“What an astonishing device.”
“I’m very grateful to be allowed to use it.”
“Oh yes,” the ghost said, coughing out a little laugh. “I’d forgotten we proscribe their use.”
“The government is probably far too lenient to us,” Vivienne said, repeating a common radio-screed.
Disapproval flickered over her face before the ghost turned to face Vivienne’s desk.
“I know you’re just telling me what you imagine I want to hear. Your services are essential no matter what the others say. It’s why the breeding program is so important.”
Vivienne caught herself before she disagreed, but the surge of adrenaline left her hands trembling.
“Ah,” the ghost said, gesturing toward a very particular portrait on Vivienne’s desk. “I know her. Wasn’t your wife used for that disincarnation?”
She knew the answer. They all did. Most likely it was why Vivienne was their favorite. She would have burned the picture if it hadn’t been such an extravagant and public courtesy. Instead she put it on her desk where clients could see it. None before had felt the need to comment. The ghost turned to offer her profile to the camera.
“She was.”
“A shame, it wasn’t up to your standard. You should have done the work yourself.”
Vivienne was trying to find some response, any response, when the old ghost continued.
“You know, I saw her quite recently.”
“She is a very important woman.”
“No she wasn’t,” the ghost said.
Vivienne closed her mouth with an audible clack of teeth. She was accustomed to the callousness of the dead, but even she could be surprised.
The ghost turned to see her then laughed. “You thought I meant your client. That is so funny. No you silly little thing, I saw your wife.”
“Aditi has returned?”
“Oh yes. It’s quite common really. She can stay huddled with the unmoored. No need to ever immigrate her.”
“Truly,” she said. “A blessing I never expected.”
“So sad that you can’t benefit from it in some way. Really though, you were lucky to have her at all. One like that, they’d usually send directly to the breeding program. Anyhow. Is the next plate ready?”
***
Vivienne never left Aditi’s side. Not when the cancer disfigured her, or when she spent her every waking hour screaming in pain, or even when the agony gave way to a silent, twitching coma. Vivienne waited until all heat of life had gone.
Her client asked her to do the work, to dismember the woman she’d loved, but no matter how much influence the ghosts could bring to bear, Vivienne could not see Aditi as meat to be cut. Her status allowed her to decline. She turned down all work for months, then finally got the papers to leave the city. To clear her head, she’d told them.
Past the refugee camps, the road led up into mountains. There she found the ruin of a resort picked over by the bone gatherers.
Thick pads of moss coated the remnants like rotting velvet stuck to the armature of a child’s automaton. Pine trees pushed apart concrete and macadam. The air was clean, cleaner than Vivienne had ever known it. Away from the city, wind had no effect on time. She felt it on her skin and expected to see things around her change. Trees swayed, her hair moved, and the world remained solid. Vivienne pulled her leather jacket closed.
After the shock wore off she recognized the place—a building facade there, the stump of a dead tree there. They’d filmed old pabulum dramas there when the world belonged to the living. She had no way of knowing how long it had been dead, but the town left bones as surely as any person.
She camped in a ruined building for a night, thinking perhaps that she’d press further along the road the next day.
Dreams put her back in her childhood home. The apartment high above the city smelled of rotting meat. Her father senselessly rustled butcher’s papers, unable to perform the final, small tasks he’d been given. Senility turned him into a corpse long before he stopped moving. She woke with his empty, glinting eyes on her.
The absence pressed her thin, filled her with nothing. It ached. When death came to her father it was a relief. When they took her brother to the Mill, it meant no more teasing. But when Aditi died, she could not bear the thought of the body without the person.
For the first time in her life, Vivienne—wrapped in her leather jacket in the midst of a dead resort—wanted someone to come back for her.
Outside the city the invisible spaces between each moment had the weight of a corpse. In the morning Vivienne turned around and went home. In her time she had amassed enough money that she would never need to touch a corpse again.
After a month of burning savings she took her first client since the death.
She had no talent for aimlessness.
***
Vivienne bustled the girls into her workshop. They’d been crying for far too long, and the popping and swaying of the atelier did nothing to quiet them. Ancient explosions from unnumbered wars silhouetted buildings against the night, a night that brought with it an angry chill.
Vivienne hated it when they cried. She fixed papaver tea and made them drink it.
Making work until the drug took effect, she began prepping the workspace.
Into the cutting tray went two boning knives to get at the joints, four scalpels for the skin, and her old standby butcher’s knife for stubborn viscera. She gave them all a few strokes on the hone, testing with the lightest touch of her thumb until the edges had the tacky-grab of a sea anemone’s tentacles.
The girls quieted down.
Using a wide leather belt bolted to the wall, she stropped the edges down to surgical precision. The rhythmic sound calmed her, and—she liked to think—helped calm her specimens. She tugged the restraints on the work tables, ran water through the bleeder lines, and finally returned to the girls.
They stared at the wall, lost in whatever dreams came to the ones processed by the Mill. Vivienne stood them up and took off their tarps. The drooling girl had returned to drooling, so much like her father. Vivienne began with her.
She took off the ear tag. She guided her to the table. She pushed her down. She strapped down her arms and legs. With a deft hand she punctured the inner thigh with a long needle, then switched on the machine.
It hummed and the lines spiraled blood up, out, and down into the floor drain.
The room filled with the smell of it.
The girl turned pale.
Her lips grayed.
She shivered violently well after her eyes had closed.
The shivering slowed to spastic twitches.
Finally, her muscles relaxed and she fouled the table, adding a new stink to the room.
Vivienne grabbed the water hose and gave the body a thorough blast to clean off the piss and shit. She turned to the other girl, quietly cursing that she hadn’t run them simultaneously. The drooling distracted her.
She shook her head and picked up the needle.
Hand on girl’s thigh, fingertip brushed by pubic hair, she had to lean down to put enough force into the push. The girl laughed faintly and all the associations changed.
For just a second it was another time, another thigh, another laugh. This fragmentary instant coincided with the needle puncturing skin.
Two intimate moments merged. It felt just like killing Aditi.
Vivienne clenched her jaw and watched the girl bleed out. The anger pulled her up, out of the top of her head, to watch from the ceiling.
“No more,” she said, her voice an echo inside her skull.
The ghost had some purpose to having the corpse made to resemble that dead actress. Vivienne didn’t need to know what the ghost wanted to do. What Vivienne did know was how to make the corpse look like the client instead of her cinema heroine.
***
An obscene metastasis of flowers sweetened the air to syrup. The field of the Memento Ossium glowed in permanent, false sunset. T
owering grave markers sent bright knives of light careening off the wealth of who-knew how many worlds. Vivienne had to shade her eyes from the reflecting gold and silver. This place, a small city unto itself, held all the power of the ghosts. They lavished it with attention, held parties and dinners and fundraisers here.
On the other side of the city was the small memorial for the former-living. The oldest names were pried off and melted down to make plaques for the most recent. Aditi’s name had been gone for a year.
Vivienne stood with a small group of the living, well away from the main ceremony. The ghosts clustered around her client in foggy dunes, only their glinting eyes to hint at numbers. There were more ghosts attending the ceremony than there were living in the entire city.
The old ghost wore the actress face from the top of her monument. She lectured them in a language Vivienne could barely hear. She pointed and gestured. Hours passed before Vivienne was called to open the coffin.
The ghosts moved icily through her and mobbed the body.
They pawed at the flesh with impotent hands, their murmurs and exhalations almost sexual. At some point the old ghost had faded back to her own face, but Vivienne couldn’t tell if it was before or after they’d begun fawning over the corpse.
The ghosts lavished her with murmured awe, more even than usual. Her disgust and anger melted into pride of workmanship.
They still expected her to help dig the grave though, and dispose of the previous coffin. Most of her clients held ceremonies once a year, she had the muscle for it.
This was the second in a month for the old ghost, and the coffin they’d dug up reeked. It was a rookie’s mistake. Cleaning all the viscera before reassembly was the only useful thing her father had taught her.
The old ghost found her after the living finished tamping down the grave.
A smile snagged on the ghost’s teeth.
“I’m afraid I had no choice but to tell the others this was your doing.”
Vivienne hadn’t been in a fight since her teens. The old fear reared up and chased her pulse into a frantic gallop. She fought the urge to put her hands in front of her face.
“They were so impressed,” the client said. “No one has your skill with a corpse.”
“I don’t know what to say. Thank you,” Vivienne said.
“Oh, no need for that. You’ll be hearing from someone soon about your next job. I’m certain of it.”
The ghost vanished.
***
Vivienne stopped in one of the new districts on her way back from the abandoned resort. The last scheduled storm for the day was just blowing out and it left the scent of roasting meat nearby, savory and spiced with rosemary and garlic. Long beams of sunlight passed between towers that blued into the distance like a forest. Only a few unmoored ghosts walked the streets, oblivious to the modern world. They carried tiny pockets of time with them.
This was the only home she could imagine.
Before going outside, she considered joining one of the refugee groups that trickled out of the city.
Vivienne smirked to herself at the irony of finding the outside world too dead.
As she stood watching the retreating storm, she noticed a ghost a half block away. Long black hair blew in wind from another time and little spots of color floated in her wake. Vivienne’s breath caught in her throat, certain she was looking at Aditi returned. Unware, she bit her knuckles down to blood and stepped forward.
The ghost startled at an unheard sound and turned to face her. She was just another ghost; no one she’d ever seen before. Vivienne’s arms fell to her sides and she sat down hard on the empty street.
The unmoored ghost she’d mistaken for her wife turned and walked away.
***
The door shut with a clatter. She slid the bolts and closed the transom as though it could keep her safe. Vivienne sat at her desk. The photo of the client who’d taken Aditi’s body faced her like an accuser.
In the lower drawer was a bottle that had come with the photo, some kind of amber-colored liquor older than empires. She poured it into a water glass, drank it down, then paced her office waiting for the alcohol to hit her blood.
Hands trembling, she picked up one of the lines for the bleeder and held it like a talisman. That snagging smile of her client made the Mill a much more tangible prospect.
Vivienne wasn’t too old to breed.
Her defiance—so easy when assembling the composite corpse—could not be summoned, even with the alcohol flooding her veins.
It took exploratory jabs to get the needle into a specimen’s artery, doing it to herself would hurt. Somewhere among her things there were several smaller needles designed for arteries closer to the surface. That she could do.
The room went cold enough for her to look up to see if any of the windows were open. They were all sealed and covered.
Movement made her turn.
Standing in front of the closed door was a ghost. It stood silently, featureless and gray as slate. A blanker, real after all.
“You intend to take me to the Mill,” Vivienne said.
The ghost didn’t move. It had no eyes, no mouth, nothing of a face.
“Get one of the others to butcher me, but I won’t go there.”
She pulled the long needle off and attached the smaller one, holding it up like a threat.
In response the ghost lifted something, something impossible to see, an emptiness, like a face cut out of a picture. Through the thing she could see sky.
Trying to look at it hurt. Full body, flu-sick pain washed over her until every articulation in her body moaned.
With her left hand she raised up the line to the bleeder and pushed the needle into her neck just behind the jaw. The pain flared bright but she kept pushing until the tube filled with blood.
As the ghost moved toward her, its eyes opened. They opened and opened until there was nothing but eyes.
Vivienne frantically switched on the bleeder. It tugged in her flesh, pulling inside her like a fish hook.
“You’re just a ghost,” she said. “You can’t touch me. I’ll be dead before anyone can get in this room.”
The smell of blood filled the air.
With the thing raised up, the ghost closed the distance between them. It slid the empty thing into her head.
And then Vivienne was on the floor. She couldn’t move.
She watched the door burst open. She watched herself dragged into the street and thrown onto a cart. She watched Dimitrios shaking his head over her. She watched someone cutting her.
She could feel everything. They dressed her for a client, and she could feel the other’s skin covering her like wet cloth.
Even after she’d been buried as someone else, Vivienne never stopped seeing.
Zak Jarvis is a writer and artist living in southern California. He has stories in Werewolves and Shapeshifters: Encounters with the Beast Within and Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed, both edited by John Skipp.
The Interview
Adrian Chamberlin
“The decision to terminate my employment at Fairlight Hospital was a mutual one, agreed between myself and the hospital board.” I swallowed noisily as I answered, and fresh sweat broke out on my neck.
James Quinn looked up at me with narrowed eyes as he considered the answer I had given him. I knew he recognised it as a lie, knew what he was thinking. Mutual decision to leave—in other words, dismissed. Sacked. His eyes flicked back to my resume that rested on his imposing rosewood desk like a futile peace offering. I squeezed my knees anxiously as I waited for his reaction, suddenly aware that the heels of my shoes were drumming against the plastic base of the swivel chair where I sat. I forced my feet to stop. I had shown too many nerves already.
Quinn’s eyes narrowed suddenly, and he leaned over, peering closely at my resume like some scavenging animal searching for signs of life in a road kill victim.
I stole a glance o
ut the window to my left. I know it’s bad form to gaze around a room during a job interview, but I needed to divert my attention from this rapidly deteriorating scenario. I had to remind myself there was an outside world, to fool myself into thinking my future didn’t depend on this young man’s opinion of—and ultimately, decision on—me and my abilities.
A beautiful May morning. Sunlight kissed the grounds of Nemeton Hospital, the neatly mown lawns and well tended rosebushes a perfect picture of early summer freshness. Only the high red brick walls in the distance reminded me this was a secure hospital, and the long term patients treated within were in effect prisoners.
Just like I—no other avenues to consider. No other company dared consider my employment applications after the media blew the Fairlight scandal out of proportion. This interview, for the position of clinical psychiatrist within a newly formed company, was my last hope. And the first question I had been asked I answered with a lie. Did I lie because I was nervous? Or was I nervous because I’d lied?
Truth told, I’d nearly thrown the invitation letter away, believing it nothing more than a cruel joke. Almost a full year had passed since Fairlight. After the enquiry, the threat of legal action, and continuous harassment from the media, I had given up hope of finding employment within the mental healthcare profession. My application had been halfhearted—one last grasp at my former glory before I succumbed to thoughts of suicide. I hadn’t seriously expected a reply.
But there I sat, in front of an interview panel that, strangely, consisted of only one. James Quinn looked at least twenty-five years my junior, probably fresh out of university. I was surprised that the personnel manager was one so young. His sharply cut suit and flashy tie, combined with stylishly cropped and gelled blond hair, bore more resemblance to a sales rep than a man entrusted with such an important position. However, his youth reflected that of the company. Nemeton Hospital had only recently been built. The office I sat in still smelled of fresh paint and newly laid carpet tiles, and I noticed the filing cabinets behind Quinn were still covered in the protective polythene routinely used during transit. Things seemed to have been set up in rather a hurry. Even the letter inviting me to attend the interview had arrived less than a week after I posted my application. Why the urgency?
HELP! WANTED: Tales of On-the-Job Terror Page 7