She slid into the seat next to me, pressing against my side until I moved over enough for her to fully sit down. Even when I went to the far wall of the booth she kept sliding over, meeting my eyes and smiling as though she was a lover wanting to be close in a shared seat. I didn’t lower my gaze, but I still felt my skin crawl, and when I spoke, I could hear panic in my voice.
“What are you doing here?”
The woman chuckled and gave a shrug. “Several reasons. Maybe the most obvious one to you is to let you know that I could. That I know who you are, where you are, and how to get to you.”
“Why, so you can kill me?”
Her grin widened as she put her hand on my leg and slid it swiftly up to my groin. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. I could do it up close or far away. Make it look like an accident or a random act of violence. Like I said, getting to you might be the most obvious reason, but it’s not the only reason. Or the most interesting one.”
I frowned at her and shoved her hand away from me. “Okay then. Why else?”
Snickering, she propped the side of her head on her upturned hand and stared at me. “Well, to look at you, for one. I’ve seen your body plenty, but other than our little indirect interactions, I don’t have a full picture of you. You know, your personality, your intelligence, that kind of thing.”
I glanced around the coffee shop. I could try to call or signal for help, but what good would that do? What could I say that anyone would believe or that would get her arrested or even detained? They’d probably lock me up, and I’d lose the chance to actually learn anything new. So I forced myself to stay calm as I gave her a nod.
“Okay. Why do you care about that?”
Her eyes widened. “There we go. I like good questions, and that’s a very good one. By way of an answer, I think I’ll tell you a story. The story of how I was once like you.” She wrinkled her nose. “Well, kinda.”
She paused a moment to see if I had a response, but I kept quiet. The longer I could keep her talking, the more likely she’d say something that might help me get out of this or beat her. So I just nodded, and with that, she began.
I told you before this isn’t my first rodeo, and that’s true. Twelve years ago I was driving home from work one night when suddenly…well, I wasn’t. I was sitting in a hospital waiting room in what I learned was Kuala Lumpur, though that took me a bit to figure out. Turns out I was in the body of a seventy-five year old Malasian man who’s wife was dying of lung cancer. It was very scary and disorienting, but once I was satisfied I wasn’t dead or dreaming or crazy, I started trying to attack the problems and questions before me.
First off, I was still me for the most part. I had my memories, my personality, things like that. But it wasn’t a clean swap either. I realized this when a nurse came in to give me an update on my wife’s latest test results. I talked to her normally, pretending like I knew the woman she was talking about and that I was saddened by the latest bad prognosis—I’ve always been pretty good at faking that kind of stuff, and I did improv for a couple of semesters in college, but I still give myself credit for holding my shit together at the time. Just talking to her, asking questions I thought she might expect me to ask, while still trying to figure out how I’d gotten stuck in the old man I saw in the waiting room mirror.
It was halfway through the conversation with the nurse that it struck me. I wasn’t talking to her in English, but in Malay. And while I consider myself to be somewhat worldly, I do not know how to say a single word in Malay.
I spent the next day and a half as that man. As disorienting and terrifying as it might have been for you or for Taylor your first times, at least you had me communicating a little. A touchstone to outside reality letting you know that it wasn’t all just inside your head. Because even after I felt I’d convinced myself I wasn’t crazy, the doubts would still creep back in. What if I really was this old Malaysian guy and I was having a break from reality?
It didn’t help that I kept finding little things that didn’t match with my memories of myself. I’m not musically inclined, for example. But that night, when I went back to where the man and his wife lived, I found an old guitar in the corner of their bedroom. Without even thinking about it, I picked it up and started to play. It filled me with a strange sense of peace for about thirty seconds, and then it hit me that I shouldn’t be able to play it if I was really me. Throwing it down, I went back out into the city, prowling the streets until I found an all-night internet café.
I looked myself up. I kept a decently low profile even back then, but I was less careful before this started happening, and it didn’t take long before I found enough to know I did exist and that whatever this was, it wasn’t me being crazy or just a dream. I spent the next few hours walking around, trying to decide what I should do next, and I wound up at this little place eating breakfast as the sun came up.
By then I’d grown more accustomed to that body, but everything was still strange—my eyesight was terrible and my hearing wasn’t much better. Everything was stiff, and whenever I got up, my joints ached for a couple of minutes until I got warmed up. Even the food I was eating tasted different, and I wasn’t entirely sure it was just because of the locale. I was pondering this when suddenly I wasn’t in a restaurant. I was in an airport, about to board a plane.
That’s when I first knew for sure that it really was me swapping bodies with someone else. The man had booked a flight back to Malaysia within an hour of our swap, on my credit card no less. He was trying to get back to his wife I guess, but by the time he was waiting in line with his boarding pass, he was back where I’d been, eating breakfast.
I never had a chance to confirm it, but this swap hadn’t been his first time. Couldn’t have been. He’d been on my laptop booking the flight back too fast, and to the extent I’d retraced his route while in my body, there weren’t any signs of someone going through the process I’d went through of figuring out what was going on or why. To one extent or another, he already knew.
Not that it helped him in the end. I couldn’t remember his name, but I remembered enough about the hospital and area that I was able to keep an eye out for the obituaries. Maybe it was morbid curiosity or some instinct to find more pieces of the puzzle, but I didn’t have long to wait for an answer. I couldn’t recognize his name and I’d never seen her face, but when his face popped up there a few days later, I had what I needed to dig deeper.
Most of the information came from an another article three days earlier. The man had apparently come back to the hospital to learn that his wife had died while he was away. Flying into a rage, he’d tore through the cancer floor before disappearing into the stairwell. By the time security came up and tracked him to the roof of the hospital, it was already too late. When he jumped, he hit a parked car and bounced off, crashing halfway through the window of an administration office on the hospital’s first floor. Big news in that day’s news cycle over there, but as it turned out, even bigger news for me. Because right away it told me that him dying didn’t affect me. I wasn’t hurt or killed by what had happened when I wasn’t in his body, so despite our connection, whatever the source or nature of it, I was still safe. What I learned a few months later was that his death hadn’t ended anything either.
That’s when I swapped into someone new.
You see, once you start swapping with someone, you’ll keep swapping with them for so long as you’re both alive. But once one of you dies, the survivor keeps on going, and in time they start swapping with someone else. And while I’ve always suspected that my first swap had some experience and knowledge, I’ve only met one person that had things somewhat figured out.
Her name was Debbie. She’d been swapping back and forth with people since she was seventeen, and over the years, she’d gotten very good at it. What, for a lot of people, would be terrifying, she saw as liberating. Like she’d been chosen by God to live dozens of lives. I didn’t buy into her religious hokum, but I couldn’t deny that it was supernatural or at least beyond my ability to explain. So I made a point of talking to her. Leaving her notes, writing her letters. We even got to where we’d talk on the phone as we became friends.
Before Debbie, I’d always felt like an intruder or a voyeur. I’d found ways to make it fun and exciting, sure, but the uncertainty and mystery of it all made it hard to fully enjoy. Debbie helped with that, giving me a better idea of how it all worked, even if neither of us really knew why.
So some people just naturally start swapping, like me…and so far as I can tell, Taylor. This isn’t some long-standing phenomena I don’t think. Best me and Debbie ever figured out, the only accounts that seem to match what we’re doing go back a couple of hundred years, but they’ve ramped up over time. Still very rare, of course, and those “accounts” are almost always written off as fantasy or insane. But anyway, it happens now from time to time.
What is probably of greater interest to you is the fact that not everyone comes to the swap meet through random selection. If a person in a swapping pair dies thinking of a specific person, there’s a very high chance—no guarantees, but a very high chance—that if that person is alive, they’ll be the next one selected as the dead one’s replacement.
I broke in, unable to hold my tongue any longer or keep the anger out of my raised voice. “That’s why you had him hold my picture when you killed him!”
She scowled at me. “Lower your voice. And yes. You were arguably a loose end, but I also had the impression from going through Taylor’s stuff that you were a good friend, intelligent and level-headed. Someone I could talk to and work out an arrangement with if you were reasonable, or get rid of if not.” The woman smirked. “Though I have to tell you, your little outburst is making me question if you’re worth reasoning with.”
Swallowing, I gritted my teeth as I replied. “I’ll stay calm. So…so what else did you learn from Debbie?”
She shrugged. “At the time, not much. She was ahead of me, but there’s no rule book for this stuff. You learn by experience, experimentation and, in the case of me and Debbie, collaboration.”
I frowned. “Well what happened then? She must have died, right? Or why else are you still swapping with new people?”
She stared at me coldly. “Well, obviously. And it hasn’t been the same since I lost Debbie. I’ve had a lot of fun, but the monotony gets to you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re bored of swapping to new bodies?”
The woman snorted. “No. Are you slow? The opposite. I can go for weeks or months between people, and there are times in there when I get worried it’ll just stop forever. That’s why I try to make the most out of the times I get.”
“By killing people.”
She smiled thinly at me. “Yes, but I don’t kill my swap partner so long as they aren’t a threat or obstacle to me. Taylor was smart and determined, and he would have eventually found a way to find me, possibly expose me. I hated to lose him, but it was him or me.” Her smile grew larger. “And I’ll always choose me.”
God, I wanted to kill her right there. But that would be stupid. Someone would stop me, and I’d be the one that got arrested. Instead I tried to think of another useful question.
“You know when it’s going to happen, don’t you?”
Her laugh was warm this time. “See, I knew I liked you. Yeah, I can tell. I couldn’t at first. I would have vomited my guts up the first time if the old man had left his wife to eat anytime soon. But the nausea gets better over time. You get control quicker and you start getting a little tickle in the back of your head, kind of like an itch. It’s gotten so I can tell when its coming a few minutes or hours ahead of time depending on how it feels, but nothing more precise.”
I nodded. “Okay. Yeah, I knew that from the video.”
She frowned. “I know you knew it from the video. That’s why I made the video that way. As a simple test to see what you would notice and figure out. Don’t make me like you less by bragging about something that only proves you’re not an idiot.”
I flushed and started to respond when I realized how bizarre this all was. I was feeling embarrassed, about to defend myself to this woman, this monster, when what I should be doing was
“Sorry Alvin, got to cut this short.”
With that, she stood up and looked around the coffee shop as she reached into her purse for something. It was a long black pistol, and even as I began to cry out, she was already firing.
Her first shot went through the man behind the counter, followed by two in the back of the old woman paying for her coffee. She turned then, shooting each of a family of four as they scrabbled for the side door. A couple of those she only wounded, so she shot them again in the head as they tried to crawl away.
Someone had triggered an alarm, maybe a fire alarm, by that point, and several people had made it outside, but that didn’t stop her from emptying the last of her rounds into a young woman cowering beneath the espresso machines. The first of the police were pulling up as she threw down the gun and laid down on her belly. She didn’t say anything or even look my way until they pulled me down onto the floor next to her. Then, just as they were handcuffing her and lifting her back up to carry outside, she met my eyes for a moment.
And gave me a little wink.
They treated me as a suspect for the first hour, and as a possible accomplice for the next couple of hours after that. They knew from the store videos that I hadn’t done anything, but they also knew she’d been sitting pressed up against me for twenty minutes before she stood up and started her murder spree. I knew better than to tell them the truth, so I told them what would make at least some sense: that she was a stranger, an attractive woman who had just come up to me at the coffee shop, and at first had seemed normal. We had just made small talk, and I admitted it all seemed odd, but she was hot and I didn’t have anywhere to be, so I decided to just see where it went. Then she got up without warning and started killing everyone in sight.
The cops didn’t like that answer, but they couldn’t dispute it either. There was no connection between the two of us that could be proven, and I could honestly tell them that I didn’t even know her name. They finally let me go an hour ago, and I’ve spent the time since writing this all down as fast as I can, the real true version of what happened. I need to send it to someone fast, because maybe it’s my imagination, but I think I feel a faint tickling in the back of my head. Maybe what she told me about that is a lie, but I
That’s as far as he got before the swap unfortunately, but I think I can finish this for him. Most of it is going to educated guesses, but I have gotten pretty good at this.
Alvin swapped back to find himself in a holding cell. On the concrete floor he found a wet blue balloon and an empty sandwich bag. He may have even figured out that I vomited that balloon up after I was alone in the cell. After he realizes how his stomach is beginning to hurt, he might even realize that the little bag had been full of a potent and fast-acting poison. If not, maybe the residue on his new lips will give him a clue.
In his lap he’ll hopefully find the other item from the balloon. A small, neatly folded note for him I wrote hours earlier. Not because I had to, but because I saw no harm in it. Perhaps it helped him understand, and if not, at least it made the end of our game feel a bit more satisfying. Like saying “checkmate” when you knock over the other player’s king.
The note said:
In case I don’t tell you before now—if the other one dies while you’re in the loaner, you keep it free of charge. Keep your chin up, Debbie.
The police talked to me again the next week, but it was half-hearted. They still wanted to know more about me and Deborah Haskins of Vancouver, BC. Yes, it was true she’d somehow committed suicide while in holding the week before, but they still found it strange that there were no ties between us.
I smiled and gave them a shrug. This body was a good one. Young and healthy. No signs of neurological problems, and I’d known from Taylor’s social media that Alvin kept in good shape. It was nice to be a man again, and if I’m being honest, Alvin was better-looking than I’d been in my prime. Over the last week I’d practiced being him enough I was fairly comfortable, but I was still mindful of making my smile match the few videos of him I could find. Not too big, not too long. Just a small, almost bashful grin as I met the detective’s gaze, maybe with a bit of my own twinkle in the eyes.
“I guess it’s just a mystery, but then detectives live on mysteries, don’t they?”
He glowered at me. “Don’t be a smartass.”
I stood up and grabbed my jacket off the back of the chair. Alvin’s taste in clothes really was terrible, but I’d have to improve it gradually so no one paid too much attention. I planned on staying here, at least for awhile.
“Sorry, but I really do have things to do.”
His scowl deepened. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
I grinned at him, one of my real smiles for just a moment as I lifted a middle finger toward him and headed for the door.
Petentro t1_irg8i5z wrote
So like is this the fucking origin story of the grave keeper? Because I can't help but see the similarities