The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  Charlie opened the back door, and freezing air came rushing into the car.

  “Hey, buddy,” John called. “Jump up here with me.”

  Charlie looked at him, then closed the back door and opened the front passenger one. He bundled into the seat and buckled himself in. John sat there, nodding.

  “How was school?”

  Charlie made a sign with his hand, one of the few they had. The hand tilting left and right. So-so.

  “Okay. Do anything fun?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “Can I see your folder?”

  The school put all his homework and notes to the parents in the same creased yellow-and-black folder every day. Charlie bit his lip, then pulled his backpack from between his feet, unzipped the top, and handed the folder over.

  John opened it.

  “Sight words today, huh?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Okay, we’ll go over those later.” He put the list of words in the facing compartment. “Whoa. What’s this?”

  John was staring at a drawing of a black face with orange eyes. It seemed . . . too grown-up. A devil. And those eyes . . . John felt a flutter of worry.

  “Huh, buddy?”

  Charlie pulled his notebook from his side pocket and began to write.

  DRAWING WE DID ON MONDAY

  “Yeah, I can see it’s a drawing. Why did Ms. Sena send it home?”

  A blue Subaru moved off from in front of John’s car and a Toyota took its place. Charlie was writing.

  DON’T KNOW

  The woman in the blue Subaru honked her horn. John saw the steps emptying out.

  “Okay. So who’s it supposed to be?”

  A FRIEND

  “No shi— Sorry, I mean, really? This guy is your friend?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Wow. I’d be a little scared of him.”

  Charlie looked at him, something strange in his eyes.

  “Um, not because he’s black,” John said quickly. Damn, you had to be so careful with kids. “You know . . . of course, that’s fine. But I mean . . . who is he?”

  Charlie pointed to the drawing. John had to shift around to see the words at the bottom.

  THE MAGICIAN

  Maybe he was a new comic supervillain, John thought. He couldn’t keep up with them anymore.

  “Where’d he come from?”

  Charlie didn’t move, just watched the kids jumping and yelling through the corner of the windshield.

  “Charlie?”

  The boy sighed, then bent to the notebook.

  HE WAS AN EXSILE. HE WAS FORCED TO LEAVE HIS HOME.

  “Oh,” John said, stumped. And what the fuck do I say now? “And he . . . comes to visit you sometimes?”

  Charlie’s eyes, so brown and deep, blinked at him. This seemed to indicate yes.

  “Right, right. And is he a good guy or a bad guy?”

  More writing.

  DON’T KNOW YET.

  “Okay, okay. It’s just a picture, right? Using your imagination. I guess that’s good.”

  Charlie nodded. John stared at him for three more beats, then started the car. He waited for a woman with her hand linked to a squalling five-year-old to clear his bumper before pulling out of the St. Adolphus driveway.

  As he sped up, heading for home, he looked over at his boy, slumped in his seat.

  Charlie reached for the radio dial. He looked out the passenger window as the pop songs played.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Nat called in sick to Mass Memorial the next morning. He felt off, and there was too much to do with Becca.

  He needed to establish a baseline on the Prescott case. Something definite.

  Nat found his cell phone plugged into a wall charger—he had no memory of putting it there, he’d been so tired the night before—and found John’s number.

  “Hey.”

  “What’s going on?” said John.

  “Listen, I’m going to ask you something, and it’s crazy, but don’t give me an argument, okay?”

  He heard John sigh on the other end. “You know what? Less and less seems crazy to me these days, buddy. Hit me.”

  “I need to get into the morgue.”

  Silence on the other end. “I’m coming over,” John said and hung up.

  Nat hung up, walked over to his fridge, and poured himself a glass of orange juice. He leaned against the counter and drank the juice, his eyes staring at the pale green backsplash that glowed under his undercabinet lights. His eyes were unfocused.

  What the hell, Nat thought. How did a suddenly announced desire to go on a tour of the Northam morgue become just a regular thing? What’s next, midnight picnics at the cemetery?

  Nat heard a car honk. He looked out the window. There was John, sitting in a beat-up black Crown Vic, a department car.

  Nat pulled on his coat and boots and locked the condo as he left. When he got in the car, he slapped John on the shoulder in greeting. John looked over at him. “Hey, bud.”

  Nat nodded. Now that he was in the car, he found the words he was about to speak ridiculous. Let me see the corpse of Chuck Godwin. I want to make sure he isn’t out wandering the streets.

  John put the car in reverse.

  “Where we going?” Nat said.

  “You said the morgue, right? Well, then, it’s the morgue.”

  Nat gave John a sharp look. “What the fuck is going on that I don’t know about?”

  “You asked me—”

  “No, it’s not you. What I mean is, why would I feel compelled to go to the morgue? Jesus, John, what’s happening?”

  A fold of flesh under John’s right eye twitched. “I got a wacky report awhile back,” he said.

  “ ‘Wacky’? The hell’s that mean?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “About someone who should be dead?”

  John grimaced.

  “All right,” Nat said. “Who’s yours?”

  John frowned. “Margaret Post.”

  Nat sucked in a breath, then let it out, staring at the pedestrians in the window as John drove downtown. Normal people leading their normal lives with normal everyday problems. Just a touch of seasonal depression around here, that’s all this was.

  “Don’t you want to know who mine is?” Nat finally said.

  “Yeah, not really. But I guess I have to ask.”

  “Chuck Godwin.”

  John swerved to avoid a pothole. “The guy from the car accident?”

  “Yeah.”

  John shot him a quick glance. “I feel like I just went a little insane right there, just a little bit.”

  “How did you hear about . . . God—” He stopped, massaging his forehead with his free hand. “You know what? I don’t even want to know. Let’s just go over there and make sure they’re where they’re supposed to be.”

  John flipped the siren switch and blew through three red lights on the way to State Street. They pulled up to the county building, and John threw the Vic into park. He shut off the engine and took a pack of Big Red gum with two sticks left out of his shirt pocket and offered one to Nat. Nat shook his head.

  “You’re right that something’s off,” John said. “I’ve been feeling it all week. You ever get the feeling that everyone else is in on some joke, that they’re walking around with their lips pressed tight, but no one wants to tell you?”

  Nat stared out the grimy window. He stared at the people passing on the street. A black woman with dreads was walking toward them—must be a Wartham student, Nat thought—hugging her long down coat to her and puffing out large clouds of steam. Her eyes flicked to him as she passed, and Nat stared at her. She looked away quickly and he saw her in the side-view mirror increase her pace.

&
nbsp; “I don’t know,” Nat said slowly. “There is such a thing as mass psychosis. These things are like chemicals in the water. They travel underground, unseen. One person says something innocent at an office on a Wednesday morning, and in three hours it’s reached the other side of town and someone susceptible starts imagining there’s something weird going on. And with e-mail, texting . . .” His voice faded away. I’m not even convincing myself, he thought. “One way to find out.”

  They both got out.

  At the morgue door, John rang the bell and a buzzer sounded loudly in the room beyond. The stainless steel doors were set flush into the wall, separated only by a thin steel molding. Nat thought they looked like the doors on a nuclear silo.

  A thin, nervous-looking woman opened the door two inches and looked at them. There was annoyance on her face.

  “Hi. I’m Detective Bailey. I called ahead?”

  The woman looked him up and down.

  “Can I see some ID?” she said.

  John stiffened and gave her an extra two seconds of staring time, then pursed his lips and reached inside his blazer. He came out with a worn leather document holder and flipped it open. Nat saw a quick flash of silver.

  The woman studied the photo and looked at John, then went back to the picture.

  “Are you keeping JFK in there or something?” Nat said.

  The woman’s watery eyes swung to him.

  “This facility is for authorized personnel only. Who are you?”

  “He’s with me,” John said, a little louder than before. “We need to check two bodies.”

  The woman pursed her lips before stepping back and let the door slam shut. John looked at Nat, his look saying, Do you see what I have to put up with all day? He pushed the door open.

  Elizabeth was walking back toward her office, her hands clasped and bloodless by her side.

  “Excuse me,” John said.

  The woman stopped.

  “Margaret Post?”

  “She was put ba—” Elizabeth said, turning. “I mean . . . She’s in 12B.”

  John looked at her quizzically. “Aren’t you going to open it for us?”

  Elizabeth swiveled. “I have a call waiting for me.”

  John’s face was slowly going beet red. “Where’s the other one? Godwin?”

  “8A. You’ll find gloves over there.”

  * * *

  John began looking for 12B. There was tiny black lettering near the top right corner of the lockers, but the glare of the fluorescents made them difficult to read.

  “Why is Margaret Post still here?” Nat said.

  “Her parents are missionaries,” John said, bending over to check a number. “They were working in, um, was it Brazil? I don’t know, some South American country, way back in the bush, preaching the Pentecostal Bible to the natives. Took them awhile to get their affairs organized and get back to the States. They’re flying in today, I think. They still keep a house here.”

  Nat pointed to the right. “It’s down here, genius.”

  John straightened up and followed him.

  “The Posts are from here?” said Nat.

  “Originally? Yeah.”

  “From Northam?”

  “Yep, from the Shan.”

  Nat found 12B, a middle locker in the stacks of three. He gripped the handle. “I thought she was from somewhere else.”

  “She was born down there in Brazil or wherever the fuck. But the parents were originally local. Hang on . . . she might not smell so good.”

  “Man, so long as she’s laid out here, I don’t care if she reeks like the Cryptkeeper.”

  Nat pulled the locker. It came sliding out with a screech.

  John looked at Nat. The locker was empty, the metal clean and shining in the overhead fluorescents. Nat felt little darts of adrenaline shoot through his bloodstream.

  “She did say 12B, right?” he said.

  John called, “Hello . . . ? You believe that shit?” Nat could hear a thin note of worry in his voice.

  He felt the same thing in his chest, needles of doubt growing colder and colder.

  Things began to move in a swirl. Nat didn’t wait for Elizabeth Dyer, but walked down to the center of the lockers, his shoes clicking fast on the linoleum. John went past him and pounded his fist on Elizabeth Dyer’s door. Nat saw him moving, his jaw tight, as he looked for 8A. Out of the corner of his eye, Nat saw the door crack open an inch or two.

  “Hey, you said 12B for Post,” John said, exasperated, to someone on the other side.

  The morgue attendant pulled her door open. From the corner of his eye, Nat saw the pale white sheet of her face.

  “That’s right,” she said, her voice high. She was staring at the empty locker.

  Nat found 8A. He grimaced as he pulled on the stainless steel handle. The drawer refused to budge.

  “Well, she’s fucking missing,” John said.

  Nat swore at the locker handle and pulled again. Nothing.

  John came up behind him and wrapped his thick, muscular hand over Nat’s sinewy fingers and they both pulled. The metal handle didn’t move.

  “What the fuck is going on in here?!” John barked at the attendant.

  She was moving past them now. She began pulling other lockers, then pushing them back. Shooo. Clank. Shooo. Clank. They were empty. No Margaret.

  Nat and John looked at each other, and Nat braced his foot against the locker’s base. “Now,” he said, his voice tight. They hauled back, and suddenly the locker came away with a rasping sound. Nat and John both let go and jumped back, John staggering all the way to the nearest examination table, which he bumped hard with his hip, rattling it in its floor screws. The locker slid all the way out on its own momentum and jumped when it hit the end of its runner.

  “Fuck me,” said John.

  The locker was empty.

  John’s eyes seemed to fill with a cold fear.

  Nat was trying to control his breathing. His thoughts flipped back to the talk with Dr. Jennifer Greene back at the hospital. What had she called Cotard patients?

  Walkers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Nat Thayer sat at his desk and stared at his computer screen. It was Friday afternoon, the day after his visit to the morgue, and what he was about to do seemed not only insane to him, but somehow . . . a betrayal. Not only because of what he was considering, but where he was considering doing it. In his office at a pristine psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, a temple to the scientific spirit. And he was about to desecrate it.

  Is this really what it’s come to? he thought. I’m surrounded by some of the best scientific minds in the Northeast, and I’m about to do an Internet search for zombies.

  Yes, he decided, this was what it had come to. The missing bodies at the morgue were the final straw. Something was happening that was beyond his experience.

  He smiled, but the laughter didn’t come. Suddenly uncertain, he stood up and paced over to the window that overlooked the hospital atrium and the Shan to the west. His eyes moved past the traffic turning into the hospital in the direction of Endicott Street and Becca’s house. He hadn’t been able to get her off his mind. With any other patient . . .

  As he debated his next move, Nat tapped absently on the glass. Becca, are you there? he thought idly. Are you . . . all right?

  Nat wasn’t really afraid of being made a laughingstock. His geeky high school years had cured him of most social anxieties. He’d been purified in the scorching fires of Northam High.

  But this?

  Get on with it, he thought. He sat in his office chair, his fingers reaching for the keyboard. He tapped in zombie expert and hit Search.

  He spent the next hour and a half reading. He skimmed two pages of the original results and found them full of cranks, Amazon.com listings fo
r World War Z, and reviews of films on the undead. I may be the only person in America, he thought to himself, looking for usable information on actual zombies. Goddamn fanboys.

  Finally, he modified the search to zombie academic and began slowly reading through the links. He found a paper by a Professor Helen Zimmerman of anthropology at North Carolina State: “Culturally Undead: The Roots of Zombie Belief in Bantu Animist Communities.” He clicked on it and read in silence for five minutes before sighing and hitting the back button. The piece was gibberish to him, and had induced flashbacks to the lit classes of his undergraduate days.

  The link below was a first-person account by Helen Zimmerman on investigating zombies. “Ah, now that’s more like it,” Nat said aloud.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Ramona Best took the green can of Comet cleaner and shook out some powder onto the old white T-shirt she was using as a rag. It had been one of the shirts she’d left behind when she’d gone to Wartham, a track jersey from her freshman year at Roosevelt High. Her boobs had grown enough since then that wearing the T-shirt now risked turning the catcalls of the boys on the corners into outright propositions. You couldn’t be so sexy that they jumped down from the mailboxes or the stoops and started following you, talking Hey, can I walk you home? or You bustin’ that top out! The shirt now took her over that fine line, so she’d sacrificed it to the task at hand.

  The chrome in the kitchen was all that was left to be done. She worked with the lights out, following the gleam of late afternoon sunlight around the chrome where it met the green stone backsplash. She didn’t need the lights; she had the path of the chrome memorized. This is where she’d done her homework when her mother was out working as a nurse’s assistant at Jamaica Hospital, the 7 p.m.–to–7 a.m. shift, before she passed away five years ago. Her mom had never saved enough money to renovate the kitchen, so it was still circa 1974, all linoleum and fake granite and as much chrome as a big-finned Cadillac Eldorado.

  Ramona took the Comet, cut it with a little water from the tap, and leaned over behind the faucet and started scrubbing there. She could feel the granules of the cleaner grating underneath the cotton, and the smell nearly made her dizzy. It was a smell she remembered from childhood; every Wednesday, it had been her job to get the kitchen “army clean” by the time her mom got home from work. Now Ramona dug the cloth into the base of the fountain and found release through the ache in her biceps. She didn’t want to think about Mama right now.