All of that served to put him in a fine snit as he stalked toward the low-slung brick house that had been converted into the morgue some fifty years ago, when one of the casinos had decided they wanted to expand and had bought the previous morgue and then plowed it under and built a coffee shop over it.
And may they all eat rotten food and be haunted every day for it, he thought, as he always did. Though Dicky was far too young to have actually ever seen the old morgue, his father and grandfather had both been well acquainted with the place—from the opposite side of the table, as undertakers rather than coroners—and both had proclaimed it vastly superior to the new facility. Their tales of ceilings that one did not have to squat to avoid, of spacious operating facilities where taking a step away from a corpse to avoid the gasses released in the first incision didn’t involve nearly tripping over another one that had been crammed in behind you, and of an air-conditioning system that worked well enough to allow the place to smell like anything other than a morgue during the summer months had spoiled him, and working without such luxuries often drove him to frustration, which he usually took out—in his mind, since he rarely had occasion to visit the casinos—on those who were sampling the wares of what should have been his office. Unfortunately, he had yet to hear of a single patron being bothered by things that went bump in the night, nor had he caught any notices regarding food poisoning coming from that direction. He considered this an unfortunate state of affairs.
He could tell almost immediately once he’d swiped his key and passed through the front door that something was wrong. One of the advantages to working in a place for long hours over the course of many years was that you started to get a sense of what it should feel like under given circumstances. Cold as it was this morning—it was not snowing yet but probably would be in the afternoon, if the cloud cover was any indication—and on a supposedly busy day, the morgue should have felt unpleasantly chilly, and the walls should have been creaking with the wet. Even though brick supposedly held up better than wood to the elements, he had never heard his elders complain of the walls creaking when it got wet, something that he’d been living with in this building throughout his entire tenure there. Some of the new hires occasionally got spooked at that sound and took off never to involve themselves in the business of corpses again. Others, like himself, just assumed it was the glue straining at the brick and trying to pull it in differing directions and got used to it.
His receptionist, an empty-headed lad whose given name was Stephen yet who insisted on being called “Hawk”—even going so far as to sign his paychecks and memos that way—was also nowhere to be seen. That was not at all like him. Regardless of his other problems—the basic inability to take a phone message, his bungled filing system, and his insistence on the idiot nickname—Stephen always made it a point to arrive on time, earlier than Hollis when he could make it, and stay for the entire duration. Hollis supposed that was one of the reasons he kept Stephen around, since finding help that was willing to show up so readily, at a morgue no less, was nearly impossible. At least he was around when you needed to find a file and couldn’t because of his creative reorganization of the alphabet.
That single thing, more than any other, put Hollis into a more cautious mode. The building was hot, and there didn’t seem to be enough moisture in the air. With each breath he took, Hollis felt like he was sandblasting his throat, but that took a backseat to his missing receptionist. Stephen was never late, unless he was suffering from something horrible, pneumonia or some such. So what had made him late this time?
Hollis crept toward the desk that dominated the front room, his shadow stretching long and looming over it as one of the overhead lights flickered to life, given a cue from the motion detectors set throughout the building. No incessant beeping came from the alarm box to the left of the door, which said to Hollis that someone had been in already at least. Either that or Stephen’s forgetfulness had reached a new level, and he simply hadn’t armed it the previous night before leaving. That theory didn’t hold water for long though, as Hollis remembered that he had been working late—carving corpses seemed to be a job that just never ended this fine holiday season—and he himself had set the alarm after ushering Stephen out. No one else came in this early, nor should anyone have been in over the late-night and early morning hours, so of course, Stephen must have been in.
The door was locked, darling, the voice of Marie, always to be counted on for simple reasoning abilities, chimed in from the deeper reaches of his mind. Perhaps he’s simply in the restroom. Hollis might have slapped himself in the forehead, if he hadn’t been concerned that someone might see him do it. Door locked, no alarm, the desk guy is in the john. Elementary, my dear Watson. That still didn’t account for the lack of a chill. Even with the heaters running full blast, the morgue was never truly warm in any sense of the word. Neither did it explain the sensation of something dark and unpleasant creeping up his spine, but it was at least an answer he could live with for a few moments.
He took a quick inventory of the front room nonetheless. It never hurt to be careful, his mother had always told him, and Dicky rarely forgot to pay attention to the suggestions and wisdom of that venerable old lady, even though she had been in her grave for nearly six years. So far as he could tell, everything was in place and nothing had been disturbed. The desk looked like it always did, too large and about to split from damp-rot, with a smattering of pens and old files scattered across it. And there was another sign that Stephen was there, somewhere: a fresh cup of coffee was still steaming on one corner, lending the space a lived-in look. The bookcases behind it still looked as big and ugly as ever, and the locks on all the filing cabinets lining the far wall still appeared to be engaged. In other words, everything was normal, but why then did he feel so uncomfortable?
He stepped toward the desk, almost subconsciously pushed the coffee mug further onto it to avoid any accidental spills, pushed past the divider between the front desk and the work areas, and made his way further into the back. He opened his mouth, about to call out for Stephen—given the time Dicky had spent fighting the flimflams, the youth should have come out of the bathroom by now—but stopped when he heard something else coming from the freezer.
Yet another reason to hate the design of this place over the floor plan of the previous building: the reception area moved straight into the freezer, which also served as the operating area. There was no sense of… of transition. Just bam, and you were there. Dicky had heard that it was supposedly to promote efficiency and to maximize space, but he just found it annoying. Then, of course, they put the restrooms behind that, so anyone who just needed to take a leak was treated to a tour of the freezers and possibly even an excellent view of some poor dead schmuck’s guts on a scale.
There shouldn’t have been any sounds coming from that direction at all, except the low hum of the refrigeration units themselves or maybe a toilet flushing. What he’d heard had been neither of those, and point in fact, he couldn’t hear the cooling system running at all. What he could hear sounded like the noise your showerhead makes when it’s no longer functioning properly: the steady drip, drip, drip that you didn’t notice in the daytime but which was liable to drive you out of your mind in the middle of the night.
Thinking of all the things it could be—the refrigeration being shut down and that being the sound of thawing chief among them—drove him forward, breaking the sense of paralysis and sending him into the freezer without much care or caution.
“Stephen! Are you back here? What the hell is going—”
“On,” was how he had meant to finish, but as he pushed through the swinging door and saw what had happened in the freezer—in his freezer—he found he couldn’t speak at all. The heat was part of it; back there, it was even worse than it had been up front, maybe as hot as 80 degrees. Then there was the smell. Hollis had spent much of his life around corpses in assorted stages of decay and so was
quite used to the stench of decomposition, but never had he been hit with it in such force. It was like a physical blow that drove him backward, retching and leaving the remains of the waffles Marie had made for breakfast in a steaming heap on the floor.
The individual boxes on all the freezers had been torn open—not simply slid out of their casings as they were meant to be, but actually ripped open—and their contents disgorged onto the floor, leaving bodies strewn in piles around the room. It hadn’t occurred to Dicky how many extra corpses had been turning up lately until he saw that. And then there had been the other thing, the thing his mind still wouldn’t let him remember seeing, though he knew it was there.
You didn’t see that. Most assuredly not. See what? He could hear a high-pitched giggle in his head, the sound of his sanity considering taking a nice long vacation, perhaps of the permanent type. As he backed out and pushed through the swinging door back into the reception area, he continued to repeat this mantra to himself, mumbling under his breath as he thought the words and trying to keep a rein on himself.
“Didn’t see what, sir?” a pleasant and not-unreasonable voice spoke from behind him, and Dicky Hollis shrieked and whirled around. What he saw was like a power surge deep in his brain, shorting out all the fuses and leaving nothing but a dark house behind. The final impossibility of the sight was simply too much for him to bear, too much with which to try to cope.
Before the circuits of his mind suffered from their permanent blowout, Hollis recognized the face of the man standing there; with so many people nagging him about this one, how could he have forgotten? But how does a corpse get back up, walk around to the front, steal your assistant’s clothes, and speak in such a reasonable voice? That the man had been dead was never a question in Dicky’s mind. The officers at the scene had pronounced him so, the paramedics had seconded that vote, and the hospital staff had made it unanimous, but still, there he was, as large as life and smiling.
Karim Alvat, who now thought of himself as Karesh Lintar, continued to smile as he advanced on the coroner with one of the scalpels from the precision set in his hand. Blood coated the tip of it and was spattered freely on the clothes he was wearing—hospital greens, a little too large but still serviceable. Lintar’s face fell when the man’s face went slack, finding in himself a great well of disappointment that Hollis had apparently been so unwilling to face him that he had short-circuited his own brain rather than face the reality of the situation.
“Tsk-tsk, my good sir. I was hoping you’d be more… sporting. Still, I suppose you’re not totally useless. Yet.”
Lintar’s smile widened as he advanced on Hollis, who was even now thinking of the beaches in Florida, of Marie running into the waves in the bikini he loved so much, the blue one that left only the barest hint to the imagination. His body lifted its arm in a wave, as his face broke into a sunny smile. Lintar remained unimpressed, as he drove the scalpel into Dicky’s eye socket. No scream came, but the life flowed out of the man as easily as it had his assistant, and Lintar drank from the fountain, laughing to himself as he did.
I’ll not fail this time. Not this time or ever again, he thought as he drank his fill.
Chapter 22
Damien was unaware of the passage of time; he knew only that quite a lot of it had gone by. The place he had been since his brief moment of waking didn’t seem to have much concept of it, and the things he had seen and spoken to while there had all told him the same thing: It doesn’t matter. What has happened has already happened, and what will happen will happen when it is time.
As for where he was, he couldn’t really make any guesses on that count either, except to count all of it as some kind of fever dream. He also supposed it was possible that he was dead and this was his purgatory, but he didn’t care to look at that possibility too hard and never asked.
The place—if it was really a place—had seemed empty when he had first arrived, but slowly detail had crept into the landscape. At first, it had been nothing but a white void, something akin to what he imagined the inside of a black hole might look like, but then streets had begun to form, followed by buildings and people. All of them had a familiar air, sparking a sense of déjà vu that he couldn’t quite lay a finger on at first. It came to him later that everything was from someplace he had seen or been during his childhood. Then it had occurred to him to ask one of the others why there was nothing from his adulthood there.
The girl he’d chosen to ask—a tall and leggy redhead who likewise looked familiar to him—had simply quirked her head, as if he’d asked one of the dumbest questions in the world, and told him, “These came before you were chosen.” Then she had turned away, heading down the street with a sexy grind going on in back. That tripped his memory, as he identified her as the babysitter he’d had in third grade, Lois Pasternak, whom he had always held a secret lust for that not even Tim or the others had known about.
He had spent what felt like days wandering in and out of the buildings—none of them were locked, even the ones that should have been—and talking to the people, tripping himself so often over memories that he had thought were forgotten that his head was practically swimming when the goddess came to him.
She came out of the ruins of the Delany House, one of the casinos that had been a favorite hangout of his when he’d been a teenager. It had good food any hour of the night and was the only arcade to have that Elvira pinball that they’d all been obsessed with. The place had shut down not too long before his eighteenth birthday, always with the promise that it was just a remodel and they’d be open “real soon, now.” The last time he’d checked, which had been just a month before his problems with Karim had started, the place was still closed.
What caught Damien’s attention about this person over any of the others was that she didn’t appear to be some figment of his past. She wasn’t his third-grade babysitter or some distant aunt he’d seen once, or his sixth-grade math tutor. She was just She, elemental and eternal, the sum of all of those memories and yet part of none of them.
Describing her, even holding focus on her, was next to impossible, because she incorporated elements of all the people he had known, blending them into a whole that was greater than any part individually could have hoped to aspire to be. She radiated light, casting deep shadows around her as she passed, and making it hard to look right at her, but Damien could still see the small, secret smile she wore as she approached.
He felt a tingle from inside and a rush of lust for this strange woman. Buried in him were all the feelings he had ever had for anyone, but what he felt for her was surpassing them all. He knew nothing about this woman except for the undisputable truth that he loved her. How he could feel such a thing, he didn’t know and couldn’t have explained; he only knew it to be true. When she reached him, he fell to his knees and confessed it to her.
She reached out one hand, laying it on his head and ruffling his hair, the way Sheila—the original, not Brokov—had used to do, laughing a little. When she spoke, her voice sounded layered somehow, like a concert with a really good reverb system that also provided a backup choir.
“I know. You prove it each day when you wake and again when you sleep. Every breath speaks of it to me.”
Damien couldn’t speak; his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth, and he felt that even if he somehow managed to pull it away, nothing but gibberish would have come from between his lips.
She just shook her head, as though she could read his thoughts and knew all that he would have said if he could. For all he knew, she probably could read his mind. It wouldn’t have surprised him at this point.
“I know. Just as I know that you don’t realize who and what I am. But part of you knows and recognizes. And you know what I am here for.”
Damien managed a nod but could not take his eyes off of her. He knew, all right. He knew whose Disciple he was now and understood that being there wa
s his way of hiding from that. He’d buried himself in the memories of the past, digging deep so he couldn’t be found by his duty, wanting nothing more than to go back and stop this before it had all begun, let someone else shoulder the weight for a while. She was here to drag him out of the dream.
“I’m not dragging anyone, Damien.” Her voice, intruding on his thoughts as it had, startled him back to paying attention. “But you do have to choose. You can stay here, and I’ll bother you no more, but you must remember that all of this is just a dream. The real world is out there,” she gestured to the horizon with her arm, indicating the coming sunset, which triggered other notes of oddness in his soul, since until then, the sun had always stood as if at high noon. Then she lowered her arm slowly, her multicolored eyes looking at him with more compassion than he could bear, forcing him to drop his gaze. “And that world yet has need of you.”
Damien found his voice then, though it was shaken and lacking in the normal arrogance that bled from it. “Why?”
The woman shook her head, looking almost sad, the sadness of someone who has tried to teach a pupil in every way she knows and still continues to fail. “The servant of the talu`shar survives. The one of the blood remains unaware, still. There is none to guide him, and no longer enough time to bring another.”
Damien considered that and then nodded. Things were beginning to make a bit of sense now. It at least explained why he was still alive; if the janitor had lived—and how the hell had that happened anyway?—then the bargain he’d made with the magic was pretty much null and void. It didn’t get him out of the physical torture that doing that had earned him, but he was guaranteed to survive anyway.
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