One Last Night Together - Part Three

One Last Night Together – Part Three

By Brandon Palzkill

            Duncan had always considered himself to be a strong, steady-minded individual. Anyone from work would have readily offered that he had a very level head on his shoulders, and was never prone to hallucinations. Yet, he must have been hallucinating. He must have been going mad. He must have taken a sharp blow to the head or suffered some other serious trauma. In his mind, that was the only reasonable explanation as to why Angela was standing, before him. What other possibility could there be? She had died; she is dead. 

            “Are you… you?” Duncan stammered, unable to piece together a coherent question. 

            “Yes…” she answered, softly, “…and, no.”

When she spoke, it was as though she was standing at the other end of a gymnasium. Her voice was unnaturally distant, and carried a slow, ringing echo, as haunting as the answer, she gave.

“But, you’re…” Duncan began, woefully.

“Yes… I am,” Angela cut across, sparing him from having to finish his painful sentence. 

Angela’s affirmation made the reality of this conversation all the more surreal to Duncan, who peered more intently at his lost love, than he could ever remember doing, while she lived. She looked exactly as she had, on her very last day, and yet she seemed different; otherworldly. Her brown hair was streaked with white, while her normally soft blue eyes looked gray and colder. Her once pink flesh had paled to a milky white, and radiated with a strange, ethereal glow, which enhanced her beauty, much more than it detracted from it. 

“Is this real?” He asked, unconcealed longing in his voice.

Angela nodded, but said nothing, and an icy chill flickered through Duncan’s body.

“What are you?”

Terrified excitement, which coursed through him, made the question come out far more aggressively than he had intended, and she looked mildly affronted by his tone. For a long while, she said nothing, and Duncan was worried that he might have insulted her.  In fact, Angela was formulating an answer to his harshly posed inquiry, and took great care in selecting her words, so that he might better understand her.

“I am something of a facsimile; an entity that exists, somewhere between life and death. I am a physical reincarnation of my former self, something more substantial than any mere ghost or phantasm, yet no heart beats within my chest, nor does blood flow within my veins. I exist on an entirely different plane than you do.”

Duncan found himself hardly able to understand her, at all, but specific words, she had used, had him thinking about vampires and zombies; scary movie monsters on Saturday afternoons. They had terrorized his childhood in ways that he had long forgotten, but were now at the forefront of his memories. He became suddenly concerned that she might attack him and took a step back. 

“Why have you come back to me?” he asked, cautiously.

“I have come to be your guide,” she answered, her hollow voice ringing with something resembling pity. 

“What do you mean, “guide?’” Duncan pressed on. “Where will you be taking me?”

“That all depends on you...” Angela said, gravely.