Ted Nelson was dead, but that wasn’t getting in the way of his drinking. We were at a place called Bucktooth’s, an absolute pigsty on the edge of town, eating stale nuts and getting wrecked on two-dollar drafts, when he leaned in close and said, “I think I died today.”
It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. But there was such earnestness in Ted’s voice when he spoke those preposterous words that if I hadn’t been so drunk, I might have believed him. For a second, anyway.
“Nah, you’re alive,” I said and slapped him on the back to punctuate my declaration. “It’s just your love life that’s dead. But if you save up a few bucks, that can change.”
He didn’t laugh. Can you blame him? Dead people don’t have much of a sense of humor. At least not the ones I’ve spoken to, which in my experience amounts to Ted and only Ted, but it’s a lot more than most can say. Besides, when was the last time you heard about someone experiencing a comical paranormal episode? Never. It’s always rattling chains and bumps in the night, neither of which are very funny—proof positive, at least to me, that when you die, so does your sense of humor.
Ted was proving that tonight. He pressed the full weight of his upper body against the bar like he always did when he was either bored, down, or on the verge of vomiting all over the place. And then he spoke four words I’d never heard anybody utter before, and hopefully never will again: “I saw my body.”
Okay, now he had my attention. I wasn’t exactly convinced. Who would be? But I was reasonably sure he was in the thick of something other than an existential crisis, or a panic attack, or the relapse of a broken heart once healed but still easily bruised. He’d had all three before, and I was an old pro at helping him through. Ted was my best buddy in the whole world. I couldn’t let him go through it alone. Not while he still owed me fifty bucks, anyway.
I raised a finger at Slim, the bartender, who was standing across from us with his arms folded, probably waiting for his shift to end so he could take his place alongside the rest of the drunks. He slopped two fresh Styrofoam cups in front of us and added two more ticks to my tab.
I tapped the lip of my cup against Ted’s. “To the memory of you,” I said.
Again, no laugh. Mr. Tough Audience didn’t even touch his drink. Instead, he pressed his hands together like a drunk in prayer, and when he spoke, he sounded on the verge of tears. “This isn’t a joke.”
I put my beer down and regarded Ted through the filmy haze that was as much a part of the décor of Bucktooth’s as the time-stained linoleum and the cracked mirror behind the bar. His eyes were darting back and forth, a bit too fast for a guy who’d only been drinking. I hoped he wasn’t back on the pills.
“You’re not dead, Ted. You’re sitting right next to me. Drinking beer that I’m buying, I’ll remind you. I’m not sure if this qualifies you as being alive, exactly, but it certainly doesn’t mean you’re pushing up daisies.”
I thought my words would go over well. Sometimes, sentiments spoken in a bar after a half-dozen drinks can come off like sage advice, or philosophical crumbs of poetry, but Ted wasn’t buying it.
“You didn’t see what I saw,” he said. “Trust me, if you had, you wouldn’t be so damn smug.”
Sometimes Ted said weird things. Like the time he swore up and down he’d seen a UFO hovering over a cow pasture at three in the morning. Or the other time when he claimed to have secret knowledge about the origins of Bigfoot. Peculiar exclamations with no basis in reality were as much a part of Ted as his abhorrence of employment and his fondness for dill pickles. But this . . . this really took the cake.
By now, I didn’t know if I should humor him or pretend like he wasn’t there, so I aimed for somewhere in the middle. “Drink your beer,” I said. It worked.
We sat in silence for the next ten minutes, listening to the sad jukebox in the corner spit out one lousy tune after another, too bored and cash-broke to get up and do anything about it. Then Ted started rocking back and forth on his barstool like a kid trying not to pee his pants.
“You alright?” I shouldn’t have asked. I already knew the answer.
“Of course not!” he shouted.
On the other side of the bar, Slim snapped upright. Something in Ted’s body language told me he was about two cranks away from flying straight off the handle, and if he did, he was going to get us kicked out. I couldn’t have that. Not again. Not so soon after getting back into Slim’s good graces following Ted’s last blowup. So I tried a different approach.
“Alright, alright. Tell it to me again. You say you saw your own body. Where?”
Ted let out the sigh of a hypochondriac who’s finally convinced his doctor to order up a round of comprehensive blood work. “On the floor of my room. Between the bed and the wall.”
“Did you check to see if you were still breathing?” I asked, but I immediately wished I hadn’t when Ted’s eyes went all squirrely again and his face melted.
“You think I’m crazy.”
“No, not at all,” I said, but the truth was, I was getting tired of the routine. “People die all the time. It’s not every day you drop dead and go out for drinks, but it happens.”
Bad move. Ted lost it.
It happened so fast I didn’t even get the luxury of savoring my quip. He pushed back from the bar, picked up his beer, and pitched it. It was more of a symbolic act, it being a Styrofoam cup and all, but it was full, and it connected with the mirror on the business side of the bar and bounced off with an explosive splash and a sudsy plop—no damage done; just Ted’s luck to try to break something and fail.
None of that made a lick of difference to Slim. He reached under the bar, pulled out a sawed-off baseball bat, and kicked us straight out. The rest of the bar patrons, about eight total, watched us leave in open-mouthed, drunken silence while some cowpoke on the jukebox twanged a tune of trucks, flags, and absentee fathers.
I shoved Ted through the threshold of the exit door. As the door swung shut, I heard Slim shout something about calling my tab and if I didn’t pay it off by the end of the week, he’d come find me. We hit the sidewalk and kept moving. I didn’t say a word until we’d cleared a full two blocks. Then I let Ted have it.
“Do you realize what you’ve done? He’ll never let us back in again!”
This wasn’t altogether true. Slim had barked similar threats in the past, but this was the third time in as many months he’d thrown us out, and I had a feeling if my next apology wasn’t especially convincing, he might consider this the final strike. I hoped not. Bucktooth’s was the only bar in town, and the idea of Ted and I getting drunk together anyplace else just felt depressing and creepy. But at this moment, Ted didn’t care about any of that; his planet-sized eyes told me as much. He was still on his “dead” kick and holding onto it like a worrywart to a rabbit’s foot.
“What does it matter?” he said. “What does anything matter if I’m dead?”
He walked ahead of me, moving at the hurried pace normally reserved for someone headed to a bar, not away from one. I asked him where the hell we were going and told him to slow down, but he only sped up.
“We’re going to my house,” he said. “I’ll show you. You’ll see it for yourself, and then you’ll believe me.”
Ted lived with his parents about a half-hour walk from Bucktooth’s. The place was nothing to look at, just the sadder half of a beat-up duplex that had seen its better days long before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, but it wasn’t too shabby, either, considering Ted didn’t have to pay a cent to live there. He still had the same bedroom he’d always had, likely the same bedroom he always would have, assuming he didn’t move into the master bedroom when his mother and father kicked the bucket. If I knew Ted, he’d never leave on his own, and although I’m sure his old man wished he’d get the hell out already, if his beloved Momma had it her way, he never would.
When we hit the walkway leading to the front door, Ted came to a slow, listing halt.
“What are you stopping for?” I said.
I tried to push past him but he refused to budge, staring up above the front door at the dark square of his bedroom window.
“Gimme a minute,” he said. “Just . . . hold your horses a second. I don’t know if I’m ready to go back in there.”
The walk had worn my drunk off, and I’d come too far and walked too hard on a night when I should have been swaying dizzily and pissing on my shoes in the alley behind Bucktooth’s to let this go.
“All I know is this,” I growled. “If there’s no body in your room, I’ll kill you myself.”
He didn’t answer; didn’t even acknowledge I’d spoken at all. He just sighed that defeated old sigh of his, the one he always kept in reserve for thinking about girls he loved who didn’t love him back, or dreaming of places he’d never go, or talking about how much he loved donuts. Then he pushed the front door open.
We stopped in the closet-sized foyer. Ted motioned for me to close the door gently and cocked his head, listening for his parents. I could hear the hum of the TV and the drone of his old man snoring on the couch, but I knew it was his dear old Momma that Ted was checking on.
I followed closely behind as he tiptoed toward the cramped living room and poked his head around the corner. The light of the TV screen illuminated the room, and when I leaned in to see for myself, I caught sight of Ted’s mom, fast asleep beside the old man, each of them canted to one side in their non-matching recliners like a couple of hardcore drug cases. They weren’t, of course. The strongest stuff I’d ever seen Ted’s mother drink was hot chocolate, and his old man subsisted on little more than soda water and saltines. I found it a wonder Ted had developed a taste for anything stronger than orange juice.
Satisfied we wouldn’t wake them, Ted motioned for me to follow him upstairs. The landing was only big enough for the two of us, and I ran into Ted the moment my foot hit the top step. Standing so close, I could feel his whole body trembling, racked with fear, but I was at my rope’s end. I pushed past him impatiently, shoved open his bedroom door, flipped the light switch, and walked inside.
From behind me, I heard Ted wince—the sound of an aborted exhale caught on the tip of his tongue, then the clap of his hand against his forehead as he covered his eyes like a child at a midnight spook show.
The room was downright puny, but not so small I didn’t have to move past the foot of the bed to see the narrow space between the edge of the mattress and the wall.
I looked down. In the dim light cast from the low-watt bulb overhead, I saw a shape on the floor.
“This better not be a joke,” I said, steeling my nerve, half-expecting some Halloween-store prop to come flying into my face, but a quick glance over my shoulder at Ted, who now had half his fist inserted in his mouth, told me this was no elaborate setup. As if the guy could have pulled one off in the first place.
I moved closer to the lump on the floor, halted. Stuck my foot out and gave a firm push. It was a body, alright. And it was lying face down on the gross, old, crinkly carpet.
Bracing myself with one hand on the mattress and another on the wall, I leaned down for a better look. And although I could see its face only in profile, there was no mistaking the familiar shock of jet-black hair, the patchy days-old growth of beard, and the broad yet bony shoulders lying at rest under a hopelessly out of fashion tie-dyed t-shirt.
It was Ted.
***
I don’t know how long I stood above the body before reality—and a pressing urgency—swept over me. But when I was finally able to tear my eyes away from it, and when the thudding sound of my own heart in my ears began to recede, I became aware of an odd choking sound coming from somewhere in the room.
Ted was crying. He had his arms drawn up to his chest, face in his palms, back pressed firmly against the wall underneath a crack in the ceiling that ran east to west like a lightning bolt.
Back in the old days, we used to joke the crack had been caused when Satan tore a hole into our dimension to deliver Ted to his soon-to-be long-suffering parents. Now, in the light of what lay on the floor of his bedroom, that old joke didn’t seem so funny anymore.
My head did that odd thing it sometimes does when I’m unsure about what to do next: It rolled on my neck like a pendulum, from Ted to the body and back again, a half-dozen times.
I thought I should say something. Up to this point, I had been the sole source of reason, the steady if not irritated voice assuring Ted everything he was telling me was impossible. But now, faced with the reality of the situation, that voice was extinguished, and it was all I could do to manage a verbal response: “What the hell is happening?”
Which would have been a great question if either of us had the foggiest notion of how to answer.
Feeling outside of myself, I knelt beside the body; watched my hand reach down and take hold of its shoulder, which was cold but still pliant to the touch. I lifted and the torso flopped over easily, revealing a slack, mirror image of the Ted standing three feet away from me.
I can’t say what about that shocked me and caused me to fly backward. It wasn’t like I was expecting to look into the face of a stranger. But in that moment the gravity of the circumstance must have fallen on me like a bag of rocks dropped from a great height, because I gasped, recoiled, leapt to my feet, and knocked over the bedside lamp.
The crash was ungodly loud, and I had only a split second to register surprise that the bulb hadn’t shattered before the sound of footsteps on the staircase jolted us to attention. Then a high-pitched whisper coming from the doorjamb, and the sound of the doorknob rattling.
“Teddy! What’s going on in there?”
Ted’s hands flew to his temples, and he stared at me for help. All I could do was shake my head absently.
“Nothing, Momma!” he finally said. “Go back to sleep.”
Again, the handle of the door rattling as she tried to enter. And again, the voice in the doorjamb, sounding like it was in the room with us.
“What was that noise?”
Something caused Ted and I to launch into action at the same time, and we collided against one another. One of us must have let out a groan or a yelp, because Ted’s mother called out again, this time more insistently: “Is there someone in there with you?”
“No,” Ted said, but I cut in, flying into preemptive mode: “Yes! It’s just me, Mrs. Nelson.”
The fact I rarely addressed the woman so formally wasn’t lost on me. Usually, anytime I ever referred to Ted’s mother it was always “your mom” or, when speaking directly to her, a more polite “ma’am” because I never felt comfortable referring to her by her first name, and the whole last name thing was a little too 80s-TV for me. Tonight, though, it seemed to be the only thing that fit. And it worked.
The sound of my voice seemed to startle her into silence. Which was a good thing, as Ted looked about on the verge of another meltdown.
Ted’s mom was quiet for a few seconds, but when she spoke again she sounded relieved, probably glad to know it was me in there with her son and not some random streetwalker or drug dealer. I hadn’t always been the best influence on Ted, but at least I was an old influence and not a new one.
“That’s fine, boys,” she said, then added: “Is everything okay?”
Ted, who seemed now to have regained some of his loosening grip, replied before I had a chance. “Yeah, Momma, we’re just horsing around.” Then he came through with a stroke of genius that caused me to reevaluate his ability to think fast in difficult circumstances: “Do you think you can fix us some sandwiches?”
The silence on the other side of the door gave me a second’s worry, but then normalcy, as it always does, prevailed.
“Okay,” she said, and we stood completely still, listening to her stockinged feet as she descended the stairs, rounded the corner, and began opening drawers and cupboards in the kitchen below.
For a second, all there was in the world was a great rush of air as the sound of our simultaneous exhalations filled the room. Then Ted’s crisis meter jumped back into the red, and he began to pace the room furiously—as furiously as he could, anyway, considering all he had to work with between me and the body was about four square feet.
“What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?” he kept asking, until an ingrained instinct I’d first recognized within myself one dark, painful day on a school playground came rushing back like a bolt of reason: When forced to choose between fight and flight, always flee.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.
I looked back down at the body, still unable to think of it as Ted no matter how much it resembled him.
“And let’s take this with us,” I added.
As if to congratulate me on a brilliant idea, Ted extended his arms and formed a perfect O with his mouth.
I didn’t wait for the accolades; there wasn’t enough time. I righted the knocked-over lamp and directed Ted to strip the comforter from his bed. Then I took hold of the body by the feet and dragged it out from between the bed and the wall.
Working quickly and somehow managing to ignore the fact there were two Teds in the room, we used the comforter to roll the body up like the world’s biggest burrito. Then we stared dumbly at one another, wondering what to do next.
“We have to carry him out of here,” I said, “and we have to move fast.”
Being the bigger of the two, I elected to be our procession’s lone pallbearer. With shockingly little effort, I scooped my hands underneath the body and slung it over my shoulder. It was so easy, in fact, that I almost issued a crack—“Light as a feather and almost as smart” came to mind—but decided Ted wouldn’t appreciate it, so I kept my mouth shut.
Ted ducked past me and tiptoed to the bedroom door. He pressed his ear against it to make sure there wasn’t anyone in the hall, clicked the lock, cracked the door, threw out a final peek, and pushed it wide.
We were halfway down the stairs when Mrs. Nelson called up to us, the sound of her slow footsteps moving through the kitchen signaling her approach.
“You boys want something to drink?”
A bolt of panic shot through me as I pictured her rounding the corner with a plate of food in hand, catching us in the act of trying to sneak a dead body out of the house.
Without thinking, I shoved Ted out of my way, jumped the last three steps, landed in the foyer with a crash, and burst out the front door.
If we’d had time to think things through, one of us (let’s be real, probably me) would have suggested making sure there was nobody outside to witness our hasty, corpse-burdened exit. I still don’t know what I would have done if there had been someone out there. Thankfully, there wasn’t.
I ran and didn’t stop moving until I was around the corner, a good fifty feet from Ted’s house. When I was certain I was out of sight, I stopped.
Muffled voices danced in my direction from behind the brick wall shielding me from view, and after a few moments Ted’s silhouette rounded the corner, growing slowly larger, too slow for my liking. When he finally caught up, he looked like he was on the verge of laughter.
“What’s so funny?” I gasped between hitching breaths.
He shook his head briskly and the levity sailed off; the grim countenance returned. “Nothing. That was close, but you did it. She didn’t see what we were up to. She thinks we’re drunk.”
“I wish we were, but someone had to go and ruin that,” I said. Figuring I’d given Ted enough grief for the night, I hooked a sharp finger at the body on my shoulder. “What do we do with this? Take it to the cops?”
Ted’s mouth fell open as if I’d suggested chopping it up into bits and cooking it on a barbecue grill. “Are you crazy? They’ll think we had something to do with it.”
I considered arguing the fact that once the cops saw the body was an identical replica of Ted, right down to the clothes he wore and the five-day growth of beard on his cheeks, they would also have to come to the conclusion something very strange was going on—and perhaps their significantly less booze-addled brains would come up with a better course of action. Then I thought again.
Maybe a seasoned detective like the kind you see on TV would take the time to consider the finer points of the mystery. But the average desk jockey on duty at the station, or the common cop pulling graveyard shift on a slow night, would see the body and immediately arrest us.
At very least, they’d bring us in for questioning, no matter who the body looked like, no matter how insistent we were with our story. They’d take one look at us, a couple of hoods with deer-in-the-headlights eyes, and suspect us of something heinous.
And then there was the issue of Ted’s mom. If we got hauled in, she’d no doubt hear about it. It’s a very small town. And if she were called in to identify the body, or even to try to determine which “Ted” was really her son and which was the impostor, she likely wouldn’t survive the ordeal. She’d drop right then and there.
I couldn’t let such a thing happen. If I did, I’d never hear the end of it from Ted.
“You’re right,” I finally said.
It must have been the first time I’d ever conceded the point to Ted because he blinked and made a face like he’d been given a free meal.
“But we’re not taking this thing back to my place,” I said, “and I can’t carry it around all night. We have to stash it until we can figure out what’s going on.”
Ted pinched his lips with his thumb and forefinger and spun in a slow circle. He was weighing the options (as if anything would jump out and present itself as viable) but I was already steps ahead of him.
Bucktooth’s was a thirty-minute walk away, and if we cut through a few back yards and hustled, we could be there even sooner. Once there, we could hide Dead Ted behind the trash dumpster out back. At least until we decided on our next move.
When I suggested the idea, Ted immediately snapped his fingers and bounced his head in rhythm to the staccato firing of his lips: “Yes, yes, yes, yes . . . great idea, yes!”
It was dark out, but not too dark, and the fact not a soul saw us moving through the streets, weaving in and out of shadows with a body-sized package in tow, was a miracle. I don’t believe in them, but I take what I can get.
On any other night, without the cloud of the impossible following us, it might have occurred to me it was Saturday, and like all nights in our town nearly every single resident was locked inside their homes drinking themselves into a stupor—that even if they had come to their front windows and looked outside and seen two derelicts hauling a dead body through the streets, they wouldn’t have done anything. For all I knew, everyone did see us. They simply didn’t care. Which was fine with me.
When we got close to Bucktooth’s, we hooked a right down a side street and came up from behind. It was a move intended to ensure we would approach unseen, and we might have accomplished the task if not for the wino who burst through the back door and staggered past us on his way to a dark corner to vomit.
As he hobbled past, arms pinwheeling for balance, his eyes met mine, but I could tell right away he wouldn’t be a problem. The guy was so gone that even if he did see the body, he would have thought it just another of his kind: someone so obliterated they had to be carried around like a rucksack.
Ted and I waited until the guttural gags and muttered curses subsided and the wino spun back around to go inside again. Once he was gone, we made a wide arc around Vomit Corner and moved through the dimly lit blockade of stacked trash bags—the overflow of refuse from Bucktooth’s that wouldn’t fit inside the old banged-up dumpster—and lay the body in the shadows.
It came to rest face down and we almost left it like that, but Ted reached out as an afterthought and turned it onto its side. Presumably, so it could breathe. Or peek out from beneath the comforter and gaze up at the stars. Or because Ted didn’t like the idea of desecrating a dead body, especially his own.
For what seemed like an eternity, we stood staring down at the long, slender form wrapped in flannel. I wondered briefly if we’d done the right thing by bringing it here. And then the stench of bar-food rot and garbage snaked into my nose, and I spun on my heel.
I grabbed Ted by the back of the shirt and dragged him along until we’d cleared enough distance to ensure if anyone poked their heads out of the bar, we wouldn’t be seen.
“We need to talk,” I said. “But here’s not a good place.”
Bucktooth’s was situated on the seedy corner of a seedier four-way stop. Right across the street, conveniently located for all the late-night drunks not yet confident enough to slide behind the wheel, was an all-night diner everybody called Sara’s. Nobody knew why. Maybe because the sign atop the roof—DINER in all caps—seemed like such an offense, such a slap in the face of originality, that someone at some point had chosen to give the place an actual name. Or maybe the original owner’s name had been Sara. I didn’t give a damn. All I wanted was a place to sit and think.
We took a seat in a booth facing the street so we could keep an eye on Bucktooth’s. Without telling Ted, I made the decision that if anybody went poking around behind the dumpster, or if any cops should show up, we would simply haul ass back to his place.
I wasn’t sure if it was a plan Ted was willing to comply with, but he wasn’t exactly in a mental state to agree to anything. Plus, as best as I could tell, the guy was dead, and dead people aren’t the best at making decisions.
When the waitress came, I ordered us two coffees, but when she gave me a look that said, “You better order more or you’re not welcome for longer than five minutes,” I asked for a plate of fries.
She rolled her eyes and walked away. I looked outside the window; all was clear out back of Bucktooth’s. I turned to Ted and leaned in close so we could talk without being overheard.
“The body’s safe for now. Nobody’s gonna go poking around back there until morning. We have some time to figure out what to do.”
The coffee came. I took a long, hard swallow, probably shaving a millimeter off my esophagus, while Ted stared down his cup like a hypnotized rat. I fought the urge to slap an open hand against the table to wake him up and opted instead for pushing the cup closer to him.
“Drink up,” I said. “We both need to be wide awake for this.”
Ted looked around the diner like a guy emerging from a tunnel into daylight. At this hour of night, the place resembled a day-old helium balloon: wrinkly on the edges, worse for the wear, and a bit sad.
“How can this be happening?” he said. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen. If I’m dead, I shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be able to see me or hear me or touch me.”
“Then you’re not dead,” I said, even though his argument made sense.
He scoffed and jerked his head in the direction of Bucktooth’s. “Then what is that thing we hid back there? A body snatcher? A clone? An alien? What?”
I considered every option. None had the ring of truth about them, and nothing sounded feasible aside from the possibility of a shared hallucination. But I didn’t even know if that was a thing.
I thought back to the bar and the last round of drinks Slim poured us. Could he have slipped us something? Definitely. Would he have? I doubted it.
“Tell me again how you found the body,” I said. “It was in your room. Between the bed and the wall, you said?”
Ted nodded, his eyes growing clearer in the light of recollection. “I was in bed, taking a nap. And when I woke up . . . it was there.”
I held a hand up. “Okay, back up. You were sleeping?”
“Yeah. I was tired, so I took a nap before meeting you at Buck’s.”
“What happened before you went to sleep? Did you do something? Did you see something, or read something, or . . . I don’t know, talk to someone? Anything.”
I was reaching now, my mind a flailing hand in the dark, hoping to take hold of some clue yet terrified of what I might find. I figured anything would be better than waiting for the inevitable to find us. More than anything, I wanted to outsmart this thing; to take the mystery that had been thrust into my lap and split it inside out. To solve it. A wave of desperation washed over me, and I wished I’d watched more crime shows as a kid. I could have used some pointers.
Ted’s eyes grew wide and he jumped as if startled, staring dumbly into his undrunk coffee, seeing something in the forefront of his mind for the first time. “Momma made me dinner,” he said.
This was not unusual. The woman doted on Ted, a bit too much for sometimes even him to take. Cooking him dinner, though, seemed pretty harmless.
“Okay, what’s so strange about that?”
Ted’s eyes darkened under the weight of a terrifying revelation. “Nothing,” he said, “except right after, I got sleepy. Real sleepy. I figured it was from staying up late the night before, but this was different. I barely made it to my bed before I crashed out.”
I started to say something, then stopped myself. Asking Ted if he thought his mother had something to do with his inexplicable unconsciousness felt obscene, even if it did follow the train of logic.
Yet, if we were going strictly on circumstantial evidence, this would make his mother a prime suspect. But a suspect to what? The unraveling of reality? The creation of a Ted replica, right down to the clothes? It was too outlandish to contemplate. Ted’s mother could have drugged him, but what could account for Dead Ted?
No. This had to be something else.
Just then, a flash of movement outside the front window of the diner caught my eye. I stared out, squinting past my own reflection, trying to be discreet and not raise Ted’s hackles, but what I saw nearly caused me to come up out of my seat.
Something had dashed through the circle of light cast by a nearby flickering streetlamp and plunged into the shadows. But rather than obscuring itself completely, it stopped just far enough outside the ring of light to remain partially visible.
My breath caught as my eyes fell upon a perfectly still, black, featureless mass. If it knew I saw it, it made no effort to conceal itself. It only stood there, as still as marble, shielded in shadow, watching us.
***
Ted was still talking, but the whole of my attention was now focused on the thing lurking in the shadows across the street. From our position inside the diner, it looked like little more than a black, blurry, featureless mass. So featureless, in fact, that if I’d pointed it out to anyone else they might not have seen anything at all. Yet an unmistakable sensation of being watched—no, stalked—was putting down stakes in the pit of my stomach, and I found myself in the grip of the inescapable knowing that whatever it was, it wasn’t human. And the only thing separating us from it was a twenty-foot-wide strip of asphalt and a single pane of glass.
I blinked once. Then again. Hoping it would disappear. Feeling myself pressed deeper into my seat by the weight of a growing dread. When I tore my eyes away from it and looked at Ted, words were tumbling from his mouth, completely oblivious to what I was seeing. I decided not to tell him. The last thing I needed now was for Ted to retreat inside himself again.
“It was the strangest, most vivid dream I’ve ever had,” he was saying. “Nothing really happened. It was just a bad feeling. A horrible feeling. I was drowning under a black wave. I heard a loud noise, and when I sat up in bed, it was like I couldn’t breathe. That’s when I saw . . . it.”
He spat the word with a mouthful of disgust. I couldn’t blame him. What Ted had seen was an abomination—the buckling under of one of the principal pillars of reality. People didn’t spontaneously reproduce like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And people who died in their sleep didn’t get out of bed, step over their bodies, and go about their night like nothing happened. What Ted had seen and experienced could not be explained. He had every right to recoil in revulsion.
My eyes darted back across the street. Still there. My heart fluttered against my shirt.
The plate of fries arrived, and we picked at them like a couple of nervous customers planning a robbery. Which was probably why the waitress was eyeballing us with such intensity, urging us with everything but her words to finish up and get the hell out.
I waited, eyes glued to the shape in the shadows, biding our time until it dawned on me that the longer we sat still, the closer we drifted to an inevitable conclusion I wanted no part of. “We can’t stay here,” I said. “We have to do something.”
I waved for the bill. The thing outside moved again. My eyes snapped back to it. It was gone.
I stared into the empty space left by its absence, certain there had been something there, but the longer my eyes adjusted, the more uncertain I grew.
When the bill came, I put a wad of cash on the table and stood slowly, keeping my eyes fixed on the curtain of darkness surrounding the streetlight’s glow.
“What are you looking at?” Ted asked, and I responded almost too quickly: “Nothing.”
I didn’t dare breathe a word of what I’d seen. Although he was showing signs of returning to normal, Ted was still in such a fragile state that I felt I had to try to insulate him from the deepening severity of the situation. He’d have done the same for me. At least I hoped he would. Sometimes, it’s better to be kept in the dark—and the stubborn part of me that insisted on following Ted home to verify his story swore if I was ever in the dark on something like this again, I’d try my damnedest to stay there.
“Should we check on the body?” Ted said. His voice was uncertain and shaky, laced with the hope I’d tell him it wasn’t necessary.
“No,” I said.
I didn’t want to go back behind Bucktooth’s unless it was absolutely necessary, and right now I felt an urgent impulse to put distance between us and whatever it was no doubt still watching us from the shadows.
We hoofed it back the way we’d come, this time just the two of us, no longer cutting through back yards and fields to make up time but walking the long, straight road that cut a line from one end of town to the other.
About a quarter mile from the diner, we passed through the glow of a brightly lit used car lot. Being in the light made me feel exposed, and I wanted to hurry past it, but when I shot a glimpse at Ted, my feet stopped moving.
Deep, dark, disturbing circles had formed under his eyes. He was breathing heavily from his mouth, and his lips looked painfully swollen. He had all the beat-up, haggard aura of a guy who’d just gone ten rounds with disaster. And although the light illuminating us painted everything in bug-guts yellow, there was a pallor about Ted that plain scared me.
“You don’t look so good,” I said. “How do you feel?”
Ted shrugged almost nonchalantly. “For a dead guy, I think I feel okay.”
I told him not to joke and pressed my open palm against his forehead. Not that I could have told if he was running hot or cold. It just seemed like the thing to do.
Before I could determine if he was dead or alive, Ted jerked away from me, feigning disgust. I thought it was a good sign he still had it in him to joke, and I would have revised my opinion about dead people having no sense of humor, but the way he looked was alarming.
“I’m serious,” I said, “you look . . .” I managed to stop my mouth before uttering the word that hung between us like an uncollected dirty sheet on a clothesline: dead.
What we really needed was a doctor. Someone to give Ted a once-over. Someone to quell what was fast becoming our shared worry and give assurance that the guy I was tooling around town with in the middle of the night was not, in fact, deceased. But the nearest hospital was twenty-five miles away in the next town over, and without a car, we’d never make it—not before whatever was draining the life from Ted had done its worst.
My mind jumped to the two-office medical clinic downtown, the place I’d stumbled into six months before when a mislaid footstep and a drink too many had left me with a gash on my forehead. One of the doctors there had sewn me up and sent me home with a bottle of painkillers. I figured the place kept business hours, but sometimes it was open on weekends, and even though the likelihood someone would be there at this time of night was slim, I figured if we could get there, the next logical step would make itself evident. Beyond looking Ted over, I was hoping a doctor could give us some idea of what was going on.
Best case scenario, although highly unlikely, we could even tell the doctor about Dead Ted, whose body lay in wait of discovery behind Bucktooth’s. And if it was discovered before then? All it would take for anyone to piece things together would be to talk to Slim or anyone else who’d been inside Bucktooth’s with us. They’d learn the two of us had left together. Dead Ted would tell them the rest: that I had murdered him myself and left him behind the dumpster. It was at this moment I resolved to not let Ted out of my sight until this thing was over. He would be the walking (stumbling), talking (mumbling) evidence I’d need to prove I wasn’t a killer. What the hell had I gotten myself into?
I started to walk again, and Ted shambled after me like a zombie in slow-motion pursuit. The fifteen-minute walk took us forty-five. I kept having to fall back and push Ted into motion. One time, he simply stopped and stared down as if he were catching a catnap on his feet. By the time we finally made it to the center of town with all three of its snoozing intersections and half-dozen rolled-up shops, he was barely conscious. The whole of downtown was engulfed in darkness, save for a solitary light burning in the second-story window of the medical clinic.
“Holy hell,” I said, “I think we’re in luck.”
Expecting to find it locked, I pushed against the glass door. It swung open. The postage-stamp-sized lobby was pitch black except for a faint glow coming from the computer monitor behind the admissions desk.
“Hello?” I called out. “I got a real sick guy. Is there anyone here?”
Silence.
I moved us farther inside. We moved to the short flight of steps leading up from the lobby to the examination rooms. I had just enough time to wonder how really sick people were supposed to make it up those stairs without the help of an elevator when Ted collapsed against me.
“Hang on,” I said, and for the second time that night I picked him up. “We’re almost there.”
I carried him up the dark stairway. Halfway up, I saw the rectangular outline of a closed door. Light spilled from underneath it, dousing the floor with just enough illumination to guide me.
I pushed the door open. Standing in the center of the waiting room, staring at us expectantly, was a man in a white lab coat. He looked like he’d been waiting for us.
“Are you a doctor?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, and although the sound of that word should have come as sweet relief considering how far we’d come, there was something peculiar about the doctor’s manner. Something disquieting. With his slicked-back hair and sharp, bony features, he looked more like one of Hitler’s “final solution” doctors than a GP. But of course, beggars and choosers and all that stuff.
I set Ted down to stand on his own two feet, and he managed to keep himself upright for a few seconds before wheeling in a semi-circle and almost toppling over.
The doctor snapped his fingers sharply and pointed to the examination table. I managed to get Ted up onto it. As soon as he was up, he crumbled backward into a lying position.
“What’s wrong with him?” the doctor said, and it occurred to me I hadn’t thought things out this far.
“He’s . . . sick,” I said, wondering how much I should say.
The doctor looked at me like I was a grade-A jerk and leaned over Ted, pressing his hands against his forehead, lifting his eyelids and staring into his pupils like he was looking through a telescope lens.
It was at this point I noticed the man’s lack of any medical instruments—no stethoscope, or even that handheld light they use to look into your eyes and throat—and immediately wished I’d have bit the bullet and called for an ambulance to take us to the hospital. For all I knew, this guy was either drunk off his ass or, even worse, not a real doctor at all.
I opened my mouth to say something, but he cut me off.
“Has he taken any drugs?” he asked.
“No,” I replied. “We had a few beers. He was fine at first . . .”
The doctor, or whoever he was, was lifting Ted’s shirt and pinching at the flesh around his underarms. I’m no doctor, but I like to think I can spot a crackpot or a phony pretty fast. He didn’t look like he was checking Ted’s health. He looked like he was sizing him up for dinner.
Ted’s eyes, meanwhile, were rolling around in their sockets, and red patches had begun to form on his cheeks below blackened, saggy bags. It occurred to me how horribly sick he’d become in such a short amount of time. Before, at Sara’s, he’d looked wrung out. Now Ted looked like he was at death’s door and about to gain entry.
“Can’t you give him something?” I said, practically pleading.
The doctor spun around and marched to the door, feet moving with unmistakable purpose. “I have just the thing,” he said and disappeared into the dark hall.
He returned within seconds, standing in the threshold, holding something in his hands. It was a phone. A cordless office phone. He held it out to Ted. Then, directing his words at me, he said, “There’s someone on the phone who’d like to speak with him.”
By this point, I was too tired and confused to do anything but acquiesce. I took the phone and held it up to Ted’s ear. The voice I heard coming from the other end was unmistakable. It was Ted’s mother.
She was shouting with enough volume for all three of us to hear, but it was Ted who was doing all of the suffering for it—grimacing in pain with every shrill exclamation and deafening declaration. His mother wanted him home immediately. And if he didn’t get home immediately, he wasn’t going to have a home to come home to.
While Ted nodded and muttered his uh-huhs and yeah-Mommas into the receiver, the doctor sidled up beside me, so uncomfortably close that I could feel his breath on my cheek and smell the rank odor of dry sweat.
“Ted’s in a very perilous condition,” he said, whispering into my ear. “Right now, it is of utmost urgency that we get him the help he needs. You two have been friends for a very long time. Don’t let Ted down now. What the two of us—you and I—must do right now is ensure Ted gets home to his mother. She’s the woman who birthed him and the only person in the world who can save him now. And that’s what you want, isn’t it? To save your friend?”
He was clearly trying to convince me, to hypnotize me into going along, but his lips smacked when he spoke, and his tongue clicked against his teeth, and I might have shuddered violently if the events of the past few hours hadn’t somehow inoculated me against the weird, the baffling, and the all-out disgusting.
I shook my head and tried to pull away. He must have sensed he wasn’t convincing me because he pushed in even closer, his face grave, and spoke four words that told me I’d better pay attention to him: “The body is gone.”
My face must have gone pale instantly, because before I could utter a sound, he spoke again, still whispering, as if attempting to keep the details from poor old Ted, who was busy being berated by a very worried and very insistent mother.
“Your friend, Slim,” the doctor said, emphasizing the word “friend” with just the right amount of irony. “The one who barkeeps at the lovely establishment you frequent. He found the body.”
My heart didn’t exactly sink, but rather glided downward, traveling the distance from my chest to my stomach in the space of seconds. How could we have been so stupid? How could I have been so stupid?
When my thoughts raced back to the figure I’d seen lurking outside the diner, I felt like kicking myself. How could I have assumed what I saw was anything other than a suspicious bystander, or maybe even Slim himself? Someone who’d seen us leave a body-sized package behind the bar and called the cops. I tipped my head, ears straining expectantly for the call of approaching sirens.
“There will be no police,” the doctor declared, reading my thoughts. Or maybe he was just good at reading body language. If I had a mirror, I probably could have held it up to my face and seen the evidence of all that had gone on this evening written clearly across my forehead. The doctor’s face contorted strangely in what I could only assume was the unpracticed imitation of a smile. Then he said, “We . . . interceded.”
“We?” I asked, but I knew no answer would be forthcoming. All I got in reply was a slow, dismissive blink from the man before me . . . a man I knew for sure was no doctor.
Then he said, “Mother knows best,” and repeated himself as if I’d somehow been able to miss it. “Mother knows best. You boys interrupted something that was taking place, and now it’s time to let the process resume. Ted is not dead. He is very much alive. But I can’t tell you the extent of the spiritual and psychological damage he may suffer if he isn’t brought home to his mother at once.”
Right then, something in me wilted. Possibly it was the stress of running all night from an unavoidable fate, or perhaps it was the running around itself. One look at me and you’d know this was the most exercise I’d had in a single day in years, and I suspected only my obligation to my best friend was keeping me going when all I really wanted to do was go home and sleep for fourteen hours straight.
I turned back to Ted, who now had the phone pulled away from his ear and was holding it out to me. “Momma wants to talk to you,” he said.
Pressing the phone against my ear, I uttered a barely audible “Hello” and listened as Mrs. Nelson’s suddenly calm, soothing voice gnawed into the final straw of my resistance: “It’s time to bring Ted home now,” she said. “He’s been through enough. You are a great friend to him and always have been, but he’s sick and needs his mother. I can help him.”
I started to speak—to protest, to ask her what the hell was going on—but she cut me off abruptly. When she did, her voice took on a startling timbre, and the words she spoke sounded more like a growl than a command: “Bring him home. Now.”
A gasp erupted from my throat before I could contain it, and as soon as it did, I knew I’d shown my hand. I was terrified, and she knew it. The doctor knew it. Ted knew it. And now that I knew it, the final wall of my resolve crumbled. All I could do now, aside from holding myself and Ted up long enough to get him home, was comply.
“Okay,” I said.
When I went to hand the phone back to the doctor, he was gone. Just then a voice, unheard by my ears but distinctly sensed and understood somewhere deep within me, spoke the words: The Devil sends his regards.
A chill coursed through me, an icy finger raking upward from the small of my back to the base of my spine. Where had I heard those words before? In a song, or a dream, or a thought not yet crystallized? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I had to take Ted home. There was nothing else to do.
***
It was just after three in the morning when Ted and I half-walked, half-staggered through the front door of his parents’ house. His mother met us at the door and ushered us inside with such warmth as I’d never received from her, her face brimming with so much gratitude you’d thought I’d saved her one and only boy’s life. I’m sure she wanted me to believe I had, but I was fairly certain all I’d really done was deliver Ted to his doom.
As soon as she had taken him from me, wrapping Ted’s arm over her shoulder, I turned to leave, but she clapped a hand on my forearm with incredibly strong, slender fingers.
“Stay,” she said. “You’ve always been there for Teddy. You were here for him tonight again. You deserve to know what’s going on. And I think when you find out, you’ll know everything has been for the best.”
Too tired to refuse, I followed them up to Ted’s bedroom, his mother shouldering most of his weight as they stepped slowly up the rise. Ted looked like a frail calf being led to the slaughter, and I could do no more than bear witness.
Standing in one corner of Ted’s bedroom was his father, a guy I’d only spoken to once or twice in all my adult life. He had always been an unmoving fixture in their home, planted before the TV or chewing slowly and silently from the kitchen table, never a kind or unkind word. Tonight was no different, save for something in his eyes that danced with life the moment he laid eyes on Ted.
“Welcome home, son,” he said.
Bleary-eyed and pale-fleshed as a ghost, Ted flashed his father a weak smile. Then, turning to his bed, his face cinched up in a knot of fear and his knees wobbled. I followed his gaze. Dead Ted was back, just like the mysterious doctor had said, only now it was lying flat on its back on top of the mattress with its arms resting at its sides and its chin pointing straight up to the ceiling.
Ted began to tremble, taking on all the quaking elasticity of a bowl of Jello knocked sideways, but his mother tightened her grip and urged him forward, whispering into his ear. I assumed they were words of comfort, or encouragement, because Ted did not dig in his heels but moved closer to the bed, albeit haltingly.
He stopped at its foot and gazed down on the sight of his sleeping double, and I could only guess what terrifying thoughts passed through his head in those final moments before he took a seated position on the floor between the bed and the wall—the same space where his lifeless twin had lain only hours earlier—and, with his mother standing over him, lay back on the floor and closed his eyes.
“He wasn’t supposed to wake up,” I heard Ted’s mother say, and only after a few seconds did I realize she was addressing me. “We should have stayed with him. To make sure it took. But you’ve brought him back, and that’s all that matters. Now it’s time to let the process finish.”
What process? my brain screamed, but by this point my lips had gone mute, and my feet, which might earlier have carried me out of there in violent, uncoordinated haste, felt cemented in place. I figured there was no reason to ask any more questions. I would know what was happening soon enough.
Mrs. Nelson turned to the body on the bed. She raised splayed-fingered hands over her head. And then she began, before my very disbelieving eyes, to sway back and forth and chant. It might have been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so horrifying, the sight of this meek, mild woman revealing herself before me as a willing accomplice, the catalyst of some dark endeavor.
The floor shook, and almost at once there came a blast of air so cold I could see my own breath; and in the shock of icy air there arrived a sense of knowing so irresistibly strong and so undeniably true that I wondered stupidly how I could have not understood what was happening from the very start.
A strong aroma was beginning to fill the room. Everything before me began to dim, and I could have believed I was seeing now through a thin, dark, web-like veil—not exactly the smoke of fire and brimstone; more like the haze of an infernal fire.
The body on the bed twitched. A noise like the sound of a giant’s vertebra snapping into place erupted overhead, and I looked up to see the old crack in the ceiling of Ted’s bedroom had grown. It was still growing, right before my eyes. Expanding, evolving, transmogrifying into something that no longer looked like a crack but now resembled a crude, yawning entrance. A doorway.
Mr. and Mrs. Nelson clasped hands and watched from the foot of the bed as the body convulsed again, a thrashing motion so wild it stirred the air. Its face twisted fiercely for an instant, then fell expressionless once more.
Dead Ted was coming to life.
Not daring to move from where I stood, I craned my neck, straining to see if the living Ted was still lying in the space between the bed and the wall where the nightmare had started. But even before my eyes could register that he had disappeared—vanished, without trace, as surely as his lifeless twin had come into being and was now awakening—I understood. The floor was empty; Ted was gone.
The body on the bed took one great, spastic lungful of air. And then it began to breathe. Chest rising and falling. Slowly, it sat upright—back rigid as a fence post. Its eyelids flipped open. Black coals danced in bony sockets as it regarded first its parents, then turned its head to me.
The Devil sends his regards.
I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. I wanted to collapse into a ball and wrap my hands around my head and disappear. I did none of these things. Instead, I looked away, backed slowly out of the room, and slipped quietly out of the house.
I don’t remember going home. Couldn’t tell you if I crawled, walked, ran, or flew. Just that when I got there, I locked myself inside and didn’t sleep until the sun came up.
***
It took me days to wrap my mind around what had taken place. Even after, my head still raced with lingering questions and ached with doubts as to the possibility of a disembodied spirit having the ability to take physical form, to manipulate the space around itself—and to revolt, by the very fact of its existence, against the laws of nature and reason. It seemed astonishingly implausible. A thing that could not have been. And yet it had, and I had borne witness. As had Slim, unknowingly, along with everyone else at Bucktooth’s; as had Ted’s parents; as had Ted himself—up until the moment he was swallowed whole and wiped clean from existence.
I went about my business like nothing had happened (or so I tried) but my every move was the indication something had happened. Something terrible. I steered clear from anywhere I thought I might encounter Ted and didn’t dare go within spitting distance of Bucktooth’s.
This amounted to me spending most of my time at home, watching a lot of TV and subsisting on noodle packets and coffee.
The hours alone and time away from drinking might have done me good if not for the constant companion stalking my waking hours and even visiting me in my sleep, heaving me out of bed with a muted scream on my lips and a burning vision before me: the sight of Dead Ted coming to life. The black, soulless eyes that fell on me as it awakened.
Weeks passed. Finally, months. And then one brisk autumn morning, as the dead, golden castoffs of summer trees raked their bony corpses across sidewalks and into gutters and collected on the forgotten edges of grassless fields, Ted came calling.
I heard the knock and knew it was him before I opened it. His formerly untamed black mane was chopped short, pushed back from his forehead in a banker’s cut. His face was clean-shaven and the clothes he wore resembled something the two of us might have made fun of together back in the old days. I looked him up and down, the whole of his skinny frame tucked tidily into a suit I could have guessed cost twice what he still owed me in bar money, and coughed.
“Nice costume,” I wanted to say, but I found myself unable to form the words, incapable of assuming the comfort and ease with which the old Ted and the old me had always communicated. I said, instead, “Hello, Ted.”
“Hello. It’s been a long time,” he said, and I’ll be damned if even his voice sounded like that of a different person, his vowels sharp, his consonants clipped, efficient. Before, when Ted spoke, the words dripped from his tongue like syrup. Now they fell out like cheap coins. “I thought about calling first but figured you wouldn’t answer. I came by to give you this.”
He handed me a small, white business envelope. There was a $100 bill inside.
“It’s what I owe you, plus a little more,” he said and stuck his hands in the pockets of his baggy slacks as if to forestall any attempt on my part to hand the money back to him. Like I ever would.
I gazed at Ted for a long moment, staring into his eyes, not sure what I was looking for. A spark of life, perhaps, or a sign of the old Ted lurking behind the newly acquired wardrobe and ghastly vanilla countenance.
“I also wanted to thank you for everything you did for me,” Ted added and paused, searching for the right words: “You know, that night.”
“You’d have done the same for me,” I said, but the thought of my best friend failing to keep me safe from harm made me feel guilty for even suggesting it. With a hand quite close to trembling, I made a sweeping gesture from his forehead to his feet. “So what’s going on here?” I asked. “You cleaned up your act? Don’t tell me you’ve also started going to church.”
Ted laughed, but it came out forced, the sound of a man pretending to find something funny—or someone to whom humor was an unknown quantity.
“No church for me,” he said. “Business school, though. And I landed a pretty good job through a friend of my mother’s in the meantime. She called in an old favor.”
Or maybe cashed in on an old investment, I thought, then drove it away, struggling to mask my understanding of what had happened. Something told me it was dangerous to let him know. The old Ted would have never seen it, any more than he would have called his “Momma” his “mother,” but the new Ted read it on my face as clear as day.
He smiled and turned away as if there was no more left to say. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said: “My mother sends her regards.”
Beneath my feet, the earth dipped and bounced. I gripped the door frame to steady myself. Ted’s words lingered in the air between us, palpable, tangible as a clue waving in my face yet fuzzy as a scrubbed-clean recollection. Where had I heard those words before? In a nightmare; in a whisper; in a growl faintly heard from behind a closed and padlocked door.
The Devil sends his regards.
I cleared my throat, tried to hold my voice steady. “Don’t you mean your Momma sends her regards?” I said, but Ted only smiled.
Outside on the street, two kids on bikes flashed past, quick as a fleeting memory. Their laughter trailed behind them and was lost on the wind.
“Take care,” Ted said. “Good to see you again.”
I stood in the doorway and watched him go. He walked to the curb, climbed behind the wheel of a sedan I’d never seen before, and drove away. Nowhere in his face had I seen even the faintest sign of the friend I’d known for half my life; the friend I’d tried to save but failed.
I thumbed the hundred-dollar bill and held it up to the light to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. You couldn’t put anything past Ted, and I had no reason to trust the new version any more than I did the old one.
There was something written on the bill in black ink. I held it close. The words scratched into the center just below Ben Franklin’s face read: You had no choice.
I turned it over. On the flip side, written in the same hand, these words: Stay away.
I shoved the money into my pocket, threw on my jacket, and began the long walk out to Bucktooth’s. I had a lot of drinking to catch up on.