No matter how much the opaque spirit of the man in his kitchen vied for his attention, Eddie kept him tuned out. His old skin sagged from his bones—death by old age—kind, rheumy eyes always staring, an unknowable plea drowning in their depths. Eddie had tried talking to the man many times before because he reminded him of his own long-deceased grandfather. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get a coherent word or thought from the man. He knew that he was the problem, not the poor old spirit. So, he tried his best to ignore him. Maybe he’d get the hint that Eddie wasn’t much company and leave.

That also went for the woman wearing a billowing dress with a collar that went up along her neck, barely concealing a red, vertical slash, standing behind the couch whispering his name.

He turned up the volume when a skinny man clothed in rags, his eyes swollen and leaking a viscous fluid, sat in the chair to his left. The man’s mouth, stained with grime, moved but no sound came out.

Just ignore them. They’ll get tired and go away.

Eddie ran a hand over the remaining stubble of his hair. He’d shaved it all off a week ago. It was hot and he couldn’t be bothered with it anymore. It was yet another aspect of his process to simplify his life. He’d traded in his Bronx apartment for a better place in Cos Cob, Connecticut. It was small, the rent was cheap and it was close to his job as the manager of a pet supplies store. The stock market may have been gangbusters but the economy was still in a major shit heap. Almost everyone in the pet store had recent degrees going to waste.

Closing his eyes, he conjured the image of his talisman, the mental portal his uber-psychic father had taught him to construct as a barrier between the living and the dead.

The once-solid barn sitting amidst a green and gold field of waving grass looked weathered and worn. The vibrant red paint had faded, chipped away, revealing gray, rotting wood. He placed himself within the shadowy confines of the barn, facing the wide-open double doors.

There was a time he could keep those doors locked tight, opening them only when he wanted to, when he needed to speak to the other side. Now, no matter how hard he tried, the hinges remained rusted in place, his psychic barrier thrown wide for all to come and go as they please.

The doorbell rang, yanking him from his broken talisman. He paid for the pizza, dropped the box on his coffee table but didn’t open it. His head hung low as he fumbled with his cell phone.

Please, Jessica, call. I’m just as broken as you are, maybe even more so. Something’s coming, and if we don’t face it, I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.

The constant pressure of the dead, like being a passenger in a steadily rising jet, had never felt more ominous, more foreboding. Sometimes, when his mind was weak with exhaustion and he couldn’t hold them back or continue ignoring their presence, he was able to sense another mind, a living mind, someone with gifts, though nothing quite as immense as those he’d been born with, poking, prodding, searching. This mind, whenever it came through, caused great ripples in the pool of souls that existed around him—hell, around everyone. Then they would press in even closer, demanding—what? He desperately tried to close his mind, not only to keep out the other, but to erect a “do not cross” barrier for the multitudes that congregated in his apartment, the pet store, even his car.

What did they want? What were they up to?

It had gotten much worse over the past couple of weeks. Bits and pieces came into focus momentarily, then evaporated like steam. Eddie clung to each fragment, seeing how they fit in the puzzle.

As the picture lost its obscurity, his worry grew.

Jessica’s number, repeated a dozen times, stared back at him from his phone’s call log. I know I’m the last one you want to talk to, but whatever’s brewing doesn’t care about what either of us wants.

When he looked up, every space in the apartment was crammed with the ethereal bodies of the dead. All eyes, even empty sockets as black as the core of the galaxy, were fixed on him. Jaws worked, up and down, up and down, but he refused to hear their words.

A half dozen women, young, blond, pretty, their wet, onyx eyes shielding him from their intent, stood between him and the television, their forms so concrete, he couldn’t see the picture behind them. Heavy droplets of tears fell from their unfathomable eyes.

“Not you again,” he said, pinching his eyes shut.

The women were the worst of the lot. With the others, he was still able to catch glimpses of how they lived, how they died, what they wanted from him, which at this point seemed to be his sanity. Not so with the blonds, the oldest maybe scraping up against middle age. Their chests didn’t move, but he could sense the inrush of air that preceded the same thing they said to him, day and night.

“Perfect, not perfect. Perfect, not perfect.”

When they’d first come to him, along with the parade of other uninvited dead, he’d tried to connect with them, to learn their story, perhaps set them to rest. At the very least, his intent was to get them to bother someone else, maybe even someone not as sensitive as he, a person whose life wouldn’t be turned inside out by their constant presence. They were as impenetrable as the deepest edges of space, wraiths of dazzling beauty and confounding purpose.

Who wasn’t perfect? Were they talking about themselves? They sure looked perfect enough, at least in the physical sense.

Or was it a commentary on him, a condemnation that despite his cockiness in his psychic abilities, he was a far cry from what they truly needed, perhaps what all of the dead who suffocated him needed.

“Perfect, not perfect.”

He reached for the can of beer on the coffee table, the hot, bitter remains barely enough to coat his tongue. The amber bottle of anti-anxiety pills sat on top of his television, but to get to them, he’d have to pass through the women. For a man who had been interacting with the dead since he was a small child, he was frustratingly afraid to get so close as to mix his atoms with theirs, to share a space in place and time more intimate than if he’d made love to them.

They were what scared him, what drove him to break his promise never to speak to Jessica again. The others wanted to be around him because he was one of the few that could see and interact with them, a filament connecting them to a life now gone.

The perfect women were different. Not so long ago, he would have been able to decipher their intent. Now, they were either an urging or an admonishment. A plea or a caution. Sometimes the other dead, equally disturbed by them, gave him glimpses, but it was hard to coalesce everything into a linear plotline.

Eddie buried his head in a stained pillow, squeezing his eyes shut so hard, bright sparks flitted in his periphery.

Jessica.

“Are you sure this is it?” the tall, pale man asked, rubbing his thumb along the crease in the paper.

“The spirits are quite sure,” Nina D’Arcangela replied with a dismissive wave of her hand. She loathed people who doubted her. She’d had enough of that growing up, the strange kid in a family of eight who had been left alone because no one knew how to react to the things she said and did. Even her parents, the weakest pair of suburban automatons to ever sire children, had been of no use to her, other than to question her sanity, and seemingly, her right to be part of the family.

What she didn’t say was that the connection to the spirit world had never been so strong. It was almost overwhelming, not to say unsettling. She’d been a psychic medium since she’d turned thirteen, able to snatch bits and bobs from the netherworld. It was always enough to build a story that would assure her return clientele.