A Blue Sky Existence

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

The Closing Chapter

 Charlie withdrew his arms from Etty’s shoulders with immense reluctance. As much as he longed to quietly exist with her, he also didn’t want to find out first-hand what happened to a Grim who disobeyed the laws of Time.

     After drinking in the scent of her hair for a last time, he left the room. On his way down the stairs he narrowly avoided Clare coming up, probably to try consoling her inconsolable daughter.

     Charlie was in the middle of the road. The sun was gradually making way for nightfall, and the air was cool and crisp. At first he felt paralysed, utterly clueless as to how he might locate Brody. Then, the familiar sensation stirred inside him, and suddenly Charlie felt certain about going northeast in Southside.

     He felt only one thing during his swift and uninterrupted journey: increasing urgency. He was also very aware that for the first time, he was totally alone on a duty.

    He halted in his invisible tracks as soon as the sensation disappeared, like an extinguished flame. There was a house on Charlie’s right, one in a row of semi-detached buildings, with a slate roof and broken drainpipe. It wasn’t Brody’s house, but Viola’s. He could hear hysterical cries coming from inside.

    Charlie wasted no time in passing through a frosted glass door and a wall immediately into the front room. This would look like any average room were it not for a broken vase, a coffee table pushed away to a strange angle, and a cluster of small off-white pills scattered over a red carpet.

    There were five people in the room: the Kegel brothers, standing apart from each other, a tinge of fear replacing the usual expression of thuggish stoicism on their faces. Emmeline Sleeth was backed into a corner, gnawing on her knuckle and looking uncharacteristically agitated. Viola stood on the edge of the carpet, afraid to come any closer, short blonde hair swinging in front of her face as she yapped feverishly into the home phone which she had dragged from across the room.

    ‘Okay, okay, okay, I’m trying! I’m calm, I’m calm, he…I - I don’t know, he’s on the floor, he’s out of control, I don’t…he w-was taking ecstasy, I think he’s having a bad reaction or something…I…ten minutes ago? Look, can you just bloody get down here! Hurry!’

     The phone clicked, but Viola kept the receiver close to her ear, unable to let it go. Charlie stared where her eyes were staring: in the centre of the carpet, pale, sweating, and violently convulsing, was Brody. His head, arms and legs shook relentlessly, and although his jaw was half open, no sound came from his mouth.

     Charlie would never be able to erase from his memory how disturbingly dilated Brody’s pupils were: his eyes were like two inkwells and, against the damp pallor of his skin, made him look neither dead nor alive.

     The pills were contaminated. He didn’t know how he knew this, but it didn’t matter. It was time. It was now.

    Sweeping aside any and all loathing, he dived to the floor, stuck his arms through Brody’s chest, and wrenched out his soul.

    Time slowed down dramatically. Charlie saw that all he held in his hands, for the moment, was a formless, foggy being. But by the time he’d separated it from the body completely, the soul expanded to Charlie’s height and developed into Brody’s shape.

    There was a long and deep howl from Viola as the phone fell from her hands. She collapsed onto her knees by Brody’s body, suddenly still. Emmeline sank into the wall and onto her heels, but the only change in the Kegel brothers was a heavy, quick sigh from each of them.