The Shrunken Head

by Lauren Oliver

  Dumfrey thought it was wonderful. “You’re a strong man, Sam!” he always said with a hearty laugh. “The strongest boy in America. You’ll look good with some size on you.”

  What Dumfrey didn’t understand was that Sam didn’t care about being a strong man. All he wanted was to be normal. He wanted to play with a puppy without worrying about knocking the air out of its little lungs. He wanted to be allowed to hold Cornelius in his hand, like Thomas did, and feed him bread crumbs. He didn’t want to yank doors off their hinges accidentally. He didn’t like the fact that he could not give Pippa a hug when she was upset because he risked crushing her ribs.

  He remembered how the detectives had looked at him at Anderson’s apartment, after the door had splintered to pieces at his touch. Like he was some kind of freak.

  Well, he was.

  “All you’ve got to do is get us in,” Thomas said. His eyes were bright and it occurred to Sam that he was actually enjoying himself.

  “In where?” Sam said suspiciously.

  “The morgue,” Thomas said, and ducked under the turnstiles without paying a token. Sam frowned and pushed two tokens into the coin slot.

  “Like—like where they put the dead people?” Max stuttered.

  “Sure,” Thomas said, turning to her. “But you aren’t scared of a few dead bodies, right, Max? You’ve seen plenty.”

  Sam heard the challenge in his voice. Max must have, too.

  “Sure,” she said, turning away from him.

  “Even still,” Sam leaped in, in a desperate attempt to show that he, at least, was on Max’s side, “we can’t just walk in.”

  “We’re not going to walk in,” Thomas said. “You”—he placed a finger on Sam’s chest—“are going to break in.”

  “Usually”—Sam panted—“when you say”—he huffed and strained—“you have a plan”— he adjusted his feet for purchase and heard the lock on the other side of the door whine in protest—“it has”—another hard shove and the door shuddered against his back—“more than one”—he turned around and pushed with both hands—“step,” he finished, breathing hard, as the steel lock gave way.

  The service door opened with a long creeeeak.

  The morgue was in the basement of Bellevue Hospital, all the way on the east side, on First Avenue between Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Ninth Streets. Pippa knew this because the previous year when one of Miss Groenovelt’s spotted tabby cats had died, she insisted that it had been foul play and had carried the body there for an autopsy. She had come back sputtering in outrage after they explained that it was not the habit of New York City medical examiners to conduct postmortems on cats. Pippa had spent many afternoons sipping weak chamomile tea and comforting Miss Groenovelt as she blubbered about poor Tabitha.

  “Well?” Sam said, stalling. He hated hospitals, even more than he hated the thought of dead bodies. Hated the thought of illness and bedpans and, on the crazy ward, people strapped to their cots. “What now?”

  Thomas answered him by slipping inside. Sam was glad that Thomas had at least taken the lead. He cast one last glance behind him. They’d snuck out just after dinner, and the sun was now setting beyond the spiky line of buildings, layering the sky with colors that looked as if they belonged in Sol’s Candy Shoppe. For one wild second, Sam had the urge to run.

  “Come on, Sam,” Pippa whispered, gesturing to him to hurry up. He filed in after her, easing the door closed behind him.

  Once they were inside, the sounds of car traffic from First Avenue, and the stink of fish from the East River, faded. They were standing at one end of a long, ugly hallway, poorly lit, that smelled simultaneously of lemon oil and unwashed sheets. From somewhere above them, Sam heard the squeak of shoes and the hum of machinery. He imagined, too, that he heard someone moaning.

  To their right was a short flight of stairs leading upward, and signs pointing the way to registration and metabolic unit and psychiatric and accident and emergency: all words that made Sam feel like a thousand insects were crawling over his skin.

  “This way.” Thomas had unconsciously dropped his voice to a whisper. He gestured the group forward. At the far end of the hall—it seemed miles and miles away—was a small sign indicating the way to a second set of stairs.

  They inched forward together. Although it was dinner hour and they were alone in the hall, Sam had the impression that eyes were everywhere, watching him. The hall was very cold and lined on either side with small rooms; he was afraid to look inside to see what they contained.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Max muttered.

  “Me, too,” Sam said, and then wished he hadn’t. He should have said, instead, that he wasn’t scared at all.

  When they were twenty feet from the stairs going down, a door suddenly opened in front of them, and a nurse’s voice drifted out: “That’s a good girl, Mrs. Marsh, be a sport. I’ll be right back.” Her elbow appeared; then her right foot.

  They froze. Pippa gave a squeak of fear. Sam’s stomach plunged all the way to his toes, and he wondered whether he would have to go to surgery if it were to get stuck there. The nurse was coming into the hall. She would find them and arrest them for trespassing, and they would be sent to jail.

  Or even worse, to Bellevue.

  At the last minute, the nurse clucked her tongue and said, “Now don’t do that, Mrs. Marsh,” and retreated back into the room. But Sam knew they had mere seconds before she reappeared.

  Thomas was the first to recover. He sprang toward the first door he saw and threw it open. It was a broom closet, no wider than a coffin, and cluttered with cleaning supplies and buckets, old mops and stiff rags. Thomas practically shoved Pippa inside, and Sam crowded after her, uncomfortably aware of the fact that he was pressing against her back and that her hair was tickling his chest. Thomas folded himself up at their feet.

  “Let me in!” Max whispered, jabbing Sam from behind with an elbow.

  “There’s no room!” Pippa squealed. “Sam, stop crushing me.”

  “Shhh,” Thomas hissed.

  “Sorry, I’m trying to—”

  “I said you’re crushing me.”

  “SHHH.”

  “Let. Me. In!”

  Pippa pushed. Sam leaned back. And Max went stumbling backward into the hallway, just as Thomas reached up and closed the door.

  Sam nearly went hurtling after her. He heard the creak of a door again, and the nurse’s cooing voice.

  “We can’t just—” he started to say.

  “SHHH,” Thomas and Pippa said at once.

  “—leave her,” he finished in a whisper.

  But even as he spoke, he heard the nurse’s voice through the door.

  “What are you doing down here, dearie?” the nurse said. “There’s no visitors allowed in the contagious ward.”

  Sam knew how much Max would hate to be called dearie. He only hoped she would restrain herself from sticking a knife in the woman. Then she’d never get out of Bellevue.

  Luckily, when Max spoke she sounded very unlike herself: young, and deeply apologetic. “Sorry. I—I got lost, I guess.”

  Sam felt a warm rush of admiration for her. She knew how to lie to get herself out of a bad spot. He would probably have gone straight to pudding.

  “Oh, you poor thing!” the nurse said. “Let me guess. You’re here for your mommy, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Max said quickly. “I’m here for my, um, mommy.” On this last word, Max rapidly turned a choking sound into a cough.

  Pippa shifted so her shoulder was digging uncomfortably into Sam’s chest. Sam tried to glare at her, but it was too dark. And Thomas was planted directly on his feet, which were starting to go numb.

  “Let me take you upstairs, dear,” the nurse said. “I’m sure we can find your mommy.”

  “That’s okay—” Max started to say.

  But the nurse cut her off. “It’s no trouble at all, dearie. No trouble at all. Come on, this way. Take my hand, like a good girl.”
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br />   It might have been Sam’s imagination, but he thought he heard Max mutter something very quiet (and very rude) under her breath. But the nurse kept babbling over her—“There’s a good girl, how frightening to be lost in this big place on your own”—and then Sam heard the squeak, squeak, squeak of the nurse’s shoes against the tile floor. He could no longer feel his feet, and Pippa’s shoulder made every breath painful.

  At last, when the nurse’s footsteps had receded, Thomas pushed open the door. Pippa practically shoved Sam out into the hall, gasping.

  “You nearly turned me into a pancake,” she said accusatorily.

  He rubbed the cavity of his chest, where her shoulder had been digging a hole. “Well, you nearly turned me into a doughnut.” He stamped his feet to try and get the feeling back.

  “Come on,” Thomas said. “There’s no time for arguing.” And he started again in the direction of the stairs.

  “What about Max?” Sam said. The nurse would surely soon discover she wasn’t a visitor.

  “Max can take care of herself, Sam,” Pippa said. “We’ll meet up with her later.”

  “But—” Sam started to protest.

  “Do you want to help Dumfrey, or not?” Thomas’s eyes were bright like two hard stones. Sam squeezed up his fists. But Pippa was right. If anyone would be okay, it was Max.

  That’s why he liked her so much.

  “Fine,” he said, and let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Fine,” he said again.

  “This way,” Thomas said.

  They hurried in silence down the length of the hall, to the stairs leading into the basement, and the sign pointing the way to the morgue.

  The morgue was dark, and colder than Pippa expected. From somewhere in the blackness came the sounds of dripping, as though a faucet had been left on. She took a step forward and Thomas yelped.

  “You stepped on my heel,” he said.

  “Your heel ran into my toe,” she whispered back.

  “What’s that smell?” Thomas said, a little louder.

  Pippa inhaled. It smelled a little bit like tub water after someone had just finished bathing or like sweaty feet that had been scrubbed repeatedly with soap.

  Suddenly, the electric lights came on with a buzz and a whirr. Sam had found a switch on the wall, and Pippa exhaled a little. She had imagined there would be bodies everywhere. But they were in a large room, very bare, very clean. One wall was fitted with cabinets, each the size of a small refrigerator.

  “All right. What now?” Sam said.

  They looked instinctively to Thomas, but he shook his head. “I—I’m not sure.”

  Pippa took a few steps into the room, lifting her fingers and grazing the wall of large metal cabinets. Immediately, she felt a jolt. She had a sudden vision, like a lightning bolt through her brain: a body, frigid and motionless, and two white feet, bloated as rotten fish. She stumbled backward, holding her head.

  “What?” Thomas rushed toward her and grabbed her elbow. “What’s the matter?” It was only then that she realized she’d cried out.

  “P—people,” she stuttered, pointing to the wall: a jigsaw pattern of cabinets, all fitted together. Now that she was focusing, she could see beyond them—inside them. She saw bodies, each draped in a sheet, all cold and sad like slabs of beef on a butcher’s counter. “It’s full of people.”

  “Over here.” Sam’s voice echoed a little in the big, dim space. He had moved into the adjoining room. Pippa saw three steel-legged tables, each draped in clean white linen, under which she could see more bodies, silhouetted: the lines of the chest and knees and even, in one case, a foot protruding from the sheet. Her stomach turned over. One of them was a woman, and one of them a girl not much older than Pippa herself, with blond hair the color of new straw.

  “I wonder if one of them is Potts . . . ?” Even though Sam spoke quietly, his voice was amplified by the emptiness of the room, so Pippa felt as though he were shouting.

  “That one,” she said, raising a shaking hand toward the middle of the three tables. Even without lifting the linen she could see. It was effortless, far easier than looking in someone’s pockets—perhaps because she did not have the resistance of another person’s mind to contend with.

  Recently, she had noticed a shift, a change in the way that her mind’s vision worked. It was becoming easier to slide behind locked drawers and into suitcases, to feel what was there so strongly that it became a picture in her brain.

  Sam peeled back the sheet, holding it carefully between two fingers, as if death were a germ and he were in danger of catching it. Thomas sucked in a breath and took a step closer to the body. Potts’s face was ghastly and pale. His chest was as white as milk, and dark stitching crisscrossed his chest and stomach, where the doctors must have opened him up. His hands, which Pippa had seen so often clutching a mop, holding an old rag, or jiggling a toilet handle, now lay flat and useless on the table.

  Footsteps echoed from somewhere above them. Sam made a strangled noise.

  “Someone’s coming,” Pippa said, feeling a sudden surge of terror.

  “Look.” Thomas seized a piece of paper lying next to Potts; it was covered in densely packed writing. “It’s the report on his death.”

  The footsteps were coming down the stairs.

  “Take it,” Pippa said. “And let’s get out of here.”

  “We can’t just steal it,” Thomas said. His eyes were clicking rapidly along the page, left to right, like the Underwood typewriter in Anderson’s office. “They’ll know someone was here.”

  “And they’ll know we’re here if they catch us,” Pippa said.

  By now, they could hear voices. A man was saying: “Should be illegal, bodies turning up at all hours. Nine to five, I say, and let the rest of ’em wait.”

  A second, higher voice, squeaked, “Absolutely, sir. Very true, sir.”

  The first voice snapped, “Don’t be an idiot! Of course we can’t expect dead people to maintain regular hours! Inconsiderate, every one of them. For God’s sakes hold up the feet.”

  They were coming down the stairs. Sam flipped the sheet back over Potts’s head. Thomas stuffed the report into his pocket. Pippa looked around wildly for a second exit, but there was none. They were trapped.

  “We have to hide,” Thomas whispered. And before Pippa could argue, he was drawing her into the first room, toward the large wall full of body-size cabinets.

  “No.” Pippa stopped short when she realized what Thomas expected of her. “No way.”

  “There’s no other choice,” he said.

  Sam wrenched open a cabinet and, finding it empty, practically dove inside it.

  “I won’t,” Pippa repeated. Thomas slid open the nearest cabinet, and the face of a dead man stared up at them. Pippa nearly screamed. He moved on to the next one. Also occupied, this time by a monstrously fat woman.

  “A little help, Pip?” he whispered. He was sweating.

  There was a scuffling sound on the stairs. One of the men exploded: “What did I tell you about his feet?”

  Pippa’s stomach was filled with lead. She knew that Thomas was right. They had no choice. “Over here,” she whispered to Thomas. There was another empty cabinet, and she and Thomas squeezed in together. Pippa had to lie down on her back. It was very cold.

  To keep them fresh, she thought, like vegetables, and felt the hysterical desire to laugh. She forced herself to breathe.

  But as Thomas eased the cabinet closed, and they were swallowed in darkness, she couldn’t help feeling as though they might never get out; they would get stuck here forever and die and end up just like the others.

  Only a second later, the men stepped into the morgue. Their voices were very loud; they were less than three feet away.

  “All right, what do you want to do with ’im?”

  Pippa knew they must be bringing in another body. She prayed that the men would not think of placing him in a cabinet; she and Thomas would surely be disco
vered. Even though it was cold, her palms were sweating. She could hear Thomas breathing and, though she was comforted by his presence, wished she could tell him to shut up.

  “Take him out for a date,” the older man said, then gave an ugly laugh. “What do we usually do with ’em? Leave him out on the table, so the doc can start the slice and dice.”

  Footsteps squeaked on the floor as the men passed into the other room. She wished they would hurry. Pippa was desperate to get out of this terrible hole and wondered whether this was how Mr. Dumfrey felt, sitting in his jail cell. Thinking of Mr. Dumfrey steeled her nerves slightly. She was doing this for Mr. Dumfrey.

  After what seemed like forever, the men’s footsteps returned and then retreated up the stairs. Pippa tried to sit up, forgetting how small the space was, and banged her head.

  “Ow,” she said aloud in the darkness.

  “Are you all right?” The cabinet slid open and Sam’s face was revealed, blinking down at her and Thomas. Pippa squinted in the electric light, which seemed suddenly blinding.

  “I’m all right,” she said, sitting up, although she had a cracking headache. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She had seen, she thought, enough dead people for one evening.

  It wasn’t until they reached the street that Thomas remembered Max—and then, only because Sam reminded him.

  “We have to find her,” Sam said. “We can’t just abandon her.”

  Pippa looked as though she was inclined to disagree.

  Thomas said, “She might have found her way out. She might be halfway back to the museum by now.” He was desperate to return to the museum and read the report on Potts’s death, still tucked neatly into his pocket.

  “But what if she isn’t?” Sam persisted with unusual force. For the first time it occurred to Thomas that Sam must like Max—must like her a lot.

  “All right, let me think.” Thomas’s head was pounding. Going back into Bellevue was a terrible idea. Someone would soon discover they had stolen the report from Potts’s body, assuming it had not been discovered already. They needed to get off the street, as far away from Bellevue as possible.