The Mortals

Lester Paley had come to the Sunset Motel to kill himself. It wasn't out of some sort of abject despair. He rather liked his life, when it still had been his life. Before the black spots on his lungs, anyway. Before the coughing up blood, the aching limbs, the constant dizziness and feeling like he wasn't where or who he should be. He could feel the life leaving him and he didn't want to go. But he also didn't want to wither away. Take life on your own terms, his father had always told him as a boy. His father had meant that more in the way of not letting anyone tell him what to do, and Lester killing himself probably had never entered his father's mind, but here Lester Paley was, at the Sunset Motel in St. Augustine, Florida.

It was a brightly colored place, the temperament of cotton candy, with yellow and blue stucco walls and pictures of pink beach sunsets adorning the walls of the lobby when he'd come in. There were assorted blues and oranges coloring the counters and pillars and the walls and ceilings, but the motel room itself was rather blasé – white walls and a big bed and a TV with a bad antenna. He supposed he would rather have this then a more expensive place. He had never been one for lush overindulgences. Even in death. He just felt like there was something so fake about getting some really fancy hotel room. Why bother? That wasn't how most people lived.

He had decided to kill himself the week prior, when his doctor told him there was no hope. It wasn't even his first doctor – that would still have held some hope, perhaps – but his third opinion, all of them having said the same thing. No hope. No chance of recovery. Oh well.

He didn't want to dwell on it much. He wanted to go on his own terms and with his mind intact. Maybe a few too many pills, quick and easy, something from the pharmacy. He'd always loved the beach and so that was where he'd come to. He proposed to his late wife, Annamarie, on a beach in 1935. That seemed so long ago now – over 40 years. She'd been dead since '67, of cancer as well. 12 long years now without her and he had the cancer too, now – like he'd gotten it from missing her, he thought sometimes.

But he'd see her again soon. If there was anything after, anyway.

***

The first time he saw the girl with the wild shock of raven hair, he was taking a walk on the beach in the early morning. He could no longer sleep for very long. Less and less as the days slogged along, actually – by his count he'd only slept five and a half hours tonight. The beach was quiet and he just listened to the waves rolling in and the sky was that nubile pink-and-yellow. Far in the distance he saw a tall man walking a dog, but he had this corner of the beach to himself. It was 6 a.m.

So he stood there for a while, hands in his pockets, the morning breeze and the smell of sand surrounding him like a blanket. The girl came to him a while after that. She was barefoot and wearing a white sun-dress. Her hair was not even long enough to reach her shoulders, but it was spiky and wild, like one of the punks Lester had begun to see in the city. Against her ghost-pale skin, the dark black hair was quite a contrast.

He also noticed she was very skinny and had large blue eyes, blue as the ocean they were standing by. She wasn't smiling and at first she didn't look at him; instead she walked to the sea and let the water lap at her bare feet. He felt like a creep, standing there and watching this girl who had to be 25 at the oldest. She could be his daughter. So he looked away and walked a little further down the beach.

He was surprised when she walked his way and even looked at him.

Then she said, “You won't die, you know.”

“What?”

She had kept walking, but now she stopped and turned around. She said, “Just what I said. You won't die. You think you will, but the cancer won't take you, and you'll live for years longer than you think.”

Again she kept walking. It was like she didn't realize that what she'd said was lunacy. He tried to follow her, but she didn't look back. He felt the coughing fit a split second before it came and then he was sputtering and coughing, and when he looked up, she was gone as if she'd been whisked away in the wind.

***

For the rest of that day, he convinced himself it hadn't happened. It had been a product of his sleep deprived brain, he told himself. There was no raven-haired girl, a beauty of his dreams who had told him he wouldn't die. His long-dead wife and his therapist would have told him the same thing – she'd been some freak manifestation of his desires. The product of a sleeping mind just barely awake. The girl, he concluded by that evening as he ate dinner at the Clam Diner down the street, had been some kind of bizarre sunrise-apparition, fading with the day. He was going to die. There was no way around it.

He didn't know where he got the idea to go down to the bar at the White Lion hotel down the way – he supposed he just wanted a drink. He wasn't supposed to drink with the cancer, and in fact, he'd given it up years ago when his wife had, and just never picked it up. But fuck it, right? It wasn't going to save him if he didn't drink, he rationalized.

The girl's image and words hadn't faded from his mind all day, no matter how hard he tried. He hoped a glass of whiskey would drown her.

The bar which was all shiny and polished oak and yellow leather seats and the swanky beats of groove music, and there she was sitting at the end of the table, clad now in a black halter top and bell bottoms and high heels, with a brown suede coat around her shoulders. She was sipping from a margarita glass. She glanced at him when he came in and he knew she was real.

He sat three seats down from her and, at first, didn't acknowledge her. He ordered a Budweiser to start and the bartender gave him one. He sipped at it a few moments. The girl sipped her margarita. Behind them there was a middle-aged couple, fat and tan, talking too loud over the music and Lester wished they'd shut up.

“You know, it was rather rude of you to say what you said to me earlier,” he said, turning to the raven-haired girl.

She looked genuinely surprised, her eyes widening to cartoon-character levels, like those on a character from a Disney picture in theaters before the feature film. She said, “What do you mean?”

“Telling me I'm not going to die. Like you knew me. Like you could see in the future somehow. Or maybe you were just playing some rotten prank. Where are your parents? Your family? Would they like what you're doing now, you think?”

Her face looked so openly sad and guilty that he instantly felt sorry for her. She said, “I mean... I didn't mean to make you feel bad. I was trying to help you.”

“Help me?”

“Yeah. I just saw that you were sad, and I wanted to try and make you feel better, because it wasn't true. That you were going to die like you thought, I mean.”

“How would you know any of that? How would you know I was dying?”

She had her mouth open in a little “o” shape. She didn't reply for a moment as the wheels in her head turned. Then she said, “I can explain. But can we go somewhere a bit more private?”

***

Her name was Winifred, she told him as they walked along the sidewalk near the motel. She had been traveling the country on the last of her dead father's inheritance, to see all the things she wished she had.

And, she said, she could see inside peoples' minds and could see the future.

At this, Lester Paley balked. He said, “What are you talking about?”

“I can see inside peoples' heads,” she said. “Usually only, you know, the big things. What they're worried or happy about. And I can sort of get pictures, in a way, of what's going to happen to them. It's hard to describe.”

“Are you reading my mind right now?” he asked, feeling so goddamn foolish, talking this nonsense.

“No,” she said. “I can only read peoples' big, important thoughts. Like if they're real happy about something, or if they just got super bad news. It's like those thoughts are – I don't know – the loudest somehow. Or something like that.”

“And you saw my cancer,” Lester said.

“Yes. Well, I saw that you were worried about dying. Then I saw that you wouldn't die like you were worried about. I saw you living a long time from now, at least a few more years, and you were happy.”

He shook his head. They stood there on the sidewalk. Two disparate souls in the dark. A taxi cab passed with one lone yellowish light shining through the night.

He said, “How did this happen to you?” If you're not insane, he thought, but he didn't say that.

“I think it's been in me all my life. I think I was just born weird, and I think other people are, too, but the world just doesn't notice them or it locks them up or kills them,” she said.

“So I'm not going to die,” Lester said, just feeling the words come out of his mouth.

“Not from the cancer. The cancer will take a turn at the last second. You'll suffer some more in the meantime, but you'll live in the end from this.”

“Wow.”

They walked a bit further, until the sounds of the waves hitting the shore were audible, and another question occurred to Lester.

“What are you doing here, then?”

“How do you mean?”

“Just...you know, what brings you to a beach in St. Augustine, of all places?”

“I've given up on trying to figure out why I have this power,” she said. “I just want to kind of wander. While I have the chance, anyway. I like helping people if I can.”

“While you have the chance?”

There was such a sad smile that came over Winifred's face then, a smile like that of someone much older than she; someone who had seen so much more lost. She didn't look him in the eye.

“I'm dying for real,” she said. “I guess I just want to see some things 'fore I go.”

“Dying?”

She nodded. “There's something coming for me all the time. It's creeping closer. Getting more confident in a way, I think. I don't want to die, man. I got so much more I want to do.”

Lester didn't know what to say. His whole body felt useless like a wet noodle. He had been told he wasn't going to die – and what of that? Was it even true? He couldn't tell what he should say to this young, obviously very troubled woman.

She spread her arms out and began to waltz through the streets, in a drunken traipse.

He asked, “What's after you? I just don't understand.”

“Oh, I don't even know myself. I hear its footfalls in the dark, giant footprints on the sky, coming for me from far away. It could be some kind of animal, or it could be some human figure, in a black cloak like the reaper in The Seventh Seal. I like to picture it like a kind of giant beast myself, a panther or a lion or something with big teeth, dripping blood... but one thing's for sure. It ain't from this Earth. It just appears like something from here because it can. I feel it all the time just circling me, prowling... waiting for when I'm finally weak enough to pounce.”

“And then what'll happen?”

“Who the hell knows?” She then let out a high, crazy, drunken-sounding laugh – the sound of a woman on the edge, Lester thought. “It's like, I dunno, like I'm being punished in a way for this. Like a person who has the powers I do doesn't get to live, because it's some trade-off. I'd give up the powers if I could. I'd trade them for a long life.”

He didn't know what was going on. But he knew when someone was depressed. This woman was in the throes of something deep and dark in her own mind at any rate. He said, “I'm sorry this is happening to you.”

“Me, too,” she said, and she began to walk away, her head tilted toward the sky, and she disappeared into one of the rooms at the Sunset Beach Motel, leaving Lester standing there alone in the middle of the street.

***

He woke up the next day with a new lease on life. His feet touching the tile floor, the taste of the warm black coffee and the scrambled eggs he had at the diner, the sound of the Beatles and the Stones playing over the radio...

It was all so new and fresh. He wasn't going to die. Everything felt shiny-white. He didn't even know if it was true he was going to be okay, but it felt like it was, goddammit. He felt good.

He went to the book store downtown and picked up a copy of Ernest Hemingway's “The Sun Also Rises,” which he had wanted to read for some time and hadn't since his wife was alive at least. There were so few pleasures in life except those which you least expected, and when you got older there was less you didn't expect. So you fell back on the routine. And you hoped that was good enough.

Lester Paley tried not to think about the raven-haired girl from the previous night. She'd been out of control and had not wanted his help; not really. She had walked away from him and had refused his help.

Something about that, however, felt off. The analysis felt all wrong. He thought of Annamarie, coming home smelling of cigarette smoke and dishwashing fluid and sweat after a night of volunteering at the soup kitchen or the local Baptist church. She'd convinced him to come out eventually, and he'd been resilient at first – don't we work hard enough – but he'd given it a shot for her. He found he liked the looks in their eyes when he handed them plates of soups, liked the gratitude and the warm and kind chatter that filled the halls, talk with no animosity or greed – people, really, at their best. Oddly enough that could only come from having no worldly possessions.

He'd mentioned that good feeling to Annamarie, wondering if it was decent to get pleasure just from helping – was that antithetical to altruism, he'd asked?

The point, his wife said, was that it was good to give back. They had so much good so it was important to give to those who didn't have it.

When she'd died, he gave up the charity. He just couldn't do it. His heart ached too much and it reminded him of her to even step inside the churches he'd volunteered at, so he stayed home and read and watched TV and let the world outside keep turning.

Someone else, he'd thought for years, would do the hard stuff.

***

He thought about all of that as he drove back to the beach and the Sunset Motel. He knew what room the girl had gone into, and so he pulled up and parked his car and got out and knocked on her door. Nobody answered and he thought at first that she may have checked out. But he could see in the window and the room wasn't cleaned up, and there was a sliver of yellow light from the bathroom door, closed to him. None of it felt good to him at all.

He wrestled with the doorknob. It did not yield. He yanked at it again and banged on it with his closed fist – maybe she was sleeping; it wasn't plausible, but he had to keep his brain racing. He looked around, thinking for a fleeting second that he probably looked insane to the passersby, but if there was anyone who could help, he had to flag them down. But there was no one. It was dusk and they were all out for a drink or at home already.

So he raised his leg, aching and tired and old, and kicked the door. He did it once and then again and the door gave and the room hung wide open, dark and disarray. He went in and rushed to the bathroom where the light was on and opened that door, too. And there she was, in the tub, wearing a nightgown and her eyes were closed. The pill bottle was on the toilet seat.

He ran to the door with her in his arms, and he put her in his car and he drove her to the hospital. They took her, the army of nurses in white, and they had her on a gurney with wires and lights and everyone was shouting. Then she disappeared beneath the mob of the white-clad personnel.

He waited in the lobby. Having told them he was her uncle, they let him stay. Her parents, he invented, were in their home state of Virginia and she was seeing him on her vacation.

And no, he said – he didn't know what she had been doing with the pills.

“I'm as surprised as you,” he said.

***

Eventually, they let him go back and see her, and she was in bed with wires hooked up to her nose and wrist, on an IV drip. She looked very small and very weak. She didn't say very much at all when the doctors were there. They talked to her in a small way, condescending like a child, really more addressing Lester than her. They told him to keep an eye on her and he said he would.

When Lester and Winifred were alone again, that was when she spoke: “You shouldn't have saved me,” she said.

“What?” he asked. “Why the hell not?”

“”Cos I can't be saved. It's coming for me. Oh, God,” she said – and here, her eyes seemed wide and her skin was shaking and trembling and he had never seen anyone so scared. “Oh God,” she was saying. “Oh God it's coming now. This is it. It sensed what I tried to do and now it's coming, it's...”

Then the lights began to flicker, and down the hall they could hear the startled cries, the cries of shock. It seemed that outside there was a great storm, like a hurricane, brewing. Rain hit the window hard, crashing against the glass, and the wind outside howled and howled. Then there was a loud smack and the glass shattered, a spider-web-crack forming and snaking up the window frame.

“Jesus,” Lester said.

“You should go,” she was saying, though her voice was soft compared to the roaring wind that had kicked up. “You should just go, and leave me here.”

Lester Paley would have answered, perhaps, that he wasn't going to do it; not after all he'd already done. But he didn't say a word, because he was looking in rapt awe at the thing in the window.

It was a tiger's face, he thought, but it was not entirely corporeal – it looked to Lester like a vaporous illusion, fading in and out like a ghost. It was perhaps the size of the front of an 18-wheel truck, looming hanging there in the night air snarling with the volume of a hurricane. Its eyes were blazing inferno-red, swirling like oceans but all different shades of crimson and orange and other colors of fire, and Lester thought he had never seen such hatred, such goddamn malice.

And Winifred screamed like he had never heard a human being scream before. Her scream reached the heavens and mixed with the eardrum-shattering howl of the tiger-thing outside. Lester reacted without thinking – he moved on instinct, unhooking Winifred from her IV and then they were hobbling arm-in-arm, running down the hallway at a mad, lurching hobble. There were nurses and patients with wide-eyed concern looking at them and looking around. One old woman said, “Such a storm outside – it's like some kind of hurricane.”

***

They made it to Lester's car, the wind and rain hitting them like bullets, and they were off. Lester put his foot on the accelerator and pushed it to the floor. The car was hitting 70. It'd be a miracle if they weren't pulled over.

“I'm sorry I got you involved in this,” Winifred said beside him, her voice sounding like a part of the storm, coming from all around them. He looked at her and for a brief second as the lightning crashed it was as if he could see through her. Then it passed and she was there again, just a frail, scared thing, but holding her own here – not running.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “I got myself involved.”

“Sorry anyway.”

The wind was whirling around them. Lester Paley relaxed his tense muscles. He began to think he'd been hallucinating the tiger-thing. Maybe it had just been a manifestation of his own fear.

Beside him Winifred was murmuring a soft prayer.

She finished and looked up at him. “I don't want to die,” she said. “Not by that thing.”

He gulped and stopped kidding himself. “It... it's chasing you, like you said? It wants you because of what you can do?”

She nodded. “It's not going to let me live. I've known it for some time now. I don't see any way out of this.”

He said, “I'm sorry.”

The night whirled and raged around them. Lester began to think the tiger-beast was there with them, always following, waiting until it had a clear shot at the girl next to him...

“Where do you want to go?” Lester asked. He felt a quiet desperation. It was not unlike that which he'd felt when his wife was passing and he knew it was inevitable.

“Take me to the ocean,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, and so they went.

***

They stood there on the beach and the wind howled around them. They had both taken off their shoes. The sand flowed between their toes. The ocean rolled in and the moon was bright. The wind made it hard for Lester to hear Winifred, but they stood there close but not touching and they talked.

“I was always such a curious child,” Winifred said. “My mother told me I was. I remember always wanting to talk to everyone. I was so outgoing. I would just blab on and on to people in the grocery store or the park and think it was normal. I was so fascinated by people.”

“That's good,” Lester said. “It's good to be curious.”

“Looking back, I guess I was manifesting my powers even then. In some really vague way, anyway. Like, I'd get these weird sensations and feelings about people when I talked to them. And I'd tell my mom afterward, stuff like 'hey, that man's going to do something great.' Or other times I'd just feel very sad. I wonder all the time about that – about what I may have missed because I was too young to read.”

“But what about you?” Lester asked, turning toward her and feeling this crazy desire, this mad impulse...

“What?”

“It's like you're just focusing on everyone else,” he said. “Didn't you have any good memories just about you?”

“I mean, I guess,” she said. “I've always been such a jumbled mind. Everyone else's thoughts in mine. I had a fiance once. But I kept seeing what was going to happen to him in the future. I think my power's strongest when it's with someone I really care about. So we broke up.”

She paused and walked to the edge of the shore and let the water lap at her feet. She said, “I always wanted to write a book. I feel like I could. I have enough experiences to do it. Things are always swimming in my head, and I feel like I have the right to use them and make something beautiful, some kind of harmonious, beautiful art. I remember things that aren't really my memories – they're others' futures. It's like I have a whole world inside my head.”

Lester Paley, who had known and been friends with writers his whole life, said, “That's what novelists always do. You'd be in the tradition of the greats.”

“Would be,” she said, and she let out a sigh that he could even hear somehow over the raging storm.

The storm was moving closer to them, rolling like some kind of panzer tank. Lester recalled the horrors he'd seen in World War 2. The blood and the bodies and the smoke in the sky. The severed limbs falling like rain. Just the constant feeling of dread, clenching your soul like a vicegrip, a metal hand. The clouds were bulbous and ready to pop like horrific, bloated balloons. And somewhere he could hear the tiger-beast prowling, its footfalls in the thunder.

She said, “What do you think it's like on the other side?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I suppose like some kind of peace. When I was dying, I always thought it was like you were just finally free of all the worry and doubt you had. I kind of wanted it, to be honest.”

“That sounds nice.”

“What'd you think it was like?”

The clouds and the storm and the noise rolled ever onwards. It was almost upon them now, the great dark mass seeming to touch the surface of the water. Lester could feel the heat of it – the hairs on his legs and arms was standing up as if someone had rubbed a balloon on them.

“I picture dying like, you're standing in a room full of everyone you've ever known,” she said. “And there's the perfect music playing, soft, and the lights are warm, and you know there's something really good coming for you. I know that probably isn't what it's like, but I always wanted to imagine it that way, anyway.”

The storm was there by that point, pressing down upon them like a great ephemeral ghost blanket, the heat of the night too close. It felt like the night was burning.

He looked at her and she was his wife, a silent figure lost in the night and quickly fading, and a great feeling of sadness came over him, because she had tried to help him, had been nice to him. She looked at him with eyes wide with the spectre of death looming, a look he recognized from Annamarie's last days and from his own only days prior when he looked in the mirror.

He could relate.

He extended a hand out to her as the wind was kicking up and the tiger-beast's face was visible in the clouds as massive as God. She hesitated only a moment and then took his hand, and somehow her hand was warm even out here in the miasmal whirling raging darkness.

The tiger-beast was snarling. And the storm was then upon them and Lester could feel it coming, the winds in their faces, rain hitting them fast and hard now, the clouds as black as coal. And he didn't let go of Winifred's hand.