The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  There are problems everywhere. I eat at these restaurants anyway, and most of the time I enjoy them, but there is only one place where I know I can count on a flawless meal, without peer: Devlin Lemon’s little restaurant in the Garden District. It’s called the Lemon Tree and decorated with wrought-iron baskets full of bright yellow lemons with their leaves still attached. In lesser hands it could have some serious cuteness issues. In Devlin’s hands, you just want to prostrate yourself on the cerulean carpet and cry, ‘Feed me, you eponymous, lemon-stacking, brilliant fool.’ Or at least I do.

  Devlin came from the frozen North with a Culinary Institute of America degree and a love for local ingredients. Anything that passes through his hands – a steak, a lobe of Hudson Valley foie gras, an unpasteurized French cheese – is likely to come out tasting good, but he has always reached the apex of his talent with Louisiana ingredients: Gulf fish, artichokes, Creole tomatoes, andouille and tasso, cane syrup, even mirlitons. I’ve never met another cook who could make a mirliton taste like anything but a sweaty sock. Devlin bakes them with shrimp, garlic, and a shocking amount of butter until they release a hitherto untold sweetness.

  (All right, you nitpicking foodies. Yes, I am talking to you. I know you’ve been squirming since you read the words ‘unpasteurized French cheese’, and I am quite aware that these ambrosial creations are legally forbidden to enter the country, let alone appear on a restaurant menu. The only thing I can say is all that’s on the menu is not always all you can eat, and a good chef takes care of his regulars.)

  Devlin knows everything I like and hate to eat. He knows that I am genetically disposed to think cilantro tastes like soap and that I can’t stand cauliflower because it reminds me of certain cancers I see. He knows I will not eat amberjack under any circumstances; it was he who told me of the giant worms that lurk in its digestive tract. He knows how dearly I love sorrel, caviar, and clotted cream. At the Lemon Tree, I glance at the menu, but I usually end up telling my waitperson, ‘Ask Devlin what Dr Brite should have today.’

  Lest you get the wrong idea, nothing has ever ‘happened’, as they say, between us. We are both happily married. Any intimacy between me and Devlin is purely about his feeding and my eating.

  It was May, close enough to my birthday that I had begun to wonder whether Devlin might find me something special – some Iranian caviar, perhaps, or some really fresh white truffles. I’ve never considered having my birthday dinner anywhere but the Lemon Tree, and some celebratory tidbit almost always finds its way onto the table.

  I was at work in the basement of the big stone building at the corner of Tulane and Broad, where I spend a large part of my life. I’d spent the morning posting a young man killed in an automobile accident near the Calliope housing project (gross cranial trauma) and a fat old lady who died in her sleep (coronary event). I was beginning to think about lunch as my assistant wheeled out the last body that had come in the night before, a robbery victim who’d been shot in the head. I saw that the victim was wearing check-patterned chef’s pants and work boots, but did not find this surprising. Kitchen workers keep strange hours and are often (wrongly) thought to be carrying large amounts of cash. His shirt had already been removed.

  At first, I could only see that he was a young white man. The gun had been small and his cranium was intact, but even a low-caliber bullet to the head can distort facial features beyond recognition. This is mainly because the hemorrhaging of the brain produces gases that force blood into the tissues, particularly those around the eyes. This man’s eyes were swollen shut and looked as if they had been smeared with heavy purple-black makeup. His lips were drawn rigidly across his teeth, and the teeth had dried blood on them. His hair was thickly crusted with blood; only a few clean strands told me that it had been strawberry-blond. This may have been when the first breath of suspicion touched me, but if so, I did not notice it.

  I parted the hair with my latex-gloved fingers. ‘Slightly stellate entry wound behind and below the right ear,’ I said to my assistant, Jeffrey, who wrote it down. ‘Stippling of the tissue around the entry wound. No exit wound. The bullet’s still in there. What’s his name?’

  ‘That’s a funny thing,’ said Jeffrey. ‘I can’t find his report. I’m gonna have to call upstairs for the dupe.’

  ‘Well, go do it, please. I’ll get him undressed.’ I picked up a pair of scissors and began to cut his pants off. As I did, his left hand slipped off the table and hung over the edge; rigor had not completely stiffened him yet.

  Something about that hand caught my eye: a black-ink wedding band tattooed around the third finger. Many cooks don’t like to wear wedding rings because they can so easily get snagged or lost, so this kind of tattoo is common. Devlin had one. His was done in a distinctive crosshatched pattern, just like the one on this man’s hand.

  I had opened one pants leg up to the crotch. Then I put the scissors down, moved to the head of the table, and looked carefully into the man’s face. A warm rush of adrenaline spread through the muscles of my back as I saw what I had not seen before. The eyeball protrusion, tissue infiltration, and rigor had disguised him, but they could not hide his identity completely.

  I was supporting my entire weight on the edge of the table when Jeffrey came back. ‘I don’t have to call upstairs,’ he said. ‘I found his paperwork on the floor in the cooler – Dr Brite? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I know him.’

  ‘Oh, hell.’

  ‘Let me see that paperwork.’ I scanned the police report, but it told me nothing I didn’t already know: he had been shot in a robbery leaving the restaurant; he had been dead about eight hours; he was Devlin Lemon.

  ‘I’m not posting him,’ I said.

  ‘Well, of course not. We’ll get Dr Garrison to post him.’

  ‘Nobody’s posting him,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He can’t – I mean, we can’t – oh, God.’ I bowed my head to hide the tears that stood in my eyes. Jeffrey had never seen me cry. No one at the morgue had ever seen me cry. I don’t socialize a great deal, but inevitably I had seen acquaintances on my tables before. I see everyone who dies in New Orleans. But none had affected me like this. I took a deep breath. ‘I have reason to suspect the presence of a communicable disease in this case,’ I said. It was the only half-plausible reason I could think of to delay the autopsy. ‘I’m keeping the body here until further notice.’

  ‘His family won’t like that. Getty said they were already talking about holding a wake.’

  ‘I’ll talk to them. I have no choice, Jeffrey. If there’s a communicable disease involved, I can’t release the body yet.’

  ‘Well, then, shouldn’t we take fluids?’

  ‘Later,’ I told him. ‘I need to . . . I need to read up on this. We may have to take special precautions.’

  Jeffrey’s odd mint-green eyes met mine. He knew I was lying, and I knew that he knew. He trusted me, though; we worked well together. And he could see that I was rattled. He would drop the matter for now. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to ask Dr Garrison to speak with the family when he comes in?’

  ‘No. I’ll do it. I’ll call them after lunch. I’m going to have lunch now.’

  I shut myself in my office just before the tears finally came. I curled up in my chair and hugged myself and cried. More than anything I wanted to call Seymour, but he and his brother were camping in Bogue Falaya for three days, unreachable.

  Even if I could speak to Seymour, what would I say? I wasn’t sure I could own up to what was in my head right now. I wasn’t thinking of Devlin’s family, or his youth, or the fear he must have felt when his murderer pressed the gun’s muzzle against his skull. I wasn’t thinking of Devlin at all, not exactly. I was thinking of the last appetizer I’d eaten at the Lemon Tree, a disk of beef marrow melting into a fricassee of chanterelles, its flavor brightened by a persillade so finely chopped you could barely see it. I was remembering the scent and savor of this dish.
I could only remember it; I could not taste it, for the taste of loss was too bitter in my mouth.

  When I finally washed my face and went back into the autopsy room, Devlin was gone. Jeffrey had zipped him into a body bag and rolled him back into the cooler. Maybe he’d feel comfortable there, I thought. Except for the presence of corpses, it was a lot like the walk-in refrigerator in a restaurant.

  Was I losing my mind? It had been years since I thought that way about a dead person – as if he could feel comfortable, or feel pain, or have an opinion about his surroundings. Cutting open one body, sawing off the top of its skull, folding its face down and lifting the brain from its moorings had gone a long way toward convincing me that the dead do not care what is done to them. Doing these things thousands of times left me no doubt. I treat them with respect because they still matter to the living, but I no longer imagine them ‘feeling comfortable’.

  Now, though, I was.

  I got through the rest of the day somehow. I even called Devlin’s wife, whom I’d met once or twice at the restaurant. From the sound of her voice, I could tell she had been heavily tranquilized. She didn’t argue when I told her I would have to keep Devlin’s body for a few days. I expected to get a call from the wake-planning parents or siblings, but it didn’t come. I left the morgue in the early evening, as twilight was falling over the city, and drove home. There I tried to eat some dry crackers, gagged on them, and crawled into bed with the cats.

  A thin, sobbing, unearthly voice was trying to get me to hear it. ‘I’m hungry,’ it kept telling the darkness. ‘I’m hungry.’ It was trapped there, not knowing where it was or why. I tried to reply, but I could not form the words.

  I wrenched myself awake, showered, and drove to the morgue hours before my next shift was scheduled to start. No one questioned my presence: they left me alone, assuming I had work to catch up on – which I did, in a way. I wheeled Devlin out of the cooler and slid him onto one of the tables, my back muscles knotting in protest. I ignored the pain. After measuring and photographing the bullet wound in his skull, I washed away the blood, used a disposable plastic razor to shave the hair around the area, and inserted a pair of long forceps into the hole. I was afraid that the bullet had ricocheted inside his skull, hiding itself among scrambled pieces of brain, but my forceps traveled a straight track to the region of his cerebellum and found metal. I pulled out a bloody bit of lead with a slightly flattened tip. I caught myself thanking God, or somebody, for my findings – his brain was not destroyed; the bullet had not shattered into fragments I would have to search out. What was I thinking? It didn’t matter how little damage had been done. Devlin was still dead.

  I wondered what was happening to me as I triple-bagged the bullet, put it in a padded envelope, and left the building with it tucked under my arm. I might not lose my job if anyone found out about this, but only because I am a good liar and could probably come up with a plausible reason for my actions. In truth, I didn’t know what I was doing or why.

  Usually Seymour brings me my coffee in bed, and I drink it with plenty of milk and sugar. This morning I drank it black in a Styrofoam cup from a gas station. Then I drove to the French Quarter, parked on Royal Street, and walked to St Louis Cathedral. I was not raised Catholic and had never been to a Mass, but I’d lit candles here to ask for various small favors, and they had all been granted. I lit a candle now, stuffing a ten-dollar bill into the collection box, looking into the porcelain faces of Mary and her small son. Then I slid into a pew and sat there for a long time.

  I did not pray, exactly. I didn’t know how. Instead I thought of marrow melting into chanterelles, of whole roasted snapper with wild-rice-stuffed figs, of fresh sweet Gulf shrimp on a bed of crispy fried spinach. I tried to remember everything Devlin had ever cooked for me, and as I did so, I slid my hand into the padded envelope and clutched the bullet in its triple layer of plastic.

  I felt a little better when I came out of the cathedral. By noon, Jackson Square would be full of tacky fortune-tellers, bad musicians, and ugly tourists, but right now it was peaceful. My good mood lasted until I went back to work, looked in the cooler, and saw Devlin there. His face had begun to look haggard from dehydration, and the bullet that had been in his head was now in its padded envelope under the front seat of my car. Nothing else had changed. I don’t know what I expected. If prayers could cause the dead to get up and walk away, I would have been out of work long ago.

  ‘You look sick,’ said Jeffrey. ‘I swear you’ve lost weight since yesterday.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Why don’t you go home? Dix and I can handle things here.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. But after lunch – which I could not eat – I felt worse than ever. ‘Do you really think you and Dix would be all right if I went home?’ I asked Jeffrey.

  ‘Absolutely. Get out of here and get some rest. And some food,’ he called after me. ‘Get yourself a hot meal.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ I muttered as I got into my car. Though it was only April, temperatures were already in the eighties, and I wondered if I was really picking up the dark rich smell of the blood on the bullet under my seat.

  I did not go straight to my destination. Instead I stopped at a nice restaurant on St Charles Avenue and attempted to have lunch. There was nothing wrong with any of the food I ordered, but it all seemed to taste of ashes and decay. The waiter wanted to know if there was a problem. I said I’d had the flu and would take the leftovers with me, and he encased them in a foil swan, which I threw away as soon as I left the place. In two days I had managed to eat perhaps two grams of food. It was time to seek serious help.

  I knew enough to stay out of the Quarter this time. The places that billed themselves as voodoo shops there were tourist traps, pure and simple. But I didn’t know where to go. I had noticed a building on Broad Street, near my workplace, with words like CANDLES and HERBS and BOTANICA painted on its side. The woman behind the counter had skin the shade and texture of a Brazil nut. Her eyes were gorgeous: large and tilted, fringed with dark lashes, the irises a color somewhere between green and gold.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, and I stood there stupidly. I had finally admitted to myself what I wanted to do, and in the same breath I had realized that there was no sane way to ask for it. I didn’t particularly care whether I sounded sane, but if I asked how to raise the dead, the woman would probably throw me out of her shop.

  I didn’t know what I was going to say until I heard myself saying it. ‘I’m a writer,’ I said, and almost laughed. I had kidded myself that my ramblings had literary merit, once upon a time, but those days were long gone. ‘I’m writing a story in which someone wants to bring a corpse back to life. Like they’re supposed to do in Haiti. Do you have any information on that?’

  Those devastating eyes regarded me levelly. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘There are books. Of course, the dead can’t actually return to life – you understand that?’ Perhaps my voice was a little too ragged, the skin around my eyes a little too red – but couldn’t these be side effects of late writing hours?

  ‘It’s only a story,’ I told her.

  ‘Good.’ She took a book from a shelf near the counter. Its black cover was embossed with a single word, VODOUN. ‘The recipe is on page fifty-three. You’ll recognize most of the ingredients – in fact, you’ll find most of them in your kitchen. But you may not have heard of datura, also known as the zombi cucumber.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A powerful hallucinogen, among other things.’ She took down another book, this one titled Plants of the Gods. ‘You can learn more about it in here.’

  ‘Where can I, uh, where can my characters get it?’

  ‘You can’t. Not unless you grow it yourself, or find it growing wild – it’s illegal.’ Her eyes shone, and I wondered if she thought she was saving me from something.

  ‘Then it won’t work,’ I said. I have killed every plant I ever tried to grow, and the idea of tramping around some w
ilderness trying to identify a hallucinogenic plant was just silly – I can’t even stand to go camping with Seymour and his brother.

  Nonetheless, I paid for both books, took them home, and spread them out on my desk. As the woman had promised, most of the ingredients in the voodoo (or vodoun) spell were familiar, but it was obvious that datura was central to the thing. This seemed like an insurmountable obstacle at first. Then I turned to the entry for datura in Plants of the Gods, and I began to wonder.

  The book told me that datura grows in tropical and temperate zones in both hemispheres, and that all species have tropane alkaloids as their active principles. Organic chemistry was the only part of medical school that I found nearly impossible to get through, and I had studied it so hard that I still remembered most of it. Even if I hadn’t, the names of three tropane alkaloids were listed in the book: atropine, hyoscyamine, and scopolamine. I handled at least two of these compounds on a weekly basis.

  When a person dies at home, any medications he or she is taking are supposed to be brought into the morgue with the body. We note these medications on the autopsy report, count the pills, and (at least in theory) wash them down the sink. Atropine is the active ingredient in Lomotil, which is used to control severe diarrhea. Hyoscyamine is used in Cystospaz and Uriced, which are used for glaucoma, urinary obstructions, and bowel problems. These three drugs come in with bodies all the time; I was certain that there were some waiting to be counted in the morgue right now. Scopolamine is used in transdermal motion-sickness patches, which I don’t see as often, but it would be easy to get one.

  I wrote myself a prescription for a scopolamine patch and drove to a Walgreen’s to fill it. I could write myself scripts for the others, too, but Lomotil is a controlled substance. I didn’t want somebody recognizing my name and spreading rumors. I’d see if the drugs were available at the morgue. If not, the Walgreen’s was open all night.