Ghosts of Christmas Present: A Dead Detective Short Story (The Dead Detective)

by J. R. Rain

  “But you’re both enrolled in school, at least?”

  “Sure!” Tinkerbell said. “We go to Georgetown Day. But we get lots of lessons after school from our uncles.”

  Uh oh. That didn’t sound good. One thing family counselors learned early to red-flag was the word “uncles.” Mary Lee excused herself for a moment and went back to the desk. Under her breath, she asked Jackie to phone Child Protection Services.

  “There won’t be anybody there this time of night,” Jackie said.

  “Don’t you have a friend who works there?”

  Jackie snorted rudely. “Dontrice is no friend of mine. But at least she’s too damn smart to get stuck working all night Christmas Eve, like me…” The phone beside her rang. She picked it up, and after a moment, handed the receiver to Mary Lee with a startled look on her face. “It’s for you. Says his name is a ‘Mr. Walker’.”

  “Yo, this is Walkie T. —the Walkman,” said an angry squawking in Mary Lee’s ear. “I’ll be the supervisor in charge of yo’ sorry ass tonight, Mary Lee! Now, you two dumb bitches quit messin’ round, and let my kids go in that autopsy room and visit they daddy, you hear? Read me loud and clear? Don’t make me come down there and drop you one upside yo’ head now. And… well, damn, Mary Lee. I just can’t stay mad at you, doll baby, not tonight. Merry fuckin’ Christmas!”

  And then, mercifully, the voice was gone. Numb, Mary Lee let the phone receiver dangle off the side of the desk beside her. Her face was white as a sheet, and her hands were trembling. How had that—thing—on the phone known her name?

  It rang again.

  Jackie put it on speakerphone this time.

  “And a Happy fuckin’ New Year!” it howled.

  Both women looked up to find the two Di Angelo children standing directly in front of them. They had eyes like cats. The girl’s were a startling green and her brother’s gold.

  “Can we go see our father now?” Tinkerbell asked. Her tone was firm, and she wasn’t smiling.

  Jackie shook her head no, but then, after a few moments, her face went blank and she pressed the orderly call button that released the sliding hall doors.

  “Luis will take care of you,” she said, gasping for breath. She turned to Mary Lee. “You better take them in.” The overhead lights blinked.

  Mary Lee was even more terrified by this, if possible. Her ears were still ringing with the obscenity-laced threats that had just been screamed at her over the telephone. “Do I have to?” she mumbled.

  Her iPhone buzzed in her pocket, but she ignored it. She’d managed to work upstairs from the city morgue for nearly six weeks without having to actually set eyes on a single corpse. Yet. But now it appeared her luck was about to run out. Even here in the outside reception area, the heavy smell of formaldehyde and air freshener mixed with something else—rotting pork maybe—was making her slightly nauseous.

  “Yes, visitors must be accompanied by staff at all times; that’s the rule. And I’m the Admissions Manager. I’m not supposed to leave the desk unattended when I’m covering it.”

  This left Mary Lee completely out of arguments. With a quiet groan, she tottered off toward the hall doorway. The two children fell in on either side of her, and Tinkerbell took her hand. The hall was wide, brightly tiled, and built at a slight incline to assist the transport aides to push gurneys down it. Metal rails ran down either wall. Somebody, probably Shanelle, had wrapped alternating lengths of white and red ribbon around them to suggest candy canes. The smell in here was much worse, and Mary Lee swayed slightly.

  “Don’t worry,” the girl said kindly. “We’ve seen lots of dead bodies. You’ll get used to them.”

  “As long as they stay dead…” Ariel muttered.

  “He still has to sleep with the light on.”

  “Shut up, Tink!”

  “We should have brought our spectrascopes. I bet there are lots of cool ghosts in a place like this,” Tinkerbell sneered.

  Mary Lee shuddered. They passed a pair of closed doors: the supervisors’ office and a supply closet. Farther down the hall were doors marked “Pathology” and “Isolation.” They wanted the Main Autopsy lab just to the right.

  Luis Reyes, one of the two medical orderlies on duty there that night, resembled a wild boar. The black hairs on his head came down within an inch of his brow, and his beard was a thicket of bristles. His teeth were brown tusks, inlaid with silver. No matter what question anyone ever asked him, he always replied, “Great,” in the same flat tone of voice: “Luis, how was your Thanksgiving?” “Great.” “Luis, please empty these entrails into the Hazmat bin.” “Great.” It was impossible to tell if he was being sarcastic. Now, Jackie Sprewell rang him from the front desk to say the new girl from the third floor was escorting two children back to the autopsy room to do a PIP on the John Doe.

  “Great,” he said. Then he sighed and turned off the main medical monitor, which was displaying a porn video. Jamal, who normally shared the shift with him, had ducked out an hour ago to smoke a joint. Sometimes he came back, sometimes he didn’t.

  Now, Luis was left here on his own on the busiest night of the year for domestic killings. Something about the family tension. Ordinary guys would suddenly pop their old ladies just for bitching at them, or young mothers would stick their babies in the oven instead of the Christmas turkey. People drank too much and then went crazy at the dinner table.

  And all the dead bodies ended up right here on his stainless steel tables. Luis was grateful his own parents had gone back to the Dominican Republic. They’d be in church right now. Traffic here would pick up after 2 a.m. or so, when the CSI Forensics were done, and the ambulances started trickling in with the bagged and tagged decedents.

  He’d be stuck doing it all if Jamal didn’t show up soon. Now this. He heard footsteps in the outer hallway. Every electrical light and appliance slowly dimmed, then blinked twice, before coming back to life. The porn chick’s moans and “uh huhs” loudly blared from the monitor again.

  “Joder!” Luis hit the space bar of the laptop computer playing the video, and shut the monitor off for good just as the outside lab doors swung open.

  The autopsy lab was kept heavily refrigerated, so there was a little hallway between the outer doors and the inner one, which consisted of fat strips of transparent acetate hung from ceiling to floor to form a sort of airlock. The new family counselor lady, visibly shivering, walked in through it with a couple of Anglo kids. They looked like they were at Disney World, staring at everything and bursting with questions.

  “This is our first visit,” the girl said. “It’s so totally cool in here! I didn’t think everything would be so bright and clean and modern. Wow, look at those drills and bone saws.” In fact, she was grossly flattering the place, about the size of a small elementary school classroom, which was already looking its age after twenty years.

  Its walls were covered with heavy tile, dark green along three walls and white across one, which was impossible to keep completely clean, and the white Formica flooring was cracking in spots. But it was nice of the kid to be so enthusiastic. Luis no longer noticed the cold or the smell, but most visitors did; the family counselor lady looked like she was about to vomitar como loco.

  “You do keep organs in glass jars, though, right?” the boy asked. “We do at home.”

  Luis just shook his head.

  “What are you here for?” he asked the woman impatiently. “Mary Lee something” it said on the name badge on her sweater. Upstairs, they came and they went; nobody worked here for long. Luis paid them no attention. Except for one of the PAs, who bore a slight resemblance to one of his favorite porn actresses. He’d be sorry to see her go.

  “To see our dad!” the girl said.

  “Got your PIP form?” Luis pronounced this as “peep.”

  “Is this him?” The boy had wandered over to one of the waist-high autopsy tables. There were three in a long row inside the room, with raised edges and runnels to accommodate blood, and l
arge sinks and taps built into the end where the corpses’ feet were laid. Only one table was occupied, this by a tagged blue body bag. A white-padded gurney cart rested beside it. Before Luis could make any move to stop him, the crazy Anglo boy was already unzipping the bag.

  “Hey, this isn’t Dad.” The kid sounded disappointed. “Look.”

  The naked body inside the bag was that of a young, very large, and well-muscled black man. A kid, really. He looked to be about twenty. Someone must have switched him and the white John Doe with the chest wound who’d been lying there just an hour before, thought Luis. This one had already been autopsied and had his name on a tag on his right big toe; he was left over from the night before, a drug shootout in Petworth. Strips of skin and flesh had been sliced and peeled away from his biceps during the post-mortem, and there was evidence of several messy bullet wounds on his close-shaven head. He had also been sawed open from his throat down in order to obtain samples from his internal organs. The massive cut had then been haphazardly stapled closed again.

  “Whoa, look at that!” the girl said, joining her brother beside the body. Both were peering at the cadaver on tiptoe. “He’s been killed execution-style. Tapped three times in the head. Nice! It’s okay,” she reassured Mary Lee. “We take anatomy classes from Uncle Crawley. This isn’t Dad, but our father has definitely been in here.”

  “What the fuck are you talkin’ about?” Luis said.

  “See those nostril abrasions?” Tinkerbell asked. She pointed at the corpse’s forehead. Luis noticed the girl was wearing bright blue fingernail polish. “The pineal gland was extracted endoscopically through the nose, I bet. ‘Cuz look; there are more incisions in his neck. And see? More just above the kidneys on his sides. Dad was harvesting glands. He and Mom always do that whenever they see a dead person. It’s like the first rule of being a horogaunt.”

  She peeled the bag back further, and Mary Lee winced at the sight.

  “I bet if we check the testes, we’ll find—”

  “Don’t get too close to the blood, Tink,” Ariel said.

  But it was too late; she’d already smelled it. Tinkerbell’s nostrils were flared, and the tips of her upper incisors now pillowed against her lower lip. The fluorescent lights overhead were dimming and hissing.

  “Okay, basta!” Luis said. He pulled the two kids away from the slab by their coat collars and zipped the body bag back up. “I better call my boss about the body switch. Shit! The electricity’s going crazy again.”

  There was a long set of sinks and cabinets against the white-tiled wall; Mary Lee was being sick into one of them just as the big wall monitor roared back online. Ariel stopped and stared up at the sex act now back on the screen with frank interest. Tinkerbell came over to put a hand on Mary Lee’s shoulder.

  “You okay?”

  “Thanks, could you hand me a paper towel? I was just feeling… dizzy for a minute.” Mary Lee wiped her mouth with it and then blew her nose. Through the pungent chemical tang of formaldehyde, she still smelled human urine and feces and something else, something like foot odor. “What’s a ‘horror gaunt’?” she asked the girl without thinking.

  Tink looked sly and at the same time slightly ashamed of herself, as if she’d said too much. “Don’t tell anybody, okay? Because we’re not supposed to ever mention it to other people. They’re called horogaunts. That’s a kind of like… an undead being or whatever. They inject human glandular extractions and other stuff into themselves.”

  Mary Lee looked like she might be ill again.

  “But don’t worry, Ari and I aren’t ga’nts. It’s not hereditary.” Tinkerbell licked her lips. “Not like vampirism…”

  She opened her mouth, and Mary Lee caught a glimpse of the girl’s gleaming white fangs. Tink’s pupils had shrunk to vertical slits and her eyes seemed to glow green. Then the lights went out again.

  “Tink!” Ari’s said, sounding exasperated. “Leave her alone.”

  His sister whispered something in reply, and Mary Lee had collapsed to the floor in the sudden pitch-blackness and was now crawling across the frigid Formica on her hands and knees.

  Her brother then hissed very loudly, “I’m telling!”

  “Okay, okay…” Tink’s annoyed little voice said, and the lights began creeping back on again, then got stuck halfway, sputtering and flickering. Mary Lee had crawled to the farthest corner of the room, near the freezer door, and was cowering underneath a sink next to a medical cabinet. She’d pulled her knees up under her chin and was shivering uncontrollably. Luis, his dead Android phone in his hand, was feeling his way along the near wall trying to reach the doorway.

  “Besides, you don’t want to spoil your presents. Dad’s probably just gone next door to the hospital to do some last-minute shopping for stocking-stuffers,” Ari reasonably pointed out.

  Luis kept edging toward the door, making the sign against evil with his other hand. He’d been wrong about the two kids, he realized now. They weren’t crazy—they were the children of the devil.

  “Santa stuffs stockings,” Tinkerbell said as Luis ducked through the acetate strips and escaped through the outer doorway into the hall.

  Behind him, the boy said, “Oh, come on, Tink—you know I haven’t believed in Santa Claus for at least two years!”

  “You think they have armed guards here? Mary Lee, do they?” Tinkerbell leaned down to peer at her.

  Mary Lee curled into a fetal position on the floor, screaming, “No! No! Please, just leave me alone and go away!” This sounded funny muffled by her pants and made both children laugh.

  “Remember the time Miss Sweetser did that in math class?” Tink said. It had been Ari’s class, and Ari who’d made the teacher actually freak out by almost making her catch on fire, but everyone in the whole school heard about it and imitated it behind her back all year, so it was almost as if Tinkerbell had really been there. This was better, though.

  Meanwhile, Luis shot past Jackie Sprewell at the reception desk. “What’s going on back there?” she called at him.

  The lights in the reception area were haywire, too, and the boom box radio was playing Blowfly. No matter what she did, she couldn’t turn it off. When she tried to phone security, all she could reach was a recording of Walkie Talkie telling her to leave a message.

  Luis paused briefly in his flight. “I’m outta here. You can stay here if you want, but not me. You better come, too. You will if you’re smart. Those kids are ladrones de tumbas, canibales…”

  “Cannibals?”

  “Yes,” Luis said. When she showed no sign of following him, he took off again toward the front door and rocketed through it, leaving Jackie staring after him.

  Cannibals?

  The plastic Christmas tree on the corner table sparked and caught on fire. Jackie looked around wildly for the nearest fire extinguisher. It was part of her job to administer stuff like that, but for a moment, her mind blanked. The closet. It was behind her in a utility closet.

  She was just returning with it when Luis came back in the front door. Backward. And floating about a foot off the ground. Jackie froze, watching open-mouthed. After a few seconds, she realized Luis was being carried, hoisted aloft by a woman who was grasping his shirt straight-armed. He was wriggling like a fish on a hook, but the woman appeared not to notice. She carried Luis across the reception area and dumped him on his back onto the high counter of the front desk. Then she gazed at Jackie Sprewell and smiled.

  The woman was beautiful. She was dressed like a glamorous cat burglar, in tight, expensive black clothes, and carrying a big, black leather bag. Her skin glowed a light brown; her face was perfectly heart-shaped and Mediterranean, Arab or Greek maybe, with a strong nose and high cheekbones. Her hair and eyes were both the color of chocolate streaked with gold; her hair was pulled tight from her face into a long ponytail. But when Jackie made the mistake of looking into those eyes, it was like falling into a dark, bottomless hole.

  “Where are they?” The woman had a no
ticeable Southern accent.

  Jackie decided it might be smart to answer her. But she was blanking again. It was the heat. “Where are who?”

  “My kids. I know they’re in here somewhere. Walkie, will you please shut up?”

  The boom box lapsed into sullen silence.

  “They’re in the autopsy room,” Luis said, daring to raise his head slightly. He was getting dizzy from lack of blood flow.

  “Thank you,” the woman said and let go of his shirtfront.

  Luis fell against the countertop with a thud. Without a backward glance, the woman stalked off through the automatic doors into the hall. A security monitor under the desk cycled camera views from about a dozen locations on the first floor. It blinked onto the reception area as the woman walked off. Jackie could see herself and Luis on the screen—but she couldn’t see the woman at all. Nothing. Jackie watched on the camera as the hall doors hissed shut behind… no one.

  Not even a shadow.

  Jackie set the extinguisher down on the floor behind the desk and crouched low beside it. Gray, foul-smelling smoke was drifting over from the direction of the little lounge, hugging the ceiling. The plastic tree burning.

  Let it. In a minute, it will set off the alarms, then the sprinkler system. That will show up on the central police and fire computers.

  Luis rolled off the desk and joined her on the floor. “We should get outta here,” he said.

  “Be quiet,” Jackie snapped. “There’s another one of them around somewhere. Maybe outside, maybe inside. Let them take whatever they want and just go.”

  Luis nodded. Great. He really needed to take a piss. But Jackie was una muchacha lista—a smart girl. He should listen to her and stay right where he was. He would never, for the rest of his life, forget the shock of walking straight into that demon-bitch outside the front door or her strength, the speed at which she’d moved. Her smile, like grinning death. Sure, the woman looked hot—but her touch and her breath had been cold. Cold as the grave.