Page 16

Calisto

The in-between, as I called it for want of a better name, was exactly how I remembered it. A place of nothingness. A place where the thick fog enshrouding it ensured you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of you. There were one or two dark shapes in the distance—people, I assumed—but either they hadn’t noticed me, or they simply weren’t interested.

Given I’d left my physical body back in Asher’s bedroom, I expected to feel a difference in my movements, but when I flexed my fingers and rolled my neck, it felt the same. And when I climbed gingerly to my feet, it took just as much effort to stand as it would normally.

There was grass beneath my feet. Although, it was gray, not green, so it was stretching it to call it grass. The fact remained, though, that apart from the color, it looked more like grass than it did anything else, so grass it was.

Now I was here, the question was where to look for Baxter? Turning in a slow circle did nothing to help that decision. There were no signposts, no landmarks to navigate by. Just the endless fog and the nothingness. By that reasoning, I supposed it didn’t matter which way I went, as long as I went somewhere. With that in mind, I started walking.

Barely a minute passed before the first shape loomed out of the mist directly in my path, my heart rate spiking as I stopped dead to avoid a collision. A man with dark hair and a beard. If I had to estimate his age, I would have said mid-forties. Did his age matter when he was dead?

His suit and tie said he’d just stepped out of the office. Heart attack at his desk. There was no reasoning behind me knowing that, but I knew it to be true without a doubt. The heart attack had been his first. He’d ignored the warning signs in the preceding week and kept working just as hard, and it had proved fatal.

If he saw me, he gave no sign of it, looking straight through me before continuing on his path. There were more people after that. A young woman in her twenties with blonde curly hair who’d died of cancer—she was glad to get her hair back after three unsuccessful rounds of chemotherapy and kept running her fingers through it. An old man in a tweed jacket who’d stumbled off the curb at the wrong time and been hit by a car. A policewoman still in uniform who’d died in the line of duty trying to stop a bank robbery.

Unlike the first man, they spared me a glance. None of them tried to talk to me, and I didn’t talk to them. What would I say? Sorry, you’re dead. Life sucks. And maybe you should try to move on from here to wherever is next. I doubted whatever I said would go down well, and it certainly wouldn’t help them.

The landscape wasn’t quite featureless. Every now and again, I’d stumble across something so out of place I couldn’t help but stop and stare. The first was a small boat. Not on water, but on the grass that wasn’t grass, the boat’s glossy white-painted surface vivid against all the gray.

It was tempting to look inside, if only to find out if the interior was furnished or nothing but an empty shell. I fought it, vowing not to let myself get distracted. Time might move more slowly here, but it still moved.

The next thing I stumbled across was a postbox. Just like the boat, there was no reason for it to be here. It looked just like a postbox should. Tall, red, slightly phallic, with a top wider than its black base. It even had times written on it, the post due to be picked up from this one at 4p.m Monday to Friday with an earlier collection on a Saturday. Smiling, I looked around for someone to share the joke with, but found no one. No lost soul wandering nearby. And no postman stuck in a loop of denial, determined to continue doing his job long after he’d shuffled off the mortal coil.

It was just past the postbox that I became aware of being followed. It wasn’t a noise. No footsteps, or telltale crunch of ‘grass.’ Just an awareness of a presence that kept pace with me, that moved when I moved and stopped when I did, like they were intent on keeping the same distance away, and watching from afar.

Hair standing up on the back of my neck, I stopped and peered in the direction I thought they were, cursing the fog for the umpteenth time. Why did this place have to have the ambience of a Victorian graveyard? Why couldn’t it be a lush, green tropical island with shimmering pools of blue water? “If that’s you, Baxter,” I called out, wincing at the volume of my voice in the deathly stillness, “then I’m not finding it at all funny. So come out, would you? I’ll grovel if that’s what you want. You know I don’t want to be here. But I came here for you… to say sorry.”

Nothing, my heart thudding in my chest as I waited. Not Baxter, that same sixth sense told me. A woman. Well, great. If it wasn’t Baxter, then it wasn’t anyone I needed to talk to. I carried on walking, doing my best to ignore the constant niggle telling me they were still there. Still watching. Still keeping their distance.

More random objects. A windmill of all things, its blades moving slowly despite there being no wind to propel them. I guess this was a place where science and common sense went out of the window. A lawnmower. One you sat on. Well, at least there’d be something to mow the grass that wasn’t grass.

And then a car. Not a Porsche. Nothing so grand as Asher’s flashy motor. This car was sunshine yellow and looked to be at least thirty percent rust. I was more interested in the man sitting cross-legged on its bonnet, though. Relief at seeing Baxter in one piece, unhurt, didn’t last long, replaced by a sense of irritation that had me striding over there. “I’ve been calling you,” I said.

For a moment, I thought he couldn’t hear me, but then he turned his head slowly, the corners of his lips twitching as he took me in. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“I came looking for you!”

“And you found me.”

“Did you hear me?” I was one part annoyed and two parts curious about his answer.

“I…”

“The truth.”

“Yes… I heard you.”

“So you just ignored me?” Baxter patted the empty expanse of the bonnet next to him in an invitation. Despite being tempted to tell him I was fine where I was and didn’t want to sit on a strange object in the middle of nowhere that made zero sense to even be here, I climbed on and settled myself into the same position he was. Now, I was cross-legged back in Asher’s bedroom, and here. “I’m not mad.”

Baxter laughed. “You might want to work on your delivery of that line. Maybe sound a little less mad when you say it.”

“If you heard me, I didn’t have to come here. I’ve spent hours wandering around looking for you.”

“I’ve been trying to get you here for years.”

“I know.” The fog seemed to have thickened around us and I could barely see a meter in front of me. I lifted my hand, and it swirled around my fingertips. I had a momentary thought that if I asked it to disperse, it would, before dismissing it. Did I think I was some sort of king who controlled this world? “It’s not exactly the nicest place, is it?”

“It’s my home,” Baxter said, his tone flatter than I ever remembered hearing it. “The only one I have.”

“That’s not true. You have a home with me.”

“You asked me to leave.”

I winced. “You know I’ve been under a lot of strain. You know me better than anyone.” Baxter’s shrug said I still had an awful lot of making up to do. “If you heard me, you also heard me apologize. And say I missed you. I do. I came here because I was worried something might have happened to you.”

“Nothing happens here.”

“No?” I peered into the fog again. “What do you do, then? What have you spent the last”—I stopped myself from saying three days, remembering that for Baxter it had been longer—“however long doing?”

“Walking. Sitting. Thinking.”

“Sounds riveting.” Baxter didn’t laugh at the joke. I considered how to phrase the question I wanted to ask. “Have you ever tried to get to the place that comes after this?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The people here,” Baxter said slowly, “all fit into three categories. The first category is the people so lost they don’t even know where they are or why they’re here.” I thought about all the people I’d encountered while searching for Baxter, figuring that was an apt description for them, none of them remotely interested in connecting with me or with each other. “That accounts for about ninety percent of the people here. They don’t even know they’re supposed to be searching for something.”

“If that was the case, wouldn’t there be thousands of them? I’ve seen like ten at most.”

Baxter shifted position slightly, the car remaining abnormally silent when it should have creaked under his weight—under our combined weight. “I think they sometimes stumble to the right place. They disappear, anyway.”

“You think they find the right place? Where else would they go?”

“I’ll get to that. The second category,” he continued, “are people like me. The ones who know exactly where they are and why. Although, not quite like me… I’m the only one as far as I know with a strange link to a necromancer that means I can go back and forth across worlds.”

“Why are we linked?” I asked. It wasn’t as if we’d never raised that question before, but given the new information Baxter was sharing, it was as good a time as any to revisit the topic.

Baxter shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You must have some idea.”

He turned his head and gave me a hard stare. “One day I was minding my own business here, and then the next I had some precocious kid showing me every item of Lego he’d ever made. For three hours.”

“It wasn’t three hours.”

“It felt like it. Which”—he waved an arm at the featureless landscape—“is saying something when this is the alternative.”

“Rude,” I muttered.

At least that made Baxter smile, something there’d been unusually few of since I’d tracked him down. I didn’t know if it was being here making him so melancholy, or the grudge he still bore about what I’d said. “Maybe it’s because you’re psychic,” I suggested.

“I was psychic,” Baxter corrected. “That died when I did.” He shrugged. “I doubt we’ll ever know.”

“Yeah...” I let out a sigh. “And for the record, I wasn’t precocious.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree about that.”

“I wasn’t!”

“U-huh.”

“What about the third category?” I asked, keen to change the subject if I couldn’t get him to agree.

“I hadn’t finished with category two.”

Crossing my arms, I leaned back against the windscreen of the car, stretching my legs out in front of me before I got cramp from sitting like a pretzel—would the version of me in Asher’s bedroom get cramp?—and waited.

“Category two people,” Baxter said, “make up about seven percent of the population here. They’re… We’re people who aren’t ready to embrace a true death because we have unfinished business.”

“Your murder,” I said.

“My murder,” Baxter agreed with a nod.

“I’m surprised you’ve never asked me to investigate it.”

“You!” Even without the laugh that followed, the way he’d said it would have been insulting enough.

“Yes, me,” I said waspishly. “I have a brain.”

“No one’s saying you don’t, but you and murder don’t exactly go together.”

“We could ask Ben,” I suggested. “He’s a detective. I’d have to come up with some story about how I heard about you, but—”

“No.”

“Why not?” I asked cautiously. “You just said yourself that you’ve got unfinished business. The difference is you could finish it. We could find out who murdered you and why.”

“And then I can go?” Baxter said thinly. “Is that your plan? Are you that keen to get rid of me?”

“No! Not at all. I just thought…”

“It was years ago,” Baxter said. “I doubt there are any breadcrumbs left to follow.”

“So you’re just going to stay here forever?”

“I’m just going to stay here,” Baxter echoed, his voice flat.

“What about when I’m dead?”

Baxter suddenly became very interested in his hands, checking his palms and his fingers for imagined flaws. “Then I guess I’m here all the time. Or maybe I’ll find myself flung into someone else’s life.” He smirked. “Maybe I’ll get lucky next time and they’ll have a hobby that’s less nerdy. Oh, and a social life where they actually go out and meet people.”

“I go out,” I said defensively.

“And they’ll know what to do with a smoking hot guy who wanders into their life and professes undying love to them.”

“I presume you’re talking about Asher.”

Baxter’s eyebrows shot up. “Did I miss another hot guy turning up?”

“No, of course not,” I said, my cheeks flaming.

“So, yeah, Asher,” Baxter said. “Lovely sinuous Asher with a body to die for, eyes the color of a frozen pond on a sunny day, and enough earnestness when it comes to you to fill the deepest of deep wells. Not to mention his—”

“I kissed him,” I said before he could detail more of Asher’s attributes and lose himself completely in poetic description.

Baxter’s reaction was immediate and made him look far more like his usual self as he scooted round to face me, eyes brimming with merriment and chin propped on his hand. “Tell me more.”

“Here?”

“It’s where we are.”

“Why are we on a car?”

“This was the first car I owned. No sarcastic comments about the color, thank you very much. And don’t change the subject. At the risk of sounding like a teenage girl, I want all the details. Where were you? How long was the kiss? Did it involve tongues? Was it just a kiss or did anything else happen?”

“So the objects I keep seeing are linked to people? The windmill? The postbox? The lawnmower?”

“Yeah. That’s about as exciting as it gets round here. Come on, the kiss? You know I live vicariously through you, which is about as disappointing as it sounds most of the time, so give me something.”

“We were in bed.”

“Nice!”

“Yes, there were tongues, and yes, it went on for a while. Until I realized he was naked. I may have overreacted slightly, and that was the end of it.”

“He was naked!” Baxter’s eyes went as round as saucers. “Tell me you copped a feel.”

“Not deliberately.”

“So you’re an item now?”

“No. In fact, nothing has happened since that night.”

Baxter straightened, exuding smugness. “Which is why you needed to talk to me. You wanted advice.”

“Not so much advice. More a sounding board,” I admitted. “It’s easier to talk to you because you know everything.”

“Get naked. Throw yourself at him. Have some fun. Worry about the rest later.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“It is easy. Sex is not a promise.”

“I know that. I’ve had sex multiple times.”

Baxter coughed. “I think the word ‘multiple’ is incredibly generous, but if your point is you’re not a virgin, I’ll accept that.”

“I don’t want to hurt him.”

“He’s an adult. A very fine, very—”

“ Don’t start that again!”

Baxter grinned. “Sorry. Can’t help myself. He can say no, though. He can ask what your intentions toward him are like you’re in some Merchant Ivory film. He can tell you he’s not interested unless you intend to make a commitment toward him. He can tell you that you’re unworthy of his muscled magnificence.”

“All true,” I admitted. I caught myself just in time. “Not the muscled magnificence part, obviously.”

“No?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You said he was naked.”

I shook my head before I could get drawn into any more bickering. “Listen… No matter what you might think, I didn’t come here to talk about Asher. I came to apologize and make things right between us.”

“And you have.”

“Have I?”

Baxter clapped a hand to his chest dramatically. “I am abuzz with the glow of reconciliation.”

“Dick!” Even I could hear the fondness in my voice, though. Baxter might not be my sibling by blood, but in many ways, I was closer to him than any of my actual siblings. I might have admitted as much, either that or carried on insulting him, which amounted to the same thing, if it wasn’t for the sound that came out of the fog.

Jumping to my feet on the car, I stared in the direction it had come from, my heart pounding as I attempted to convince myself it hadn’t been a roar, that I was hearing things. “Are there animals here?”

Still in his cross-legged position and seemingly unphased by the noise, Baxter shook his head. “No. There are no animals.”

“Then, what—?”

“You should go.” A hint of urgency that did nothing to calm my racing heart had crept into Baxter’s voice.

“Something has been following me ever since I got here. Is it that?” Whatever that was.

Baxter shook his head. “No, it’s the girl that’s been following you.”

“What girl?”

“The one who wants to talk to you. I told you about her, remember?”

That’s right. He had. And I’d told him a random dead girl wanting to talk to me made little sense. “If she wants to talk to me, then why didn’t she? Why just follow me?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s shy.”

I laughed at the thought of someone who was dead being shy, and then immediately felt bad. Why wouldn’t she be if she’d had that character trait in life? It wasn’t like people got here and became someone else. They stayed the same person; they were just dead.

The sound came again. Definitely a roar. This time, it was closer. Like, whoever or whatever—and my mind was definitely veering toward the latter choice—was heading our way. Was it us? Or was it just me? Was that why Baxter seemed wholly unconcerned about it, but had told me to leave?

“What’s the other three percent?” I asked.

“What?”

“You said that category one people make up ninety percent of the population, and that people like you, category two people, make up a further seven percent. That leaves three percent as category three, but you never told me what category three is.”

Baxter stood and faced me, both of us standing on the car. “Later. Time to go, Calisto. You’ve been here too long.”