was his only reply.RED WET GRIN
GEMMA FILES
Imagine a lady, old as dirt. Kind of old where there don’t seem to be much left of her but bones, wrapped in a loose, wrinkly bag of skin. Cataracts on her slitty blue eyes, so thick they make ‘em throw back light; she stinks of vinegar and baby powder, adult diaper rash and Clorox bleach. Goes without saying she’s white, too, but I will anyhow, just to set the scene.
Chart down the bottom of her bed says camp, Mrs. Willena, plus a bunch of meds and a few more diagnoses—degenerative dementia; Alzheimer’s disease. And on the very last line, there’s this, just in case: has signed a DNR.
Most old ladies, they got yellow teeth, stained from years of smoking, coffee; some got off-white or ivory, meaning they come out at the end of the day, go in a cup and get cleaned with Polident if you’re well provided for, baking soda if not. Dip and no insurance gives you brown teeth, or black, or none. Mrs. Camp, though—she had something different, something I never saw before or since. Bitch was closemouthed in general, had a scowl on her, like knotted purse-strings. But sometimes . . .
. . . sometimes, Mrs. Camp, she let slip with a kind of wet, red grin, ‘specially if she thought you weren’t looking. Thin in the lips but with way too many teeth for comfort, all dyed dark as stewed beetroot somehow, and crooked with it, too. That’s how I first knew she was a wrong ‘un.
My mawmaw knew conjure, grew up with it. And my Auntie Fee grew up with her, so she knew it, too—maybe not as much, but enough.
So: “What makes somebody’s smile that shade?” I asked her, one day, as we sat in her room down the end of the DNR unit. “It don’t seem natural.”
Auntie Fee laughed a bit, just a bare hissing sketch of the way she used to, and blew a little smoke out through her tracheotomy scar; janitors’d been good enough to unplug the fire alarms in that part of the home a while back, ‘cause when you got Covid and you’re upward of eighty, who the hell cares? “Ain’t much natural ‘bout that one,” she whispered, and I nodded. “But them choppers of hers . . . they mind me of something your mawmaw used to mention, back when. You ever hear of reddening the bones?”
“Never.”
“Well, you go home and look it up on that Google of yours, Lainey. Thing knows more’n I’ve forgot, or so I hear.”
Didn’t have the internet at home, so I went to McDonald’s instead. Google showed me pictures of graves from Paleolithic times, skeletons dyed with ochre and madder root, sprinkled with the dust of ground-up rowan-tree berries. The idea was to bring vitality back by coloring them the same shade as blood, so you could consult with your elders if things got bad enough—uncover ‘em and ask ‘em for advice, same way you would’ve back when they were alive. Found a couple of sites said you could make totems by cleaning roadkill, disarticulating the skeleton and boiling it, then stewing beetroot mush, red wine, and red chalk dust to make a paste with it. You mixed it with your own blood to “feed” ‘em, then rubbed the bones all over, buried them, dug ‘em back up when the moon was dark, and washed the paste back off: Hey presto, nice and red.
“So you think she’s a conjure lady?” I asked Auntie Fee, the next morning. She stared at me sideways like she didn’t remember a thing about it, which maybe she didn’t. “Or used to be, I guess.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Camp, Fee.”
“Oh, her. Hm, wouldn’t put it past her; sure is haughty enough, not that she’s got any good reason to be, these days. Now she’s stuck in here waitin’ to die with the rest of us, I mean.”
“True enough, I guess. How would a person go ‘bout reddening their own bones, though?”
“Oh child, how would I know? Pass me another one of them ciga-rettes, ‘fore that other nurse comes in.”
It was Covid times, two years on. Got a job in Dawson’s Care Home, mainly to check up on Auntie, and ‘cause they were short-staffed enough they sort of stopped remembering to check up on whether or not a person had the exact kinda experience they claimed they had, on their resume. Though from my point of view, wasn’t like I lied to ‘em, exactly; was halfway through my paramedic training when they slapped me up in Mennenvale Female for a five-year bid, and I probably spent at least three quarters of that playing trusty in medical, drug bust or no drug bust. Kept my head down the whole while to rack up good behavior, and they needed people already knew where to stick a needle wouldn’t kill a bitch outright, so old Doc Rutina didn’t have to fuck around with anything entrance-level while they were bringing in somebody with a shank between their ribs.
Anyhow. Doc’s character testimony came in handy later on, when the M-vale board had to figure out if it was worth letting me out on compassionate after my mother passed—second wave was all over that place already, ‘specially in gen pop, so they decided what the hell. Kind of hilarious in hindsight, considering I hadn’t seen that sorry whore since she dropped me off at Mawmaw’s and skedaddled, back when I was five.
Guess Mawmaw must’ve had enough of men altogether by the time she hit fifty, so she took up with Auntie Fee instead, her best friend since childhood. They raised me up both together, sharin’ a truck, a house, and a bed ‘til Mawmaw got cancer and Fee nursed her through everything after—two surgeries, two courses of radiation, three trips to the hospital that all but cleaned ‘em out, broke ‘em so bad I had to give Fee my tuition just to keep the bank from evicting her after she paid for Mawmaw’s funeral. No baby, that’s so you do better’n either of us is what she told me, with tears in her eyes; and Naw, Fee, I’ll be just fine was what I told her, folding it back into her hand.
Well, what else was I gonna say?
But I was out of M-vale now, just like Auntie Fee was in Dawson’s, penned up with Mrs. Camp and the rest of them wheezing biddies on the DNR unit. She needed me, same way I needed that job—bad enough to lie for, or obfuscate, at least. Didn’t know just how bad, though, not back then.
Not as yet.
Dawson’s was a bleak place, overall—worse than M-vale’s infirmary by far, and that was saying something. Didn’t help they were sticking to no family visits, or all the staff went double-masked, hair-netted, and gloved up like they was treating Ebola, smiles hid behind face shields we had to disinfect thirty times a day. Some nurses wore those clear plastic glasses underneath, like dental hygienists; janitors and us newbies, we mainly got by with dollar-store swim goggles and wraparound sunglasses, if that. Nobody wanted to get too close, on either side.
Auntie Fee was fast asleep when I came in her room that first time. They’d took her wig off and hid it somewhere, her face gone all white and slack under a mess of baby-fine hair; had to take her pulse and study her breath awhile, to convince myself she wasn’t dead already.
Eventually, she cracked one eye open. “Hello, ma’am,” I said, at last. “I’m new ‘round here, thought we should probably get acquainted. My name is—” She stirred and snuffled a bit, grimaced, then went off in a surprise coughing fit once she recognized my voice. “Lainey, child, that you?” she managed, finally. “Gal, I thought you still had . . . six months to go, last I checked. What-all you doin’ up in here, for Christ’s own sake?”
At that I gave a quick look ‘round, just in case anybody else might be bothered to listen in. “Well, now,” I told her, quietly, “Jesus can look after himself, if the Bible’s anything to go by. Bad bitches like us, though—times like this, we got no choice but to look after each other.”
That got her eyes all bright again, thank God, even under those toothin, bleared-up lids. “You go on and speak for yourself, Elaine Ann Merrimay,” she hissed at me. “And wash your damn mouth out, too, while you’re at it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied, smiling, under my mask. One thing a job like mine teaches is that people say all sorts of things when they’re dying. It’s like the process breaks something open inside them, some long-buried infectious reservoir, a quick-draining sick-pocket. They don’t even have to know what’s happening, let alone accept it; might still be entirely convinced they’ll survive, but it doesn’t matter. A sort of punch-drunkenness takes over, when it comes home that the walls around ‘em are probably the ones they’re gonna die inside; not despair, exactly, just a kind of stillness, a waiting. The ones without that look, they were either new, or checked out completely: dementia, psychosis, amnesia, catatonia.
Mrs. Camp wasn’t any of that, though, whatever it said on her chart. Didn’t know what she had goin’ on inside her, either, any more than what she might’ve done to make her teeth so red . . . but it made me shiver.
The night nurse, Ke’Von, said she liked to tuck cutlery up her sleeve and sneak it back to her room, which was creepy, even if she never cut anybody with it but herself. For all her bag-of-bones gauntness, she moved on her own, not fast but steady; never needed hearing aids or glasses, either. Sometimes I saw her whispering to other residents, right close up in the ear—one day I had to take her back to her room when I saw the lady she’d been talking to was crying, but Mrs. Camp wouldn’t tell what she’d been saying, and the other one just blubbered, lying how she couldn’t remember. One way or the other, that same lady died a day or so later, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. Didn’t like how Mrs. Camp grinned as they wheeled her body past, though.
About a week later, I swapped shifts with Ke’Von, ‘cause his boyfriend was sick of ‘em only ever meeting up over breakfast. Not like I had anybody at home, and besides . . . I sort of wanted to know what went on at Dawson’s every night, ‘specially in Mrs. Camp’s room.
“That bitch is odd with a capital ‘O,’” Ke’Von agreed, when I asked him how she seemed, from his angle. “You know she cuts herself, right? All over, where she thinks nobody’s gonna see?”
“Yeah, ‘Von, I know—with the cutlery.”
“Okay, sure . . . but did I tell you what she cuts on herself?” I shook my head, folding another towel. “Looks like words, but not in any language I ever saw. No, seriously—took a snap while she was asleep one time, ran it through a bunch of translation apps. That shit ain’t even Cyrillic, sis.”
“What’s it look like?”
“Um . . . Arabic, maybe, with a little Pinyin thrown in on top, but like if worms wrote it underneath a tree’s bark, or some shit. And you know I know what I’m talkin’ about, so don’t give me that stink eye, either.”
“Yeah, yeah. You higher-education-havin’ motherfucker, you.”
He struck a pose, like he was rolling his Languages degree out for all and sundry to admire. After which we both smirked at each other, high-fived, blew each other a kiss and got the fuck back to work.
Soon enough, I was walking in on Mrs. Camp herself. I knew she’d seen me; caught the eye-flicker, even if she didn’t react as I went through the routine spiel: How’re-we-today-time-for-your-sponge-bath, and the rest. I was the one lost my place, shocked still, when I slid her robe down her shoulders. On her front from breastbone to waist and all down both arms, not to mention the tops of her thighs and inside both her legs, her skin was scar-etched with signs like veves or alchemy, all woven together in a sagging web—some red, some pink, some white as sin. Must’ve taken all her life to make. And looking at it . . . maybe it was the way the wrinkles bent those scars out of shape, but just for a second, the whole of it made my guts twist, and my head hurt.
Then she looked over her shoulder at me, and grinned, like she was ready to bite a chunk out of my arm, right there. Don’t mind admitting it, I jumped. She laughed.
“Be careful when you put your hand under the pillow, dear,” she told me, like it was a secret. For the first time, I heard her accent—Kiwi, maybe, or South African; kayuh-ful, hend, pillah, deah. “Sometimes there are things under there. And they might not always let you go.”
The fuck? I thought. But: “Thanks for the warning, ma’am” was all I replied. To which she simply chuckled, then looked away as I sponged her down, stripped the mattress, checked for night-sweat and other fluids. No need to clean the rubber covers, thank God—Ke’Von was good about that, not like some—but I still had to check, which meant steering her to a chair while the air finished drying her. Which was harder than it’d been a minute ago. I couldn’t get my hands near her without the skin on my arms trying to yank itself away.
It got a bit easier once I’d helped her dress, and she didn’t look at me again, either, which also helped, so I sighed to myself slightly when it was all done. Almost made it out the door, too, before I heard her mutter something.
“Sorry, Mrs. C.—what’s that?”
“I said, ‘You and Miss Fiona over there have a bit of a bond there, don’t you?’” She nodded toward Fee’s room, thin lips twitching. “Oh, not by blood, I mean; can’t smell that on you, not quite. But something, nevertheless.” That grin blooming back out, even as I tried my best not to look. “A certain care, on both sides. It’s very—’sweet’ would be the word, I suppose.”
“Think you got me confused, ma’am. Maybe it’s just ‘cause Miss Fiona and me, we’re . . . from the same stock.”
“Why, what a way to put it, Nurse Merrimay! Sounds positively archaic.”
“Not sure what-all you mean by that, ma’am.”
“Really? You surprise me.”
High-nosed, gutter-minded bitch, I couldn’t stop myself from shaping back inside my jaws, where nobody should’ve been able to see— or hear—it. Her head whipped around, though, like I’d said it out loud. And she just smiled the more, ‘til I felt like I was going to puke with it.
Vinegar in my eyes, prickling at ‘em; vinegar in my nose, making it itch, making me want to sneeze and retch at the same time. Shouldn’t have been able to smell her breath, but I could—it was rank with meat, and peat. Dead vegetable matter. A bog-stink, hot like a breeze from hell.
And then she looked away, suddenly, blinking at the window—the way people do, they got what she’s got. They disconnect. Needle skips in the brain, and they’re somewhere else. Somewhen.
“Suboptimal conditions,” she said, abruptly, scowling up at the dark sky outside. “Oh, I should have prepared better. Why is there never enough time?”
Since I didn’t think she even knew I was here anymore, I could pretend like I hadn’t heard. Never any good answer to that question, anyway.
Last time I ever saw her, alive. But not the last time I ever saw her.
It shouldn’t’ve been me who found her; wouldn’t’ve been, Ke’Von’s man-at-home hadn’t gotten a positive test result that sent ‘Von off to line up for most of the day before to get his ass tested. But he did, and whoever covered ‘Von’s shift did the usual half-assed job, probably just knocking on Mrs. Camp’s door and moving on when nobody answered.
Between paramedic training and M-vale, I’ve seen my share of the shit people can do to each other, and I can handle it—mostly. That room, though; that night. It’s the only thing that’s showed up in my nightmares, since.
I remember walking in, flipping the light and thinking Shit, who painted the place red? Then my foot went out from under me and I went down, splat, in a cold, viscous puddle; scrambled back to my feet, wiping myself down, swearing. Wasn’t ‘til I saw the limp, shredded thing all over the bed and realized how the stuff dripping off me was blood that I punched the alarm and swore even harder, if only so’s I wouldn’t start screaming.
The worst part was how I could still make out Mrs. Camp’s scars on the torn remains of her skin, surrounded by a spill of deflating organs. They made weird channels for the blood leaking everywhere, guiding it into patterns on patterns on patterns, a whole new design.
Doc Dawson and a couple of orderlies came running, took over, set me aside to wait for the cops. I remember Dawson himself wrapping a blanket ‘round my shoulders and saying, quietly: Sorry, Elaine, can’t let you wash ‘til the CSIs say it’s okay. Poor little Nurse Sarah, who thought she could handle anything just ‘cause she’d bagged upward of fifty patients when the ventilators wouldn’t give ‘em enough oxygen and gotten quick enough at slipping a bronchoscopy tube down the throat to clear the lungs of gunk, she just about tore out of the building, wailing— never saw her again. And that one detective, a lady, saying: No one saying you did this, Miss Merrimay, though if you did have to remove all the bones from a body, you’d know how, right? Not to mention the residents and the rest of the staff alike, rubbernecking over the yellow tape like this was hands down the most interesting shit ever happened to them.
Dawson drove me home. “Might want to think about preparing for the worst, Elaine,” he told me, at my door. “I mean, I’ll do my absolute best to avoid the topic but if the police happen to ask me why I hired an uncertified ex-con on compassionate parole as a nurse, I’m going to have to tell them we had no idea you falsified your resume, so we’re letting you go; you understand. Just can’t afford to keep the home operating if we lose our liability insurance.”
So he knew the whole time, obviously. Asshole.
“I get it,” I said, finally. “Thanks for that, Doc. G’night.” And closed the door on him, right in his face. Then I took a hot shower, burned my scrubs in the sink, and passed out.
Last thing I remember is wondering just what the fuck did happen to old Mrs. Camp’s bones, let alone the rest of her.
I took the day off, then switched with ‘Von again for the night shift, ‘cause I felt like I really might as well rack up as much time with Auntie Fee and money as I could, considering. Helped I actually kind of liked the hands-on work—reading a chart all the way through, getting the routine and the meds down, trying to catch issues might’ve got skipped over like solving a puzzle, in a way.
So when I opened the door to a resident’s room I’d never visited before, the bloated size of the woman in bed didn’t throw me any, or the restraints—she was another dementia case, prone to wandering, and people on permanent rest get heavy. The faint sour stink in the air was . . . familiar, somehow, though I knew I didn’t know the name: Azzarello, Mrs. Joy, 8/10/41. Then I read further enough, something did hit me wrong, and frowned. The fuck? I mouthed.
“Language, dear,” croaked the woman in the bed, without opening her eyes.
I froze. “’Scuse me, ma’am?” I asked, after a moment.
“Oh, sorry.” Mrs. Azzarello gave a close-lipped smile, eyes crinkling open. “That’s what I have to tell my grandkids, when they visit. Shocking how young folks talk these days, isn’t it?” She took a deep breath, looking around, like she’d never seen her own room before. “Still, shouldn’t complain. It’s a miracle just to be alive, on a beautiful night like this.”
“Guess so.” My brain did the thing brains are supposed to do, telling me: Course you thought she sounded like Mrs. Camp—you were thinking about Camp and she said something Camp used to say, ‘cause most folk her age say the same things, sooner or later. “Mrs. Azzarello—"
“Call me Joy, dear. And I’ll call you Elaine.”
But my first name’s not on my badge, I thought.
“Um—sure. Well, Joy . . . don’t remember the last time we updated your chart, do you? Offhand.”
Those eyes of hers flickered, and though my brain still had no idea what was going on—wouldn’t admit anything was going on, for fear it might make it true—my nerves and my guts, they knew.
“Oh, I don’t pay attention to all that,” she said. “That’s what my family pays for, don’t they? Elaine.”
And she grinned at me: Wet. Toothy. Red. Dark brown red, like peat. Like meat.
Hello, Mrs. Camp.
Made myself smile after that, say some happy nurse-y bullshit— I don’t remember. It was straight-up reflex, taking over. Meanwhile, I checked the chart again.
Wt Admit: 104 lb 7 oz / 47.732 kg, I read on Mrs. Azzarello’s chart, doing my level best to look dumb as paint. Wt Last: 99 lb 14 oz / 45.303 kg.
The words kept on repeating in my head, while I strained and grunted her puffy, malformed body upright for a sponge-down; couldn’t be less than two hundred pounds, now. Close to her, that vinegary stink was worse, the skin drum-tight, full of weird protrusions and hardnesses. Her round, weirdly cheerful face had marks all down the cheeks and forehead: faint, wavery, purple. Bruises from the inside, spread out thin and long as cellulite, tapering into scars.
Stretch marks, I thought, numbly. Fuckin’ stretch marks.
“See you later, ma’am,” I sang out as I opened up that door again, glancing back. She grinned at me again, even wider.
“Do say hello to Miss Fiona for me, dear,” she said.
(Deah.)
I slammed the door, ran down the hall, and barely made it to the john.
“What would be the point of reddening your own bones?” I asked Auntie Fee, a few days later. Didn’t necessarily expect her to answer, but she did—it was a good day for her, least in that way.
“Your mawmaw would’ve said the point was to keep on living,” she told me, whispering, wheezing. “The soft parts go, but the hard parts survive. Bone has a long memory, you know, longer by far than flesh. Think about all them old kinds of human beings they’re always finding in caves and such—all that information they can get ahold of now, and from nothin’ more than a bunch of dust. They can boil it down, tell you exactly what that person might’ve looked like when they were alive.”
“That’s from DNA, Auntie Fee.”
“Sure, but where-all does DNA live, exactly? In the bone, the marrow. In the smallest of all small things, just like God willed it to do.”
I moistened my lips. “Auntie Fee, you ever notice how Mrs. Camp used to smell like vinegar?”
She snorted. “Hardly coulda missed it.”
“Well, Mrs. Azzarello, she smells like that too, now. Why you think that is?”
“Oh, Lainey. And I thought you were so smart.” She chuckled. “Need a lot of vinegar to make your bones soft, red or not. That’s so’s you can slip ‘em out through the mouth and into the skin of the next person you want to pretend you are. Break out of this whole waiting-to-die nuthouse in stages, one dead old lady at a time.”
Granted, she said it like she couldn’t imagine it being anything but a joke.
And yet.
After my shift, I went surfing on my phone, reading about things like the penanggalan, the kephn, the obayifo, adze, and the loogaroo, who leave their skins behind to go hunting as floating sacks of organs or balls of fire, fireflies even, soaking their guts in vinegar-tubs to shrink ‘em back down for reentry. Then I ordered some stuff off of Amazon, splurging on next-day delivery. And finally, I called Prisha, who’d be on the front desk by now, and handled a lot of the admin. She cheerfully filled me in, without even asking why I needed to know.
Maybe people ‘round here could stand to ask a few more questions, every once in a while, I thought.
Mrs. Azzarello hadn’t talked, though she made a point of grinning when-ever no one else was by, teeth like an open gash. All the mysterious bloat she’d suffered was shrinking away fast, leaving her gaunt as before, or gaunter. The orderlies didn’t think she’d last much longer, offered me a chance to get in on the betting pool. I declined, but asked ‘em to do me a favor: Could they put this Love U Grandma teddy bear in Mrs. A’s room for me? Somewhere she can see it, and it’s facing her; even if she don’t remember who it’s from, it’ll make her happy. They agreed.
Nanny cams in those bears don’t send a signal very far, but Ke’Von’s boyfriend was one of those IT geeks builds fiber-optic networks for fun; he set up an app under my user ID on the home’s network that picked up the cam signal via Bluetooth, so I could log in from my phone to watch it.
This is federal-level privacy violation, he warned me, in a text. Easy to find if admin goes looking. U sure u need to do this???
Yup, I texted back.
was his only reply.
Traded shifts with Ke’Von again, which pissed him off ‘til I made him promise not to go into Mrs. Azzarello’s room, and to stay off that corridor as much as he could—then he got all interested. So I said I’d show him what I came up with, once I had it. “Bitch, you better,” he told me; Might be you think again if it’s what I think it’s gonna be, I thought, but didn’t say.
Tried to stay up and watch, but I fell asleep two hours in and yawned all next day, so I switched to skimming through each night’s video on my break the next morning, deleting it if nothing happened. And four days later, I got my proof.
“Well, technically Mrs. Camp’s file’s still private” was what Prisha had told me, when I called. “But there’s no next-of-kin listed and she’s super deceased, so—what’d you want to know?”
“Oh, just where she came from, who she was. Stuff like that.”
“Well, says here she was born in Rhodesia, this place that used to be next to South Africa; trained as an anthropologist, wrote a lot about various Indigenous folk religions. Oh, and her husband was in Doctors Without Borders, just like Dr. Dawson—a lot younger than her, too, when they hooked up. Doesn’t say how he died, just it was a few years ago, and . . .” She paused. “. . . uh, maybe I shouldn’t get into this, but— hell, the bank records are right there.”
“What?”
“Turns out, Mrs. Camp had her a lot of money set aside. Like, not to be shitty about it, but enough to afford a much better home than here. Huh.” I could almost hear her shrug. “Could be she was being nice to Dr. Dawson, since him and her husband were friends? I guess?”
“Guess we’ll never know,” I said, and hung up.
Okay, so . . . what I saw on that file was bad. Worse than. Like the first time I got beat up so awful I didn’t recognize myself, after. Like that other time I woke up bleeding, hurting from north to south down there, and couldn’t remember anything about it—just laughing at some shitty country bar, things getting dimmer, getting small, flicking off. Like that one night in M-vale I heard someone bumping against the wall over and over, moaning, and I banged back ‘cause I thought they were enjoying themselves just a little too much—but in the morning Guard Winslow went in to find out why they weren’t lined up for count, only to discover someone’d fucked ‘em to death with a hammered-out bolt from the kitchen stove fan hood.
No sound or color, thankfully, but the nanny cam had an infrared setting, and didn’t need light to see: grainy black and white, except reading white for various shades of gray, and what have you.
It starts with Mrs. Azzarello in bed, slack, barely seeming to breathe. A rattle deep in her chest. Then she spasms, jolting back and forth, like somebody with an invisible set of defib panels is trying to revive her: mouth open wide, arms whipping. Black mist abruptly sprays, falling to darken the sheets, painting scattershot patterns over floor and walls.
The body writhes, twisting. It opens its mouth again, wider, wider. More mist sprays from splitting skin. The head twists and twists again, corkscrewing itself upward. The hair parts, shows what must be skull. The gray bedsheets have gone almost completely black; great splotches drip down, soaking the mattress. And something sharp-edged, black as the blood its shed rips free, reaching upward. We catch gleams off slick tendons, peeling away like string cheese; at the end of fleshless fingers, somehow still strung and reaching, dim nails shine.
The rest of the skin tears away with ease, like it’s already rotten. Both hands pop back the scalp, shred and shed the upper body from skull to thighs; knees and feet kick free of the bottom half, like a pair of crotch-ripped pants. Organs spill out the rib cage as the thing inside curls back, clambers into a crouch, crawls to the end of the bed, and sits there waiting, a cat on the lookout for prey. Can’t listen, ‘cause it’s got no ears; can’t see, not with those empty sockets. Doesn’t seem to matter worth a damn, though, on either point.
Then something blurs and jerks, almost too fast to register—it’s down on the floor all of a sudden, spider-crawling, limbs bent back and unnaturally high. Scuttling, to the door, and through it. And just before the light outside blots out the camera’s IR vision, you see how it’s nothing but bones, and all its bones are black.
But in color, you just know, there’s no way they’d be anything but red.
***
Knowing what to expect when I walked into Mrs. Azzarello’s room the next morning didn’t make it any easier, ‘specially the part about how once I hit the alarm, I’d inevitably end up in a room with that same lady cop asking me what I thought the odds were on the same person finding this kind of mess twice in a row. Not to mention why I hadn’t seen fit to tell anybody, last time, how I was not only a former adoptive ward of one of the patients, but a former resident of M-vale.
“’Cause I knew the whole place’d get shut down, if I did,” I said, bluntly. “You tell me what’s more important—fucking my life up even more and gettin’ my auntie thrown out on the street, or figurin’ out who did this. And how.”
That got her to blink. Cops don’t like admitting they don’t know something, but the smarter ones don’t like lying, either; getting caught at it wrecks cases, makes the whole job harder. In the end, she just told me they might come back to me on the topic, so don’t skip town—best I could’ve hoped for, really. Fuck your worst-case scenario, Dr. Dawson.
When it was finally over, I cornered Ke’Von at the end of his shift and dragged him out to my car. He didn’t want to come—was already freaking out over having been grilled by the cops for the second time in a month—but I insisted. “Got something to show you,” I told him, and cued up the recording.
“The fuck’s that,” he asked, afterward, a lot more toneless than that reads.
More like: The fuck. Is that.
“Mrs. Camp,” I answered. “Them weird-ass bones of hers, anyways.”
Never seen a guy that big make a face like that before, and I don’t hope to ever again, if I’m lucky.
“Lainey, no,” he said, finally, kind of pleading, like he thought I could do anything about it. “I mean . . . c’mon now, no. That is some seriously ill sort of bullshit, right there. That just . . . can’t happen.”
“Well, I kind of think it can, ‘Von,” I pointed out, “if only ‘cause we both of us just watched it happen, in real time. Shouldn’t, I do agree with you on that one, for sure. But . . .”
He nodded. “You could’ve faked this, though, somehow, right? For—a joke, or a prank, or whatever. A . . . sick, sick . . . joke.”
Now, that did get me annoyed, just a tad. “Seriously? If I did, your boyfriend must’ve been in on it, ‘cause everything I know about computers could fit in a fuckin’ Dixie cup. Who you think helped me set up this shit, in the first place?”
“Aw, man.” He thought about it for a minute, and I watched emotions chase each other over his face. “Okay, so—ugh, Christ. So. What do we do about it?” I had to think. I mean . . . conjury, at least according to what I’d heard, didn’t truck too much with stopping things. It was more all about rerouting what was already happening, turning it toward or away the people you wanted to hurt or to keep safe. There was always this sense that motion made for more motion, that the world followed a set of laws mostly based on energy and nothing ever really came to an end, as such. But then again—I ain’t my mawmaw, nor yet my Auntie Fee, and some things are just bad, rotten, inexplicably so; need to be done away with, or close as makes no nevermind. Just like some people do things that put ‘em beyond the pale forever, making it so there’s no forgiveness for them, just regret and penitence at best, eternal exclusion from being trustworthy-’til-proven-otherwise at worst.
“I think we gotta kill it,” I told Ke’Von. “Break it down real small, burn it and piss on the ashes, bury it out in the goddamn desert . . . something like that, anyways. So it can’t do something like that anymore, to anyone.”
“Suits me. Can we, though? I mean—that’s fuckin’ magic, right there.”
Well, he wasn’t wrong.
“We can try,” I offered, which was all I had. “Don’t have to help me do it, you don’t want to; I’d understand. Can’t claim I wouldn’t appreciate it if you did, though.”
“I just bet you would. Bitch.”
“All day, every day.”
I gave him a smile, most probably of the wan, small variety. To which he just kind of nodded again, sighing.
“. . . Yeah, okay,” he replied, at last.
***
Whole home was afraid, now, staff talkin’ amongst themselves, surly, too quiet. Overheard Dawson begging one orderly named Wojciech not to quit, and if he couldn’t afford to let even him go—same asshole I knew for a fact liked to slap patients ‘round on the sly—then things really were getting tight around here. Then again, plenty of people were looking at me cross-eyed as well, like they thought the cops might be right, and I was doing this shit. Like it was my fault Mrs. Camp had chosen me to fuck around with while she was making her slow-motion escape from death.
Late that afternoon, Ke’Von found me in the office, on the computer. “Mrs. Waltham,” he murmured. “On the second floor, few doors down from your Auntie Fee. Lisbeth had to get me to help her change the sheets, ‘cause suddenly she’s too heavy for her to move and looking like ten tons of sick in a two-ton bag.” He hesitated. “Might have to go slow, though—Beth swears she’s gonna make sure Dawson knows something weird is going on with Mrs. W., and she’s a good one. She means it.”
Maybe, I thought. But would Dawson do anything about it?
“Go slow, we may not get another chance,” I said.
At that, Ke’Von gave up trying to be subtle; still kept his voice low, thank God. “Lainey, I don’t wanna kill an old lady, no matter what the fuck’s inside her! You get me?”
“Look, me either,” I told him. “So . . . we wait ‘til the bones come out, give it a few days for it to finish—eating her, I guess. Absorbing her. Whatever.”
“Aw, shit.” He looked away. “Man, we’re supposed to help people.”
I sighed. “’Von, Mrs. Waltham’s gonna die anyway—just like Camp, and Azzarello. If it wasn’t Covid it’d be Alzheimer’s; matter of when, not if, this unit. We both know that.”
Ke’Von scowled at empty air. “So what’s this all for, then, anyway?”
I’d asked myself the same question, truth told—wasn’t sure how long Mrs. Camp had been thinkin’ on this, but just hopping over and over from one DNR-havin’ end-of-lifer to the next didn’t sound like any kind of long-term strategy, to me. Then again, maybe there was less and less Mrs. Camp every time she let those red bones rip, ‘side from the parts that remembered how she liked sneering at other people.
“Really don’t think that matters now, ‘Von,” I said, at last.
“Shit, probably not.” He grimaced. “The hell you looking up the cleaning inventory for, exactly?”
“Just checking on something Prisha told me,” I said.
Ke’Von and I’d already both switched back to night shift, which wasn’t hard because—surprise, surprise—people were really eager to get off that shift, if they only could. We snuck the bear into Mrs. Waltham’s room, and Ke’Von’s man put a script on my app to send us an alert if it picked up any motion. “Looks to me like that thing takes at least a minute, minute and a half to finish, completely,” I told him. “So long as one of us stays nearish, we should be able to get there quick enough.”
Ke’Von shook his head. “We really doing this?”
“Brought your bat, didn’t you?” He had, and we weren’t the only night staffers who’d started carrying for self-defense, be it knives, Tasers or tire irons— anything they thought they could hide fast if Dawson dropped by, which he was doing a lot less of. Wojciech had started wearing a full tool belt, with a wrench and a hammer. “Just keep moving, look busy, even if you have to let things slide. Gotta pray there’s no code blues, when that thing goes off.”
“Christ Almighty.” Ke’Von offered his hand; I gripped it tight. “Stay safe, okay?”
That was one long fucking night. Some of it I spent watching Auntie Fee sleep, through the little window on her room’s door; the rest I spent trying to stop myself from checking on Mrs. Waltham, while Ke’Von tried to do the same. Every noise—the buzzing of lights, slow tick of wall clocks, creak of opening doors or the squeak of cleaning bucket wheels—sounded ten times loud as normal, the silence between noises ten times as deep.
One of the former caught my attention when I was passing by Mrs. Waltham’s room for what must have been the twelfth time, eventually: a different kind of wheel-squeak, one I didn’t recognize. Looked down the hall to see Wojciech hauling an empty cargo cart away from a residence room. As the door clicked closed behind him, every muscle in me went instantly cold and stiff, faster than my brain could figure why. “Hey!” I shouted. “Wojciech! The fuck you doing?”
He looked up, startled. Then his eyes narrowed, and my guts clenched up. He stepped away, hand falling to the hammer on his hip, and I took a step back . . . which is when the phone alert from the nanny cam went off, a shrill shriek I’d intentionally picked to be painful as possible. Made me jump like a rabbit.
I turned, grabbed up the bat I’d brought from home—hidden behind a supply closet door—and ran, forgetting Wojciech completely. Pulled up in front of Mrs. Waltham’s room, panting. “’Von, get on over here!” I yelled, hard enough to scrape my own throat. Then I flung the door open and lunged inside.
The upper half of Mrs. Waltham’s body looked like it’d exploded: blood all over the bed, the walls, dotted by shreds of skin. Mrs. Camp’s shiny red-brown skeleton sat up amid the wreckage and clicked its teeth at me, tilting its head, like it was flirting. Words seemed to leak out between its jaws, buzzing inside my head: Why, hello, deah! So pleased you could joy-en me! I do hope you—
Well, fuck that shit.
If I hadn’t right then realized which door Wojciech must’ve opened, not to mention what he must’ve left in that room, I’d probably have stood there frozen a lot longer than I did. But I wasn’t losing anyone else—not that night, anyhow. So I just swung my bat as hard as I could, aiming straight for her skull. That fleshless arm came up, but I’d moved too fast. The bat struck the skull’s temple dead on, with a deafening crack, and spun right the fuck out of my hands, leaving my palms stinging in agony. I staggered backwards. The skull grinned at me, utterly untouched.
And: Oh my deah, deah, deah. The click-buzzing voice sounded almost fond. Didn’t really think that would work, did you? After all, this is magic.
Right that same second, Ke’Von appeared in the doorway, own bat held high like he was ready to try for a grand slam. Then he saw Mrs. Camp, and dropped it. The skeleton’s jaw flapped like it was laughing. It reached down, ripped away the tissue left over its legs, and leaped at him. Ke’Von screamed. They went down together. I jumped in, grabbed my arms ‘round the rib cage—those red bones were hot and slippery, almost steaming—and tried to pull her off, feet skidding on the blood-slick floor. Ke’Von was still screaming, trying to push Mrs. Camp’s naked skull away, but it had its teeth into his wrist now and was biting down, grinding; I shoved one hand up inside her jawbone, hooked the fingers of my other into her eye sockets, and pulled ‘til her grip broke, twisting upper from lower like I was Steve Irwin punching a crocodile’s ticket. As Ke’Von yanked his mauled hand back, I rolled my whole body, hard as I could. Whatever let the thing move like it still had muscles, it sure didn’t give it any extra mass—Mrs. Camp’s skeleton went flying down the hall like a discarded puppet, clattering to the floor in a heap. An instant later it was straight upright again, crouched in that same hunting-spider pose.
This was fun, children, I heard, in my head. But I haven’t the time, right now. See you soon . . . you in particular, Elaine.
Faster than a snake, the thing leaped over our heads, bone feet rat-tling down the hall. By the time I could make myself roll over to look for it, it was gone.
Ke’Von was twisting on the floor, meanwhile, desperately holding his wounded wrist shut. The size of the blood-puddle slapped me back to reality—he needed emergency care, now. I stumbled back into Mrs. Waltham’s room, hit the alarm.
Then I ran.
When the cops realized I wasn’t first on the scene for once, they searched the building, but I’d worked here long enough to know spots like that place behind the boiler where the basement wall went back three extra feet. Thing was a sweatbox, but I gritted my teeth and sat it out, turning on my phone every few minutes to check the time. Please, God, I thought, let them finish up and clear out before it’s too late. If I was right, I had at least a few hours . . . but there was no way to know, really.
At last, around five in the morning, I took my chance.
Creeping back up, I found Mrs. Waltham’s room taped off and the blood already mopped up off the linoleum; whatever Ke’Von had told the cops, they’d apparently decided they didn’t need to leave officers in place. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding, went to the supply closet, unscrewed the handle from one of the mops.
Then I opened the door to Auntie Fee’s room.
Fee was snoring. Her room looked exactly like usual, except for the big blue plastic barrel that asshole Wojciech had left in a corner; I could smell its vinegar stink from here. Faint gurglings echoed from inside it; shadows moved, like they were settling.
Just to confirm my guess, I shook Fee’s shoulder, gently first, than harder. When she didn’t move, I skinned back her eyelid; her pupil shrank, but the eye stayed still. My stomach went cold again. Of course Wojciech had probably pumped something extra into Fee’s IV, to make sure she stayed down—for all I knew, she was dying already.
A dull clunk echoed through the room, then a whirr, a dropped coin edge-spinning, about to fall flat. The stench of vinegar billowed out; I choked, bracing myself on the bed to keep from puking. It took everything I had to make myself turn around.
Mrs. Camp’s skeleton grinned at me as it rose slowly from the open barrel, teeth wet and red and shiny as always. Vinegar ran down its skull’s smooth sides; I heard static in my head yet again, buzzing.
Deah, we’re not really going to bother with this, are we? You already know how fighting me ends, for you.
“Just tell me one thing,” I managed, trying to spit out the taste. “Dawson . . . was he in on this from the beginning?”
The skeleton’s skull tilted. Well, when I realized those nasty plaques in my brain were going to make it difficult to focus, I had to improvise. Dawson offered the perfect environment, even if I had to settle for distinctly substandard material. And I was going to take your auntie, there, just to teach you a lesson, but—no amount of old bodies can ever provide as much power as one young, healthy one, you know. It clapped its jaws, smacking nonexistent lips. Which is why, though I’d have preferred a different, what did you say?—stock?—you’ll do, dear. You’ll do.
The dripping digits came up, curving into claws.
This will hurt quite astonishingly, dear, the skeleton told me, pleas-antly. But not for long.
And: Yeah, I thought, that’s true. If I just stand here and let it.
***
In hindsight, I think Mrs. Camp might just have forgotten how fragile her bones had to be, now she’d spent hours soaking in vinegar. Soft enough to get down a woman’s throat without killing her, right? I mean . . . she was magic, that’s true. But if magic could cure senility, this would be a whole ‘nother sort of story.
When she leaped at me, I didn’t try to duck out of the way; just let her grab on, fingers clasping ‘round my throat. My breath choked off for a second, ‘til I stretched my head back and locked the muscles hard, and the bones bent like rubber. I shoved one hand up to wedge my fingers between hers, loosening her grip; jabbed my other right between her ribs to grab her spine, then ran straight at the wall. The skeleton crumpled between my body and the wallpaper, black rips tearing mushily open in the smooth red surfaces.
The buzzing static in my head skirled upward, into a shriek. While the rubbery arms beat at me helplessly, I grabbed at the joints in hip and shoulder and yanked them apart, threads of sinew stretching like taffy, hurling arms and legs into each corner; they whipped over and over themselves, began humping back toward me like blind snakes, while I threw the rib cage down and trampled on it in a frenzy. Vertebrae separated; ribs spun away. My head was splitting with those silent screams. And then I stamped down hard on the neck, separating skull from spine; crouched and jumped, both feet landing square on the skull, weight of my whole body behind ‘em. Crushed instantly flat, the skull split apart like a rotten melon.
The shrieking stopped. The limbs stopped moving. A second later, whatever held them together dissolved, and every bone not already torn free tumbled away from its neighbors. Suddenly I was standing amidst a scattered fan of pieces, red and damp and lifeless. I dropped to my knees, panting. “Don’t throw up,” I gasped to myself, “don’t throw up, don’t throw up . . ." It’s over, I thought. It’s done.
Except it wasn’t, quite.
I made myself get up, soon as I could. First step: Gather up all the pieces, dump them back into the vinegar barrel. Lid on, lock shut. Then down to the basement, find a cart—thank Christ this was the deadest hour of the day, just before shift change at six a.m.—and wrangle the barrel back down to the basement, in the service lift. That gave me privacy, and time, to separate what was left of Mrs. Camp out into twenty different medical waste disposal bags, double-wrap them, and put ‘em all in the bin for next week’s pickup.
After that, one last meeting.
When he opened his office door and found me waiting in his desk chair, Dawson boggled, but only for a moment. Then he came in and closed the door.
“Miss Merrimay,” he said, dully. “I’d say I’m sorry, and it’s the truth, but somehow I don’t think you care.”
“Got that right, Doc.” I folded my arms, not getting up. “Did you know? When you admitted her? That all this shit was going to go down?”
Dawson closed his eyes. “I’d seen her do amazing things,” he said. “She spent her life learning how. It was like having a saint for a sister-in-law—Edward was as good as my brother. Then he died, and she couldn’t save him, or stave off the Alzheimer’s, and she offered to leave me enough to keep the home going for decades if I’d just . . . accommodate her.” He gave me a desperate look. “You have to believe me, even after everything I’d seen—what she planned? I just didn’t think it could be possible. Would you, if you hadn’t seen it?”
“Still ordered the vinegar drums, didn’t you?” I said, tonelessly. “Don’t lie, Doc, I saw your signature on the order. Passed them off as cleaning supplies. Got Wojciech to haul one into every target’s room and haul it away afterward. And went out of your way to get a good selection of candidates in your intake. Dementia patients, no kin left who cared about ‘em . . . they couldn’t remember if they saw anything, and who’d believe ‘em if they did?” I got up, then, walking ‘round the desk to glare in his face. “So you can tell yourself it was all for the home, but I’m gonna bet she told you what’d happen to you, if you didn’t. And you believed her.”
Dawson took a shuddering breath. “I have no excuse for what I’ve done,” he said. “But if you want to punish me for it, you’re going to have to come up with a much more plausible version of events, if you don’t want the home shutting down after I go to prison. Not to mention how I could provide an equally plausible version that would present you to considerable disadvantage, as well.” He moistened his lips. “So it seems to me we can either ruin each other, or walk away and not throw more of the living after the dead. Which would you prefer?”
I sighed. “Doc, I’d be a lot more pissed off about that kind of ultimatum, I hadn’t already thought of it.” He blinked. “So here’s what we’re going to do.”
The cops marched into the home a week later and arrested Jan Wojciech right in the middle of his shift, charging him with the murders of Mrs. Camp, Mrs. Azzarello, and Mrs. Waltham, as well as multiple ongoing cases of patient abuse, theft, and trafficking of medical pharmaceuticals. Dawson made sure there was enough evidence available on the smaller stuff that the circumstantial murder case looked a lot more convincing, and the court denied bail. Trial’s still in progress; I haven’t really cared to follow it. In the meantime, Mrs. Camp’s will was cleared by the lawyers, and things have improved a lot around the home: better staff, better food, better class of care. I even got a pay raise.
Never told Ke’Von about the deal I worked with Dawson, and he didn’t ask. But then again, it was never the same between us, really. About a month and a half later, he quit. We haven’t talked since then.
I did ask Fee, once, if I’d done the right thing. She took a long time answering. At last, all she said was Would you do the same again, Lainey, you had to?
Absolutely, I said, and she shrugged.
Then there you go.
And I would. If somebody’s got to suffer shit they don’t deserve, better assholes like Wojciech than the people in the home, even if it means weasels like Dawson get to put off their reckoning awhile.
Nobody gets to put it off forever, after all. Mrs. Camp could tell you that, and so can I.
So will I, no doubt.