by Dan Wells
“It’s still sick,” said Max. “What else?”
“The killer gains revenge. The killer gains power.”
“The killer gains peace and quiet,” said Max.
“Probably not,” I said. “If all you want to do is shut someone up, there are easier ways to do it than torturing them to death.”
“What if it’s someone who’s been nagging you your whole life, and you just can’t stand it anymore, and you want to make them suffer for it before they die? Then your reward is peace and quiet.”
“Actually,” I said, “in that case your reward would be power, revenge, and satisfaction. You’d be taking control of your life, and getting revenge on the person who’d taken it away from you.”
“And when you’re done with all that,” said Max, “you’d have peace and quiet. I’m telling you, it keeps coming back to that.”
“Does it, though?” I asked. “If I want peace and quiet, the last thing I’m going to do is dump a dead body in the middle of an ongoing serial killer investigation. This death is going to get more coverage, more attention, and a lot more investigation than any other dead body in any other nowhere town.”
“All right already,” said Max. “I give up, I don’t get peace and quiet. I get the exact opposite of peace and quiet; I get . . . war and noise. I get a noisy war; I’m a terrorist.”
Pieces clicked together in my mind. “Maybe you are,” I said, leaning forward eagerly. “I mean, not a standard terrorist, but it’s the same general idea—you use violence to get attention.”
“So I’m a four-year-old?”
“You’re doing this on purpose,” I said, “because you want people to notice you. You kill someone in a weird way, leave them in an obvious place, and that’s how you get your message out.”
“Why is this suddenly me instead of you?”
“Me then. Whatever. The killer. The killer is trying to say something. ‘I hate women,’ or ‘I’m better than you,’ or something like that.”
“ ‘I can do whatever I want.’ ”
“Exactly.”
Max took a bite of his sandwich. “So who’s he talking to?”
“I . . . don’t know. Everyone, I guess. The police. The FBI. We have an agent in from out of town who does this for a living, he might be talking to him.”
“What if it’s the Clayton Killer?”
“The methods are completely different,” I said.
“No, I mean what if he’s talking to the Clayton Killer?”
I stared back. The Clayton Killer was dead, but Max didn’t know that. Nobody did. Including the new killer.
What if this was one killer’s way of saying “Hi, I’m new in town?” to another?
“Holy crap, here she comes,” said Max.
“Who?” I looked up sharply and saw Brooke coming straight toward us. That was three looks during lunch; I wasn’t allowed that many. I had to follow my rules as strictly as I could, even if she initiated it. They were my first and last defense against Mr. Monster, and if I could do anything I wanted, then so could he. I couldn’t let that happen.
“If she asks what we’re talking about,” said Max, “please say cars.”
Brooke stepped up to the table. “Hey John.”
“Hey.” I wasn’t allowed to talk to her again during lunch either, after saying ‘hi’ on the way into the lunch room.
“You have English next?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I tried to be as polite as I could, watching the wall behind her, looking just to the right of her face.
“Mrs. Barlow said we’re starting the same new unit as your class,” Brooke said. “Beowulf and Grendel.”
“Yeah,” I said, hoping for the conversation to end. Then, desperate not to seem rude, I added, “They sound really interesting.” I gritted my teeth. I shouldn’t have said that.
“They do,” said Brooke. I could see in my peripheral vision that she was smiling. I glanced down at the table, then back up at the space just beyond her other shoulder.
“I think it would be great to talk about it,” she said, “you know, like in the car and stuff. Since we’re there everyday anyway.”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t supposed to contribute to the conversation, but . . . what else could I do? “That would help a lot in class, since we’re in different classes.”
“Exactly,” said Brooke. “We can share all the brilliant insights from each other’s classes, and then sound like geniuses in our own.”
I looked down at the table again. “Yeah.” Please leave.
“Great!” she said. “I guess I’ll see you in the car?”
“Yeah.”
“All right, see you there!” She walked away. Finally.
Max stared as she walked away. “Goodbye, beautiful butt. I’ll miss you.” He turned back to me and clapped his hands silently. “Effing brilliant, by the way. I’d never picked you for that kind of romantic subtlety.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, shaking my head. It felt prickly and wrong, like it was caught in a spiderweb.
“Brushing her off like that,” said Max. “If the second-hottest girl in school walked up to me, wearing those shorts and begging to be my study partner, there’s not a chance in hell I could have played it so cool. I don’t think anyone in school could have played it that cool.”
“ ‘The second hottest girl?’ ”
“She’s no Marci,” said Max. “But seriously: I’m very impressed. You’ve got her wrapped around your finger.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Don’t be modest, dude, it’s a great plan.” Max leaned back and gestured broadly with both hands. “You give her just enough attention to show what a nice guy you are, and then you back off and let her fill in the blanks herself. It’s really starting to work; the ‘hard to get’ thing is paying off.”
“That’s not what that was.”
“Oh come on,” said Max. “You think nobody notices? You drive her to school every morning, you gaze longingly as she walks away, and then you practically avoid her the rest of the day. Yesterday at lunch you walked up to her, chatted about her shoes, of all things, and then just one period later you walked right past her in the hall and pretended not to notice when she smiled at you.”
That was the break between fifth and sixth period; English and math. She had a class right on my path from one to the other, so I usually walked around the other hallway to avoid her. That day I’d been held up talking to the teacher and didn’t have time, so I walked straight down the hall staring at the floor, just so I wouldn’t see her.
And apparently she liked this? How could I ever hope to understand people?
It had to stop. I couldn’t let her get any closer to me than she was now; not like this. Mr. Monster wanted her so much it hurt.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “She’s just the girl I drive to school, nothing more.”
“Are you kidding me?” asked Max. “I think even people in other countries can tell you’re in love with her.”
“I spend too much time with her already.”
“What does that mean?” Max asked. “She’s a fox, man. When I say that she’s the second hottest girl in school, I assure you that I have devoted a lot of time to a detailed comparison. You need to get over yourself and ask her out.”
I stared at him. “Are you crazy?”
“No,” said Max, “You’re crazy. I actually think you’re playing hard to get a little too well. She probably would have asked you out herself by now if you made yourself a little more available.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I pay attention,” said Max. “She is, as mentioned, very hot. And when you’re busily ignoring her she sends a lot of interested glances in your direction. I think she finds you mysterious, though I’m starting to think you’re just a clueless idiot.”
I didn’t need this. I had enough trouble keeping Mr. Monster under control—livi
ng through his fantasies at night, and then spending my days building a cage of rules and behavior patterns to keep those fantasies from becoming reality. He wanted to hurt people, sometimes very badly, and the things he’d planned for Brooke were almost too horrific to think about. He wanted to possess her, wholly and completely, and he couldn’t do that until she was dead. It was all I could do to look at her and smile with this black pit of intent roiling inside me. And now here was my friend, my only friend, telling me I should focus on her even more—spend more time with her, think about her more often, and do more things to attract her to me.
Something had to change, and soon, or nobody around me would be safe.
7
For my sixteenth birthday I got a dead body to play with: Mrs. Soder, the oldest woman in Clayton County, finally died. The corpse was laid out on the stainless steel embalming table, the body bag removed and the body motionless. It had died in the hospital, and they’d shipped it to us in a hospital gown. This made it a lot easier; rather than wrestle with real clothes, or try to get the family’s permission to cut them off, we could just snip a tie here and there and have the hospital gown off in seconds. The embalming would be almost too easy—I wanted to take as much time as possible, so I could really enjoy it.
Mom was in the office, signing some papers with Ron, the coroner, and Margaret wasn’t here yet. Lauren was technically our office assistant, but she still wasn’t speaking to Mom and, naturally, wasn’t here either.
All the more time for me.
I touched its hair, long and white and very fine, like corn-silk. Mrs. Soder had been nearly a hundred years old when she died, and the body curved oddly on the table thanks to the old-age hump in its spine. The first thing you do with a body, naturally, is to make sure it’s dead: it’s definitely going to be dead by the time you’re done with it, so you’d better make sure it’s not alive when you start.
We had a small makeup mirror in one of the drawers, and I held it in front of the body’s nose. A living body, even in a coma, would start to mist it up with its breath. I counted to twenty as I held the mirror, but nothing happened. It wasn’t breathing. I put the mirror back and pulled out a sewing needle, small and sharp but large enough to keep a solid grip on. I poked the body in the fingertip—not deep enough to break the skin, but hard enough to shock the nerves and spark an involuntary reaction. Nothing moved. It was dead.
I pulled over a portable sink, basically just an elevated bucket on wheels, and placed it under the head. Step two in an embalming was to wash the body, and the hair was one of the most important parts because it was one of the most visible. It didn’t look like anyone had washed or brushed this body’s hair in a while, but that was fine with me. More time for me. We had a small rubber hose hooked up to our stationary sink, and I pulled it over and sprayed it just enough to wet the hair. We didn’t have a special shampoo for corpses, just a bottle of the same stuff we used upstairs, and I squeezed a bit onto the upper side of the head, near the forehead. Then I started to brush it through.
“Hey John,” said Mom, bustling into the room in green medical scrubs. She had on her flustered face—eyes slightly wide, mouth slightly open, teeth clamped together—but she was moving loosely, almost casually. Sometimes I think she enjoyed being flustered, and acted like it even when she was relaxed. “Sorry to leave you alone so long; Ron had some kind of new state form I’d never seen before.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
Mom paused, turned, and looked at me. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m just washing its hair.”
“Her hair,” said Mom, turning back to the counter.
“Her hair,” I repeated. “Sorry.”
I always called corpses “it,” because . . . well, obviously. They’re dead. But apparently that kind of thing really bothered normal humans. It was just so hard for me to remember.
“Where’s Margaret?” I asked.
“I told her not to bother,” said Mom. “This is an easy one—you and I can do it without her, and she can take care of all the service planning with the family.”
“Don’t you usually do that?”
“Maybe I just want to spend some time with my son,” she said, scowling in what I had come to learn was a humorous way. “You ever think of that?”
I looked at her earnestly. “My favorite part of family togetherness is when we aspirate body cavities. What’s yours?”
“My favorite part is when you don’t talk like a smart aleck,” she said, and pulled a bottle of Dis-Spray down from a shelf. “Check for cradle cap. She was in the hospital nearly two weeks, and goodness knows if they washed her hair at all.”
I looked at its head—her head—and parted the hair to peer in at the scalp.
“There’s some kind of muck in there.”
“Cradle cap,” said Mom. “It’s oil and dead skin cells, and it’s a bear to get off. Try this.” She stepped over and squirted the area with Dis-Spray. “That should eat through it. Just keep brushing.”
I pressed a little harder with the brush, scraping gently at the scum on her scalp. After a few minutes the Dis-Spray started to break it down, and I brushed it out. When I was content that the hair was mostly clean I sprayed it again with water, soaking it more thoroughly this time, and brushing it even more to help rinse it all clean.
I timed my brushes to the beat of my own heart, one stroke per beat. Both were slow and measured; calm for the first time in weeks. Embalming was a job, like any other, but the people who did it for a living each had their own way of going about it. For my dad it had been a form of respect, a way to honor the lives of those who had passed on. For my mom it was service—she got to spend hours helping someone who was truly helpless, and even more time with the family helping to arrange the funeral and the burial and the services that went with each. For both of my parents embalming was a good thing—an almost reverent thing. It was their shared sense of deference for the dead that had brought them together in the first place.
For me, embalming was a form of meditation; it brought a sense of peace that I had never found in any other aspect of my life. I loved the stillness of it, the quietness. The bodies never moved or yelled; they never fought or left. The dead simply lay there, at peace with the world, and let me do whatever I needed to do. I was in control of myself.
I was in control of them.
While I brushed the hair, Mom cut away the hospital gown and replaced it with a towel for modesty. She washed the limbs and body, and when I finished the hair I pulled out a razor. We shaved the face of every corpse, no matter the age or gender, because even women and children had a bit of peach fuzz here and there. I massaged a dab of shaving gel into the cheeks and upper lip, and gently slid the razor across the skin.
A few minutes later I set the razor down. “I’m done shaving,” I said. “Are we ready to set its features?”
“Her features,” said Mom.
“Her features,” I repeated.
“We go through this every time, John,” she said. “You have to think of them as people, not objects. You of all people should recognize how important that is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting away the shaving things.
“Look at me, John,” she said. I turned to look at her. “I’m not kidding about this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Her. Let’s set her features.”
“Don’t slip up again,” she said, and I nodded.
She had died so recently that her body was still stiff from rigor mortis, and before we could arrange her face we had to massage her body back into mobility. Rigor mortis was caused by a natural buildup of calcium in the muscles; living bodies used that calcium for various things, but in dead bodies it just built up and built up until the muscles grew rigid. In a day or so she’d be loose again from decay, but for now we had to knead the calcium out by hand, stroking and pressing and rubbing the flesh until it was soft and pliable.
Once we could work with h
er again we started on her features: positioning her head, closing her mouth, and so on. We put tufts of cotton under the eyelids to keep them from looking sunken, and then sealed them closed with cream. We embedded two small hooks in her gums, one behind her upper lip and one on her jaw, and then cinched the mouth closed with a small black string. It was important to place the hooks carefully, and to tie the string just right: too loose and the mouth would flop open; too tight and the nose would look pinched and unnatural. The last thing a family wanted to see at a viewing was their dead grandmother sneering at them from her coffin.
Once the features were set we started the first internal phase of the process, called arterial embalming. While Mom gathered the proper chemicals and mixed them in the pump, I used a scalpel to cut a small hole near the body’s collarbone, then used a blunt hook to fish out a pair of slick purple blood vessels. Each was about as wide as a finger, and I cut them open carefully to avoid slicing all the way through. The whole process was very bloodless, since there was no beating heart to provide pressure and pump the blood out. I attached each vessel—one artery and one vein—to a metal tube, then connected the arterial tube to the pump when Mom wheeled it over. The tube in the vein connected to a hose, which we snaked down to a drain in the floor.
Mom turned on the pump and it went to work, pumping in a cocktail of detergents and preservatives and perfumes and dyes, and forcing as much of the old blood as possible down the drain. I looked up at the ventilator fan as it churned steadily overhead.
“I hope the fan doesn’t give out on us,” I said. Mom laughed. It was an old joke—our old ventilator was so bad, and the embalming chemicals were so toxic, that we used to have to step outside while the pump worked. The fan never actually gave out, but Margaret said the same thing every time. After all the extra business we’d had over the winter, though, Mom and Margaret had invested some of their profits in a new ventilation system. The new fan was high-tech and reliable, but we still had to make the same comment. It was practically a ritual.
Cavity embalming has the same general purpose as arterial embalming: you take the old fluids out and put new fluids in, to kill bacteria and halt decomposition long enough for a viewing and a funeral. But whereas arterial embalming used the body’s natural circulatory system to make the job easy, cavity embalming involved a lot of individual organs and unconnected spaces that had to be dealt with one by one. We accomplished this with a tool called a trocar—basically a long, bladed nozzle attached to a vacuum. We used the trocar to puncture a body and suck out the gunk, a process called “aspiration,” and then once we’d sucked everything out we cleaned the trocar and attached it to a different tube, so it could drizzle in another chemical cocktail similar to the one we put in the arteries.
