I was in a dungeon, nailing someone to a thick wooden board, when the phone rang. I opened my eyes and sat up in my bedroom, listening to Mom’s footsteps as she walked to her cell phone. It was five a.m. I’d been asleep for almost two hours.
“Hello?” she said. Her voice was muffled, but there was only one plausible reason for a phone call at this hour. The coroner was bringing the body, and they needed it worked on quickly. They were probably flying it back to the family this afternoon. I got out of bed and pulled on a shirt.
“Bye.” I heard the soft snap as Mom closed her phone, and the creak of the floor as she began to move. Faint footsteps told me she was walking into the hall, and a moment later she opened my door. “Wake up, John, the . . . oh. Do you ever sleep?”
“Was that Ron?” I asked, pulling on socks.
“Yeah, they’re bringing the . . . how do you do that?”
“I’m a genius,” I said. “You probably ought to call Margaret if they’re in this much of a hurry.”
She stared at me a moment, then flipped open her phone. “Get something to eat,” she said, walking back to her room. “And stop knowing everything.”
Within half an hour Ron pulled up in the coroner’s van, along with a couple of policemen. I stayed upstairs, watching through the window, as they met Mom by the back door and carried the body in.
Margaret pulled up as the van was leaving, and we all met downstairs to pull on our masks and aprons. Mom was leafing through the papers.
“No body parts reported missing,” she said. We’d learned to check that before we got started, after a bad experience last fall. “They performed a full autopsy, bagged the organs, and sewed her back up.” She set down the papers. “I hate these.”
“Dibs on the cavity embalming,” said Margaret, pushing open the door. The cavity embalming was where we used the trocar to suck all the gunk out of the organs and replace them with embalming fluid; with an autopsy case like this, where the organs had been removed, she could do that off to the side of the room while Mom and I did an arterial embalming on the rest of the body. The trouble was, an arterial embalming for a body with no organs was like trying to carry water in a sieve—there were too many holes, and the fluid leaked everywhere. We’d have to embalm it in at least four sections, possibly more.
The body was laid on the metal table, still in the body bag. I washed my hands quickly and pulled on a pair of disposable gloves, then zipped the bag open. The coroner had wrapped her in towels for modesty, and to soak up any blood that leaked out during transit, but there wasn’t much blood left at this point. The body was white and empty, like a doll.
“Grab her head,” Mom said, putting one hand under the small of the woman’s back, and another under her legs. I supported the head and shoulders, and on three we lifted the body up while Margaret pulled the body bag out from underneath. We set the corpse back on the table and Mom started peeling away the towels. “Close your eyes,” she said, and I did, waiting patiently while she stowed the transport towels in a biohazard bag and draped new ones over the chest and groin. I kept my eyes closed until she said, “all done.”
The body’s chest was cut in a Y-incision: two cuts from shoulder to breastbone, and one long cut from breastbone to groin. The top half had been stitched back up, but the bottom was still loose and a bright orange bag peeked through. Margaret carefully pulled the abdomen open and extracted the heavy bag, setting it on a metal cart and then wheeling it to the side counter by the trocar. Mom handed me a warm rag and a bottle of Dis-Spray, and we went to work cleaning the outside of the corpse.
Embalming usually relaxed me, but this time little details kept jumping out and spoiling the calm. First it was her wrists—no longer red, for there was very little blood left in the tissue, but obviously worn and tattered. They’d been bound for some time, and very tightly; portions of the skin were worn away completely to expose the muscle underneath. I imagined the body alive—a living, breathing woman, struggling desperately to escape her bonds. She twisted and turned, fighting back the pain as the ropes bit into her skin and tore it away. She couldn’t escape.
I thought about the lake, calm and desolate, and pushed the thoughts of struggle away. I’m just cleaning—nothing more, nothing less. Let me spray some more on this part, and scrub it gently. Everything is quiet. Everything is fine.
The skin was smooth for the most part, but marked here and there with cuts, scabs, and blisters. Now that the body was cleaned, far more of these blemishes were evident than I’d seen at the lake—they speckled the body like bits of confetti, random and horrifying. What could do this? The blisters were obviously from burns—ominous patches where the skin had bubbled and swollen like a hot dog on a grill. I touched one softly, feeling the bumps and valleys. The center of the blistered patch was tough, like a callus, or like it had burned hotter than the rest. Someone had placed something on this person, intentionally burning it, over and over in different places.
Someone had tortured it.
The cuts and scratches on the body that had looked so strange before made better sense now—she hadn’t scratched herself by running through a forest or tumbling through the brush to escape, she had been deliberately stabbed and sliced numerous times. From the scabs that covered some of the wounds it was obvious that this had been going on for some time; I looked closer, searching for healed-over scars, and found some, thin and white, scattered all over her skin. How would someone make such small lacerations? A straight razor would make a long slash, unless it was used very carefully; these, on the other hand, were short, almost puncture-like wounds. I set down the Dis-Spray and examined one of the recent wounds in greater detail, stretching it apart with my fingers. It wasn’t deep. I looked at another one, a tiny hole in the muscle of her thigh, and this time it was deep—long and narrow, like a nail hole. I flashed back to my dream this morning, hearing a girl scream, and imagined what I would use to make these kinds of wounds: a nail here, a screwdriver there, a pair of scissors somewhere else. It looked chaotic, but there was a pattern to it as well—a mind guiding the procedure, trying different tools to see what each one would do, and what reaction each one would get. Did a nail in the thigh provoke the same kind of scream as a nail in the shoulder? A nail in the abdomen? Which did the victim fear more when you came back the second time—a wound that pierced muscle, organ, or bone?
“John?”
I looked up. Mom was staring at me.
“Huh?”
“Are you okay?” It was hard to read her through the surgical mask, but her eyes were dark and narrow, and the skin around them was wrinkled. She was concerned.
“I’m fine,” I said, picking up the Dis-Spray and getting back to work. “I’m just tired.”
“You just woke up.”
“I’m still waking up,” I said. “I’m just groggy, I’m fine.”
“Okay,” said Mom, and went back to work on the body’s hair.
Except I wasn’t fine. Everything I saw, I imagined myself doing—every wound on the body I saw myself inflicting. This was not the serene death of an old woman who had passed away in her sleep; this was a brutal, violent death—a dehumanizing series of tortures and humiliations. This didn’t pacify Mr. Monster, it excited him. He was a shark who smelled blood in the water. He was a tiger who smelled fresh meat.
I was a killer who sensed a victim—not this body, but the thing that had attacked it. I was a killer of killers, and a new one in town meant it was time to kill again.
I slammed down the Dis-Spray, harder than I’d meant to, and left for the bathroom. I couldn’t be in there anymore. I peeled off my gloves and tossed them in the trash, turning on the sink and scooping handfuls of cold water into my mouth. I swallowed, wiping my face on my sleeve, then paused. After a moment I drank again.
I would not allow myself to think those thoughts. I am not a killer, I thought, Mr. Monster is the killer. I’m the one who stops him. I was scared.
But I had to get back in there. I had to know everything I could about the body, because that would tell me more about the person who’d killed it. But why did I need to know? Agent Forman’s words came back to me: “You’re not a cop. You’re not an investigator.” I didn’t need to study this body at all. I could ignore it completely.
I walked back in to the embalming room without thinking, as if my feet were moving by themselves. I turned to walk out but instead pulled two more gloves from the box on the counter.
“Everything okay?” Mom asked.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. I walked back to the table and picked up my rag, using it as an excuse to look closer at the cuts in the corpse’s arms.
“We’re all done with the top,” said Mom, “help me sit her up so we can do the back.” I took one shoulder, Mom took the other, and we pulled; rigor mortis had come and gone, and the body moved easily.
“Uh oh,” said Mom, freezing in place. The body was halfway sitting, but it was light and hollow and easy to hold up. I looked at Mom’s hand and saw her pressing against the skin of the body’s back. It moved strangely. “Tissue gas,” she said.
Margaret turned and looked warily at Mom. “You’re kidding.”
“Check it out,” said Mom, and moved her hand again. I peered closer and saw it—the skin moved over the top of the muscle freely, as if it were disconnected. That was bad.
“The skin is slipping,” said Mom. “The autopsy cleansers must have masked the smell.” She leaned in close to the back, sniffed, then pulled down her mask and sniffed again. She reeled back in disgust. “Oh, that’s horrible. Lay her back down, John.”
We laid the body down, minds racing. Tissue gas was an embalmer’s worst nightmare—a highly infectious bacteria that thrived on dead tissue and released a noxious gas inside the body. Smell was usually the easiest way to detect it, but sometimes—as with this body—the smell was buried under other chemicals, and the only way to identify it was the “skin-slip” Mom had found on the back, where interior gas bubbles separated the skin from the muscle. The gas itself was bad enough, because the stink would soon become so foul it would be all but impossible to cover up. That didn’t reflect well on us when people showed up for the viewing. Even worse than the gas, though, were the bacteria that made it—once they got into your workspace, you might never get them out again. If we didn’t put a stop to this right now, every body we embalmed would catch the same bacteria from our tools and table. It could destroy the entire business.
“Everybody stop and think,” said Mom. “What have we touched?”
“Rubber gloves,” said Margaret. “A scalpel to cut open the hazmat bag; the trocar.”
“Just one?” asked Mom.
“It was already attached to the vaccum,” said Margaret. “I didn’t even open the drawer with the others.”
“I touched the Dis-Spray bottle, three rags, the comb, and the shampoo,” said Mom. “John touched a bottle and a rag.”
“And the doorknob,” I said, “and the bathroom doorknob.”
“You didn’t take your gloves off first?”
“No.”
“John . . . ,” said Mom, annoyed. “Okay, anything else?”
“I touched the cart,” said Margaret, “and we should disinfect the counters as well, just in case.”
“And the table, obviously,” said Mom. “Let’s designate an infection zone by Margaret, and put all of our used tools there; we’ll keep the rest of it clean, and when we’re done embalming we can clean the room til it screams in protest.”
“And we need to call the police,” I said.
Mom and Margaret both looked up in surprise. “Why?” asked Mom.
“This might be important to the investigation.”
“You don’t think they already know?” asked Mom. “They’ve been studying this body for four days.”
“Was it in the paperwork?” I asked.
Mom thought, then glanced at Margaret. “He’s right. Ron would have told us if he knew. The bacteria might not have developed yet.”
“Plus Ron’s got to disinfect his whole lab,” said Margaret. “It won’t do us any good to keep clean if every body he sends us is already infected.” She rolled her eyes. “I have half a mind to go clean it myself—I don’t know if I trust Ron to do it right.”
Mom peeled off her gloves, threw them in the trash, then washed her hands with hot water and soap in the sink. She turned off the water, thought a moment, then turned it back on and washed the water handles and soap dispenser as well. When she was certain everything was clean she motioned for me to open the door, so she wouldn’t have to touch anything else in the room, and went to the office to call.
“Smart thinking, John,” said Margaret. “If they don’t know about the tissue gas, one of the wounds might be a lot older than they think it is. You’ve got a knack for this stuff.” She turned back to her pile of organs, and I went back to the body. Tissue gas was most common in bedsores—big, nasty ones on hospital patients, or on old people who never moved for weeks or months at a time. Gangrene was another possible source of the bacteria, and usually showed up in the same types of cases. It was possible that this body could have developed tissue gas in one of those ways if she’d been held in one place for months on end, without being allowed to move, but there was no evidence of that here—besides, both of those causes would leave massive exterior wounds. Most of hers were small, and any obvious infections had been cleaned away during the autopsy.
There was one other way to get the right kind of bacteria, that didn’t require a big wound. I put my hands under the body’s shoulders and lifted, feeling the skin slide sickly under my fingers. The back was covered with cuts and punctures and burns, just like the rest of the body, but some, as I’d noticed before, were bigger. More misshapen. The coroner had cleaned the body so well that there were no visible infections, but the shape of the wounds was enough if you knew what you were looking for: a series of wounds similar to the others, but irregular and distorted as if they’d been stretched out of shape. Just like a bedsore, but smaller. There were only a few ways that kind of thing would happen to an ordinary wound, and only one of them would result in tissue gas. Somehow, by accident or by design, these wounds had been infected with human waste.
I peered more closely at the wounds. She might have been kept for days in a cell with no toilet, or some feces might have been forced into the wounds manually by her attacker. Either way, the cruel, devastating dehumanization hit me like a wave, pulling me back down into the waking nightmare I’d been in ever since we started on the body.
I was in the embalming room, but I was also in a basement somewhere; I was with Janella Willis the corpse, but I was also with Janella Willis the crying, screaming victim—not just once but a dozen times, a hundred times, all at once, different realities lacing in and out of each other as they howled around me. I was stabbing her, I was burning her, I was breaking her bones. Sometimes I laughed, sometimes I cursed and raged, and other times I was simply there, blank and hollow. Part of my mind was enjoying the thrill of it, while another part was trying to analyze the possibilities; I tried to shut them both off, desperate to think about anything else, but it was too much. Instead I focused on the analytical side, trying to force myself to turn this into something helpful, hoping there was some way I could learn something or discover something by living through the scenario in my mind. Instead I found myself playing out the same scenarios with Brooke instead, simultaneously thrilled and repulsed by each piercing scream.
No! I refused to let myself sink to that. My eyes were open, but dark daydreams clouded my view and melded with the reality around me. The woman on the table was Brooke, her abdomen sliced wide open. No! Never Brooke! I tried again to push the thoughts away entirely, but again I was too weak. The best I could do was to twist them, to change them into something less intense.
Marci.
Marci was physically beautiful, but she was nothing to me—and that made her easier to bear thinking about. Fantasizing about Brooke felt wrong, like I was betraying her directly, but if I did the same for Marci . . . I had no attachment to Marci. There was nothing to betray. I latched on to the thought—Marci’s shape and her color, the dark brown of her hair—and then there she was on the table. I could breathe easier now.
With my mind under stronger control I realized that I was gripping the table with one hand, steadying myself against it. I needed to get out of there. The door opened and Mom came through, sighing, and I put another hand on the table, taking another step toward the door.
I can do this, I thought. I’m leaving a bad situation. I can barely control my own thoughts, but I’m still in command of my actions. Mom said something to Margaret, something about Ron and the phone. I ignored them. I needed to leave.
One more step. I was doing it.
And then the door opened again, and Lauren was standing there—her face bruised, her eyes puffy from damage and tears.
“What happened?” Mom cried.
Lauren was whimpering, a lost kitten in a vast and deadly wilderness. Her words were a wrenching knot of terror and confusion: “He hit me.”
And then the world shattered, and Mr. Monster roared so loud that Mom and Margaret and Lauren could all hear it. They looked at me in shock, and I ran from the room.
Death! Death!
Confusion became rage, and the deep, driving need to kill exploded in a torrent of red-hot emotion. No more waiting—it has to be now! I stumbled through the halls, lost in my own home, until at last I found my way outside and sucked in the fresh air like a drowning man.
Kill him! Make him scream!
NO!
It was still early, but the sun was rising and the town was infused with ghostly half-light. I paused for balance, holding the wall, then walked to my car and turned it on. I had to do something. The tires squealed as I pulled away, and in my mind Curt answered with a squeal of terror. At the corner I forced myself to turn in the opposite direction from his house, my driving wild and erratic, as if my own hands were fighting with me.
I will not kill!
Then what?
I pushed my foot down hard, pressing the pedal all the way to the floor, letting the pure animal thrill of speed wipe the fog away from my mind. When it cleared I slowed down and answered myself.
Fire.
I could feel the need boiling inside of me, a knot of angry tension that shook and struggled like a living thing. Fire would calm it. Fire.
I drove wildly to the old warehouse, sliding to a stop in the gravel outside. I climbed out of the car and slammed the door, loving the wrenching crash as the force of it shook the car. There was no one else there, and I stormed inside looking for fuel; I didn’t have my gas can, but there in the middle of the floor were the cans of alcohol-based paint. I picked up one of these and splashed the contents across the mattress and a pile of wood I’d built the other day. I picked up another and threw the whole thing; it bounced off a wall and hit the ground with a thud, spraying its flammable liquid all across the warehouse. I kicked a barrel to knock it over, but it stayed up and I kicked it again, then again and again, feeling a rush of adrenaline as the barrel resisted, resisted, and at last tipped over.
Then I thought of Curt beating Lauren, and I yelled again. It echoed madly in the warehouse, inarticulate and inhuman.
I fumbled in my pocket for a book of matches—the one thing a pyromaniac was never without—and pried a match out of it with trembling hands. I folded the matchbook over backwards, trapping the chemical head between the strike pad and the cardboard, then ripping it out violently. The head popped to life and the match lit, and with it I lit the entire book. I felt a thrill as it flared up, my breath growing fast and urgent, and dropped the ball of flame onto the fuel-soaked mattress. Fire rippled across it instantly, flashing brightly and then dying down as the initial fuel was consumed. Soon the mattress itself was on fire, not just the paint, and I stepped closer. It was beautiful.
The fire spread to other things—the pallets I’d stacked it on, the wooden planks nearby, the splash of paint on the floor. I watched it move from one object to the next, sometimes running, sometimes leaping, always moving and growing and crackling with joy. Was the cat here? I didn’t care—let it burn. I stayed until it wasn’t safe anymore, relishing the release. This was what I wanted! This was power! With fire itself doing my bidding, I was practically a god.
I backed out slowly, watching the flames dance behind the windows. As I stood in the doorway a flash of movement caught my eye, and I saw the white cat streaking out from a hiding place toward the open door. I timed its approach and slammed my foot into the door frame right as it passed, hearing it hiss and cry as my kick pinned it to the wall. I grabbed its tail in my hands and yanked it up angrily, pulling it across and slamming it into the wall. It cried again, desperate, and I windmilled it back into the wall on the other side of the door. It hit with a sickening crunch.
“Is this what you wanted?” I was screaming. “Is this what you wanted?” I leaned back and then whipped it forward, hurling the cat into the middle of the jubilant orange flames. It arced through the air and slammed sickeningly into a stack of wood. I heard it mewl again, weak and wretched, and then the heat was too much and I backed out of the building completely.