Free Book Excerpts

What happens when an ordinary guy who does not believe in spirits encounters a spirit who believes in him…and who needs help in finding his identity and who killed him.

Excerpt

Waking up with a splitting headache and a throbbing shoulder, Elliott had no idea where he was. By clamping his eyes shut and reopening them, he was able to discern that he was in a hospital room, though he had no clue as to how he’d gotten there.
The one thing he did know was that someone was sitting in the chair beside his bed, watching him. But when he managed to turn his head to see who it was, the chair was empty. He was alone in the room. Except that he knew he wasn’t.
He drifted in and out of sleep  interrupted with annoying frequency by nurses waking him up to do whatever nurses find it necessary to wake people up to do. Mostly they said nothing and achieved their objectives with expressionless faces.  And whenever he awoke, he would glance over at the chair and feel whoever wasn’t there watching him.
He gradually became aware—he had no idea how—that whoever was not in the chair’s name was John, and got the distinct impression that John was, to say the least, confused, and apparently unable to grasp the concept that he was indeed dead. He also sensed that John not only hadn’t a clue as to how he died, but had no idea of who he had been while he was alive.
Of course, on the subject of being confused, Elliott realized that he was hardly a poster boy for sharp thinking himself. He, at first, had no idea how he had ended up in the hospital, either. It wasn’t until he saw Norm Shepard, an E.R. nurse who lived in his building, standing over him that he realized he was in St. Joseph’s. Norm smiled when he saw Elliott looking at him.
“Welcome to the world of the living,” he said, and Elliott glanced quickly over to the chair. John, he sensed, was not amused. “I had to come up to this floor for some charts” Norm was saying, “and thought I’d check in to see how you’re doing.”
Elliott opened his mouth to talk, but somebody else’s voice came out, and Norm quickly raised his hand to silence him. “No talk just yet,” he said.
* * *
Over the next couple of days, every time he looked at the chair, he knew John was there, watching him. When visitors would stop by…his sister Cessy was there a lot, as were several of his friends and Rick Morrison, a guy he had begun dating a few weeks before the accident… most would stand by the bedside or at the foot of the bed. But when anyone sat down, he would be aware that John wasn’t in the chair—apparently even though he was now non-corporeal, he didn’t like being sat on. At such times, he would sense John by the window, looking out at the traffic on Lakeshore Drive. He never got the impression that John was particularly interested in whoever else was in the room.
How he himself had ended up in St. Joe he learned in bits and pieces.
He learned that he had been crossing Sheridan Road at Wellington, a few blocks from the hospital, around eleven o’clock at night, on his way home from dinner with  friends and was hurrying across the street to catch a northbound #151bus. He’d been hit from behind by a car speeding around the corner. Apparently he’d been thrown head-first into the curb and suffered a severe head trauma which had caused serious bleeding inside the brain, and a badly bruised left shoulder. He’d been unconscious or heavily sedated for a couple of days, and was cautioned that he’d look a bit like a monk for a while after he got out, since they had to shave a part of his head to be able to get in and release the pressure.
He did his best to convince himself that the head injury accounted for John’s presence, or lack thereof, and that he’d just go away after a while. But he didn’t, and Elliott didn’t dare mention him to anyone lest they decide to transfer him to the psychiatric ward for observation. He was nothing if not practical and logical, and John’s intrusion into his life was neither. So they kept their own counsel, John and he. And still the overwhelming sense he got from John was utter confusion over his current state and how it came about. And he also felt that since he was the only one who was aware of John, John looked to him for help, though Elliott had absolutely no idea of what he could do.
And then one night just before he was scheduled to be released, Norm Shepard stopped by again after his shift. Since his first visit, some vague memories of and after the accident were beginning to return.
“I think I remember seeing you in the E.R. when I was brought in,” Elliott said. “I guess I was in pretty bad shape.”
Norm nodded. “Well, the pressure in your brain was building up pretty fast. It was touch and go there for a minute. You’re a lucky guy.”
Elliott sighed. “Considering the alternative, I guess you’re right,” he said. Again, he was aware that John did not appreciate his humor. “But I vaguely recall they brought somebody in right after me, and you took off. I guess the other guy was worse off than I was.”
Norm shrugged. “Yeah, you could say that. He didn’t have a chance. Shot six times. It’s a wonder he even made it to the hospital.”
“Sorry about that,” Elliott said, and he was. “Who was he? Did I see a couple cops come in with him?”
“Yeah, they brought him in. Found him in an alley less than two blocks from here. No I.D. on him, and he died without fully regaining consciousness.”
“So did they find out who he was?”
“I have no idea,” Norm said. “We admitted him as a John Doe.”
* * *
John Doe! Was, Elliott wondered, the presence in the chair the guy from the E.R.? He sensed no particular reaction from the direction of the chair. But if it was the same guy, had he somehow made some sort of link with Elliott in the few minutes they were both teetering on the threshold between life and death? Or, more likely, Elliott thought, was it Elliott himself who had made the link? Maybe, he reasoned, this whole thing really was just some sort of psychotic episode his own mind created for reasons of its own. When he got home from the hospital, he convinced himself, back in his own world with his own things around him, John would probably just fade away.
Although he prided himself on logical, linear thinking, Elliott found his thoughts in the hospital skipping over the surface of his mindlike a flat stone thrown onto a calm pond. He’d start off giving thought to one thing, and suddenly find himself somewhere totally unrelated.
Contemplating his conviction that the presence in the chair was named John, he convinced himself he must have subconsciously heard someone in the E.R. referring to the other man as ‘John Doe.’  From there, his thoughts inexplicably segued to the fact that names had always intrigued him, possibly because ‘Elliott’ was not a name he would have chosen for himself. When he was a teenager, he liked to think of himself as more of a ‘Tom’ or perhaps a ‘Mike.’ He always suspected that his mother, whose maiden name had been Von Eck,  had chosen a high-gloss first name like ‘Elliott’ as way of compensating for his primer-coat last name, ‘Smith.’
But, being a very adaptable sort, he grew used to it. He in fact prided himself on both his adaptability and his practicality, though he took a certain pleasure in his few minor idiosyncracies. He collected trivia, for example, the way black pants collect cat hair. In addition to a penchant for remembering interesting but relatively useless information from everything he read, he enjoyed using his own observations to provide even more.  He knew, for example, the height in stories of every building he passed regularly; he knew the number of steps between floors in any building in which he had occasion to use the stairs.
Bringing his thoughts back to the name ‘John’, he  knew it is the second most common name for American men—more than four million—just as ‘Smith’ is the most common American surname. He could think of at least half a dozen ‘John’s he knew personally.
However, although his last name may have been common, his resources were not. He had always been a little embarrassed by the fact that by sheer chance he was born into an extremely affluent family, not one member of which had done a real day’s work in his or her life. Elliott was hardly foolish enough to turn his back on the family money, but had done his best to avoid its pitfalls.
Possibly as an offshoot of his fascination with trivia, he had always had the innate ability to look at something and intuitively see how a minimum of effort and investment could produce the maximum results. It subsequently came naturally to him to support himself by buying, renovating, and reselling small apartment buildings around the north side of the city, though he made an occasional concession to his wealth by keeping a few he couldn’t bear to part with. It kept him busy, and he enjoyed it.
That night, and every night thereafter that he remained in the hospital, between vivid technicolor dreams he could not remember later, there was one thing he did remember…one thought accompanied by a sensation of sorrow and loss, repeating over and over: “My name is John!”

Copyright 2008 Dorien Grey. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.