Stepping Outside Oneself - A Paranormal Suspense Read online

  Chapter 4

  Gray.

  Everything was gray.

  The sky above, with its delicate curls of charcoal-gray clouds and dove-gray falling raindrops in sparkling precision.

  The mangled remnants of what had once been my smoky gray RAV4. My sister had convinced her then-boyfriend to custom paint it for me when I couldn’t find a model in a color I liked. It lay wedged, upside-down, up against a tractor trailer almost as if someone had crumpled a sheet of aluminum foil and then tossed it away.

  I could see now what the bystander had been talking about. We were at the edge of a steep drop-off. The tops of pines, thirty feet high, were just about level with us. If my car hadn’t slammed into that park semi – if it had instead sailed off, off, off, into that rain-soaked distance – I might not have been found for days. Weeks. And by then all of my precious life blood would have drained out of me, soaked into the ground, and been lost.

  I’d have returned to that Earth from which I had come.

  My body, at least.

  I blinked and turned.

  There it was, below me, splayed out on that light-blue blanket. Mike was kneeling over me, his hands crossed one-on-top-the-other at my chest, steadily compressing the rhythms of CPR. His face was a mask of concentration and he stared into my open, unseeing eyes. The green irises with flecks of gold shone in the ambulance’s lights. My body made soft stretches in time with his motion, but there was no other sign of life.

  Because I was floating here above him.

  The reality of it sunk in.

  I was free.

  I looked around, soaking it in. The world was still there, but it was as if I were seeing it through some sort of a virtual reality gaming system. I was no longer a part of it. There was the stretch of road in the distance, wholly empty, running all the way south to Providence. I turned, and in the other direction I could now see that traffic was backing up, blocked by a pair of police cars. I felt a twinge of guilt at causing all these drivers to be late for whatever it was they were doing at three a.m.

  Not to worry. I won’t keep you long.

  Mike growled, “Come back, damn it! Don’t you give up on me!”

  I looked down at him with compassion. Surely he realized our bodies were just like a chrysalis for a caterpillar? They were temporary. They were always temporary. Just a shell to hold us for the blink of an eye. And then they were sloughed off.

  I drifted over to the ambulance. From my vantage point I could see that it had endured some rough times. There were all sorts of dents and dings. Right there, in its center, it looked as if a heavy tree branch had caved it in. It had almost made the shape of a crab. There were the two outstretched claws … and there was the body …

  I blinked.

  My sister and I were the sign of the crab.

  We’d joked about it, that it was hard in this day and age to be labelled with “cancer” as a trait. Surely that meant that, sometime when we were ancient, we’d both come down with breast cancer and have to get one each lopped off. We’d have a single pair of breasts between us. But instead neither of us had made it that far. She’d died five years ago and now I was going to die alone, here on a stretch of highway, and all because –

  I blinked.

  Mary.

  I looked again at the crab on the roof.

  Mike’s voice was rough. “Damnit, Sarah! Fight! Come back!”

  Awareness billowed in me. Mary had always believed in the supernatural. In ghosts and fairies and spirits. I’d always told her she was insane, of course. That I only believed what I saw with my own two eyes.

  I saw the crab. Something I could not possibly be seeing with my corporeal form.

  I floated back to my body and stared at it. How did this work? If I rotated myself so I was oriented properly, and just settled back down –

  SLAM

  I gasped in a lungful of air, coughing, and Mike immediately lifted his hands from my chest, his face glowing with relief. “Jesus, you had me scared,” he burst out. He ran a hand along his brow and gave me a weary smile. “Took you long enough.”

  “The crab,” I urged. “Go and see the crab.”

  His brow creased. “Right, we’ll go see the crab soon. I need to finish this leg of yours, because if you keep bleeding –”

  “No, the crab! I need you –” I spun my head and found the cop, who was still watching us. At his chest was a video-cam.

  Joy lifted my heart.

  He could prove it! He could prove that I had left my body!

  “You! Go climb the bumper and look at the ambulance roof! Show that there’s a crab there!”

  His lips pressed together. “Lady, there’s no crab on that roof. You just lay down and –”

  I tried to press up to sitting. “Not a real crab, you jerk! A dent! Like a crab! It’ll prove I left my body! My sister always swore she wanted to do something like this when she was dying. She never had the chance. I need to do this for her. Go climb up on the bumper and take a look!”

  He looked askance at the ambulance. “I don’t think I –”

  I struggled up. “Look, you lazy phlegm-wad, if you don’t –”

  Mike looked up at the cop. “Jesus, Abe, I need her calm! Just go and take a look already!”

  Abe shrugged in resignation and trundled over to the ambulance.

  Mike turned back to me. “Now lay flat. Your leg is a mess, Sarah, and I have to get this wrapped up. And then we have to get you to the emergency room.”

  I lay against the cold ground, but my eyes were on the cop. On the way he took eons to carefully lift himself up onto the bumper … to peer over …

  His voice called back in confusion. “Hey, I think she’s right. I can see it. In the center of your roof. There really is this big dent that looks like a crab.”

  Jordan’s gaze went between the ambulance and me. “Maybe she saw it when you were getting her out of her car, Mike.”

  Mike glanced at him in disbelief. “I’m not that tall, Jordan. There’s no way she could see up there from my arms.”

  Jordan shook his head. “There’s got to be some sort of a logical explanation. There’s no such thing as ghosts or spirits. When we die, that’s it. The light turns off.”

  I snapped, “But I did see it. I was up there above everything. Floating above my own body, even.”

  Jordan drew one of those smiles on his lips. The fake smiles that infuriated me beyond anything else. His voice took on the tone of a first-grade teacher whose student has just told him that the sky was purple. “Of course you were floating high in the sky. We can have someone talk to you all about it once we –”

  “Stop it,” I snapped. “I saw what I saw! And I saw Mary in the road! She was standing there looking at me!”

  Jordan’s voice edged with disbelief. “Mary who is dead.”

  “But she’s not dead! Or she is, but maybe she’s – maybe she’s –”

  My heart thundered with the possibilities, with the wild, frantic hope –

  Mike’s voice cried from far away, “Jesus, Sarah, don’t –”

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