The Ultimate Undead

by Anne Rice

  Holy Jumping Jesus, he whispered to himself. Talk about the power of the imagination.

  Meehoff decided he was simply more worked up about this than he’d first realized. While trying to imagine Kramer’s footsteps, he’d actually begun to hear them. Tiny, slapping footfalls, muffled by the lid of the coffin. Accompanied by a jingle-jing of keys.

  Then came a sound that could not have been imagination. It was the immense squealing of hinges, a huge door swinging shut with a heavy slam. Meehoff threw open the upper-half lid, sat up and whirled around to see the door to the subbasement shuddering in its frame.

  He was scrambling from the coffin even as he knew he’d be too late. Just as his feet were hitting the chilly floor, he heard the sound of a key scraping in the lock to the thick door. He sprinted across the room, reached the door, and twisted its handle anxiously. The handle would not budge.

  “Awright, Kramer!” Meehoff cried out, pounding the door. “You win! Chalk one up for you! Just lemme out, okay?”

  He paused.

  Wait a minute, Meehoff thought. Kramer was supposed to be in the hospital, wasn’t he? The Croghans wouldn’t make that up, would they? Which meant that whoever had locked him in wasn’t Kramer, but was …

  Naaaah. It had to be Kramer. It had to be.

  Not them.

  Meehoff began to shout again. He pounded on the door to no avail. He paused for a time to press an ear to the wood, and he thought that he could hear slow, receding footsteps moving away, down the corridor of the subbasement until they faded to nothing.

  Meehoff sagged to the floor. He didn’t like this, not one bit. Trapped underground in a cold, cold room. No telling what vermin lurked in the shadowed corners. Spiderwebs that he hadn’t noticed before were now visible with excruciating clarity. He fancied that he heard the scurrying of insects along the floor and the chittering of rats within the walls. The soft whistle of damp winds that caressed the bones of those who’d been left to rot in the subbasement’s secret passages.

  Meehoff possessed a vivid imagination, and tonight he was imagining it all.

  What to do, he begged himself, what to do….

  Then, gradually, he brightened. Why, what else? In the face of peril … laugh. What was that old saying? Laugh and the world laughs with you. Die and … well, never mind.

  Meehoff crawled back to where he’d left his shoes. He slipped them back on and tied the laces with shaking fingers. He came to his feet and looked around. And he smiled.

  It’s show time.

  He addressed the stacks of coffins, trying to mask the quiver of desperation in his voice. “Hey hey, thanks for coming out tonight, folks!” Reminding himself of the famous show-biz adage. How do you conquer stage fright? Imagine that your audience is stark naked. And, if necessary, imagine that you’ve even got an audience.

  He reached over and heaved the bottom lid of the black coffin up and down. “Welcome to tonight’s Grand Opening! Yeaaaaaahhh! Whoa! Are you guys a buncha stiffs out there, or what? Talk about a wooden crowd! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

  He did Liberace. He did the sex-change operation. He did the Arab virgin. Twice. Three times even. He did every joke he’d ever stolen. There was nothing but the sound of his own voice, followed by his laughter slapping off the concrete walls in an overlapping echo.

  But he remained resolutely sane. He kept it up until he exhausted himself thoroughly, and then he dragged himself into the black coffin and fell hard asleep.

  Meehoff awoke some time later to an unmistakable series of sounds. The unlatching of the storage room door. The turn of the handle. The squeak of hinges. He sat up in the coffin and looked. The door was hanging open a few inches, beckoning him.

  Though he was groggy and disoriented, Meehoff’s body clock told him that it was morning. Near dawn, he guessed. He’d been down here all night. Whoever the hell had locked him in must’ve decided that the joke was over.

  But it ain’t over till it’s over, he told himself grimly. Not till Jack Meehoff says it’s over.

  He climbed out of the coffin, stepped carefully toward the door, and moved out into the corridor. It was deserted. Not a sound filtered down from upstairs.

  Meehoff padded to the end of the corridor and spiraled up the endless stairs that led from the subbasement to ground level. Thinking: All right, motherfucker, where are you?

  He searched stealthily, as if stalking prey.

  The hallways. Empty.

  The lounge and the parlors. Empty.

  Kramer’s “inner sanctum.” Empty.

  At last he came to the embalming room. He pushed the door open, took a few steps inside, and froze. His eyes became very large.

  Because the corpses were all on their feet, watching him. Standing up unassisted. Look ma, no hands. No wires. No nets.

  Meehoff’s frayed nerves crackled. He wanted badly to scream.

  Here they were, the bodies of the dear departed. A teenage boy whose head had been cratered in a car wreck. A matronly sort whose flabby torso was crosshatched with the crude stitches of a Y-shaped autopsy incision. An old scarecrow of a man whose body was a crinkled map of melanoma scars. A young woman bearing a wide knife wound between her once-splendid breasts. A veritable parade march of death. All watching him watching them.

  Meehoff commanded himself: Feets do yo’ duty….

  But he couldn’t move. It was as if a giant, invisible hand held him tightly, restraining him. He couldn’t even twitch.

  Then he saw Kramer. The stubby old janitor was sitting atop a desk in the far corner of the room, his ever-present unlit cigar jammed between his lips. He hopped down from the desk and paced forward, coming to Meehoff.

  Tucked under one arm Kramer had a huge, fat book, as big as a pulpit Bible. The cover was made of cracked, ancient, black leather. Inked on its spine were intricately arcane symbols in a language that Meehoff had never seen before. The troll-man came to a halt before him. Kramer removed the cigar slowly, savoring it. He looked up at the statue-stiff Meehoff and said, “I guess you figured out by now that note was really from me, huh?”

  Because his mouth would not move, Meehoff couldn’t reply.

  Kramer went on. “Y’know, one of the great things about livin’ in L.A. is that you can find just about anything you want in this town, if you look for it hard enough. A book of Jamaican obeah spells? Took me two days to track one down …” He looked over his shoulder to the corpses and barked an unintelligible phrase which sounded to Meehoff like a cross between a gargle and a backward-masked heavy-metal lyric.

  The corpses began to walk.

  Stolidly they shuffled about the room, retrieving various tools of the embalming trade. Then they were coming toward Meehoff, who remained riveted to the floor.

  Kramer stepped away as the ancient cancer patient shambled up, bearing a huge scalpel. “You’re a funny guy, ain’t cha,” the dead man rasped, swinging the scalpel and hacking a divot out of Meehoff’s cheek. The other corpses hooted with laughter.

  “He’s a real cutup!” piped the young woman.

  “You were told not to disturb us customers, weren’t you, dear?” chastised the bloated matron. To Meehoff her voice sounded vaguely like June Cleaver’s. She was shaking her head in disappointed sorrow. The effort caused her to pop several stitches.

  Taking the old man’s place directly was the auto-crash victim. The teenager was holding a monstrous-sized, hollow-ended needle that was attached to a long, rubber hose. The end of the hose was connected to a vacuum pump that was screwed to the top of an empty glass jar the boy was holding in his other hand. The jar was large enough to hold several quarts of liquid.

  Meehoff knew what the needle and the tube and the jar were for: they comprised a siphon designed to drain bodies of blood. The device was intended for use only on bodies that were already dead. When Meehoff had examined the thing his first night on the job, he’d supposed that it would work on a living body in much the same way that porcupines made love. Very painfully.

/>   The crash victim impaled him with the needle, thrusting it into his gut. Meehoff’s breath whooshed out in a fog of bloody mist. Mutely he looked into the grinning ruin of the face of the boy who held him skewered. He heard the whirring of the vacuum pump as the boy switched it on.

  Meehoff felt his insides churning. At last he could move, and he performed a jittering soft-shoe in time with the machine’s musical chatter. The corpses clamored gleefully as Meehoff slumped to the floor in a grotesque pratfall. Dimly he could hear the sound of his own blood splashing to the bottom of the empty jar.

  And to Jack Meehoff’s ears, it sounded for all the world like a healthy round of applause.

  HOUSE OF LAZARUS

  F. A. MCMAHAN

  “RICH ARD?”

  My eyes snapped open and I lay staring at the ceiling. I’d been on the verge of stupor. “What?” I yelled.

  “Where’s the tape?” Damon said. He was one of the older ones.

  “What kind of tape?”

  “Adhesive tape. I want to hang a picture.”

  I sighed. “Top drawer of the bureau in the hall.”

  “I looked there and didn’t see any.”

  “Well, look again. I got four rolls last time.”

  “Oh,” Damon said. Then after a minute, “Found it. Thanks.”

  So much for peace and quiet. I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

  Four in the afternoon and no one was around but Damon and the Princess and me. So I’d figured it would be a good time to crash and have a little time to myself. But it never worked that way.

  A clatter came from the hallway, followed by sounds of rustling paper. I followed the racket to the big room we call the gallery and found Damon wrestling with a length of form-feed computer paper about twenty feet long.

  “Can you hold that end up?” he said. He’d tried to tape up a corner, but his tugging pulled it loose, and the page fluttered to the floor.

  “What’s it called?” I said, twisting to look at the drawings as I held the end of the paper in place.

  “Haven’t named it yet. Push it up about six inches higher. Yeah.” Damon pulled his end tight, then drew a length of tape out of the dispenser he’d put in his mouth. He mumbled something more.

  It sounded like “my table and chairs.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Like anyone cares.”

  The Princess sat in the corner, wide-eyed and staring at Damon and me. Some adjust better than others. A few never adjust at all. Princess had been here four months, and all she ever did was stare. If I thought about it too much, it gave me the creeps.

  “Okay, just hold it a minute longer,” Damon said.

  I watched him pull the tape, then place it carefully along the edge of the paper. Damon had been with me for seven, eight years, maybe. And he still looked good. I was okay, too.

  I guess sometimes everything works, and a body makes a perfect transition. Usually, though, it doesn’t take too well. If you end up a dropout, I mean. I’m sure there are successful conversions all the time. Why else would people keep trying?

  “Hey, Richard. Meet my new friend.”

  Damon and I turned to see Marky standing in the doorway with his arm around a battered and grimy young man.

  “Hello,” I said, leaving Damon to his tape.

  “A bunch of creeps jumped him and took turns trying to take him apart,” Marky said, scratching at the curls of dead flesh on his face. “I told him he could come here. That he’d be safe here. His name’s Sal.”

  “Hi, Sal. I’m Richard.”

  “He’s our housemother,” Marky said, grinning.

  “I’m the head of this house,” I said, giving Marky a look that told him to shut up. “The House of Lazarus.”

  “You’re just another stinking pack. Like the Dead. And the Bloods. And Hereafter.”

  “Sal, we’re not like that here. All we want is to be left alone. To stay among our own kind and get on as best we can.”

  “This is sanctuary,” Marky said. “It’s not like anywhere else. It’s almost like being alive again.”

  “Nothing’s like being alive,” Sal screamed. “I don’t look alive. I don’t smell alive. I don’t feel alive. I’m dead.” His head snapped round, eyes locked on me. “You’re dead. We’re all dead. And if you think that playing normal and pretending happiness and acting like a living thing can make you alive again, then you’re the dumbest simp I ever met.”

  “Hey!” Damon shouted, sharp and stunning as a slap in the face.

  Sal’s mouth fell open. Damon had him by the collar and slammed the boy up against the wall.

  “You wanna talk to Richard like that, you gotta go through me first.”

  “Damon, please,” I said. A chunk of flesh had come loose at Sal’s neck and folded over Damon’s hand. “Stop it.”

  No one moved.

  Then Damon said, “Sorry,” and released the boy.

  Groaning, Sal let his legs go limp beneath him and sat down hard on the floor. He started gasping, made choking sounds like he was crying. Only he didn’t have any tears that he could shed.

  I knelt down and touched his neck, eased the flap of skin back into place. His flesh was cold and doughy. “You okay?”

  He clenched his teeth and nodded.

  “How long since you were reanimated?”

  “Couple weeks.” Sal sniffed. “I don’t know. A month.”

  “It’s hard at first,” I said, sitting down next to him. Damon and Marky moved away from us.

  “But why? Why does it have to be hard? Why does it have to be at all. Why aren’t I dead and buried?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because someone loved you so much that they couldn’t bear to lose you. They wanted you alive again.”

  “Nobody loved me. If they had, they never would have done this to me. This isn’t life. This is hell.”

  “They didn’t know it would turn out this way when they requested reanimation,” I said, brushing Sal’s hair out of his eyes. “Whoever did this to you thought they would be getting their son back. Or their brother. Or their lover. The procedure is way too expensive for most people to have it done for revenge, out of meanness. Only someone who is grieving, who is so overcome with sorrow at the thought that they will never see their loved one again that they would risk anything, spend any amount of money to get that loved one back—”

  I’d said it so many times to so many children. Only the words still hurt like when I’d heard it for the first time. And I looked away.

  “—only someone who couldn’t live without you would have bothered to try to snatch you away from death.”

  “Then why am I like this now?” Sal said, still sobbing a little. “There’s so much missing. Why can’t I remember who did this?”

  “Because they’re still working all the bugs out. And sometimes things don’t go the way they’re supposed to.”

  “Do you remember? What it was like when you were alive?”

  “A little,” I said and got up off the floor. Sal and I were alone in the gallery. Damon’s picture was hanging on the wall like a happy birthday banner. “I remember who arranged for my conversion and why. Not much else. I’ve been like this for so long that it’s hard to imagine I was ever any other way.”

  “So why’d you start the House of Lazarus?”

  “I didn’t start it,” I said and looked down at Sal. He’d stopped trying to cry. “I just took over when the last head of the house retired.”

  “Retired?”

  I shrugged. “Wasted away.”

  Sal was quiet for a minute as my words sank in.

  “So what’s the deal with the house and all?” he finally said. “I mean, what’s the attraction? What’s it for?”

  “The House of Lazarus is a place for bodies who don’t have anywhere else to go, who don’t have a family. They come here and become part of our family. It’s home.”

  “You’re not bashers? You don’t want to destroy all the simps and the crips and
the lifers?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Sal said. “I’m not a simp. When I woke, I still had my mind. Not a lot of my memories are left. But my mind works okay.”

  I smiled. “I know.”

  “The rot’s already started, though.” Sal fingered the loose skin at his neck. Bits of flesh were peeling off his hands and face and arms. “Most of them will try to kill you if they think you’re alive. But when you start to go, they want to wreck you even worse.”

  “Not here,” I said.

  “How old are you?” He didn’t mean my actual age. He wanted to know how long since I was converted.

  “Eleven years. The process worked with me. Everything’s intact. Everything was retained except my old self, my old personality. I came out of it a completely different person. So I left.”

  “You’ll last forever,” Sal said.

  “You don’t know that. Nobody does.”

  “How long do you think I have? Before important chunks start dropping off and I can’t get around anymore, I mean.”

  “I don’t know that either. Some go fast, a couple of months. Some take a lot longer to decompose.”

  “Richard?” I turned to see Damon behind me. “Marky wants you to take a look at that junk on his stomach. He says it’s worse.”

  “Okay.”

  “Wait,” Sal called, and I looked back at him. “Can I stay here?”

  “As long as you want,” I said.

  The boy held my gaze a minute, then bent his head to his chest. “Thanks.”

  And I followed Damon out the door.

  Of the eleven children in my house, only three—Marky, Elena, and now Sal—showed signs of physical deterioration, Elena’s so slow that it was almost unnoticeable. But the other eight had various mental imperfections. The Princess seemed to have lost most of her mind in transition. Andrea frequently confused things or stopped in the middle of something because she forgot how to do it. Captain Crow, Jackie, and Butterfly all went through violent mood swings. Todd was withdrawn and insecure. Wizard never talked.

  Damon was the best off of all of them. And even he had fits of depression once in a while, bouts of despair that I couldn’t bring him out of no matter what I did.