Ghosts in the Flesh

By Roger E. Carrier

Late one night in a tragic twist of fate, Dan Peterson is murdered after witnessing a man leave an apartment complex. This serial killer feigns a heart attack and slashes Dan’s throat when the Good Samaritan runs to help him. Dan dies a silent, gurgling death, but after a flash of light, Dan wakes up on a park bench next to a statue of Mark Twain.

It is spring, and fifty-three-year-old Dan is young again. The only problem is that nobody can see him, and he cannot interact with any person in the park. In panic, Dan believes that he is dying in a hospital bed and his experience is the result of a drug-induced vision. Soon after, Dan meets Hannah, who also awoke from death on the Mark Twain bench. The murdered Hannah and Dan are solid and real to each other, but invisible to the outside world.

At last, the two unconventional ghosts set out to find their killer and seek revenge. The first problem they must solve is to find a means of communicating with the police.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543434316

Roger E. Carrier

Raised in Utah, Roger Carrier has traveled through some fifty countries by bus and train, including a three-month bus trip from Salt Lake City to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sleeping in bars and run-down hotels, he made a similar hard-class journey through Africa and India. Roger, a retired teacher and businessman, is the author of A Celebration of Humanism and Freethought (Prometheus Press, 1995, pseudonym David Allen Williams). He is also a mountain climber, a reader of the classics, and collector of early 19th century rare books. He lives in Utah with his family. Finding Sagrado is his first published novel.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Roger E. Carrier.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017910399

ISBN:              Hardcover              978-1-5434-3418-7

                        Softcover                978-1-5434-3417-0

                        eBook                    978-1-5434-3431-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Rebecca Renieri of Athens, Greece

Rev. date: 05/08/2019

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For

Denise Mitchell Leifeste

Courage Under Fire

"Only the eternal wilderness lacks ghosts.

If man has treaded upon the ground, there is

a ghost lurking somewhere." Anon.

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W HILE DRIVING HOME one October night, Dan Peterson turned onto the wrong street. He had seen a police cruiser in the area and decided it would be best to make a left into a residential parking lot and go out to the right to avoid an illegal U-turn. The overcast sky had obscured the stars, and to make the night even darker, the streetlight and the two lamps in the parking lot were out.

Dan hadn’t committed a traffic violation by turning into the parking lot, but a few months ago he had received a ticket for cutting through a corner at a convenience store. The cop had said that if he had come to a complete stop, he would have avoided a citation.

Nothing wrong with changing your mind—after stopping, the cop had said.

The advice had cost Dan ninety dollars, and he doubted that the same law applied to a residential lot. To be sure, he decided not to take a chance. He pulled parallel to the curb and turned off his engine and lights. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Dan surveyed the scene. The place reminded him of the apartment building where he and his wife had lived as newlyweds. So long ago, Dan thought with a sigh. The cold seeping into the car finally brought him back to the present. Just then a man jogged around the corner of the building, and when Dad started his engine and turned on his lights, the man was caught in full view.

The man paused, looked both ways, then grabbed his chest. He staggered back and fell under a tree.

Oh, my God, Dan said, stopping his car and jumping out.

He stooped to run under the tree’s low branches and found the man lying on his back.

Are you all right? he asked, kneeling.

Ahh!

That was Dan’s last sound, a cry ended by a branding iron of pain shooting through his neck. When he saw the knife coming at him again, he raised his arm to defend himself, but it dropped uselessly to his side. His lungs deflated with an audible whoosh.

A flash of light consumed his field of vision, and its brightness caused him to shrink away. What followed was even more mysterious and had no satisfactory explanation.

Dan found himself sitting on a park bench, and at the far end of the bench sat Mark Twain reading a book. Dan leaned over to see the cover.

Huckleberry Finn, he mumbled, marveling at the quality of the statue.

The vision of Mark Twain, Dan realized, was his brain’s retreat from the deathlike pain he had experienced, pain that had vanished with the flash of light. The hallucination was also a retreat from the new reality surrounding him. His reason told him that he was suffering from shock, and forcing himself to break his gaze at Mark Twain, he attempted to absorb the fact that it was no longer night, and clearly no longer October. The dramatic change in the blink of an eye overwhelmed his brain’s capacity to comprehend the vision.

Dumfounded, he stared down a path bordered by cherry trees, whose pink blossoms invited a smile. The path curved around a pond, past a Greek pavilion with Corinthian columns and disappeared over the top of a hill. The tiny valley before him was as lovely a vision as you could dream up for a spring day. It might have been a vision from a childhood memory.

Dan shook his head.

It’s not spring, he said.

He heard his voice as if from a distance, but with it came the conviction that he could either accept the reality before him or embrace a screaming insanity. The pretty scene nudged the second option aside. Don’t panic, he thought. Go on and enjoy your morphine-induced vision. At least you survived the attack—for a while, at least.

No, I’ll live, he said, in a firm voice, pausing. And where there’s life there’s hope, he added, mumbling the old cliché.

As he gazed upon this newborn world, he became aware of the chirping of birds. Their spring melodies filled him with a sense of well-being. His initial panic had evaporated, and he noted that he had never been in the park before. Filled with curiosity, he enjoyed the hallucination. Yet someone had slashed his throat. He knew that as well as he knew his own name.

Dan Peterson! he yelled, as if to establish the fact that he was alive.

In a strange way, he found comfort in knowing his name. It was proof that he hadn’t lost his memory. All of it was there, including the death of his wife from breast cancer two years ago. He was now fifty-four, and Clara had been fifty when she died. Their three daughters were married, and each had a child. He was a grandpa to the toddlers. What more could a man ask for? Clara and he had lived long enough to see their children grown and with families of their own. The natural order of a parent dying before his or her children was kind. The reverse was unspeakable.

Understanding the grace of the natural order helped Dan to accept his death—or this morphine-induced illusion. Not ten minutes had passed, and he was already dismissing the second explanation. This place was real. It was heaven. He felt his neck and remembered the fire. No, he could not have survived that wound. He knew this as sure as he knew his name.

Dan Peterson! he screamed again.

As a professor of literature, he had always been philosophical about Shakespeare’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Now he could accept the battle-ax of death.

I’m still alive! he wanted to shout but restrained himself.

Sensing that screaming would lead to insanity, he shook his head, rose to his feet, and pulled down a cherry bough overhanging the bench. He took a deep sniff.

Nice, he said loud.

As he stood there, he spotted a key on the bench. He picked it up. It was an old-fashioned skeleton key as thick as pencil, but his attention again diverted to the wonder of his surroundings. As it did, he slipped the key into his pocket.

It’s spring, he said, luxuriating in the beautiful morning.

The chirping birds brought a smile to his face as he noted that it was probably seventy-five degrees. Just about perfect. He took another breath and let it out slowly. Then, for the first time, he looked at himself. He could see down his shirt—a blue short-sleeved shirt, an open collar without buttons. But not his shirt. The same for his pants and shoes. Somehow he had awakened dressed in a casual style from the 1940s or ‘50s. In the midst of studying his clothes, he gasped.

He frowned. What the hell?

The wrinkles on the backs of his hands had vanished along with the age spots—so had the scar from the operation on his index finger, sliced when a glass platter broke in his hand. He had been cleaning his wife’s hutch after her death. Wrapping his bloody hand in a dishtowel, he had driven himself to the emergency room. They called in a hand specialist, who sewed the tendon back together that night. The freak accident had almost severed his finger. The scar would never disappear.

Such injuries are complicated to repair, the doctor had said.

This memory proved once again that he could remember his former life, if that’s what it was. Yet even a memory could be false. The mind grasps at whatever straws it might find to save itself. Dan could see how the firing of the brain’s last electrical synapses could conjure up a vision of a park, could conjure up a vision that he was young again, or at least had young-looking hands. He had yet to see his face.

But why a vision of a park on a spring day? His question immediately found an answer. Because it was a safe place to be—much safer than in an emergency room where a doctor, shaking his head, would pull a sheet over your face.

Fear spiked through him at the possibility that the beautiful scene before him might soon fade into darkness. He took some more breaths to calm himself.

Again, he examined his hands. It was not an illusion. The scar had vanished. The skin looked young. He touched his face. He wasn’t a teenager. The stubble of facial hair felt as if he had shaved a few hours ago. Were the wrinkles around his eyes also gone? He had to know.

He set off at a jog down the path toward the lake to look at his reflection in the water. He ran with the vitality of a young man. Until today, he had cultivated the idea that at least physically nothing had changed since his thirtieth birthday. Wrinkles yes, but not his physical strength. This common vanity of older men in good shape, however, soon fell away. As he ran, his whole body felt young.

At the pond, he knelt on a rock and stared into the clear water. A foot below the surface, the dark bottom provided a reflection. It wasn’t the quality of a mirror, but the wrinkles were gone—clearly gone. He looked the way he did at about thirty—the perfect age. His receding hairline had vanished. Thick brown hair now covered his scalp.

He stood with amazement in his eyes and surveyed the park.

This isn’t heaven, he said flatly.

He stared as a young woman jogged down the path he had just taken. Running at her side was a collie on a leash. Dan smiled at the comforting scene. In heaven, you wore white robes and sang in a choir. You did not take your dog out for exercise. You did not run in place while the animal lifted his leg against a tree. Wouldn’t that be a sacrilege in heaven?

It didn’t matter. He didn’t want to be in heaven. That would mean he was dead. He wanted to be alive and breathing and enjoying the sight of the shapely woman. This last activity didn’t exist in any description of heaven he had read or heard about. In the realms of eternal love, people didn’t feel the quickening hint of lust.

From a hundred feet away, he stood in wonder, watching as the dog finished its business.

Hey, please help me! he called as the woman set out again.

He waved his arms and began to shout. Oblivious of him, the woman continued down the trail, passed him, and jogged toward the Greek pavilion that glowed like alabaster in the sun.

Earphones, he said with relief.

Earphones explained her non-reaction. She couldn’t hear him. But he had practically waved his arms in front of her face. Distracted, that was it. At least he wasn’t alone in this place that was probably a vision induced by drugs dripping into a vein in his arm. Despite the feeling of physical reality, he could not dismiss the idea that the world before him had to be an illusion. Stuff like this just doesn’t happen, he thought. Nothing else made any sense.

But why not enjoy it while it lasts?

Just let it be, he said aloud.

Time passed as he stood by the pond and watched the occasional walkers or joggers come down the path. Reluctant to directly confront anyone, he kept his distance at twenty feet and yelled and waved his arms—no reaction. At last, completely frustrated, he approached an old man with a little white dog.

Hey. Hey, sir! he shouted, pushing his arm right though the man’s chest. He pulled it back. It wasn’t bloody. He might as well have hit a cloud. To top it off, the dog didn’t react and continued along, occasionally sniffing the grass at the side of the path.

Am I a ghost? Dan thought, wondering if maybe this was hell? Had he wound up in a place where you could see people but not interact with them? Good God, he was an agnostic. Maybe that was the cause of the hallucination. Deep down inside, everybody wants to wake up in a field of daisies after they die—or awaken in a lovely park such as this one, or in a hometown to be welcomed with open arms by friends and family who had gone before. Could his hallucination be explained as a mental rebellion against his doubts about religious truth? Hell wasn’t filled with fire and brimstone, he reasoned. It was a park where no one interacted with you—ever.

But right now, Dan didn’t care. He was alive and breathing. And it was good.

His negative thoughts had evaporated as fast as they were born, and he took another breath. My God, I feel great, he thought. He wasn’t fifty anymore. He was thirty, but he needed to find a mirror to be sure. Suddenly, his attention shot to the top of the hill.

Help! Help! came the panicked cries of a woman running down the trail. They can’t see me! Nobody can see me! Help!

Running as if chased by a pack of wolves, the woman raced to the man with the little dog. She waved her arms in his face and pushed at him.

Please, help me! she yelled.

Receiving no response, she ran screaming down the path. Unsure of what to do, Dan moved to the middle of the path and extended his arms to force her to stop. She ran into him, knocking him backward. Stumbling, Dan managed to keep his footing as the woman clung desperately to him.

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