C.E. Murphy: Thunderbird Falls

“Phoebe,” I said, amazed at how calm my voice was, “call the cops.”

“You are the cops,” she said. I could hear the grin in her voice in the suddenly echoing shower room.

“Phoebe!”

“Yow, okay, what’s wrong?” Phoebe didn’t call the cops. She splashed back through the showers, rewetting her feet. “What’s wrong, Joanne?”

“There’s a dead girl in the shower,” I said, still very calmly. “Please go call the police, Phoebe.”

“There’s what ?!” Phoebe looked around the edge of the shower stall and went pale under her olive skin. “Oh my God. Oh my God, we have to do something!” She surged forward. I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back.

“We have to call the cops,” I repeated. “She’s dead, Phoebe. Look at her color. There’s nothing we can do. We shouldn’t touch her.”

“You are the cops!”

“I’m also the one who found the body. Again,” I added in a mutter.

“Again?” Phoebe’s voice rose and broke.

“I found a murder victim in January,” I said. My boss was going find a way to blame me for this. He was convinced I lived out each day with the deliberate intention to piss him off. Some days he was right, but it hadn’t been in my game plan today. I didn’t get up at five in the morning to volunteer at protests with irritating my boss in mind. Rather the opposite, in fact, not that I’d admit that out loud.

I took Phoebe’s other shoulder and steered her away from the body. “Shouldn’t we at least check to make sure she’s dead?” she demanded, voice rising. I exhaled, nice and slow.

“She’s dead, Phoebe. Look, okay.” I let her go and waded to the dead girl. She looked like she’d been posed for a photograph, her back against the tile wall, her bottom leg and arm stretched out long and her top leg folded gracefully forward into the water, bent at the knee. Her head was thrown back, slender neck exposed, as if she were laughing without inhibition. The edge of the drain was just barely visible beneath her hip, all of the drain holes covered. I wondered who would take that kind of picture, then remembered that if nobody else would, the police photographer would have to do the job.

“Christ.” I crouched and pressed two fingers against her neck, below her jaw. She was on the cool side of lukewarm, the skin pliant, and had no pulse. I tried a second time, then a third, shifting my fingers slightly. “She’s dead, Phoebe.” I stood up again, wiping my fingers against my towel. I’d never touched a dead body before. It hadn’t felt like I expected it to. “Go call the cops.”

“What’re you going to do?” Phoebe’s voice trembled as she backed away, water splashing around her ankles.

“I’m going to go get dressed.” I turned to follow Phoebe, who continued to back up, still staring at the dead girl. “Watch where you’re go—”

I lunged, too late. Phoebe’s heel caught the curb of the shower area and her feet slid out from under her, kicking water into my eyes. My fingers closed on empty air as she shrieked and crashed to the tile floor with a painful crack. My own feet slid on the wet tiles and for a moment I thought I’d dive after her. My arms swung wildly and I caught my balance, heaving myself upright with a gasp. Phoebe, her mouth a tight line, stared up at me, then let out an uncharacteristic soprano giggle. I stepped over the curb and offered her a hand up.

“I take it you’re okay, then.”

Phoebe wrapped her fingers around mine in a strong grip and I hauled her to her feet. “No, I’m not okay.” Her voice squeaked as high as her giggle had. “We just found a dead girl in the showers and I think my butt’s going to be bruised for a month.” She giggled again, then set her mouth and pressed her eyes shut, inhaling deeply through her nostrils. “I’m okay,” she said after several seconds. I nodded.

“I’ll call the cops. You get dressed.”

“Okay.” She gave me a pathetically grateful look that I didn’t like from my fencing instructor, and left me alone with the dead girl. I stole a glance at her over my shoulder, feeling power flutter behind my breastbone, urging me to use it.

I could think of one good reason to disregard it. Well, one reason. Good was debatable, especially since even in my own head I heard it as a whine: but I don’t want to be a shaman !

Except, possibly, when it meant I could save little girls from heatstroke. I sighed and went back to the dead woman, kneeling in the cooling water. The bottom edge of my towel drooped into it, sucking up as much as it could, and I debated running to put some clothes on before doing anything else. Only then I’d be soaking up water with my uniform, which, unlike a towel, wasn’t designed for it. It wasn’t like the police would arrive in the thirty seconds I intended to be out.

“Arright,” I muttered. “One healthy little girl for one esoteric death investigation. I guess that’s fair.” Five more minutes before calling the cops wasn’t going to make a difference to the body. “I’m here,” I said out loud, “if you want to talk.”

There was a place between life and death that spirits could linger in, a place that, with all due apology to Mr. King, I’d started calling the Dead Zone. If I could catch this young woman’s spirit there, I might just be able to learn something useful, like how she’d ended up filling a drain at the University of Washington’s gym locker rooms.

Reaching that world was easier with a drum, but somewhere in the shower room a shower leaked, a steady drip-drop of water hitting water. It was a pattern, and that was good enough. I closed my eyes. The sound amplified, deliberate poiks bouncing off the bones behind my ears. I lost count of the drops, and rose out of my body.

I slid through the ceiling, skimming through pipes and wires and insulation that felt laced with asbestos. The sky above the university was so bright it made my eyes ache, and for a few seconds I turned my attention away from the journey for the sake of the view.

The world glittered. White and blue lights zoomed along in tangled blurs, each of them a point of life. Trees glowed in the full bloom of summer and I could see the thin silver rivers of sap running through them to put out leaves that glimmered with hope and brightness. Concrete and asphalt lay like heavy thick blots of paint smeared over the brilliance, but at midmorning, with people out and doing things, those smears of paint had endless sparks of life along them, defying what seemed, at this level, to be a deliberate attempt to wipe out the natural order of the world.

Don’t get me wrong. Not only do I like my indoor plumbing and my Mustang that runs roughshod over those dark blots of freeway, but I also think that a dam built by man is just as natural as a dam built by a beaver. We’re a part of this world, and there’s nothing unnatural about how we choose to modify it. If it weren’t in our nature, we wouldn’t be doing it.

Still, looking down from the astral plane, the way we lay out streets and modify the world to suit ourselves looks pretty awkward compared to the blur of life all around it. Humans like right angles and straight lines. There weren’t many of those outside of man-made objects.

But even overlooking humanity’s additions to the lay of the land, there was something subtly wrong with the patterns of light and life. I’d noticed it months earlier—the last time I’d gone tripping into the astral plane—and it seemed worse now. There was a sick hue to the neon brilliance, like the heat had drawn color out, mixed it with a little death, and injected it back into the world without much regard to where it’d come from. It made my nerves jangle, discomfort pulling at the hairs on my arms until I felt like a porcupine, hunched up and defensive.