Manhattan, 1899
Monsieur Dupont, career undertaker and director of a Manhattan viewing parlor for the dead, considered a postmortem body the most beautiful treasure. For him, the tired cliché of an undertaker being obsessed with death was transcended; he rejoiced that the dead made him feel so alive.
The dead were the key to the kingdom of heaven.
His craft had started innocently enough. Locks of hair. The obsession progressed. Other tokens and trinkets were next, taken and procured with exquisite care. Subtle trophies.
No one would know or see. No one could. Grief was such a strange, ever-changing beast, but one constant remained: no one ever noticed all the details of a corpse. No one would notice if some small thing wasn’t exactly as it had been, as death had already made the familiar strange.
Memory rewrote itself. He’d seen the proof of it time and again. The dead were transformed and made perfect by their loved ones. In that perfection it was just so lovely, so sacred, so beautiful to take a small scrap of that elevated, exalted existence…
So, he began. Tokens of his little saints made into sacred objects. Tiny souvenirs from the world’s most innocent: children. Taking something from a child was the most sacred of all transactions. Procured and placed into sacred vessels. Surely no one would mind. Their bodies were photographed for posterity, and a souvenir was taken in private just before the body was taken to the grave.
No one but the ghosts, that is. Spirits of children noticed what was gone but didn’t understand.
Then there was Ingrid. His Ingrid. The child that by all rights should have been his if fate hadn’t been so cruel. Heinrich Schwerin, thinking the girl was actually his, had interfered and ruined everything. He took the little girl’s body, presenting her dressed and anointed as a saint and giving it as a gift to an orphanage when worship of her should have been done in private. A promising apprentice gone mad. None of it had gone to the grand design. As a divine architect, Dupont had lost control of the lamb that wandered from the flock and had to be fed to the wolves, never knowing the child he’d gone mad over wasn’t even his.
He stared out the third-floor window of his viewing parlor and watched as boisterous theatre folk tumbled from their boarding house. There was such life in this city, and to juxtapose it with constant death was high art. He took on the sorrows of those who did not wish to, or could not, greet death in their own homes. He took it on for them, an extension of his undertaker role. Wakes were usually done in the home, in the downstairs parlor, but for those who couldn’t bear it or didn’t have a suitable place to host an entourage for days, his viewing parlor stood in for home. Families could consider calling their parlor instead a “living room” because he was displacing death for them, banishing it from their doorstep.
Thankfully, the spirits had been banished from his.
The best thing about meeting his business partner Montmartre at a lecture about the mapping of the human mind three years prior was that the man had devised a way to keep out the ghosts. The children floating outside the window, pointing at what had been left behind in Dupont’s cabinet of treasures, simply didn’t understand. He’d tried to explain it to them, but if children had a hard time grasping divine mystery in life, it was even more hopeless after death. He wished he, like most people, didn’t see ghosts. He supposed his ability was an unfortunate symptom of a profession in death.
Montmartre had devised the ghost barricade, but out of the corner of Dupont’s eye, he could see them marching around the exterior of the building like striking workers on the line. He couldn’t allow their constant parade to distract him, so he stared at a fresh child laid out on the slab and dabbed rouge on cold blue cheeks.
He feared his careful enterprise would be revealed after all the nonsense with Ingrid. Part of him relished the edge of danger. Part of him wrestled to regain a simpler life he’d left behind once his mind had been opened to the grander possibilities of his artistic rituals. What was it his friends would say? Arte Uber Alles. Art above everything.
Turning to another work in progress, a waxen sculpture standing against the wall, he affixed a hint of color to the lips of the new seraph that adorned a pedestal of the stage set. So very realistic. He stared at his work and swelled in pride. No amount of danger could dull this rush.
He stared at the lovely little faces. He would make saints of them all.
There was a knock at the door. He scowled, put down his tools, and went to answer it. His stomach twisted with dread when he saw the tired face he’d once found sweet, years ago, when she’d worked as his maid. But now she was a troublesome card he had to strategize how to play.
“What did you do to my daughter?” the mousy-haired woman demanded, barging past him into the entrance foyer, her wide eyes full of rage. “And why?” She shrieked. Whatever beauty she’d once had was now sunken by grief and pierced by the sharp knife of poverty.
“Shhh, my Greta, my love,” he murmured. “You’ve come back to me. Now we can grieve, together…”
He clutched her passionately, forced her to acknowledge him. Their past. Their little Ingrid. Their illicit child. He held Greta as she cried and tried to soothe the wildness of her sorrow with sweet nothings.
The thought occurred to him that they could try again. She could be his Eve and he could build something new, with all of his prizes collected in an Eden of his design. Perhaps, finally, he could feast with all the saints…
Montmartre wouldn’t like it. But that man had his own agenda, and Dupont planned on leaving him to it.
Dupont seized Greta roughly. “Come with me, and we’ll make hell a heaven.”