How could she? She was so small, so helpless. Looking down at her, John knew what he had to do. Maybe Clark was right and the watchers were monsters, although he found that hard to reconcile with his memories of Dakota’s empathy and sadness. But Clark was wrong about what lay beyond the gates. He had to be. It couldn’t be worse than this place.
He set off then, still wandering aimlessly, but now he had a destination in mind, now he had something to look for. He wasn’t doing it for himself, though he knew he’d step through the gates when they stood in front of him. He was doing it for the baby.
“I’m going to call you Dolly,” he told the infant. “Darlene would’ve liked that. What do you think?”
He chucked the infant under her chin. Her only response was to stare up at him.
John figured he had it easier than most people who suddenly had an infant came into their lives. Dolly didn’t need to eat and she didn’t cry unless he set her down. She was only happy in his arms. She didn’t soil the rags he’d wrapped her in. Sometimes she slept, but there was nothing restful about it. She’d be lying in his arms one minute, the next it was as though someone had thrown a switch and she’d been turned off. He’d been frantic the first time it happened, panicking until he realized that she was only experiencing what passed for sleep in this place.
He didn’t let himself enter that blank state. The idea had crept into his mind as he wandered the streets with Dolly that to do so, to let himself turn off the way he and all the other undead did, would make it all that much more difficult for him to complete his task. The longer he denied it of himself, the more seductive the lure of that strange sleep became, but he stuck to his resolve. After a time, he was rewarded for maintaining his purposefulness. His vision sharpened; the world still appeared monochromatic, but at least it was all back in focus. He grew more clearheaded. He began to recognize more and more parts of the city. But the gates remained as elusive as Dakota had proved to be since the last time he’d seen her.
One day he came upon Clark again. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since the last time he’d seen the man—a few weeks? A few months? It was difficult to tell time in the city as it had become because the light never changed. There was no day, no night, no comforting progression from one into the other. There was only the city, held in eternal twilight.
Clark was furious when he saw the infant in John’s arms. He ranted and swore at John, threatened to beat him for interfering in what he saw as the child’s right of choice. John stood his ground, holding Dolly.
“What are you so afraid of?” he asked when Clark paused to take a breath.
Clark stared at him, a look of growing horror spreading across his features until he turned and fled without replying. He hadn’t needed to rely. John knew what Clark was afraid of. It was the same fear that kept them all in this desolate city: Death. Dying. They were all afraid. They were all trapped here by that fear. Except for John. He was still trapped like the others; the difference was that he was no longer afraid.
But if a fear of death was no longer to be found in his personal lexicon, despair remained. Time passed. Weeks, months. But he was no closer to finding these fabled gates than he’d been when he first found Dolly and took up the search. He walked through a city that grew more and more familiar. He recognized his own borough, his own street, his own house. He walked slowly up his walk and looked in through the window, but he didn’t go in. He was too afraid of succumbing to the growing need to sit somewhere and close his eyes. It would be so easy to go inside, to stretch out on the couch, to let himself fall into the welcoming dark.
Instead he turned away, his path now leading toward the building that housed High Lonesome Sounds. He found it without any trouble, walked up its eerily silent stairwell, boots echoing with a hollow sound, a sound full of dust and broken hopes. At the top of the stairs, he turned to his right and stepped into the recording studio’s lounge. The room was empty, except for an open fiddlecase in the middle of the floor, an instrument lying in it, a bow lying across the fiddle, horsehairs loose.
He shifted Dolly from the one arm to the crook of the other. Kneeling down, he slipped the bow into its holder in the lid of the case and shut the lid. He stared at the closed case for a long moment. He had no words to describe how much he’d missed it, how incomplete he’d felt without it. Sitting more comfortably on the floor, he fashioned a sling out of his jacket so that he could carry Dolly snuggled up against his chest and leave his arms free.
When he left the studio, he carried the fiddlecase with him. He went down the stairs, out onto the street. There were no cars, no pedestrians. Nothing had changed. He was still trapped in that reflection of the city he’d known when he was alive, the deserted streets and abandoned buildings peopled only by the undead. But something felt different. It wasn’t just that he seemed more himself, more the way he’d been when he was still alive, carrying his fiddle once more. It was as though retrieving the instrument had put a sense of expectation in the air. The grey dismal streets, overhung by a brooding sky, were suddenly pregnant with possibilities.
He heard the footsteps before he saw the man: a tall, rangy individual, arriving from a side street at a brisk walk. Faded blue jeans, black sweatshirt with matching baseball cap. Flat-heeled cowboy boots. What set him apart from the undead was the purposeful set to his features. His gaze was turned outward, rather than inward.
“Hello!” John called after the stranger as the man began to cross the street. “Have you got a minute?”
The stranger paused in mid-step. He regarded John with surprise, but waited for John to cross the street and join him. John introduced himself and put out his hand. The man hesitated for a moment, then took John’s hand.
“Bernard Gair,” the man said in response. “Pleased, I’m sure.” His look of surprise had shifted into one of vague puzzlement. “Have we met before . . . ?”
John shook his head. “No, but I do know one of your colleagues. She calls herself Dakota.”
“The name doesn’t ring a bell. But then there are so many of us—though never enough to do the job.”
“That’s what she told me. Look, I know how busy you must be so I won’t keep you any longer. I just wanted to ask you if you could direct me to . . .”
John’s voice trailed off as he realized he wasn’t being listened to. Gair peered more closely at him.
“You’re one of the lost, aren’t you?” Gair said. “I’m surprised I can even see you. You’re usually so . . . insubstantial. But there’s something different about you.”
“I’m looking for the gates,” John told him.
“The gates.”
Something in the way he repeated the words made John afraid that Gair wouldn’t help him.
“It’s not for me,” he said quickly. “It’s for her.”
He drew back a fold of the sling’s cloth to show Gair the sleeping infant nestled against his chest.
“I see,” Gair said. “But does she want to go on?”
“I think she’s a little young to be making that kind of decision for herself.”
Gair shook his head. “Age makes no difference to a spirit’s ability to decide such a thing. Infants can cling as tenaciously to life as do the elderly—often more so, since they have had so little time to experience it.”
“I’m not asking you to make a judgment,” John said. “I’m just asking for some directions. Let the kid decide for herself once she’s at the gates and can look through.”
Gair needed time to consider that before he finally gave a slow nod.
“That could be arranged,” he allowed.
“If you could just give me directions,” John said.
Gair pulled up the left sleeve of his sweatshirt so that he could check the time on his wristwatch.
“Let me take you instead,” he said.
Even with directions, John couldn’t have found the gates on his own. “The journey,” Gair explained, “doesn’t exercise distance so much as a state of mind.” That was as good a description as any, John realized as he fell in step with his new companion, for it took them no time at all to circumvent familiar territory and step out onto a long boulevard. John felt a tugging in that part of his chest where his heart had once beaten as he looked down to the far end of the avenue. An immense archway stood there. Between its pillars the air shimmered like a heat mirage and called to him.
When Gair paused, John came to a reluctant halt beside him. Gair looked at his watch again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to leave you now. I have another appointment.”
John found it hard to look at the man. His gaze kept being drawn back to the shimmering air inside the arch.
“I think I can find my way from here,” he said.
Gair smiled. “I should think you could.” He shook John’s hand. “Godspeed,” he murmured, then he faded away just as Dakota had faded from his living room what seemed like a thousand lifetimes ago.
Dolly stirred against John’s chest as he continued on toward the gates. He rearranged her in the sling so that she, too, could look at the approaching gates, but she turned her face away and for the first time his holding her wasn’t enough. She began to wail at the sight of the gates, her distress growing in volume the closer they got.
John slowed his pace, uncertain now. He thought of Clark’s cursing at him, of Gair telling him that Dolly, for all her infancy, was old enough to make this decision on her own. He realized that they were both right. He couldn’t force her to go through, to travel on. But what would he do if she refused? He couldn’t simply leave her behind either.
The archway of the gates loomed over him now. The heat shimmer had changed into a warm golden light that washed out from between the pillars, dispelling all the shadows that had ever taken root in John’s soul. But the infant in his arms wept more pitifully, howled until he covered her head with part of the cloth and let her burrow her face against his chest. She whimpered softly there until John thought his heart would break. With each step he took, the sounds she made grew more piteous.
He stood directly before the archway, bathed in its golden light. Through the pulsing glow, he could see the big sky Dakota had described. It went on forever. He could feel his heart swell to fill it. All he wanted to do was step through, to be done with the lies of the flesh, the lies that had told him, this one life was all, the lies that had tricked him into being trapped in the city of the undead.
But there was the infant to consider and he couldn’t abandon her. Couldn’t abandon her, but he couldn’t explain it to her, that there was nothing to fear, that it was only light and an enormous sky. And peace. There were no words to capture the wonder that pulsed through his veins, that blossomed in his heart, swelled until his chest was full and he knew the light must be pouring out of his eyes and mouth.
Now he understood Dakota’s sorrow. It would be heartbreaking to know what waited for those who turned their backs on this glory. It had nothing to do with gods or religions. There was no hierarchy of belief entailed. No one was denied admittance. It was simply the place one stepped through so that the journey could continue.
John cradled the sobbing infant, jigging her gently against his chest. He stared into the light. He stared into the endless sky.
“Dakota,” he called softly.
“Hello, John Narraway.”
He turned to find her standing beside him, her own solemn gaze drinking in the light that pulsed in the big sky between the gates and flowed over them. She smiled at him.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said. “And certainly not in this place. You did well to find it.”
“I had help. One of your colleagues showed me the way.”
“There’s nothing wrong with accepting help sometimes.”
“I know that now,” John said. “I also understand how hard it is to offer help and have it refused.”
Dakota stepped closer and drew the infant from the sling at John’s chest.
“It is hard,” she agreed, cradling Dolly. Her eyes still held the reflected light that came from between the gates, but they were sad once more as she studied the weeping infant. She sighed, adding, “But it’s not something that can be forced.”
John nodded. There was something about Dakota’s voice, about the way she looked that distracted him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
“I will take care of the little one,” Dakota said. “There’s no need for you to remain here.”
“What will you do with her?”
“Whatever she wants.”
“But she’s so young.”
The sadness deepened in Dakota’s eyes. “I know.”
There was so much empathy in her voice, in the way she held the infant, in her gaze. And then John realized what was different about her. Her voice wasn’t hollow, it held resonance. She wasn’t monochrome, but touched with color. There was only a hint, at first, like an old tinted photograph, but it was like looking at a rainbow for John. As it grew stronger he drank in the wonder of it. He wished she would speak again, just so that he could cherish the texture of her voice, but she remained silent, solemn gaze held by the infant in her arms.
“I find it hardest when they’re so young,” she finally said, looking up at him. “They don’t communicate in words so it’s impossible to ease their fears.”
But words weren’t the only way to communicate, John thought. He crouched down to lay his fiddlecase on the ground, took out his bow and tightened the hair. He ran his thumb across the fiddle strings to check the tuning, marveling anew at the richness of sound. He thought perhaps he’d missed that the most.
“What are you doing?” Dakota asked him.
John shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to explain it to her, but that he couldn’t. Instead he slipped the fiddle under his chin, drew the bow across the strings, and used music to express what words couldn’t. He turned to the gates, drank in the light and the immense wonder of the sky and distilled it into a simple melody, an air of grace and beauty. Warm generous notes spilled from the sound holes of his instrument, grew stronger and more resonant in the light of the gates, gained such presence that they could almost be seen, touched and held with more than the ear.
The infant in Dakota’s arms fell silent and listened. She turned innocent eyes toward the gates and reached out for them. John slowly brought the melody to an end. He laid down his fiddle and bow and took the infant from Dakota, walked with her toward the light. When he was directly under the arch, the light seemed to flare and suddenly the weight was gone from his arms. He heard a joyous cry, but could see nothing for the light. His felt a beating in his chest as though he was alive once more, pulse drumming. He wanted to follow Dolly into the light more than he’d ever wanted anything before in his life, but he slowly turned his back on the light and stepped back onto the boulevard.
“John Narraway,” Dakota said. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t go through,” he said. “Not yet. I have to help the others—like you do.”
“But—”
“It’s not because I don’t want to go through anymore,” John said. “It’s . . .”
He didn’t know how to explain it and not even fiddle music would help him now. All he could think of was the despair that had clung to him in the city of the undead, the same despair that possessed all those lost souls he’d left there, wandering forever through its deserted streets, huddling in its abandoned buildings, denying themselves the light. He knew that, like Dakota and Gair, he had to try to prevent others from making the same mistake. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, he knew there would be times when it would be heartbreaking, but he could see no other course.
“I just want to help,” he said. “I have to help. You told me before that there aren’t enough of you and the fellow that brought me here said the same thing.”
Dakota gave him a long considering look before she finally smiled. “You know,” she said. “I think you do have the generosity of heart now.”
John put away his fiddle. When he stood up, Dakota took his hand and they began to walk back down the boulevard, away from the gates.
“I’m going to miss that light,” John said.
Dakota squeezed his hand. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “The light has always been inside us.”
John glanced back. From this distance, the light was like a heat mirage again, shimmering between the pillars of the gates, but he could still feel its glow, see the flare of its wonder and the sky beyond it that went on forever. Something of it echoed in his chest and he knew Dakota was right.
“We carry it with us wherever we go,” he said.
“Learn to play that on your fiddle, John Narraway,” she said.
John returned her smile. “I will,” he promised. “I surely will.”