Summer Writing Project, part two
This is a continuation of the novel-length story I'm working on this summer.



The autumn wind whipped through the streets with murder on its mind. It seemed to take the fact that I wore a t-shirt and jeans in 40-degree weather personally. As with the pain of the mortician’s needle, though, I found it easy to tune the cold out, turning freezing agony into minor irritation. Paying the angry weather no mind, I started trudging down the sidewalk, watching the green rectangular street signs as I passed them in an idle search for Bauer Street.

“Are we even in the right city?” I asked the tattoo.

YES.

“Should I call a cab or something?”

NO NEED. NOT FAR.

Early morning darkness still lurked in the sky, even though the sun had begun to poke its way past the horizon. I found myself slowing down, stepping carefully except for mad dashes across the city’s intersection crosswalks. I wanted to see if the sun burned my skin. I breathed a slight sigh of relief when the yellow glow touched my pale arms and didn’t incinerate me.

84 Bauer Street turned out not to be a home at all but rather a short, squalid-looking office building with dingy brick walls. The front door, unlocked, led to a short hallway that ended in a narrow set of wooden stairs. The stairs led both up toward another floor and down to a basement that smelled too much like mold for my liking. I glanced at my tattoo for guidance. The eye looked at me for a moment before fading into the usual inky cloud and giving me my directions.

UP.

The trek up the flight of stairs seemed to take longer than the entire trip from the mortuary. The floor creaked loudly with each footfall, and my insides gave an uncomfortable plastic crinkling sound as I lurched awkwardly from one step to another. The journey finally ended in front of a wooden door. The plastic plaque that hung from the door read, “Lucy Cooke and Associate – Professional Investigation.”

I raised my hand to knock, but hesitated before I touched the door. Bewildered, I looked at the tattoo for guidance.

DON’T BOTHER KNOCKING, it said.

I’M ALREADY EXPECTING YOU.

Before I could respond, I heard a woman’s voice from the other side. “Come in, Eddie.”

With a hard swallow, I opened the door.

I can technically call the room beyond an office and get away with it. It had a stained gray carpet, white plaster walls, and one window. The room itself was no more than fifteen feet across in either direction and had two doors – one that I had just come through and one marked with a crude picture of a toilet. I could have reached up and touched the ceiling without fully extending my arms. Directly opposite the door I had just stepped through sat a long wooden desk and a metal gray file cabinet. The woman behind the desk – the only person in the room – cocked an eyebrow as I stepped forward, letting the door drift shut behind me. A black laptop and an old corded phone sat on her desk, but both had been pushed aside. She folded her hands on the empty space in front of her and looked at me with the type of irritated grimace that a kindergarten teacher reserved for a child who had just eaten a full bowl of paste.

I looked away from the woman, turning my attention to the tattoo on my hand. The eye blinked plaintively and said nothing.

“I don’t suppose you ever considered how much money it costs to get hold of the security tapes at a city morgue, or how difficult it is to keep a frightened mortician quiet when he swears he just saw a zombie, did you?” The woman couldn’t have been much older than thirty, but she sounded like an angry grandmother.

I held up my hand, showing her the eye tattoo. “Why didn’t you just tell me to be more careful?”

The grimace disappeared, replaced by a slightly defeated smile. “Good point. I guess neither of us were thinking clearly. I just wanted to make sure you got out of there. And don’t get too upset about the tattoo, Eddie. It’s just my way of keeping an eye on you – no pun intended.”

She pushed herself up from the desk and crossed the short distance between us. I took in her appearance with a critical eye. It couldn’t have been much past six in the morning, but she looked like she was ready to head in for a job interview. She wore a conservative dark red business suit with a short skirt. Her braided hair fell past her shoulder and toward the middle of her back. She wore round-rimmed black spectacles, completing the stern businesswoman appearance. The heels of her shoes left slight indents on the thin carpet as she stepped to within a few feet of me.

“Who are you?” I asked. Then I pointed to the tattoo on my hand. “And how did you do this?”

She furrowed her brow slightly. “You really don’t remember, huh? These spells of yours are getting worse. Oh well.” She stuck her hand out to shake mine. “Pleased to meet you again, Eddie. I’m Lucy, a woman of wealth and taste.”

I shook her hand carefully, but narrowed my eyes as I did so. “What’s Lucy short for?”

She pulled her hand back defensively. “Lucille, silly. You must be really far gone if you’re seeing the Devil in every detail.”

“Meeting Lucifer in disguise wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that’s happened to me today.”

“You don’t have to worry about me, big guy. I’m Lucy Cooke, and you’re Associate. I’m the woman who helps put you back together when you come in all addled like this.”

I shifted my weight. The blood-soaked gauze in my belly squelched slightly.

“You’re going to have questions for me,” she continued. “I’ll tell you right now that I won’t have all the answers for you. But clean yourself up first.” She pointed toward the bathroom. “Splash some water on your face and take a few deep breaths. Just make sure not to look in the mirror.”

Wordlessly, I stepped into the bathroom. The room was a little larger than a storage closet. I shivered at the prospect of closing myself away in an area so small. I decided to leave the door open a crack, just in case. The carpet ended at the door, leaving white tiled floor. The toilet seat had a crack in it and everything looked dingy and orange in the dull glow of the overhead light. I took off my shirt and leaned over the sink. Some water on my face did sound like a good way to clear my head.

“So I need to know what you remember,” called Lucy from the other side of the door. “It will help me figure out where we stand.”

I splashed some cold water on my face and felt instantly awake. The world seemed to snap into focus a little more.

“Eddie? Did you hear me?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I don’t remember anything,” I said. “I had to rely on this weird tattoo to even figure out my own name.”

“That’s not good,” said Lucy in a quieter voice.

“Tell me about it,” I answered.

The bathroom door creaked as Lucy leaned against it. “Okay, here’s the basics. Technically, you work for me in this hokey little investigative agency. It’s just you and me, and we do little stuff like phone traces or checking to make sure a guy’s wife isn’t cheating on him. Every once in a while, if we get lucky, we wind up doing some missing persons work. You’re big on that stuff. You usually say it will help you piece things together.”

“Piece what together?” I glanced at the wall just below the bathroom mirror. The corner of the mirror had a grayish smudge to it, like oil on the glass.

“You. If you haven’t noticed, Eddie, you’re more than a little addle-brained. It’s some bum deal you’ve got going – you can’t die, but you lose a little bit of your mind every time you come close.” Her voice trailed off again, lowering to a quiet mumble. “I didn’t think it would get so bad you’d forget me, though…”

The smudge wasn’t just on the corner of the mirror. Despite Lucy’s warning, I raised my eyes, hoping to get a glimpse at my reflection. But the whole mirror was coated in that gray oily stuff. I touched the glass, trying to clear the oil away.

And then…

And then the mirror isn’t a mirror anymore. It’s a window, dark and streaked with heavy rain. I look through the window and see a woman in a corset, her skin pale and her chest quivering with every breath. Just existing seems to take a toll on her, and her eyes look so very tired. She wants to give up. I shake my head, telling her that she can’t. She coughs up a spattering of blood that leaves three red beads dribbling down the corner of her mouth. Then she reaches her hand toward me, and…

“Eddie?” called Lucy, wondering why I hadn’t responded.

And she touches me. The woman in the corset reaches through the window, revealing it to be nothing more than an illusory fog. Her feel her fingers against my skin. I feel her pulse as she touches my cheek. Her heart beats once, twice, and then trails off. Her eyes widen, and then close. She dies in front of me. She’s dead, but…

“Eddie?” called Lucy again.

But she won’t fall down. Her eyes open again, but there’s nothing inside. Her hand grips my cheek now, pulling the skin sharply. My eyes dart to the side, looking at her wrist. She has no skin. She’s just a skeleton, pulling me toward the window, drawing me into her world. Her mouth opens, ready for a kiss. Her teeth are cracked. Worms creep across her tongue as she whispers my name.

“Eddie!”

The world flashed brightly and I fell backwards. I think I blacked out for a few seconds. When I came to, I found myself slumped against the wall of the bathroom. My head ached – a pain I couldn’t ignore. I touched the side of my head and found that I was bleeding. Apparently, I can still bleed.

Lucy stood over me, shaking in exertion. She dusted the stray hair from her hands where she had grabbed the back of my head. Behind her, the bathroom mirror had a spiderweb crack in the center. There was no oil on the mirror – just a bit of my own blood where my head had collided with it.

“Damn it Eddie, I told you not to look into the mirror!”

“Wha—what happened?”

Lucy crouched down and grabbed my shoulders, helping to straighten me up. “You’ve got to realize a few things, okay? You might want to be a normal person, but you’re not. For that matter, neither am I. But I know a lot more than you do about what’s going on, so you’ve got to listen to me. If I tell you not to look in the mirror, that means don’t look in the mirror.”

“Does that always happen?”

She turned slightly and grabbed a white washcloth from the rack on the wall. Dabbing it at the blood on my head, she answered. “Not always, but often enough.”

“What were those visions?”

“They’re…well, I guess they’re memories, sort of.”

“Memories? My memories?”

“I don’t know. You’ve never really gone into too much detail about them. Whatever they are, though, they’re memories you’re not ready for.”

I started breathing harder as Lucy spoke. My eyes burned around the edges. All the tension inside of me started welling up to the surface. I didn’t say anything, because if I spoke I thought I would start to cry.

Lucy dropped the washcloth to the floor and looked at my face. The angry matron she had been before was gone now, replaced by concern. “There’s a lot to explain, but I can help. You’ve got to listen to me, though.”

“How do I know I can trust you?” My voice trembled. I didn’t care. “I don’t know anything about anything.”

“You’ll get some of it back, bit by bit. You always do.”

Her eyes drifted down toward my chest and stomach. The long scar left by the mortician still had a yellow iodine stain, and the stitches were clearly visible.

“Man…he really did a shoddy job, didn’t he?” Lucy said. She touched the stitching. My body tensed at the contact.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “The first step to feeling human again is to make your body function like a human again. Come with me. We’ll get some blood pumping through those organs again.” She helped me stand up, then said in a soft voice, “We’re still looking, Eddie, and we’ll find her.”

“Find who?”

“That’s part of what we need to figure out. When we first met, I promised to help you find a woman you couldn’t remember. We’re professional investigators, and that’s one of the things we’re still investigating.”

She helped me to my feet and took my hand, leading me out of the bathroom.

“Come with me, Eddie. I’ll help bring you back.”