FOUR
Jack
The scar was growing.
I know, that sounds like an oxymoron. By definition, scars should heal. But the gash was definitely bigger than it had been last week.
I stared at the scar—a jagged five-foot slice into the fabric of our world. Reality warped slightly around it, like heat waves in the desert sun.
The ragged scar in reality hovered two feet above the floor of the enormous drawing room of Villa Maledetti. The scar extended toward the ceiling and sat at a slight angle between a games table and the back of a sofa. I first noticed the scar several weeks ago, but it had recently begun to grow.
As it did nothing more than just float around and glow on occasion, I was unsure how concerned to be.
“How did the podcast interview go in the end?” Tennyson D’Angelo asked from behind me. “What I heard sounded good.”
I turned away from the scar, watching as Tennyson—the youngest D’Angelo triplet—walked over to me, wearing his preferred track shorts and t-shirt. Though it was just past sunrise, the June weather was oppressively hot and humid, so Tennyson’s clothing choices didn’t seem too off. But I knew he found shorts easier to wear with his prosthetic leg—the result of an encounter with a roadside bomb in Afghanistan—so his clothing was hardly temperature-dependent. The titanium metal gleamed in the morning sunlight as he walked. Dark haired and lean, Tennyson exuded coiled strength.
“You seem distracted.” Tennyson moved around me, nearly passing through the scar on his way to the sofa. Like a feather in the wind, the gash reacted to his movement through space, eddying sideways, moving to the right of the room.
“It’s the scar, isn’t it?” Tennyson sat down on the couch, following my eyes even though his fully human eyesight couldn’t see the scar.
“It is situated to the right of the television.” I pointed toward it. “It has been growing.”
Tennyson’s head snapped to attention. “Really? Any other changes?”
“No. Only the growth.”
There wasn’t much else to say. The scar was a complete anomaly. Only I could see it. It didn’t do much other than float around and occasionally glow. We had spent some time researching what it might be but had turned up nothing. So, we waited.
Tennyson grunted. “Did you hear what I said before?” he asked. “The podcast interview?”
Right. I had just finished another one of those.
“It went well,” I replied. “Intelligent questions this time around.”
Translation—the discussion was entirely professional and focused on archeology. No questions about my personal life, my ‘hotness factor’ or my odd clothing choices.
“Good.” Tennyson rubbed a hand against the portion of his left thigh attached to the prosthetic. “So . . . I had a vision about Chiara earlier.”
Tennyson dropped the comment casually, as if it weren’t a verbal bomb designed to get my full attention.
I barely avoided flinching at the sound of her name. Tennyson smiled, far too knowing. I was definitely transparent in more than one way.
I had distanced myself emotionally from Chiara. Not a difficult task, as she had kicked me out. My phantom heart clenched in my chest.
I had seen her only a handful of times over the past year. Each time, our interaction had been the same—strained and polite until one of us broke and then it was verbal fireworks.
I was determined to put both D’Angelo women—Sofia and Chiara—behind me.
And, generally, I had been successful.
Well, most of the time.
Usually.
Fine. Maybe I winced every now and again when I heard Chiara’s name. I couldn’t claim indifference toward her. I looked forward to the day when I would see Chiara and feel . . . nothing.
Goals.
But as part of me obviously cared, I asked, “What did you see? In your vision?”
Tennyson’s eyes went unfocused as he replayed the scene mentally. “Chiara hunched over a tablet screen. I got the sense that it was her boyfriend’s tablet, not hers. She was busily tapping through things. For some reason, there was a Mickey Mouse doll sitting next to her. It was weird.”
Tennyson shook his head before continuing.
“But as a vision, it was fairly typical Chiara behavior.” Tennyson’s voice was so very dry. “You know her last boyfriend dumped her because she was looking through his email?”
Yes. Chiara would do that. Curiosity and secrets were absolute kryptonite for her. She struggled to keep out of others’ personal business.
It was her greatest strength and biggest weakness.
Chiara loved being involved. If she encountered a complete stranger with a problem, she would make phone calls and google solutions. She had spent weeks chasing answers to my ghostly state before pointing out, rightly so, that maybe I needed to step back from it for a while. She nearly single-handedly kept Nonna sane and healthy, and she was constantly helping her mother and brothers. She needed to be needed.
The problem? Chiara didn’t know when to stop. The line between altruistic helpfulness and intrusive prying was vague at best for her.
“I wonder at what point we insist she get help for her issues. Maybe we should stage an intervention.” Tennyson stretched out his good leg. The resulting something—air waves? ripples in space?—caused the scar to flutter. “But back to you. What are you going to do about the sudden media attention? Don’t think I haven’t seen all those online comments.”
Tennyson’s grin could best be described as salacious.
If I had a body, I would have blushed. Media outlets had been harassing me for months to do an in-person interview. I had done several phone interviews but obviously nothing face-to-face.
And then that dratted photo had surfaced.
The occasional polite interview request had turned into a torrent of emails, phone calls, posts and tweets.
What was I going to do? I gave the only possible answer: “Nothing.”
Tennyson snorted. “I’m not entirely sure ‘nothing’ is an effective strategy. All it’s going to take is one member of the paparazzi snapping a photo that shows your translucent state, and we’ll have a much larger problem on our hands.”
“If I do nothing to feed the frenzy, it will die a natural death. It’s the only solution. I am still a ghost.” I swept a hand down my chest.
Tennyson grunted and dropped the topic. He moved on to talking about another upcoming podcast, massaging his leg as he spoke. I only half listened.
Despite my accomplishments of the past year, my physical state had not altered. I was still transparent and existing in that odd space between life and death.
No sensations. No touch. No smell. No change.
Though, I had recently formed some hope that my state wasn’t static.
Clenching my jaw, I focused on what I could change. I concentrated on the tip of my index finger, mentally ‘pushing’ on it, for lack of a better description.
I had learned a lot about my corporeal state. I was tethered to a razor edge between this physical world and the shadow world. As my consciousness was in this world, if I focused all my mental energy, I could pull a tiny piece of my physical body more into one world or the other.
So as I pushed on my finger, it became more solid. Trickles of sensation drifted up my arm. The heat of the room. The fluttering breeze.
A searing pain flooded in behind, nearly blacking my vision with its intensity. Red hot flames licking up my arm. The pain snapped my concentration, forcing me to let go of my mental pushing. My finger instantly faded into near invisibility and then fluttered before settling back into its semi-transparent state.
That was always the problem—the agonizing pain that accompanied the shift. The pain made it impossible to hold the change for long. Not to mention the bounce into near invisibility afterward. If I forced a part of me to stay physical for too long, would it bounce into nothingness?
Though I hoped that perhaps one day, if I built up enough resistance to the pain, I might be able to pull my entire body into the realm of the living for short periods of time.
Possibly long enough to smell the crisp air after an autumn rainfall. To taste a sweet, summer strawberry.
To hold a soft, petite woman in my arms—
I hadn’t mentioned this newfound ability to anyone yet. The hope felt so tentative and fragile. If it came to naught, the disappointment would be easier to bear alone.
When Tennyson finished speaking, I mentioned my other news. “I spoke with the installation company today. They informed me they should have all the home automation stuff done within the next week or so.”
“That’s great,” he replied. “I gotta say it, Jack. It’s awesome that you bought your own place, but I’m glad you’re staying put here.”
I had recently purchased a sprawling villa a few miles west of the medieval hilltop town of San Gimignano. The villa stood on a rise midway between Volterra and Florence, allowing for easy access from either city.
Though I had no physicality, I could control voice-activation software. How that worked . . . I had no idea. It just did. Technology allowed me to interact with the world at large. Having a house wired with voice activation software meant I could turn lights on and off, control my computer and television, make phone calls and so on.
Why I had purchased the house was harder to answer. I was a ghost; I didn’t need food or water or other physical necessities. I obviously didn’t need to own a house. Furthermore, I enjoyed living with Tennyson. We were good for each other . . . kindred lonely souls.
But . . . I had also been Lord Knight, peer of the realm and owner of multiple large estates in England. My father and father’s father and so on back into history had been hereditary land owners. Running large estates was a hallmark of the British peerage and was a fundamental part of my own personal identity. I hadn’t realized how fundamental until I lost everything. I needed to rebuild. To become again who and what I had been.
The villa was another step toward that. Owning and managing my own residence would help me feel settled, even if I still spent most of my time with Tennyson.
I smiled at him. “Not tired of me yet?”
“Of course I’m tired of seeing your ugly mug around here.” Tennyson’s tone was all brotherly affection. “But your company is . . . uncomplicated, and it’s nice to have someone to talk to.”
That was truth. Tennyson was lonely. It didn’t take a psychic to understand that. He lived alone with his hound dog, Elvis, and me, his ghost roommate, and had very limited contact with the outside world. In the past year, I hadn’t heard him even so much as mention a woman in his life, much less date one. He had dated Lucy Snow for a number of years—my great-whatever niece who had gone on to marry Branwell last autumn . . . long story there—so that relationship was old news.
It wasn’t as if Tennyson couldn’t attract a woman. Even I understood he was drop-dead sexy, as Chiara would say—incredibly blue eyes paired with dark, Italian coloring and handsome features. To those who knew him, he was charming and funny and utterly loyal.
But his supernatural gift of Second Sight was completely debilitating. Feeling the emotions of those around him, even occasionally seeing into the future . . . it was all too much. Tennyson was continually hanging on by a thread. Judith, their mother, had confided in me that Tennyson was doing better with me around. Having the companionship of someone he could talk to without feeling their emotions had been helpful.
But I knew the bleakness of Tennyson’s future contributed to his dark moods. How could you be sunny and cheerful when your only aspiration in life was to hold off madness as long as possible?
We were a hopeless pair, he and I.
Difficult as it was to admit, Chiara had been right about many things last year. Most importantly, that I needed a purpose—something to work toward. Raising the golden horde of artifacts had given me a much-needed focus.
I recognized that I had been melancholy, grieving and angry a year ago.
Now . . . the grief lingered. The loss of so many loved ones would never fully heal. But the melancholy had eased somewhat and my anger only flared occasionally.
I had come to realize one important fact:
Loss could describe me.
But loss didn’t have to define me.
I could be a phoenix. I could rise from the ashes.
I could find meaning and a purpose in my existence, even if I remained unchanged for eternity.
Though even there I had that tiny glimmer of hope. I channeled my energy, pushing my finger into reality.
Push. Pain. Bounce.
Push. Pain. Bounce.
The light from the tall windows to the left of the room rimmed Tennyson in glowing sun, his hands still kneading his sore upper thigh. “Uffa! The leg is hurting today.”
Tennyson sat back with a huff, flinging his arms along the back of the sofa. Like a helium-filled balloon, the scar rippled in reaction to the movement, drifting to the side of the sofa. If the scar wasn’t fully in reality, why did it react to Tennyson?
I wandered closer to it.
The strange scar didn’t react to me. It didn’t eddy around my presence like it did for Tennyson. I had no mass, even to it. Since its appearance, the scar had grown in periodic spurts and pulsed like a beating heart every now and again.
It was odd.
The closer I got to it, the more . . . stretched I felt. It was as if the scar were denser matter somehow. I didn’t think I could walk through it. Today, in particular, it felt more potent. The closer I came, the more pressure I felt, like it wanted to repel me. There was no other way to describe it. The scar was dissonance.
Every now and again, I encountered a place in this world that felt . . . different. Like reality was heavier or denser in that place.
For example, a ruined tower lay behind the villa, just opposite the large terrace off the back of the drawing room where I stood. The tower ruins had an odd darkness around them. Like reality dimmed just in that spot.
It made a sort of random sense. Our world was hardly a seamless plane. It had ups and downs and hills and valleys. So the in-between world that I inhabited probably had areas where the divisions between the physical world and the shadow world varied. And as I was the only resident of this space, the variations would only be noticeable to me.
Carefully, I moved to an opposite chair and sat down, keeping the entire length of the sofa between me and the scar. Though I didn’t have any mass, I could hold myself in a position in the world. So I could sit in a chair or stand on a floor without sinking through it.
Suddenly Tennyson’s body tensed. His eyes snapped to the side, staring at something only he could see, following it beyond me.
A vision.
Not good.
They had been happening more of late.
Worse, Tennyson often seemed more fractured after one.
Something flickered in my peripheral vision. I whipped my head toward it. The scar pulsed, rippling and glowing.
“Tennyson.” I stood up, keeping my eyes on the scar. “Can you hear me? Can you fight the vision?”
Tennyson continued to move his head, tracking things I couldn’t see. His mouth moved, no words coming out.
The scar jerked, growing larger. Its edges bulged, like something was pushing on it from behind.
“Tennyson.” I clapped my hands.
Stupid me. That made no sound.
“Tenn!” I yelled, waving my arms, trying to snatch his attention.
Tennyson remained locked in his trance.
The scar rippled again, the glow turning white hot, stretching and straining until . . . it snapped.
The gash ruptured, tearing through the very fabric of reality itself.
A dark, roiling something poured through the jagged cut. Gleaming black, it spread across the floor like a spilled barrel of oil, shiny and greasy. I sprang back, launching myself upward, intent on staying out of its path.
The rippling mass continued to pour through, sprawling around the room. A creeping, crawling sludge. It wrapped around Tennyson, swamping, swarming. If Tennyson felt it, he was too deep in his vision to react.
I was too busy studying Tennyson to realize that a section of the ooze had flowed behind me, rearing itself up off the floor.
Suddenly, I was yanked upwards. The black slime had wrapped around my middle and was pulling me sideways. I tried to push it off, but my hands passed through it.
Somehow, the sludge was able to hold me, but I couldn’t touch it.
The edges of the scar continued to pulse, the black filth swamping the room.
“Tennyson!” I yelled. “Snap out of it!”
I wriggled and fought, struggling to free myself.
Just as quickly as it had poured in, the slime reversed course and began to retreat back into the scar, moving off of Tennyson. The swirling morass shifted into a powerful vacuum, relentlessly sucking everything back into itself.
Me included.
“Help me!!” I yelled, fighting for my freedom.
Panicked in earnest, I tried to grab purchase on the chair, then the ottoman. But of course, my hands passed through each item. I slid through the couch and then Tennyson himself.
I hated the thought of moving through the organs and flesh of living beings.
And still the black sludge drew me.
Damn.
It was going to suck me in. To where? I had no idea. But I didn’t particularly care to find out.
I kicked my legs and swung my arms, mimicking a swimmer fighting a powerful current. I managed to slow my slide toward the pulsing gash.
Hallelujah!
Just as abruptly as it had ruptured, the rip suddenly closed. The slime released me and vanished into the scar.
The sudden change in momentum caused me to shoot forward, my arms and legs propelling me. I floundered, flapping my arms backward to slow myself.
I came to a stop sitting—erh, hovering—on Tennyson’s lap.
His eyes focused on me, a frown knitting his brow.
“Ya know, Jack, when I said I was glad you were staying here, I wasn’t suggesting that we cuddle.”
Right.
I scrambled to my feet. The scar remained, hovering in the corner.
“Tenn, I think we have a problem.”