Page 35 of Shadowing My Dreams
“Another place? Holy shit.” I jumped up and ran over to my computer and turned it on.
“Dude? What’s happening right now?”
“You may have… You made me think about searching for this person another way. It’s Isaac’s lover Drew that we’re… Hold on.” I held my finger up as I typed in my password.
“You are making no sense right now.”
“Or perfect sense. If this is… You may be a fucking genius, Daveed Humphrey. I will let you know in… Where is the file that… Oh, here.” I scrolled down the list of names and laughed when I saw it. “Fucking Andrew Parker. We had the answer all along!”
I ran over to him and kissed him on his cheek.
“What the hell is happening?”
“Magic, baby. I think it’s magic.” We had the answer all along. Andrew had rented another place from the same landlord after Isaac died in eighty-four. Living here must have been too much for him. We had a name and an address; now, all I needed was Archie. I quickly picked up my phone.
“You have really gone fucking crazy.”
14
Archie
Igrabbed Jack by the arm and stopped him on the small, windy street at the edge of Sunset Plaza. He was a man on a mission. “This is a giant leap. Just because I found his records, and…”
“But he died here,” he whined. “If Isaac is waiting for him, there’s a good chance he’s waiting for him too.”
“Maybe? The choices of people still astound me.” I shrugged.
He reached for my hand, and our fingers intertwined. “Would you cross over? If you were in love with… someone, and you died first, or would you stay and wait for them?”
“It is something that seems very romantic.” We slowly started walking toward the house at the top of the small hill. “I don’t know. How can someone know what they would do when they die? Maybe not everyone is given a choice?”
“I hope I would. I want to be in that kind of…”
“Stop. Don’t say that, Jack.” I squeezed his hand. “If you were mine and you died before me, I wouldn’t want you turning into Isaac. I’d want you to be at peace, whatever that was for you. We have no idea what happened to Drew, do we? What if he lovedIsaac, but then he found someone elseand loved them just as much? What if he found another love? It’s not a finite thing, you know? We have no idea what we are walking into if anything. He may have moved on. Most people do, Jack. It’s not the norm for a spirit to stay here. They’re the fly in the soup, right?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he chuckled and pulled me slowly up the hill.
“The fly in the soup theory. It’s an abnormality. Flies sink or get stuck. Most people with soup never have a fly in it, but some – the few – find a fly. God, my legs are on fire.” I panted as I walked.
“I am totally lost. I have never heard of this theory.”
“Earthbound spirits are fairly rare. Most people die and move on. It’s the rare few that stay. There’s just been thousands of years of human history. I’ve also discovered that some spirits choose to come and go, which blew my mind. How do they do that?”
“Oh, I see. That’s…” He stopped as he thought about it. We were on an incline, and I was afraid that I would topple over at any moment. “So out of the roughly five trillion people…”
“Come on.” I pulled, and we continued our ascent. “It’s actually eight and a half billion as of this year.”
“Ok, smarty pants. I think it’s very hot that you know that. So, if one percent stayed, that would be?”
“Over eight million people,” I sighed. “I don’t think it’s that high. But, yes.”
“That’s a lot of ghosts. So, if you looked at this from a generational thing and said, maybe point five percent for every generation over the course of human history… Fuck.”
“It’s a lot of fucking ghosts.” I frowned. “I see them almost everywhere. There are very few places where ghosts don’t at least pass through. Older places – you know, most of the world besides the Americas, have many more ghosts than wedo because they have so much more history. I once went to London on a getaway and stayed in my hotel for most of it. Their streets were crawling with the dead. It made me so sick to be surrounded by them. It was overwhelming.” We finally made it to the top of the fucking hill, and we stood in front of a small cottage with a red front door. I pointed to the house. “Looks like we’re here.”
“It’s cuter than my house.” Jack frowned. “Drew upgraded.”
“How are we going to do this ghostnap?” I scrunched my face up and stared at the house. “I’m still confused as to how this is supposed to happen unless we break in when no one’s home. I wouldn’t survive prison.”
