The Last Handful of Clover - Book 1: The Hereafter

1.01 Tree of Blood

June 5, 9:02 pm

Three days after he died, the Void spat out Richard like a mouthful of curdled milk.

He arrived back in the world in terror, as every ghost did—his face a contorted mass of pain, unable to scream through a mouth still unformed, unable to see through eyes that had yet to gel. Gross appendages that had yet to become arms and legs, kicked feebly against what felt like a wall, what felt like furniture, what felt like a floor far more solid that he himself.

Inside of the body, which was quickly assembling itself like a time-lapse film of a developing fetus, Richard Pratt knew nothing but agony. He did not know he was Richard Pratt, did not know he was even human. All he felt was terror and pain.

And loss.

Crushing loss so powerful that if he had a heart, it would have stopped beating just to escape it. If he had a mind, it would have crumbled under the relentless weight of it.

By the time his body was fully formed, Richard began to suspect that he was not just a mass of pain and loneliness. He was something that had once been human. And his first coherent thoughts emerged:

How can a mind so empty be in such agony? How can emptiness feel so full of despair, of loss, of regret?

In the Void, he had lost everything. He knew that there had been a life before this moment. In fact, there had been a whole human story. But the Void had stripped everything away from him—the people he loved, the life he had, and eventually, even his memories and his sense of who he used to be. All that remained was a deep and soul-crushing sense of everything that had been taken from him.

The darkness broke, and Richard sensed shapes and colors around him. The world slowly took shape, like salt crystals in a jar of seawater, or as if the memories were acid, dripping on him with a maddening lack of predictability or pattern.

Images from the Void returned...

He had been flowing toward something, as if he had been floating in a stream of black blood, in a night so deep that no light could ever penetrate it. But still he had felt the current drawing him toward a distant ocean. And worse, he had not been alone in the stream. The river had been full of the dead, like rotting corpses torn from their graves by a tsunami. They battered against him in the same desperation and terror. Their fingers clawed at each other with a shared, mindless need.

But then he had been... what?

Snagged?

Yes, that seemed right. It was as if a claw or branch had plucked him from the stream. No, chosen him, and then hurled him backward, toward the land of the living. And after the Void had ripped everything from him, his empty husk found itself... here.

Blackness.

Silence. No longer did Richard have an urge to scream. The sound of his ragged, panicked breathing slowly faded in his ears.

He heard a clock ticking somewhere, and the sound was sharp and clear. It's a grandfather clock, he thought, unsure how he knew that in the blackness. And more sounds: a low hum he couldn't identify. A dog's bark, very far away. Slow traffic. These sounds were familiar, and as he focused on them, the world stopped spinning. He sensed a floor under him. And then a name gelled in the dark.

Richard, he remembered. My name is Richard Pratt.

No, that's not quite right. My name was Richard Pratt...

Like moths drawn to a light, other memories fluttered to him. This was my home, he thought, and paused. The thread to who he was felt so fragile that he was afraid that if he tugged upon it, it would break.