‘Fuck you, you fucking bitch,’ whispered the voice. ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with, you fucking sad excuse for a woman. You can suck my smelly cunt and then stick your tongue up my asshole and lick the tip of my shit.’
Shocked, Anna slowly lowered the sheet over Mary Stephens’s naked body, but she left her face uncovered. Mary Stephens hadn’t blinked once, and her lips hadn’t appeared to move, either, and yet Anna had heard her quite clearly.
She stayed utterly still, barely breathing, and listening hard. The morgue was beginning to feel even colder than it was already, and she could distinctly sense a change in its atmosphere, as if the air were becoming pressurized. She could also hear a faint monotonous squeaking sound, like somebody dragging a kitchen chair along a very long corridor.
‘Who are you?’ she said, staring into Mary Stephens’s eyes. She waved her hand backward and forward, but Mary Stephens didn’t blink once.
The voice was louder, and harsher. ‘If you don’t know me by now, you fucking bitch, you very soon will. I’m going to fuck you and all of your fucking kind. I’m going to shove my fist up your cunt right up to the elbow, and see if that doesn’t make you scream.’
Anna backed away from the refrigerator drawer. She felt a cold sensation sliding down her back, as if ice water were being slowly poured over her neck, soaking her shirt. The whispering voice was real, there was no question about that. She wasn’t imagining it. But Mary Stephens’s lips still weren’t moving, and the voice seemed to be coming from behind her, rather than from Mary Stephens’s mouth.
‘After all this time you thought you could get away with it, you fucking whore. Well, let me tell you this: nothing costs more than what you don’t pay for. I’m going to piss all over your face so that you have to drink it.’
There was no doubt about it. The voice was coming from behind her. Yet there was nobody else in the morgue, only three dead bodies if the labels on the drawers were anything to go by, and she hadn’t heard the doors from the corridor open and close, which she would have done if anybody had come in after her.
‘Well? What do you have to say for yourself?’ whispered the voice. ‘Do you want to pray for forgiveness, for what you’ve done? Why don’t you get down on your knees, you fucking slut, and beg for absolution?’
Anna turned around. On the opposite side of the morgue was the stainless-steel grossing station, where body parts were dissected and examined. As she turned around all of its lights flicked on, and its powerful backdraft ventilation system started up – the ventilation system that prevented laboratory assistants from breathing in fragments of human bone.
Standing right next to the grossing station was a black-draped figure that looked like a nun. She was standing completely still, although the backdraft ventilation was stirring the cloth that covered her head.
‘Who are you?’ Anna demanded. ‘What are you doing here? This morgue is strictly off limits for visitors.’
‘Off-limits?’ said the voice harshly. Anna still couldn’t be sure where it was coming from, even though this nun was standing right here in front of her. ‘What do you know about off-limits, you hypocrite? You and all of your kind. You make me sick to my fucking stomach!’
‘Who the hell are you?’ Anna retorted, although she was shaking now, and she had the irrational feeling that the nun might suddenly jump on her. ‘Are you a nun? Are you a real nun? Let me see your face!’
‘Am I a real nun? Why don’t you ask Father Sooran? Ask that stupid fucker! He thought he was clever! Oh, yes! He thought he was so clever!’
‘You’d better get the hell out of here, right now,’ said Anna, as assertively as she could manage. ‘Get out of here, get out of this hospital, and stay out. I’m calling security so you don’t have long.’
‘What are you afraid of, Anna?’ the voice whispered, and now it sounded very close to her left ear – so close that she could have sworn that she felt somebody’s breath against her cheek. The nun, however, was still standing beside the grossing table, her black robes reflected in its shiny metal doors.
‘Are you afraid of having spirits inside you? Is that what scares you, you fucking slut? You’ve had enough men inside you, haven’t you? What about that Jerry? He fucked you right, left and center, didn’t he? Pity for you he was fucking your best friend too! And David, what you let David do to you, you fucking whore! But – ha! – he’s gone off to meet his Maker, hasn’t he, your David? Or has he? Souls within souls, Anna! Souls within souls within souls!’
Anna lifted up the Rapid Reach pager that she wore around her neck, but before she could press the emergency button the morgue was instantly plunged into total darkness. At the same time, she heard a rushing, rustling sound, and the heels of two bony hands pushed her backward so hard that she hit a trolley right behind her and lost her balance. She fell awkwardly on to the floor, jarring her right hip, and as she fell she was showered in surgical instruments, which jangled all around her like wind-chimes.
She tried to get on to her feet again, cutting her hands on some of the scalpels that were scattered all around her, but before she could even start to lift herself up, those bony hands pushed her back down again, so hard that the back of her head knocked against the tiles. She saw tiny white prickly stars in front of her eyes, and for a moment she felt as if she were going to lose consciousness.
As she lay there, somebody climbed on top of her, somebody skeletal, like a huge articulated spider, and sat on top of her, pinning her shoulders down with their knees. It was the nun, she was sure of it, even though the morgue was still pitch black. She could feel her habit bunched up around her hips. She could even smell its suffocating mustiness and a faint aroma of stale urine.
‘Nothing will stop us this time from getting our revenge,’ the voice whispered. ‘You don’t understand, do you, Anna, how much you are hated, and by how many? At last you are getting what you deserve. Now, kiss me, you fucking slut, and beg for my mercy!’
Anna twisted her shoulders and tried to struggle out from underneath the nun’s knees, but as bony as she was the nun felt impossibly heavy, and Anna couldn’t shift her even an inch. She tried to wriggle herself downward, too, but the nun simply pressed down on her even harder, and Anna felt as if the nun’s shins were going to snap her collarbone.
‘Kiss me, you bitch!’ the voice repeated.
With that, the nun scooped her claw-like hand under the back of Anna’s head. She dug her fingernails into her scalp and forcibly lifted her head upward, so that Anna felt as if her neck could break. The nun shifted herself forward two or three inches, and Anna found her face being pressed into wet, pungent hairiness. With a surge of nausea that made her retch out loud, she realized that the nun was pressing her face between her legs.
‘Kiss me, you fucking bitch! Kiss the lips of Satan himself! Do you know who I am? Do you know who he is? Kiss his lips and beg for his forgiveness!’
Anna closed her mouth tight and closed her eyes, too, as the nun lasciviously rubbed her face from side to side, smothering her cheeks with slippery juice. Anna could even feel the nun’s stiff clitoris against her lips, and she had to suppress another retch.
At last the nun released her grip on Anna’s head and let it drop back on the floor. With another rustle of musty fabric, she climbed off her, and although she couldn’t see her in the darkness, Anna could sense her standing close to her.
Anna spat and wiped her face with her sleeve, She tried not to taste what was on her lips, but it was almost impossible not to. She had an overwhelming urge to get up on to her feet, but she was afraid of what the nun might do if she tried to. She groped for her pager, but she couldn’t find it, or even the chain to which it was supposed to be attached. Maybe it had broken when the nun had sat astride her.
She waited, and waited, and after a short while she felt that the nun was no longer there. She hadn’t heard her leave, and the doors hadn’t opened, but somehow she was sure that she had gone. She stood up and blindl
y shuffled her way toward the light switch, holding out her hands in front of her so that she wouldn’t bump into the wall.
She switched on the lights, and again they clicked and flickered. She looked quickly around the morgue, terrified that the nun might be standing right behind her, but the only other person in the room was Mary Stephens, lying in her open refrigerator drawer.
Anna went over to the grossing station. She turned on the mixer faucet and splashed her face with water as hot as she could stand it. Opening the doors underneath the sink she found a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. She diluted half a cupful in a beaker and gargled with it before she spat it out and rinsed her mouth out with water.
She stood in front of the sink for almost half a minute, her head bowed, breathing deeply, trying to understand what had just happened to her. She was sure that she wasn’t losing her mind. The nun had vanished as silently and as mysteriously as she had appeared, but Anna knew that she hadn’t imagined her. The surgical instruments were still scattered across the floor, and the back of her head was still sore from banging it against the tiles. She touched it cautiously and could feel a lump coming up.
She badly needed to tell somebody about this – somebody who could explain to her how she could have heard David and John Patrick Bridges talking to her when they were dead, and how she could have been attacked by a nun who seemed to be able to walk through walls. She thought at first of going to see Ken Fiedler, SLU’s head of psychiatry, but she was convinced that none of these experiences were imaginary. Ken might think they were, though, and if he believed that she was psychologically unbalanced, he would be duty-bound to report it to the hospital authorities. She supposed she should have taken a sample of the vaginal fluid on her face before she had washed it off. Maybe if she had done that, and analyzed it, she would have found out what had really just happened to her.
As it was, she had been left with nothing but her bruises and a dull headache and the taste of isopropyl alcohol in her mouth, like nail-polish remover. More than that, she could still remember almost everything that the whispery voice had said to her, and she could still feel the sensation of the nun’s beak-like clitoris against her lips, as if the nun had been trying to humiliate her and arouse her at the same time.
Maybe she didn’t need a psychiatrist. Maybe she needed to talk to a priest, or even a medium.
She bent over and started to collect up the surgical instruments from the floor. She would have to tell Henry Rutgers that she had accidentally knocked them over and that they all needed to be sterilized again. When she had gathered them all up, she went back across the room to cover up Mary Stephens’s body and slide her drawer back into the refrigerator.
Mary Stephens was still staring at the ceiling, but she was no longer frowning. Instead, her mouth was stretched wide open, and her face was distorted into a mask of absolute terror.
Anna left the morgue and went back down in the elevator to the reception area. The sun had gone down now, and it was dusk outside. She’d not only thought about talking to Ken Fiedler, she had also wondered if she ought to report what had happened to hospital security, but then she’d decided against doing that, too. How could she explain that she had been assaulted in the morgue by a woman dressed as a nun, who had appeared from nowhere and sworn obscenities at her, and then disappeared into nowhere, without even opening or closing the doors?
She decided that what she needed was to go home, calm herself down and try to work it all out rationally. There had to be some explanation for her experience, even if the nun had been some kind of psychic phenomenon.
Only last week she had been reading about research carried out at the University of Michigan which suggested that the reduction of oxygen and glucose at the moment of death stimulates brain activity and could account for people still being able to think after they were clinically dead. It was a possible explanation for NDEs – near death experiences – when people had felt themselves being drawn toward a bright light and had sometimes even seen their dead relatives waiting for them on the other side.
Once home, she opened the door of her loft and stepped inside. It was chilly and silent. No David any more, not this evening, not tomorrow, not ever. She dropped her purse and her laptop on to one of the couches and went into the kitchen to find herself a glass. She badly needed a drink.
She switched on the TV, but left it on mute. Wendy Williams was laughing with one of her show-business guests, but all Anna wanted was the flickering light of the television screen and other human faces, so that she didn’t feel so alone.
She sat on the couch for a while, taking occasional sips of vodka and turning the incident in the morgue over and over in her mind, like the jerky images of an early kinetoscope. She saw the lights in the grossing station abruptly switch on, all by themselves, and the whistling sound of its extractor fans starting up. She saw the nun, standing black and motionless with her head covered. She heard the whispering voice, with its bitter obscenities. Now that she was sitting here, feeling much less agitated, she could remember almost everything, including every word that had been whispered at her, as if she had recorded it.
What disturbed her more than anything else was that the nun had known her name. ‘What are you afraid of, Anna?’ And she had known details of her private life that even her best friends didn’t know.
‘What about that Jerry? He fucked you right, left and center, didn’t he? Pity for you he was fucking your best friend too! And David, what you let David do to you, you fucking whore!’
Six years ago she had been involved with a chiropractor called Jerry Manville. Jerry had been handsome and confident and amusing, with a sexual appetite that had led to them making love in parking lots in the back seat of his car, and even in closets at other people’s dinner parties. Jerry had two-timed her with her closest friend Kay, and with several other women, too, and that had been the end of a passionate but argumentative relationship.
David had liked tying her to the bed with scarves now and again, and she had found that highly arousing. But how had the nun known about that? Was she real, or a spirit; and if she was real, was she really a nun?
‘Am I a real nun? Why don’t you ask Father Sooran? Ask that stupid fucker! He thinks he’s so clever! Oh, yes! He thinks he’s so clever.’
Father Sooran. That was the only clue to her identity that the nun had given her. But Anna only rarely attended church, and she wasn’t a Catholic. She didn’t know any priests, apart from Father William, who regularly visited the hospital to hear confessions from bedridden patients and to give the last rites to those who were dying.
So who was Father Sooran?
She opened her laptop and Googled the name ‘Father Sooran’. Google asked her if she had really meant ‘Father Horan’ or ‘Father Curran’ or ‘Father Surin’. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to remember exactly how the nun had pronounced it. It had definitely not been ‘Horan’ or ‘Curran’. If ‘Surin’ was a French name, then it would have sounded like ‘Sooran’. She clicked on ‘Father Surin’.
What came up gave her a prickly feeling of sheer disbelief. Jean-Joseph Surin had been a French Jesuit mystic, the highly respected writer of several devotional books and hundreds of letters, and an exorcist. His most celebrated exorcism had been that of Jeanne des Anges, the mother superior of the Ursuline convent in Loudun, in France, who was said to have been possessed by seven demons.
Jeanne des Anges had spoken in the foulest language, railed against God, and had lifted up her habit and openly masturbated.
Father Surin had been so shocked by her behavior that he had offered his own spirit to be possessed by the seven demons in her place. Jeanne des Anges gradually recovered, but for the rest of his life Father Surin was plagued by nightmares, as well as convulsions, paralysis and temporary bouts of insanity. He had unsuccessfully tried to kill himself by jumping out of a second-story window, and sometimes he was seen wandering through the grounds of the college in Paris where he was studying, s
tark naked and smeared in his own excrement.
He had been born in the year 1600 and died in 1665. He’d been sent to exorcize Jeanne des Anges in December, 1634.
‘Why don’t you ask Father Surin? He thinks he’s so clever!’ How could she ask Father Surin if Father Surin had been dead for nearly four centuries?
Anna closed her laptop and went over to the side table to pour herself another vodka. Her mind was churning over, and her headache was almost blinding. The nun couldn’t have been imaginary, because she had mentioned Father Surin, and Anna had never heard of Father Surin before. Neither had she ever read anything about the exorcism of Jeanne des Anges, and yet the whispering voice had talked in the foulest language about demonic possession.
‘Are you afraid of having spirits inside you? Is that what scares you, you fucking slut!’
She stared at herself in the mirror over the side table. ‘There’s a logical explanation for all of this,’ she told herself, out loud. ‘There are no such things as demons. There is no such thing as demonic possession. There are no such things as vanishing nuns, and dead people can’t talk.’
She was about to tell herself something reassuring, when she thought she saw a slight movement in the mirror, and she froze. Behind her, in the shadowy corner just beside her bedroom door, in between the blinds and the door frame, she thought she saw a dark nunlike figure, standing quite still.
She turned around, dropping the vodka bottle on to the floor. It smashed, and as it smashed the mirror smashed too, as explosively as if somebody had hit it dead center with a hammer.
She stood amidst the glittering fragments of broken glass, trembling. There was no nun standing in the corner, only shadows.
Outside, a police siren suddenly shrieked.
TWELVE
I had been waiting for over an hour at the headquarters of the Coral Gables Police Department before Detective Blezard came back into the interview room, accompanied by a female police officer. I badly needed a horseshoe coffee, and my nose was feeling bunged up.
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