Circus of the Damned abvh-3

by Laurell Hamilton

  I climbed onto the mound of gladioluses, chrysanthemums, carnations. The perfume of flowers mixed with the stale smell of the corpse. I stood knee-deep in dying flowers and waved my bleeding wrist in front of the zombie’s face.

  The pale eyes followed my hand, flat and dead as day-old fish. Andrew Doughal was not home, but something was, something that smelled blood and knew its worth.

  I know that zombies don’t have souls. In fact, I can only raise the dead after three days. It takes that long for the soul to leave. Incidentally, the same amount of time it takes for vampires to rise. Fancy that.

  But if it isn’t the soul reanimating the corpse, then what is it? Magic, my magic, or Larry’s. Maybe. But there was something in the corpse. If the soul was gone, something filled the void. In an animation that worked, magic filled it. Now? Now I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know. What did it matter as long as I pulled the fat out of the fire? Yeah. Maybe if I kept repeating that, I’d even believe it.

  I offered the corpse my bleeding wrist. The thing hesitated for a second. If it refused, I was out of options.

  The zombie stared at me. I dropped the knife and squeezed the skin around the wound. Blood welled out, thick and viscous. The zombie snatched at my hand. Its pale hands were cold and strong. Its head bowed over the wound, mouth sucking. It fed at my wrist, jaws working convulsively, swallowing as hard and as fast as it could. I was going to have the world’s worst hickey. But at least it hurt.

  I tried to draw my hand away, but the zombie just sucked harder. It didn’t want to let go. Great.

  “Larry, can you stand?” I asked softly. We were still trying to pretend that nothing had gone wrong. The zombie had accepted blood. I controlled it now, if I could get it to let go.

  Larry looked up at me in slow motion. “Sure,” he said. He got to his feet using the burial mound for support. When he was standing, he asked, “What now?”

  Good question. “Help me get it loose.” I tried to pull my wrist free, but the thing hung on for dear life.

  Larry wrapped his arms around the corpse and pulled. It didn’t help.

  “Try the head,” I said.

  He tried pulling back on the corpse’s hair, but zombies don’t feel pain. Larry pried a finger along the corpse’s mouth, breaking the suction with a little pop. Larry looked like he was going to be sick. Poor him; it was my arm.

  He wiped his finger on his dress slacks, as if he had touched something slimy. I wasn’t sympathetic.

  The knife wound was already red. It would be a hell of a bruise tomorrow.

  The zombie stood on top of its grave, staring at me. There was life in the eyes; someone was home. The trick was, was it the right someone?

  “Are you Andrew Doughal?” I asked.

  He licked his lips and said, “I am.” It was a rough voice. A voice for ordering people about. I wasn’t impressed. It was my blood that gave him the voice. The dead really are mute, really do forget who and what they are, until they taste fresh blood. Homer was right; makes you wonder what else was true in the Iliad.

  I put pressure on the knife wound with my other hand and stepped back, off the grave. “He’ll answer your questions now,” I said. “But keep them simple. He’s been mostly dead all day.”

  The lawyers didn’t smile. I guess I didn’t blame them. I waved them forward. They hung back. Squeamish lawyers? Surely not.

  Mrs. Doughal poked her lawyer in the arm. “Get on with it. This is costing a fortune.”

  I started to say we don’t charge by the minute, but for all I knew Bert had arranged for the longer the corpse was up, the more expensive it was. That actually was a good idea. Andrew Doughal was fine tonight. He answered questions in his cultured, articulate voice. If you ignored the way his skin glistened in the moonlight, he looked alive. But give it a few days, or weeks. He’d rot; they all rotted. If Bert had figured out a way to make clients put the dead back in their graves before pieces started to fall off, so much the better.

  There were few things as sad as the family bringing dear old mom back to the cemetery with expensive perfume covering up the smell of decay. The worst was the client who had bathed her husband before bringing him back. She had to bring most of his flesh in a plastic garbage sack. The meat had just slid off the bone in the warm water.

  Larry moved back, stumbling over a flowerpot. I caught him, and he fell against me, still unsteady.

  He smiled. “Thanks… for everything.” He stared at me, our faces inches apart. A trickle of sweat oozed down his face in the cold October night.

  “You got a coat?”

  “In my car.”

  “Get it and put it on. You’ll catch your death sweating in this cold.”

  His smile flashed into a grin. “Anything you say, boss.”‘ His eyes were bigger than they should have been, a lot of white showing. “You pulled me back from the edge. I won’t forget.”

  “Gratitude is great, kid, but go get your coat. You can’t work if you’re home sick with the flu.”

  Larry nodded and started slowly towards the cars. He was still unsteady, but he was moving. The flow of blood had almost stopped on my wrist. I wondered if I had a Band-Aid in my car big enough to cover it. I shrugged and started to follow Larry towards the cars. The lawyers’ deep, courtroom voices filled the October dark. Words echoing against the trees. Who the hell were they trying to impress? The corpse didn’t care.

  Chapter 20

  Larry and I sat on the cool autumn grass watching the lawyers draw up the will. “They’re so serious,” he said.

  “It’s their job to be serious,” I said.

  “Being a lawyer means you can’t have a sense of humor?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  He grinned. His short, curly hair was a red so bright, it was nearly orange. His eyes were blue and soft as a spring sky. I’d seen both hair and eyes in the dome light from our cars. Back in the dark he looked grey-eyed and brown-haired. I’d hate to have to give a witness description of someone I only saw in the dark.

  Larry Kirkland had that milk-pale complexion of some redheads. A thick sprinkling of golden freckles completed the look. He looked like an overgrown Howdy Doody puppet. I mean that in a cute way. Being short, really short for a man, I was sure he wouldn’t like being called cute. It was one of my least favorite endearments. I think if all short people could vote, the word “cute” would be stricken from the English language. I know it would get my vote.

  “How long have you been an animator?” I asked.

  He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. “About eight hours.”

  I stared at him. “This is your first job, anywhere?”

  He nodded. “Didn’t Mr. Vaughn tell you about me?”

  “Bert just said he’d hired another animator named Lawrence Kirkland.”

  “I’m in my senior year at Washington University, and this is my semester of job co-op.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty; why?”

  “You’re not even legal,” I said.

  “So I can’t drink or go in porno theaters. No big loss, unless the job takes us to places like that.” He looked at me and leaned in. “Does the job take us to porno theaters?” His face was neutrally pleasant, and I couldn’t tell if he was teasing or not. I gambled that he was kidding.

  “Twenty is fine.” I shook my head.

  “You don’t look like twenty’s fine,” he said.

  “It’s not your age that bothers me,” I said.

  “But something bothers you.”

  I wasn’t sure how to put it into words, but there was something pleasant and humorous in his face. It was a face that laughed more often than it cried. He looked bright and clean as a new penny, and I didn’t want that to change. I didn’t want to be the one who forced him to get down in the dirt and roll.

  “Have you ever lost someone close to you? Family, I mean?”

  The humor slipped away from his face. He looked like a solemn lit
tle boy. “You’re serious.”

  “Deadly,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Just answer the question. Have you ever lost someone close to you?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve even got all my grandparents.”

  “Have you ever seen violence up close and personal?”

  “I got into fights in high school.”

  “Why?”

  He grinned. “They thought short meant weak.”

  I had to smile. “And you showed them different.”

  “Hell, no; they beat the crap out of me for four years.” He smiled.

  “You ever win a fight?”

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  “But the winning’s not the important part,” I said.

  He looked very steadily at me, eyes serious. “No, it’s not.”

  There was a moment of nearly perfect understanding between us. A shared history of being the smallest kid in class. Years of being the last picked for sports. Being the automatic victim for bullies. Being short can make you mean. I was sure that we understood each other but, being female, I had to verbalize it. Men do a lot of this mind-reading shit, but sometimes you’re wrong. I needed to know.

  “The important part is taking the beating and not giving up,” I said.

  He nodded. “Takes a beating and keeps on ticking.”

  Now that I’d spoiled our first moment of perfect understanding by making us both verbalize, I was happy. “Other than school fights, you’ve never seen violence?”

  “I go to rock concerts.”

  I shook my head. “Not the same.”

  “You got a point to make?” he asked.

  “You should never have tried to raise a third zombie.”

  “I did it, didn’t I?” He sounded defensive, but I pressed on. When I have a point to make, I may not be graceful, but I’m relentless.

  “You raised and lost control of it. If I hadn’t come along, the zombie would have broken free and hurt someone.”

  “It’s just a zombie. They don’t attack people.”

  I stared at him, trying to see if he was kidding. He wasn’t. Shit. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  I covered my face with my hands and counted to ten, slowly. It wasn’t Larry I was mad at, it was Bert, but Larry was so convenient for yelling. I’d have to wait until tomorrow to yell at Bert, but Larry was right here. How lucky.

  “The zombie had broken free of your control, Larry. If I hadn’t come along and fed it blood, it would have found blood on its own. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I sighed. “The zombie would have attacked someone. Taken a bite out of someone.”

  “Zombies attacking humans is just superstition, ghost stories.”

  “Is that what they’re teaching in college now?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll loan you some back copies of The Animator. Trust me, Larry, zombies do attack people. I’ve seen people killed by them.”

  “You’re just trying to scare me,” he said.

  “Scared would be better than stupid.”

  “I raised it. What do you want from me?” He looked completely baffled.

  “I want you to understand what nearly happened here tonight. I want you to understand that what we do isn’t a game. It’s not parlor tricks. It’s real, and it can be dangerous.”

  “All right,” he said. He’d given in too easily. He didn’t really believe. He was humoring me. But there are some things you can’t tell someone. He, or she, has to learn some things in person. I wished I could wrap Larry up in cellophane and keep him on a shelf, all safe and secure and untouched, but life didn’t work that way. If he stayed in this business long enough, the new would wear off. But you can’t tell someone who’s reached twenty and never been touched by death. They don’t believe in the boogeyman.

  At twenty I’d believed in everything. I suddenly felt old.

  Larry pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket.

  “Please tell me you don’t smoke,” I said.

  He looked up at me, eyes sort of wide and startled. “You don’t smoke?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t like people to smoke around you?” He made it a question.

  “No,” I said.

  “Look, I feel pretty awful right now. I need the cigarette, okay?”

  “Need it?”

  “Yeah, need it.” He had one slender white cigarette between two fingers of his right hand. The pack had disappeared back into his pocket. A disposable lighter had appeared. He looked at me very steadily. His hands were shaking just a bit.

  Shit. He’d raised three zombies on his first night out, and I was going to be talking to Bert about the wisdom of sending Larry out on his own.

  Besides, we were outside. “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks.”

  He lit the cigarette and drew a deep breath of nicotine and tar. Smoke curled out of his mouth and nose, like pale ghosts. “Feel better already,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Just so you don’t smoke in the car with me.”

  “No problem,” he said. The tip of his cigarette pulsed orange in the dark as he sucked on it. He looked past me, letting smoke curl from his lips as he said, “We’re being paged.”

  I turned and, sure enough, the lawyers were waving at us. I felt like a janitor being called in to clean up the messy necessities. I stood up, and Larry followed me.

  “You sure you feel well enough for this?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t raise a dead ant, but I think I’m up to watching you do it.”

  There were bruises under his eyes and the skin was too tight around his mouth, but if he wanted to play macho man who was I to stop him? “Great; let’s do it.”

  I got salt out of my trunk. It was perfectly legal to carry zombie-raising supplies. I suppose the machete that I used for beheading chickens could be used as a weapon, but the rest of the stuff was considered harmless. Shows you what the legal system knows about zombies.

  Andrew Doughal had recovered himself. He still looked a little waxy, but his face was serious, concerned, alive. He smoothed a hand down the stylish lapel of his suit coat. He looked down at me, not just because he was taller but because he was good at looking down. Some people have a real talent for being condescending.

  “Do you know what’s happening, Mr. Doughal?” I asked the zombie.

  He looked down his narrow patrician nose. “I am going home with my wife.”

  I sighed. I hated it when zombies didn’t realize they were dead. They acted so… human.

  “Mr. Doughal, do you know why you’re in a cemetery?”

  “What’s happening?” one of the lawyers asked.

  “He’s forgotten that he’s dead,” I said softly.

  The zombie stared at me, perfectly arrogant. He must have been a real pain in the ass when he was alive, but even assholes are piteous once in a while.

  “I don’t know what you are babbling about,” the zombie said. “You obviously are suffering from some delusion.”

  “Can you explain why you are here in a cemetery?” I asked.

  “I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

  “Do you remember how you got to the cemetery?”

  “We… we drove, of course.” The first hint of unease wavered through his voice.

  “You’re guessing, Mr. Doughal. You don’t really remember driving to the cemetery, do you?”

  “I… I…” He looked at his wife, his grown children, but they were walking to their cars. No one even looked back. He was dead, no getting around that, but most families didn’t just walk away. They might be horrified, or saddened, or even sickened, but they were never neutral. The Doughals had gotten the will signed, and they were leaving. They had their inheritance. Let good ol’ dad crawl back into his grave.

  He called, “Emily?”

  She hesitated, stiffenin
g, but one of her sons grabbed her arm and hurried her toward the cars. Was he embarrassed, or scared?

  “I want to go home,” he yelled after them. The arrogance had leaked away, and all that was left was that sickening fear, the desperate need not to believe. He felt so alive. How could he possibly be dead?

  His wife half-turned. “Andrew, I’m sorry.” Her grown children hustled her into the nearest car. You would have thought they were the getaway drivers for a bank robbery, they peeled out so fast.

  The lawyers and secretaries left as fast as was decent. Everybody had what they’d come for. They were done with the corpse. The trouble was that the “corpse” was staring after them like a child who was left in the dark.

  Why couldn’t he have stayed an arrogant SOB?

  “Why are they leaving me?” he asked.

  “You died, Mr. Doughal, nearly a week ago.”

  “No, it’s not true.”

  Larry moved up beside me. “You really are dead, Mr. Doughal. I raised you from the dead myself.”

  He stared from one to the other of us. He was beginning to run out of excuses. “I don’t feel dead.”

  “Trust us, Mr. Doughal, you are dead,” I said.

  “Will it hurt?”

  A lot of zombies asked that; will it hurt to go back into the grave? “No, Mr. Doughal, it doesn’t hurt. I promise.”

  He took a deep, shaking breath and nodded. “I’m dead, really dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then put me back, please.” He had rallied and found his dignity. It was nightmarish when the zombie refused to believe. You could still lay them to rest, but the clients had to hold them down on the grave while they screamed. I’d only had that happen twice, but I remembered each time as if it had happened last night. Some things don’t dim with time.

  I threw salt against his chest. It sounded like sleet hitting a roof. “With salt I bind you to your grave.”

  I had the still-bloody knife in my hand. I wiped the gelling blood across his lips. He didn’t jerk away. He believed. “With blood and steel I bind you to your grave, Andrew Doughal. Be at peace, and walk no more.”

  The zombie laid full length on the mound of flowers. The flowers seemed to flow over him like quicksand, and just like that he was swallowed back into the grave.