Balance

“I’ve been murdered,” said the woman, almost casually. She eased back into the leather chair on the other side of the table and lit up a smoke. “It must have happened some time last night, between one a.m. and two, I think.”

I let out an audible sigh. The thing with crackpots and drug addicts is they want many things solved but never have the money to solve them. And what really needs solving is often in their head. A therapist might have better luck finding a key for that kind of safe than a private detective.

The woman tapped out a line of ash directly onto my desk. If the desk meant anything to me I might’ve cared, but it already had more chips in it than a casino.

“Will you take my case?” she said.

”Case? What case?”

“You don’t believe me, do you? That I’m dead.” She didn’t look angry, just a little disappointed, if anything.

“Even a cheap P.I. like myself needs evidence of a crime. In the case of a murder, I need a dead body. Or at least a missing person. But lady, you’re a walking contradiction.“

Her long fingers slowly unfurled the red floral scarf from around her neck, revealing a long black incision in her skin, a raw wound still gaping.

“Jesus,” I said. That pulled the plug on my self confidence and drained all the water away.

”Like I said, I’m dead. I’m only alive now because of a necromancer.”

I thought about that a while. As far as I knew, we didn’t have a necromancer in town. Or even the state, as far as I remembered. The rare few in the country all worked for the government — mostly propping up important dead political figures.

The woman dipped a finger into her wound like it was an open mouth. “See? I can assure you, it’s no prothetic.”

Nope, there was no denying it. This woman was dead. “Lady, why are you here and not at the police station giving a statement?”

She wrapped the scarf back around her neck and for whatever reason I thought of a butcher parcelling up a slab of meat.

“What do you think they’d do to me after I give them the information?”

I shrugged. I had no idea. What were you meant to do with the living-dead? “Maybe they’d keep you under surveillance for a while. In case the killer tries to finish you off, I mean.”

”They’d kill me,” said the woman. She leaned forward staring earnestly into my eyes. “They’d make sure I could rest in peace by cremating me. And they’d justify my screams by saying I was already dead. In the eyes of the law, I am dead. I know about these things — I’ve read reports about cases like mine.”

A beat of silence thumped between us. I didn’t want to believe she was right. But what if she was?

“Do you have children, detective?”

I nodded. “A son.” I didn’t say his mother had taken him out of state, far away from me. That I hadn’t seen him in months and might never get to again.

“What if your boy was murdered? What if he was brought back to life after, but now he’s at the mercy of a necromancer’s will. Any moment the spell could be broken and he’d be collapse for good.”

That made me think about a story I’d read in the paper last week. Of a young girl with a heart-defect no one had known about. One day, playing soccer at school, she’d just tipped over and died.

“So what are you after here?” I asked. “You want me to attempt to catch the necromancer, because you’re worried he’ll grow bored of you? Or you want me to try to catch the killer?”

She leaned forward. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The person who killed me, it was the same face as the person who brought me back to… to this.“

The rain spattered like clumps of sand against the window.

“Oh,” I said. Not my most eloquent moment but it was all I could manage.

She’d been bought back to life as a marionette for the necro to play with? And once bored playing, the strings would be snipped and the puppet would slump to the ground. Until then, she’d always been living, expecting any moment to die.

Her veneer cracked then — she tried to smile but it wavered like a breezing candle.

For some reason a thought came to me. An image, really. It was of a submarine that had fallen too deep into the depths of the sea, and the pressure that had been pushing against the hull finally broke the bolts. I saw water leaking in, red lights flashing, the crew being submerged in ice-cold water right up to their necks, and still the water rose. They were looking upwards at the metal roof with bulging eyes, trying to see beyond it, trying to get a last look at a real sky. But all they can see is the grey metal of their water-logged coffin.

”Detective?”

I thought of my son. Imagined him playing soccer in a state far away. Of him grasping his chest as he fell to the damp grass. His strings cut.

I took a deep breath. Sat upright.

”Are you okay?” she asked.

When had I become the person that needed to be asked if they were okay? How had I not noticed it happen? I guess you’re strong until the day you’re not.

”I know I’m going to die,” she said. “I know it’s only a matter of time. Die for good, I mean. It’s whenever my killer clicks his fingers, I suppose. But I don’t want others to suffer like this. To be the living-dead is very different to living dead. This… this I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.“

Another thought struck me then. Had I been living dead since my wife and kid snuck out that night? Sure, there was no necromancer propping me up, but I wasn’t living, hadn’t been in a long time. I hadn’t accepted any new client in months. They seemed not worth my time. And now I couldn’t afford a secretary or even to keep the computer on.

But it hadn’t been that the clients weren’t worth my time — it had been that I wasn’t worth their time. That’s what I felt. That had been the truth of it. It’s why my family left.

”I’ll take your case,” I said. “We’ll find this guy, don’t worry.”

She beamed. “Thank you.”

*****

THE END.