Water of Souls

by Eli Constant

  At the back of grandmother’s second diary—I’m skipping around, remembering things as I read—I find where she talks about working in the funeral home with grandfather. She describes how the bodies feel before and after they’ve been embalmed.

  It’s interesting, how she describes the absence of blood and bodily fluids and how it changes the aura around the deceased. It’s interesting...

  A knock on my door pulls me out of my thoughts. Quickly, I close the diary I’m reading and I shove all of them under the sofa cushions, spreading them out so they won’t be noticeable if someone sits down.

  “Coming!” I skip to the door, willing my heartbeat to slow. The journals are hidden. There’s nothing to be worried about. When I open the door, I’m surprised to see Terrance’s face.

  “Hey, Tori.”

  I move to the side so he can enter and I close the door behind him, confusion plain on my face. “Hey. What’s going on? You don’t normally make house calls and when you do, there’s usually a phone call to give warning.”

  “I did try to call. You didn’t answer.”

  “Oh, shit. My cell must have died. I didn’t plug it in last night when I came home.” I turn and find my purse hanging on the wall mounted rack next to the door. Digging for a minute, I find my phone, which is in fact dead. “Yep, dead.” I wave it at him and then walk to the kitchen where I have a charger plugged into the outlet by the bread box.

  “I’m sorry to bug you on a Sunday, but I was wondering if you could come down to the morgue and take a look at that body you found.”

  “Sure, I can, but why?”

  “There’s something... unusual about it. We’re not sure what to make of it.”

  “The coroner doesn’t have an idea?”

  “No, he does, but I want to hear what you think too.”

  I nod. “Okay... you’ve got my attention. Give me five.” I walk to the closet where I keep my boots and coat and I put them on slowly, my brain going through possibilities, although I know blind speculation is stupid. “Ready.” I grab my purse and open the front door again.

  “Great.”

  As I close the apartment door and look down the stairs at Terrance’s already descending form, I realize something. “Hey, how did you get in?”

  “You really shouldn’t put a key in such an obvious spot.” He says, digging into his jacket and holding up a little brass key that glints in the stairwell light.

  “I’ll take that back.” I quipped.

  “Nah, I think I’ll keep it. For your own good. You’ll be dumb and put it back and then all sorts of people will be able to just stroll in uninvited.”

  “Terrance, give me back my key.”

  “Nope.” He pushes through the door that leads to my carport.

  I decide not to keep arguing. Let him have a key. Someday, the Bonneau chief of police walking around with my house key in his pocket might prove a good thing. “Fine, suit yourself. I’ll just change the locks.” It’s an empty threat. I’m way too lazy to deal with that. Besides, the only locksmith in town is a total perv. Last time I had him over—to fix the door to the basement which had to be replaced after I’d kicked it open to get to a reanimated body downstairs—he’d grunted lustfully while given me the up-and-down slow gaze.

  Talk about skeevy.

  I follow Terrance to the morgue. It’s only a couple blocks away from the station. I take it as a good sign that he lets me drive the Bronco behind him. It means I’m not a suspect. Probably. I’m pretty sure they can’t accuse me of a murder that occurred when I was still a little kid. I mean, some kids are sick and twisted, taking knives to their families in the middle of the night. But that wasn’t me.

  I just see dead people, I don’t make them.

  Chapter Seven

  When I shift the Bronco to park, I pull out my phone—that is hovering right around ten percent charged since I hadn’t had it plugged in for long and didn’t own a car charger—and text Kyle that I had to leave the house and didn’t know when I’d be back.

  He replies simply with. ‘Maybe dinner then.’

  I want to immediately message back and tell him to go over to my apartment after church still and just relax until I came back, but I resisted. He needs space. And I need time to decide whether or not I can be honest with him. I wonder how he’ll spend his free time today. He doesn’t open the bar on Sundays. Jim always did, but then again, I don’t think Jim was ever a God-fearing church-goer.

  That’s another thing that makes me hesitate when it comes to telling Kyle the truth. Jim said he’d understand and that I could trust him. I wasn’t so sure. Religions have condemned necromancy for hundreds of years. Catholics were the worst, Episcopalians a close second. Kyle is Baptist, but I’m not sure if that would make a difference. Not in the scheme of things.

  Christians might have stories about Jesus raising the dead, but they didn’t take too kindly to someone else following in their savior’s footsteps. I’m mixed up on the subject of religion myself.

  Don’t get me wrong; I do believe in God. I always have. But I also believe that there’s truth in all things, in all cultural beliefs and the deities they worship. I believe it even stronger now that I know necromancers aren’t the only preternatural creatures to roam the world.

  It’s like the old fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Liam said they were all, each and every one, based on truth. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for Hansel and Gretel to face the cannibalistic witch and be carried home on the back of a swan shifter or how the queen must have felt, facing the prospect of giving her baby to the impish Rumpel Stilzche. She had used her human ingenuity to defeat him. It’s all humans really had, in the end, to protect themselves.

  Wit, strength of spirit, the few weapons that are actually effective against vampires and werewolves and fairies.

  Part of me wants to refuse to accept that such things could have truly happened, but the other part of me knows what I am, what Liam is, what I experienced last year—fighting Blackthorn and his golem progeny.

  Tap, tap.

  I turn to my window and see Terrance’s face. His hand is just dropping from hitting the glass. “You ready, Tori?”

  I’m surprised he doesn’t have some quip about me texting and taking too long. His favorite thing to do is jab me about my poor imitation of cop lingo. I distinctly remember him calling me ‘a little shit that knows jack about police work’. Granted, that’s not completely in context, but the sting was keen and he’d laughed. He’s got too much on his mind for joking right now I guess. That bothers me. If whatever I’m about to see has Terrance this reserved, then I’m sure I’m not going to enjoy it one bit.

  Of course, who would enjoy a trip to the morgue? “Sure.” I tuck my phone into my purse and he steps back as I swing open the driver’s door. I leave the purse behind, only opting to take my car keys with me. I don’t need the extra baggage for this. “Can you give me a little warning on what I’m about to see, Terrance?”

  “No. I need you to see it with fresh eyes.” His hand grips the long steel handle of the morgue’s reinforced door and he pulls it towards himself.

  I don’t respond to his answer. He wants me to experience the body untainted. He doesn’t understand that I’ve already held the bones within my mind, tasted them in my mouth, recreated her face in minute detail. I know Maggie Smythe. I know her intimately. I know she was a mother. I feel in my heart she was a good person.

  And now she’s dead.

  I cannot see her with fresh eyes.

  We walk down a corridor, the fluorescent lights above our head flickering on and off like we’ve stepped onto the set of a horror movie. “That’s fucking disturbing,” I murmur, pointing up at the lights when Terrance glances back at me.

  “I asked Doug about that. This building’s so old that the electrical work’s not up to code. This happens sometimes.”

  We’re heading to a set of double swinging doors ahead. I can
see through the two long, narrow windows that the county coroner is reading over a chart and I can just see Maggie’s bones set out in order along a cold steel table. I am glad that she is gone, that she has moved on, because even spirits feel sorrow. Anyone would feel sorrow at seeing themselves reduced to a reassembled skeleton against shiny steel.

  The lights stop flickering and then it begins again, the electrical interruptions. I reach up with my power, feeling the lights and if it is indeed an issue of human manufacture.

  As I suspect, it is not an issue with the electrical at all. The morgue is a ghost factory. They zoom about the crawlspace below and the roof access above. They do not feel like people anymore. Not spirits holding onto unfinished business. Yet, they are also not disintegrated into the basest instincts. They are not angry wraiths full of spite, holding onto the indistinct memories of a bad life.

  They are bodies never claimed. Burials in unmarked graves. Jane and John Does.

  I don’t like the word ghost. I never have and I rarely use it. There are so many categories of being in the state of the afterlife. A ghost is just one of them. And they happen to be the rarest form. We necromancers have no explanation as to why they exist.

  When you die, there are choices. A- You have no unfinished business and you have no seed of rage within you that can be manipulated. You go into the ether. B- You do have unfinished business and you stick around until it’s resolved. You still have no seed of rage and you eventually go into the ether. C- You have something in your life, something that has happened to you for which you have never found resolution. You died with hate and no forgiveness in your heart. That feeds the anti-ether and you become its creature. You become a wraith. Able to cross sides and enact horrors on the living, when the anti-ether allows. Sometimes, it feels like a shiver. There’s a colloquialism for that—‘someone just walked over my grave’. Not true, of course, but even I say it sometimes.

  And then there are ghosts. Option D. Some have theorized that they died with no sense of who they were, so neither the ether nor the anti-ether could claim them.

  I don’t know what I believe on the matter, but I do believe that this building, this morgue, is a hub for the rarest form of afterlife. And that fact makes me curious.

  I follow Terrance through the double doors, not really paying attention to anything but what I’m feeling within the building, the unseen things. Terrance is talking to Doug already; their conversation is just a buzz in my ear. I reach deeper into the crawlspace below, feeling, and studying. The ghosts are whispers, little things skimming in and out of my mind with ease. They do not hurt; they leave no trace of themselves behind.

  “Tori?”

  I come back to the here and now and it is like pushing through cobwebs. The ghosts, benign though they may be, are still drawn to me. Now that I am moving away from them, leaving them to their activities, they are protesting. I leave them easily though. Wraiths would not give up like that.

  “Tori?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Just thinking.”

  “I need you to focus now.” Terrance doesn’t sound happy with me.

  “Okay.” I look at Terrance, catch the suspicion reignited in his eyes. Just wonderful.

  “I’ll leave you to it then. It’s a Sunday and my wife wasn’t pleased that I came into work.”

  “Your job isn’t a weekday gig, Doug. She knows that.”

  “Sure she does. Why don’t you call and remind her? Maybe she’ll be nicer to you than she would be to me.” Doug sounds deflated, definitely tied up in apron strings. He hands Terrance a set of keys and sighs. “Growing up, never thought I’d end up whipped by a woman. Just like my daddy.”

  It’s odd to hear a man with white hair use the word ‘daddy’. Although, I’d never been a girl to call my own dad that and I sure as hell would never call a significant other that. It just sounds so inherently... dirty. Maybe that’s society’s fault.

  “Good thing I’m already married or you’d put me off it.” Terrance pats Doug on the back. “I’ll lock everything up and then you can pick up the keys tomorrow morning on your way in.” One of the perks of a small town with a police station and morgue only a few blocks away.

  “Sounds good.” Doug, shoulders slumped, takes off his lab coat and walks out; the double doors swing behind him. In and out. In and out. Until they finally stop with a little brushing sound that is magnified by the steel surface and depressive emptiness of the room we’re stood in. Maggie’s spiritless bones are poor companionship. And Terrance’s living form even poorer. He’s staring at me, like I’ve got some magic up my sleeve that can tell him something more about the body than I’ve already divulged.

  Oh right... magic.

  Finally, I look at Maggie. Even though there is no spirit connection now, I can feel a latent peace still clinging on. The body’s been rearticulated, every bone accounted for. There’s something though... unnatural. I can’t put my finger on it. I lean closer, really studying.

  It takes me a long time before I finally see what’s bothering me.

  There are tiny holes drilled in all of the bones, but nothing running through them. Just empty tunnels. I hold up a femur, hold it up to the light and see the glow passing through. Someone has drilled through the bones. It’s crude, done with a shaky hand. Some of the bone has been chipped away at the surface of each perforation. This isn’t something I recognize. It’s not something done with any purpose I understand.

  I put the bone back in place, feeling how it likes to be near the others. Again, this has nothing to do with Maggie being here or gone. It just is. I pick up another bone, finding the same holes. This time, the workmanship is cleaner, more studied. There is a progression of confidence that speaks of something at the beginning of its journey, rather than a more advanced stage.

  Thinking of Maggie, I focus on the skull. I see her wonderful eyes in my mind, chocolate brown and so like Mei’s. I remember her speaking. I see the delay from the movement of her mouth to the sound of her words.

  Her mouth. The tightness.

  As if pulled by a string, controlled by some invisible hand. It reminded me of an old ventriloquist doll my grandmother once had. It was lifeless, yet the painted eyes seemed to follow me everywhere. My grandmother had thrown the doll out after I’d started having nightmares.

  I remember the chemical taste in my mouth from when I’d first found the body. I remember how I’d thought that it was not like other bodies I’d worked with, murder victims or not. Before my process, the bodies tasted natural, clean. Regardless how they’d died. But this one...

  “Oh my god. She was embalmed.” My finger goes to lift the skull, to turn it over, to see inside. There is the telltale connection running from the lower jaw up and through the nasal cavities and back down. The suture string I use would have deteriorated over time. This has not. It’s wire, not in the best condition, but still there. And it’s not made for simply clamping the mouth shut.

  I see her spinning in my mind. The twirling as she looked at the sky. The way it was not smooth, as if she did not have full control of her body.

  The holes through her bones. More points of connection. The creepy doll that had once starred in my nightmares flashed before my eyes. A puppet. Someone controlling her. Hanging in the air. Is that why Maggie moved that way?

  Terrance hadn’t responded to my first declaration. He’d already known. Of course he had. “The holes, they don’t serve a purpose, not one that makes sense to a... rational person. This isn’t rational though. The way she moved and her body... Someone strung her up like a marionette, Terrance. They treated her like a damn doll.”

  “Yes. We think they did.”

  I’m startled when Terrance speaks. I shouldn’t be. He’s standing only a few feet away and he’s looking at the same remains I am. “Doug’s already told you this?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Then why am I here, Terrance. Why make me see her again. I don’t want to know what happened to her. My job’s fi
nished.” I realize the skull is still in my hand. I want to drop it, as if it’s made of flame and I’m being burned, but I can’t do that, not to Maggie. So I place it down gently, perfectly repositioned with the body.

  “You said ‘the way she moved’. What did you mean by that?” Terrance is looking at me too intently, but he’s trying to keep his voice neutral.

  “I just mean, the way she would have moved. If someone had wired her up through the holes in her bones.” I don’t sound convincing, not with the stutter marring my words.

  “Then tell me this, Tori.” He pauses, walks away to lean against the row of steel cabinetry lining the wall. “How did you find the body in the first place? How did you know how far we had to dig? You kept telling them to be careful, that they were getting close.”

  “You told me I had a month, Terrance. Why are you grilling me? I don’t even know what to say right now. I haven’t decided what to tell you.”

  Terrance doesn’t stay motionless for long. He walks to the furthest end of the room, to another table pushed against the wall that I had not noticed, and he lifts a white sheet. Beneath the white sheet, is another set of bones.

  I follow him so that I can see them better. It takes no more than a glance to see that they have been treated in the same way Maggie’s have. The only difference is that remnants of wires still cling to this body and the drilling seems near-perfect this time. I cannot imagine the difficulty and the patience it must have taken to get the holes in just the right places, to thread them like shoestrings in and out of the skin. It would almost be like sewing, making sure that each appendage was wired beautifully and could be positioned at will. On the surface, it would look like a long seam line. The hem of a dress.

  In some sick portion of my mind, I see it. I rebuild the victim in front of me and I see her seated in a chair, a beautiful meal in front of her, her eyes glued open instead of shut. The dead’s eyes should always be shut. I feel for her, but she’s not anywhere I can connect with her. I can’t ask her questions. Without a spirit connection, I cannot build her exactly in my head though. I cannot see her how she was alive—with a thriving, pumping heart within her chest. My mind goes to the ghosts living in the morgue and I wonder if one of them was her. If she died with so little sense of self that she could not be claimed by either the ether or the anti-ether.