Haunted: Dark Delicacies® III

by Del Howison

  Wiley’s last two years were riddled with tragedy. Bad sales, poor reviews, and a terminal cancer diagnosis beleaguered him, and in June, his wife of thirty years, Linda, hanged herself in their home. Wiley was not a suspect in her death but remained a person of interest in the ongoing investigation of two young girls who vanished from a coffee shop in which he often wrote.

  His longtime agent said Wiley’s new novel, Small Print, an avant-garde work in which each chapter is one sentence, was purchased, after his death, by his former publisher.

  The novel is seven pages long.

  RESURRECTION MAN

  AXELLE CAROLYN

  THE DEAD DON’T feel. The dead don’t talk. The dead don’t walk, and no matter what your confessor may tell you, they won’t rise from their graves on Judgment Day. Dead bodies are nothing but toxic waste, bones, and decaying flesh. When Our Lord Jesus Christ returns to earth for our final hours, He will judge our immortal souls. And leave the bodies in my care.”

  The students laughed. Nervously, for the most part, but some with genuine enthusiasm. Alistair S. Cooper, Great Britain’s leading surgeon and anatomy teacher, knew how to tell his audience a good joke. He knew his pupils needed the release when confronted with their first dead body, cut up and open, naked and on display on the dissecting table.

  He also knew he needed to make his point loud and clear. Too long had primitive beliefs hampered the progress of medicine. The mere idea of physical resurrection was absurd, so he couldn’t fathom why Londoners still insisted on burying their dead at the eve of the nineteenth century. It was to him little more than a hazardous and archaic practice. Why not let him study the bodies and then cremate them? His students had to understand that science should not be strangled by tradition or religion. Cooper was a modern man, liberal and devoted to rationality. Having to struggle for each corpse because the good people of London wanted their mortal shells to stay whole for their presumed apocalyptic return was illogical and frustrating.

  “Society tells us we should be buried untouched,” he said, “yet the law does not protect the dead. Steal a shroud, they will judge and condemn you. Steal a cadaver, you’ll walk away free. A corpse is worth nothing—it belongs to no one. Even grave robbing, this most despised activity, isn’t illegal. If justice does not give bodies any value, why should science?” As if to illustrate his point, he plunged a pair of forceps into the gaping thorax of his subject, a murderer known to the public as the Dockside Butcher. The students, sitting in rows around the slab, winced when the dead man’s vertebrae creaked under the tool.

  “It is far more important to save the living than to preserve the deceased,” the surgeon added. He pulled out the heart from the ribcage and after a somewhat lengthy analysis, concluded the lesson.

  A brilliant anatomist, Cooper had devoted his life to the advancement of knowledge, and had never let superstitions get in the way of his research. He had thus autopsied his share of criminals—the only corpses automatically delivered to him, straight from the gallows—and a fair number of innocents, stolen from their graves by a gang of professional robbers. Dealing with body snatchers was unpleasant, though, so the surgeon had limited his interest to those unfortunate few whose deaths had resulted from some incurable disease or rare malformation. Only they presented an acute challenge to modern science.

  But it was another type of challenge that Cooper contemplated that evening, sitting in front of a pint at the local inn, his head bowed, his usually exceptionally steady hand trembling with anticipation. The passing of Ben Vaughan, an eight-foot-tall, deformed giant, had been a local tragedy. The carnival man was adored by his peers and had made quite a name for himself among the public. His formidable stature and oddly shaped bone structure, however, made him the perfect object of study for Cooper. The surgeon had at once contacted his grave-robbing partners to acquire the precious skeleton. But ever since Vaughan’s death six weeks prior, the answer had been the same from every gang: all deemed the tomb too dangerous. The giant, terrified that his eternal sleep might be disturbed by the sting of the scalpel, had taken special measures to ensure the safety of his resting place. The exact nature of these measures was unknown, but various traps and a lead coffin were near certainties. Yet the scientific discoveries his autopsy could lead to were too important for Cooper to be so easily deterred.

  “Cowards, all of them,” he said, and he lifted his glass to his lips.

  It was already dark when Cooper left the establishment. The flickering streetlights shed long shadows across the path, illuminating the drizzle that hit the surgeon as he looked around the sinuous cobbled street, making sure no one had recognized him. It was a moonless night, perfect for tonight’s enterprise. Cooper lifted the collar of his gray frock coat and started his way to the churchyard.

  The church grounds were plunged in obscurity. It was one of London’s poorest areas, where lamplighters did not venture. Obviously, the giant had chosen to spend his meager earnings on safety mechanisms rather than a pricy location. A mistake perhaps: the place was deserted at night and police officers were seldom spotted in the neighborhood. The squalid houses nearby, separated from the graveyard by a wide and badly paved avenue, were all decrepit. They gave shelter to an army of beggars and delinquents who lived in fear of wall collapses yet gave extravagant sums for their overcrowded accommodation. Paying little mind to his surroundings, Cooper picked up the sack, pickaxe, and shovel he had hidden in a bush against the iron fence of the cemetery. The gate creaked as he pushed it open, and he cast a furtive look over his shoulder to make sure he hadn’t been followed. Then he took a few steps inside the churchyard. The gate closed behind him with a metallic clang.

  The little graveyard was so dark that the surgeon could hardly make out the outline of the Gothic church in front of him. He stepped away from the fence, put down his tools, and rummaged blindly in his sack until he found a small copper lantern. He lit it as fast as his trembling fingers allowed, and in the vacillating light examined the burial grounds. All was still, yet no peace emanated from the place. The poor’s refuges in death were as overpopulated as their habitats in life. London was overflowing with corpses, their coffins piled up on top of each other in each grave, their bodies often prematurely decomposed by quicklime. Cooper lifted the lantern above his head. He glanced at the sea of tombstones around him. On each side of the narrow path that led to the massive edifice, not a stone had been left unturned, and every square inch of muddy earth hid a tomb, even if none was visible. There was something undeniably eerie about the little cemetery, and for a moment the surgeon thought of turning back. Then he remembered the purpose of his mission and the higher interest he was serving. He gathered his spirits, and without wasting another minute, scurried toward a carved headstone a dozen yards to the right. The giant’s headstone.

  Cooper started using the shovel right away. No need for the pickaxe; the ground was soft and soggy. Given the size of the cadaver and the possibility that the coffin might not be made of wood, the doctor had decided against the resurrection men’s common method. They would have dug up the head of the casket, broken it with a crowbar, and hauled the body out of its box. The surgeon, on the other hand, would dig a hole the length of the whole grave. Sweating in the cold and stopping often to look out for strange noises, he was waist deep in the grave when, with a screeching sound, the shovel scraped a surface. Kneeling in the mud, his heart beating fast and loud in his eardrums, he removed some of the earth with his leather-gloved hands, revealing a wooden lid. He knocked twice with his clenched index, and the coffin gave a hollow sound: the layer would not be thick or heavy to lift. Could it be the body snatchers’ fears were unjustified? Comforted by this discovery, he went back to work, clearing away the rest of the coffin. The rain redoubled, lashing his back as he hunched over the tomb.

  Cooper scooped away the last spadeful of soil and stood at the edge of the casket, catching his breath. Thoughts raced through his mind. What if the coffin was booby-trapped? Would
he have time to jump out of the hole? He would have to take the risk. Shifting around in the tomb to face the part opposite the hinges, the surgeon stuck the crowbar in the slit below the lid and pushed down with all his weight. The wood creaked and split, a couple of inches at first, and then the cheap locks gave. The smell of decay emanating from inside instantly gripped Cooper’s throat and he coughed, his eyes welling up. He threw the crowbar to the surface and wiped his forehead with his right sleeve. He sighed deeply, refilling his lungs with fresh air before going back to his gruesome task. But as he looked down at the coffin, something moved in the bushes to his right, in the periphery of his vision. The surgeon turned. Nothing. His gaze roamed around the place. All seemed quiet.

  “Probably just a fox,” he said to himself. His voice seemed unusually loud to him, but he forced himself to repeat, “Just a fox,” and with a last look around the cemetery, he knelt down in the grave.

  Cooper gripped the lid of the coffin and carefully pulled it open. The stench was hard to stomach. The surgeon, used to the sight and smell of the recently deceased but unaccustomed to corpses in such an advanced state of decomposition, gagged as he removed Ben Vaughan’s shroud. The face of the giant had already rotted away, his features unrecognizable, his lidless eyes sunk back in their sockets and gnawed at by myriad insects. Maggots crawled in his hair, in his half-eaten ears and exposed ribcage. The flesh of his fingers had all but disappeared; the cheap suit he had been buried in was now little more than shreds. Yet his skeleton was intact, protruding through the moldering skin, shiny white in the timid light of the lantern. His upper torso was twisted, his shoulders hunched, his frame narrow: despite the pestilence and the horror of the place, Cooper couldn’t help but admire the uniqueness of the specimen. Struggling to subdue his jangling nerves, he was preparing to lift the body’s head and place a rope underneath its armpits when he heard a crack somewhere above him. Leaning on the side of the box, he stuck out his head, looked up, and saw nothing. He listened intently. At first, all he heard was the sound of his own breathing. But after a few seconds, as his breaths became longer and more subdued, he made out a crackle in the bushes to his left. He squinted. Another sound to his right. He spun around quick as lightning to catch the source of the noise, and as he shifted, his left hand slipped from the coffin to the head of the corpse.

  The cold, moist feel of putrid flesh startled him, and his hand brushed the cadaver’s blackened lips … which suddenly snapped shut, entrapping three of the surgeon’s fingers. Cooper howled in pain and surprise. He tried to pull his fingers out, but the teeth dug hard into his skin, and the dead jaws held on too tight. Doing his best not to succumb to panic, he knelt in the mud and brought his face near Vaughan’s. Tugging repeatedly and wincing with each failed attempt, he noticed a little piece of metal at the edge of the giant’s mouth. A trap! How could he not have noticed it sooner? How could he have been so naïve, assuming the casket would be the only potential danger? Absorbed in his fight against the corpse, he was only vaguely aware of the shuffling above him. He jerked his hand one last time, leaning on the cadaver’s upper arm, and triggered another hidden mechanism. The dead man’s putrefied fingers caught the intruder’s right arm, gripping him in an inextricable clench. Transfixed with terror, Cooper yelped and pulled, but the grasp only tightened. Tears of frustration welled up in his eyes. He inhaled deeply and took a moment to calm down. In his own relative silence, he finally registered footsteps around the tomb. He froze, his heart skipping a beat. Then he slowly looked up and saw the wavering lights of approaching torches. He had been found.

  “Who goes there?” Cooper cried, hoping against hope that the newcomers would deliver him from his gruesome predicament.

  No reply. The footsteps had stopped; the lights were right above him.

  “Who are you?” he insisted, craning his neck, trying to see at the surface.

  Without a word, the intruders stepped into view. The nightmarish vision made Cooper scream, and he pulled at the corpse’s hand and mouth again, desperate. They were a dozen around the tomb, of all shapes and heights. A couple of dwarfs, one of them bearded and haggard, the other slim with long hair, flanked twins whose heads came out of the same body. A woman the size of a child, her face covered in thick brown hair, stood by a man whose scarred features, disfigured by smallpox, were crowned by a pair of black horns. An obscenely obese woman held the hand of a small, bald creature with hoglike teeth coming out of its lower jaw. The only one who didn’t carry a torch was a torso with a head and one arm, crawling on the grass.

  Medical marvels. Vaughan’s sideshow companions.

  Cooper’s cries and supplications stopped when the homed man swung a wooden board down into the grave, hitting the surgeon’s right temple and knocking him unconscious.

  * * *

  The world was gray. Cooper looked around, but in the first seconds after he’d awoken, he couldn’t see past the dense mist that clouded over his vision. He blinked and shook his head. Once he’d fully regained consciousness, he tried to move his arm. He was stuck. Twisting his neck, he saw that his wrists and ankles were tied to the table he lay on. A thick rope was wrapped around his naked waist.

  The room was dark, but he recognized it at once. He was bound to the slab in the auditorium, where he had taught countless students and given numerous public lessons. He smelled the chemicals used in dissection and heard the clanging of instruments—scissors, blades, forceps, scalpels, picks, and probes—against the pans, and the chatter of the audience in the rows around him. Sideshow freaks occupied every seat around, from the front steps to the ceiling. Three figures in medical apparel stood a few feet away, caught in a debate. Cooper moaned. The monsters fell silent and turned to him.

  They approached.

  “Sssso Missster Cooper, you are awake,” said the tallest, thinnest of the three, revealing a forked tongue. He held out his scaled hands. His companions, a dwarf and a creature with a mustache, broad shoulders, and large breasts, passed him a scalpel and a pair of forceps.

  “You don’t believe in the afterlife, Mister Cooper, sir,” the dwarf said.

  Cooper shook his head and groaned. He was desperate to argue his case, but terror blocked all coherent thought.

  “Ben Vaughan did,” the hermaphrodite added in a low voice. “He believed.”

  “In fact, he believed sssso much he made ussss promissss we’d keep hisss remainsss sssafe from your … kind,” the Lizard Man explained, spitting the last word with disdain.

  “We knew you’d come,” the little man said.

  “And we have instructions,” the she-male added.

  The Lizard pressed the tip of his scalpel on the surgeon’s sternum. A single pearl of blood formed between the blade and the skin.

  “In God’s name, leave me alone!” the doctor pleaded, as loud as his exhausted lungs allowed. He could feel long drops of sweat running down his forehead onto the slab.

  “In God’sss name?” the Lizard repeated. “That’s exactly what we will do. Act in God’s name.” In one quick, brutal gesture, he slid the scalpel down his patient’s thorax, opening him up from the middle of his ribcage to the lower part of his stomach. The prisoner yelped, the last sounds he could emit. The audience applauded and nodded in approval.

  “You sssee, Missster Cooper, we’re going to give you a tassste of resurrection,” he hissed as he put down the scalpel and prepared to plunge the forceps into the wound.

  Alistair S. Cooper fought the ropes around his wrists, but the bonds were too tight and there was nothing he could do. He was above all a practical man, and he could tell his body had reached its limits. As the cold metal of the extractor touched his chest, he knew his mortal shell would soon be clay, an empty carcass left to decay. Worn out, resolute, he closed his eyes and prayed for a quick death, and the salvation of his soul.

  A HAUNTING

  JOHN CONNOLLY

  THE WORLD HAD grown passing strange.

  Even the hotel felt different, a
s though all of the furniture had been shifted slightly in his absence, the reception desk moved a foot away from its previous position, the lights adjusted so they were either too low or too bright. It was wrong. It was not as it had once been. All had changed.

  Yet how could it be otherwise when she was no longer with him? He had never stayed here alone before. She had always been by his side, standing at his left hand as he checked them both in, watching in silent approval as he signed the register, her fingers instinctively tightening on his arm as he wrote the words “Mr. & Mrs.,” just as he had done on that first night when they had come here on their honeymoon. She had repeated that small, impossibly intimate gesture on every similar occasion thereafter, telling him in her silent way that she would not take for granted this coupling, the yoking together of their two diverse personalities under a single name. She was his as he was hers, and she had never regretted that fact, and would never grow weary of it.

  But now there was no “Mrs.,” only “Mr.” He looked up at the young woman behind the desk. He had not seen her before, and he assumed that she was new. There were always new people here, but in the past enough of the old had remained to give them a sense of comforting familiarity when they had stayed here. Now, as his electronic key was prepared and his credit card swiped, he took time to take in the faces of the staff and saw none that he recognized. Even the concierge was no longer the same. Everything had been altered, it seemed, by her departure from this life. Her death had tilted the globe on its axis, displacing furniture, light fixtures, even people. They had left with her, and all of them had been quietly replaced without a single objection.

  But he had not replaced her with another, and he never would.

  He bent down to pick up his bag, and the pain shot through him again, the sensation so sharp and brutal that he lost his breath and had to lean back against the reception desk. The young woman asked him if he was all right, and, after a time, he lied and told her that he was. A bellhop came and offered to bring his bag to his room for him, leaving him with a vague sense of shame that he could not accomplish even this simple task alone: to carry a small leather bag from reception to elevator, from elevator to room. He knew that nobody was looking, that nobody cared, that this was the bellhop’s purpose, but it was the fact that the element of choice had been taken from him that troubled him so. He could not have carried the bag, not at that moment, even had he wanted to do so. His body ached, and every movement spoke of weakness and decay. He envisaged it sometimes as a honeycomb, riddled with spaces where cells had collapsed and decayed, a fragile construction that would disintegrate under pressure. He was coming to the end of his life, and his body was in terminal decline.