The Damned by Andrew Pyper Read Free Book Online Page A

me, too.
    She’s told me this herself, in her midnight whispers. A voice audible just under the white noise of the shower stall, a singsong that followed me through the streets on my long, pointless walks.
    You’re not supposed to be here, Danny. But as long as you are, you’ll live like you’re dead. Like me.
    She was most threatening on the two occasions over the last twenty years when I asked a woman out to share a meal with me. The first time my date asked who the blond girl standing behind my chair in the restaurant was, and left before the main courses arrived. The second time the woman herself called to say she’d be unable to make it out as she’d fallen ill, though I could tell from the quaver in her voice that Ash had come to see her.
    Jealousy is the one emotion my sister has never had to fake.
    So I closed the door on the world, on the fantasy of companionship, of family. Heeded her warnings. It seemed to have worked.
    Over the past year or so, Ash’s visits became less frequent. I even tried to convince myself that, maybe, she was nothing more than a ghost among ghosts. Distracting, yes, even a little frightening. But essentially just another thing one could learn to manage. Ghosts are the dead that can make themselves visible, but once you see there’s nothing they can do they lose their power.
    But I was wrong about that.
    Ghosts can do things. They can speak, they can touch, they can hold their face over yours so they’re the first thing you see when you wake.
    And if they find a bridge that can carry enough of them from their side to ours, they can kill.
    S OMETHING ABOUT BEING TRULY ALONE in the world gave me the idea of seeing if I could get The After published.
    With my father gone there wasn’t anyone, not a living soul, who I might want to ask if it was a good idea, or confide in, or protect. It wasn’t money I needed (Dad left the house and his retirement savings to me, and given that I existed like a junk food monk, I could have lived on at the corner of Farnum and Fairgrove until the Orchard heart finally claimed me, too). It certainly wasn’t a desire for attention. I think it was because dying was all I had, the only information I could offer the world. The only way I might provide comfort to another, even if it could be for no one other than a stranger.
    After some calls and letters, there were a number of New York agents willing to submit the manuscript. I went with the one with the lowest expectations.
    At the time, as one editor who rejected the book put it, “Heaven’s not really big right now.” It was true that there weren’t the number of afterlife memoirs on the shelves then that there are now. But a couple publishers liked the “hook” of my mother’s Omega, and theone I decided on eventually persuaded me to add Evidence of Heaven as a subtitle.
    I ended up doing it for a living. The talks, the fly-in-fly-out book signings. Enough to make the payments on my narrow, two-story town house outside Porter Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I more or less randomly moved after the book came out. Other than this, through the rest of my twenties and thirties I lived in self-imposed solitude. No wife, no kids. A handful of publishing-related acquaintances but no friends.
    That was before I met Willa and Eddie. Before something happened to me far stranger than dying and coming back again.
    I fell in love.

9
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    L ove at first sight.
    This was the exhausted phrase I used when asked how Willa and I got together. It’s a question put to us more than most, given my shambling height next to her squat self, her tomboyish freckles and raunchy laugh.
    â€œHow did you two meet?” the world reasonably asked.
    â€œIt was love at first sight,” I said. “My sight, anyway. Not sure she even saw me at first.”
    â€œYou? I saw you, ” Willa would jump in. “How could I not see you?”
    It’s