The Dead Woman

CHAPTER SEVEN

Matt raised his ax. He'd brought it with him from the store. Abbey had given him a strange look, but hadn't said anything. He just couldn't bear the thought of leaving it behind. It was his only connection to the past. To the person he used to be. On the bus ride, he'd been forced to stow it in a compartment, and even that had bothered him.

He brought the heavy blade down on the wood, smiling as it split in two. His shoulder barely hurt at all anymore. He'd checked the wound in the mirror after waking up and was surprised to find it had all but healed. One of the benefits of his condition, he supposed.

Good thing Abbey had a mountain of logs to split. Matt loved to work the wood. The labor cleared his head and kept him trim, plus it gave him time to think. He settled into the rhythm of the task: placing a log on the stump, hefting the ax, and splitting it. Repeat as desired. The steady thud of the blade into wood was as comforting to him as the sound of his own heartbeat.

Place.

Heft.

Chop.

Repeat.

It felt good to be outdoors. The day was starting off warmer than normal for this time of year, and the birds serenaded him as he worked. Abbey's place, it turned out, was set far back into the country. The house sat in the middle of the only cleared patch of land on sixteen acres. Her father, she said, had built the house with his own two hands. The man apparently liked his privacy.

He placed another log on the stump.

Last night with Abbey wasn't love. Matt knew that. He attributed it to a combination of alcohol consumption and the shock of finding a kindred spirit.

But were they kindred spirits? Really? Sure, Abbey could see evil, but what did that tell him about her? Nothing. Other than her ability to see the festering decay of evil and the fact that she was a demon in the sack, he really didn't know much about her at all.

Matt raised the ax over his head.

Obviously, she had been the one to call Dale the day before. Matt realized that now. Once he'd left, she must have figured where he was going, since she could see the sores on Brad's face, too. But why hadn't she come along? Was she afraid? Or just apathetic? Did she use her "gift" to help people, as Matt did? Or did she let it go to waste? Was she a potential ally? The thought had its appeal, and it was more than just the mind-blowing sex.

Matt brought the ax down, splitting the log with a sharp crack.

Matt hated to admit it, but he was tired of being alone all the time. Until now, he'd just figured it was his lot in life. His destiny. But if he could share his mission with someone else, a like-minded person who could help him hunt Mr. Dark...

Hell, did she even know about Mr. Dark? Matt needed to know, and he could think of only one way to find out. It was time to finish the discussion they'd started the night before.

He leaned the ax against the stump and turned toward the house. He entered through the same door in the side of the garage that he'd used to go out into the yard. Inside, Abbey's van sat cold and silent, waiting for them to make their trip back to town. He passed through the garage and into the house.

"That's none of your business, Dale." Abbey was on the phone when Matt walked into the house. She looked fantastic in a faded red T-shirt that was barely long enough to cover her ass. The smoke from her cigarette danced through the house. Matt could have lived without the smoke, but somehow he didn't think she would look the same without it. He felt his crotch stir again as he watched her pace through the living room.

"You don't get to ask me questions like that anymore," Abbey snapped into the phone. "That's what divorce means. It means you have to stay out of my goddamn business." She placed her palm over the mouthpiece and smiled at Matt. "Sorry, cowboy," she whispered. "I'll be off in a minute. I made breakfast, though. Help yourself."

The smell of bacon and eggs wafted through the living room, reminding him that he hadn't eaten yet. According to the clock on the wall, he'd been chopping for an hour and a half. It didn't seem like it, but time often moved at a strange pace when he was working the wood. Since she was on the phone, and since his stomach had started gurgling loud enough to be heard in the other room, Matt decided their conversation about Mr. Dark could wait.

He followed his nose into a small kitchen with a checkered floor and burled wooden cabinets. The gleaming white and chrome oven looked ancient, as did the fridge. He couldn't see a dishwasher anywhere, but the sink was full of soapy water and a couple of cooking pans. The walls were covered with a daisy-patterned wallpaper that looked spotless, even in the bright light of the morning that filtered through the window above the sink. The whole place had a very fifties feel to it, and Matt liked it immediately.

A platter of bacon, eggs, and fried potatoes sat on the linoleum table. Abbey had already set two places and poured a couple of glasses of orange juice. She must have been just about to get him when her ex-husband called. He sat in the seat closest to the window and tried not to eavesdrop on their conversation while he shoved food into his mouth.

Unfortunately, that was harder than he thought. Abbey's voice carried through the house like a bell, and he had a hard time distracting himself from it. To help him focus on something else, he began to look through the kitchen.

The fifties vibe really struck him the more he looked at it. Even the pictures on the wall looked antique. That's probably her mother's doing, he thought. After all, she did run an antique store. She probably had a fondness for them.

One picture in particular caught his attention: an old black and white shot of a woman who looked a lot like Abbey (probably her mom, he reflected) standing in front of a car lot. The woman stood next to a smiling man in a tweed suit as they posed in front of an old Buick. There were other older cars in the background, their windows decorated with words like "On Sale! Today Only!" and "Bring one home to the Missus!" written in white shoe polish. The man held a set of keys towards the camera, beaming like a child with a gold star on his report card.

Matt smiled. He could see where Abbey got her looks. He got up and stepped over to the wall to get a better look at the photo. Abbey's mother smiled prettily back at him. They had the exact same smile: big and bright and full of life.

"Wait a minute," he whispered. He reached up and plucked the picture from the wall, bringing it closer to his face. No fucking way...

"Nice picture, isn't it?" Abbey's voice came from behind him.

Matt turned to see her leaning against the doorframe.

"That's not your mother, is it?"

Abbey shook her head. "Nope. That's me with my first husband, Clark, on the day we bought our very first car."

Matt looked back at the picture and took it in. The cars, the clothes, the way Abbey's hair was styled. Like Rita Hayworth's but not as dark. "When was this taken?

Abbey sighed. "Nineteen forty-seven." She walked over and grabbed the picture from Matt's hand and placed it back on the wall, tracing the outline of Clark's face with her index finger. Her lips bent up into a rueful smile. "The same year we got married."

Matt stared back at her, his mouth agape. Nineteen forty-seven? Sixty-four years ago? But she looked exactly the same. "How...?"

"What do you say we go have a drink, cowboy?" Abbey asked.

Matt looked at his watch. "It's only ten a.m."

Abbey folded her arms over her chest. "Do you honestly give a fuck what time it is?"

"No," Matt replied, looking at the picture on the wall. A picture that told him he'd just slept with a woman who had to be in her eighties. "Not really."

# # #

"I was pretty wild back then," Abbey said. "Clark loved that about me. We would party all night long and sleep through the day."

They were seated at a small corner table at a restaurant called the Candlewood. The place was open and airy, with a shitload of miscellaneous movie memorabilia plastered all over the walls. One such wall was devoted to Marilyn Monroe, while another was covered with movie posters featuring Clark Gable. Their wall, Matt noted, housed the restaurant's Alfred Hitchcock collection. It seemed fitting.

The place had opened at ten o'clock, and so did the bar, but for the moment they were the only two people in the bar section. No one else in town, it seemed, had cause to drink before noon. Abbey held a glass of Grand Marnier in her hand, while Matt nursed a beer.

"Must have been hard to make a living that way," Matt noted.

"You don't know the half of it," Abbey replied. "Neither one of us could hold down a job, but Clark's father was wealthy. When he died, he left everything to Clark, and that's when we got married and bought the Buick."

"Clark looked pretty happy in that picture," Matt said.

"We were," Abbey said. "Both of us."

"What happened?"

"I died."

"That seems to be going around," Matt said. "How?"

Abbey turned her glass up and downed the remaining liquor in a single gulp. Her face tensed, and she set the glass back on the table. "Drug overdose. Heroin. I wasn't dead for three months, though. More like three hours. Clark came home from work and found me. He took my pulse, realized I was dead, and called the medics."

"The medics?"

"We didn't call them EMTs or paramedics back then, but they were essentially the same thing. You have to realize, there was no 911 emergency system. Every branch of emergency services—police, fire, medical—had its own number and location. We called the people who responded to medical emergencies medics."

Matt nodded and took a drink of his beer. "And?"

"I woke up before the medics arrived. It really freaked Clark out."

"What did the medics have to say about it?"

"I managed to convince Clark he was mistaken, and that I'd only fainted. Once he believed, the medics accepted it. After all, he didn't know a damn thing about medicine. They told him not to panic next time and that they'd be sending us a bill. But I know the truth. I died. Just like you. And the next day, I started seeing these weird blotches on people. Some had it worse than others, and some people looked like they'd been dead for years. Those people were usually the mean ones. The things I saw them do..." Abbey shuddered. "Anyway, it didn't take long to figure out what the sores and rot represented."

"Did you tell anyone?" Matt asked.

"Are you crazy?" she replied. "I'd just overdosed on drugs. I figured it was a side effect or something. My husband was already looking at me like something out of a horror movie. I didn't want to make things worse. I figured it would pass. Of course, it didn't."

"No," Matt agreed. "It didn't."

The waitress came over and refilled Abbey's glass. She offered Matt another beer but he declined. Abbey raised her eyebrow but said nothing. After the waitress left, the two stayed silent for several long minutes. Matt was trying to figure out how to ask his next question, and couldn't quite get it out.

Abbey must have noticed. "You have something else, don't you?"

Matt nodded and finished the remainder of his beer. He wiped his lips with a napkin and leaned forward. "That picture, you said it was taken in 1947?"

Abbey nodded. She took a drink from her fresh glass. "Shit, I need a smoke. Or even a lollipop. Goddamn anti tobacco lobby. Who goes to a bar and doesn't smoke? Fascist bastards."

"How old were you?"

"Twenty-six."

"How is that possible?"

Abbey smiled again. "I have no idea. But it must have something to do with my—with our—unique condition."

Mat had never given much thought to that. He had always assumed that his life would run a normal course. As normal as a dead man running after a ghost could get, anyway. He figured he would someday grow old and eventually die. But if Abbey was right, then how many years did he have left? Would he be sitting in a bar in another sixty years looking exactly the same as he did now?

"So," he said, "the antique shop..."

"Was never my mother's," she finished. "Sorry about the lie, but I didn't know you then. Telling someone your mother was killed by a serial killer right before Christmas is a convenient way of getting people to change the subject."

"No problem," he said.

"I move around every few years," Abbey continued. "As you can imagine, it would get pretty complicated if I stayed in one town more than five or ten years."

"I bet."

"So what about you?" Abbey asked. "What do you plan to do with eternity?"

This is it, Matt thought. You're never going to have a better chance to bring it up.

"I'm going to catch Mr. Dark," he said, and waved the waitress over. Maybe another drink wouldn't be such a bad idea, after all.

"Who the hell is Mr. Dark?" Abbey asked. "He a friend of yours?"

Damn, Matt thought. He was just about to tell her how Mr. Dark had ruined his life when the door to the restaurant slammed open and a very angry Dale stormed in.

"I knew it!" he said, pointing at Matt. "I knew you were with him!" Dale started walking towards them, his eyes blazing and his hand reaching for his baton.