CHAPTER 6

MAYBE SHE HAD BEEN SIXTEEN YEARS OLD, MAYBE A YEAR OLDER; it is not easy to judge the age of a dead face. My age, perhaps?

she was dead was not in doubt.

"Her name was Olivia James."

A voice!

I moved around, raising my hands already formed into aching fists.

Then I saw a boy, or a young man. He was standing a dozen feet away and did not move toward me or flinch at my raised fists.

As I saw him he looked tall and thin. His face was pale as a ghost, pale almost to translucence, and made all the whiter by the black hair that framed it.

He wore a black coat that fell to mid calf over a buttoned iron-gray shirt. His pants were black, and his shoes seemed to be tall boots of black leather, though they were dusty.

The buttons of his coat were silver but not brightly polished. Each was a tiny skull, no bigger than a nut.

On his right hand was a silver ring in a shape I had never seen before. It looked like a warrior, a woman, gripping a sword.

The other ring, the one on his left hand, was a face in terror. A young face, and in between nervous glances it seemed to change, as though the face was animated, alive.

I also had the impression of tattoos on my wrist and neck in the few visible patches of skin.

His eyes was blue. They were a blue I had never seen before in any human eye. His eyes were unexplainable, like something from a travel poster of a Greek island.

I felt like asking him where I was , but I then thought that would have made me seem vulnerable. It would have invited him to take some advantage of me. Better to be tough, if tough was something I could pull off. So instead I asked a simple question.

"Who are you?"

He steaded at me and I felt like turning my eyes but I had to force myself not to turn away. He looked at me and I felt quite exposed suddenly, as if his eyes were seeing the things I showed no one.

All of it was beyond my ability to control.

"Her name was Olivia James.

Was I supposed to laugh? Was that some effort at a joke? But nothing about him suggested humor.

"Tell me who you are," I said. My voice sounded pitifully thin. If there was any threat in that voice, then it was a laughable one.

"That's not the question you wanted answered first," he said.

He had a strange voice. It was as if his mouth was pressed close against my ear so that I could hear every shade of every word, the inhalation and exhalation, the play of tongue against teeth, teeth against lips, lips softly percussing the b and p sounds.

I recoiled a bit from that voice, not from fear but from a sense that its intimacy was somehow inappropriate.

"Are you reading my mind?" I asked.

There was the slightest narrowing of his eyes, and if not a smile, there was a softening of the stern lines of his mouth.

He did not answer.

Instead he said, "Olivia James. Age sixteen. Dead by her own hand."

With that he laid his pale fingers softly, reverently on her cheek and then rolled or moved her head to the side so that I could see.

"Oh, God!" I cried. It was a hole, just large enough that a little finger could have been stuck into it. The hole was in her temple, and it was the color of ancient rust. Around the hole is a stretched oval of scorched skin and crisped hair.

It was the most terrible thing I had ever seen in my life. I stared at her face. She was not pretty; her chin was too big, too meaty. Her nose was perhaps too forceful, and there were dark circles under her eyes.

I felt, I have seeing this face, that she had endured pain. It was a sad face, though how can a face in death ever be happy?

I was so intent on her face that I failed at first to notice that the light all around me had changed.

I looked up and saw that the church was gone. The coffin, that terrible object, that reproach against life itself, grew transparent.

And then, the pale flesh of the dead girl began to regain some aspects of life. It grew pink. And I was certain I detected the movement of her eyes beneath their lids.

I cried out, "She's alive!"

And just then, as though my exclamation was a signal, she sat up. She sat up and now, dreamlike, the coffin was no longer there. Feeling wildly unstable, I put my hand out as though to steady myself, but there was nothing within my reach but the shoulder of the boy in black.

My fingers closed around his bicep, which flexed at my touch. It was reassuring in its solidity. He was real, not some figment of my imagination.

He shook his head and did not meet my eyes.and then he said "I am not to be touched."

It wasn't anger but a soft-spoken warning. It was said with what might have been regret but with absolute conviction.

I pulled my hand away and mumbled an apology, but I was less concerned about him than I was consumed with the horror of looking directly into the dead girl's eyes. She had risen to her feet. She stood.

The hole still a testament to brutality, bloody, only now, now, oh . . . oh . . . It was bleeding. Wet and viscous, the blood drained from the hole in her head as the blood seemed to drain from my own limbs. Little of something more solid slid down the trail of blood, bits of her brain forced outward as the bullet had forced its way inward.

Her eyes were brown and empty, her face blank, her blond hair fidgeted in a slight breeze, and the blood ran down her cheek and down her neck and pooled at the hollow of her throat.

I felt like saying we needed to call the police (911). I felt like saying that we must help. But the boy in black stood perfectly still, looking at me and not at the girl, the girl dead or living or whatever unholy cross between the two that defined Olivia James.

Dead too James.

"The question you want answered," the boy in black said as though no time had passed, "is whether you are dead."

I licked my lips nervously. My throat burned as though I'd been days without a drink of water. "Yes," I said to him.

"You live," he said "She is past help," the boy in black said.

"She's standing, she's . . . Can you hear me?" I addressed this to Olivia, knowing how foolish it was, knowing that my words would fall into the inconceivably vast chasm that separates the living and the dead.

No recognition in those brown eyes, no sudden cock of the head. I was inaudible and invisible to her.

Then she began to move, to walk. But backward. Away from us but backward, not awkward but with normal grace. As though she had always walked backward.