Ordinary Souls by J.S. Bailey

The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our SOULS ~ Edgar Allan Poe ~

Also By J.S. Bailey Novels Rage’s Echo The Land Beyond the Portal Servant

The Chronicles of Servitude, Book One

Sacrifice

The Chronicles of Servitude, Book Two

Multi-author Collections Through the Portal Call of the Warrior In Creeps the Night A Winter’s Romance Tales by the Tree

Cover design, interior book design, and eBook design by Blue Harvest Creative www.blueharvestcreative.com

Ordinary Souls

Copyright Š 2016 J.S. Bailey

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by Open Window an imprint of BHC Press Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954054 ISBN-13: 978-1-946006-05-9 ISBN-10: 1-946006-05-X Visit the author at: www.jsbaileywrites.com & www.bhcpress.com Also available in hardcover and eBook

Table of Contents Introduction 9 the Mirror 19 the Ghosts of Memory 61 Vapors 76 Maria 102 Agoraphobia 107 the Author, the Lonely Walker, and the Class 117 the Outing 128 Imaginary Friend 136 Weary Traveler 148 Journal Entry from the End of the Universe 162 and Lead Us Not 174

White Lightning 192 There We Will Be 211 Rochelle’s Pizza Run 224 Solitude 250 Diamonds in the Sky 275

Introduction

by J.S. Bailey

Short stories are magical things. Unlike novels, they tend to pack a heavy punch in a small amount of space. Some of my favorite short stories, in no particular order, are “Skin” by Roald Dahl, which involves a tattoo created by a famous artist and the people who want to buy it off a man’s back; “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

by Flannery O’Connor, which involves a family vacation disrupted by an escaped killer; and “The Telltale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, which is of course that classic tale of insanity and murder.

Each of these stories is horrifying in its simplicity and leaves the skin crawling. In other words, they exemplify what I love the most in this medium of fiction.

I don’t remember which short story is the first I wrote, but in recent years I’ve found myself compelled to write more of them.

Some appeared in anthologies, some I published on their own, and some have never seen the light of day until now. Ordinary Souls is, I hope, a fun mix of stories featuring perfectly ordinary human beings thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Because isn’t that what fiction is all about?

For those who may be interested, I’ve summarized what brought each of these stories into being.

The Mirror Recently while looking at my face in the bathroom mirror, I wondered what would happen if mirrors could show the future.

(Bad things, I assume. Knowing the future is never good.)

I chose to set this story in the UK to pay homage to my love of all things British. I conducted quite a bit of research during the course of my writing, as I have never set foot in the UK, so my internet search history now includes such items as “what do british call living room” and “what do british call sweatpants.” Lisa Shambrook,

a fellow author who lives in Wales, was kind enough to answer some of my questions that Google was unable to answer for me. Thank you, Lisa!

The Ghosts of Memory When I was nineteen years old, my fourteen-year-old brother informed me he’d found an abandoned house on the other side of town, so being the responsible older sibling, I accompanied him on a bike ride so I might investigate this house myself under my brother’s guidance.

I don’t remember what it looked like on the outside—I have a vague memory of walls overgrown with vegetation—but the inside told a chilling story.

The house was furnished but in disarray. Family photos, the kind you get taken at a studio, lay on the kitchen table as if someone had been sorting through them to distribute to relatives. The family’s clothing and hairstyles screamed Early Nineties. Unopened mail lay there as well. The sender on one envelope led me to believe that it contained a medical bill. I can’t remember the recipient’s name. Might have been John.

Despite the house’s structural instability, the two us of ventured upstairs. Clothes were laid out in a bedroom, including a high school letterman’s jacket embroidered with the name “Darla.”

When we got home, I searched for Darla on MySpace (remember MySpace?), adding the last name I’d seen on the mail in the kitchen. A profile came up for a local woman. So Darla still existed. Good.

I was tempted to message Darla and ask her what had happened at that house. I did not.

To this day, I wonder what compelled an entire family to leave their home and belongings behind. I’d never heard any rumors floating around town about a tragedy. It is all very mysterious.

The house is gone now, bulldozed into oblivion. I haven’t been down that street since.

Vapors Several years ago I was skimming through a book about the early Church fathers and martyrs, and I got to wondering what it would be like to meet them in person and see what they had to say about their faith and the time period they had lived in.

A few hours later I left to go to my classes at Northern Kentucky University. I always liked to take the scenic route through the rolling hills of southern Clermont County as opposed to taking the interstate because driving on a winding road through forests and then along the Ohio River seemed so peaceful compared to the alternative. Driving along that route put my mind at ease, and what do minds at ease do? Come up with stories, of course!

I knew I wanted to write a short story set in the post-apocalyptic future where humans and other living things could be resurrected through the use of technology so archaeologists could learn more about the past. I jotted down notes when I got home. The story, which I named “Vapors,” took me about eight days to write. I originally published it as an ebook short.

Maria One day I started daydreaming about a painting that would hypnotize people the longer they stared at it. Something about the picture would have to be “off” in some way to catch and hold people’s attention long enough for the hypnotism to work. The details of this changed during my first draft, of course, as happens with all of my stories.

I wonder what other people daydream about.

Agoraphobia I’ve been tempted for so long to write a story told from the second-person point of view, kind of like those Choose Your Own Adventure books I read as a child.

So I did.

The Author, the Lonely Walker, and the Class While writing the story “The Mirror” that appears earlier in this collection, I envisioned a high school English class sitting around discussing it with questions like, “Is the mirror evil or good?” Then I thought it might be fun to write a story about an author writing a story that ends up being assigned to an English class. Three stories for the price of one!

The Outing This story first appeared in A Winter’s Romance, a short story anthology featuring romantic stories that take place during the winter. I sent it to my dear friend Laura Custodio to proofread, and she messaged me back with, “What the hell did I just read?” Apparently she feared for my husband’s life.

Imaginary Friend Jerry Madison is my novel Rage’s Echo’s resident ghost. He’d been hanging out in that graveyard for so long, and I thought it would have been too boring for him to have absolutely nothing happen the whole time he was out there, so I gave him something to do.

Weary Traveler One day my husband and I went for a hike at the Cincinnati Nature Center’s Rowe Woods. Rowe Woods is home to an old house called Krippendorf Lodge that is often rented out for weddings. Dense woods grow all around the lodge so you can’t see it until you’re practically walking onto its porch. Since our hike was during the day, Krippendorf Lodge was as silent as an abandoned dwelling, its windows dark and full of secrets.

After our hike, we went home and I spent the evening soaking in the tub, during which I conceived the idea for “Weary Traveler,” which of course tells of a very different sort of hike than the one we’d had.

Journal Entry from the End of the Universe Have you ever felt that you don’t have enough years left in you to do everything you want to do?

So does the narrator of this story.

(And its author.)

And Lead Us Not During my experiences working as a cashier, I often caught glimpses of people’s driver’s licenses when they would open their wallets, displaying their names and addresses in all their glory.

Luckily for everyone, I never felt the urge to show up on their doorsteps.

White Lightning Family vacations. Need I say more?

There We Will Be This story came about from a free-write when I had no idea what to put down on paper. It first appeared in the anthology Call of the Warrior and had to be trimmed considerably to fall into the proper word count range. The revised draft reads much better than the version I originally scrawled into a journal. (Revised drafts generally do.)

Rochelle’s Pizza Run Back in 2014, author LaDonna Cole wanted to assemble a portal-themed short story anthology for charity.

“My first novel is called The Land Beyond the Portal,” I told her.

She told me to write a short story sequel to it. I happily complied.

Solitude This little story introduces readers to Bobby Roland, the socially-awkward protagonist of The Chronicles of Servitude. It was originally released in 2014 as an ebook short.

Diamonds in the Sky Sometimes I want to tell a story but don’t know what to write.

One rainy July day, I was sitting on my couch with my cat Chai, a pen and notebook in hand, and I started writing the first thing that came into my head. I had no idea where this story would lead, and I have to say it surprised me.

Journal Entry from the End of the Universe [Entry not dated] I didn’t used to be immortal. I used to be as normal as the next person.

Everything that has happened to me is all my fault.

My name was Samantha Carwell.

I grew up in a middle-class suburban neighborhood in a place called Virginia. I had parents (Monica and Dominic) and a brother (Kevin). I supposed I lucked out being born when I was. I came into the world after the downfall of the so-called “Jim Crow” laws that targeted people of my skin color, so my life went fairly easy.

The four of us traveled every chance we got. Some of my childhood’s fondest memories were of visiting the Grand Canyon, hiking through the Smoky Mountains and sneaking offtrail with Kevin, and exploring Mam-

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moth Cave. I filled scrapbook after scrapbook with all the pictures I’d taken, and on those inevitable days when school was in session, I would come home and pore over each page reliving the memories conserved within.

Somehow, eventually, Kevin and I grew up. He moved to another city to study law, and I took a job at a local library. Despite my desires, I could only afford to travel once a year. I went to the Colorado Rockies at the age of twenty, Alaska at twenty-one, and Los Angeles at twenty-two. I filled more scrapbooks, and I was happy. I remember one time I even— [Page too scorched to be readable] —comes a time when you realize you can’t do everything.

You will never read all the books you want, watch all the movies you want, or paint all the pictures you want. There simply isn’t enough time to do it all. We may live our lives to the fullest, but we still die with that stack of unread books sitting on our bedside tables.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps heaven is full of books, and its residents are free to read to their hearts’ content for all of eternity.

I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been there.

I digress.

When I turned twenty-six, I sank into a despondency no amount of traveling or reading could lift. I found joy in nothing, knowing my time here would run out eventually. I suppose I’ve always been a melancholic at heart. On my good days joy could overflow my soul but I still felt a deeper sadness knowing it all must come to an end.

Endings may bring about sorrow, but they exist for a reason. I’ve found that out too late.

I knew a fellow library employee (Joan) who claimed to know magick. (I’d seen her work apparent spells on our

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coworkers, curing menstrual cramps and skin conditions and the like.) I confessed my woes to her one night over drinks at a music-themed bar called The Metronome, and she nodded and listened like my problems were of grave importance. When I finished, she sat in a pondering silence, then said, “What you’re telling me is you fear dying before you can have all the experiences you desire.”

I nodded, dreading the lecture that would surely follow.

Joan was at least two decades older than I and likely thought me a whiny, ungrateful child.

She surprised me by saying, “There might be something I can do about that.”

“There is?”

Her hazel eyes sparkled. “Of course there is. I can stop you from dying.”

I think I laughed at her. “Make me immortal, you mean. Like a vampire.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You won’t need to drink blood to survive, and you can lounge around in the sun whenever you want.”

When she’d once told me she knew magick, I’d assumed she simply whipped up so-called “potions” that could cure warts and varicose veins and things. (That was before I saw her cure our head librarian’s psoriasis before my eyes.)

Perhaps I’d underestimated her abilities. “How can you do that?” I asked.

She pushed a strand of silver hair out of her face and tucked it behind a gauged ear. “If I told you, it would take away the mystery, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess. What’s the catch?”

Her lips twisted into a wry smile. “Once it’s done, it can’t be undone. You’ll literally live forever.”

I tried to imagine what forever might be like but stopped because it made me feel sick. But not dying? Getting to live long

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enough to visit every place I’d ever heard of? That sounded like a deal to me.

“Have you done this to anyone else?” I asked.

“No, but I’ve made the offer.”

“When can we do it?”

“As soon as you know you’re ready—and I mean that. This isn’t a decision you should make lightly.”

“I know.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Do you, now?”

I was twenty-six years old. Of course I knew. I knew everything.

I didn’t feel any different after Joan cast her spell. I almost

wondered if she made the whole thing up just to make me feel better about my mortality.

I worked at the library a little longer, then got a passport and visa and moved to Wales to study film and screenwriting.

People back home asked me why Wales and not England, and I told them that Wales had always seemed left out in the stories and movies I’d seen, so I thought I would give it a bit of company. I lived in a village called— [Page(s) missing] After I finished school, I traveled to England and Scotland as often as I could. The new scenery and cultures inspired me like nothing else before. I wrote a film about a black American “finding herself” in the UK (original, I know) and a miniseries about a young British woman who longed to be immortal. I did a lot of freelance work and garnered a few awards for my screenplays, which made me prouder than I like to admit.

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I traveled to mainland Europe and spent time in Spain and Portugal to research some screenplays I’d been hired to write. I flew back to the States every so often to see my family who, over the years, seemed to grow more and more suspicious of me.

I wasn’t sure why until I turned forty-five and realized I looked exactly like the twenty-six-year-old who had supposedly been granted immortality. I didn’t have a single line on my face, and my ebony skin positively glowed.

“How do you do it?” my mother asked me over video chat one summer, her voice frail with age. “How do you stay looking so young?”

“Constant exposure to the Welsh countryside and loads of tea,” I joked.

She squinted at me. “No, that’s not it. You’ve had work done, or something.”

“Well, maybe a bit,” I admitted. It wasn’t technically a lie.

“It’s getting spooky, Samantha. You’re fifty and look half your age.”

I blinked. Was I fifty now? I’d been so busy with work I’d forgotten to keep track.

My parents passed away when I was in my sixties. I dyed my dreadlocks gray before I flew out to their respective funerals, but I couldn’t fake wrinkles without hiring a professional makeup artist. I received accusing stares from my silver-haired brother and his wife, and their children and grandchildren eyed me with wonder.

I wished I could tell them, especially Kevin. We’d kept no secrets with each other as children, and it felt wrong to hide the truth now.

He wouldn’t have believed me if I told him.

Sometime before, I’d started hearing idle gossip about myself among my circle of fellow screenwriters.

“Exactly how old is Samantha?” I heard one of them say when I got up from a restaurant table to use the loo.

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I stopped in my tracks and strained my ears to hear the rest through the divider separating our table from my current position. “Not sure,” someone else said, “but I’ve known her twenty years now. Hasn’t aged a day.”

“Must be genetics. Lucky girl. She could be her own daughter.”

I was a very lucky girl: due to a defect, I was unable to have children. I don’t know how I could have coped watching them die. Losing my occasional lovers proved difficult enough.

I kept dyeing my hair gray. The gossip about me continued relentlessly. Eventually Tina Jones, a writer I’d considered a close friend, confronted me at my house on the Welsh coast.

“Samantha, we’ve all been talking, and I think it’s time you told us who you really are,” Tina said in her singsong accent.

I tried to act surprised. “Who I really am?”

She looked me straight in the eye. “How old are you?”

“I think…about fifty, I suppose. It’s hard to keep track; I don’t celebrate birthdays.”

Tina withdrew some papers from her handbag. One was a photo of me shortly after my high school graduation. “Nigel and I have been doing a bit of research, we have, and the real Samantha Carwell was born in 1990. Those of us who can count know that was seventy-five years ago.”

I examined a fingernail. “Was it?”

“You’re not seventy-five, Sam. If I had to guess, I’d say you couldn’t be more than thirty.”

I shrugged. “I’m just lucky.”

We got into a full-blown argument after that, Tina accusing me of stealing Samantha Carwell’s identity and even going so far as to say I must have had surgery before I came to Wales to make myself look like the “real” Samantha. Tina finally stormed off in a huff, and I knew then that I had to make a change, and not one I desired.

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I’d fallen in love with the Welsh countryside and its quaint villages with unpronounceable names, but it was time to move on.

[Page(s) missing] I hope it doesn’t bore you that I’ve summed up my life in such a way. I’ve lived far too long, and if I described everything in intricate detail, this journal entry would overflow the largest library.

I wish I could say that the details faded with time. On the contrary: immortality has sharpened the details. I remember nearly everything.

I left Wales behind with a heavy heart and returned to America, even daring to return to that town where I’d been raised to find I scarcely recognized it. My childhood home was gone, replaced with a charming two-story with solar panels mounted on the roof.

I stood at the fence trying to reconcile this new structure with the small ranch in my memory when a man emerged from the house and walked out to meet me.

“Can I help you?” he asked. He wore overalls and might have been fifty.

“Oh, no,” I laughed. It sounded wooden in my ears. “I was just reminiscing, I was. I grew up in the house that used to be here.”

The man narrowed dark eyes at me. “Are you sure about that?”

“Fairly.” I felt a prickle of unease. It dawned on me that I’d developed a Welsh accent over the decades I’d lived there.

The man puffed up his chest like he thought himself the most important person who’d ever lived and gave me a condescending grin. “Well, you’re wrong—house that stood here burned to the ground forty years ago. You wouldn’t have been born yet.”

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I knew the house had caught fire but hadn’t considered how long ago it had been now. “I—I’m older than I look,” I stammered before hurrying off.

[Next few lines scorched] I bought a change of identity and a house in Maine. I called myself Samantha Cornell now, and I enrolled in college to study music. I became skilled at piano and violin, playing in various ensembles whenever invited to do so.

I searched for Joan a few years later only to learn she had died peacefully in her sleep at the age of a hundred and five. Her surviving sister told me she’d renounced her occult practices some decades before, becoming a devout Lutheran and teaching Sunday school until the very end.

The things you learn about people.

Once I visited Kevin in the nursing home where his children had interred him. We were both in our nineties at that point, and he looked so fragile and broken it made me cry.

“Samantha?” he whispered, his eyes wide as he lay on his bed. “Is that really you?”

I nodded, the lump in my throat obstructing the words I wanted to say.

“How do you do it?” he asked.

And I finally told him.

My

memories of life as a screenwriter in Wales seemed both distant and close at the same time. At night I dreamed of the house I’d owned by the sea and I would fill with joy over my apparent return, but then I’d wake and reality would crash back down like a smothering wave. I’d been happy in Wales—happier

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than I was before or have been since—and it broke my heart that I’d had to leave it behind in order to protect my secret.

To cheer myself up, I started traveling again. I went to Costa Rica, to Peru, to Brazil and Argentina. I made brief friendships with my fellow travelers but never let anyone become close enough to start asking too many questions. I published a few travel memoirs under pen names. I took more pictures and made more scrapbooks.

I’d never felt so empty.

As I passed my hundredth year and went about my life pretending to be normal, it occurred to me I was never meant to see these days. These days belonged to a new generation, not mine, and at times I felt like an intruder in an alien world, a sensation I could feel the strongest whenever I opened my eyes and saw new fashions, new vehicles, new forms of entertainment, and new gadgets.

Language changed, too. I found myself adopting slang that sounded absurd at first until it became so common as to be unnoticed.

One time I watched one of the films I’d written the screenplay for and laughed at the quaintness of people’s mannerisms and speech.

Laughed, and then cried.

People think one hundred years is a long time. It is not. Nor is two hundred years, or three hundred.

I don’t know what to consider “a long time” anymore.

Sometimes I wonder if this is what God feels like, plodding through the ages without a great deal of notice while civilizations rise and fall like the tide; although I’ve heard it said that God exists outside of time.

I am trapped inside it.

From time to time I conducted experiments to see what would happen if, for example, I stopped eating and drinking.

Nothing happened. I cannot die, so it only makes sense that starvation and dehydration would have no effect on my health.

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I never even felt sick. I’ve avoided all diseases as well, or rather they’ve avoided me.

These facts have made me wonder: if illness and poor health can’t kill me, am I truly alive? I think that— [Page too scorched to read] —few decades I changed my identity and moved somewhere else. I saw nations born and nations in ruins, natural disasters sculpt new terrain, and technological advancements the people from my childhood never could have dreamed of.

I picked up many new skills along the way, learning new languages and musical instruments and the like. I even took up screenwriting again, though the medium itself had changed into something nearly unrecognizable from the olden days. I enjoyed it, though. Screenwriting has always been my biggest love despite all my other pursuits. Bringing entire worlds into being through dialogue amounts to bliss.

I moved back to Wales as well. It was a very different place from what I remembered. The towns and buildings had all changed, leaving only the green, rolling hills as a reminder of where I truly was.

Which reminds me: two thousand years isn’t a long time, either.

Man flew to the stars, and still I lived. The air grew hotter and then colder, and I left the Earth behind to see what lay beyond my own experiences. I found worlds both dazzling and frightening and met strange beings who weren’t that different from us at heart.

I met monsters, too. They are not worth describing here.

I watched as mankind changed. It was subtle, but over long eons I no longer looked like them. Their faces had a different

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shape to them. And their eyes! They thought me an alien whenever they saw me. I didn’t try to convince them otherwise.

It broke my heart, though, knowing that what humanity had once been lay interred beneath the ages like a forgotten corpse.

Eventually the sun expanded and died, taking the Earth and inner planets with it. Wales had been long gone by then anyway, the continents long ago shifted into shapes unrecognizable. The history that had once been reality to me faded with the ages and was lost even to myth.

And still I lived on.

New stars and planets formed from the ashes of their predecessors, and I thought it beautiful.

But even they died in time.

I’m not sure what year it is anymore. I’m not sure that years matter. What does matter is that all the remaining stars are dying, and no new ones are forming from their remains.

The universe is becoming very cold.

As I write this entry, I’m sitting outside a cave on a nameless planet where I’ve taken refuge, in the remnant of a galaxy many millions of light years beyond the one where I was born.

I’ve lived in this place for several centuries now. No one notices if you don’t age anymore.

I’m looking up at the sky this very moment. I see one faint star, maybe two if I squint hard enough. The air has been growing more and more frigid with each passing year. This planet’s tiny sun doesn’t put out enough heat to warm me.

The beings who live near me seem not to notice the cold.

This is what they’ve always known.

I don’t like living here. Most of the vegetation is brown, the water tastes like rust, and the air smells sour as if the planet itself is ill.

I don’t think there’s anywhere else to go, and no more transports even if there was.

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I’m scared. The small sun will burn out, too, and then I’ll have nothing to look at but darkness for all of eternity unless God takes pity on me and finally removes me from time.

I write this entry in case explorers from another universe come along and find it, though how they’ll be able to translate it is beyond me. Hopefully they’ll find a way to understand my words and learn not to make my mistake.

After these countless eons, I understand why life is supposed to be short: it’s to preserve our sanity and make each moment something to be treasured.

I’m going to keep this journal with me always. No one will be permitted to look at it while I live. If you’re reading it, you’ll know the end finally came for me. I take comfort in that.

About the Author As a child, J.S. Bailey escaped to fantastic worlds through the magic of books and began to write as soon as she could pick up a pen. She dabbled in writing science fiction until she discovered supernatural suspense novels and decided to write her own. Today, her stories focus on unassuming characters who are thrown into terrifying situations, which may or may not involve ghosts, demons, and evil old men. She believes that good should always triumph in the end. She lives with her husband in Cincinnati, Ohio.