Chapter Three
Still Later, and Earlier

"Steal My Breath"
by The Brothers Grim

       Death was brutal. He had not been prepared for this. No, he had expected to ease gently into darkness, to glide softly into the arms of oblivion. If there turned out to be an afterlife, he hoped it would be radiant and welcoming; he did not believe that any just God would ever condemn a decent, caring person's soul to eternal damnation, a patently unfair punishment, even for suicide. Hopefully, the universe would turn out to be ruled by a truly just God, and not by the arbitrary monster of various holy writs, who seemed to more a reflection of the tribal cruelties of the people who created Him than any sort of all-knowing, all-pervading deity.
       Not that Reid Campbell disbelieved in Hell. It was just a case of, "Been there. Done that."
       So he was prepared even for damnation, when you got right down to it. At least in Hell, you always knew where you stood. ("Break's over, back on your heads.") He was no longer prepared to face the vagaries of his life, which had become as unstable as one of those aluminum funhouse floors that would suddenly quake to life amidst a clank of springs and machinery, sending you sprawling while all around you crazy calliope music undulated and revelers screamed for joy. Lately he'd feel that same urge come over him suddenly, the urge to scream as the sidewalk before him became liquid and threatened to cast him into the air. And he would scream, and fall to the ground, trying to hold the earth in place. And then they'd have to usher him away somewhere, give him a nice shot and another damn prescription.
       The bad thing about those endless vials of pills they gave you, aside from all the damn side-effects, like impotence and hair loss, one a metaphor for the other, ha-ha, was that the effects were cumulative. Once you started taking them, these happy pills with names that sounded like mythical Greek cities with all those "-thiums" and "-axes" and "-zines" at the end of their names, you couldn't stop or their magic would be gone, locked away in the Crystal Cave as it were. There were good things about them too...
       ...Like how few of them it would take to kill you, what a tiny number of pills indeed it would take to solve all your little problems of hair-loss and impotence and demonic professors that sing hate in your eardrums in the dark hours before dawn.
       Only a few more than you were supposed to take. That's all. Not a whole bottle or two, just a few extra pills, wash it down with vodka, lie back and wait. Just a few more than you were prescribed.
       But apparently more than he had taken.
       But that's because dying was brutal. Why shouldn't it be, since life was so brutal as well? Several times after he was supposed to have died he had awakened to find himself on a sad little hospital bed, his arm wired up to one of those fluid-filled sacky things, an IV needle in his arm. He held on for several days, several horrible haunted days, before he eventually, finally passed over. Or thought he had passed over.
       God damn it, he had survived.
       Even now, poised as he was on the brink of a soon-to-be-regained life, Reid could feel the memories of what had happened in the hours after his death slipping away from him. Well, of course, he'd crossed the river Nepenthe (or was it Lethe?) both ways, and why shouldn't that mythic river sap away memories of death as well as life?
       He tried to review it in his mind. "My so-called death". He had opened his eyes from a nightmare, to find himself still in his hospital bed. The pallid florescents buzzed above him, and the monitor beside his bed gave off a steady "eeee" sound. He sat up, and stepped out of his body.
       That should have been disconcerting, but instead it felt entirely natural, as if leaving his body were something he did every day. He turned his head and looked down at his cold, still corpse, noting in his mind the lack of any sense of loss or longing for his surrendered life. He knew he was dead in that instant; but the knowledge felt neither frightening nor liberating, only cold. The he looked around the room, and felt even colder.
       There was a man in the room, not Professor Firth but a short man, a small man, dressed in odd clothing that seemed to be made out of woven twine but which carried an aura of formality, as if the small man were on his way to a goblin award ceremony or a Hobbiton charity ball. He wore a tall conical lawn gnome hat, which appeared to have a series of small roundish objects orbiting it with no visible means of support. The gnome noticed his gaze, and met it, scowling. "You think you're better off?" it glared.
       "I don't know... I had hoped..." Reid tried to reply, but couldn't hear any sound coming from between his lips.
       "I hear ya anyway," the gnome responded. His features seemed to be changing; he seemed more beast than human now, with an air of warthog about him, yet was still clearly the same individual; moreover, Reid could not recall seeing anything specific about him change.
       "Who are you?" Reid asked. It seemed pertinent, somehow.
       The gnome answered in a language Reid had neither heard before nor understood, yet the meaning of the gnome's speech was clear. "A concerned citizen," was how Reid's mind translated it. The gnome strode out of the dark corner where he had been standing with an odd, wobbling gait that seemed unaffected by gravity. He walked over to the side of the bed and hopped up onto it, landing standing on top of the outstretched legs of Reid's corpse. Reid withdrew reflexively, and was surprised to find himself suddenly on the other side of the room, watching the little man thrusting both arms into the corpse's chest.
       "What are you doing?" Reid asked. He was starting to feel a little frightened, which struck him as odd. He should be feeling a lot frightened.
       The gnome looked over at him and hissed, his face instantly catlike. "Nothing that concerns you!"
       Reid was taken aback. The gnome returned his attention to the corpse. He began to hum to himself, a sprightly, poppy song.
       "It is my body," Reid spoke, attempting a commanding tone and failing miserably.
       "Eh, you're quite done with it." This time the gnome didn't even look up, but his tone was friendly, almost endearingly so. Reid suddenly felt a wave of warmth, of security flowing over him. He stretched out his arms and looked up toward the ceiling. He felt buoyant, and expected to rise up through the tiles, through the roof, up into the sky. Instead, he began rising, but rising in place; he felt himself borne aloft, yet his position in the room remained the same. The room was dropping away; not into the distance, but out of reality; it was indescribable, but the room was rapidly growing less and less real, more and more wraithlike. "I'm leaving," he said, not to the gnome, particularly, just thinking out loud.
       "See you in Hell," the gnome responded.
       "Not if I see you first," Reid answered.
       The room had completely faded by this point, and Reid had the sensation that he was simply floating in space surrounded by clouds. As he began to focus on them, he realized that the "clouds" seemed to be some sort of rolling liquid, not water vapor at all. He floated, still with the feeling that he was rising, and shapes began appearing in those clouds, shapes that were vague and yet specific, as shapes in clouds always are. And as he drifted, these shapes grew slowly more distinct, and he began to recognize them as images from his life.
       He watched, incredulous, as an eddy of white liquid slowly formed itself into a fire engine, a toy he had treasured as a child. The picture was unmistakable, yet as he stared it pulled itself apart from within, undulating, transforming. The eddy swelled, becoming the face of Steve Banacek, his best friend from his old neighborhood. Steve was dropping a water balloon from a tree. The cloud balloon burst in slow motion upon the cloud ground, and little wisps of ghost balloon shrapnel spattered slowly outward, dissipating.
       The images started coming faster, and the clouds began growing darker. There were his parents, he watched their faces age. There was his brother, grown up, waving at him from a porch, with his family around him. There was the car crash he had walked away from as a teenager, there was his prom date, Marcia something; there was Nikita Kruschev and Eisenhower; and JFK...
       There was his first guitar.
       Lightning flashed within a nearby cloud bank. Suddenly the slow movement of the clouds began to intensify; they were starting to spin around him, like a whirlpool; faces and figures appearing and disappearing within the maelstrom with maddening speed. No longer the fluffy faces of his childhood, these were wild, chaotically twisted faces, contorted figures, unearthly constructions; some familiar, some strange and unsettling. And suddenly they began rearing up at him, those faces out of his nightmares, demon faces laughing, canine teeth, rabid eyes; Alex! Nancy! Frank! Sean! Wendy! Johnny!
       Professor Firth.
       No sooner had the professor appeared then all other apparitions vanished, all clouds were gone. There was nothing around but black, black, black, with no light anywhere, yet the professor was clearly visible. He stood, only partially solid, eyes shut, palms outstretched.
       Reid tried to will himself away from the grim apparition, and indeed felt a rushing sense of motion, but the professor kept pace with him so exactly that neither of them seemed to be moving at all. The professor's eyes snapped open.
       "Are you trying to get away from me, Reid? Do you really think that could be possible?"
       "Leave me alone. I'm dead."
       "Death is just the beginning. You'll never be alone."
       "I just want it to be over! Why does there have to be a goddamn afterlife?"
       "Because there are gods, child! Because sadism and savagery is truth! Because there are beings that feed on horror as you or I might eat a grape! Because life's a bitch, and then I eat your soul!"
       Reid began to feel irrationally angry, not even taking the time to marvel that his disembodied self was still able to feel emotions. "So you're the Devil now, Professor. You're Satan?"
       "Pleased to meet me?"
       Reid laughed, and kept laughing. This was so insane! Maybe he wasn't dead at all, just off on a psychotic mind-jaunt-
       "No, you're dead alright." Professor Firth looked dour. "And I'm not the devil. I'm not even a demon."
       "Then what in hell's name are you?"
       The Professor's eye's grew shadowed. "I'm an echo."
       Reid had been looking away, staring off into the darkness before him, which seemed to be comprised of moving layers of liquid black. He looked over at the Professor. "What?"
       But the Professor was gone.
       Reid had a sense that he was still moving, still going somewhere, even though he could see nothing ahead, behind, above, or below him; nothing but black on black; shifting, swirling black.
       He began to feel uneasy.
       It seemed to him that his momentum was increasing. It was starting to feel as though he was falling forward. A rush of vertigo shot through him and he felt a wave of panic starting to ripple up his spine. (Why did he still have a spine? Was there such thing as an "astral spine"?) He tried focusing, concentrating all his mental energy on slowing his descent; he only seemed to fall faster.
       It seemed to him that the black around him was no longer undulating; it was squirming.
       And up ahead of him, something moved. Something so large, so far away, so vast and immense that it seemed incomprehensible even in light of Reid Campbell's current situation. He couldn't see it; didn't even know that it was there for certain; but he felt it move.
       Suddenly every hackle on his body stood up like he'd been jolted with a slash of frozen electricity. Suddenly terror washed through him like a surge of liquid nitrogen, raw blue cold numbing every nerve and capillary. Suddenly his mind seemed like it was falling faster than his body, like his soul was about to be ripped apart by the acceleration. He began to scream, but it seemed he was falling forward too fast to hear its sound leave his lips.
       The thing before him, the vast, horrible thing, shifted again, and suddenly Reid Campbell was conscious of a terrible truth: it was aware of him as well.
       It was expecting him.
       Reid woke up screaming. He was back in a hospital bed. He was dead, and reborn, and disoriented. He had been remembering what had happened after he died, and lapsed into a dream... or had been dreaming, and lapsed into memory... but here he was, back among the living, no longer shrouded on a slab, and the memories of his death and its aftermath were fading, fading, fading...
       He stood up, got out of the bed, somewhat gratified to see that his body followed him. He knew what he had to do next.