Off the Beaten Path: Eight Tales of the Paranormal Read Online Free Page B

hit me, or laughed, or called the cops, but that made it worse. I could feel the belief in him. I gulped down sobs. “I’m sorry, but I guess I’m supposed to guide you to real death, not this in-between living body you’ve got.”
    Mark squeezed my hand, then wrapped an arm around my back. His skin felt lukewarm as he hugged me. “No, it’s not fair.” He looked thoughtful as he pulled away from me. “Nothing tastes the same, you know. I feel…” he stared at our hands for a second, searching, “like when the audio is slightly out of sync with the visual. It’s close enough to bear, but it doesn’t feel right. My body doesn’t react the way it should, as if there’s a disconnected plug.” His head shook slowly back and forth. Maybe the action lined up all the thoughts inside. “I guess I wondered if I’d die from it. I thought maybe the fall knocked my head too hard, you know?”
    “ Do you want to know why you died?”
    “ No, not really. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.” His eyes held hope for a second. “Does it have to be now?”
    “ I don’t know. I guess you can have a couple of hours, but any longer and the consequences might be bad.” My leg twinged in pain, and I held back a grimace. He nodded, and I echoed his nod slowly. “I need to be there, okay?”
    “What?  Why?”
    “Without me, you can’t truly move to the next world. I think I might have to actually kill you.” My head sank into my hands. Apparently, that’s when it struck him that this was real. Still, he didn’t cry or shout, he just gave me an address and a time.
    I didn ’t move for an hour and forty-five minutes. I couldn’t. I had just convinced Mark to allow me to murder him, or maybe he simply agreed to assisted suicide. Either way, it went against every moral I had ever had.  My bones and nerves were aching with a terrible emptiness.
    When I finally stood, my stomach was in my throat, and I puked behind a tree until not even bile could come up. My leg could barely take my weight, and I could feel that the gouges had swirled over my knee, soaking the gauze from earlier. I touched my jeans and felt wet stickiness, but all I could see was dry denim.  Another supernatural measure of protection, then.
    I walked to his ho use and climbed up to the window Mark had said to. He was ready, but I couldn’t make my mouth move. I finally spoke.  “Hey.  Um.  Are you sure?”
    “ Yeah. Since you told me, something feels different.” Thoughtfulness crossed his face, then was replaced with exhaustion. “Like static. I think I’ve been dying since we talked.” He grabbed my hand in both of his icy palms to prove his point.
    I sat on the side of his bed , and we talked about movies we had seen, music we hated, and other mundane topics. His voice faded, and he looked like he simply fell asleep. I swallowed, and whispered to him about the next world, coaxing him towards the realm of the dead.
    The familiar fizz began where my hand grasped his, and for the first time I watched a body part with the soul that filled it. Mark rose out of his shell, strings of soul stretching back to connect body and spirit until the strings snapped, like gum on a shoe.
    Then, he was just gone.
    He had moved on.
    I stared at his body. It didn’t matter that he had felt his death, or that he had felt relief in moving on. It didn’t even matter that I hadn’t needed to kill his body with a knife or a gun. For the first time in years of working with the dead, I felt the true weight of death, and part of me wanted to find the peace I had just promised Mark.
    I climbed out of his room and walked to our bench, struggling to breathe against the horrible pressure on my chest. My body sank onto the weathered wood, and I thought I’d be dragged into the dirt below by the heaviness of me. My palms bit with pain, my nails dotted with pinpricks of blood from tight fists, and the tears were unstoppable. I was a mistake, just like Mark. I was born to