CHAPTER ONE

I was conceived in the back seat of my father’s 1972 Mercury Marquis on a rainy April night in 1978. And wouldn’t you know, my name happened to be Mercury… Mercury Erin Bernz. I needn’t tell you whose idea it was to name me Mercury. If you guessed my father, you didn’t have to guess. His name, John Bernz, a man who loved his car more than his own daughter.

I once put a long scrape on the driver’s side with a stick I had been using as a witch’s wand. I was nine then; my age meant nothing to an angry man baring the buckle-end of a black, leather belt. Even here, where souls have no need for brains, I remember the tears rolling down my cheeks and hearing the screams that hadn’t batted an eye on any neighbor taking in the beauty of that warm, May morning. Except for one man on our street, Mr. Chesney. He looked up from the rose trimmers he had in his hands, and at that moment I thought he was going to intervene. His mouth had opened slightly… but he just looked away and began pruning again. Everyone was afraid of my father�"especially me. But I never thought things would go this far. 

I’m here, wherever here is. It’s not heaven or hell; it’s a place here on Earth. Souls, not all like me, live day by day as if death is something only imagined by the living. I suppose it’s because they choose to forget. Not all, though. Here, memories of departing are alive for some. Typically, the dead tend to vanquish their dark and final moments on Earth, unless they were taken out of rights by the evil that walks unadorned in filth and disease. I am one of the souls with pain and spite lingering still on the other side. Perhaps the sting of the pain withholds too much venom to overcome. I simply cannot help it, as they cannot help it. In this limbo my energy brings me to the night I was murdered by my own father: February 17, 1995. I’m Mercury Erin Bernz, the dead girl, and this is my story.