Story Series | Prologue

 

Prologue | Then

A young man crumples to the floor in a dark attic that shimmers with shards of glass and puddles of blood. 

But it’s a strange sensation as he realizes he no longer has a body, and instead of feeling the hardwood knock against his knees, nothing happens. He looks down and there is nothing — no legs, no hands. It’s like his entire body has been amputated, separated from himself, and left over there, propped limply against the wall of the low-ceilinged room. Lifeless. 

Riley looks at his own corpse for a long time, feeling bizarre. The blood is still draining from the bullet wound in his body’s abdomen. The freckles that sprinkle its nose now look like inkblots against the death-pale complexion, and a sliver of green shines through the partially opened eyelids in a weird, unseeing gaze. Translucent tear-trails still streak the cheeks, and there’s a visible smudge where Norah kissed him as he died with his hand in hers just hours ago.

Norah. 

That’s why he’s here. For Norah. He came back for her. But where did he come back from? He can’t remember. His mind, or whatever it is now, feels fuzzy like static; his entire existence is a buzzing mass of energy. He’s never felt like this before, and in fact, it’s a feeling that transcends feeling. He can’t comprehend it. 

Is he dreaming, he wonders, still gazing at the corpse in the corner. Is this a nightmare?

No, it’s not. He feels unconscious, asleep, yet so weirdly awake.

Norah. 

Phantasm or not, he has a purpose here. Riley focuses on the empty attic, the complete silence of the floors below him. 

Norah is gone. To where, he doesn’t know. How he knows this, he also doesn’t know. 

But his murderer is still here. 

Riley suddenly finds himself hovering by the attic’s open trapdoor, gazing down to the dark room beneath, at the lump of bloodied, wrinkled skin and broken bone that is, or was, Martin Brickley. 

Now Riley sweeps over to the attic’s tiny east-facing window. Hardly reminiscent of last night’s storm, the sky is like navy velvet, encrusted with tiny, twinkling stars just beginning their morning retreat. Below is the crooked roof of the neighbouring cabaret bar; just beyond, the Saint-Vincent Cemetery. Riley stares at the dark expanse of tombs beyond the cemetery’s border wall, trying to piece together what he missed in the, what, three hours since that bullet went through his belly?

He is nothing but emotion, pure sadness and terror, his mind racing through the worst possibilities — until he notices something, or lack thereof: his motorcycle has disappeared from where he parked it against the cemetery wall last night. 

Norah took it. She must have. Which means she’s all right, or at least alive. He can find her.

Riley surges out the window and over the cabaret’s mossy roof, approaching the spot where he hurriedly left his old Harley last night. But he hasn’t even reached the street when he starts to feel even stranger; dizzy, disoriented. He trudges on, slower, willing himself through the muggy air, but the more distance he puts between himself and the Brickley house, the less he is. He feels like he’s slowly dissolving into the atmosphere. 

By the time he arrives at the vacant puddle where his bike used to be, he’s lost all sense of himself. He’s vaguely aware of a pulling sensation, an invisible vacuum tugging him backwards. Alarmed but utterly incapacitated, he’s dragged through the wall of the closed cabaret, through its ancient, shadowed interior, right through a solitary couple of still-awake, still-drunk bartenders making out mischievously against the bar — the girl screams as Riley tumbles invisibly through their embrace — and up, up, back into the attic. 

And now he’s back at the window, staring down rue Saint-Vincent. Like nothing happened. 

Bewildered, anguished, Riley collects himself, his thoughts and feelings.  

I am Riley Sheppard. 

This is Norah’s attic. 

Norah is gone.

Norah’s father shot me. 

I can’t leave.

He killed me. 

Riley screams, and is surprised at how human and real it sounds, and that he is able to scream at all. If he could cry, he would. He would probably puke, too. Instead, he stays floating, buzzing, in the attic of his girlfriend’s dilapidated home, letting his strange new sense of vision absorb the dark blue sunrise as it creeps over the sleepy hill of Montmartre. 

He continues to scream and moan, so confused, tormented, tangled in emotions, emotions that seem so much more powerful now without a body to contain them, until he hears sirens emanating from the depths of Paris.