Garden of Lilies

by Eli Constant

  You don’t catch necromancy. You’re born with it.

  I wash Mrs. Grayson’s body gently, every nook and crevice. She’s so old that her skin has lost all elasticity. It seems to move like wet putty as I move the sponge. It slinks downward to pool against the table and only shifts as I wash her other side. It’s almost as if she is melting.

  When she is disinfected and dried, I massage her limbs, relieving the rigor mortis that is still stiffening her body. It is a slow, meticulous process. Soon though, she is pliable. I can manipulate her.

  She is a clean slate now.

  I run a line of skin glue on the inner lip of each eyelid and then I press her eyes closed for a moment, waiting for the glue to set and then I sit an eye cap atop each eye to keep them firmly closed. I’ll remove those later.

  I always find sewing the mouth shut the hardest part. I normally wait to do that last, in case the body should rise and need my help. I can feel that Mrs. Grayson is no longer hovering about her body. She’s gone, well and truly, to the other side. How nice it must be to die without unfinished business.

  Some morticians use a needle injector and wire to keep the jaw shut, but I do not. The old school way may be more difficult, but it is how I learned. It’s the way old Mr. Jones insisted I do it. I’ve never been inclined to do otherwise. I draw the suture string through Mrs. Grayson’s lower jaw below the gums and I snake it upwards. The needle presses easily between the top teeth and gum line. After a little work, I feel the needle push into the left nostril and I curve it through the septum to exit down through the right nostril to terminate back in the mouth. I pull the two ends of the string taught, like I am closing the back of a stuffed animal at one of those bear-making stores, and I tie them together.

  When my fingers slip out of the mouth, Mrs. Grayson looks peaceful, but not happy.

  The dead must look happy to console the living.

  I play with the corners of her mouth, smoothing my fingers up and down her cheeks until a soft smile graces her face.

  She was a beautiful woman.

  Next, I replace the bins beneath the table which are only partly full of disinfectant wash so that I can drain the blood and replace it with embalming solution. This can be a slow process, one liquid replacing the other. The embalming fluid I use is dyed to help the body retain a lifelike hue.

  I find that insanely creepy. Dead bodies are supposed to be pale and ghostly, not rosy-cheeked. But my clients prefer the coloring, as if it gives them some hope that everything is a dream and their loved one is not gone for good.

  Lastly, I make a small cut near Mrs. Grayson’s bellybutton and I use an obscene-looking, sharp tool to puncture the internal organs and drain them of fluids and gases. When that is stitched back up, I let everything dry so that I can dress Mrs. Grayson without dampening her clothing.

  It used to take me three or more hours to embalm a body on my own. Now, I can do it less than two sometimes. I’m good at my job and I often wonder if that makes me even more of a freak of nature than my gift does.

  The lovely coffin Mr. Grayson chose is against the far wall on another long table. The pale rose color of it is a little dull down here in the basement, not gleaming like it does in the upper rooms with daylight shining on it. It’s something I would choose. If I wanted to be buried. It’s funny—I’m scared to death that I’ll be found and burned alive, but I want to be cremated when I actually do die (of natural causes, I hope). I don’t want to risk coming back to bother some other poor necromancer (however many of us still exist). I won’t be one of those souls. Without a physical body, a spirit cannot return as the undead. Yes, they can stay tethered to the world in corporeal form, but not for long.

  Unless their souls attach to something else—like another person or a house. Now that’s a totally different ballgame and normally (but not always) comes about at the hands of an ill-intentioned one of my kind.

  When Mrs. Grayson is clothed, in a pale blue two piece skirt suit with a ruffle-neck blouse and cream shoes, I curl her hair. I bring the iron close to her head, but I am still careful not to get it so close that I burn her.

  She cannot feel the pain, but I can.

  I usually can’t carry the bodies by myself, but Mrs. Grayson is so thin and petite that she is a feather in my arms as I transfer her to the open casket. Even if I wasn’t healed, I think I could still manage her slight frame. But I am healed, fully it seems. I don’t question it, though I should.

  The elderly woman looks angelic against the silver satin of the interior, her hair, still salt-and-pepper grey despite her age, spins out in a halo and is a nice contrast to the light fabric.

  I have an urge to lift her from the casket, to wrap my arms tightly around her frail body, and to call her soul back to the land of the living. She has not been gone so long that it would take blood. For some reason, I feel I will never need bloodletting to call long lost souls back. I am stronger than I ever have been. I can feel it, hovering beneath the tiny hairs that rise as if touched by static electricity along my body.

  I close the coffin and step back. It feels almost as if my gift could overtake me, if I allowed it to.

  I will not allow it to.

  Standing there, I close my eyes and reach within myself to find control. I can taste the essence of the body encased in wood and satin cloth. I’ve never noticed before how different the vessels feel after they’ve been embalmed. I have to concentrate harder to reach into it and find the latent memories caught within the cells.

  I wonder if it has to do with the embalming process. I wonder why I’ve never noticed this fact before. Perhaps another side effect of my new powers coming to life.

  I rub the mark on my hand and I shudder.

  When I get upstairs into the funeral parlor, I glance out the front door and see a cop car. I can’t tell who’s in it, but I flick the porch light on and off. They reciprocate with the headlights.

  Chapter Thirty.

  Mrs. Grayson’s funeral comes and goes. It is a somber affair.

  I’ve sent Dean and Max home already. I shouldn’t have, there were still things to do, but I crave solitude. I need it right now. I’m not totally alone, of course. Darryl’s outside in his marked car, passing the time with a show on his smart phone. He hasn’t said a word to me since he’s arrived for his shift and I don’t care to talk to him either.

  Unlike after Lilly Miller’s funeral, I face the clean-up for the Grayson funeral as soon as the graveside service is finished. Mrs. Grayson—Mary-Ann as her husband called her when he spoke without tears, but with pain etched into the lines of his deeply-wrinkled face—had had little in the way of personal things that meant much to her. Only photos.

  Nonperishable memories ranging from black and white to brightly colored. They were still displayed all over the funeral home. I pick them up one by one and place them into the gray plastic tote they were brought to me in. There is one in particular that catches my eye. Mrs. Grayson is middle-aged, sitting alone in a field where the grass is just beginning to brown from too much summer sun. Her hair, then a rich brown with golden highlights, glints. It’s her expression that resonates. Beatific. Content. Totally and incandescently happy.

  I want to reach in and take the contentment for myself, like so much bottled bliss.

  When all is done, the sun is setting. It sends orange and yellow in riotous arcs through the sky. It is another thing I would like to bottle and keep on a shelf, to open in sadder times.

  When everything is cleaned up, I am glad that I can go upstairs and rest.

  Things are mostly ready for the Tacklon funeral on Monday, so seamlessly arranged that I think I might owe Dean a raise. Of course, if I give Dean a raise, I might have to consider giving Max one too—though he’s done little to really deserve one. Bradford Tacklon’s body is in its coffin downstairs, already embalmed and accepted this afternoon by Max while Dean and I had gone graveside. Dean hadn’t known the deceased was being transported from Florida, already prepared. Tha
t always made the job easier. We charged a bit less, but that was fine. There’ll be a few last minute touch ups, especially with the make up on his face that had run a bit in the heat from transfer, but nothing that couldn’t be done Monday morning before services began.

  Terrance has called me three times today. I’ve ignored them all. I shouldn’t. There may be something I can do to help find the girls that are missing. And he’s watching over me, stationing his men at my house like I’m important enough to protect.

  But I don’t care. I just find that I don’t fucking care.

  Besides, I won’t put an officer at risk. Had Steve barged into the bar when Blackthorn had been going full fae on me, he likely would have died. I can’t say it enough, to myself or others, but I won’t let someone else get hurt protecting me. Not again.

  I find I’m not hungry as I mount the stairs and enter my apartment. I’m always hungry. It’s a permanent state of existence with me. But not tonight. I’m filled with other things. Power. Sadness. Grief.

  In my room, I strip off the black dress and matching jacket. Its three-quarter sleeves are just tight enough that they have cut into the crooks of my arms all day. I rub the dark pinkish lines they leave, little scars that will eventually fade.

  I’ve still not done laundry, I realize as I’m sifting through my black dresser looking for my favorite nightgown. You’d think, since I am some damn queen of fairies, that an elf or two would putter about my apartment waxing my floors and washing my clothes.

  I force myself, and it takes more effort than it should, to sift through my laundry basket, discarding the lights on the floor and leaving the darks in a jumble. I’m irritated to find that my black oversized sleep dress with the words ‘there are never enough sheep’ is gone. I don’t particularly care for the saying, but it’s the softest length of fabric you’ve ever felt. Like cotton parading around as silk and then topped with something akin to a baby’s newborn hair fluff.

  “Shit.” I murmur, digging through the darks one more time. I get on my hands and knees and make sure it hasn’t made itself into the depths of the closet—where I keep all the clothes I long to wear again. Hello, size tens and twelves. I do not give the box of size sixteens a mental wave. I refuse to ever pull them out again. From the closet, I crawl like an addict pursuing spilled heroine. I want the comfort of that nightgown, dammit.

  But it’s nowhere to be found. “This is ridiculous. Clothes don’t get up and walk out by themselves.”

  Giving up, I tote the laundry basket down to the basement. I know I should install a washer and dryer in the apartment, there’s even the perfect place for it in a long thin closet adjacent to the bathroom. It shares a wall with the plumbing and I’ve gotten estimates.

  I remember dad, though, trudging up and down the stairs doing my laundry and his. It shouldn’t be nostalgic, but it is. I try to remember that, as I heave and ho and come up short of breath when I finally reach the bottom of the basement stairs. It’s going down for god’s sakes. It’s ridiculous that I should feel so wasted. Gravity is my friend going down.

  “Fuck.” I whisper-shout the expletive as I trip over something on the floor, something that shouldn’t be there.

  It’s dark in the basement, the only area that can be seen clearly exists in the halo of light at the base of the stairs, a result of my leaving the upper door open. I rise to my feet without haste. I can feel it now. There is something here, floating around me, trying to hop in and out of objects and find an anchor.

  This is a malevolent soul. And most certainly not Mr. Bradford Tacklon’s, who had already moved into the ether before his body had arrived. I find the light switch on the wall and I see what I have tripped over.

  The spirit might not be Mr. Tacklon’s, but the body lying across the floor is certainly his, what was once his vessel rather.

  “Who are you?” I only half-expect an answer. Though, for a moment, my heart jumps in hope that it might be Jim. Though I know it can’t be... he’s gone into the after-ether. He won’t be coming back. I push down the emotions that threaten to overcome me. “I won’t do anything to hurt you. Just answer me and I can help you,” I speak slowly, methodically, feeling the darkness of the spirit. But I hope I can walk it back from the razor’s edge of evil.

  Sometimes, violent apparitions are those that come from the anti-ether—the other place that we necromancers don’t like to speak of. It is the opposite of the ether. A Christian person would simply consider them in terms of heaven versus hell. It’s not that simple though.

  The spirits that enter the ether, they are given release. They go toward whatever lies beyond for souls that deserve good things. The souls that go into the ether, those stay away until reborn. The anti-ether... I cannot simply say it is for bad people. It’s not that simple.

  There are different classes of the afterlife. Different ways of existing. Like ghosts-spirits that have stayed too long in our reality and are now loosely bound to the earth. They are not freshly arrived and holding onto humanity. Ghosts are lost things, haunting, but ultimately benign.

  Sometimes though, overwhelming anger can guide a spirit into the anti-ether. An innocent person who cannot forgive their murderer, a person who otherwise would have entered the ether, is pulled into that other place, that place of darkness and ill feelings. There, they know nothing save for what they feel. And those feelings are jumbles—ethereal... no, not ethereal. That is too lovely a word for what these are—cocktails of magnified anger, frustration, fear and pain.

  They are wraiths. In the ether, a spirit continues to feel a full range of emotions. They continue to thrive. It is balance, essential and necessary balance. The evil would not take over.

  Another thing about the anti-ether, a thing that I wish was not, is that those wraiths, so bestial and pain-controlled, can cross back over if their will is strong enough. And they can become more corporeal if they are given recognition. These are the ones that truly haunt houses; the ones that hurt people. Ghosts do not cause harm. Spirits do not cause harm.

  But wraiths do. Whether for their own enjoyment or someone else’s, they cause pain and the pain feeds them. I find it unfair—men like Jim should allow a pass back and forth. Why is it that bad things are often allotted the upper hand?

  It is not so farfetched a thing that even a Saint might become wraith given the right circumstances. We are emotions, sometimes inexplicable emotions and desires. We lust for things that will hurt us. We are filled with hatred when we are jilted, even if it will be a blessing in the end. We tremble at the future and the untold things it holds.

  When the particulars of our selves are washed away, we are creatures controlled by our senses.

  I had loosed a wraith once, reached through its tar-coated exterior to the tiny spark of goodness beneath. The once-a-spirit had risen from the blackness as a shining, diamond thing. And then it had disappeared, this time to where it truly belonged. The ether.

  “I said who are you?” I do not raise my voice any more than I would for a normal conversation. You do not stoke the anger of a wraith.

  There’s no answer to my question. I feel the emotions of the thing reaching out to me, like jellyfish tentacles looking for target.

  “You don’t belong here anymore.” I move to Mr. Tacklon’s body and I pick it up gingerly. The glue of one eye has not held and the eye cap has fallen off. He stares at me, one eye open, and it makes me feel ill.

  I never feel ill around the dead. Never. Something is very, very wrong.

  I walk, the unwanted visitor swirling around me, and I place Mr.Tacklon back in his ebony casket and reclose the lid. It was the last black coffin we had in stock, a little beaten up, but his family had insisted. He did look nice in it, his dark grey suit a nice compliment to the silver sheen of the interior material. The spirit swirls at my back, brushing against me. I press my stomach into the coffin to feel the realness of it and I take a deep breath.

  “Listen to what you are.” I say, swiveling, my body b
etween the soul and the coffin. It is like I am another barrier to keep the casket’s occupant safe. As if a lifeless body needs protection. I reach for one of the containers of salt I keep in an open steel cabinet. I want to bind the body, just in case. I won’t let this unwelcome spirit enter the lifeless form. “Feel it. You aren’t real. You don’t exist anymore. This world isn’t made for you. Not anymore.”

  “It is my creature to control. Not yours,” the hiss is harsh, breaking through the air like throwing knives. A figure walks from the downstairs hallway into the embalming room. He seems to carry a darkness with him, one that is only dispensed by a quick passing of his hand through the air. His eyes seem to absorb the shadow that once shrouded him.

  “Blackthorn,” I do not like saying his name; it leaves a pungent, acrid film on my tongue. I do not like the fear and anger mixing in my stomach like some sort of chemistry experiment about to go badly.

  “Victoria,” he responds with my name, such malice in his tone that I find myself shrinking away without meaning to; my back meets the wall and only then do I realize I have moved.

  “You should leave,” I still hold the salt in my hand, as if it will protect me. I think about Darryl outside. Why is he always the one on duty when I could actually use some help?

  “Oh?” he says it rather flippantly, walking closer, but staying on the other side of the room so that my embalming table is a barrier. “Now, why would I want to do that? We’re all alone, a lovely prospect. I can have my way with you before I deliver you to my master. If he did not want you, I would rape your body until your flesh tore and your blood flowed like water.”

  His last sentence sends shivers to jolt my body like cresting waves in a brutal wide-ocean storm. I see a movement, something sliding upwards from within the silky pants he wore. It pushed against the buttoned waistline, trying to snake out of his clothing. He sees me looking and he reaches a hand down to pat the bulge. “You see,” he whispers, his voice still that hiss that made me cringe, but now there is a heat there. A heat that makes me shiver in a way that is as far from pleasure as the moon is from the sun. “I am ready for you, Victoria. He would not be so very angry with me if I were to take only a small taste of your body as recompense. You owe me that. A body.”