It didn’t take a genius to figure out he’d gone out to the place he’d asked about earlier in the evening. Not only that, but apparently curiosity got the better of Clay. “After we heard about it - the official statement seems to be a transient accidentally burned it down while squatting in the place, killing himself. Which didn’t make sense, because nobody would go all the way out there to squat, or do anything - nobody hangs around there. It feels off.” Clay’s eyes took on a suspicious glitter, almost amused. “Well, if you were there, you’d know that.”

“Sometimes we used that area to test and calibrate instruments,” Shane interrupted, getting things back on track. “And we thought maybe we could sneak by, after the fire department and the cops had cleared out, and see what kind of reading we’d get.”

“And that was the weird part,” Clay interjected, picking up the conversation again. “The instruments barely registered. I mean, that place is usually such a paranormal hotbed it’s like pointing a scanner at you. But this time, the paranormal energy was very minimal. Quiet, almost.”

“It felt different too,” Shane added. “I didn’t feel the overwhelming urge to leave.”

“It’s like they were somehow appeased,” Clay finished, staring straight at him, the accusation tacit and obvious.

Gryphon sighed, wondering if he was awake enough to think of a decent lie.

Don’t look at me, Ruby said. I can’t think of anything that doesn’t sound like complete shit.

Damn it. She was the best liar among them - and if she was giving up, he knew he could do no better. With a resigned shrug, he decided to go for a half truth. “I thought maybe I could help them, but after discussing it with my people -”

Don’t you bring us into this, Taneesha snapped.

“- I decided it was better if I went off on my own. It might have been dangerous if I brought you guys along.”

They both stared at him with varying shades of disbelief, before Clay exclaimed, “Might have been dangerous? Those crazy ghosts have killed people! And look what they did to you!”

“They didn’t do this to me.” It was out of his mouth before he could stop it. Damn.

Clay and Shane exchanged the same puzzled glance they always seemed to share when they were with him, and Shane - as always - asked first. “Then who did that to you?”

No way out. Shit! “Louis Stanhope.”

The shock was palpable. After several seconds of pained silence, Clay exclaimed (beating Shane to it for once), “What? How did he - “

“It doesn’t matter.” He really didn’t want to talk about this. “He wasn’t very popular among the dead, especially the restless ones that are stuck at Serenity Acres. They wanted him; they got him.”

“Wanted him?” Shane repeated, as if testing out the phrase, seeing if the chamber was empty.

“They wanted a target. They picked him. That’s why they’re so quiet now. They have their punching bag.”

Clay turned away, hand to his mouth, while Shane remained laconic and unflappable, more a monument than a man. “They killed him?” It almost wasn’t a question.

“Yeah.” He wasn’t about to admit Ruby did it, and even so, the Serenity Acres people would probably have preferred taking credit for it.

I got tagged before, Ruby said grimly. It wasn’t happening again.

I don’t know how anyone got you when you were alive, Ray said. You’re completely fuckin’ scary.

Clay sighed heavily, as if punched in the gut. “Shit. What if they identify him by dental records?”

“They won’t. Don’t ask me how, but the dead seem to take care of their own.” It sounded stupid as hell, but it must have been true, because how else could you explain the fact that he wasn’t on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list as a serial killer? By all rights, he should be. It wasn’t like they could charge his former passengers for doing the deeds themselves.

He looked around for some water - his mouth was as dry as a sand trap - and didn’t see any, unless that was the stuff in that one bag dripping shit into his arm. He heard a distant bleeping of machines somewhere in the room, beyond the blue curtain on his left, but nowhere near him. “They wonder why they couldn’t hook machines to me?”

“For a while, yeah. We tried to make up some bullshit story, but couldn’t figure out anything that sounded remotely feasible,” Shane admitted. He turned towards the window, crossing his arms over his chest as he looked out at the gray sky. “We got lucky; I think they eventually just gave up.”

“I get that reaction from a lot of people.” He then realized that it sounded like it had taken a while for the giving up to occur. Oh no. “How long have I been here?”

Shane glanced over his shoulder, but didn’t turn around. “Two days.”

We could have told you that, Hugh said. At least we’ve been able to keep others out, so far.

Gryphon groaned deep in his dry throat, letting his head fall back and staring up at the ceiling. It was that weird panel type with little holes. What was that called? He swallowed hard, and asked, ironically, “Will I live?”

Clay snorted a small laugh, that earned him a scolding glance from Shane. He ignored it, in that casual way that people who have been together for a while always managed to do. “Well, they’d probably feel better if they could use some machines on ya, but yeah, it looks like it. Good thing too, as we’re getting swamped with cases, and we need you back on point.”

“Rachel and Kevin were very pleased with what you did for them,” Shane said, answering some questions before he could ask. “We went back and swept the area, after they finished exhuming the remains, and there’s zero ghostly activity; the Stanhopes are gone in more than just a physical sense. They are a little squeamish about moving into a place where there were bodies buried in the backyard, but they’ve sunk too much money into it to up and move now.”

“Can’t blame ‘em.” If he could move out of his ghost infested body, he would too.

“No. But Kevin’s been passing on the good word, and we’ve been getting some interesting calls. The Oregon Historical Society wants us to go into the old Hardin mansion and confirm whether there’s a ghost in there or not. They’d rather we didn’t ask it to leave if we find one, though.”

“Good for tourism,” Clay added.

If it was a poltergeist, Gryph bet they’d feel a hell of a lot different. “So I guess I got the gig?”

This got a rare smile from Shane. It was fragile, though, and didn’t last long. “You’re certainly not a fraud. But I realize you might not wanna.”

“But we’d consider it a major favor if you did,” Clay said, his eyes bright with eagerness. Gryph could now imagine the wagging tail on the stocky woodman’s body, and it was a pretty comical mental image. Did he ever not wear plaid shirts? “Since we can charge more for these high profile gigs, you’ll certainly get a raise.”

Gryphon bit his lower lip as he thought, watching the liquid drip drip drip down from the nearest i.v. bag. Take it, Mr. Aronofsky urged. It might be good for you to settle down for a bit, take up a hobby besides drinking yourself into a stupor.

Or, at least you got steady money to drink yourself into a stupor, Ray chimed in.

Don’t encourage him, Mr. Aronofsky replied sharply.

But what if he was death? Now that he was mostly conscious, it sounded incredibly silly. Did he really want to fall into the Stanhope trap, think he was far more than he really was?

He was cursed. Or damned, or filled with bad mojo - something, anything like that. He had to learn to live with it, or it really would kill him, sooner than his passengers would. And he’d be lying if he said he didn’t need the money. “Well … I don’t have any plans …”

Clay exclaimed “Yes!” and pumped his fist in the air, but when he noticed both him and Shane staring at him, he hid his fist behind his back and cleared his throat, trying to pretend he hadn’t done that. “I mean, great.”

“Do you think you could ask Kevin to do a favor for me? I mean, without charging.”

Shane shrugged, nonchalant. “I don’t see why not.”

“I’ve been trying to find Edith Broslowski, Mr. Aronofsky’s sister-in-law. Last we found, she won the Washington lottery and moved to Florida, and we hope she can tell us where Beatrice, Mr. Aronofsky’s wife, is. Do you think he could make some inquiries, search some property records …?”

Shane nodded, seemingly sure, although there was no way he could be. “That shouldn’t be a problem. I can ask him to come by.”

“That would be great, thanks.”

Don’t do this just for me, Mr. Aronofsky said, but he sounded just a little relieved. Maybe now they could find Beatrice, and not have to chance hurricanes or cockroaches the size of coconuts to do it.

Gryphon knew he needed to take it easy for now. He’d been too sick too long, and had put himself at too much risk. Wandering around, going nowhere, sleeping in his car and drinking more than eating wasn’t going to serve him well. It hadn’t so far.

So, he decided. He could stay here for a few weeks, and if he made a few bucks and talked to a few bored ghosts, who would it hurt?

Death waited for no one, but no one said it had to be in a big hurry.

The End

He should have passed on this whole business to someone like Louis. Too bad he was a crazy psychotic prick.

Gryph looked around, but found himself sitting alone on the empty beach, the sand so smooth it looked like a painting. But he touched it, felt the grains in the hollow of his palm, and knew this internal reality hadn’t abandoned him. “Okay, where are you?” he asked, shaking the sand off his hand. “Come on, there’s no need to be ashamed of your mindscape. As happy places go, this is very … nice.” Saying typical or by the book would probably be seen as discouraging or some shit. Still, when was the last time he’d been at a beach? Most people’s happy places had been unusual lately, odd places that never would have struck him as anyone’s idea of a restful sanctuary, but that just reinforced the truth that people were fucking strange.

No one answered, no one appeared, so he pressed his hand into the wet sand, killing time. His print remained, and he watched water ooze up into it slowly, before the tide lapped the shore and filled it more directly with white foamy water. It was like him, wasn’t it? He was empty, and the dead filled him up.

“Oh please,” a familiar voice said. “Would you please stop with this self-pity shit?”

He looked up sharply, snide remark locked and loaded, but it died in his throat when he saw who was talking to him. It was a scrawny young man, barefoot, in loose black sweatpants and a long white shirt that hung off him like he was a child wearing his dad’s clothes. He had five o’clock shadow that was starkly black against his pale skin, matching his messy raven hair, which was neither short or long, just somewhere in the middle and none too neat. His face was young and unremarkable, except when you got to his eyes; they were green, and old - astonishingly old. They were the eyes of an octogenarian staring out of a twenty year old face, and it was shocking in its contrast.

And familiarity. He was looking at the person he saw in the mirror every other morning.

After the shock of seeing himself, he realized he was being fucked with. “Ruby, is that you? Hugh? What is this shit?”

The scruffy him scoffed and shook his head. “You’re very selective about the strange phenomena you choose to believe in. I’m not them. I really think I’m you. Or you’re me. However that works.”

“Guys, stop it. I’m in no mood to be fucked with right now.”

“You’re never in any mood to be fucked with. You’re no fun anymore.”

“Go away.” He looked off at the ocean, determined to ignore whoever it was that thought this was funny, and that’s when he saw that the tide had washed something up. It ended up near his foot, just separate from a clump of seaweed, It was two Tarot cards stuck together, sodden and torn, One was the Death card, which he had long grown bored with, and the other was that funky one, the “psychopomp” card he pulled at the psychic fair, with that dog faced Egyptian god on it. What was his name again?

“Anubis,” his other self supplied helpfully. “Do you know what he was the god of?”

“Alpo?”

“The dead. He was a death god, hence psychopomp, conductor of souls. Unlike many death gods, he was considered rather benevolent; he weighed your soul fairly, and adjudicated your afterlife standing reasonably. He put the dead on their correct path in the underworld. Be fair to him, and he was fair to you.”

“Okay, so now I know you’re Sylvio.”

“Aren’t you getting the theme here?”

“What theme? Death? Hate to break this to you, but that’s not a news flash.”

His other self - possibly Sylvio - huffed a sigh through his nose, and then stuck his hands in his pockets, as if trying to keep from jumping on him and pounding his face into pulp. (Well, in that case, it could honestly be himself …) “What was it that Stanhope could do that you couldn’t?”

He looked up at his doppelganger suspiciously, feeling like he was getting roped into something, although he wasn’t sure what yet. “Go psycho, kill his family, and proclaim himself god?”

“Besides that.”

He had to think about that, because honestly he thought that encapsulated things nicely. “He could do that … that ripping thing, where he could kill the dead with nothing more than the stink eye.”

“If he had the same power as you, why could he do that? And why did the dead rally to your side instead of his?”

“Because, I just said: he could kill them.”

“And what is it you do to them?”

He looked up at himself like he was a complete moron - and if he was him, he just might be - but whatever he was going to say died in his throat. Yes, what the fuck was he going to say? Finally, he decided the safest thing to say was, “I don’t kill them.”

His other self looked down at him with a raised eyebrow, his expression smug enough that Gryph wanted to smack it off. “Then what is it you do with them?”

He had no idea how to answer that question. “I don’t do anything with them. They take me over, remember?”

“And what happens then?”

“They use me, usually for some bloody god awful revenge.”

His second self looked at him quite expectantly. “And then what?”

Gryph glared at him. “What do you mean ‘and then what’? Are you a complete moron? Then they -” It suddenly occurred to him what this guy had been leading to. “Oh no. Hell no. It’s different.”

“How is it different? What would happen to them if you hadn’t come along?”

He shook his head and looked out at the ocean, wondering what the whole point of this mini Spanish Inquisition was, and if maybe the point was somewhere out there, floating just beyond the edge of the horizon. “I don’t know. I guess they’d be stuck where they were.”

“Right. So you find these people, who are dead and yet still not quite, Through you they find -”

“Shut up,” he demanded, picking up a clod of wet sand and lobbing it into the water. “I’m not listening to you.” The clod made a satisfying “plop” as it hit the water, but the ripples barely cut through the movement of the tide.

“You can’t deny it. Why even try?”

“Whoever the hell you are, just fuck off, all right?” He realized then that the thick stubble didn’t make him look older; paradoxically, it made him look like a kid who had smeared his face with shoe polish. The problem was his eyes were so old that the rest of his face would always look young by comparison. When did that happen? Why had he never noticed it before? And why hadn’t he realized he was fish belly white? He was as white as a fucking …

… ghost. Was this someone’s idea of a joke?

“The difference between you and him is he killed them again; you give them peace. That’s more than most of them got while they were alive.”

Gryphon felt his heart skip a beat, the taste of acid sour in his mouth, and he didn’t want to even contemplate what he was saying. “You’re full of shit,” he began, but as he turned to face him, he was gone, leaving nary a footprint behind.

He sighed and threw another wet clump of sand at where the asshole had been. “Oh sure, leave before I can nail you to the wall, you fucker.” But was he gone? Probably not. This was somebody’s mindscape, certainly not his. He wasn’t crazy about beaches. They were nice, but he didn’t quite get the wild appeal.

With nothing to look at except the open sky and the endless sea, he glanced back down at the Tarot cards, still laying at his feet in defiance of the waves. He picked up the Death card, his old skeleton friend astride his pale horse, and even though it was so wet it was as limp as a noodle, it suddenly crumbled into dust, the grit blowing away in the wind.

He woke up to the murmur of conversation, Clay and Shane talking to a woman with a low voice, and Gryphon wasn’t too surprised to find himself in another dreary hospital room, painted some pastel shade of blue turned extremely off white. He had tubes in his arms once more, and was covered by a scratchy industrial blanket. So he’d survived again. Shit.

He was in a bed by the window this time, light filtering through the dirty window like it was rays of the sun penetrating deep, dark water. It was still gray outside, still cloudy, but not raining at the moment. He stared out it for a bit, wondering if you could tell the difference between the asphalt and the sky right now. He could be upside down for all the chromatic similarity.

Was he really death? Was that what that whole dream/hallucination/ drug induced illusion was trying to tell him? He was death, or at least he was the equivalent to death to these people, these poltergeists stuck in limbo? Ghosts had a tendency to go away as soon as their message was heard; they just wanted to make sure they were noticed, much like an attention starved child. But poltergeists were just stuck, pointlessly violently or disruptive, and getting a message across just wasn’t enough. They were unhappy, and just having a talk with someone wasn’t enough to let them move on. They needed action; they needed resolution.

They needed to die right this time.

Still didn’t make sense. So Stanhope was death, and he was death, only Stanhope just killed them, with no regard to what they wanted. Gryphon suspected he might do the same if he could prevent being possessed by them, but that option was not his table. Why not? What was the fundamental difference between how they acquired their abilities? Stanhope didn’t get possessed by them; he controlled them all the way along. Gryph was hapless, at the mercy of others.

Stanhope certainly was the death god among them. Maybe the difference was Louis was the unpleasant one, while he was the benign one. He was Anubis to Louis’s … oh man, what other death gods were there?

Osiris, Sylvio offered. He was better known as an Egyptian death god, although Anubis came first. I don’t think Osiris was a bad guy, though.

We’re gettin’ into a whole weird area here, Ray interjected. You can’t honestly be thinkin’ you’re death. I mean … shit man, that’s crazy.

He swallowed back a laugh, but just barely. Crazy was the only word for it.

The doctor or nurse - whatever she was - had left, so Clay and Shane had turned back towards his bed, and stared at him, surprised to see his eyes open. He just stared back at them, wondering what the etiquette was in situations like this. Finally, Shane said, “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

“I know. When they find out I don’t have health insurance, they’re going to freak.”

They approached the foot of his bed, and Clay looked like he was all but bursting at the seams to say something. How much did they figure out already? “What happened to you?” Shane said first, as always leading the way. “The e.r. staff figured you’d been beaten up pretty bad. The cops’ll probably be coming by as soon as they know you’re awake. For a statement.”

“Did it have anything to do at all with what happened at Serenity Acres?” Clay asked, eyes wide and bright. He seemed to almost jittering with eagerness … or maybe he’d just had too much coffee. Shane smacked him casually on the arm for mentioning it, but he hardly noticed it.

“What happened at Serenity Acres?” he replied coolly, figuring he was so tired he could easily lie with a straight face.

Even the usually sober and staid Shane stared back at him with the slightest bit of disbelief, and he knew they’d probably figured out most of it.

But he had to smother another laugh as he wondered if Death actually ever needed to explain itself, no matter what it left in its wake.