Billy Bones: Beyond the Grave

Chapter 3

“Where?” I asked.

“Dead Lessons.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “So, where do we go?”

“I’ll take you,” Liz said. She turned to Jeeves, who kept fingering Kenji’s robes. “We’ll probably be late getting back. I have to stop downtown for something and they’ll be coming with me.”

Jeeves just blinked and walked away. He turned only once to look at Kenji’s robes again.

“What’s with the robes?” I asked.

“Traditional Japanese wear,” Kenji said as we made our way out the door.

It was dark out, and strangely it helped to dull the headache I still had.

“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “Why did Jeeves keep looking at your robes?”

“Oh,” he said. “They’re silk.”

I nodded. “So, how’d you die?” I asked, quickening my pace to keep up with Liz.

He pointed to the stains on his robes. “Poisonous berries. I couldn’t read the sign. I only speak Japanese.”

I was about to respond that he spoke my language quite nicely, but Miesha interrupted.

“Well that’s ridiculous,” she said. “Your Russian is perfect.”

“I don’t speak Russian,” Kenji said.

“Sure you do. You all do,” she said. Her lips pursed like she was a little irritated.

Liz slowed her pace so that she walked in the midst of us. “No one speaks Russian,” she said. Miesha’s pout got more pronounced. “Nor any other language from the Livingworld. We all speak the same language here in the Afterlife. It’s all in the book.” She looked at the three of us. “I see none of you have your book. Have you read it yet?” she asked.

All of us hung our heads.

Liz said nothing and marched ahead once more. We followed on her heels past faint streetlamps and old mansions until we started to get closer to the center of Necropolis. The buildings here were closer together with narrow passageways that receded into blackness. Eyes shone from within some of those alleys, and even Goliath avoided walking too close to them.

Finally Liz brought us up to a blackened stone structure with massive wooden doors. On each door hung a waiting gargoyle with arms crossed.

“What took ya so long?” the gargoyles asked in unison.

Liz nodded her head in our direction. “Sleepy heads,” she said.

The gargoyle on the left looked at us. “My turn to guess!” he said.

“No, it’s not,” said the other. “It’s mine!”

“You got the last one,” said the first.

“That didn’t count! She was holding her head in her hands. Any idiot could have guessed how she died.”

“Fine,” said the first with a pout. “Your turn then.”

Liz rolled her eyes and opened the door. “When these two figure out how you three died, meet me inside.”

The second gargoyle hemmed and hawed as he looked us over. He had us spin about countless times before he finally took a guess.

“I’ve got it!” he exclaimed. “Two nose pickers, a berry-eater, and a drowned dog.”

We were about to follow after Liz then, when the second one pointed and screamed. “Watch out!”

A man who was being chased by three police officers was running at high speed and about to barrel into me.

I braced myself as the man pounded into me, knocking me to the ground. A truck whizzed by, barely missing the both of us as we rolled.

The man’s bowler hat tilted over his half-decayed face. He hovered inches from me with rank breath.

Leaning to my ear, he whispered as he shoved something into my pocket. “Keep this for me,” he said. “Don’t let them get their hands on it!”

Then he leapt up and grabbed Kenji and Miesha, using them as shields to hide from the police. He shoved the two of them into the officers and tried to make a run for it, but Goliath got in the way. The man tripped over the dog, falling face first into the cobbled sidewalk.

“Oomph,” he muttered.

The police pounced on him, seizing him by the scruff of the neck. As they hauled him away, the man gave me one last half-gaze and a wink.

I shook off the encounter and exhaled.

“What was that about?” Miesha asked. I shrugged.

I had no idea.

The other two turned to enter the building. I was about to follow when I paused to put my hand in my pocket. I wanted to see what the man had left in there.

At first, I wasn’t sure what it was. It was large and knobby. I tried to pull it out, but couldn’t manage it. It was too big.

I felt about it, wondering what he could have left in there, and then started to realize what it was.

The thing in my pocket had four fingers and a thumb.

I gasped.

He’d left his hand in there.