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That she was dead was not in doubt.
“Her name was Samantha Early.”
A voice!
I spun around, raising my hands already formed into aching fists. Adrenaline chased away the lethargy of dread as instinct took over.
He was a boy, or a young man. He stood a dozen feet away and did not move toward me or flinch at my upraised fists.
He was 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 midcalf 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 hazelnut.
On his right hand was a silver ring in a shape I could only vaguely make out. It looked like a warrior, a woman, gripping a sword.
The other ring, the one on his left hand, was a face contorted in unimaginable terror. A young face, and in between nervous glances it seemed to change, as though the face was animated, alive.
I had as well the impression of tattoos at wrist and neck in the few visible patches of skin.
His eyes were the only color in that monochromatic picture. They were blue. They were a blue I had never seen before in any human eye. His eyes were the turquoise of the Mediterranean, like something from a travel poster of a Greek island.
I wanted to ask him where I was, but 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 the question that was inevitable.
“Who are you?”
He looked at me and 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. I fought an urge to squirm, but still my shoulders hunched forward, and my eyes lowered, and my lips pressed tightly, and my lungs labored to take in breath so that my nostrils flared.
All of it was beyond my ability to control.
“Her name was Samantha Early. It is a terribly apt name. Dead too early is young Samantha Early.”
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 want 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, “Samantha Early. Age sixteen. Dead by her own hand.”
With that he laid his pale fingers softly, reverently on her cheek and then rolled 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 an elongated oval of scorched skin and crisped hair.
It was the most terrible thing I had ever seen in my life. I looked then 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, 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.
