Orpheus - Haunting the Dead.pdf - Dice

THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER
near-death experiences, one of the marks Orpheus looks
for in their agents. And everything I’ve seen here makes
me think you’d be a good candidate. Orpheus is looking
for ghosts to join its ranks. Spirits have abilities. You can
be trained in your new form. You can grow, learn more.
It’s up to you. And you knew. Part of you knew all along.”
Remembering them, Shutty rolled up her tuxedo
sleeves to stare at her old scars. Long and ragged from
her wrist to the middle of her forearm, they were
seething now, worms crawling in and out of worms. She
regarded the sight curiously. If it had been an effect in
a movie, she might have thought it was pretty cool.
“You mean I knew this about the world all along?”
“In a way,” Dennison said.
Kleck screeched.
Shutty bristled. “This is ridiculous. What are you, a
fucking recruiter? I’m dead! Dead! Not on my way to
ROTC. And you… you don’t even know what that thing
was that ate Alex, or where he went now, do you?”
“Yeah. That’s all true,” Dennison said.
The screaming shrank to a low moaning. Beneath
that were the sounds of Kleck’s hands scratching against
the tile. Beneath that, the sound of steady chewing.
Shutty was weighing, wavering, looking down, looking
back, hungering for whatever was on the other side of
that door.
“How long can I stay a ghost?” she asked, though the
answer didn’t really matter.
“I’ve never met one more than a few years old,
myself. The theory is that eventually you just, well…
fade,” Dennison said.
Clawing at the floor, twitching from the waste up,
his precious phantom genitalia long ago eaten away,
Kleck muttered, “Help me. Help me.”
But Kate was at the open door, holding her eye
contact with Shutty.
“I’m not going any place he can go,” Shutty said.
Dennison nodded. “If we let those things eat him, and
I honestly don’t know what they’re doing to him, I’ll need
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HAUNTING THE DEAD
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