one

the mark inside

It always goes down hard when a dead guy takes his first swing at me. Like an invisible club coming out of the dark behind my eyes, landing in a million different places—places of the mind, places of the soul. I’ve been told I have a pretty mean soul, but I always flinch a little. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

He’s tough, this son of a bitch.

He was a child killer when he was still alive. I can tell that right off. It’s the Terrible Thing that fuels his madness, makes him strong. It comes at me like a ripe smell of sulfur and smoldering ash, his last moments flashing in the thundering sonic boom of a bad heartbeat—and then I see his whole life, man. I take it on fast-forward, a quicktime superhighway of images, scenes, tiny little details flashing across the electrified chambers of my mind. I get it in just two seconds. It’s a lot to swallow. The moment is always terrifying.

Freefloaters, they’re always damn hard to pull.

You never know how tough they are until they’re right on top of you.

Usually, you have to go looking for them in places like this. These old Victorian houses are death traps. The nasty ones get in deep in all the nooks and crannies—there’s a million places to hide. But sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes they’re just cruising for a straight fight. Didn’t even need to call this one out, he’s just that crazy. Jumped me right in the middle of the room, saw me coming a mile away. Thinks he’s a real Billy Badass. Tough shit, Billy—I saw you coming too.

He was an altar boy in school, a four-letter football athlete in college. He could have gone pro but he became a cop instead. All the while living with his dark secret: the desire to smash something smaller than himself. So many years of madness and self-punishment and playing chess with his best friends and his family, who never knew the monster he really was. His final mistake. His own little boy. Psycho killers with families always screw up like that in the end. They get convinced they can be normal on the surface, but remain tortured by their desires until they finally give in, and it’s never pretty. I’ve seen the writhing lifescapes of at least a dozen like him. The trick is not to go too far when you pull a mark in. The trick is to use their own insanity against them.

See, it’s the crime, their most agonized moment—that’s what always brings these guys down. The moment when they finally fell, the moment when they lost everything, screaming that it just wasn’t fair, every regret and every lie and every damn one of those tormented secrets rising to the surface like sewage, hitting hard and blasting them off the earth—but not into death, not all the way. Every bad mark holds that Terrible Thing right out in front of them. If you’re like me, you see it superimposed on the world like a shimmering red serpentine coil, oozing and twisting and sluicing across everything else they possess, like a cancer. If you’re like me, you can reach out and grab it.

And if you’re like me…it burns.

Burns so deep you feel your whole body swell at the seams and threaten to blow right there.

But I hold him.

What’s inside me holds him.

The Pull.

I keep my feet planted on the floor now, allowing the energy of his own attack to ground me there. It’s an old-school martial arts technique—but it works, even when you’re fighting something that isn’t alive. I concentrate on the hard surfaces and familiar smells around my body, using them as an anchor to the world. The dusty living room, the antique furniture and ornate French doors. The sharp scent of old souls trapped in the carpet and the peeling wallpaper. The candles filling the air with ordinary magic—the false magic of men and faith, not ghosts and whispers. It armors me. Allows me to turn his own attack against him. Works every time.

I hear the desperate screech of his fractured mind do a midair whipcrack in the opposite direction, trying to resist the Pull.

But none of them can resist it.

I am a black hole and he is the light that cannot escape it.

I turn it on harder, feeling the burn as I get a grip on the twisting red ooze that flows through him. This always hurts the mark worse than it hurts me, even though it hurts me a whole goddamn lot, like ice daggers spiked with fire jamming into my eyes and my heart. The mark spits at me and curses, fighting dirty, kicking up a shockwave that shatters all the glass in the room, but I have him now, and he’s coming in hard, the way most spirits do when they try to possess you, connecting to your nervous system, taking control of your bones and mind, like a spider spinning up a fly.

But my Gift is to withstand that, to brush it aside.

Drink them down.

Kick their asses.

He screams all the way, the formless mist of madness and unsettled rage blasting apart and sleeting through the surface of my skin. In this one kinetic flashburn moment, everything he ever was—his life, his memories, his death in madness—it all goes into me.

My body shakes and rumbles as the mark plunges down deep.

Deeper.

And then…

Touchdown.

My whole body lights up from the lowest depth, coils of living energy dragracing my bloodstream. His rage scorches my mind, the desperate whine of a dying animal run through a feedback loop. I get it under control, bearing down hard, my teeth clenching.

He’s in my house now.

The scream fades to a rumble, then a low simmer, as the substance of his insanity fizzes and dissipates like acid seltzer. I feel it burst and become sour muck, oozing along the walls of my stomach and lungs, a living disease given terrible formless autonomy, still trying to scream its way out. It’s ingested now. Way down inside me.

This part is bad.

It’s the worst part of the job.

Then again, who said life—or death—was fair.

I glance at my watch and notice that I walked in here exactly three minutes ago. Just in time to crash the party. The woman is cringing in a far corner, near the fireplace, crying as she watches my body quake and rumble, my eyes jacked open, infused with the dull red glow of a madman’s cancer. All his hatred of her and his secrets and his terrible acts of violence—the things he did right here in this room and out there in the city, for years and years, and she never knew—it’s bouncing around in my guts like a pinball on fire, tearing me to pieces. It rips a month from my life in three seconds. Then another month. Then a year. Always a lot of damage when they’re so far down in the sickness.

But I still hold him.

He still oozes inside me.

I take a few deep breaths.

You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

The woman is still crying in the corner, but her eyes are full like saucers, the startled whites beaming at me, even through the flickering half-darkness. I see her face shimmer in the light from the candles, and she lets out a long sigh.

And that’s when the mark hits me again.

A sucker punch, right out of nowhere, deep in my guts.

I lose control for just a split second as the awful oozing cancer gets a grip on my mind. The world fritzes out…

And…

It spirals across my vision like an X-ray bathing the room in neon darkness. A dark so bright it blinds you. A glowing blade of white-hot laser light, peeling back the skin of reality to expose new layers. My scleral contact lenses keep the sudden shock from scorching me sightless, but the water in my eyes sizzles away fast. Didn’t see this coming. Have to pull back. Have to get him under control. Have to do it now…have to…

…but…

I see everything.

Everything the dead people see.

This is where they live.

It’s beautiful and terrifying, and all the answers I ever looked for are hovering right here in front of me in a sea of shadows.

It feels good.

It’s been so long.

It knew I would come back.

I smile in the Blacklight, feeling it rush into me.

I’m standing right where I was, in the same room, but the room is now revealed for what it really is. A flashing flipbook of half-images, all rushing in at once in a machinegun stutter. A million shapes swimming in translucent curtains, shadows of old lives, echoes of lost love and bad family business played out long ago. I see every story this old house ever witnessed. I see children giggling on the carpet in front of me. Toys spread out on the floor, which then turn into vases of flowers, and then I see the house built in reverse, the farmland it once stood on, and the years before that, all bathed in bright polarized shadows as the Blacklight shifts and pulses, taking me back in time, then forward again, ricocheting all over history, flickering images like changing channels on an old black-and-white television set. I stand here in this spot and see it all go down, and I can tell that it’s the mark’s madness forcing me to look at this—because he wants out. This is what dead people see on their side of the world, and he wants me to see it so I lose control of him.

But I’ve played this game before.

I know how to win it.

I ground myself again and bring myself back to the moment set before me. I concentrate on the room and it solidifies in ice-black glimmers, coming into sharp focus, so bright and so hot. I see the mark’s terrible crimes in the room. I see the candles transform into the knives he used to slit his own son’s throat. I see the razor wire and the rubber gloves and the bottles of ammonia appear on the coffee table, where he prepared his tools in the terrible hours before his final crime. I could reach out and bring that razor wire back with me if I wanted to, the same way I can pull marks. I’ve done it before. No one has ever been able to tell me why I can do it.

I even see the faint trace of the mark’s madness, floating in the air where it was just before I grabbed him, still hanging there, like the slime trail of a phantom slug.

The slime trail that allowed me to grab him in the first place.

I see it all.

It feels good.

Feels like I belong here.

It’s amazing and overwhelming and brighter than a million suns, hitting me hard…and I know I can use this…it will lead me to the truth…I want to stay here…it’s where I belong…it’s so beautiful…

No.

Get down, you bastard.

I will not have this fucking shit from you.

I go for the tiny pocketknife in my satchel, snick it open, and slide the sharp end along my little finger—just a tiny scrape. Enough to ping my system, to remind myself that I’m still human in this strange twilight of dead things. The pain shocks up my arm, overriding everything. The mark thrashes and screams and kicks me, but I have him cold now, and he has no choice but to retreat. And as be backs off…

The vision recedes and fades away.

The room is normal again.

My eyes still burn.

I reach up fast, and pull the lenses, toss them on the floor, where they melt like translucent slag. Damn. Those things are expensive.

That’ll teach me to forget my goggles.

I calm myself, measuring reality by the beating of my heart, making sure I’m still all here. Yeah. I’m still here.

And I win, you son of a bitch.

“Ma’am, your husband is gone. He won’t be giving you any more trouble.”

The woman shivers, and I think she says thank you, but it’s hard to tell. She didn’t see what I just saw. Nobody ever sees it but me. It’s enough to make a man feel really damn alone in a mighty cruel world.

She rises to her feet, throws herself into my arms, crying. I never have any idea what to do at times like this. Pulling marks ain’t easy, but it’s easier than a woman’s tears. So I tell her it’s okay, tell her she’s safe now. She smells like sweet things. I’m reminded of a hundred others like her. I’m reminded of things I can never have. I tell her it’s okay now. That’s all I can do.

The big man next to me puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Come on, Buck,” he says. “Why don’t you step outside? I’ll take it from here.”

© 2011 by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan and Stephen Romano