Nearafter (D.E.A.T.H. bk. 1)

Chapter Nineteen: [Ethan]

Ethan reached for Clara's breasts, feeling not for the first time like he might accidentally touch them. She had work done. Ethan could tell, and the plunging neckline of her red dress was not helping him in his struggle to avoid staring directly at them. But there they were, staring right back.

He hesitated, with his ghost fingers idling only inches away from her physical skin. His hand had lightly brushed up against them only twice before during his first two failed attempts, and he had jerked his hand away as if he had touched fire, apologizing endlessly. Of course, she had only rolled her eyes, sighed with impatience, and said, with no detectable enthusiasm: "Again..."

He focused now. The matter over mind principle was harder to overcome as a newly dead with fresh memory of physical sensation. This was why, as Clara theorized, that Ethan was struggling with something that normally came natural to most trainee reapers. Most trainee reapers weren't newly deads stuck in the near after with no place to move on to.

But he could do it. He knew he could. He just had to not focus, allow his mind to drift, and then, he had to just do it. So, he did. He allowed his mind to wander, to move aimlessly through his memory. He thought about how his life was before his death. No friends. No family save for a little brother whom he barely knew. No significant others. There was his foster family, but he'd only known them for a few months, and he'd never gotten along with any of them anyway.

He reached while his mind was occupied. He imagined Clara to be a cloud of vapor and his hand passed right through her chest, as if she were not even there.

Ethan gasped. He resisted the urge to pull his hand away. He allowed his hand to explore until he felt something physical. The physical thing seemed to instinctively wrap itself around Ethan's fingers, cold, and slippery, like ice cold tendrils of water.

He looked at Clara. With her hands on her hips, she looked bored, even with half his arm now lodged in her chest.

"Pull," she said.

Ethan pulled. There was a bit of resistance starting off but then he felt something release, and then he saw Clara begin split in two, until she completely separated from herself. Her body crumpled where it stood, a pile of empty flesh and bones, a doll with dead eyes staring up at the storage room ceiling.

She took an awkward step forward. Ethan still gripped a fistful of her red dress until she shoved him off of her.

"You can let go now. Jesus," she spat, running a hand down the front of her dress. She was back to her old self again.

"I did it!" Ethan cheered.

"Yay for you," Clara remarked. She was kneeling over her lifeless body now that lay sprawled out on the floor, carefully positioning her corpse's arms at its sides.

"It didn't feel as weird as I thought it would," he said, talking more to himself than to Clara as she was still occupied with her lifeless body.

He stared carefully at his hands as he could still feel that cold slick sensation on his fingers, tickling the ghost hairs on his arms. "Clara?"

"Uh huh?"

"You think maybe we could try that again. I want to be sure I got the hang of it."

She shook her head.

"Once is enough. If you've done it before you can do it again." She clapped her hands together. "Now pay attention. This next one's tricky."

"Wait," he said. "We're doing something else now?"

She nodded.

"I told you this was the crash course, didn't I?"

"Sure, but-"

"Watch closely now, Ethan. I'm not going to demonstrate this again. I find it to be very...uncomfortable."

Ethan knelt down on the floor with Clara, next to her corpse, giving her his undivided attention.

"What are you going to do..."

"Just watch." She rolled her neck, closed her eyes, opened them, and then, unceremoniously she reached for her lifeless body's open mouth, reached into her lifeless body's open mouth. Her fingers, her hand, her entire arms vanished down her corpse's throat. It was hard to watch, but Ethan could not look away.

And then, it happened in a fraction of a second. One minute Clara knelt over her own body with her ghost arm down her physical body's throat, the next, she dispersed into a dark mist, a hazy, liquefied representation of herself shone through like an image reflecting off the surface of a lake. Laying on the floor her physical body hitched. And then ghost Clara was like a vapor of thick exhaust, a light gray smog flowing into her own lifeless body's mouth like a smoker, re-inhaling a plume of silver smoke, until ghost Clara was gone.

Her body twitched once, and then sat up so suddenly that Ethan fell back on his ass.

Clara gasped, drawing in one big breath of air, swallowed, and then burped. She giggled, putting a hand to her mouth.

"Excuse me," she said. She felt around in her dress and produced from some hidden pocket a compact mirror, in which she carefully fixed her hairdo, gently batting her blond curls and brushing aside her bangs. It was suddenly as if she no longer could see Ethan laying back on the floor, dumbstruck.

"What the hell was that!" he said.

Her eyes shifted to Ethan, who was now on his feet. She frowned, clearly displeased with what she was seeing. She sighed, snapping the compact mirror shut and slipping it back into the folds of her dress. She stood, brushing the dust and wrinkles from the silky red fabric.

"These floors are putrid," she mumbled. "Anywho. That," she began... "is lesson number two. Possession. Or repossession; whatever you prefer to call it."

Ethan's eyes went wide at the idea.

"Possession?" he repeated, almost as if he did not quite hear her correctly. But she nodded. "Isn't that illegal?" he asked.

"For whom?" she asked in return.

"For anyone," she said.

"Not as long as you are licensed," Clara said.

"I'm not licensed," Ethan said.

"You've been approved for training purposes. Besides, technically you're not even under contract, so it doesn't matter now does it?"

Ethan thought for a moment. Sure, he was dead, but he had no file, and he was trapped in the near after, which meant that he wouldn't be destined for Limbo anytime soon. So, Clara was right. The Department had no say as to what he did in the world. The thought was sort of interesting, until something else occurred to him.

"But what about the Committee?" he asked. "Don't they have-"

"Don't worry about those guys," she said. "What they don't know, won't hurt."

Slowly, Ethan nodded.

"Alright," he said. He looked around the small room that they were in. Every surface seemed cluttered with junk. Embalming junk. Strange hooks and pumps and tubes, and little plastic tubs. There were strange jars of multicolored liquids, tools and utensils that looked as if they belonged in some horror film.

Clara had sauntered off to the back of the room where a small area had been cleared of all the creepy knick-knacks that dominated every other corner of the storage room.

"So, am I going to be possessing your body or something?" he asked, tentatively.

Clara rolled her eyes and undid a pair of metal latches attached to what looked like two heavy oven doors installed into the back wall.

"Don't be daft," she said. She opened the doors and slid two gurneys out. They were both occupied, a thin white sheet draped over two, naked, dead bodies. She pulled both sheets away simultaneously. "Jockimo was kind enough to provide us with a pair of volunteers," she explained.