by Amy Cross
“What the hell!” she shouts, looking up to see a swarm of ravens flying over the top of the grave, while some are peering over the edge at her, as if their lust for blood can no longer be contained. Holding her shovel up, Sam prepares to defend herself.
***
“Sam! Sam, where are you?”
“Down here!” Sam calls out, sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the grave. She looks up at the darkening evening sky, just as Anna peers over the side of the grave.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Sure, apart from the swarm of murderous ravens that attacked me a couple of hours ago.”
“Ravens?” Anna looks over her shoulder for a moment, before turning back to look down at Sam. “I don't see any ravens now.”
“Are you sure? Check again.”
Anna looks left, then right.
“There's nothing,” she says finally. “I don't see a single bird.”
“They left after a while,” Sam continues, “but I was worried it might be a trap. The last thing I want is to climb up and then get rushed from behind, so I figured I'd come up later, but if you're sure they're gone.” Reaching up, she starts climbing back up to the top, while trying to ignore the fact that her right side aches after the fall into the grave.
“I'd offer to help pull you up,” Anna tells her, “but I'm a bit worried my arm would just come sloughing off.”
“I'm fine,” Sam replies with a grunt as she hauls herself onto the grass. She turns and looks around, but as the sun continues to set in the distance, there's no sign of any more ravens. In fact, the entire scene seems strangely peaceful as long, warm shadows stretch across the grass. “Didn't you see them earlier?” she asks. “There were ravens everywhere.”
“Are you sure?”
“Look,” she replies, indicating the scratches on her face and neck.
“Ravens did that to you?”
“There were hundreds of them. I can't believe you didn't see or hear them.”
“I was in the bathroom, taking off all that make-up,” Anna replies. “It was dumb of me to put it on in the first place.”
“You looked pretty good,” Sam tells her. “Stop being so hard on yourself.”
“There's no point pretending. With the way I am right now, it's stupid trying to look like something I'm not. I'm just rotting, and sooner or later I'll fall apart.”
“You don't know that,” Sam continues. “The whole perpetual grace thing should keep you preserved just fine. From what Faraday and Sparky said last year, I'm pretty sure we're okay so long as we both just stay within the town limits. Maybe we can even live forever.”
“I'm falling to pieces,” Anna replies. “There's no way any guy is ever want to be with me.”
“Is this about a guy?”
“I'm being hypothetical.”
“Do you have any particular hypothetical guy in mind?”
“I'm just saying,” Anna continues, getting to her feet, “that there's no point trying to fool myself. Before I died, I kinda only cared about hanging out with guys. First there was Tommy, then Darren, then Mark and Sean, then Dean... It was pretty much my whole life, and now I can't do it anymore. It's like I've lost my only hobby. All I can do is sit around this place and watch as maggots slowly make their way through my flesh. My body's just deteriorating more and more every day. Soon, even make-up won't make a difference. If Scott saw the real me -”
“Scott?” Sam asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Hypothetically,” Anna continues, “if someone named Scott saw the real me, he'd run screaming. I mean, that'd be a totally normal response. No-one wants to kiss someone whose jaw might drop off while you've got your tongue down their throat.”
“Come on,” Sam replies as they make their way to the cottage. “I think we're both in the mood for some fun tonight, and that doesn't mean sitting around the cottage playing cards. Why don't we go into town?”
“I'm not really in the mood...”
“It'd be a change of scene,” Sam points out. “We could go to that cafe by the town square and just watch the world go past. I'm not saying that it's boring to sit around every night in the cottage, but a little external stimulation might help to get our minds off things. If nothing else, it'd be a change of scenery, and at least we wouldn't be surrounded by graves.”
“And what would we do at the cafe? Look for hot guys?”
“You know,” Sam continues, “it is possible to go out and have fun without necessarily looking for a guy. We could just chill out a bit.” She glances at the roof of the cottage, half-expecting to see more ravens. “It's as if they couldn't come down into the grave for some reason,” she mutters. “Something to do with holy ground, maybe. Either way, it can't be an isolated incident. They'll be back. They're probably just putting their feathery little heads together and coming up with a plan.”
“I don't feel like doing anything tonight,” Anna tells her. “You go and enjoy yourself.”
“But -”
“Seriously, I'd be terrible company. I just want to sit here and try to get used to the idea of having fun by myself. I feel like I need to straighten myself out a bit.”
“Then I'll stay and -”
“Please?” Anna adds. “Just for an hour or two. The undertaker's men are bringing that girl's body over, so I can keep myself busy preparing it for Friday. You deserve to relax, so go to the cafe in town and try to take your mind off things. It looks like the only thing for me to do these days is working here, so I might as well throw myself into it. You've been through way more stuff than I have lately, so let me do this for you.”
“Watch out for ravens,” Sam replies darkly, glancing up at the clear sky. “They're out there somewhere, and they're going to come back.”
“I'll be fine,” Anna says with a smile as Sam walks away. “We make a pretty good time, huh?”
She waits for an answer.
“Sam? We make a good team, don't we?”
Lost in her own thoughts, Sam doesn't answer. She's already thinking about the ravens, and about the fact that she can feel a growing sense of doom creeping across her shoulders.
Chapter Six
“Ruth Havershot,” Anna mutters an hour later as she stands in the preparation shed behind the cottage. On a table in front of her, there's a dead body under a sheet. “Twenty-one years old, died in a car crash last night.”
Sighing, she pulls the sheet away to reveal a dead, naked woman with a thick set of stitches running down her front, evidently left over from the autopsy. Apart from the autopsy scars, however, the only obvious sign of injury is a thick, bloodied wound on the dead woman's forehead, where part of her skull appears to have been crushed.
“Nice,” Anna continues, taking a quick look at the form that was delivered by the undertaker's men a short while earlier. Peering at the girl's legs, she sees that they've barely been scratched in the accident, and that the rest of her is similarly pristine. At various points on the body, there are small red marks, as if she has been repeatedly stabbed by something tiny. “Good job we don't do open caskets in this country.”
Grabbing some tools from the nearby bench, she starts to set the body in position. The limbs have already begun to stiffen, causing them to creak a little as she straightens them at the sides, and then she goes to the cardboard box in the corner and takes out the linen dress that the family brought earlier. For the next few minutes, she works to get the dead body into the dress, a process that brings little dignity to the corpse. Finally, however, she manages to get the dress on the body, and she stands back to admire her work.
“Not bad,” she tells herself. “Not...”
Her voice trails off as she stares at the dead girl's right arm. Reaching down, she runs one of her discolored fingers against Ruth Havershot's flesh, and she can't help but notice that the dead girl really doesn't look very dead yet. Her eyes might have begun to sink into her skull a little, but her extremities are for the most part looking very healthy.
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br /> “Pretty,” she whispers, remembering what it was like when she was alive and her skin was still an okay color. “Shame you won't be needing it, but -”
She pauses as suddenly an idea flits into her mind.
“No,” she tells herself, turning toward the counter, before she stops and looks back at the arm.
She takes a deep breath.
“No,” she says again, grabbing the hairbrush. When she gets back to the body, however, she can't help but stare at Ruth Havershot's arm. It looks so healthy and vibrant, as if the decomposition process has barely started yet. Not like Anna's own arms, which are a faint gray-blue color with hints of green and yellow. She can't help but feel that it's a shame to take a perfectly nice-looking arm and bury it underground where it's only going to rot away.
She takes a deep breath.
She tells herself that it would be wrong to steal from the dead.
Then again, she reasons, the situation is totally unfair. Why bury so many perfectly good body parts, when...
She takes another, deeper, slower breath.
Slowly, she reaches out for the hacksaw on the counter.
***
“Hey, Sam, how are things going?”
Silence.
“Sam?”
Anna's voice rings out across the empty room. After a moment, she leans through to double-check that Sam is still out. As soon as she's made sure that the coast is clear, Anna hurries through with Ruth Havershot's severed arms, and places them on the kitchen table before setting some needle and thread down and grabbing a seat. Sitting down, she stares at the arms on the table for a moment, trying to summon the courage to get started. The whole idea seems crazy, but at the same time she figures she's got nothing to lose. Even if the new arms don't work, they'd be better than a pair of rotting stumps that are clearly going to fall off before too long.
“Bad person,” she mutters to herself. “You're a bad person, Anna.”
Taking a deep breath, she reaches up with her right hand and takes hold of her left arm, just below the shoulder. For a few minutes, she sits in complete silence, still not quite ready to take the plunge. Finally, figuring that she just has to get on with the job, she starts gently pulling her arm loose from the shoulder. At first nothing much seems to happen, but slowly she starts to hear a faint ripping sound and the sensation of movement begins to drain from her arm. She pulls a little harder, slowly tearing the arm loose from her shoulder, and she lets out a gasp as the entire arm finally becomes disconnected and she places it on the table.
“It didn't hurt,” she says out loud, surprised by how easy things are going so far. “Farewell, old arm. Okay, Anna. Stay calm.”
Grabbing Ruth Havershot's dismembered left arm, Anna holds it up to her torn shoulder and spends a couple of minutes squidging it into place, trying to get the various pieces of meat and bone to slot together. She's surprised to find that, with a few minor adjustments, the arm more or less fits, and finally she props herself against the table before picking up the needle and thread.
“Okay,” she mutters. “Here goes nothing.”
With that, she slips the tip of the needle into her torn shoulder, twists it under the flesh, and pokes it back out through Ruth Havershot's arm. Wincing despite the lack of pain, she starts pulling the needle out, along with a long trail of thread.
***
Standing in the bathroom an hour later, Anna stares at her own reflection for a moment before slowly, and with a little difficulty, raising her left arm – or rather, Ruth Havershot's left arm – and carefully clenching and un-clenching the fist.
“It works,” she says with a hint of shock in her voice. “It actually works.”
She raises the other arm, which has also been transplanted, and slowly she interlinks the fingers of the left and right hands. She's surprised to find that not only do they move as commanded, but she can even feel them touching each other, as if the new arms have more or less perfectly integrated themselves with the rest of her body. Holding her arms out to the sides, she notes that they even look pretty good. They're more or less the same size and shape as her old arms, and the only difference is that these new arms are healthy-looking while the old ones were rotten.
“No maggots,” she continues, examining her new hands with a sense of wonder in her eyes. “Not a maggot in sight.”
For the next few minutes, she continues to enjoy her new arms, moving them slowly and carefully. She knows that the stitches around the tops aren't as secure as they could be, so she figures she should probably get some metal staples from the examination room and really fix the new appendages perfectly. Heading back through to the back room, she stops for a moment to look at Ruth Havershot's armless body. After a few seconds, her gaze moves to the dead girl's legs.
“Nice pins,” she mutters, before looking down at her own rotten legs, then back at Ruth's.
She pauses.
“No,” she tells herself, heading to the counter and opening the drawer, looking for metal staples. “Enough is enough. For one night, anyway. I can't...”
She pauses again, as this time she feels a maggot making its way through her thigh.
Slowly, she turns back to look at the dead girl on the table.
***
“I am a disgusting, awful person with no morals,” Anna whispers to herself as she sits next to Ruth Havershot's body a few hours later. “I deserve to go to Hell for this! I will go to Hell for this!”
Ruth's body is now missing not only its arms but also its legs, both of which have been haphazardly attached to Anna's own body. Now, having sworn a short while ago that she was done for the night, Anna is staring down at Ruth's calm, dead face. She knows she can't take the head, that a head transplant would be a step too far, but she's come up with a new idea, one that she figures might just work.
“Okay,” she whispers, holding up the cheese slicer. “Here's the deal. I just need some patches of skin to graft onto my face. It's not like you're gonna need them anyway, Ruth. You've left the physical world behind.”
She pauses.
“And maybe your eyes,” she adds. “I might take those too. I mean, people are always going on about organ donation and how it's a good thing, and this is only one step further along that road.”
She swallows hard, before placing the blade of the cheese slicer against Ruth's cheek.
“Don't hate me,” she says quietly. “You're dead anyway and I'm alive. Well, kind of alive. Well, I'm still up and about, so I have more use for your body parts than you do. I don't even know how this is working, but I figure I might as well take advantage of the situation. So without further ado...”
Slowly, she places the blade of the cheese slicer against Ruth Havershot's cheeks and starts slicing some skin away.
Chapter Seven
“Don't often see you in here,” says Mr. Hale, the cafe owner, as Sam steps through the door. “What brings you out on such a quiet night?”
“Nothing much,” Sam replies, glancing briefly but longingly at the beer pump as she makes her way to the counter. Looking back at the door, she watches as a large, brightly-colored circus tent flutters in the wind on the other side of the main square. Even at night, the tent stands out as a completely incongruous sight, set against the modest houses of Rippon, and the sound of banging and hammering – ringing out across the otherwise quiet town – seems like an intrusion. It's as if, even late at night, the circus is determined to make as much noise as possible.
“The carnival is in town,” Mr. Hale says with an unimpressed sigh. “Or rather, some kind of freak-show.”
“Freak-show?”
“Americans,” he continues huffily. “I was down at the mayor's office this morning, trying to find out whatever possessed the town council to issue a permit for this sort of thing. Apparently it's some kind of traveling spiritualist group. They're gonna be here for a few days, holding a religious revival meeting. Now, I'm a good Christian man myself, but I like my religion to be quiet and aus
tere, not showy and...” He pauses, as a shiver passes through his body. “This is Rippon,” he adds finally, “not the American Deep South.”
“I didn't think revival shows were still a thing,” Sam replies. “Rippon isn't exactly the Dust Bowl.”
“It's hard to believe that too many people are going to go tomorrow night,” Mr. Hale continues. “The people of Rippon are like me. We prefer things to be quiet, and our local church is sparse and respectful,just the way we like it. What kind of person wants to stand around whooping and hollering and singing Hallelujah? Worship isn't jazz, for God's sake. It's a private thing, for private people.”
Glancing again at the beer pump,Sam can't help but imagine how good it would feel, after all this time, to have just one ice cold beer. She can feel the urge gripping her from the inside, imploring her to give in just this once. One beer couldn't hurt. She wouldn't even get drunk on just one beer, and after a long day of grave-digging, she feels as if she deserves a reward.
“Fancy one?” Mr. Hale asks, grabbing a pint glass.
“No,” Sam replies quickly. “I'll just have a cola, thanks. With lemon.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
As Mr. Hale starts pouring a glass of cola, Sam continues to stare at the beer pump. After a moment she reaches out and uses a fingertip to wipe condensation from the metal.
“And a beer,” she says finally, even though she promised herself long ago that she wouldn't drink again. “Just one can't hurt, right?”
Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out some notes and coins.
“It's on the house,” Mr. Hale tells her. “There's always been a kind of arrangement in Rippon. The gardener gets free food and drinks here. Our way of showing that we appreciate what you do in that cemetery.”