Messenger of Fear. Майкл Грант

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      I took another step.

      Another.

      And I looked down to see a face.

      I stared in confusion. This was not me. Could not be me. I could not bring the image of my own face to mind, yet I knew this was not me.

      Maybe she had been fifteen years old, maybe a year older; it is not easy to judge the age of a dead face. My age, perhaps?

      That she was dead was not in doubt.

      “Her name was Samantha Early.”

      A voice!

      I spun around, raising my hands—already formed into aching fists. Adrenaline chased away the lethargy of dread as instinct took over.

      He was a boy or young man. He stood a dozen feet away and did not move toward me or flinch at my upraised fists.

      He was tall and thin. His face was pale as a ghost, pale almost to translucence, and made all the whiter by the long black hair that framed it.

      He wore a black coat that fell to mid-calf over an iron-gray buttoned shirt. His pants were black, and his shoes seemed to be tall boots of black leather, though they were dusty. The buttons of his coat were silver but not brightly polished. Each was a tiny skull, no bigger than a hazelnut.

      On his right hand was a silver ring in a shape I could only vaguely make out. It looked like a warrior, a woman, gripping a sword.

      The other ring, the one on his left hand, was a face contorted in unimaginable terror. A young face, and in between nervous glances it seemed to change, as though the face was animated, alive.

      I had as well the impression of tattoos at wrist and neck, from the few visible patches of skin.

      His eyes were the only color in that monochromatic picture. They were blue. They were a blue I had never seen before in any human eye. His eyes were the turquoise of the Mediterranean, like something from a travel poster of a Greek island.

      I wanted to ask him where I was, but that would have made me seem vulnerable. It would have invited him to take some advantage of me. Better to be tough, if tough was something I could pull off. So instead I asked the question that was inevitable.

      “Who are you?”

      He looked at me and I had to force myself not to turn away. He looked at me and I felt quite exposed suddenly, as if his eyes were seeing the things I showed no one. I fought an urge to squirm, but still my shoulders hunched forward, and my eyes lowered, and my lips pressed tightly and my lungs labored to take in breath so that my nostrils flared.

      All of it was beyond my ability to control.

      “Her name was Samantha Early. It is a terribly apt name. Dead too early is young Samantha Early.”

      Was I supposed to laugh? Was that some effort at a joke? But nothing about him suggested humor.

      “Tell me who you are,” I said. My voice sounded pitifully thin. If there was any threat in that voice, then it was a laughable one.

      “That’s not the question you want answered first,” he said.

      He had a strange voice. It was as if his mouth was pressed close against my ear so that I could hear every shade of every word, the inhalation and exhalation, the play of tongue against teeth, teeth against lips, lips softly percussing the b and p sounds.

      I recoiled a bit from that voice, not from fear but from a sense that its intimacy was somehow inappropriate.

      “Are you reading my mind?” I asked.

      There was the slightest narrowing of his eyes, and if not a smile, there was a softening of the stern lines of his mouth.

      He did not answer. Instead he said, “Samantha Early. Aged sixteen. Dead by her own hand.”

      With that he laid his pale fingers softly, reverently on her cheek and then rolled her head to the side so that I could see.

      “Oh, God!” I cried. It was a hole, just large enough that a little finger could have been stuck into it. The hole was in her temple, and it was the color of ancient rust. Around the hole, an elongated oval of scorched skin and crisped hair.

      It was the most terrible thing I had ever seen in my life.

      I looked then at her face. She was not pretty; her chin was too big, too meaty. Her nose was perhaps too forceful, and there were dark circles under her eyes. I felt, seeing this face, that she had endured pain. It was a sad face, though how can a face in death ever be happy?

      I was so intent on her face that I failed at first to notice that the light all around me had changed.

      I looked up and saw that the church was gone. The coffin, that terrible object, that reproach against life itself, grew transparent.

      And then, the pale flesh of the dead girl began to regain some aspects of life. It grew pink. And I was certain I detected the movement of her eyes beneath their lids.

      I cried out, “She’s alive!”

      And just then, as though my exclamation was a signal, she sat up. She sat up and now, dreamlike, the coffin was no longer there. Feeling wildly unstable, I put my hand out as though to steady myself, but there was nothing within my reach but the shoulder of the boy in black.

      My fingers closed around his bicep, which flexed at my touch. It was reassuring in its solidity. He was real, not some figment.

      He shook his head and did not meet my eyes. “I am not to be touched.”

      It wasn’t anger but a soft-spoken warning. It was said with what might have been regret but with absolute conviction.

      I pulled my hand away and mumbled an apology, but I was less concerned about him than I was consumed with the horror of looking directly into the dead girl’s eyes. She had risen to her feet. She stood. The hole still a testament to brutality, bloody, only now, now, oh . . . oh . . . It was bleeding. Wet and viscous, the blood drained from the hole in her head as the blood seemed to drain from my own limbs. Little globules of something more solid slid down the trail of blood, bits of her brain forced outward as the bullet had forced its way inward.

      Her eyes were brown and empty, her face blank, her blond hair fidgeted in a slight breeze, and the blood ran down her cheek and down her neck and pooled at the hollow of her throat.

      I wanted to say that we needed to call 911. I wanted to say that we must help. But the boy in black stood perfectly still, looking at me and not at the girl, the girl dead or living or whatever unholy cross between the two that defined Samantha Early.

      Dead too early.

      “The question you want answered,” the boy in black said as though no time had passed, “is whether you are dead.”

      I licked my lips nervously. My throat burned as though I’d been days without a drink of water. “Yes,” I said to him.

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