“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 -1 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 wilderness trying to identify a hallucinogenic plant was just silly -1 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.
I could hardly make myself wait until midnight, but there was no way I could do anything at the morgue before then; too many people would be there. I gathered the other ingredients I needed and tried to make myself take a nap, but hunger pangs kept me awake. I fed the cats. I read more of the VODOUN book and learned that I was taking an enormous risk, not with Devlin, but with my own soul. I was tampering with the fabric of reality and would eventually have to pay a price. I didn’t care. With Devlin dead, I thought I might never be able to eat again, so I would soon be dead too.
When midnight came, I forced myself to wait another half-hour. Then I packed up the things I needed and drove to work.
I had been afraid that a traffic accident or a house fire would have caused a spate of activity, but everything was quiet; only the night assistant and the janitor were there. Even so, I wheeled Devlin into the decomp room. He hadn’t begun to decompose, but that room could be locked and there was no window in the door.
First I sewed up the skin over his head wound. I realized I should have done this earlier, as the skin had begun to curl and shrink away from the edges of the wound, but I did as well as I could. I had already cleaned the area around the wound, but now I washed all the blood from his hair, head, and neck. I didn’t know what had happened to his shirt, so I had brought in the top of a green scrub suit. Rigor mortis had passed and his limbs moved easily, but I was not strong enough to wrestle him into the top. I put it on an instrument tray nearby.
Finding the Lomotil, Cystospaz, and Uriced had been no problem. I crushed the pills, cut the scopolamine patch into tiny pieces, and mixed them with most of the other ingredients in an organ-specimen jar. The copy of VODOUN was open to page fifty-three on the counter, and I checked the recipe to make sure I had done everything right. I had only the last two steps to go.
“The final ingredient,” the text read, “is a finger bone taken from a living person.”
I sterilized my hands, my bone saw, and a heavy kitchen cleaver I’d brought from home. I had been tempted to grab a couple of painkillers along with the other pills, but I was afraid they would make me groggy. I had to be absolutely aware of what I was doing. I splayed my left hand on the steel table, expelled a long breath, and brought the cleaver down on the first joint of my forefinger.
This may seem senseless. The spell did not specify which finger to use, and I rely on my hands for my livelihood; why didn’t I choose my relatively useless pinky finger? I’m not sure. I was doing what I felt I had to do - had been from the moment I first saw Devlin on my table, really - and all I can say is that my pinky didn’t feel important enough. I didn’t know how the spell would work, if it did work, but I understood that the finger bone had to be taken from a living person because it was a sacrifice.
I didn’t need the bone saw at all. The cleaver went through the flesh, through the bone, and the joint skittered across the table’s slick surface. It would have fallen to the floor if the table hadn’t had a raised lip for catching blood and other fluids. I only looked at my left hand long enough to sink a few clumsy stitches into the raw flesh and slap on a butterfly bandage. The stitches were the most painful part of the whole procedure. When I had stopped the bleeding, I turned my attention to the severed joint. The book didn’t say anything about meat, blood, or nerves: it said a finger bone, so I used a scalpel to dissect away as much of the other material as I could before dropping the slick little bone into the jar of ingredients.
As I mixed everything together, I felt ravenous. Hunger, exhaustion, and shock were preying on me now; I think I believed Devlin was going to get off that table and immediately fix me a nice meal.
It was ready. I had done everything else; there was only the last step to go. I tilted Devlin’s head back, pulled his lower jaw down, and poured the mixture into his mouth.
Nothing happened.
Maybe the mixture had to dissolve, I thought. It wouldn’t do so on its own because his mouth was so dried out. I ran some water into the jar and let it trickle between his lips.
Still nothing.
“Goddamn it,” I said. “Devlin, you fucking asshole, come back here?
I guess that was why the title of the recipe was ‘Calling Back the Dead’. You had to actually call them. Because as soon as I spoke, Devlin opened his eyes.
I had the scalpel in my hand, not so much because I was afraid of him as because I was afraid for him. The book didn’t say anything about what the person would be like when they came back. I didn’t want a zombi, didn’t want him in some mind
less state of animated limbo. That would be worse than staying dead -and I doubted very much whether a zombie knew enough to hold a haunch of meat over a fire, let alone make a foie gras creme brulee. If he was merely animated - if Devlin himself wasn’t there -I was prepared to drive the scalpel into the base of his skull, doing essentially what the bullet had done before. I don’t know what I thought I would do if that didn’t work.
But I never had to worry about it, because as soon as he opened his eyes, I saw the man I knew in them. And as soon as his gaze met mine, he said, “Dr Brite?”
Then the mixture hit the back of his throat and he began to cough. Wouldn’t that have been cute, if I’d brought him back to life only to have him choke on my severed finger bone? “Devlin,” I said, “swallow.” He did, and the obstruction went down.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 23