by Martin Rose
I left a note for them explaining I’d shoot them if they left the house and not to let anyone in. As an afterthought, I found an old package of cookies and left it on the counter for them, like a parent might for a child. I sniffed one, just to see if the old memories of a chocolate cookie, the taste and smell, might be aroused, brought into life. If I might hunger for such an obscure piece of my old life.
No reaction. No salivary glands churned into action, nothing at all.
*
I wasn’t hurt enough to justify the visit, but I wanted to see her.
I slipped the lock at the funeral home and entered the darkness. I sorted through the events as I slinked through and found the back room where Niko conducted her work. A corpse was there, waiting for her. He was naked and covered with a sheet, anticipating her attentions. And she would touch him, in all the ways I wished—
That’s ridiculous, I cut into the fantasy abruptly. In my condition, sex was out of the question. But I remembered all the times when it had not been, and though I no longer functioned in that way, my most essential sex organ—my brain—was far from dead.
Then why are we here? I asked myself.
I used the excuse that I needed a safe place to think. It was getting difficult to do that at the house with so many dead bodies piling up at an alarming rate. In the darkness, surrounded by the metal gurneys casting predator shapes in the moonlight from the windows, and the heady aroma of formaldehyde, I felt at home. My mind was free to wander.
The hour passed and I dosed myself when the time came, crunching on my gravel pills with a dry mouth. It was like eating tarmac.
The door clicked open and fluorescent light shuddered on. From where I sat, in an uncomfortable metal chair behind the farthest gurney, she did not see me at first. She was dewy from the early morning rain that had been falling when I first entered. Droplets shimmered in her hair, and I admired her from afar. Some might not have felt as I did and might have seen only a gothic freak; they would have no appreciation for her attention to detail, her desire to paint herself with tattoos like a canvas. She had fashioned herself a work of art, and it would take a talented man to look beneath that and see the other wild shapes hidden behind the flash and the presentation.
I enjoyed the moment undetected. She took off her raincoat and hung it on a hook; she busied herself with gathering tools from drawers, washing her hands in the sink, turning on a radio. Morning music filled the air, reports of the weather, and then a tune with Kurt Cobain’s wailing voice. He sang about a heart-shaped box.
Her eyes found me as she drew close to attend to the body.
“How long have you been watching me?” she asked.
“Not long,” I said, standing up. A wide brimmed hat cast a long shadow over my destroyed face. She couldn’t see the damage—she already knew I was ugly, but there was no need to emphasize it without something to mitigate my appearance.
Coming here had been a mistake. I had a job to do, and Niko wasn’t a part of it. I’d come here to fulfill an old man’s whim and nothing else. She stood there like a frightened child with a plate of scalpels in her hand. I owed her more respect than this. I realized I hadn’t come here for any good reason.
One should consider the lives they change and influence just for the crime of showing up; I could think of no good I could bring her by being here, other than to shake up her predictable world and wreak havoc on the ordinary.
“I’ll be on my way,” I grunted, but she reached out, setting the tray down and drawing me back with a touch on my arm, pulling my sleeve toward her.
“Stay. There’s blood on your collar. And you seem . . . distracted.”
Was I? To be under her scrutiny was more frightening than being shot at. I relented and allowed her to push me onto the empty chair beside the gurney.
I gestured to the gurney supporting the shrouded body beside me. “I don’t expect to be sitting on one of those anytime soon.”
She drew back the sheet from the corpse she was working on. He was an old man, his face deeply lined, large bags beneath his eyes. A whirl of white hair capped the skin of his ashen skull. He looked sterile and waxen. She strapped on a set of latex gloves.
“I don’t recall you explaining why that hasn’t happened to you yet,” she said, opening jars of strange, foul-smelling liquids. They gave off a flavor like mint if you set it on fire first.
“Tell me what you think,” I answered. “Tell me what you see.”
She took a large swab that looked like an oversized Q-tip and dipped it into a jar before facing the corpse on the table. Her gaze assessed me in the poor light, hat shadowing my features. She frowned. With a quick motion, she swabbed the corpse around the nostrils, the eyes, and into the mouth and along the gums. His lips peeled back with a wet, slurping noise.
“You’re not like I am. I think you were once. I’d say you were dead, but you walk and you talk, you act like anyone.”
“When I’m not falling apart.”
“There’s that, as well.”
“What do you think happened to me?”
“I wonder if a witch cast a spell on you. Like a fairytale. Did she?”
I laughed softly. “Perhaps that’s what did happen. But the witch is a man, and he is my brother. His name is Jamie.”
“Hmmm,” she murmured and moved about, running a snaking tube into the corpse’s arm, one end disappearing into his flesh and the other leading to a cylinder resembling a massive syringe. She flicked a switch and the cylinder began to pump, pushing fluid into the old man’s dead body.
“That makes things complicated.”
“He was misled by his good intentions, I fear. In his arrogance, he failed to realize the spell would last so long. Or cost so much.”
“I would want to know how to break the spell, then,” she said.
She stripped her hands of the latex gloves and disposed them. Her black dress hugged her curves in a bombshell sort of way but made her more fearsome than seductive and it was hard to say why—the same way timeless stone idols inspire awe. They hold the blood of countless sacrifices deep in their pores, their ancient cracks and crags.
“It cannot be broken.”
When she returned to me she drew up the plastic sheeting over the gurney beside me. The length unraveled and made a sound, impersonal, rippling plastic like chattering teeth.
Playfully, she turned a corner over. The edge fell onto my arm. My good hand remained still, sensing the plastic against the new flesh, and I looked at her, curious, surprised. She gathered the sheet in long, whispering sheaths between her fingers like a girl gathering flowers and slid them off the edge of the gurney above me, where they fell into my lap just below. She perched herself beside me on the arm of the chair so I was forced to withdraw my hand and make room for her, lean legs brushing against my own.
My mouth was dry; but then, death always makes it so, and my tongue fumbled for a response, for a protest.
“Maybe you should get up,” I suggested.
“Can the spell break with a kiss?”
She drew the plastic around my shoulders like a cloak until I swam in the sheet they used for the dead men. Her fingers splayed over the polyurethane, feeling my sunken chest beneath the funeral wrapping. I had the sensation of a butterfly pinned inside a frame. It was both delightful and terrifying.
“Never,” I spoke with regret. “A kiss can . . . spread the spell, if you will.”
Her fingers were small, the nails painted black with glitter. She took the edge of the sheet and tightened her grip until I was cocooned in plastic. Her touch no more than a bare whisper, but when you’ve spent years in a pitch black house with only Lana Turner for company, every small contact is explosive. My skin crawled with anticipation.
“Then I guess we’ll have to figure out something else, won’t we?”
It occurred to me then that I was in the hands of a siren, a temptress; she was a classic femme fatale from a pulp fiction movie, and here I was, fallin
g into her clutches, setting up the surprise third act of a predictable story, when she would draw her gun on me and explain why she did it, how fragile she was, and wouldn’t I just love her and forget about how bad she’d been? I groaned, a long lock of her hair brushed against the questionable skin of my neck. God, I really hoped she would be bad. I thought of reasons to refuse her, to push her away.
Then, she lifted the plastic over my head, crowding me, enclosing me in sterile, hospital smells. If she were a femme fatale, perhaps this was a clever way to kill me by asphyxiation, not realizing I was impervious to such attacks. But she was not a femme fatale.
She leaned and pressed her chest insistently through the plastic, into my suit, and into the skin beneath. Sensations long forgotten upwelled through me. Nipples so hard they could cut through the fabric of her dress. Her hand rested against my neck and her fingers threatened to melt through the plastic and she pressed in to kiss me. Her mouth closed over mine with only the thin synthetic barrier between us.
The sensation of being so close to her and simultaneously withheld made my hands clench into fists to funnel my building frustration. Her heart beat out time like an oil-slick cylinder in a hot engine.
“Saran wrap, next time,” I breathed, and with either hand at her waist, pulled her into me for another, stealing away her lips without being able to truly connect. I groaned, my hips a collection of broken bones grinding against her, like teenagers out late on a school night—embarrassing, adolescent, thrilling. I tasted formaldehyde.
“Stay the night,” she whispered. “We’ve got coffins.”
I laughed, delighted. Of course! There would always be a place for one more at a funeral home.
Beyond her, in the background, the corpse sat up.
The old man jerked into a sitting position, bending at the waist and knees, his mouth open and a long, wailing groan escaping his lips. No sooner did I detect the shadow of movement when I reached for the firearm. She cried out.
“No! Vitus, it’s the—”
Helpless to stop, I shot off a round. A hole appeared in the plastic and the bullet punched through the head of the old man. His skull exploded from the back and painted the wall with an impressionist expression of brains and bone. Gasping, I ripped the plastic away from my face with my free hand.
“—gas,” she finished feebly, her mouth turned down into a frown. Her raven hair tousled and messy and medieval. A sorcerer casting love spells on me. At least, right up until I pissed her off by shooting her work.
“Sometimes they do that,” she said, moving the plastic away. The rest of it slithered from my lap. For a moment, I thought I had an erection, that a part of me had sat up along with the old man, but no; wishful thinking. I was still as dead as the corpse. And not much left of me to get excited with. “Gas or the ligaments can bring it on.”
“Sorry,” I whispered, holstering the gun. “Can I—”
“No. No, Vitus, you should go. I have a mess to clean up, and a bullet hole to explain.”
“I could—”
“You can’t. Go.”
I cursed myself silently for screwing up.
“Well, at least he didn’t notice.”
She paused to stare at me, and I waved a hand at her, heading in the direction of the exit.
“I’m going. I’m going.”
And I was gone.
*
As I passed through the foyer, still dizzied by my encounter with Niko, I paused before the suit of armor once more. If the suit of armor was meant to inspire me with thoughts of chivalry and noble deeds, I could detect none. This was the suit of armor for a knight who saved damsels—yet, it looked like the coat of armor you chose to wear if you were in the business of killing them, a nightmare world where dragons ruled and set fire to the miserable earth.
I admired the dirty, stained sheen of metal beneath the cold, sterile lights. I could not shake the sensation that the dark visor slit followed me as I left.
*
Time to pay Geoff Lafferty a visit.
Officer Lafferty used to be a police officer. In a small, suburban area like the one we lived in, there isn’t a huge crime element that exists in a city, so rather than walking a beat, he had his own cruiser for catching speeders and tourists. Like everyone, he hated paperwork, knew most of the townspeople, and gave speeches to kids in class about how drugs kill.
He was hooked on prescription pills at the time. In retrospect, he realized there’s little difference between popping pills your doctor profits from and pills your pusher does, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. He’d had a kidney stone, and when they gave him something for the pain, he completed the course of pills. And then decided he’d like to complete another. And another.
A slim, shorter man, he lost weight as the habit started to dig in, take hold. He was functioning, but from time to time he’d nod off in the cruiser and wake up just in time to return at the end of his shift. One nod out too many, and he was T-boned at an intersection where he fell asleep inside the cruiser while a kid plowed into the side. The car spun and hit a traffic light. The force of the spin snapped his spine, causing a lumbar injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down.
In that split second, he was both paralyzed and cured of his addiction; back injuries such as his deprive the user of the sensations that make opiates worth taking in the first place. Sober and handicapped, the police station gave him the only job they had for officers in his position: desk jockey. In his case, evidence room manager.
The first set of Rogers had name-dropped Lafferty, so it stood to reason he may know something I didn’t. Lafferty knew me from the old days—we’d graduated high school in the same class, and he and Jamie used to pal around. Geoff had been instructed to refer people if he thought they could use my specific services, and he’d been reliable—until now.
I parked the Thunderbird outside the station, pulling my hat as far down over my face as I could manage, and approached. The police knew me, knew I was a friend of Lafferty’s. According to Geoff, I had reached a legendary status—they knew the military base wasn’t far away, and I was involved in strange goings on there. A few beers and a Bourne trilogy later, it was unanimously decided I was a government spook and officers were telling their children if they didn’t stop the goddamn racket they were gonna send Vitus after them. Thus, a legend grows.
An officer by the door glanced at me and then attempted to take a second look without being rude. He was young and fresh off a factory line. I brushed his shoulder enough to move him an inch with my bared teeth pulled back from my rotten lips, breathing out a growl so he could smell the stench of death. My eyes were ghost-lights transfixing him like roadkill, his shock punctuated by his unhinged jaw.
“Mind your fucking business,” I said, and slipped past him and inside the door.
The pale officer looked away and continued to hold up the wall by the door, shrinking into it in a failed effort to disappear.
I didn’t expect trouble here. I’ve been to states where random strangers wave and say hi, but here in Jersey, being nice is an invitation to a personal fuck-over. Someone’s always out to get you and nastiness becomes an ingrained way of life. Gang members wear three-piece suits and 1000-watt smiles. Dear Granny pimps out her children to strangers to support her coke habit. If there’s a way to make a profit off human pain and suffering, someone in Jersey has perfected it. Usually while huffing toluene. And if profit can’t be squeezed from you, they kill you and strip you for parts.
I took a flight of steps down into the basement of the headquarters.
This is where they housed the evidence. A crime is committed, and anything left behind that could be used as evidence for the prosecution is bagged and inventoried and sent off to the basement, where Geoff Lafferty comes in. In a wheelchair behind a desk, he takes in all the strange items left behind at robberies, murder scenes, rapes, and drug busts.
When he’s not running evidence, he’s finishing mountains of pap
erwork other people don’t want to do. Every once in a while, someone passes through and misses him, expecting someone several feet taller than the man seated in the wheelchair below. Whether it’s a woman who lost someone close to her or a man who needs information, Geoff Lafferty is there to supply a name: You want something done the police won’t do, talk to Vitus Adamson. My own personal carnival barker.
“Lafferty,” I greeted him, leaning against the counter. He wheeled over to the counter with a weary look in his bloodshot eyes. The walls around him are plastered with push pins and wanted fliers for missing children by the truckload who disappear and are never heard from again.
“Vitus, here to provide evidence that you’re full of shit?”
“You don’t have a bag big enough, Lafferty.”
“Is that what passes for wit these days?”
“‘Shit.’ Not ‘wit.’ Get your ears checked, old man.”
He chortled, smiling briefly; Geoff was not the type of guy who smiled much, his mouth a thin line to match a flat, emotionless face; if you were a fool, you fell for it, believing his poker face was the real one. He gave nothing away behind his eyes, measuring you from the background. Occasionally, I got to see the man behind the wall of silence. In return, he got to see me from time to time, as well.
“I had someone show up on my doorstep,” I began.
Geoff shuffled papers into proper order as I spoke, but I knew he was listening. As though to make up for all the hours of his drugged-out haze, his sobriety was supercharged—nothing escaped his notice now.
“How’s this my problem?”
“They’re dead. But they’re also liars.”
“Trust, but verify,” Lafferty sighed, quoting Reagan. “Haven’t referred anyone in a long while. You need to refresh my memory.”
“They called themselves Rogers. As in Mr. and Mrs.”
“Seriously?”
“Does it look like I’m making it up?”
“No. But they must have been, because I never met a Mr. and Mrs. Rogers.”
“You know the name of the last person you referred?”