What a wonderful experience Times Square is when you're dead! There is ten times the light a living being sees. All metal things vibrate with inner life. Electric wires are thin scratches in the air. Neon sings. The world is filled with strange sights and cries. Everything shifts from beauty to beauty.
Something that looked like a cross between a dragon and a wisp of smoke was feeding in the Square. But it was lost among so many wonders that I gave it no particular thought.
Night again. I awoke with Led Zeppelin playing in the back of my head. Stairway to Heaven. Again. It can be a long wait between Dead Milkmen cuts.
"Wakey-risey, little man," crooned one of the Sisters. It was funny how sometimes they took a close personal interest in our doings, and other times ignored us completely. "This is Euphrosyne with the red-eye weather report. The outlook is moody with a chance of existential despair. You won't be going outside tonight if you know what's good for you. There'll be lightning within the hour."
"It's too late in the year for lightning," I said.
"Oh dear. Should I inform the weather?"
By now I was beginning to realize that what I had taken on awakening to be the Corpsegrinder's dark aura was actually the high-pressure front of an approaching storm. The first drops of rain pattered on the roof. Wind skirled and the rain grew stronger. Thunder growled in the distance. "Why don't you just go fuck your--"
A light laugh that trilled up into the supersonic, and she was gone.
I was listening to the rain underfoot when a lightning bolt screamed into existence, turning me inside-out for the briefest instant then cartwheeling gleefully into oblivion. In the instant of restoration following the bolt, the walls were transparent and all the world made of glass, its secrets available to be snooped out. But before comprehension was possible, the walls opaqued again and the lightning's malevolent aftermath faded like a madman's smile in the night.
Through it all the Seven Sisters were laughing and singing, screaming with joy whenever a lightning bolt flashed, and making up nonsense poems from howls, whistles, and static. During a momentary lull, the flat hum of a carrier wave filled my head. Phaenna, by the feel of her. But instead of her voice, I heard only the sound of fearful sobs.
"Widow?" I said. "Is that you?"
"She can't hear you," Phaenna purred. "You're lucky I'm here to bring you up to speed. A lightning bolt hit the transformer outside her house. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Your Nemesis--the one you call the Corpsegrinder, such a cute nickname, by the way--has her trapped."
This was making no sense at all. "Why would the Corpsegrinder be after her?"
"Why why why why?" Phaenna sang, a snatch of some pop ballad or other.
"You didn't get answers when you were alive, what makes you think you'd get any now?" The sobbing went on and on. "She can sit it out," I said. "The Corpsegrinder can't--hey, wait. Didn't they just wire her house for cable? I'm trying to picture it. Phone lines on one side, electric on the other, cable. She can slip out on his blind side."
The sobs lessened and then rose in a most un-Widow like wail of despair.
"Typical," Phaenna said. "You haven't the slightest notion of what you're talking about. The lightning stroke has altered your little pet. Go out and see for yourself." My hackles rose. "You know damned good and well that I can't--"
Phaenna's attention shifted and the carrier beam died. The Seven Sisters are fickle that way. This time, though, it was just as well. No way was I going out there to face that monstrosity. I couldn't. And I was grateful not to have to admit it.
For a long while I sat thinking about the Corpsegrinder. Even here, protected by the strong walls of the Roxy, the mere thought of it was paralyzing. I tried to imagine what Charlie's Widow was going through, separated from this monster by only a thin curtain of brick and stucco. Feeling the hard radiation of its malice and need ... It was beyond my powers of visualization. Eventually I gave up and thought instead about my first meeting with the Widow.
She was coming down the hill from Roxborough with her arms out, the inverted image of a child playing a tightrope walker. Placing one foot ahead of the other with deliberate concentration, scanning the wire before her so cautiously that she was less than a block away when she saw me.
She screamed.
Then she was running straight at me. My back was to the transformer station--there was no place to flee. I shrank away as she stumbled to a halt.
"It's you!" she cried. "Oh God, Charlie, I knew you'd come back for me, I waited so long but I never doubted you, never, we can--" She lunged forward as if to hug me. Our eyes met. All the joy in her died.
"Oh," she said. "It's not you." I was fresh off the high-tension lines, still vibrating with energy and fear. My mind was a blaze of contradictions. I could remember almost nothing of my post-death existence. Fragments, bits of advice from the old dead, a horrifying confrontation with ... something, some creature or phenomenon that had driven me to flee Manhattan. Whether it was this event or the fearsome voltage of that radiant highway that had scoured me of experience, I did not know. "It's me," I protested.
"No, it's not." Her gaze was unflatteringly frank. "You're not Charlie and you never were. You're--just the sad remnant of what once was a man, and not a very good one at that." She turned away. She was leaving me! In my confusion, I felt such a despair as I had never known before.
"Please ... " I said.
She stopped.
A long silence. Then what in a livingwoman would have been a sigh. "You'd think that I--well, never mind." She offered her hand, and when I would not take it, said, "This way."
I followed her down Main Street, through the shallow canyon of the business district to a diner at the edge of town. It was across from Hubcap Heaven and an automotive junkyard bordered it on two sides. The diner was closed. We settled down on the ceiling.
"That's where the car ended up after I died," she said, gesturing toward the junkyard. "It Was right after I got the call about Charlie. I stayed up drinking and after a while it occurred to me that maybe they were wrong, they'd made some sort of horrible mistake and he wasn't really dead, you know?
Like maybe he was in a coma or something, some horrible kind of misdiagnosis, they'd gotten him confused with somebody else, who knows? Terrible things happen in hospitals. They make mistakes.
"I decided I had to go and straighten things out. There wasn't time to make coffee so I went to the medicine cabinet and gulped down a bunch of pills at random, figuring something among them would keep me awake. Then I jumped into the car and started off for Colorado."
"My God."
"I have no idea how fast I was going--everything was a blur when I crashed. At least I didn't take anybody with me, thank the Lord. There was this one horrible moment of confusion and pain and rage and then I found myself lying on the floor of the car with my corpse just inches beneath me on the underside of the roof." She was silent for a moment. "My first impulse was to crawl out the window. Lucky for me I didn't." Another pause. "It took me most of a night to work my way out of the yard. I had to go from wreck to wreck. There were these gaps to jump. It was a nightmare."
"I'm amazed you had the presence of mind to stay in the car."
"Dying sobers you up fast."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. And without the slightest hesitation, she joined right in with me. It was a fine warm moment, the first I'd had since I didn't know when. The two of us set each other off, laughing louder and louder, our merriment heterodyning until it filled every television screen for a mile around with snow.