The Man with the Devil's Tongue (A Prologue to the End of the World and Some Other Things)

Chapter 1

On the night of April Frausini's twentieth birthday, her dead boyfriend came to her room with a knife in his mouth.

This wasn't altogether uncommon. Brett often visited April after his motorcycle accident a year ago.

The knife was new, though.

April pulled the bed sheets closer as Brett passed through her door. Across the room, her roommate Cary slept on, oblivious to the paranormal visitor.

It was about eleven years ago that April woke to a fright-her first period and her first vision of a ghost in her room.

The ghost that particular day had been that of her grandmother. Old granny seemed so happy that her little girl was a woman now. April, meanwhile, had screamed her head off until her parents rushed to her room and granny finally disappeared into dust.

There had been many ghosts since then, most of them silent and not unkind, but April was still prone to frights now and then.

Her parents had treated her as a child with a broken brain. They took April to doctors. The doctors sent her to specialists. The specialists put her on drugs. When the drugs failed to stop the visions, the specialists zapped her brain.

After that, April told them the ghosts had gone.

She lied.

Those years of confusion had left their toll on the Frausini family unit. Their broken child was fixed but the home had developed many cracks.

In the divorce April was given the choice to pick which parent to live with. Her Mom and Dad had spent weeks coaching her, telling lies about one another, trying to paint the best self-portraits of themselves and the cruelest caricatures of the other.

April didn't want to choose either of them after that, but she chose Mom. Dad didn't talk to her much after that. Once she got to college, though, it didn't matter much; she hardly talked to Mom either. The bird was out of the nest, let her fly far. She had enrolled in classes with the intention of becoming a psychologist, believing that if she learned how to help others she may one day learn to help herself.

There were many ghosts on campus. Most of the time, April paid them no mind, but if a ghost detected her eyes upon them, they often sought her out.

She told her boyfriend Brett about it. He believed her, or at least he said he did.

Visiting her after his own death, he had no choice but to believe her now.

As Brett approached her bedside, he took the knife out of his mouth. His spirit was translucent and a dark shade of gray, looking more like an outline, and lacking the finer details of the human face. April had come to learn that a ghost's shade of gray determined their 'mood.'

And Brett was in a foul mood.

April tried to control her breathing. The knife wasn't real, she told herself. But an angry ghost was a very real thing. Had Brett grown restless and agitated while trapped on the mortal plane? Did he mean to vent that frustration on the only one capable of seeing him? April brought her left hand underneath the sheets and searched out her crucifix which she kept at the side of her bed for nights such as this.

Brett said, "I want to kill your roommate."

April almost shushed him, then remembered that only she could hear his words. She couldn't speak loudly, though. Her roommate Cary thought she was weird enough already.

"You can't kill my roommate," April said in a whisper. "You can't kill anybody. Go back to bed, sweetie."

"I can't sleep," Brett said. He ran his hands through his hair, revealing the part of his scalp that had been stripped away during the accident. "I only dream of memories. I don't want them anymore. They hurt worse than dying."