After Death(73)

The paralyzed man’s angry expression fades into puzzlement. He rolls his eyes, taking in as much of the cold-holding chamber as he can from his position.

“Give you what?” Durand asks.

Puzzlement sinks into bewilderment. “I . . . how . . . where?”

Taking a step toward the gurney, Durand says, “Give you what? Tell me. Tell me what you want.”

The fluorescent light is a bleaching radiance. The respected guest is as white as the shroud had been when Durand first entered the room, and the shroud grows whiter by the minute. The walls are alabastrine, as though this frigid chamber is built of snow, an Inuit construct. The floor could be no whiter if it were paved with bone. Durand’s remaining fear evaporates like a scrap of dry ice, and he is filled with the conviction that there’s an action he can take to ensure he’ll become the super something that he dreams of being. He must get it done before whiteness fills the chamber to such an extent that it is as blinding as pitch-blackness. The blue eyes are beacons in the ghastly face, the only color in the seamless eggshell that is forming around Durand, a blue that draws him toward the gurney and the burden on it.

“Give you what?” he asks again, and then repeats the question in a more demanding voice, “Give you what, old man?”

“Help,” the old man says. “Help me. I can’t move. I’m afraid.” As pitiful as he sounds, there is nonetheless an air of deception about him. He looks sly, as if he’s not the old man he once was, but only a body in which something demonic has clothed itself.

A wild assurance buoys Durand, a vicious courage, the belief that he can do anything he wishes here and be rewarded for it. The gurney has a hydraulic feature, and at the moment it is not lowered as far as it will go. He powers it down six or eight inches, until it will descend no farther.

“Help me,” the old man repeats. The blue that was ferocious is now a weak, robin’s-egg blue that inspires contempt. “Help me.”

Looking down on the old man, feeling taller and stronger than he’d been just a minute earlier, Durand says, “Help you what? What do you want? Are you so stupid you don’t know what you want?” He likes how he sounds when he says that in the tone of voice he often wants to use with his parents but dares not. “Stupid geezer can’t even say what he wants.”

“Call,” the old fart says. “Call.”

“Call who? You want to order a pizza?”

Amused by his joke, Durand laughs, but the geezer doesn’t even smile. He says, “Don’t.”

This is a test, a challenge, and if Durand passes it, he will be something super, not right away but later, something amazing. He moves around to the head of the gurney.

The old fart rolls his head side to side, tries to tip it back to see what’s happening, but he can’t. He says, “No.”

Durand says, “Oh, yes. I know what you really are,” because he sees now what he’s got to do to prove he’s special, to show that nothing scares him. He must prove himself to the secret masters of the universe, who work in mysterious ways.

The overhead fluorescent panels bleach the elderly man still whiter, and Durand cups his right hand under the respected guest’s stubbled chin, forcing the mouth shut. The man lacks the strength to resist. With his left hand, Durand pinches the nostrils tight. The quadriplegic can move nothing other than his head; he rolls it side to side, and for a minute he is vigorous in defense of his life, but he is not able to break his assailant’s grip. The rightness of the boy’s intention is confirmed for him when, as the light grows and the room blurs into a smooth sphere of whiteness, his pajamas seem to become a richer shade of yellow, shifting from saffron to lemon, and the hands that are instruments of suffocation flush with the color of life that a booming heart delivers. The man’s resistance grows feeble. The boy’s pajamas are now the yellow of an egg yolk, and his flesh is yet more darkly bronzed with urgent life, the blood vessels in his hands swollen to match his excitement, fingernails as pink as if they have been painted. When the geezer finishes dying, the blue of his eyes is a bleak frost, but Durand has become more vivid and colorful even than he has been in his most feverish night dreams of superpowers and violent adventures. His clamping hand relaxes, and his pinching fingers open. The blinding whiteness relents. Details of the cold-holding room return.

He has passed the test. The challenge has been met. He’s afraid of nothing. Nothing. Not even of a man returned from the dead—or of some demon possessing a corpse.

Having proved he is special, he will eventually have the super future of which he dreams. He needs only to be patient and grow into his greatness. Patience is another test he must pass.

He arranges the shroud as it was when he came here.

After turning off the lights and stepping into the hall and closing the door, he switches on the penlight. He makes his way back to his room.

In bed, in the post-Halloween dark, as he flirts with sleep yet resists surrendering to it, the events in the basement rerun in his mind until he is trembling in remembered ecstasy. In time, he knows beyond doubt that the old man was not mistakenly declared dead and then sent here by an incompetent doctor. A dead man had returned to life, brought back among the living by the masters of the universe who search for those who are able to conquer fear and are worthy of being given superpowers. From the comic books that he reads and the cooler graphic novels that Gifford collects, Durand knows there are masters of the universe; they go by a variety of names in different series, and they work in mysterious ways. They are aware of him, have chosen him. The possibility that he has imagined all that happened occurs to him, but he dismisses it, allowing himself no doubt. And then he sleeps.