by S. T. Joshi
“Not you again,” he said when he saw me at the open morgue door. “Are you haunting me, Dalhoy?”
“Just trying to take the picture that will get me in Time magazine, Biggs.”
I sauntered into the morgue, and he didn’t throw me out. At one side, a policewoman was interviewing Dr. Yeu and a nervous white man in a crewcut whom I took to be her assistant, Arthur Kurtz.
“I thought you were going to post a man outside the morgue door.”
“He was there all night.”
“So how did the thief get Aught’s corpse past him?”
“I don’t know.”
“He must have left the door at some time, to go to the toilet.”
Biggs shook his head. “He’s a rookie. Young guy, strong bladder. He swears he never left the door.”
“He fell asleep, then.”
“He says he didn’t.”
“He’s not likely to admit it, though, is he?”
“He’s a good kid, Dalhoy. I believe him.”
“Are you sure the corpse was in the morgue when he got here?”
“He went inside and checked it himself. Aught’s body was lying on that table.” He pointed to the same stainless steel table where I had photographed Aught’s face.
The policewoman was finished with the pathologist and her assistant. I moved away from Biggs so that they could talk, and approached Arthur Kurtz, who had a dazed look. I gave him my name.
“Mind if I talk to you, Dr. Kurtz?”
He blinked and focused on my face. “Are you with the police?”
“I take the pictures,” I said, which was completely true.
“What do you want to know?”
“These organs have been going missing for about two weeks, is that right?”
He nodded.
“During that time, have you noticed anything strange?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” His blue eyes slid away from mine.
“Anything out of the ordinary. Anything funny, odd.”
“Not that I’m aware of,” he said, but he still wouldn’t look at me.
“You saw something, didn’t you. What was it?”
He glanced at Dr. Yeu. I wondered if she had told him not to say anything.
“It’s all going to come out in the end, Doctor.”
Finally he met my eyes. “It was nothing. Just my nerves. I didn’t mention it because it was unimportant.”
“Tell me what it was. If it really is so trivial, I won’t even report it to Detective Sergeant Biggs.”
“Sometimes I work late into the night,” he said in a low voice. “One night about a week ago, while I was at my desk, going over some paperwork, I heard something out here.”
“Where’s your desk?”
“In the office.” He pointed at a door.
“So what happened?”
“It was a kind of slithering sound—I don’t know how else to describe it. I left my desk to investigate. At that hour, the only illumination comes from night lights that are left on all the time, so we don’t bump into tables in the dark. Most of the morgue was in shadow. I heard a scratching. I thought it must be a rat.”
“Do you get many rats down here?”
“No, we never get rats. I’ve never even seen a rat, and I’ve been working here three years.”
“So you heard a scratching. What did you do?”
“I went toward it.” He swallowed and looked at me apologetically with a faint smile. “As you can imagine, I was nervous. It came from under one of the sheets that covered a corpse on a table. As I got closer, I could see the sheet rise and fall, as if something was moving around under it.”
“What was the name of the corpse?”
“It was just a John Doe. Some homeless person who had a heart attack.”
“What did you do next?”
“I stood there, trying to work up the courage to lift the sheet. By then I had convinced myself that it must be a rat, but I didn’t want it to jump at my face. Finally, I took hold of the sheet by one corner and just jerked it down and off the table.”
He stopped talking, his blue eyes unfocused. He was looking through me, into the past, reliving the moment.
“As the sheet slid aside, something moved away on the other side of the table.”
“Something? Like what?”
“I didn’t get a good look at it. It was fast and the light was poor. I can tell you that it wasn’t very large, but it was too big to be a rat. It was more the size of a cat or a small dog. But it was black all over. It looked like a moving shadow sliding across the floor.”
“Where did this shadow go?”
He pointed toward the wall of stainless steel drawers that held the bodies. “That direction. It was dark. I ran to the light switch, but by the time I turned on the overhead lights it was gone.”
I thought about this for a few seconds. “Could it have slipped into one of the drawers?”
“I looked in all of them. There was nothing there except the cadavers.”
I thought about what else I should ask. “Was an organ missing from the John Doe?”
He shook his head. “You see why I didn’t want to tell the police about it? The whole thing makes me sound crazy.”
I patted him on the shoulder of his lab coat.
“Don’t sweat it, Doc. I won’t tell them.”
3
AFTER MIDNIGHT I MADE MY WAY INTO THE HOSPITAL through the emergency ward and slipped past the guards when a bunch of car crash victims came in. I made my way down the stairs to the morgue level and just waited in the base of the stairwell. Through the window in the doors I could see the uniform cop Biggs had stationed at the morgue door.
Not many men can go eight hours without a piss break. The rookie may have managed it the first night, but tonight he started to do the pee-pee dance just past three-thirty. Eventually, he left his post and slipped into the bathroom down the hall. That was my cue.
I left the stairwell and went into the morgue. The door was unlocked, probably to allow the uniform to check inside periodically. It was dark in there, but enough light came from the nightlights low on the walls to keep me from bumping into things, just as Arthur Kurtz had said. I knelt by one of them and made sure my camera was ready to shoot. If something was coming into the morgue, I wanted pictures of it. Then I found a clean white sheet and an empty table, climbed up on the table, and draped the sheet over myself so that it covered me from head to toe.
I folded it up on one side so that I could peek under it and see the main portion of the morgue. The table was near a wall, so most of the large room was visible, although the shadows were so thick it was hard to see much more than the shapes of the equipment.
Once I got used to the smell, it was kind of peaceful. I almost fell asleep. A metallic sound snapped me back to alertness. I couldn’t visualize what made it, but it sounded like a metal roller of some kind. With great care, I lifted the corner of the sheet to peek under it.
Something moved around the morgue. I saw its shadow, and it was a lot bigger than any cat. It bent over the tables with corpses on them and seemed to sniff the air, as though smelling them. It was making its way across the morgue in my direction.
At this point I lost all desire to get a picture of whatever it was. I lay still as death and tried to quiet my breathing so that my chest wouldn’t rise and fall. I was in the grip of a dread that chilled my entire body to the bone. I couldn’t have moved if I had tried.
It came near and bent over my table, and I saw from under the sheet that it was a naked man. His junk was dangling no more than a foot away from my face. The smell was terrible. He had been dead too long and not kept in the freezer.
Abruptly, the sheet was whipped away. In the dim light I saw him lean over me. I acted on instinct and took a flash shot of his face. The camera flash startled him and made him stumble backward. I slid off the other side of the table and headed for the door, but he was too quick. He had his arm around my neck
from the back. I used my camera to hit him in the face over my shoulder. It’s a heavy piece of equipment. We banged into a table and sent the instruments on it clattering over the tile floor.
I was seeing stars when the overhead lights came on. The arm released my throat and I could breathe again. I turned and saw the naked corpse of James Aught struggling with the rookie cop. They looked as if they were in a dance competition, but I don’t know if they were doing the waltz or the jitterbug.
There was something wrong with Aught, besides the fact that he was dead. Something black protruded from his open mouth. It was about the size of a tennis ball and it had glittering black eyes and white teeth. Its teeth snapped at the rookie’s face as he tried to hold it at a distance.
I looked around, found a motorized bone saw, and hit Aught in the back of the head with it, over and over. It made a dull crunching sound as it bounced off his skull. Aught didn’t even seem to notice the blows. He had his hands around the cop’s throat and he was strangling him. Old habits die hard.
When I managed to hit the black thing that hung out of his gaping mouth with the bone saw, I finally got his attention. He released the rookie, who crumpled to a heap on the floor, and came at me. I stumbled backward and hit my head on something hard. I must have passed out for a few seconds.
You know that disorientation you get when you pass out? You don’t remember where you are or how much time has passed. I blinked and looked around. I was lying on my back with my head propped up against a set of drawers. Across the morgue I saw Aught. He had the rookie by the feet and was pulling him into one of the open drawers in the wall that was just above the floor.
Aught moved in a way that was not even human. He seemed boneless. He squirmed and wriggled his body into the drawer, and I watched the body of the cop slowly pulled in after him. Just as the cop’s head disappeared, he opened his eyes and looked at me with a stricken expression of pure horror. Then he was gone into the drawer. After a moment, the drawer slowly rolled shut, and I heard the metallic roller noise that I had heard earlier but been unable to identify.
4
SO WHAT WOULD YOU DO? GET THE HELL OUT OF there and call the police, right? Sure, that’s what any sane human being would do. Only, I knew how long it would take them to respond. What I didn’t know was how long the rookie would continue to be alive.
Getting to my feet, I checked out my camera and headed toward the drawer. I pulled it open with caution, keeping my face well away from the opening, but when I peered inside it was empty. Completely empty. It was like the kind of magic trick David Copperfield might do in Vegas.
My mind really wasn’t working clearly. The bang on the back of my skull had fucked up my thinking. Fumbling for my cell phone, I dialed Biggs’s private number. He didn’t pick up. I tried 911, but was put on hold. Fuck it. I put the phone away and crawled into the drawer.
If I were a bigger man, it would have been too tight a space to move around in, but I’m only five-foot-seven. I was able to get into the drawer and work the drawer shut from the inside. It was pitch black. I dug out my phone and opened it, then used its screen as a flashlight. There was a kind of shadow at the end of the drawer. I wormed my way back there and discovered a section of sheet steel missing from the side.
It had been neatly cut away. When the drawer was open, the back end of the drawer hid the opening from view. It only revealed itself when the drawer was all the way closed, and then only from inside—and who in their right mind crawls into a corpse drawer?
In for a penny, in for a pound, as the Brits say. I squirmed my way through the hole and into the narrow tunnel that lay beyond it. It smelled like death. Not like formaldehyde, but like rotting flesh. There was only one way to go, and no way to turn around. I squirmed and humped my way forward like an inchworm, with my camera in one hand and my glowing phone in the other.
At some point the phone lost its signal. Big surprise, right? At least the battery didn’t give out on me. The tunnel came out on an old culvert of some kind that was made of brick. It must have been a drainage culvert for storm water, but it was dust dry and didn’t look as if it had been used for a century. It was big enough to stand up in.
I stood looking left and right, wondering which way to go. Then I noticed the drag marks in the dust in the bottom of the channel and followed them. They led me around several turns and into side channels to another hole in the side of the culvert.
“Shit, this is getting old,” I muttered to myself.
My head was pounding with the worst headache I’d ever had, and I was seeing double. I knew I should be in the hospital. I crawled into the hole and began to worm my way forward. Mercifully, this tunnel was short. It opened on a vast dark space that smelled and felt wet.
I stood up and went forward cautiously. The glow from my phone only illuminated a small circle around my feet. I was walking on gravel that crunched under my sneakers. After a dozen steps I came to the edge of black water. The phone glow wouldn’t show me the far side, so I knew it must be at least twenty or thirty feet across, but the echoes told me it was a lot wider than that. A whole lot wider.
The gravel didn’t show which way the rookie had been dragged. I mentally flipped a coin and started to the right. After walking a little way, I found him lying face down near the water. With a sinking feeling, I turned him over.
He was alive. A bruise covered one cheek and he was cut over the eye, but otherwise he did not seem badly injured. His eyes opened wide and he started to struggle.
“Take it easy,” I told him. “Me friend, you savvy? I’m going to get you out of here.”
He collapsed, all the fight gone out of him. Then he started to sob. I pretended not to notice.
“That thing—what was that thing?” he babbled, staring around at the darkness beyond the glow of my phone.
“I don’t know, but it can’t have gone far. If you can stand up, we need to get the fuck away from here.”
He didn’t argue. I helped him up, and we limped back the way I had come. We hadn’t gone a dozen steps when I heard the sound of water splashing and falling. I pointed my phone at the pool or lake or whatever it was.
“Oh, Jesus,” the rookie said. “Mary, mother of God.”
I didn’t have any words. At the limit of the pale glow, something large rose up from the surface of the black water. It was roughly spherical and black, about ten feet across, and its entire surface wriggled and writhed like a ball of snakes. Black things began to drop off it and splash into the water. They swam toward us with a serpentine motion of their bodies. They were about two feet long and impossible to describe. They looked something like salamanders, or like eels with short arms and legs. They had little round heads with white teeth.
“Shut your eyes tight,” I told the rookie.
I paused to snap off several flash pictures. The flash drove them back for a moment, but then they started coming after us again.
“We need to run,” I said.
We began to limp and hobble along the pebbled beach, as I thought of it. I had a moment of sheer terror when I wondered if I was going the right way back to the hole in the wall, or if I had been turned around when I snapped the pictures of the writhing ball of monsters.
The things started to overtake us. They weren’t strong. If they had been, we’d both be dead. We were able to kick and punch them away from our legs, but their little mouths drew blood each time they touched us.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
We stopped dead. Standing beside the hole was the naked corpse of James Aught. From its gaping mouth, one of the little round heads of the black creatures extended outward, its tiny glittering eyes watching us. They were like the eyes of an insect, soulless and without a trace of compassion.
The concussions of the rookie’s Glock almost knocked me over. He stood in a shooting stance with both hands on the grip of his gun, firing at a steady rate. I saw one of the bullets hit the round head of the creature in Aught’s mouth. The head explod
ed and the corpse of Aught collapsed to the gravel at the same instant.
There was no time to congratulate ourselves. The squirming black things were all around us. We kept kicking and hitting them, trying to prevent them from getting a grip on us with their teeth.
“You go first,” the rookie said. His face was hard, professional. I guess the training had finally kicked in.
I didn’t argue with him. I climbed into the hole and went as quickly as I could. I could hear his Glock firing behind me. Eventually he ran out of bullets. I waited for him in the old dry culvert, but he didn’t come out. Finally, I had to get the hell out of there. I ran down the culvert, not paying attention to where I was going. I didn’t know where the tunnel to the morgue might be, and anyway, I had no desire to squirm my way into it with those black things behind me.
After following the old drainage system through a dozen twists and turns, I found an iron ladder and climbed to a higher level, where the tunnels were still in use. I found a door and came out in a municipal pumping station.
5
BY THE TIME I GOT BACK TO ST. JAMES, THE MORGUE was a madhouse. Biggs and half a dozen other cops were questioning everybody on the night shift. I guess someone must have heard Aught attack me and the rookie.
“Not you again, Dalhoy,” Biggs said in disgust when he saw me. His eyes narrowed. “What happened to you? You’re covered with dirt and blood.”
“Shut up and listen.”
I pulled him aside so that we could talk without being overheard, and told him what had happened. He looked at me as if I had gone crazy.
“It this some kind of joke?”
“The rookie’s dead, Biggs. He saved my life.”
“Lewiston.”
“Was that his name? He was a good man.”
“Where is he?”
I pointed at the corpse drawer at the bottom right-hand corner.
“Send a man in there. Tell him to have his weapon ready to fire, and make sure he has a flashlight. Close the drawer on him.”
It took a while before I could convince Biggs that it was necessary. He found a policewoman with a slender build and sent her in with her gun drawn and a flashlight in her other hand. After a few minutes, she knocked on the side of the drawer. We pulled it open.