I lay on the metal cot inside my cell staring up at the ceiling. The remains of my last supper lay on the tray by the slot in the door. My date with the chair was a few hours away. I had long been reconciled with the idea that this day was coming. There was no point in fighting it, in fact I deserved it. That tends to happen when you do the things I did, and when you do those bad things in wrong place a date with the executioner is inevitable. When the priest had come to visit I had prayed with him only because I didn’t want his trip to be a waste of his time. I knew there was no forgiveness or redemption in store for me.

I was still awake when the appointed hour came, although I hadn’t heard them come get my supper tray. When I heard the guards enter death row I stood up and waited. Their orders were crisp and clear in my mind as I obeyed, knowing those words would be among the least I would hear.

The walk to the execution room was louder than I expected. The sound of my shoes shuffling across the cement floor, the clanking of the chains that I was bound with, the thumps of the guard’s hard soled boots, the whispered prayers of the priest. It was surreal how loud those noises were, considering any other time in my life I would never have noticed them.

Then the chair was right there in front of me and the guards were unlocking my leg and hand cuffs so I could be seated. There was a pane of one way glass to my left, I knew that family members of some of my victims were in the room beyond to see justice done. There might even be someone from the press to witness my last moments

“Any last words?” The warden’s voice startled me, I didn’t know he had come into chamber.

“It’s too late for that. Let’s get this over with,” I replied quietly.

Without urging from the guards I turned and sat in the chair placing my arms and legs into position. They were business like as they went preparing me and securing the straps I wouldn’t have expected them to be any different. These guards were simply men with a job to do. Then the chamber was empty of everybody but me.

The jolt hit hard when it came. It surged through every part of me and was thousands of times more painful than anything else I had ever felt. The pain lasted for less time than it took to blink and then was gone.

Then there was nothing. No light, no sound. Just endless nothing.

Then I could see, sort of. Everything was hazy like looking through frosted glass. Only those objects right in front of me formed coherent images. As I turned my head anything I wasn’t looking directly at faded into swirling fog. Then I could see myself, or rather my body slumped on the chair. Thin tendrils of smoke wafted up from me. The shape of indistinct person moved up to my body and checked for vital signs. The person was just a shape to me I could see nothing about their face. After a few seconds the person’s headed turned and nodded to somebody I couldn’t see. I could see the person’s head moving as if they were talking but I heard no sound.

“We need your assistance!” a voice, or rather, many voices boomed out of the nothingness around me. The words echoed around in my skull and made my bones rattle down to my toes.

“Wait, how the hell can I feel my toes if I am dead?” The thoughts raced back and forth through my head.

I was so startled by this that I forgot about the voices as I tried turning this new fact over in my head.

Something around me sighed, and I felt multiple presences nearby. There was nothing to see in the vast emptiness I was standing in but there was something there with me. Several somethings. I was pummeled by raw emotions from hate to love and everything in between. Whatever was around me was both the ultimate evil and the ultimate good at the same time and I could feel myself being torn to shreds. As suddenly as the emotions hit me, they were gone.

“We are sorry for the discomfort, but as we said – we need your assistance.”

There was still immense power behind those voices, but it no longer felt like that power was directed right at me. The words were only a bit less intense.

“What? Who?” I had trouble thinking clearly, and hearing voices when I should be dead was downright unsettling. That didn’t take into account I shouldn’t be feeling anything either. Well, I didn’t think I’d be feeling anything at this point.

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“Why are they always like this?” a voice dripping with hate and malignance demanded. The sound of it was so close to nails on a chalkboard I had to cringe away from the pain.

“Their souls are so finite, so small that they have a hard time coming to terms with their transition between existences. You know this brother,” this voice was filled with nothing but love which I could feel warming my insides.

“I can still feel cold and warmth. Nobody ever talked about this!”

“Something has been let loose on the world that should not be loose. We need you to help return it to where it belongs,” the good voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Why me?” I asked weakly looking around for whoever was actually doing the talking.

“You have just died, and we are able to hold your soul here before it recedes back into the cosmos that is time.”

“What?” I was thoroughly confused now.

“Your brain is so underdeveloped you’ll never understand that.”

I could hear the dismissiveness in that tone.

“To put it into terms your ignorance can understand,” the malignant voice continued. “You are in a place where we can BOTH reach you and are able to exert influence over you. So, use your ears and listen!”

I had decided I didn’t like this one, even if that did sound like something I would’ve said when I was alive and I would’ve used a similar tone.

“There is an object of power that has been stolen from this place of nothingness and it has somehow been brought to the world you just left. Whoever is using it is untrained and has already made several fatal mistakes. They just haven’t caught up to him yet. If this person manages to release too much of the power this object holds while it is in your old world the fabric that is time will be unraveled and everything ceases to exist.”

I tried to work through what I had heard. Beyond the fact that I should’ve been dead, or at least I thought I should’ve been dead I was hearing voices. Was I the butt of some wild joke the prison warden and guards had dreamed up to torture me? I was able to grasp what they said but not why they said it. Transition between existences? What kind of new age hippie mumbo-jumbo is that?

“These humans are infuriating with their inability to use their brains to grasp anything beyond the basic concepts! We are wasting our time explaining this to him.” It was the darker of the two voices I had been hearing.

“What kind of trickery is going here?” I asked, still thinking this was some sort of joke and I was the butt of that joke. I still hadn’t been able to find any hint of how they had managed to pull it off.

Something grabbed me. I could feel myself being crushed like I was a grape in a wine press.

“You are infuriating,” that something roared. It felt as if that something was right in my face. “We don’t have time to deal with your childish behavior.”

A surge of energy ripped through, all at once more painful, more exhilarating than what went through me on the electric chair. A brightness overwhelmed me, followed by a sensation of being stretched to impossible lengths. When I thought I would snap under the tension my head and feet shot together

Then I went tumbling across pavement and slid to a stop on my face up against a brick wall. I knew that was going to hurt sooner than I would have liked. As I tried to push myself to my knees pain hit me from every part of my body. I hurt more than I ever had in my life before.

After a moment of being on my hands and knees the throbbing in my head eased up enough for me to lift my head and look around. Wherever I was it was sometime after dark. I found myself up against the wall of a squat building on the edge of a parking lot. An apartment complex from the look of the nearby buildings. There was a strange smell on the air, it was new to me and I couldn’t place it. Vehicles of all sorts were parked in many of the spaces. There were marks in the gravel and dirt that ended at me showing me where I had slid across the lot. The other end of those marks stopped near the middle of the lane way down the center of the parking lot giving me no sign of where or how I began my painful slide.

“Damn, that hurt,” I whispered to myself as I tried to get to my feet. I was still wearing the orange prison shirt and pants. The arms, chest and the legs of my outfit bore the marks of my slide. Dirty, torn and I could see what may have been blood soaked into the material. The lighting here was too dim to be sure but looking at my hands there was a dark liquid seeping from the scrapes that could have been blood. I’d have to take a look when I got to somewhere with better lighting.

Many of the apartments in the buildings surrounding me were dark, but there quite a few with lights on. I needed a shower and a change of clothes, maybe something to eat, then I could figure out where I was. I chuckled to myself as I clued into the fact that the vehicles around me would give me a clue where I was. At the same time the throb in my head had eased up significantly, but I still had—a need, a pull to head off in a certain direction. It was faint but there. Turning in a circle showed that the direction it pulled me was in the same direction no matter which way I turned. I assumed that mental tug was pointing me at whatever those beings wanted me to find.

In search of at least one answer I slowly made my way to the nearest cluster of vehicles to get a look at their license plates. The plates had blue lettering with the image of a sailing ship in the middle on a white background.

“Nova Scotia. Canada’s Ocean Playground,” I read the words out loud. I was a farm boy from the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. Geography was never a favorite topic of mine.

“This day just keeps getting better,” I mumbled to myself as I set off in search of an apartment I could get into without too much fuss.