After Life Read online

  After Life

  Andrew Neiderman

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1993 by Andrew Neiderman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition May 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-783-8

  Also by Andrew Neiderman

  Duplicates

  The Maddening

  Perfect Little Angels

  Deadly Verdict

  The Magic Bullet

  The Solomon Organization

  Guardian Angel

  Teacher’s Pet

  Child’s Play

  Sight Unseen

  For Uncle Frank, who will always be my godfather.

  Prologue

  Kurt Andersen stabbed the trunk lock with his key and heaved his duffel bag in as soon as the trunk snapped open. Then he brought the door down quickly with a slam that shook the very frame of his ’89 Ford Taurus. It was as if his duffel bag was an animal he wanted to keep incarcerated, something he had trapped or wanted to punish. He clutched his car keys in his fist and turned slowly to look back at the Gardner Town High School.

  The shadowy hand of twilight now spread over the pale red-brick building. In the dim light the bricks looked more ruby, more like the color of dried blood; but whenever Kurt first set eyes on it in the morning these days, the building looked ablaze.

  He scanned the windows, now no more than frames surrounding mirrors that reflected the brooding fall sky. Bruised clouds had begun to roll over the dark blue, dragging in a curtain of thunder and rain from the east. His gaze settled for a moment on the set of windows at the corner of the building on the second floor, windows he knew belonged to the principal’s office. Immediately the shadows in the glass took the form of two giant eyes. Kurt blinked and shook his head to deny what he saw. When he looked back, the eyes were gone.

  Still, it made him feel as if he were standing barefoot in a pool of ice water. He shuddered and hurried around to unlock his car and get behind the wheel. It wasn’t until he backed out of his space and drove out of the lot and onto the highway that he felt any sense of relief. The school grounds dwindled in his rearview mirror and he fixed his eyes on the lush scenery before him.

  Summer had held on tenaciously. Warm rains and warm nights had kept the forests luxuriant and green. Homeowners in this relatively small, upstate New York residential community were cutting their lawns and pruning their hedges as often as they were in July.

  “The grass will grow into February this year,” George Freeman, the ageless science teacher predicted in the faculty room yesterday. Ordinarily everyone would have laughed or smiled at his earthy humor, but these weren’t ordinary times. The subtle yet dramatic changes that had come over the school community created an aura of fantasy. The community was changing: the students were different; even some of the old-timers like himself were cutting corners and saying things he had never imagined they would do and say. This was especially true of Henry Young, who had been the principal almost as long as Kurt had been a teacher.

  “Blame it on his pneumonia and his rendezvous with death,” George said when Kurt complained to him about some of the things Henry was doing, or more accurately, not doing. The school was coming apart at the seams. Why didn’t more people see it?

  Sometimes Kurt would look down the corridors during the changing of classes and think the world had fallen into slow motion and all sound had dropped ten decibels. But that was one of his far less horrifying visions. In others the corridor walls became pulsating flesh; the students were swallowed and sucked down into the bowels of the school, where they were churned into a syrupy liquid that poured out the rear of the building and seeped down into the earth. He even saw himself running over the muck, his feet sinking. When he pulled them up, strings of hair and teeth, bones and skin clung to the soles of his sneakers.

  Whenever these visions attacked him, he retreated to his physical-education office and fortified himself with his administrative duties. As department head, he was responsible for all purchasing. He taught only two classes, but he coached soccer and varsity basketball, as well as varsity baseball in the spring. He had been teaching at Gardner Town a little less than five years when the department-head position had been offered him. Now, nearly twenty years later, at forty-eight years of age, he was considered an institution at this high school. His teams had won more than their share of trophies. For years now he was known simply as the Coach. Even people in the community didn’t call him by his name anymore.

  Perhaps being a bachelor had made all the difference. Married only to his profession and his love of sports, he was at it day and night with a seemingly monomaniacal passion. He lived and breathed his work. His boys were his family. People were so accustomed to him being dressed in his sweat suits and sneakers that he looked out of place in a jacket and tie. It brought smiles instantly to the faces of those who saw him. He was a solid jock, standing six feet two, muscular, his light brown hair in a permanent crew cut.

  Although he had had two slight romances, he had never been able to make the compromises necessary to take someone else significantly into his life. His friends kidded him: he would have to find a woman with a good jump shot or one who favored the scent of perspiration over the scent of perfume and cologne. There were women like that, but they demanded too much of his space; they were too competitive.

  Bachelorhood was comfortable and he had his extended family without the obligations that accompanied it. Usually, once he left the school, he left the problems behind. Sometimes one of his players had personal problems and sought him out for advice; but the point was they left afterward and he could sit back in his oversized, cushion chair and turn on ESPN. What could be better? Why disturb it?

  He looked into his rearview mirror again as he made the turn that would take him onto County Road 17 and to his small, but cozy ranch-style home between the hamlets of Gardner and Sandburg. It had been his home ever since he had begun teaching here, first renting it and then buying it.

  The road behind him was empty and dark now, the darkness so deep that night seemed to be swallowing him. The moment his car headlights washed through a section of road, the darkness poured behind him like ink. It made him speed up. His tires squealed as he turned and accelerated.

  These periodic jitters were beginning to annoy him. He hated when it came over him at school, and now it was happening outside the school. When he saw his house ahead of him with the solar sensitive porch light triggered by the curtain of darkness, he felt his muscles relax and the tightness go out of his stomach. It wasn’t ever like this, he thought with regret. There were times the custodians practically had to chase him out of the building so they could clean his office and the gym.

  He turned into his driveway and waited as the door to his small, unattached garage lifted on command, turning on the garage light. Then he drove in and shut off the car headlights and engine. He went around to the trunk and took out his duffel bag. It seemed heavier, remarkably heavier. The sensation brought a smile of confusion to his face.

  How could his sweat suits, shorts, sweat socks, and jocks suddenly weigh so much? What, was he getting weaker by the second? He started to laugh at this illusion
when the bag turned so heavy it made him lean to the side.

  “Huh?”

  He dropped it to the concrete floor and stood up, his heart pounding.

  “What the hell…”

  He bent over and grasped the handles again, but this time he couldn’t lift it off the floor. He nearly wrenched his back in the attempt. For a long moment he stared down at it. Then, with his fingers trembling as he did so, he leaned over and pulled the zipper open. He separated the sides and gazed in.

  Somewhere at the pit of his stomach, a primeval scream began and reverberated its way up his body, through his chest, and to the base of his throat, nearly gagging him on the effort to get it out. He exploded in a high-pitched screech so unfamiliar and so unlike him, he thought it came from another being living within his body. It drove him back. He felt his eyes widen so fast and so hard, his forehead ached and burned with the resulting folds of skin.

  He clutched at his chest. His heart thumped with deadly force; he could actually feel the cardiovascular strain, hear the ripping of precious tissue and the gurgle of blood, blood that had rushed into his face with great force, lifting the skin from his bones, inflating his face like a balloon. His tongue curled up with the effort of the scream and contorted like a snake whose tail had been squashed under a jagged rock. Its struggle to tear loose drove it to self-destruct, to rip that part of its body that was free from that part that was trapped.

  He shook his head to deny the sight before him, but it didn’t disappear. There, stuffed into his duffel bag, a recent gift from one of his teams, were the decapitated heads of his starting five basketball players, their mouths open, their eyes in the glassy hold of death. They bobbed in a pool of their own blood, one disappearing, another appearing.

  Kurt Andersen screamed again, but this time he made no sound. The scream was caught in his throat and reverberated throughout his body, growing louder and louder as it bounced from his chest to his spine to his neck and into his brain, where it lodged itself and turned into a chorus of screams. He felt the bones in his legs soften until they were no more than straw and he began his collapse to the garage floor, a slow descent that seemed to take him forever and ever, as if he were dropping down a deep well.

  1

  Lee Overstreet paused for a moment in his unpacking of cartons and gazed out the side window in the kitchen. Despite the size and brightness of this apartment and the reasonableness of the rent, he couldn’t get used to the idea of living right next to a cemetery.

  He never told Jessie about the cemetery when he described the apartment he had found for them. One thing they didn’t need now was something else to depress them. The car accident would last for a lifetime. Whenever there was a chance for any happiness, all he had to do was watch her grope her way about their apartment or watch her reading in braille and that would put things back into perspective.

  Of course, he had anticipated that the accident and her subsequent blindness would change her; he had expected her to become bitter if not frustrated and full of self-pity. Instead she became oddly mysterious, often uttering things that seemingly made no sense. And those voices! It gave him the jitters how she could look up suddenly and say, “Who’s here, Lee? Who’s in the kitchen?” or “Who’s out in the hall?”

  “What who? There’s no one there.”

  “Yes, there was,” she would insist. “Listen.”

  He heard nothing.

  “Someone was whispering,” she would say. They were just out of range for her to make out the words…or at least all the words. Sometimes she heard one or two.

  “You’re imagining it,” he would tell her, stroking her long, light brown hair and kissing her softly on the forehead.

  Life had taken another downturn for them when he had had his job cut at Hicksville High School on Long Island. He had been unable to find another teaching position in physical education nearby and had had to work for a taxi service, doing the late shift. He was desperate, so they could give him whatever they wanted. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came this advertisement in the mail for an immediate opening at the Gardner Town High School in the Catskill Mountains of New York. He applied and forgot about it until he received a telephone call inviting him to come for an interview.

  He had met with Henry Young, the principal, who explained why the school responded so quickly to his letter of application and why there was such urgency to fill the position.

  “Kurt Andersen was more than just one of our better teachers here,” Henry Young had said. “He was, in every sense of the word, Mr. Gardner Town High. And,” he added, “a friend.” The tall, lean man with the kind of tired, drawn, and melancholy face that reminded Lee of Abraham Lincoln swallowed back his sorrow. It was understandable. Andersen’s death was so recent.

  “Massive coronary,” Henry Young explained, and shook his head. “No one expected it. The man was as strong as a horse, but as old Doc Beezly says, ‘tension wears on you in places you can’t see, can’t even feel,’” Young added, raising his eyebrows. “Good thing to keep in mind.”

  Tension, Lee thought, how do you hold it at bay?

  “Daydreaming?” Jessie asked.

  She felt her way through the kitchen door and stopped by the kitchenette set, her hands on the back of a chair. She sensed where he was standing and turned in his direction. With her ebony hair tied up with a bandanna and with her dark complexion, silvery gray eyes, and gold teardrop earrings, she looked like a fortune-teller.

  Jessie stood only two inches shorter than Lee, who was six feet tall. She had long, graceful legs and a slim figure with perky breasts that often drove him into a lustful frenzy whenever they began to make love. He loved to trace his forefinger down the slope of her soft shoulders, over her collarbone, and through the valley of her bosom. His roadway to ecstasy, he called it, and three years of marriage hadn’t dimmed the passion or slowed the beat of his heart whenever she brought her lips close to his.

  “How did you know I was daydreaming?” he asked. Her new sensitivity to things around her constantly astounded him. The doctors had told him her sense of smell and hearing, even her sense of touch, would improve, grow sharper to compensate for her loss of sight, but sometimes she seemed to possess radar.

  “I heard you stop unpacking. Want me to help? I could hand things to you, couldn’t I?”

  “No, everything’s just about out of the cartons, Jess. I was just…”

  “Admiring the scenery? Describe it to me,” she said, working her way to him. “Is it pretty? Do you see mountains? There’s not much traffic here. I don’t hear many cars go by.”

  “It’s off the main drag, just like I told you.”

  He looked out the window again. You could see the mountains in the distance, and beyond the cemetery there was a lush forest filled with pine and birch, maple and some hickory. He skipped over the graveyard and described the rest.

  “Sounds beautiful. We’ll be happy here, Lee. I know it. Well,” she said, her right hand on his left upper arm, “if you have put everything in its place, it’s time for you to show me. I want to be just as independent in this apartment as I was in Hicksville, even though this one is a lot larger.”

  “Okay,” he said, shaking his head and smiling. He had searched for a ground-floor apartment and had found this one in this turn-of-the-century, two-story Victorian. He suspected it was inexpensive because of the proximity of the graveyard, but it fit the bill. It would be easy for Jessie to work her way around it, and that was what was most important.

  Jessie smiled, that dimple in her right cheek flashing. There was always so much animation in her face—the way she raised her eyebrows, twitched her small upturned nose, quivered the corners of her mouth. He doted on her features.

  “You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?” she said.

  “How did you know?”

  “I can feel it,” she said, and he believed her.

  “All right.” He took her hand. “Let me show you around your kitchen. I put everyth
ing left to right just the way you had it in Hicksville, beginning with the toaster, the coffeepot, and the Mixmaster.

  “First cabinet,” he continued, and took her through the kitchen, dish by dish, pot by pot. When he was finished, she began on the left by herself and reviewed it, not making a single error, and ending up sitting at the kitchenette table. He shook his head. She was truly amazing.

  “Our bed is made,” she said, “and I put away all my things and most of yours.”

  “Great.” He put away the remaining articles and folded the last carton. “I’ve got to cut up all these cartons and make them flat. Then I have to tie the bundle up,” he said. “Those are the rules from the sanitation company here. I’m surprised they didn’t ask us to tie pink ribbons around everything. Talk about your prim-and-proper little communities.”

  Jessie laughed.

  “Tell me about the school, Lee. You’ve hardly spoken about it. You’re not ashamed of it, are you?” she asked perceptively.

  “Well…”

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  “It’s nothing like what I had in Hicksville. They’ve got a gym, of course, but no separate exercise room and very little gymnastic equipment.”

  “No football then?”

  “Too small a school. K to twelve is just under a thousand.”

  “That must be nice, though. You’ll get to know everyone quickly.” She smiled and then reached out for him. “Come here. I hate when you’re so far away from me when I speak to you. I can’t see your face with my fingers, and I don’t know how you’re reacting to what I say.”

  “Really? I thought you could sense things a mile away,” he said, and sat beside her. She pressed the tips of her right hand over his lips and eyes.

  “What is it, Lee? What’s wrong?”

  “Jesus.”