Anyway, when they brought him in what struck me about him was just how beautiful he was—fresh corpses are almost always beautiful, but I saw him under that sheet in the cold room and it was almost like he shimmered. There was a magical quality to him, like he wasn't quite real; small and slender with slanted eyes and a pointed nose, and skin such a soft powder-white, tinted with traces of blue—the hue of death that I've always found so alluring. I was a while tagging and wrapping him before putting him in the drawer; I wanted to take my time touching his skin and smelling him, trying to absorb as much of that strange, unnameable energy as I could.
I didn't know it yet, but what I was really searching for was her.
Jessie came to see the doctor at the end of that week, to ask her questions and get some closure or whatever it is people feel they need from us after our work is done—and from the split-second I smelt her perfume swirling into the room ahead of her before she entered the office, my heart started hammering frantically in my chest and my head fogged up and swam. When she spoke her voice was soft and thick and slow, like a wave rolling through syrup; and when she moved around the room I saw that her bone structure was every bit as delicate and beautifully carved as her younger brother's. Her anatomy was flawless. Every part of her turned to delicate points or moulded bends; layers of flesh, tendons and blood vessels wrapped neatly and snugly; and over that, her skin: a soft, white cocoon that flushed pink when she caught me staring at her. That startled me, seeing that. Her skin had the exact same ethereal quality as Roan's.
It was almost absurd, my instant fascination with her, because despite all my praises she was really a wreck—sobbing and sniffing, her hair ratty and uncombed, hanging down her face like forgotten rags on a tattered old washing line. If she hadn't been so absolutely, completely, naturally gorgeous, no beauty would have been able to shine through at all.
I was tongue-tied around her. I wanted to talk to her, touch her, tell her to stop crying so horribly because she was ruining her good looks with those blotchy cheeks and puffed-up eyes. But I was too nervous, of course, and Dr Hylton talked to her alone while I waited for them in the cold room. While I waited with her brother.
Standing there in the icy air and silence, surrounded by corpses and with Roan's in a drawer just a few feet away, I thought about how terrible it is that grief can make such a beautiful girl look as wretched as that. I thought about the peace in death—that utter tranquillity, the blue-tinged beauty. She and I could be closer, then.
But at that stage it was all still a blur—she hadn't quite become real for me. You have to remember; we had only just met.
It was only a thought. A harmless thought.
* * * *
I spent a week thinking about her constantly before I saw her again. I'd been feeling pretty down and out, thinking that I could never find the guts to talk to her and she'd never be interested anyway, but in the end, she came to me.
It happened in the library on Monday night, and started with her cool, slim hand touching my shoulder.
"Are you following me?” she asked, and her voice was soft and sweet as a schoolteacher's. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw it was her, but, well, what I mean to say is, she didn't sound angry about it.
"N-n-n-no.” I shook my head, my brain fogging up again under the pressure of the words fighting to explode out of my mouth.
"You're the diener, aren't you?” she frowned in subtle recognition. “You ... helped with my brother.” And her smile was so sad and so still that my heart clenched inside my chest. The symmetry, the fabric of her facial muscles, her cheekbones, the pulse in her fine blood vessels—
"H-h-he was b-b-b-beautiful. When I s-s-s-s-saw him I thought he was an an-an-angel."
"An angel?” She smiled, and there were tiny tears in her eyes, minute pin-pricks of shine.
I nodded.
"I thought so, too."
"Y-you l-l-l-l-l-l-look ali-li-like."
I felt the blush roar up into my cheeks. She stood there for a moment, staring at me, half-smiling.
It must have been amusing for her, watching me make such a twit out of myself.
* * * *
* * * *
She tried to make friends with me after that day, why exactly I can only guess—except that a woman's ego is a ravenous thing, and if a girl that low sees a guy staring at her the way I always did, it must be tempting to chase after his company, I think, just to try to keep feeling good. You know, for the ego boost. Uncle Stuart had always told me that women were cruel like that, cold like that, but for some reason I didn't mind, with her. I suppose I was that infatuated.
We'd go see movies every once in a while, and every time I'd be too nervous to really watch, and tied up in knots by the time it was over for fear of her asking me what I'd thought of it. We'd go drink cups of coffee where she'd talk about her day, her life, about the gaping hole of grief that she felt swallowing her up more with every moment since her brother drowned. I'd rip open dozens of tiny packets of sugar as I listened, keeping my fingers busy to hide the way my hands shook, spilling sweet, crystalline guts out onto the table between us.
She was always really friendly, really kind, even though I stammered a lot and blushed even more and never really had anything clever or useful to say in reply to her. Looking back on it, one might even say it was deliberate, what she did—leading me on like that. And who are you to argue, anyway? How do you know?
I still followed her a few times when she went shopping, and when she went to work, and I could watch her for a whole morning on church days, sitting really quiet in the back pew. She used to tie her hair up in a long rope at the back of her head, and she wore long dark skirts that clung to her hips like they were stuck to her, and in Church she always cried and bowed her head, all sad and pretty, when the congregation gathered around to pray for her and her poor dead brother.
You could tell she didn't really feel any of it, though—I mean, I think it's true what Uncle Stuart always said, that pretty women have no souls. It's all about the show, for them.
So I savoured every second she spent with me and I watched her every other chance I could, and I dreamed almost constantly about what it would be like to touch her. That was a dangerous business, I knew—and sometimes when she stood beside me in a store or in front of me in church, my fingers used to seethe with the itch and I had to clench or sit on my hands to stop myself from trying anything.
Jessie invited me to her house a few times, too, but I couldn't stand that. The ceiling felt too low, oppressing—and something about the bleak atmosphere and dank smell in the air always made me think of drunken Uncle Stuart, and the shed, and the last I ever saw of my mother.
"For the sake of sanctity,” my Uncle Stuart had said to justify it, when my mother died. And there was something in Jessie's mother's eyes that said the same thing to me, too, but this time as a warning. If she'd had a shed outside, she would have strung me up and left me in there just the same—for the sake of sanctity. She saw me as vile, corrupted, her beautiful daughter out of place at my wretched side.
You could say that that was the beginning of it, really.
I hate being judged.
* * * *
So then came the day by the lake, and that's the day you really want to know about, I'm sure. The day Jessie died.
She called me at work that afternoon, her voice husky and sleek in the buzz on the ‘phone line, saying she needed to talk. My curiosity piqued instantly, because it wasn't normal for her to call out of the blue like that, or to sound so mysterious about it.
"You're a sweet man,” she said to me. “I feel better when I'm around you."
I've often mused over this—people calling me sweet. I sometimes wonder if it isn't the shyness that makes people imagine such a soft, gentle character beneath. Not that I'm a bad person, but I'd never really said all that much about myself to her in actual words. I'd just listened. It's odd what people surmise.
She asked that we meet
by the lake where her brother had drowned, and by the time I got there the winter sun was already way below the sky, and there was nothing around us but shadows and the sound of the lake's gentle ripples, washing through the coarse sand and stones under our feet.
"I'm glad you came,” she said. “I was worried it might be too late for you."
"N-n-n-no,” I stuttered, battling because the smell of her perfume made my eyes sting, and my throat had swelled up tight. “I l-l-l-like it late at n-night."
"So do I, things are always pretty in moonlight.” She looked out across the water and sighed. She glowed like pale silk, catching the light as her chest heaved up, her white throat shimmering against the darkness. I wanted desperately to touch her on the velvet dip of her neck, where her skin looked softest—so I gnawed at the calluses around my fingernails as we walked.
"Are you happy with your life, here in Crawford Towne?” she asked.
"Y-y-y-yes. I have a j-job, and I have you and M-M-Marjorie. I don't w-w-want anything else."
"If I were to leave, would it make you sad?"
A shock of burning, painful fright pulsed suddenly through my heart. “W-W-Why, J-Jessie? Don't l-l-leave!"
She twined her fingers through mine, and my heart pounded even harder. I could feel the small, delicate bones in her fingers, fragile in my sweat-slick grip.
"I hate it here,” she spat, and her nose wrinkled up in disgust. “I hate the people, I hate this town—even the name of it: Crawford. Like something sick and creepy, crawling up your spine. But most of all I hate it with Roan gone. He was the one bright thing in my life; the one thing I loved. I didn't know how much I loved him, before—I didn't know he was the only thing I had that made me feel like I belonged."
I think I stopped listening for a little while at this point. It was all so contrived. How could a girl as pretty and popular as her possibly know anything about not feeling like you belong? I thought I had seen through her plot then, figured out why she had called me; to make herself feel better, next to a loser like me. I was starting to feel a bit sour and bitter about it all—but it was what she said a few moments later that brought me slamming back to the ground.
"Everything is always so beautiful in darkness,” she whispered in her honey, husky voice. “Do you think Roan is happier, being dead? Maybe he's the lucky one after all, not being stuck here anymore."
And the moon came out from under the clouds, exactly at that moment, like a sign from the heavens; a guide—and as the pale light fell on her face, it shadowed the hollows around her eyes ... and I saw her skull through her skin, pretty and polished and shimmering, glowing up at me in the cold, bright twilight.
* * * *
I tried my hardest to resist her, but it just goes to show you how futile it all is—women know exactly what they're doing, making themselves so beautiful like that. Who knows what else they're capable of; how else they bend our hearts and minds? Besides, Uncle Stuart always said that men can't be blamed for their impulses, that women should be more careful—and it's a lesson my own mother had to learn, so why should Jessie have been any different?
* * * *
So of course they found her body, and of course they brought her to us for the autopsy, and I could barely contain myself that day, I was so excited.
A diener doesn't just prep the bodies and assist during the autopsy, but it's also my job to put them all to bed at night—sheet-wrapped corpses, cold and clean beneath, slid smoothly into their rest-time drawers with a smooth, metallic click.
I'm the one who keeps the spare key.
The key to paradise, I suppose you could say—with her here at last, and at last perfect in death. I waited until late at night before I went back to the morgue; waiting to unlock her drawer and pull her out of the darkness to enjoy the touch I had been craving for so long, ever since we'd met.
I carried her like a fallen angel out of the cold room, feeling like Romeo cradling his dear dead Juliet in the crypt—her body drooped back in my arms, her hair fell in a long, shining sheaf towards the floor. I spread her lovely naked corpse out onto the body block, where she lay still for me, so cold and accommodating.
I knew then that I had always been right—this was how she was supposed to be. She was so lovely in death; God could only have given her life for the pleasure of someday looking at her in lifelessness.
Her torso rose smoothly up over the block; her head was tilted back and her slender, milky throat bared; her whole body a smorgasbord laid out for me to feast on, to touch and taste and feel—and all the while I couldn't believe how smart I had been, working it out this way. Now I could have her and there would be no risk at all of her bringing a baby into the world; there would be no consequences, no punishments in the shed for yielding to a woman; no tortures possible at all in the clinical world of the cold metal slab and her soft, white body. This way I could have her and no-one would ever know. No-one would ever know what I'd done, or why. It was just between her and me. Sacred.
I will never forget the feeling of ice-cold skin as soft and smooth as petals on a flower; I will never forget the waxen gaze that somehow still sparkled in her dull, empty eyes as I pulled them open. There were more than a few times when I swear she was looking at me, but I didn't feel threatened by it. If she knew it at all, I wanted her to feel it. I wanted her to know what was happening; that I was there.
If anything, I thought she would have been honoured to be the one who took my virginity. You see, there was that, too. It was a giving and a taking. I gave her my virginity, and she took it in the morgue that night, absorbing it deep into her cold, lifeless flesh.
When I was done I lay for almost an hour, pressed against a chilled, naked body that stayed delightfully icy and wouldn't warm at all against my blood. I stroked her hair and kissed her face, I told her all about me, my world and my thoughts, and everything about what she meant to me now. It was the most blissful thing, being able to speak to her properly like that, like a normal person would. I didn't stammer at all.
I could barely bring myself to leave her, so I waited until the last dark hours before dawn, staring at her, savouring her. When I saw her again in the harsh light of day, it would be for the autopsy. Every part of her cut and sawn—dissected and defaced. I didn't want to think about that.
Afterwards, as I walked back home to Marjorie's house, I was wild with euphoria—drunk on a chaotic, passionate freedom I didn't even know I had had inside of me until then. I wanted to shout to the rooftops and reach my hands up into the sky, screaming I'm in love! I'm in love!—or maybe I wanted to scream I'm a man! I'm a man! Because that's what I finally felt like, for the first time in my life. I could have met the devil in the road that night, and faced him down without fear.
It was her; it was all her—her body, her smell, the blind shine of her dead eyes, the stiff, locked, resist-and-yield sensation in her muscles and limbs as I moved against her.
It was only the next day, putting her back together after the autopsy with tears in my eyes (cause of death: suicide by drowning, we said) that I realised how wrong I had been—dead or alive, it was just like Uncle Stuart had always warned.
My heart was drugged; my soul was poisoned—caught in the clench of obsession.
Everything Uncle Stuart had ever warned me about, in all my worst nightmares, had at last come true. I was under a woman's spell.
* * * *
So you see then, that was rather cruel of her, don't you think? Getting me as infatuated as all that. Perhaps the worst part of all was that I knew she would rot, and she would be no good at all to me then. Not as a decaying corpse, not with all that stench and smell; swollen, blackening muscle sloughing off of bone, and skin tearing like wet tissue paper under my hands if I tried to touch her. She would be hideous by then; she would stink, too.
It was a cruel trick, a cruel joke, making me love her like that. In death, she became the ultimate unattainable woman.
* * * *
On the day of the fun
eral, Marjorie held my hand tightly enough to choke my blood, and she told everyone about Jessie and me, about how special she was and how she had been my only friend. People looked at me with surprise and sadness—dear, sweet Jessie Balout; not many people had known she had taken an interest in me. In me, the creepy town diener with the bad skin and hopeless stammer. How like Jessie, to keep her charity so quiet. How humble and pure of her, how saintly, not to tell.
I couldn't keep myself together any longer when they lowered her coffin into the ground. I couldn't stand the thought of that sweet, cold body, maddeningly hidden under the polished wooden lid, laid to rest in darkness, where nothing but the worms would ever touch her again.
What a waste.
At the sound of the first handful of dirt hitting the coffin lid, I felt a regret suddenly grip me, so whole and intense it was terrifying—the sky spun round and the smell of mud and freshly-turned earth became overpowering; I felt my balance tumble away and a shout tore out of my throat. 'Don't bury her! Don't bury her!' they say I screamed, over and over again as the pallbearers took me away.
Marjorie and a few other women from the town got me into a car and took me on ahead to the reception, where they took turns sharing comfort and advice, fetching me tea, egg sandwiches, the usual old-lady stuff. It was almost like a competition among them—almost funny for that: competing to care for the wretched.
I did feel wretched. Jessie was so special, so beautiful.
How could I ever find another girl like her?
* * * *
That was when things started to go wrong, you could say. After the funeral. I was so taken apart with grief over what I had lost. I thought about digging her up a few times, but I was too afraid to chance it. I couldn't sleep nights, not really, so I started sleeping in the morgue—on the body block, where I had laid her down on that first magical night.
Marjorie thought that was odd enough—me sleeping in the morgue. I made the mistake of telling her. This is the price you pay for trusting someone too much: the pain of watching their betrayal, when they use you and your tragedies as some cheap entertainment tool for the local gossip circles. I suppose I should be grateful that she didn't say anything to the police—but she went to just about everybody else in town, and that was when the rumours started. I don't suppose I have to tell you that not all of them were wrong.
Something Wicked SF and Horror Magazine #5 Page 4