Obsidian: A Decade of Horror Stories by Women

Author:Lee, Tanith & Armstrong, Kelley & Pinborough, Sarah & Tuttle, Lisa & Williams, Liz & Littlewood, Alison & McHugh, Maura & Sperring, Kari & O'Regan, Marie & Mauro, Laura [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: NewCon Press
Published: 2016-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Living With The Dead

Molly Brown

I went to the park today, and for the first time in five years, Alice looked at me as if she knew me.

Alice used to be my best friend. We were in the same class at school. We used to do each other’s hair and borrow each other’s clothes until one night when we were both sixteen, and everything changed.

The details don’t matter now. All you need to know is that we were at a party in a basement, and we both snorted something that we thought was cocaine, but it wasn’t.

The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital with everyone telling me it was a miracle I was alive because the other girl was dead.

There’d been a story in the local paper a couple of months earlier about a guy who’d collapsed in the park. He was declared dead on arrival at the hospital and was taken to the hospital mortuary. A few hours later, he woke up.

No one thought much about it at the time, everyone just assumed he’d been mistakenly declared dead when he was actually in a coma. These things happen. Not often – and never before in the kind of place where nobody dies without the whole town knowing about it – but they happen. The man hadn’t spoken once since waking; they said he just stared into space.

I remember they interviewed some expert on the news who used a lot of big words just to say: sometimes it’s like that when you wake up from a coma.

Alice had been dead a little over twenty-four hours when she opened her eyes. Like the guy before her, she never spoke or reacted to anyone or anything; she just seemed to stare into the distance as if she were looking at something no one else could see.

A few weeks later they sent her home, saying there was nothing they could do.

I wasn’t that well myself – as everyone kept reminding me, I was lucky to be alive – but I went to visit Alice every day. We would sit in her room with me talking and her staring straight ahead as if I wasn’t there. And every day as I left, her mother would beg me to come back again tomorrow: “You’re her best friend. Keep talking to her; maybe you can bring her back.”

When a forty-nine-year-old man named Sam Jenkins woke up the morning after he’d died of a heart attack, people finally began to suspect that something strange was going on. This man was definitely dead, the doctors insisted. They were being especially careful about who they declared dead these days; Sam Jenkins had been repeatedly checked – and double-checked – for any signs of life, and his body had been cold when they finally allowed it to be taken to the mortuary. Like the previous two people to wake in the hospital mortuary, Sam Jenkins never spoke. Unlike the other two, Sam Jenkins had risen naked from his mortuary slab, walked home without being noticed (it was four a.