“I’m Watson, the one who called?” she announced uncertainly to the colorless man at the desk.
He looked up at her and grunted. “Watson?”
Mentally she ground her teeth. What if this man had changed his mind; where would she go for food then? “Yes,” she said, shuffling from one foot to the other. “I’m going to be a pathologist, and I thought . . . It’s expensive, sir. Medical school is very expensive.” Her eyes pleaded with him.
“I remember,” he said measuredly. “Nothing like a little practical experience.” He handed her a form. “I’ll need your name and address and the usual information. Just fill this out and hand it in. I’ll show you the place when you’re done.”
She took the form and started to work. The Social Security number stumped her and then she decided to use her old one. By the time it could be checked, she’d be long gone.
“No phone?” he asked as she handed the form back.
“Well, I’m at school so much . . . and it’s kind of a luxury . . .”
“You’ll make up for it when you get into practice,” he said flatly. He knew doctors well.
As he filed her card away, Diedre glared at his back, wishing she could indulge herself long enough to make a meal of him. It would be so good to sip the marrow from his bones, to nibble the butter-soft convolutions of his brain.
“Okay, Watson. Come with me. If you get sick, out you go.” He opened the door to the cold room and pointed out the silent drawers that waited for their cargo. “That’s where we keep ’em. If they aren’t identified, the county takes ’em over. We do autopsies on some of ’em, if it’s ordered. Some of these stiffs are pretty messed up, some of ’em are real neat. Depends on how they go. Poison now,” he said, warming to the topic, “poison can leave the outsides as neat as a pin and only part of the insides are ruined. Cars, well, cars make ’em pretty awful. Guns—that depends on what and where. Had a guy in here once, he’d put a shotgun in his mouth and fired both barrels. Well, I can tell you, he didn’t look good.” As he talked he strolled to one of the drawers and pulled it out. “Take this one,” he went on.
Diedre ran her tongue over her lips and made a coughing noise. “What happened?”
“This one,” said the man, “had a run-in with some gasoline. We had to get identification from his teeth, and even part of his jaw was wrecked. Explosions do that.” He glanced at her to see how she was taking it.
“I’m fine,” she assured him.
“Huh.” He closed the drawer and went on to the next. “This one’s drowned. In the water a long time.” He wrinkled his nose. “Had to get the shrimps off him. Water really wrecks the tissues.”
Five drawers later Diedre found what she had been looking for.
“This one,” the man was saying, “well, it’s murder, of course, and we haven’t found all of him yet, but there’s enough here to make some kind of identification, so he’s our job.”
“When did it happen?” Diedre asked.
“A week or so ago, I guess. Found him out in the Serra Heights cemetery. A big number in the papers about it.”
Diedre stared at the bits of the night watchman. Something had shared her feast; she’d left more than this behind. It would be simple to take a bit more of him, here and there. No one would notice. But it paid to be careful. “Can I study this?” she said, doing her best to sound timorous.
“Why?” asked the man.
“To get used to it,” she replied.
“If you help me out with ID, you can.” He closed the night watchman away into his cold file cabinet. “In fact, you can do a workup on the one we just got in. Get blood type and all those things. This one hasn’t got a head, so it’s gonna be fun, running her kin to earth.”
“Hasn’t got a head?” Diedre echoed, remembering the woman left on the hillside. “What happened?”
“Found her out by the cemetery where they got the other. Probably connected. The grave she was found on was new and it was empty. Could be she’s the missing one.”
“Oh,” said Diedre, to fill in the silence that followed before the man closed the drawer. She stared at the body, watching it critically. She hadn’t done too bad a job with it.
“Any of this getting to you?” the man asked as he showed her the last of the corpses. Only about half of the shelves were filled, and Diedre wondered at this. “I’m okay,” she said, then added, as if it had just occurred to her, “Why are there so many shelves?”
“Right now things are a little slow. But if we get a good fire or quake or a six-car pile-up, we’ll be filled up, all right.” He gave her a shadowed, cynical smile. In the harsh light his skin had a dead-white cast to it, as if he had taken on the color of his charges.
Nodding, Diedre asked, “What do you want me to do first? Where do I work?”
The man showed her and she began.
It was hard getting food at first, but then she caught on and found that if she took a finger or two from a burn victim or some of the pulpy flesh from a waterlogged drowner it was easy. Accident victims were best because, by the time the metal and fire were through with them, it was too hard to get all of a body together and a few unaccounted-for bits were never missed.
She was lipping just such an accident case one night when the door to her workroom shot open.
“Tisk, tisk, tisk, Watson,” said the man she worked with.
Diedre froze, her mouth half-open and her face shocked.
The man strolled into the room. “You’re an amateur, my girl. I’ve been keeping an eye on you. I know.” He walked over to her and looked down. “First of all, don’t eat where you work. It’s too easy to get caught. Bring a couple of plastic bags with you and take the stuff home.”
She decided to bluff. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “Do you think you’re the only ghoul in this morgue? I’m not interested in competition, and that’s final. One of us has to go.” He glared at her, fingering her scalpel.
It was quiet in the room for a moment, then Diedre put far more panic than she was feeling. “What are you going to do to me? What is going to happen?”
The man sniggered. “Oh, no. Not that way, Watson. You’re going to have to wait until I’ve got everything ready. There’s going to be another accident victim here, and there won’t be any questions asked.” He spun away from her and rushed to the door. “It won’t be long; a day or two, perhaps. . . . Then it will be over and done with, Watson.” He closed the door and in a moment she heard the lock click.
For some time she sat quietly, nibbling at the carrion in her hands. Her rosy face betrayed no fear, her slender fingers did not shake. And when she was through with her meal, she had a plan.
The telephone was easy to get to, and the number she wanted was on it. Quickly she dialed, then said in a breathless voice, “Police? This is Watson at the morgue. Something’s wrong. The guy in charge here? He’s trying to kill me.” She waited while the officer on the other end expressed polite disbelief. “No. You don’t understand. He’s crazy. He thinks I’m a ghoul. He says he’s going to beat me into a pulp and then hide me in drawer forty-seven until he can get rid of me. I’m scared. I’m so scared. He’s locked me in. I can’t get out. And he’s coming back. . . .” She let her tone rise to a shriek and then hung up. So much for that.
When she unwrapped her broken arm, she saw that the ulna was still shattered and she twisted it to bring the shards out through the skin again. Next she banged her head into a cabinet, not hard enough to break the skull, but enough to bring a dark bruise to her temples. And finally she tore her clothes and dislocated her jaw before going into the file room and slipping herself into number forty-seven. It was all she could do to keep from smiling.
Somewhat later she heard the door open and the sound of voices reached her. The man she worked with was protesting to the police that there was nothing wrong here, and that his assistant seemed to be out for the night. The officer didn’t believe
him.
“But number forty-seven is empty,” she heard the man protest as the voices came nearer.
“Be a sport and open it anyway,” said the officer.
“I don’t understand. This is all ridiculous.” Amid his protests, he pulled the drawer back.
Diedre lay there, serene and ivory chill.
The man stopped talking and slammed the door shut. The officer opened it again. “Looks like you worked her over pretty good,” he remarked, pulling the cloth away from her arm and touching the bruises on her face.
“But I didn’t. . . .” Then he changed his voice. “Officer, you don’t understand. She’s a ghoul. She lives on the dead. That’s why she was working here, so she could eat the dead. . . .”
“She said you were crazy,” the officer said wearily. “Look at her, man,” he went on in a choked tone. “That’s a girl—a girl; not a ghoul. You’ve been working here too long, mister. Things get to a guy after a while.” He turned to the men with him. “We’ll need some pix of this. Get to work.”
As the flashes glared, the officer asked for Diedre’s work card, and when he saw it, “No relatives. Too bad. It’ll have to be a county grave then.”
But the man who ran the morgue cried out. “No! She’s got to be buried in stone. In a vault with a lock on the door. Otherwise she’ll get out. She’ll get out and she’ll be after people again. Don’t you understand?” He rushed at the drawer Diedre lay in. “This isn’t real. It doesn’t matter if ghouls break bones or get burned. They’re not like people! The only thing you can do is starve them.... You have to bury them in stone, locked in stone. . . .”
It was then that the police took the man away.
Diedre lay back and waited.
And this time, it was a full ten days before she left her grave.
JANE YOLEN
(1939–)
One of two children of a psychiatric social worker and a journalist and Hollywood film publicist, Jane Hyatt Yolen was born in New York City and earned a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Massachusetts. At the age of twenty-two, she sold her first work, a children’s book titled Pirates and Petticoats. A poet and the author of numerous award-winning children’s books and of adult fiction, Yolen is also the editor of various story collections, and she has served as President of Science Fiction Writers of America. Among her works are Children of the Wolf (1984), Dragonfield (1985), White Jenna (1990), Briar Rose (1992), The One-Armed Queen (1998), and the Pit Dragon volumes: Dragon’s Blood (1982), Heart’s Blood (1984), A Sending of Dragons (1987), and Dragon’s Heart (2009).
Green Messiah
(1988)
“It’s quite simple, really,” Professor Magister was saying. “With the world’s population of wild carnivores falling rapidly, the predator-to-prey ratio is way out of balance. A world so out of balance is a world that may die. It’s our only hope, really.”
Lupe stopped listening. The press conference went on and on and on, but she simply turned her attention inward. She already knew the entire speech Magister would give the reporters. He’d been practicing it on all his coworkers and volunteers. He’d remind them how the conservation movement of the seventies and eighties, Greenpeace and all the rest, had failed. How out of that dismal failure had grown a new movement, connecting all the old fragmented groups: Green Messiah. How Green Messiah had dedicated itself to repopulating the wild kingdoms by means of genetic experimentation developed at the Asimov Institute. How she, Lupe de Diega, had been one of the Chosen Ones, the volunteers, the Green Messengers, because genetically she’d matched the old legends. Dark-haired, long-fingered, yellow-eyed, with a slash of the single eyebrow across her forehead, that was Lupe. All those things that had caused her to be teased and hated for years were now her passport to fame. She would be in all the history books, not for what she was—but for what she would become. Lupe de Diega, the first girl to be genetically changed into wolf.
“Legends,” the professor was stating in his deep, resonant voice, “are merely signposts to long-forgotten facts. Our ancestors were leaving us messages, but we did not—could not—read them. The Ages of Reason and Cynicism did not allow us to believe that the past could so inform the future.”
The reporters in the audience stirred uneasily. Though word of the experiments had already leaked out, they were there for facts, not speeches. Sensing that, Dr. Magister seemed to shake himself all over and begin again.
“Green Messiah looked behind the legends to the facts,” he said.
Lupe saw that the reporters were concentrating again.
“Just as we now understand that herbalists knew things long before modern medicine re-proved them acceptable, like belladonna and penicillin, so too the old folktales carried biologic history within the body of the story. Green Messiah followed those tracks. Werewolves, the old stories warned, were people who had fingers of a single length, who had eyebrows that met in the middle, who had hair growing in their palms. We saw the possibility that this was a real genetic link with humanity’s past.”
Lupe’s eyes narrowed. She could feel her breathing deepen. She opened her mouth and panted shallowly. Then, realizing that some of the reporters were staring at her, she forced herself to close her mouth and listen to Magister again.
“Those stories of the loup-garou, the werewolf, were left over from thousands of years of human memory. Our forebears remembered something we did not—that not all humans are descended from apes. Some, it seems, are descended from Canis lupus, the wolf. Not even Darwin suspected that! We at Green Messiah are breeding the race backward, but in days, not in decades.”
He smiled over at Lupe. She did not smile back. A wolf smile means something entirely different, and she had had enough treatments already to be uncomfortable with the lifting of lips that in humans was used to signify happiness. She shrugged her shoulders in response, restraining the impulse to wag her as yet nonexistent tail.
Magister looked back at the audience. He was a good speaker. He knew how to play the crowd. “And so, my friends of the press, may I present to you the young woman with whom our first hopes lie, Ms. Lupe de Diega, a resident of Brooklyn whose ancestors came from Spain but one generation past. In a matter of a few months, she will become a full-grown werewolf, capable of changing from human to wolf and back again, capable of bringing to the dying breed new life.”
Hands went up all over the auditorium and Lupe sat back against her chair. A raised hand seemed threatening these days. Then she stopped herself and stared around. Her nostrils flared slightly. She caught a faint scent in the air, but it was neither anger nor fear. It was, perhaps, curiosity. Then she chided herself mentally. Surely curiosity had no smell.
The professor allowed questions, singling out a man half-way toward the back. The man stood so his question might be better heard.
“Will she change on—um—the full moon?”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Magister, but with a laugh so as not to affront the man. “The notion of a werewolf changing on the full moon is simply”—he smiled, letting them all in on the joke—“moonshine and malarkey. That’s a good example of the folk mind at work, disguising, making metaphoric. Do what we of Green Messiah trained ourselves to do, Mr. uh—”
“Hyatt, sir, of UPI.”
“Mr. Hyatt. Read behind the legends. Ask yourself: What does the full moon represent?”
Lupe thought of the moon, round and beckoning. It represented freedom. She knew that, even if Magister did not. For a professor he was very stupid. Very stupid indeed.
“How about magic and mystery?” called out a man from the back.
“The pull of the tides?” shouted another.
“Get your minds away from mysticism,” said Magister. “Think of facts.”
A reporter from Ms. magazine raised her hand and stood. “Do you mean that the female’s monthly or moon cycle is linked to this change?”
“Bingo!” Magister said. “That was our best guess.”
“What about males?” called out a man behind a television camera.
“We aren’t quite sure yet,” Magister admitted. “That is why we’re starting with Ms. de Diega. We expect she’ll bring us back information that will help us figure out what links the male werewolf to his change. If, indeed, there are male werewolves. There is one theory that werewolves are only female.”
There was an enormous explosion of sounds from the reporters and this time Lupe did smile.
“How does she feel about it?” the UPI reporter, Hyatt, called out.
“Why don’t you ask her directly?” Magister responded. He came over to Lupe murmuring, “Steady Lupe, steady girl. Just come to the microphone. I’ll be right by your side. It’s going very well. Nothing to be afraid of.”
She stood in a single graceful motion and followed at his heels.
“Speak, Lupe,” he instructed.
The microphone had a cold, metal scent. She spoke into it, her voice deep and steady. “I wait. I hope. I am ready.” The echo coming back to her from the corners of the auditorium made her tremble.
Magister’s hand on the small of her back, through the thin cotton dress, calmed her. She had nothing more to say.
“Good girl,” he whispered, giving her a little push. She returned to her chair.
The rest of the conference went as planned. Magister brought out maps and charts, and the graduate students handed out photocopied material to the audience so that they could follow along and print accurately what Green Messiah was doing. But Lupe’s attention was drawn to a small bird that had, somehow, gotten trapped in the room and was frantically beating against a window. She felt her body straining toward it. It took all her concentration not to whine.
The bird finally swooped toward the back and out through an open door, losing itself somewhere in the maze of halls outside. Lupe lost interest once it had disappeared and turned her head toward Magister. He was just finishing.
Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves and Ghosts Page 47
