Then we strolled about, our little group breaking up and then flowing back together, tracking one another by the sound of our laughter. At one point, Xavier and Geneviève took the lead; I was with Charlebois and his girlfriend, Luciane. Once again, a shadowy silhouette, black on dark, intrigued us. Charlebois turned on his flashlight. A man perched on all fours, on a long tombstone, posed like a beast. Shoulders hunched like those of a tiger, with a feline movement, he turned his head towards us, teeth bared in a grimace that distorted his entire face. Luciane screamed. Charlebois shouted, then swore. It was Xavier, and Geneviève’s laughter brought his brief performance to an end.
But I thought I had seen something completely different. I’d seen a man crouched in the same position, but naked, head shaken vigorously, and a shroud draped limply over the tombstone.
Xavier climbed down from his perch, but a part of me was still somewhere else, the cemetery was a necropolis, the black earth and the naked trees replaced by bright sun and pale steles; winged lions with men’s faces and curly beards, had replaced angels and archangels.
“Hey, Fabien, you coming or what?”
Everything returned to order, the streetlights on Côte-des-Neiges Road, the dome of Saint Joseph’s Oratory. Xavier and Geneviève had already headed off. Luciane started talking about leaving the cemetery. In the time it took her to convince the two of us, Charlebois and me, the other pair had disappeared into the distance. We set about looking for them. We walked up and down the rows for a good thirty minutes. At one point, guided by my sense of smell, I took off on my own, yet I knew exactly where Luciane and her boyfriend were, behind me. I walked back to them some moments later and convinced them to leave without waiting for Geneviève and Xavier, who were old enough to go home on their own and were no doubt trying to spook us by hiding as they did. Perhaps they had already left, amused by the thought that we were still out looking for them as they were walking home.
Of course, the next day, Xavier and Geneviève said I had been right. Charlebois forgave them immediately, but Luciane remained cold and distant toward them following this nocturnal prank.
In the dissection room, the prof’s staccato voice was familiar, but one day it rose an octave higher and I turned to look at the other end of the room. The man was beside himself, chewing out a big lump of a guy in a white lab coat. His colleagues appeared to be trying to disappear into the floor. The explanation passed from table to table, until it reached me. The team leader had decided it would be funny to remove the anatomy manual from the prof’s lectern and replace it with another type of anatomical publication, open to the centerfold orgy. In the face of the old physician’s anger, a girl from the next team over, who had started to weave garlands around her colleagues with a cadaver’s intestines, hastily stuffed them more or less back in place.
The fact that this professor, usually so debonair, lost all patience with his students’ tricks was an all too eloquent indication of the tension generated by the investigation into drugs at the med school. People had been questioned, minor seizures had been made, but they suspected a major ring involving hospital personnel as well.
Some students, who had chanced to overhear conversations or witness searches, wondered whether the tasteless pranks were also taking on a criminal turn. The janitors, the lab attendants, the night guards all knew more, but they must have been sworn to secrecy. It was only later, weeks or months later, that certain tidbits of information filtered out: cadavers had been dismembered — outside the dissection sessions — and their limbs had not been found. Another body, after having served for the anatomy course, had disappeared completely, its stained shroud stuffed in a recycling bin.
I turned to Xavier, a finger in his mouth, between his cheek and his gum, and knew he wasn’t picking his teeth. He frowned and smiled at the same time as Charlebois gave him the latest news: a recently delivered body had disappeared from the morgue, the body of a murdered girl, a girl whose story might have touched us, vanished perhaps from Chicago or from Dallas, when she was a kid, who’d come to Montreal only to die a few years later from a pimp’s needle. Charlebois looked shocked, and that was a sign of the wave of discomfort that had flowed over us. This was Charlebois after all, Charlebois who, at the beginning of the term had spent an evening demonstrating variations of the expression “to put your best foot forward,” complete with the prop in hand.
I recall it clearly. Raymonde, who was with me, commented that people had to be pretty wound up to do something that disgusting and Xavier burst into hysterical laughter as if to prove her right.
I told myself then, that if Xavier wasn’t more discrete, he would get caught by the narcs within a few days. Either a police officer or an informant had to have infiltrated the staff or the students, if the drug traffic was a serious as rumors said it was. What amazes me most, when I think back over it, was Xavier’s temerity. He took unheard of chances. More and more, all the time. Either coke was something new for him and he was delving into it with a tragic frenzy, or he had been into it for a long time and using larger and larger amounts, throwing caution to the wind.
Like having an orgy in his mini-van in the middle of the university parking lot one evening, running the risk of alerting the campus guards. I was there, Geneviève was too, along with one or two other people. I was stoned, I would have liked to screw Geneviève, and she would have agreed, but I just couldn’t. It’s a bad memory. Lousy, even when I think back on it. She smelled bad and that was all it took, I just couldn’t.
That and the fear, no doubt. There was enough coke in the mini-van to send each of us to prison for 25 years.
Towards the end, Xavier got out, despite a warning from Geneviève who suddenly grew angry — a murmured warning, an icy voice — an anger that immediately sobered me. But he got out anyway, with an urgent need to screw that apparently could not be satisfied with those in the mini-van.
I know it’s stupid, but I hadn’t realized that they — Geneviève and Xavier — were an item until then. That they were lovers, I mean.
Or that they had been. Obviously, things were not clear.
I started to be more cautious. Not avoiding them, not really, but avoiding their excesses. I did keep away from them at night, because that’s when they seemed more … intense. Looking back, it seems to me now that, if a police officer had infiltrated our group, he could have arrested them for possession just by seeing the intensity in their faces, in their eyes.
I still don’t understand exactly what triggered their happy-go-lucky attitude, the way in which they increasingly courted risk. For them, of course, it had been going on a long time. They must have been more cautious and discrete in the past, since they had never been caught. When I think back on it, it was almost suicidal, like the behavior of someone who knows he’s condemned and wants to burn up before the end comes. That’s it. They were burning up.
And I could have been burned as well.
I had my suspicions about what was coming when the med school morgue received a prostitute. Strangled, her face puffy. She was past her prime, but she offered a lot of flesh to her clients, tender yet firm.
Xavier knew when the shifts went on and off duty in the labs, and when the guards made their rounds. Now, I’m even convinced he knew about the police investigation underway, that he had identified the informer and knew when he was away. Obviously, running into someone in the corridors at that time of night was suspicious; it was so unusual. But it was just rare enough to make the risk acceptable.
He had coke on him. Yet, despite his feverishness, his hands weren’t shaking. He could still make a line on the back of his hand, in the hollow of the thumb tendon, sniff it while walking and get to the door which was his destination.
Over the years, I suppose, he had acquired all sorts of skills. In any case, in his pocket, he had what he needed to overpower the lock. And, like me, he had eyes to see, so he knew the
combination to open the door to the morgue.
I recall, I had a mental vision of a spectacular arrest, like on Miami Vice, with officers jumping out from all directions, weapons aimed, shouting “Freeze!”, which would have been somewhat ironic for a suspect who was already totally stoned.
But nothing like that happened.
And I didn’t at all expect what did.
Anyone can suffer from insomnia, I suppose, and much more than that.
Xavier opened a few drawers, in the half-light of the door window, until he found the woman, the prostitute. He unwrapped her white shroud. She had not been dissected yet, but had been opened for the autopsy and closed back up cursorily.
I don’t know how he could have managed to get it up while looking at that meter-long scar. But one slit is as good as another, I suppose.
Since the sliding drawer could not have supported their combined weight, he placed her on the floor, as stiff as she was, with the shroud for a sheet and the cold tiles for a mattress. Then he removed his shoes, pants and briefs. He had probably decided, no doubt with reason, that if he were caught there was no point in hastily donning his clothes.
He had some difficulty spreading her thighs. Then he penetrated her, thrust in and out for a moment, while biting her on the neck, hard enough to stifle his cry. It was brief, like between two cats, and I thought — as I often have on other occasions — that people put a lot of energy into something that lasts such a little while.
When he pulled away, the perforation marks of his teeth were clearly visible between the woman’s shoulder and her neck. I recalled how angry Geneviève had been with him another evening, another evening of lust.
Then, as he dressed, he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, “I’m counting on your discretion, Fabien.”
Shivers ran up and down my back. I can feel them still, and I can hear his voice as he said those words: low, steady, as icy as an assassin.
I still have no idea when he had realized I was there. And how could he have known that I wouldn’t denounce him, that I had not stationed myself there specifically to catch the person who was looting the morgue or that I had not followed him to witness a coke deal — after all, I could have been an informant; he had considered the possibility that an investigation was underway. But there was nothing like that. Just a face, filled with confidence — not calmness, not serenity, but something like the arrogance of a leader or an aristocrat.
He was right, or course, I didn’t denounce him.
But I never hung out with them, either of them, after that — not even during the day, between classes. Anyway, they skipped classes, as they had always done, which didn’t prevent them from getting excellent grades.
Things didn’t end there. Not any more than my insomnia gave me a break. You can’t stop events once they’ve been set in motion any more than you can force sleep to come.
The subsequent events, the memory of those events, are condensed into a few images, like the memory of a nightmare when you wake up.
There was coke on the corridor floor, not far from the morgue. I bent down and, waving my hand, blew it away. The silence was the same as every other night, the silence of an old building, the distant, confused murmur of the ventilation system, the buzz of equipment running on auto-pilot in the labs, or the hum of refrigeration in the morgue.
They had come — they — I knew it shortly after the fact: Geneviève and Xavier. The drawers were closed, there was no trace, no way for me to know a body was missing. Yet the odor was there. Only a dog could have picked it up, but it was perfectly identifiable for me as well. I followed the trail, already cooling.
I didn’t know about the cubby-hole under the roof, at the top of a metal staircase I had never used before. A small corner of a linen sheet peaked out between the door and the frame.
They sensed that I was in front of the door, just as Xavier had known I had been there the other night. They opened the door to me, just as certain that I was alone. That instinct, those infallible senses, that’s what had saved them all those years, all those centuries perhaps.
They were crouched down — the space was small. Like that night in the cemetery, they had dismembered the body, their mouths were full, at least Geneviève’s was as she gorged on the liver. Xavier was sucking the plentiful marrow from a femur, mouth dripping with the juice that served to liquefy coagulated blood, to tenderize muscles, his lips drawn back to secrete it all the better.
In the red glow of the emergency light, their fangs shone, as did the shroud and their pale foreheads under black locks of hair.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” Xavier blurted out bluntly, almost aggressively.
The arrest, the police cruisers that rolled silently behind the building, roof-lights flashing … that was another night. Xavier — I can still see him — had traces of red around his mouth. Geneviève, had streaks of white dust on her black blouse.
That was their downfall.
They didn’t do drugs in the past. The exhilaration had been enough for them, the intoxication of marauding nights, moonlight reflecting on marble tombstones, the fragrance of freshly dug earth, the dizzying fumes of the formaldehyde, which was no longer a poison for their species.
Geneviève enjoyed nothing better, she had once confided, than to rip the white satin lining from luxury caskets.
Their senses were infallible, night vision, hearing, smell, that instinct that enabled them to feel the presence of mortals within a radius of 1,000 feet, so that hunts and watches were in vain. And then there was that other talent, the ability to penetrate the minds of dogs and lull their alertness.
But the white dust froze their sense of smell and, above all, dulled their instinct. Otherwise, they could have gone on, for eons, moving from one medical school to another, periodically returning — under new identities — to that particularly well located medical school that stood next to a cemetery, to the University of Montreal.
Neither the police nor their dogs spotted me, but Xavier and Geneviève could see me clearly, standing behind a basement window, probably as white as they were. Geneviève’s face was too swollen to reveal any expressions. But Xavier placed his index finger on his lips, not asking me for silence, of course, but promising me his own and, in his thoughts, I read not only “be discrete” but also “get away from here, far away.”
Leave? Where could I go? It’s the anguish of that question that no doubt keeps me from sleeping, that and the scenes of brutality, the billy club beating down on Geneviève as she leapt, her jaw shattered by the blow, Xavier’s fierce shriek before boots kicked his belly, knocking the wind from him.
Where could I go?
I’ve just woken. I didn’t even realize that I had fallen asleep. Sleep came faster than it did yesterday, despite the hunger. Or perhaps as a result of it. I can still see the images of my dream, but they might just be a memory. Definitely a memory. I saw swarming stars in crystal-clear nights, lands of sand and rock under the full moon, pale as snow but still warm from the day’s sun. I saw the shining domes and minarets of cities, the trembling of palms on white walls, villages of cubes stacked at the edges of wadis. I saw the angular framework of derricks in place of marble palaces, the endless double line of pipelines in place of caravans, but it is still the land of my ancestors. I saw the tiny, mismatched houses of the cemeteries, the sepulchres lining the hills, and I heard one lone sound, off in the distance, the barking of our lowly brothers.
Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia. These lands are no longer as peaceful, but surely the jackals — and the hyenas — prosper there, feasting along churned up roads, and in ruined villages, in the shadow of wrecked tanks or around refugee camps.
I saw this in my dream and I woke, my chest tight. Sadness — no, nostalgia. Our ancestors, or so Geneviève claimed, had claws and fangs that were much sharper than ours. Above all, they had
wings. Xavier, who was snorting at that moment, had swept her claim away with a burst of laughter, almost hysterical. Then, sounding like the narrator of some film noir, he uttered, “Ghouls, ghouls!” I don’t know if what Geneviève asserted was true.
But in my dream, I was descending from the sky, as silent as a bird of prey, and by night I landed on the soil of my ancestors, dry between my talons or fingers, intoxicated already by the feast to which I had been invited, catching the scent of a mass grave off in the distance.
Tomorrow, I’m buying a one-way ticket to the Middle East.
The Machinery of Government
Matt Moore
In Paul’s right ear, Eddie asked: “Next: Do you have your access codes?”
“I think so,” Paul replied, moving into the front hall of the small townhouse he rented. Honestly, he had no idea where they were.
Outside, the siren was getting closer.
Three more notices scrolled up into his field of vision:
MINISTER OF NATIONAL DEFENSE EDDIE LAZENBY ARRIVING AT GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS CENTER.
PRIME MINISTER ANDREW RENAULT HAS BEEN ALERTED.
LAND AND CELLULAR COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS OVERLOADED; GOVERNMENT NETWORK REMAINS STABLE.
The upward movement of the red letters — a direction his inner ear told him was impossible while he turned to the right — made him motion-sick.
He shut his eyes, moaning, bile filling his mouth.
“Are you okay?” Eddie asked, sounding like he was next to Paul and not speaking through a device in Paul’s ear. In the background, Paul heard a commotion of commands and responses, voices trying to get Eddie’s attention.
“Yeah,” Paul replied, tentatively opening his eyes. The messages had contracted and joined others in the upper right corner of his vision. Missed communications gathered in the lower right. “Just the heads-up display.” He grabbed his briefcase from where it lay by the door.
Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories Page 13
