GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll

Author:Jonathan Carroll [Carroll, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2005-10-21T21:00:00+00:00

Isabelle’s watch stopped working in the middle of Leni’s funeral. She looked down at her wrist because she couldn’t bear to look straight ahead one second more. Straight ahead was the coffin of Leni Salomon, about to be lowered into the ground forever. Just that thought was unbearable, much less the visual confirmation. Looking at the amber-colored wooden box and knowing what lay inside it was unbearable.

Vincent stood on one side of Isabelle while Flora stood on the other. Flora had not let go of her hand once during the ceremony. Oddly enough, neither woman had cried. Vincent noticed this but was not about to ask why. He knew how much they had adored their dead friend. If their grief for her was silent, then so be it.

He also knew that wherever Leni was now, she was all right. Like an amnesiac slowly regaining his memory after a traumatic blow to the head, Ettrich had begun to remember bits and pieces of what death was like. As he had said to Isabelle, most of these memories came to him like bad, out-of-focus photographs. He would stare at them, turn them this way and that in his bafflement, wonder what they were, what they meant, where they were taken. But a few of the pictures were clear and distinct. Ettrich had begun carrying a small notebook in his pocket in which he wrote down things he thought relevant to these memories; or associations between them and his hunches.

What he didn’t grasp was that one small part of his mind worked light-years faster than the rest now, accelerated even more so when he was in physical contact with Isabelle. This part of him had recognized important details in these “photos” and gone on to make fundamental connections. Racing ahead of the rest of his conscious mind—seeing, analyzing, and filing—this super-perceptive sense was one of several things he had unknowingly brought back with him from death. Right now however it did him almost no good because he was only beginning to recognize it and its messages.

For example on the first page of his notebook, amid an array of memory fragments, lists, and free-association doodles, he had written Flannery. But when he wrote it, a name that had come to him out of nowhere, Ettrich thought it referred to Flannery O’Connor whose short stories he had loved as a student. On the seventh page of the notebook in a corner he had drawn a first-rate cartoon of a Great Dane.

This highly developed part of his mind knew that he and Isabelle were in danger and even where the danger came from. But no matter how brilliant or informed it was, it had no way of conveying the warning to him directly. This was not death where a Broximon or Bob the Bear could break the rules to help. Ettrich was alive again and here he would have to discover things on his own.

Nevertheless he was the first one to see John Flannery at the funeral that day.

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