“This isn’t going to be easy,” Ellie Taylor told the only two people in the world who knew just exactly how difficult it was going to be to look when that sheet was peeled back. “Do you need a minute?”
Father Dajani shook his head. He’d aged twenty years in the last twenty-four hours. He was a shell of a man. He gripped his wife’s hand for strength. There was despair just below his skin. He knew the words were coming, and it didn’t matter that they were two of the simplest words in the English language, once they were out of his mouth life as the Dajani family knew it could never be the same again.
“No. I’ll never be ready, no matter how long we wait,” he said, unable to look at her. “I need to do this. Before I can’t.”
Ellie nodded. “I understand,” she said, but of course she couldn’t possibly understand what the man was going through. The words were just words. Meaningless. “There’s no good way to do this, but what’s going to happen is: we’ll go in, the nurse will pull back the sheet so you can see the face, and I’ll ask you if you recognize the body. All you have to do is say yes or no, and then she’ll cover him up again. He’s been prepared for viewing, but even so he’s going to look different. I’ll be right beside you all the time.”
Dajani said nothing.
Taking that as her cue, Ellie opened the door. It was such a small thing, the most mundane of all actions she could imagine, but life-changing just the same.
She followed him into the cold room.
Ellie crossed the linoleum floor to the side of the gurney, nodding to the nurse who already had one hand on the sheet ready for the reveal. It was the worst magic trick imaginable. She drew back the sheet as far as the shallow bay beneath the dead boy’s Adam’s apple. The blue skin didn’t look real; it looked as though it had been shaped out of Play-Doh stretched out too thinly.
Time in the room divided; for her the few seconds of silence were no more than that, but for Father Dajani they were endless. He looked down at his son’s face willing there to have been some sort of mistake, for it to be anyone other than Musa on the slab. He reached out to rest a trembling hand against his boy’s cheek. That was when Ellie noticed the too-lush smell again, just like it had been back at the old man’s house, and again up on the rooftop garden when Viridius had died.
“Help me.”
The words lit up inside her mind, crystal clear. A male voice. Young. Not Father Dajani’s. Not the nurse’s.
“Please. I … I don’t know where I am…”
Ellie backed away from the gurney, her eyes darting all around the room, looking for the source of the voice, for the trick, and cursing the old man and his insincere apology. He hadn’t been lying when he said he’d ruined her life. She didn’t know how, or why, but she knew exactly what Viridius had done to her.
“I can hear voices…”
So can I, she thought hysterically.
“I can hear the crying …
“They’re lost.”
“It’s him,” Dajani said, utterly broken.
Ellie put her hand on his shoulder, ignoring the voice that refused to get out of her head.
“Cover him up,” she told the nurse.
“Not yet. Can I have a minute with him?” He still hadn’t taken his hand from his son’s cheek.
“Of course. Take all the time you need.”
Even as she reached for the door the dead boy’s frightened tears filled her mind. She wanted to scream, “Leave me alone!” his baleful moans haunted her. The dead boy refused to be silenced. He sounded absolutely terrified as he cried: “They’re out there … in the mist … all around me … I can hear them moving about … but I can’t see them. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home … Help me go home … Please…”
Ellie closed her eyes, willing Musa Dajani gone. “Please,” she said, and the nurse mistook her meaning, nodding in response and following her toward the door.
“It’s cold here … So cold…”
She looked back at the body on the slab as she opened the door, and shook her head, refusing to listen.
“Help me…”
They left Dajani alone in the room with his boy, closing the door on them. With the door closed, the voice inside her head was silenced. She saw Julie looking at her, and realized that Mother Dajani was waiting for the world to come tumbling down. “I’m so, so sorry,” Ellie said, and for a moment the woman didn’t seem to register what she’d heard, but then she collapsed in on herself, falling forward. Julie didn’t let her fall. Mother Dajani curled up into his embrace, her face pressed into his shirt. Even muffled, the woman’s wails were wretched. She kept choking on the sobs she couldn’t get out of her body; her chest heaving, the sounds emerging from her mouth ragged, raw, desperate, and broken.
Father Dajani didn’t leave the room for another quarter of an hour.
Fifteen minutes wasn’t enough for the bereaved woman to compose herself. She looked up at him when he finally emerged, her face blotchy and raw with grief, willing him to tell her there had been some terrible mistake, that it wasn’t her son in there on that slab.
He couldn’t look at her.
He just held out his hand and said, “I need to get out of here.”
“Of course. We’ll take you home.”
Dajani shook his head. “No need,” the man said. “We brought the car. I want to be on my own.”
“I can appreciate that, but you’re in no condition to drive, either of you. Let us take you home.”
The fight went out of him. He shrugged and allowed Julie to lead him and his wife back toward the elevators. Ellie was slow to follow. Instead, she went back into the mortuary to look at the boy on the slab, pulling back the thin cotton sheet so she could look at him.
She glanced back over her shoulder to be sure the door was closed. The last thing she wanted to do was upset the dead boy’s parents. “I’m here. I’m listening.”
She touched his cheek, just as his father had, and in that moment felt a surge of electricity so strong the shock was enough to make her flinch back, recoiling from the contact. The room filled with the fragrance of freshly cut grass damp with morning dew. The contact lasted no longer than the cavernous silence between heartbeats, but the aroma lingered, as did the screams of the damned that had swarmed into her head in that moment. Ellie Taylor looked down at her hand, not trusting herself to touch the dead boy again; not after that.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, feeling stupid, but not knowing what else to do.
He didn’t talk to her this time.
“How am I supposed to help you? Jesus Christ, listen to me … I’m talking to a dead kid.”
She shook her head, and left the dead boy on the slab, determined that she would help him the only way she knew how: she would find his killer.