Intersections Read online

  “Thank you for coming,” I told him.

  Of course, he said nothing in response. Just shook his head. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, checked the screen, and tucked it away again. I did him the courtesy of not looking. This was the last man I’d had sex with, and that’d been far too long ago. I wanted to hug him, to hold him. To feel his arms wrapped around me one more time.

  Apparently, the dead get no such shelter.

  He left without entering the viewing room. I almost followed him but I figured I’d haunted him enough already.

  Instead, I wandered back to my corpse and sat beside my casket. I wondered what my body smelled like—if Mom had thought to spray my favorite perfume, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, inside. Probably not.

  Soon, booming laughter hammered through the murmur of conversation and tinkling music. At first, I thought Uncle Mike must’ve told one of his raunchy jokes, but he wasn’t on the guest list. He’d been dead for years, now that I thought about it. I looked across the room. No one was laughing and yet the noise continued. I followed it back to the foyer, where a grand staircase stretched upward into the shadows. The maniacal noise—a woman laughing like a drunk hyena—came from upstairs. A dreadful chill ran through me, causing a momentary twinge of pain in all my healed wounds. Every wee slit ached for one brief moment. I didn’t want to go up there, but I suspected that the laughter must’ve come from a ghost like me. Perhaps this cackling spirit could help me understand what was happening to the Light in the sky and what other things in this dead new world I should avoid, aside from grass and sunshine.

  The stairs didn’t groan as I climbed them. I had no reflection in the glass in the frames lining the stairs—pictures of the Lamb Family past and present. Beach vacations. Universal Studios. The St. Louis Arch. I paused in front of an old black and white picture of a chubby young man in a bow tie and a smirking blond with a pointed nose. They both held guitars. Upward I went, past more family portraits. Woodsy backdrops. Library backdrops. Fireplace backdrops. Most of the men had plump cheeks and big noses—clearly a Lamb Family trait.

  At the top of the stairs, I walked down a shadowy hall. The closer I got to the laughter, the more horrible it sounded—somehow cold and yet frantic. Heart withering, I walked to the doorway of a tidy bedroom with a neatly made four-poster bed.

  The ghost of a young man crouched over the ghost of an old woman on the floor. He had his back to me. His aura glowed pale white similar to mine, but hers was an inky grey. Her head tilted back, mouth gaping. Laughter erupted from her wrinkled face. I edged around them, closer. Through his translucent back, I saw him tickling her relentlessly, digging his fingers into her ribs and under her arms.

  “Hey,” I said.

  The man ignored me.

  The old woman’s hands flapped like broken birds at him, trying to fight him off.

  “Hey, stop.”

  He kept right on tickling. Her laughter was like insects crawling through my ears and gnawing at my brain.

  Anger swarmed inside me. I stepped forward, grabbed the man’s shoulder, and yanked him off her before I lost my resolve. As soon as his hands left her body, the old woman went still. As if someone had hit the off switch. Her head drooped sideways. Her heavy eyes were completely black. Not a rich black but an empty void.

  I turned on the young man. He wore a crooked bow tie. I expected to see anger in his face and I braced to kick him square in the fellas.

  He sadly shook his head. “I waited for decades for the chance to make her laugh again.”

  His brow wrinkled. He couldn’t have been older than in his mid-twenties, and yet the weariness in his grey eyes betrayed his true age. Through the windows, the sky outside deepened. Rain pittered and pattered against the windows, growing in intensity with each passing minute.

  “When she finally passed over, I feared she might drift upward into the broken Light.”

  “Why do some ghosts go up there and some stay down here?” I said.

  He shrugged. “It seems the ones with unfinished business stay below. Those who are done—or who have nothing to live for—drift upward.”

  “Oh. Great.”

  “But she came to me. I thought we’d exist happily ever after here in our family home. But a darkness festered within her. We had only three nights together. Then came the dreadful dawn. Now she sleeps all day. Every day.” He grabbed my wrists. “She’s like all the rest—all the others that have passed over since the Light in the sky broke. You must understand. Tickling her is the only way to make her laugh. She gets a little better at night, but it’s not the same. Not like when she was alive. Something’s broken inside her. She’s not my Honey Drop anymore. And then . . . And then the clock strikes three every night. And I have to hide.”

  His words made little sense. I tried to step backward. “I . . . I’m sorry. Let me go.”

  “If I could get my guitar out of the attic, I could play for her. If anything would make her better, it’d be that. We could do it together. We could.” He pulled me toward the hall, his grip as strong as iron. Where we touched, a harsh tingle ran through me. Like sticking my finger in a socket. “Help me. We can help each other. Two are better than one. There are things I can’t do alone.”

  The thick ghost spun me around and wrapped his big arms around my waist. He lifted me off my feet and carried me into the hall. I clawed and pried at his fingers. Golden light flickered in our merged auras.

  “Do you play guitar?” he whispered in my ear.

  “Let go of me, you crazy fucker!”

  “It’s okay. I can teach you. We can play together, you and I.”

  I swung my head back to smash his face. My skull cracked against him, hard enough that that fireflies streaked across my vision. He grunted but his grip only tightened. That’s when I remembered my kitten heel. I snap-kicked my foot. The shoe popped upward. I snagged it out of the air and stabbed the heel backward into his face. This time, he howled in pain. I tumbled to the floor and crawled toward the stairs. When I looked back, he yanked the ghostly footwear out of his eye socket. A thin line of snotty ectoplasm stretched between his face and my shoe. I curled my toes, and the heel leapt out of his hand and back onto my foot.

  “You bitch,” he said. Spittle sprayed over his chin. His eyeball slid down his cheek.

  Downstairs, footsteps plodded, clicked, and clacked across the hardwood floors. I glanced down. A chubby young man in a navy blue suit walked my mom and aunt to the front door. The visitation must’ve been over. Mom and Connie walked outside onto the porch. I looked back. The chubby ghost plodded forward, hands outstretched.

  “Please,” he said. “We can make such beautiful music, you and I. I know we can.”

  That’s when Shannon’s words came back to me—about being trapped. I realized that if the man below shut the door, I’d be confined in this creepy old house with this crazy fucker. The man in the suit stood at the door, watching the women descend the porch steps. In the periphery of my vision, the ghost lunged forward. I threw myself down the stairs.

  The world turned into a violent spinning crash. The hard steps bashed my shoulders, knees, and head, each blow a sledgehammer cracking into me. I thudded onto the foyer floor. The sound of rain oriented me to the front door, where the man waved goodbye to Mom and Connie. His hand reached for the doorknob.

  I could only imagine what’d happen if he shut the door on me. I’d be trapped. Or split in two. I tucked and rolled through the doorway, only barely clearing the threshold. The heavy wood smacked into me, knocking me backward down the front porch steps. I toppled outside into the rain.

  Agony burst through me.

  Each drop of rain tore a watery canyon through my phantom form, shredding me. Riddling me. I screamed and collapsed in a heap of anguish. The rain acted as a machine gun blasting me with thousands of liquid bullets. I spilled down the wet walkway, ghost flesh torn, phantom bones shattered.

  I tried to scream, but the rain bullets had rippe