The Shadow Cabinet

by Maureen Johnson

  “How?” I said.

  “Scared ’im to death!”

  We’d reached the point in this conversation where it was clear that I wasn’t really buying it, and Jim was getting tired of selling. He dropped the smile and leaned against a nearby stone.

  “What does it matter?” he said. “It’s ’orrible.”

  “It matters because I’m about to kill it.”

  “Can’t kill what’s dead.”

  “I can,” I said. “It hasn’t done anything, has it? It ran from me. Why do you want it gone?”

  Jim scratched at his beard.

  “I wants it gone,” he said. “This cemetery is mine.”

  “How can a cemetery be yours? What’s there to have?”

  “It’s mine,” he said, an edge developing in his voice. “It was my patch.”

  The lump cowered and backed itself against the fence. I stepped closer to Jim, hand extended.

  “How about you tell me anyway?” I said. “I need to know where the dead turn up. Tell me that, and you won’t get your ghost ass blown to the moon, how about that?”

  “Dear, oh, dear,” Jim said, smiling once more. “Dear, oh, dear. Shame to hurt Ol’ Jim when he knows so much.”

  “I won’t if Old Jim tells me something.”

  “Ah, won’t ya, now? Won’t ya?”

  Behind me, the thing wobbled off into the trees and the gentle fog that had started to fall on the cemetery. I turned for a second to watch it go—a second, I mean it—and when I looked back, Jim was no longer in front of me. I heard something behind me, in the tomb. It was a small sound, like a pebble hitting the stone. The gate of the tomb was hanging open, and, like I said, it wasn’t large. I could mostly see inside from where I was standing. There was a stone crypt inside to hold the casket, but nothing else.

  As I turned, a small rock hit me on the forehead. This stunned me for a moment—more surprise than physical pain. Another rock, right on my closed eye. Another, on my arm. I stepped quickly into the tomb for protection, tucking myself back against the inside of the doorway, as a hail of rocks, some really big now, were nailing the tomb.

  “You have to be kidding me,” I said to myself, as one flew in the doorway and cracked into the back wall.

  This went on for about two minutes and then it stopped. I was just about to lean around to see if the coast was clear, when—

  Slam.

  The gate clanked shut. I moved quickly when that happened, but by the time I did, I found that it was solidly closed. I shook it with all my strength, but it wasn’t giving. Jim stood in front of me and watched with a smile.

  “Dear, oh, dear,” he said. “Look what a pretty bird I’ve caught.”

  “You’ve made a big mistake,” I said. “When I get out of here . . .”

  Jim wandered off, leaving my threat hanging in the air. I felt my pockets for the phone I knew wasn’t there, but was worth checking for anyway. I yelled out, but the cemetery was large, and the wind was sharp, and it seemed to shunt my cries into the ground. No one was around. I was locked in a tomb, very alone. I returned to the secure position on the safe side of the doorway wall and sank down to the ground and balanced my head on my knees. There was a thick coating of leaves on the tomb floor, some wet, some dry. Either way, my butt was freezing.

  This had been a stupid idea.

  Possibly all of my ideas were stupid ideas.

  They would find me, though. I mean, I wouldn’t be here forever. Someone would come around, eventually. Probably some guard who checked the place before closing, which would be . . . I unfolded my damp map and scanned the information section . . . five in the evening. It probably wasn’t even noon yet. So five hours until someone (possibly) found me.

  Thorpe, Boo, Callum . . . they would be looking too, but I’d left no indication of where I was.

  I would get out. Of that, I was certain. And it didn’t particularly bother me that I was in a tomb. The tomb was sturdy and safe, I was out of the rain and wind, and there was plenty of light coming in. I would get out. I would wait until I was sure that the rocks were not being thrown anymore, and then I would resume my campaign of yelling, and I would try to reach over to the lock and see if there was a way of getting it open. I would do this. I was finishing this little pep talk with myself when I heard something outside, a little noise, a snick. Then what sounded like a breaking twig.

  “Hello?” I called.

  No answer.

  I peered around carefully. No one was there. Possibly it was an animal. A rat, for instance.

  Now I didn’t like being in the tomb. I got to my feet, and when I did, I found that Jim was standing by the gate again, just out of reach.

  “People come here, leave all sorts,” he said. “Lots of these. Lots of them over the years. Ol’ Jim’s got dozens of ’em.”

  He held up a plastic lighter.

  “Young ones love a fire,” he said. “’Orrible thing, fire. Oh, they come here, and they burn things.”

  He flicked the lighter on and set the flame to the end of a stick.

  “Ever see a bird burn? Sad thing, if they get caught in a fire. Oh, their wings burn when they try to fly. Saddest thing. ’Orrible.”

  He watched the end of the stick burn. Then he threw it into the gate. I immediately stomped on it, but he was already lighting another. I ducked as this one came through and landed in a pile of wet leaves, which smoldered. I stamped that out as another came, and another. As they came, I stamped.

  “Can you light a light?” he said. “Only one way to know.”

  I continued running around the inside of the tomb, stamping on anything that smoked. Most of the leaves were too wet to catch, but enough dry ones were on top to get something going. I was stamping on flames now, not smoke. The circulating air only spread this around. I jumped with both feet on every square foot of the leaves, bouncing around and around. Still, little snakelike wisps of smoke peeked up here and there, making me run to the other side and jump some more. The inside of the tomb stank of smoke, which clung to me and stung my eyes. It was like I was at an out-of-control barbecue—and I had somehow locked myself in the pit.

  Boom. Another rock flew in, and I stepped back.

  “What is wrong with you?” I yelled.

  No reply. I started yelling properly, using every ounce of energy I had in me. I jumped and yelled, even long after the fires were out.

  “It’s all right!” a voice called. It sounded like the person was running in my direction. I looked out and saw a girl, roughly my height, with a tousled head of curly hair. She had big brown eyes, framed by a large pair of round tortoiseshell glasses. Her face was sporadically freckled and had that rude glow of skin that has never known makeup—a healthy, warm veneer against which a few blemishes stood out proudly. She wore an oversized chunky knit sweater and jeans that were some kind of hybrid of baggy art student and mom jean.

  “It’s all right!” she said, in a plummy, full accent. “Oh, dear, is that smoke? We’ll have you out of there in no time!”

  There was someone behind my mysterious savior, someone I knew well.

  It was Jerome.

  ST. MARY’S HOSPITAL, WEST LONDON

  10:30 A.M.

  HOSPITAL MORGUES TEND TO BE QUIET PLACES, FOR A number of reasons. For a start, the patients are silent. Also, not many people are allowed into the morgue. Usually it is located in a remote corner of the hospital, tucked away behind security doors, often with deliberately inaccurate signage to prevent distress to patients and families and mislead curious creepers. (This particular morgue had a sign on the hallway door marked “Lower Level Conference Room C.”) It is a steady, dignified place, and patients passing through leave by back entrances in the care of funeral directors or a representative of the coroner’s office.

  On this morning, a plain black Transit van pulled up in the
morgue car park in a small nook behind the hospital. A man and a woman in plain black suits got out of the front. A woman in an equally grave gray suit emerged from the back. Her fuchsia lipstick was the only bright note in the whole group. The two from the front went ahead to the service doors and requested entry from the guard, who quickly admitted them all after seeing their credentials. The three walked down the corridor, which was eerily lined with empty gurneys.

  “I’ll do the formalities,” the fuchsia-lipped woman said. “Stay here for a moment.”

  She stepped inside the morgue, into a small office space with a desk and a computer. The attendant, named Oren, was eating a snack bar and idly scrolling through a website.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “I’m Dr. Felicia Marigold,” the woman said. “Someone will have phoned about an hour ago from the Home Office.”

  “From the Home Office,” Oren repeated, setting down his snack bar and dusting his hands. “Yeah. Stephen Dene, was that it?”

  “Correct.”

  “I’ve got the paperwork here,” he said, picking up a clipboard. “Hang on a moment. I’ll go and get Dr. Rivers to sign him out.”

  Dr. Marigold looked at the clock on the wall. She’d been kept in the dark for an entire day. Thorpe was buying time—but for what, she wasn’t sure.

  • • •

  Inside the examination room, Dr. Rivers, the pathologist, looked at the clipboard.

  “Dene, Stephen,” she read. “Motor vehicle accident, head trauma, subdural hematoma. Life support terminated. Signed off at nine ten yesterday morning. All right. Get him out. Unit twenty-one.”

  Oren positioned a gurney under a drawer of the cold storage unit and pulled back and twisted the handle, releasing the door. The body inside was wrapped in a blue sheet. He rolled out the shelf while Dr. Rivers read and checked boxes.

  “Are you doing a coffee run any time soon?” she asked, flipping casually through the pages. “I’d love a latte.”

  Oren pulled back the sheet to reveal the body. He stopped moving for a moment.

  “Hey, Doc . . .”

  Oren’s tone caused the doctor to look up. The body of the boy was exposed to midtorso. The doctor saw the problem at once and quickly flipped back through several pages.

  “This can’t be the right one,” she said.

  “It’s Stephen Dene,” Oren said. “I checked the bracelet.”

  “Then someone’s put the wrong bracelet on. Stephen Dene was meant to have died yesterday morning.”

  She grabbed a latex glove from a dispenser on the wall, snapped it on, and lifted the boy’s arm gently, flexing it at the elbow, looking at the underside of the arm. Then she placed the arm back down carefully and rolled the boy’s whole body slightly to the side, examining the back.

  “There’s no lividity,” Dr. Rivers said. “There’s not even any real pallor to speak of. This can’t be Stephen Dene.”

  “I know.” Oren’s eyes had gone very round. “But this is him. I put him here myself. Yesterday. I always remember the young ones.”

  Dr. Rivers lifted the boy’s eyelids and looked into his eyes.

  “No clouding of the cornea either. Something’s going on here. Get me a crash cart from the corridor. Now. I need to check his heart.”

  Oren ran for the cart while Dr. Rivers moved the gurney into the middle of the room.

  “Get some blankets,” she said, over the rumbling sound of the cart being dragged into the examination room. “What in Christ’s name is going on here?”

  Behind them, the access door opened and Dr. Marigold entered the exam room.

  “You can’t be in here,” the attendant said as he rushed across the room with a pile of sheeting.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We have a problem,” the pathologist said. “You need to leave.”

  “I’m a doctor,” Dr. Marigold said. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “What’s happening is this,” the doctor said, indicating the body in front of her. “He’s been declared dead and has been in the cooling unit for a day, but I’m seeing no signs of death. Look at him yourself.”

  Dr. Marigold took the boy’s chin and turned it from side to side, then got very close and examined a laceration at the hairline while the pathologist attached the electrodes to the boy’s chest and switched on the machine. All it produced was a straight line and a dull hum.

  “I have absolutely no idea what’s happening,” Dr. Rivers said. “He’s dead but he’s not. We need to move him upstairs at once and start warming him properly. This could be some deep narcoleptic state or . . . I have no idea. We need to phone upstairs.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Dr. Marigold said, pulling the sheet back up. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “You most certainly will not. I’m not going to release someone who might not be dead.”

  “He has no heartbeat.”

  “Well, tell him that,” the pathologist snapped. “He also has no clinical signs of death, which means he’s going back upstairs, and he’s going now. You need to step back outside.”

  Dr. Marigold took out her phone and sent a quick text as the pathologist detached the leads. A moment later, the two dark-suited people appeared in the exam room.

  “All of you,” Dr. Rivers said, “out. Now. Or I call security.”

  “This patient is going with us,” Dr. Marigold said calmly. “We are from the Home Office. We outrank hospital security by several orders of magnitude. I will personally take responsibility for this patient.”

  “I don’t care what you . . .”

  Oren stood to the side, watching as the two nameless suited people took their places on either side of the gurney. Dr. Marigold opened the bag she had hanging from her shoulder and removed some papers. She passed them to both Dr. Rivers and Oren, along with a pen for each.

  “What is this?” the pathologist said. “And get away from—”

  “It’s a standard copy of the Official Secrets Act, which I’m going to need you to sign.”

  “I’m not signing anything. I’m not releasing the body.”

  “I don’t need your permission to release the body,” Dr. Marigold said. “I told you, he’s coming with me. Security will not stop us. The longer it takes for you to sign, the longer the patient goes without monitoring or care. His fate is now resting on how long it takes you to put a pen to a piece of paper.”

  Dr. Rivers regarded her fellow doctor for a long moment.

  “What did you do to him?” she asked. “What exactly is going on here?”

  “Nothing that concerns you. It’s not dangerous. You haven’t been exposed to anything. You’re wasting valuable time asking these questions, which I’m not going to answer. If you care at all about the well-being of the patient, you need to sign.”

  The two suited people remained at attention on either side of the gurney, but something in their demeanor changed. There was a suggestion that this situation was going to end exactly as Dr. Marigold said, and they were prepared to make sure that happened.

  Dr. Rivers looked to Oren, who had been steadily backing toward the wall, clutching the document and the pen.

  “I want no part of this,” he said, taking the pen and scrawling his name.

  Dr. Marigold accepted the document. Dr. Rivers looked down at Stephen Dene, who was now obscured by the sheet.

  “For his sake,” she finally said, before scrawling her name in a disgusted gesture.

  Dr. Marigold accepted this as well and tucked it in her bag. Her two companions silently rolled the body away and out the door.

  “So you understand,” Dr. Marigold said, “everything that has happened here today with this patient is now classified. You do not discuss him or anything you have seen. If you do so, you will be prosecuted.”

  “This is
a travesty. Something is going on with that boy.”

  “Prosecuted,” Dr. Marigold said again, “to the fullest extent of the law.”

  With that, she turned and followed the path of her associates and the gurney. When they had been gone for a moment or two, Dr. Rivers and Oren looked at each other.

  “What the bloody hell was that?” Oren said. “I don’t want trouble. I can’t have trouble. I’ve got a daughter.”

  Dr. Rivers went back into the office, pushed away the abandoned snack bar, and started typing into the computer.

  “He’s already gone from the records,” she said when Oren joined her. “They’ve already wiped everything about him.”

  “I don’t want trouble,” Oren said again. “I can’t have trouble.”

  “You won’t have trouble,” Dr. Rivers said, pushing back in the chair. “You signed, and I signed. We say nothing. Not that there’s anything to say.”

  “What was wrong with that body? Bodies don’t do that. He should have been . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Rivers said. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  She eyed the screen blankly for a moment, absorbing the events of the last few minutes. The office door opened again, and a man with pure white hair entered.

  “Home Office,” he said, producing his identification. “I’m here about a body. You should have had a call this morning. The subject’s name is Stephen Dene . . .”

  The black van was already snaking its way into London traffic, away from the hospital. Dr. Marigold looked down at Stephen Dene, lying on the gurney. She leaned in close and examined his face again, resting the back of her hand against his cheek, then his forehead.

  “Well,” she said quietly, “I knew you were stubborn, Dene, but no one is this stubborn.”

  I stand amid the roar

  Of a surf-tormented shore,

  And I hold within my hand

  Grains of the golden sand—

  How few! yet how they creep

  Through my fingers to the deep,

  While I weep—while I weep!