The September Editor's Pick Story is by Shaun Meeks
Please feel free to email Shaun at shaun_meeks@msn.com
ANGEL IN THE HIGH TOWER
by Shaun Meeks
I look in the mirror every morning, more out of habit than for any other reason. Before, I used to do it looking for a blemish, or mystery hair that has no business growing from certain places of a girl’s face.
This, of course, was back when I was so worried about how I looked, and for good reason. Kids are cruel. They love to taunt, tease, and hurt people for things they have no control over. Who can help the over active hormones that bombard our bodies, turning our faces into landmines, making us sweat uncontrollably or sprout hair as though we were born of werewolves instead of aging yuppies and hipsters?
I guess old habits die hard, because years later, here I am still obsessed with looking at myself in the mirror as the sun rises, looking for those same faults, but some faults are deeper than the surface of the skin. Some are in the darkest parts of our hearts and soul, where we allow ourselves to be our worst critics and hate who we are. It doesn’t matter how close to being perfect we get, where scourge ourselves, hunting down whatever we can find wrong. We all focus on those imperfections from time to time, forgetting to see the good that outshines the bad. I always hated my skin, blotchy and red; burning bright whenever I was the slightest bit embarrassed, never noticing my eyes or my smile.
My skin is flawless now though, so I have no idea why I look in the mirror anymore. I say flawless and anyone reading this might think I’m being vain, but it’s not vanity speaking. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see my pale, almost alabaster complexion, not even a pore visible these days and I don’t even bother with makeup.
The key to this perfection is dying.
I died three years ago, just after my fifteenth birthday.
I was murdered.
My killer is still out there, I see him roaming the streets some days when I look out the attic window of the house I lived in when I was alive and returned to when I died. I see him smiling at the kids that pass by, messing their hair up with hands that were once stained with my blood. I see him acting as though he hasn’t a care in the world, like he isn’t a murderer. For three years I have sat in this attic, listening to the echoes of my family below me, and look out the window at him.
Mr. Cooper.
I see Mr. Cooper walking down the street, waving to old Ms. Henderson and her dog, or pulling his cart of groceries from Hal’s Market. Remembering those days helps me forget the knife, the cold smile and his words. I want to forget, but it’s my second birth, born into an afterlife where I hide in a dusty attic that nobody comes to visit.
Well, that’s not totally true.
There’s Sam.
If I could blush, I no doubt would when I think of him. One of those cute boys that you look at across a room and if he sees you looking at him, your heart quickens and you feel totally embarrassed, while at the same time hoping he will smile or come over and talk to you. In a way, it happened just like that.
I had been in the attic, looking out the window as I usually did, watching people live their day-to-day lives when I saw him on the street. He was so cute, standing in his front yard, helping his mom rake leaves, and then he turned his head towards my house and somehow saw me.
He actually saw me.
He waved and I retreated into my room thinking that I was going crazy. Can dead people go mad? Do we actually have minds left that can be lost? I have no idea, but I can tell you, that was how I felt. I had no idea how he could see me, unless he was dead too. It could also be that my dad was doing work on the roof and he waved to him, not me. I sat in the floor below the window, thinking of all the possibilities, wanting to stand up and look out again to see if he would wave a second time, but not able to find the courage to do it. Even in death, boys scared the Hell out of me.
I was sitting there, fighting with my own thoughts, trying to will myself to rise when the doorbell rang and I knew that something bad was going to happen. I listened, able to hear amazing well now that I no longer had real ears, and I felt ill from what was going on. My mother answered the door, opened it to this strange boy that had just moved into the neighborhood and she was no doubt confused.
“Can I help you?”
“Hi. My name is Sam. I just moved into the house over there, number 36. I thought I would come over and say hi to you and your daughter.”
“My…daughter?”
I could hear my mom choke on the word, fighting back tears. It hurt me to hear her pain, like getting stabbed all over again.
“Yeah. I was helping my mom out and looked over here. I saw a girl upstairs in the window. I thought it was your daughter.”
“Is this a cruel joke? My daughter is dead!”
I heard the door slam and I cautiously went back over to the window, seeing Sam looking back up at it, squinting in the sunlight. I had no idea what to do. I never went downstairs to where my mom and dad were because I was even more afraid of them seeing me, knowing that I was not at rest, that I was trapped on Earth still. That might have been worse than dying, hurting them all over again.
Nobody had ever looked up at me before, but Sam did.
Standing a bit back out of sight, I looked out the window at him, and he was still looking up. I stared at his sweet face, his green eyes shimmering in the sunlight and I did something that was so unlike me. I walked closer curious if he would see me again.
And he did; waving again, only this time I waved back.
A smile opened up on his face and it forced one out on mine. He was really the cutest guy I had ever seen. Way better than all the pop stars and TV heart throbs that I used to cut out of magazines and tap on my wall.
He gave me a wink after I waved, and then went back to his house. I waited for a while to see if he would come back out, but he didn’t. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but I know it wasn’t for him to walk away and not come out again.
I felt more alone than ever. I thought that was it; but it wasn’t.
That night, Sam visited me for the first time.
He climbed the trellis at the side of the house, up to the roof and snuck into the attic. I saw him climbing and hid from him when he came, crouching down in the shadows. I might be dead, but he was still a boy; a good looking one at that, and I didn’t know what to do or say to him. I had never had my first kiss, never held hands with a boy before and other that the few male friends I had or did class assignments with, I had very little interactions with cute boys.
I was terrified. Laugh if you want; I know it’s silly for a ghost to be afraid of someone living, but I was.
So, there he was, the green-eyed boy that could see me and the ghost girl in the top of the old castle, both of us playing a strange game of hide and seek. The thought of rejection, even in the afterlife, is a daunting one. Better dead than an outcast.
I watched Sam as he inspected the room, looking for some sign of me. “I know you’re here,” he whispered into the dark. “I know you’re here and I know who you are. Your name is Angel and you were murdered three years ago, when you were fifteen. But you’re still here, aren’t you?”
I said nothing at first, just hid away and watched. I watched him move around the attic, hunting me down as though I was important.
“I’m fifteen too, and I always wondered what happens when you die. Did you see a white light like people say? Why did you decide to stay here and not go to Heaven? Do you know who killed you?”
I whispered, “I see him every day.”
He turned towards me. I stood up and stepped out into the moonlight so that he could see me. His face came to life, not with fear, but that same look kids get on their faces when they get an awesome present, something close to excitement and awe. He slowly began moving towards me.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
It seemed so silly for him to say that. Usually it would be the ghost saying not to be afraid. After all, what could he do to hurt me? I was already dead.
“My name…”
“Is Sam,” I finished for him. “I know. I heard you talking to my mom earlier. I hope she didn’t cry or anything. It was really hard on them when I died.”
“You look so real. I was expecting you to be, well, see-through and misty or something. You know like the movies, but you look so…well, real.”
“I am real, just different.”
We stood there for a moment, looking at each other, quiet, but it wasn’t awkward the way it is when you are in an elevator and someone tries small talk with you. It was a nice quiet, full of smiles and inquisitive glances. He reached out after a few moments, asking if he could touch me, and at first I wasn’t sure at first what to say. Since I died, this was the first person I had talked to or even been near, and that alone was blowing my mind a bit. I had no idea what physical contact would do.
Or if it was even possible. For all I knew he would pass through me like I was a cloud or smoke, so what could it hurt?
I nodded to him, figuring that life, and in my case death, was all about risks. I doubted much could really go wrong, but that shows how naive I really was and probably still am. I was dead after all, a thing that shouldn’t really exist in this world. When my mom and dad used to drag me to church, I remember the priest telling us that once we die, we go to Heaven or Hell, that ghosts aren’t real. Those thoughts had stayed with me even as I turned into what I was told should never be and I had no idea of the rules. Nobody had told me about the consequences of the living and the dead colliding.
His fingers touched my forearm, just for a second, and in that touch there was something I had never felt before. It was warm. Warmer than anything I had felt, with an electric charge almost that made me fill with emotion. I wanted to laugh and cry all at once. There was joy and pain in the touch, memories that I cherished filled my head and made me feel dizzy, but it didn’t last long. For that brief moment that he touched me, before he cried out and pulled his hand back I saw enough to know how badly things could go.
As his living flesh met whatever it is I am made of, the air filled with a sound of electricity. I looked down and saw swirls appear on my arm, moving like fog and shooting out towards his hand.
He pulled back and I could see the skin on two of his fingertips had turned black, like pictures I had seen of frostbite. He gasped and I was mortified that I had hurt him. I expected him to run then, dash across the room and all but fly out the window, even if it meant hurting himself, all in order to get away from me, the evil ghost in the attic.
But he didn’t run.
“Guess we won’t try that again, huh?” He laughed and I joined in, nervously at first, then seeing that he wasn’t going to leave, wasn’t going to blame me, I laughed for real. The first time I had done that in three years.
“You’re not mad, are you?” I asked.
“No. It felt weird, but I’m good. Look, the dark on my fingertips is already fading. There’s really no damage, see?” He held up his fingers for me to inspect.
Then his face grew somber. “I want to know you, Angel. I want to know who you are and who you were. I want to hear it all. ”
So I told him. I told him about my family, my life before and my life since. The one thing I skated around was the murder. I was reluctant to tell him was the sheer brutality of what Mr. Cooper did to me.
“You can tell me,” Sam encouraged.
I flashed a vision of Mr. Cooper, smiling as he slowly took me apart, piece by piece, whistling some old song as he did it, like he was doing nothing more than whittling an old stick.
I remember the house smelled of pine cleaner and medical ointments, like it was an old-age home, even though Mr. Cooper was no more than forty. I remember the sound of the clock ticking so loud as I was somehow able to look at my body that was lying across the room from my severed head. When I did, part of me was amused by it, curious as to how it was possible because the pain had left me long ago. I remember watching him work, my body on top of a plastic sheet as he took large patches of my flayed skin and laid them next to me, then placed steak like bits of me in a cooler.
The whole thing is vivid, yet I feel detached, as though I was watching a movie instead of being there.
When I finished telling Sam all of it, I saw he was crying. His eyes had become even more vibrant green as tears flowed down his cheeks. I would have wiped them away, really wanted to, but I knew my touch would burn him. This was the first time that I had ever seen a grown boy cry and it wasn’t from physical pain, but from hearing what had happened to me. It was the sweetest thing ever.
“How can he be allowed to walk around after what he did? He should be in jail, or dead.” Sam said, wiping away the tear and sniffling the snot back into his nose. “He’s a damn monster!”
“You’re the only one that knows it, aside from me. Everyone else in town thinks Mr. Cooper is just a nice guy that helps people with their groceries, says hi to kids and decorated his house every Halloween and Christmas. He hides who he really is.”
“Well, if nobody else does anything about it, we should.”
“I can’t help. I haven’t left this house since that day. I don’t even know if I could. I don’t have any idea how any of this works.”
“Well, if you could leave the house, would you? Would you make him pay for what he did?”
“I guess.” I said, but I wasn’t sure I could. Could I touch people if they couldn’t see me? Sam was able to, but that didn’t mean everyone could, and if they couldn’t would I just pass through them, unseen and mist-like?
“Well, I’ll come back tomorrow night and we’ll start planning this out. We don’t want to take any risks.”
Then, he climbed out my window and left and I wasn’t totally sure I would ever see him again. Once he was gone and his sweet eyes and trusting face weren’t there, I doubted everything I felt about him.
Should I trust him? Would he ever come see me again? Was he actually disgusted at what I was and pretending to be okay with it just until he could make a clean escape
But Sam did come back the next day, and the one after that. For three months straight, he climbed through my window long after my parents went to bed and we began to plot and plan the demise of the man that had killed me. We tested my ability to leave the house and found that I could without any consequences.
The first time it we only went out on the roof. The moon above was only a fingernail, and the street below was quiet and dark. First, I put my hand outside, like I was checking to see if it was raining or something, and if I had a heart, it would have been pounding. I was scared.
I thought that I might just come apart, that I was a prisoner of the attic and that the fresh air would cause me to evaporate into nothingness. Nobody told me the rules.
As it turned out, nothing happened. At least nothing bad. I stepped out and was amazed at the way the wind felt to me, as though I could not just feel it on the surface, but all the way through me. I was even able to smell the night air; could tell that someone had their fireplace going. It was amazing. I laughed and giggled, then sat down on the roof tiles, Sam beside me and we stared up at the stars.
“I brought these,” he said and pulled a pair of leather gloves from his pocket.
“Why?”
“So we could sit here and, well, maybe hold hands.”
Even in the dim moonlight, I could see he was blushing and if I were still alive, I can only imagine the shades of scarlet that would be on my own face. It was so sweet, so romantic and luckily the gloves worked. Nothing bad happened to him as my gloved hands held his.
That night and many after, we talked about what I was going to Mr. Cooper, how exactly I was going to make him pay. Some of the talks were pretty nasty. Sam had a lot of crazy ideas that he pillaged from horror movies.
It wasn’t all about murder though; we talked a lot about other things. Music, movies, books. He told me about his old house and why his mom had moved them here; not a planned move, but an escape from his abusive dad that was a bit of a monster himself. There was so much pain in his past, which no doubt had something to do with his passion for avenging me.
When we weren’t outside, we sat on the dusty attic floor, sometimes for hours, as close to one another as we could without having another catastrophe. I began to fall in love. The way he spoke, how one side of his mouth went up when he was saying something embarrassing, even how he sometimes snorted when he laughed at something I said, all endeared him to me. He listened to me, cared about what I had to say and shared his deepest thoughts. As beautiful as his face was, his soul was what truly stole my heart.
I hoped he felt the same way.
One night, Sam whispered, “Tomorrow.”
I was excited. For three years, I had to look at the man that had killed me, walking free and happy, while I was hidden and dead. He had stolen so much from me, not given me a chance to really live at all, and it was time to return the favor.
Not all plans go the way they were meant to.
We broke into Mr. Cooper’s home. We went through the basement window four hours after Cooper turned off the lights in his house and we assumed he was asleep. We climbed through the window and stood in the darkness, trying to get our eyes to adjust.
I could smell him. The soap he used, what he washed his cloths in and the aftershave that clung to him when he had taken my life. I was upset, near tears as memories flooded back, which must have also been why I couldn’t see.
“I think there’s a light switch up ahead,” Sam whispered. “Stay here and I’ll go turn it on. I don’t want to wake him up, though.”
Sam turned on the single bulb hanging from the ceiling.
I gasped as we saw Mr. Cooper, wide awake.
Cooper had been laying on the floor in the dark, only wearing his socks and a pair of boxers, wrapped in strips of light leather. When Sam turned on the light, Cooper jumped up, fear and guilt on his face as he clutched the leather close to him and he backed away from Sam. His eyes never fell on me, so I knew he was blind to my presence.
I cringed as Cooper screamed, “Get out of my house, thief! These are mine! They are my girls!”
His girls?
Then I saw what he had wasn’t strips of leather. They looked like leather, things I had seen when I used to go to the Royal Winter Fair with my parents. I thought what Cooper held was some of those, but when he said girls, knowing what he had done to me, I understood that they were strips of me, and maybe other girls he had killed.
He had skinned us, dried our flesh so he would always have us.
I watched as Sam pulled out the knife he had brought with him, one his brother had given him before moving across the country, and then lunged at Cooper.
Seeing the knife, Cooper released the skins and grabbed Sam. At first my eyes went to the bits of me that were falling to the ground, my old shell, but then I quickly turned my attention to Sam and Cooper. I watched them fight, falling to the ground as they struggled and yelled at one another. I wanted to run over and do something, but I was afraid. I just stood there, feeling helpless.
Then I heard Sam cry out. He shrieked in pain and Cooper stood up, breathing heavy, coated in sweat and dirt, blood smeared across his bare chest. My murderer was holding the knife. He laughed and spit on the ground.
I saw that Sam was laying on the ground in a spreading pool of blood and wanted to cry. There was so much red.
Sam whispered to me and my dead heart pounded. “I love you, Angel.”
“Who are you talking to boy? Angels? You’ll be seeing them soon enough.”
Finally mobilized into action, I screamed and charged the murderer. I wanted to stop him from killing the boy I loved.
I thrust my hands at his face, grabbing hold of him and seeing his flesh blacken quickly, more extreme than it had on Sam’s fingers, and the skin began to peel away from his skull. My hands moved from solid to mist, swirling madly as his flesh crackled, like bacon frying.
He saw me. I had navigated the invisible line of death into his world.
Copper’s eyes were locked onto mine as he opened his mouth to scream, but all that came out was blood and steam. He tried to struggle but I held tight, not wanting his suffering to end.
I watched as boiling blood bubbled out of his ears, looked him in the face as he started to cry tears of blood. He struggled at first, but as more and more of his muscle and flesh turned to ash in my hands, he became still, only moaning slightly.
I held on until all that was left of his face was blackened bone. I let him fall, landing next to my old dried skin.
I sat on the floor beside Sam for a long time. I closed his beautiful green eyes, not wanting to see the spark gone from them, and leaned down to kiss his forehead. There was no reaction. Sam lay cold and unmoving, his blood still leaking into a dark puddle on the floor.
“Thank you for stopping the monster.”
Then I left him.
That was two days ago. Since then, my world seems a bit darker, but I still have some hope. You have to hang on to hope, right? If you let the darkness take over, we become as bad as Cooper.
I feel so guilty, thinking about it all. If Sam had never found me up here, if I hadn’t waved back at him, if I had stayed in my dark corner, he would still be alive right now. But then, so would be the monster.
Was it worth it, paying the price to remove a monster from the world by sacrificing a good person? Was it ying and yang, a sort of a natural balance of karma?
I loved the time Sam and I spent together, the hours we would talk and hold gloved hands, how he just made me feel so normal, so alive, but look at where it has gotten him. I miss him so much that it actually hurts me, more than death ever did, but I want to hope that I will see him again.
Soon even.
So, I’ll just sit here by the window, checking myself hopelessly in the mirror from time to time, hoping Sam will find his way to me, that he’ll climb through my window like he used to. After all, it took me a few days to find my way here, but I did. And if he does come to me, I will finally be able to hold him in my arms and feel him kiss me.
It would be my first kiss.
Shaun Meeks lives in Toronto, Ontario with his partner, model, Burlesque performer and corsetiere, Mina LaFleur, where they own and operate their own corset company L’Atelier de LaFleur.
Shaun is a member of the Horror Writers Association and his most recent work has appeared in Zombies Gone Wild, Zippered Flesh 2, The Best of Dark Eclipse, Dark Light 3, Fresh Fear, Fifty Shades of Decay, A Feast of Frights from the Horror Zine, Shadow Masters: An Anthology from The Horror Zine, Miseria’s Chorale as well as his own two collections, At the Gates of Madness and Brother’s Ilk (with James Meeks).
He will have work coming up in numerous magazines and anthologies and will be releasing his new novel Shutdown and latest collection, Dark Reaches, later this year. To find out more or to contact Shaun, visit www.shaunmeeks.com.
