by Laura Bickle
The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office had been built a handy stone’s throw away from Detroit Receiving Hospital and the VA Medical Center. Trees planted along the sidewalk served to visually insulate the nondescript brick building from prying eyes at street level.
Anya pulled the Dart into the parking lot. She sat behind the wheel, staring at the building. There were certain places mediums hated to go: hospitals, funeral homes, cemeteries… any place the dead congregated. The freshly dead were often confused and angry. The stale dead, those who chose to hang around the physical world, tended to be manipulative and malicious. Many mediums refused to set foot into those chaotic environments. Though they seemed quiet and peaceful to ordinary people, to a medium, they were the equivalent of taking a walk in an asylum after lights-out.
Sucking in her breath, she popped the car door. Warily, she advanced upon the morgue’s glass doors. The salamander collar around her neck shivered and rolled, and Sparky slithered down her back, roiling around her feet.
“Behave,” she warned him.
Sparky blinked up at her, then trotted through the motion-activated doors. He gave a squeal of delight that the doors registered his presence and opened. He circled back behind her and activated them three more times before settling down at her heels.
Anya put her head down, jammed her hands in her pockets, and briskly walked down the industrial-green tiled hallways. Her shoes echoed loudly on the floor. The place reeked of disinfectant and some type of preservative that smelled suspiciously of Italian sausage. She tried to ignore the ghost of the old woman dressed in a housecoat, screaming at the vending machine. She looked away from the translucent figure of the teenager sitting in the hall, cutting her wrists. The girl looked puzzled when no blood came out. A car-crash victim still wore his seat belt, embedded in his torso, as he drifted through the walls, oblivious to his surroundings. Sparky rubbernecked, snapping at any ghost who came within reach.
These were not her concern. Anya didn’t know what she believed about an afterlife. She fervently hoped these people went somewhere, that some merciful angel swooped down and collected their confused souls, took them away to a bright and shiny place.
But she doubted it.
“No… leave me alone.”
A thready feminine voice leaked from under a door, breaking Anya’s step. Sparky turned, growled. Anya paused, leaning toward the stainless-steel door of the refrigeration unit. Another, deeper voice rolled over the small one:
“No one can hear you scream, girl.”
Anya ripped open the latch to the cooler, reached inside for the light.
The refrigeration unit was packed. Flickering fluorescent light illuminated body bags placed on open shelves, gurneys, and stacked in place. Something dark and sticky trailed on the concrete floor down toward the floor drain, and the room smelled like a butcher shop.
The ghost of a tall, thin man grasped the throat of a young woman spirit, pinning her to the wall. The harsh light played through bullet holes in his chest, but Anya could see no mark on the girl. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“Get the fuck off of her.” Rage boiled in Anya’s chest.
The man turned, sneered at her. “Mind your own business.” Perhaps he was used to no one seeing him. Perhaps he was used to scaring humans, both in life and in death. But Anya was having none of it.
Sparky lunged for him. His teeth grabbed the back of his hooded jacket, ripped him down from the wall. The salamander mauled him, growling, tail lashing, teeth tearing into his ectoplasmic throat. Anya had never seen him this violent, but she’d never seen him defending a child, either.
“Get back,” Anya told the girl, and she shrank back between the bars of a set of shelves.
Anya felt the power of the Lantern burning in her chest. She could feel the fire expanding into her aura, reaching outward through her palms, hungry for that terrible ghost. A Lantern was different from other mediums in one critical aspect: A Lantern attracted ghosts like insects to a bug zapper… and could devour them.
“Sparky,” she warned, and the salamander clambered out of the way. Anya reached toward the ghost, writhing on the floor. She breathed him in, drawing him into the black void in her chest. She could taste the metallic frost of the ghost as she swallowed him, the ash in the back of her mouth as the fire in her chest immolated him. She stepped back, gasping, feeling the burn of it bubbling on her chest. That might leave a scar on her physical body, but it would heal.
She turned to the girl. The ghost of the girl cowered behind the racks, terrified.
Anya stuffed down the fire in her heart, tried to reach out with hands that didn’t scald. She struggled to let the wrath drain down through her feet, into the ground. “It’s okay… he’s gone now.”
The face of the girl peeped behind a body bag. “He’s not coming back?”
Anya swallowed, shaking her head. “No.” She didn’t know for certain where the ghosts she devoured went. Someone had once told her that they went to feed powerful fire elementals, but she wasn’t entirely sure. “You’re safe now.”
Sparky growled. Anya turned to see a man-shaped shadow forming on the wall. The black mass resolved to the translucent shape of a man in a black coat and jeans. Cold blue eyes stared out of a chiseled face, the kind of face that might have belonged on an album cover in the 1980s. A shock of blond hair was ruffled over his skull in some kind of butchered punk tribute hairstyle.
“Get the hell away from the girl,” she snarled. “I’ve had enough of you fucking perverts.”
The ghost held up his hands. “I’m not here to harm anyone.”
“What are you here for? Hanging out, waiting for the apocalypse?”
A smile played over his mouth. “I’m here for the girl.”
Anya bristled. She lifted her hand, feeling the heat gathering in her fingertips. She’d devour this one as easily as the last.
“I’m here to take her to the Afterworld.”
Cold trickled down Anya’s spine. “Who are you?” she asked, suspicious. Ghosts were inveterate liars, no matter how smooth their manner.
He turned toward the girl, making Anya bristle. “Trina, my name is Charon. I’m here to take you on a trip.” He extended his hand toward the shelves.
“How do you know my name?” The girl watched him, her arms wrapped around her sides.
“Your grandmother told me. She would like for you to come visit her.”
“Can you take me out of here?” Trina shivered, and looked up at the ceiling.
“Yes.” When Charon smiled, it was with the beatific smile of an angel. Sparky waddled up to him and sniffed. His gill-fronds reached out, sensing the ghost’s aura. The ghost let him, offering no sudden moves or resistance.
Sparky might be on the fence, but Anya didn’t trust him. At all. “You aren’t taking anyone anywhere.”
Charon’s eyebrow lifted. “That’s not up to you, Lantern.” He straightened to stare Anya in the face. When he spoke within the reach of her aura, Anya felt the cold radiating from him. He was powerful; she could sense the stillness of time dragging on him. His breath steamed in the air. “It’s the girl’s time to go. You’ve done her a service by protecting her. But what would you do? You can’t take her from this place.”
Anya’s jaw hardened. Charon was right. Ghosts were anchored to physical locations, to people, or to things. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t take the girl-ghost into protective custody. The only way she could break that bond would be to devour the girl. Or she could leave her at the mercy of the other spirits in the morgue.
“What exactly are you?” Anya asked.
Charon shrugged. “I’m a guide, that’s all. I take ghosts back and forth… a cabdriver for the Afterworld. The morgue is… one of the stops on my route.”
Trina peered out from behind the racks. “I want to go with him.”
Anya’s hot fists clenched. All she could offer the ghost was oblivion.
She said nothing as Char
on took the girl’s hand. They walked through the wall of the cooler and vanished.
“I CAN’T EVEN SAY THAT he’s dead, for sure.”
Gina stared through her bifocals and poked at Bernie’s remains. The slippers had been removed from Bernie’s feet, and the diminutive medical examiner fussed over them with tweezers. Ash drifted in tiny dunes around the feet on the stainless-steel coroner’s slab. Anya wasn’t sure how much of that was Bernie’s, and how much of it had come from the cigarette dangling from the octogenarian’s latex-covered fingers.
Anya must have grimaced, because Gina stuck her wrinkly face in hers. Gina had a face like a caramel candy stuck between the seats of a car on a hot summer day: “The dead don’t give a rat’s ass if I smoke. You shouldn’t, either.” The ME then shuffled over to her desk, where Anya’s photos were laid out. Gina was so short that she had to roll up the sleeves of her standard-issue lab coat, and the hem brushed her ankles. With her frizzy gray hair, the result was very Bride of Frankenstein at the Nursing Home.
“Look, I’m a hundred percent sure the guy’s dead,” Anya said. She wasn’t going to tell Gina about seeing his ghost. “Nobody’s seen him, and the guy’s not driving or walking around without his feet.”
Gina looked through the bottom of her bifocals as she appraised the photos. “Very cool.” Gina had called Anya down just to see the pictures. The old lady was an unapologetic ghoul, and this case had captured her imagination.
“Am I not gonna get a death certificate issued?” That had never happened before.
Gina rolled her eyes. “There aren’t any tool marks on the bone that suggest his feet were sawed off, so I called around to some of my mortuary friends. They think that there’s probably enough volume of ash to suggest the guy burned up. But—”
“That can’t happen outside of a crematorium. Yeah, I know.”
“Crematoriums have to bake the bodies at a temperature of at least sixteen hundred degrees, overnight, and then the bones are pulverized in a machine to make the ash. It’s like putting a body in a giant clothes dryer with bowling balls for a few hours.”
“We don’t have a day or more in the timeline for that process to have taken place,” Anya said. “The victim picked up his mail and took it inside, sometime after it was delivered, at 1600. Phone records show he called the local pharmacy for a refill on his sleeping pills at 1923… and the body was found in this condition around 0600 the following morning.”
Gina flipped through her papers. “There wasn’t enough left to do a toxicology report on the findings, but the sleeping pills you found in his bathroom might be significant. Statistically, most cases of reported spontaneous human combustion involve the subjects being under the influence of alcohol. The theory is that the subject drinks himself into a stupor or takes some pills, passes out in front of a roaring fire, and fails to wake up when a spark lights on his sexy flammable jammies.”
Anya squeezed her eyes shut, trying to drive out any mental image of what Gina might consider to be “sexy.” “But we’ve established that a spark from the fireplace wouldn’t have been hot enough to cause him to burn completely to ash like that. I’ve got the lab checking for high-temperature accelerants.” Anya thought back to the contents of Bernie’s fridge. “He did have a nice stock of wine.”
“Any evidence of electrical fire?”
“No evidence of electrical faults in the house has been uncovered so far. The breaker box didn’t even trip, so no surges.”
“What about lightning? It’s not common, but people do occasionally get struck indoors. Usually through phone lines or contact with wiring, though.”
Anya shook her head. “I was hoping for that explanation. I checked with the National Weather Service. There were no storms that night, and no reported lightning strikes within eighty miles. His windows were shut when the cops found him, so that rules out any really weird atmospheric phenomena, like ball lightning, drifting in through an open window.”
“Well, while we’re getting weird and kinky with science… there’s the wick effect theory. I saw a guy demonstrate that on TV once with a pig corpse. Pretty impressive stuff.”
“Yeah. The idea is that fat from the human body can burn for hours, like candle wax. There was a great deal of fatty residue left on surfaces in the room in which he died, and even in the surrounding rooms.”
Gina poked at the feet. “The subject has a nice set of cankles on him. I’m betting that he was overweight?”
“Yes. More fuel for the fire?”
“More fuel for the fire. There’s also the possibility of the phospheinic fart.”
Anya blinked. “The what?”
“That’s another theory… that abnormal digestive processes can generate phosphines, which, under the right conditions, can spontaneously combust.”
Anya pinched the bridge of her nose, picturing flames shooting out of poor Bernie’s ass. And his sexy flammable jammies. “I’m not sure I want to imagine that.”
“Hey, I’m just suggesting possibilities.”
“You are one seriously morbid lady.” Anya crossed her arms. “Why are you so interested in this case?”
“It’s what I do best.” Gina tapped her cigarette into an ashtray on her desk. “Actually, this is not the only weird burn victim I’ve seen in the last few weeks. Check this out.” The coroner pulled an accordion file folder out of her desk. “An anonymous tip to nine-one-one brought the cops to the old train station.”
Anya dredged her memory. “The one on Fifteenth Street? That’s been closed since the eighties.”
“That’s the one. The homeless have pretty much taken it over since it was closed to rail passengers.”
Anya pulled out a sheaf of photographs. Taken under the cold, clear fluorescent light, the first shot showed a body of a grizzled old man in a filthy coat on the coroner’s slab. He looked like a bum asleep, except that the bottom of his gray beard and the front of his coat were charred black. The next photo showed the coat open, and it was apparent that nearly the entirety of his torso was sunken in and burned away. Bits of ribs could be seen curling around the remains of his flannel shirt, like bony fingers blackened at the tips.
“What the hell?” Anya muttered, flipping through the shots of the body, washed clean, but exhibiting a gaping black hole where the abdomen should have been. It looked like the spirit-devouring black hole in her own chest felt, but this was splayed open for all to see.
“Police report’s in there, too. Beat cops found this guy curled up under the ticket window. Nobody had seen or heard anything. They fished him out and sent him here. No identification on him. The other homeless guys called him George.”
“Where’s the body?”
“Nobody claimed him, so the county cremated him.” Gina shrugged. “Ironic, I know. But this one was just weird enough to put into my collection of bizarre forensic files.”
Anya’s brow wrinkled. “You have a collection?”
“Hell, yeah.” Gina planted her fists on her hips. “I’m gonna write a book when I retire.”
Anya snorted. Gina the Ghoul would never retire. “Can I borrow this file?”
“Sure. Gina’s collection of forensic mysteries is a lending library.” Gina stuck her thumb over her shoulder at Bernie’s remains. “I’ll lean on the lab to get you the test results back on this guy. But it’s anyone’s guess what you’re gonna find in that mess.”
Anya’s gaze flicked between the photo of the dead bum and Bernie. Was this a fluke, or could these really be connected? She frowned at the lumps of ashes and flesh on the table.
They were both impossible. How could they not be related?
No one cared very much about the homeless. In Detroit, they lived generally underneath the public radar, more visible in summer months and hidden away from the cold in shelters and abandoned buildings and alleys in the winter. They were often invisible, as much a part of the landscape as any other eyesore. Since no one cared, no one bothered much to investigate the death
of a bum who’d passed out and probably dropped a cigarette on himself. A few perfunctory forms were filled out, filed, and promptly forgotten.
Its Beaux Arts bones still beautiful, Michigan Central Station loomed like a battered spider, reaching over a dozen bent and twisted railroad tracks. Built in 1913 with generous arches and graceful columns to ferry passengers from to and from their destinations, the train station itself was backed by an eighteen-story tower. The grand old building was now surrounded by a tall fence crowned with spirals of ribbon razor wire. Most of the glass in the windows had been struck out; years of acid rain and lack of maintenance had blackened the exterior.
Anya stared up at the looming station, Sparky perched on her shoulder. The Dart sat behind her in a parking lot, its asphalt shattered with cracks and speckled with grass. She could see how someone could easily get lost in such a huge place, burn to death and not be found. The building had been alternately slated for revitalization and destruction for as long as Anya could remember. She couldn’t remember whether its latest destiny was to become a casino or be turned into a parking lot.
She paced along the chain-link fence, searching for a way to get in. If the street people could easily get in, she could, too. Anya was rewarded for her efforts by a pair of fence posts that didn’t quite fit snugly together. Squeezing between them, she scraped her arms on the raw edges of fence, wriggled through onto the property. Picking her way through weeds and trash, she climbed the short steps to the arched entrance. A piece of plywood leaned against a broken door. Anya nudged it aside and ducked in.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness of the interior. As her vision cleared, she found herself in the main-floor waiting room. Huge vaulted ceilings reached skyward, more than fifty feet, into black, flanked by an arcade of Doric columns and broken marble walls. Sunlight streamed in from the broken windows. Somewhere above, she could hear the warble of doves in their nests. Graffiti was scrawled on the walls as high as a man could reach, and higher. Bits of rebar protruded from the walls where remnants of wires and copper pipe had long since been torn out. Rusted-out barrels stood on the open floor. Newspaper and rags were strewn throughout. Shopping carts were turned over piles of burned trash to create makeshift barbecues. The place smelled overwhelmingly like stale piss. Someone was definitely living here.
