by Martin Rose
“You’re not Highsmith.”
A grin divided the dark. His teeth were bleached white and concealing endless rows of sharpened canines behind the first.
Highsmith’s a naughty one. Talking too much when he should be grateful for what he still has. Namely, his life. Which brings us to you. You’ve made it quite far, for an upstart.
“Tell me about it, whoever you are.”
I don’t deal in names.
“What are you then? You’re the one they call the Inspector, aren’t you?”
The grin stretched wider like an elastic band testing the limits of breaking.
“What do you care if I live or die?”
The same reason some men put money on horses, he answered. It’s how we put irrational and uncontrollable fate in a controlled setting. Our humanity’s acknowledgment to free-wheeling fortune, that force we cannot tame with all our science and technology.
“So you’re saying you gamble your money on me living or dying, just to comfort you in the face of an indifferent universe?”
Essentially, peasant.
“Which one was it? Which did you put money on?”
The Inspector leaned forward out of the darkness.
Moonlight tiger-striped his face, pulsing in and out of reality like a strobe giving brief flashes of things carouseling out of my vision—warped skin over bone, flaking flesh in striations that immediately faded and gave way to smooth youthful skin in a whirling dervish of disease and vitality unified. A face in flux and howling.
His knee hit the mattress as he landed. Springs squealed. Every perception intensified, from the crease in his suit pants to the bony wrist curling out from his sleeve. My lips curled up away from my teeth as I scrabbled backward along rough and dirty sheets, away from him, but he advanced, inexorable.
Time reversed upon itself. Imprisoned in dream time speed. The bed no longer a bed, but a conveyor belt forcing me to move closer even as I shrank before the Inspector’s pursuit. His mouth flew open, hissing.
This is real, I thought. Jesus Christ, this is really real.
The flash and gleam of something in his right hand. He laid the other across my chest to bar me. My limbs stricken, tied down with hundred-pound weights at the wrist. The touch of him featherlight at first and then pressing with the force of megatons. Fingers weighed me down like ancient ritual stones in human sacrifices. For the first time in my life, it occurred to me, with his undulating snaking roll across my body, that I could be raped. A fate I’d ignorantly thought was only reserved for women could also be mine to suffer.
His movement was undeniably sexual, but conquest was not his goal; he instead laid the flat of the knife blade across my belly and held it there. Put his lips directly at my ear and held me taut and listening. I longed to hear Elvedina’s footfalls like thunder, to break the spell. Where was the calvary? And the rushing emptiness of realization: there is no calvary. No one is coming to save me.
Vitus, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’m betting on life.
I laughed through the fear. “I know what people like you do, people like my father.”
And what is it we do, exactly?
“You bet on both sides and tell me how you were pulling for me all along.”
Surprise. Even a hint of pride, as though he perceived me for who I am, for the very first time.
Very good, Vitus. Very good, indeed.
And then, he sank a knife into my belly.
*
Liquid fire opened up a seam across my abdomen. I followed the line of agony out of the dream and into the screaming dawn burning over the horizon. The folding knife Lafferty gave me hours before clattered out of my midsection and to the floor.
The vulture screamed, his wings unfurled at the window and sunlight slanted through his feathers. My return to the waking world left me alone; abandoned save the vulture, the Inspector evaporated into the shadows. I clutched my belly, holding in the blood with a torment so deep it leached through the soles of my feet and into the ground. Fracked through bone and marrow. My spine rattled against the headboard as I struggled to rise—every instinct pushing me from paralysis to action and failing miserably. Strategies took form and burst apart before I could act on them. Find a phone. Find a person.
But the vulture ate the phone and nothing remained.
The door burst wide. Elvedina filled the threshold, all six-foot Balkan length of her, her eyes, mercury-burst thermometers. She lurched into the room like a loping wolf, snarling, latched a hand around my bare ankle and dragged me bodily to the end of the bed while I writhed and screamed. My voice blew out, extinguished into a pitiful gurgle of desolate noise.
I couldn’t fight her and hold my guts in at the same time.
She grabbed at my wrists; I fought with her, stubborn, until she succeeded in tearing them away from my middle. My ripped shirt, the open, oozing wound exposed.
I remembered Niko, when I first came to the funeral home with my jaw bone in hand and hope in my heart, her levelheaded stare when I expected screaming. Niko surprised me with tenderness where I deserved none, kindness when I’d used up all good will.
Elvedina plotted to kill me behind cold assassin’s eyes. Calculations stacked up behind her gaze as she scanned the room for useful items, discarded the sheets as too bulky, and instead tore her shirt off over her head, shoved the shirt down into the bleeding center of me, hard, a lit stick of dynamite exploded in my guts. I loosed a new scream of agony. She took the long sleeves of her shirt and wrapped them around my center, binding me fast. I fell back, sweating out my pain and shivering out my agony. Jamie’s voice was at my ear as though I stood outside of myself on some distant shore, watching this wash of a boy, flailing and convulsing with pain, my brother narrating for me the extent of my damage with detached, medical interest. Noting the coldness in my fingers, the numbness, the creeping shock. Taking my pulse with scientific detachment.
She slapped me.
The distant fantasy of my brother diagnosing me from afar evaporated. I skyrocketed back to the screaming present. I cursed at her and she slapped me again. Either she was keeping me alive by preventing me from passing out or she moonlighted as a dominatrix and was clocking in extra hours. She could delay the others, delay the help. Let me bleed out while the EMTs were en route. Leave me with my guts tumbling onto the floor like telephone wires. Of course, that didn’t seem to jibe with her irritating, albeit charming slaps to the face jolting me from the brink of gray-tinged vision, threatening to consume me and lead me onward to blissful shock-sleep, perhaps never to awaken.
She grabbed my face in her hand and squeezed. Brutal and dirty fingers painted lines of ice into my sweating skin. Her palm bit like the rubber heel of a stilletto shoe.
“You gonna kill me, just you fucking try,” I husked.
Doors banged open in the hall. Lafferty’s chair rolled over the planks like a freight train racing down the tracks, thawk thawk thawk thawk. A rifle shot cracked through the morning bird song. The birds fell silent. The vulture’s beak opened and closed beneath rolling eyes as he danced, agitated, from one leg to the other, worrying the bed post, his half furled wings throwing a shadow over me.
Elvedina revolved, catching the door with her fingers and slamming it shut on the racing wheelchair charging down the hall. The door buckled as he rammed it, and his wheels squealed when he bounced backward.
I tried to yell. Each word came with a sucker punch. “The damn bitch has me—”
Elvedina snarled and reached over to pick up the end table. The lamp went crashing to the floor. The lightbulb popped like a firecracker and sprayed glass. My voice lost all strength as she swung the end table by the leg and threw it into the window. More glass shattered, fragmented into the dawn.
Lafferty’s voice filled the hall in a relentless echo. “Get down!”
A shotgun blast. The bedroom knob blew out. Innards of the lock uncorked across the floor.
Elvedina turned and scooped me up.
I seesawed in her grasp. The world revolved in confusing kaleidoscope and confounding fever. Wasn’t I supposed to be picking her up off the floor? What was next, the godforsaken smelling salts?
If I’d had masculine pride, it must have fallen out of my pocket where Elvedina crushed it beneath her heel as she took me, shivering and dying, directly out the broken window. Lafferty yelled for her to stop or he’d shoot, by god, he’d chase us in the fuckin’ wheelchair if he had to.
My head tilted back. The rushing sky filled my vision; Elvedina half-naked with her own shirt wrapped around me like a swaddling child. A living sphinx. Every stride of her legs and pump of her heart a bellows. This is how I’m going to die. Staring at the sky where the scratching tree limbs cut light into prison bars. The shadow of a vulture, tracking us with his lambent eyes, crying out into the wilderness.
PART 3
DEUS EX MACHINA
Once upon a time, as all the fairy tales go, I was a zombie. They called my condition pre-deceased to describe the state in which I was legally dead but still conscious, as though it made the indignity of my arrested mortality easier to bear—made it easier to ignore the limbs that would become loose in my joints and the teeth that would unceremoniously eject from my jaw, make it easier to suffer the tears that would form in my flesh, like flaking lead paint on a fence post.
Zombie sounded too grindhouse for my brother, so he slapped a title on it, the same way he would a medal of honor on a soldier. Like I should be thankful to experience every trivial ache and monstrous agony of death in slow-mo.
They distilled chemicals from puffer fish. From the spotted mushroom Amanita Muscaria and Atropa Belladonna, deadly nightshade. A witches’ brew they named Atroxipine. They gave me endless refills. With this prescription, I could ape and mime all the rituals and habits of any living human (except for the living part). It gave me a subzero blood flow, but lit up the reactors in my brain like a Christmas tree. Restrained me from sideslipping in that feral state known from every zombie movie.
But the time between one pill and another sustaining my upright animation would stretch thin and perilous. An itch came over me as one dose ended and I readied to take another, timed out to the alarm on my wristwatch. The consequences if I skipped a dose were extreme. I could not decide to discontinue my treatment and bargain with myself for a medication-free life just to come crawling back to the pill bottle once I’d learned my lesson. To forget was to devolve. To forget was to fall through the abyss of my psyche and never find my way back again, and I would be reduced to a jaw-snapping, teeth-clattering hunger that could never be satisfied and never be filled.
I never skipped a dose. Never played with the milligrams just to see what would happen. But as the deadline approached and I waited for my watch’s interminable beep beep and felt the sheen of moisture in the back of my throat churn in anticipation of a raw meal, I intuited a darkness welling up all around me and contracting my vision to narrow pinpoints. Could sense and taste my backslide into the less than human. Falling through a hole in myself to land in the deepest and darkest ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno where I could not remember who I was, how I got there, or anything other than satisfying this endless hunger.
The times I fell through the hole were rare; but they stuck out in memory like old silent films with their washed-out silver celluloid. Broken frames. Herky-jerky sounds. Some frames sped up, others slowed down, and the central narrative lost, so when I finally did recover, I was left to piece together the broken memories. No amount of deduction could reverse engineer my personal tragedies. All that was left behind were useless bits and pieces of an engine that would never run again.
When finally I woke from a nightmare Inspector shoving his knife into my bowels, I thought myself returned to the past, drifting back and forth through my own timeline. A zombie one second, human in another. A ceiling avalanched above me in blinding white. When I turned my head, a row of gurneys stacked in an infinite line, one after the other.
I recognized the interior of Pleasant Hills Funeral Home. Bodies awaiting burial, awaiting the strict attention of my Underworld Queen, Niko. Had Elvedina brought me here? Questions crowded in and stacked up, one fast upon the other. I stretched back into memory to understand how I had arrived here, who had taken me, and if I were still in danger. My head sluggish as the result of a deep anesthesia, threatening to pull me back into the dark.
A singular memory of Elvedina carrying me, the halls and rooms of the funeral home and Niko’s voice, unintelligible—afraid? Terrified?—and then, a mask closed over my mouth, spitting noxious fumes into my lungs. When I turned to face this new assault, I held onto a second of consciousness to stare into Elvedina’s heartless and cruel face, her mouth flat as a blade and their seam the sword-gutter through which the blood of enemies is designed to run. A flashing scalpel in one hand, the doctor’s mask engulfing her rigid face into a sinister doctor with Niko’s tools at her disposal, and Niko, where was Niko?
Not here. I fought to wake. My purpose should be to protect her even if she resented me and resented my protection. What had Elvedina done with her, to her?
But there descended blackness, and no room for Niko in the black.
Voices penetrated into the leviathan through which I’d fallen. The squawking vulture. Images of my brother. Memories of my father. Dreams of Highsmith laughing at me as usual but this time he stopped laughing and begged me to help him until his face distorted into the snout of a pig, snorting. Tears ran down his face and his laugh crossed the boundary into screams.
The dreams ended. Hands pressing on my belly—deep and seismic tremblings through my solar plexus. I vomited into the mask. Someone turned me over and cleaned me up. The long and narrow line of a hand pulled a rug needle away from my stomach.
Stitching me back together.
Don’t you know? My Id whispered.You died. This is where people go when they are dead. To the funeral home. Won’t that make you so pleased, to have one last night together with her?
Every stitch pull was another in a long line of embalming. Fingers too rough to be Niko’s. Every time I opened my eyes, I waited to discover myself inside a coffin, to wake up to my own funeral. Soon, the embalming pump would sound and deliver formaldehyde into my veins and preserve my worthless heart.
But every time I opened my eyes, I was still on the table, and still not quite dead enough. Elvedina skirted the edges of my vision with her teeth bared like knives and bent over me. She wore the look of kamikaze determination, turning her blank face into a rictus. Her desperation mesmerized me in its raw ugliness. Each time her fist disappeared into the mound of my ruined guts, warmth spread out until I could only writhe beneath her stare.
Whispers cosseted me. A brisk command: “More ether, please” and the steady blip blip of my pulse rate tracking on a third-world veterinarian’s heart monitor.
Elvedina wavered into view as though I were staring up at her through the bottom of a lake.
She lifted a wand of black iron in her hand; a foot’s length of sinister metal radiated heat and turned glowing red. Elvedina grinned. The red glow lit her smile like a jack-o’-lantern’s as she laid the end of the burning wand on my belly and I understood, then: she was using a cautery.
I smelled myself burning.
Beware the echoes and specters
I passed out.
*
No matter to me the blood in my mouth or the broken bones. Years without dreaming in my zombie state made me hungry for it now. I closed my eyes, reeling back into darkness and counting sheep with abandon.
Long ago, all I had was the cold comfort of late-night television. Old noirs, black and whites on the silver screen. The dead don’t sleep; and now I floated on a wave of syrup in a vast ocean. My only complaint is I can’t change the programming, and I have to take the nightmares with the dreams.
Sometimes the nightmares seem so like real life. A shadow of a memory. Of a thing I did that I cannot take back, a decision committed th
at cannot be unmade. The fates, conspiring against my better self and forcing my hand into murder. My father had a term for this: iacta alea est. The die is cast.
When they questioned me at the police station, I said I did not know what I had done. I did not remember killing my brother. I could even believe my own lie to buy me some peace. But here in dreams, I could not relent. The memory, like a freshly printed photo:
I’ve got a gun in my hand pressed to my brother’s chest and his wife yells at us, chucking ugly knickknacks and figurines at us. They shatter on the hardwood flooring until we’re covered in ceramic and blood. We’re eye to eye. Jamie shaking and spitting blood while I press the tip of the Glock over his heart. He reaches up and I’m ready to do it again, take our sprawling fistfight right over broken glass and drop us straight off a cliff into hell, if there is one.
“Why wait?”
He guides the muzzle into the path of his heart. Presses it there. Jamie doesn’t take a swing at me. Doesn’t close his eyes. He doesn’t look angry or sorry or sad. He looks like a man about to go on his way to the most important board meeting of his career. He reaches up at his neck and grabs at a chain, a necklace glinting with blood and light. He snaps it off into his fist and loops it over the muzzle of my gun.
At the end of it, a black skeleton key sits along the side of the firearm. My key, my murder key.
“Take care of her,” Jamie said. “I love you, brother. Beware the echoes and specters. Beware the echoes and specters!”
His voice, climbing in volume, and I killed him. Blood spray coating me through and through and the errant buzzing of the fly in my grip. The fly that wants to eat, infect, and give away this zombie magic to another.
Her? What did he mean, her? Megan? Our mother?
And who were the echoes and specters?
*
Through the never ending blackness, I came back from eternity.
I woke up on a gurney, alone in the white rooms and halls of Pleasant Hills Funeral Home. The concrete floors with their chromium drains like deep-set eyes in the ground filled me with familiarity, with homecoming. The white sheets and the Tyvek, fungicide, menthol and ammonia marrying in the air. All of it filled me with a satisfaction so deep, I held myself still until it passed from me and I knew it was not a dream.