Ghouls

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

Kurt looked up and frowned. He was reading in the den, the floorlamp glowing softly behind his chair. In his lap he held a book entitled The Red Confession, but its pages were all blank.

At once the house fell silent again, though he was certain he’d heard a heavy, loud thunking sound only a moment ago. Perhaps he had imagined it.

He looked around the room, on edge, as if suspicious of something. A thin but very icy draft nagged at the back of his neck; when he turned, it seemed to follow him. And what was wrong with the furniture? It all seemed slightly out of place, as though someone had moved each piece an inch or two. The curtains hung open to reveal a window full of blackness. When he looked down, he noticed thick black-red carpet on the floor, but he could’ve sworn it had always been brown. Next, he put away The Red Confession, only to be left to gaze speechlessly at the bookshelves. His books were gone, replaced by titles he’d never seen. The King in Yellow, The Lair of the White Worm, The Book of Dead Names. Just what kind of books were these? There weren’t even authors listed on the spines, except for one on the end, / Have Seen the Inside, by the Duke of Clarence, whoever he was. Someone had taken the old books out, and switched them with these.

He sensed it was very late. Soon he became aware of a soft, rapid ticking sound. The clock? he thought. But it was much too fast and erratic to be a clock of any kind. Likewise, the corner which had always been occupied by Uncle Roy’s grandfather clock was now curiously vacant. Someone had taken the clock also. He would have to ask Melissa what had happened to the books and the clock and the carpet.

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

There it was again; he hadn’t imagined it after all.

Someone was at the door.

He walked across the room with alarming effort. He felt sluggish, dragged, as if all his pockets had been filled with lead shot. Then he realized he was dressed in his police uniform, and about the same time he knew something was wrong. Too much strangeness had piled up at once. He couldn’t figure it. The books, the carpet, the clock, and now himself in uniform at some wan hour when only the other day he’d been suspended from work.

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

But the strangest part was that he felt extremely averse to answering the door. He couldn’t explain it. He just didn’t want to do it.

He stuck his head into the foyer, refusing to even look at the front door. What did he sense waiting for him behind it? “Melissa, be a sport and get the door for me, will you? I’m…busy.”

He waited, but she made no reply.

And again—

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

It was much louder this time, driven by insistence; Kurt actually felt the frame of the house vibrate. He pictured Conan pounding on the door with a giant wooden mallet.

“Melissa!” He paused, waited. “Melissa! Get the door!”

“Get it yourself!” her small, pointed voice shot back. Hostility gave a crack to the words.

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

“Come on, Melissa,” he pleaded. “Someone’s at the door, and I don’t feel like getting it.”

From deep in the house, Melissa’s voice unwound as an enraged squeal: “Go fuck yourself! Lazy do-nothing son of a bitch! FUCK yourself!”

Kurt’s face darkened. Melissa had been brought up liberally, he knew and understood, but now her precocity had slipped too far. It was fine for him to swear, he was an adult. He would not, however, tolerate language like that from a twelve-year-old.

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

“No one’s home!” he spat at the door. To hell with whoever was knocking. Kurt crossed the foyer, the TV room, then marched purposefully into the long hall. It was hot, a dense wet ensliming sensation; the darkness seemed to bleed out of the walls and drip. He breathed the dark, he could feel it fill his chest. But he paid no attention to the incompatibilities he’d observed since finding himself in the den.

He pushed open Melissa’s bedroom door.

Moonlight flooded the room; it was dark, yet he could see everything in the cool, phosphoric glow. The room had been emptied out, save for a bed which he noticed only through the corner of his eye. The floor and walls were stripped. Dust lay stoutly, in clumps, along the baseboards. Opposite him, a single bare window framed the moon.

Kurt’s eyelids felt sewn open.

Melissa sat cross-legged on the floor, in a limp, white nightdress. An ashtray clogged with butts rested beside her knee. She seemed very thin. A cigarette tilted out of her mouth, its tip glowing orange like a fox’s eye. She hadn’t even noticed that he’d entered, but instead seemed fixed on something across the room.

“Melissa, what’s going on?” He stood off balance in the doorway, paralyzed. “What happened to your things? Where’s your furniture? How come your posters aren’t on the wall?”

“Get out!” she shouted, but it sounded more like an animal’s bark. She still had not bothered to look his way. “Little goodie-two-shoes runt. Faggot. Pussy… Get out. Go find a clam hole to fuck.”

Kurt reeled in his own furor, blood thumping at his temples. “How’d you like to chow down on a box of Tide? Sounds to me like your mouth needs a good cleaning.”

She laughed, cackled at him. “Put your cock in a rat trap, faggot. And trip it with your balls, if you got any.”

“That’s telling him, baby,” a third voice oozed. “Ask him to take it out. Let’s see how big it is.”

Kurt’s senses sank—he recognized the third voice at once. Of its own volition, his head turned slowly toward the other side of the room.

“Not you,” he heard his own voice rattle. “Anyone but you.”

Joanne Sulley was sitting on the edge of a coverless bed. All she wore was a moth-eaten black satin blouse open down the front. It revealed nearly all of her. Like Melissa, she seemed much thinner than usual, as though she’d not eaten in weeks. Her hipbones jutted, and he could see the slats of her ribs. Shadows pooled in her body’s hollows. She looked like a whore from the death camp joy divisions.

He tried to sound infuriated, but the sight of her like this made his voice quaver. “What the goddamned hell are you doing? What are you doing in my house?”

Joanne leaned her upper body back on her arms. “Melissa invited me,” she said, and parted her legs obscenely wide. “She’s my friend. We both like each other a lot. Isn’t that right, baby?”

“Uh huh,” Melissa said.

Kurt squeezed his eyes closed till his entire head throbbed. This can’t be happening, he thought. It’s impossible, none of this can be real. It must be a—

“Well, what did you think?” Joanne said. She flexed her cadaverous calves, black-nailed toes pointing to the wall. She spread her legs wide. “This is all a dream.”

He blinked. His mouth went dry from being open so long.

Joanne smiled like a waxen mask, her face little more than a skull thinly covered by sheet-white flesh. “Watch, Kurt,” she said. “Watch this,” and from nowhere she produced a foot-long vibrator. It hummed softly and glimmered in the moonlight; it looked like a bullet. She inserted it into herself, let her head loll and her jaw sag. Kurt stared as the humming object disappeared further. Her hips shifted, her legs tensed to cords. She pushed it in some more and moaned.

“Stop!” he yelled.

“Doesn’t turn you on?” the stripper said. “Maybe this will then.” She took the vibrator out, and jammed it into her mouth. Her lips stretched blue and thin against the girth of the shining, white cylinder. Soon its pressure at the back of her throat caused her eyes to swell forward in their sockets, as if they might eject altogether.

“Stop it!” he shouted. “Please, stop it! You’re crazy to do this in front of a little girl! You’re crazy!”

Suddenly the vibrator was gone. He supposed she had swallowed it.

“How can I be crazy, Kurt?” Joanne said. “It’s your dream.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “and since it’s my dream, I guess that means I can do anything I want. It wouldn’t matter because it wouldn’t be real. Why, I could even—”

“Kill me?” Joanne finished. “You don’t want to kill me, Kurt. You want to fuck me.”

A heavy tingling, like a rash, crawled over his face. He seethed. He hated this girl—not that he could kill her, even in a dream. But, still, the thoughts which filled his mind turned utterly black.

Joanne was drooling now, profusely. Saliva glazed her chin like glycerin. “Come on, admit it. You want to fuck me, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Don’t you?”

“No!”

She bent forward, her ribs moving beneath her skin. She breathed expansively as she fondled her own tiny, emaciated breasts. He noticed a fierce glimmer between her legs. It revolted him. Then, with both hands, she cupped the lean, grooved pubis and rubbed it desperately.

Dream or not, this would have to cease. It was time for a little wagon fixing—he hoped she wouldn’t mind being thrown out the window.

But when he lurched forward, nothing happened. He felt instantly encased in cement, with only a hole left for his face to peer through. He couldn’t move. He could only look as the nausea pulsed up his throat.

He heard lewd, slick sounds, like clicking.

“Come on, Kurt,” Joanne whined, and her tongue traced her upper lip. The tongue was black. “Let’s give our little friend here a lesson in biology.”

Melissa’s cheeks drew in to black pits when she sucked her cigarette; the tip burned furiously for a second, increasing the orange tint on her tiny, starving face. Then she said, “Fuck her, Kurt. Fuck her.”

“Shut up!” he shouted.

“Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her! I wanna watch!”

Joanne’s grin seemed on the verge of splitting her face. She slithered off the bed and began to crawl toward Melissa.

“Stop! No, please!” he bellowed. “I’m begging you to stop!”

Joanne continued to grovel forward, the insides of her thighs slick with shine. She had something in her hand. “Forget him, honey,” she said to the girl. “Let’s do like we did before. Remember what we did before?”

“Uh huh,” Melissa answered.

“You liked that, didn’t you?”

“Uh huh.”

“It felt good, didn’t it?”

“Uh huh.”

Joanne knelt upright, looking down. Her eyes were black now, and the irises white. The thing in her hand was a massive black rubber phallus with hip straps.

The black eyes glittered; she fastened on the straps. The mock penis stuck out at an angle, hideously veined.

She continued toward Melissa.

Kurt’s shouting brought blood to his face, and heat. His throat felt scorched raw. In the dream, he wished he could die, anything to avoid witnessing this.

Melissa lay back then, frail and shiny-eyed. She began to lift her nightdress!

“And it won’t hurt at first this time,” Joanne promised. But as she spoke, her voice lowered to an unearthly suboctave, phlegm rattling deep in her chest. “Now we can see how far it’ll go in.”

Kurt’s bones bent against the wall of his paralysis. He felt a tendon pop.

But next his feet came off the floor, as some abrupt, snapping force yanked him out of the room and into the hall. The sudden inertia made him shriek. He landed on the floor.

Melissa’s door slammed shut on its own. Squeals rose and fell from within the room, like a tape on fast forward. Then the final scream burst forth.

And the door was gone.

Kurt struggled to stand, every muscle in his body fat with pain. He walked back down the black hall, toward the light.

“It’s only a dream,” he said to himself. “Why should I care? It’s only a dream.”

Cold air whipped circles through the hall. It hadn’t been there before. Sparked, he dashed to the foyer and saw that the front door had been smashed apart from the outside.

Footsteps padded quickly along the upstairs carpet. Kurt turned, slowly, grimly. Looked up. And saw a gaunt, sticklike figure walk across the landing. It moved stiffly but with great speed. It seemed to be carrying something in its arms.

The house lights dimmed, turning red. The figure went into Kurt’s bedroom.

“Wake up, you son of a bitch,” Kurt muttered to himself. “This dream’s got to end soon.”

A second later the figure came back out, its stick feet hushing over the rug. A hinge keened, the door snapped shut. Then, arms straight at its side, the thing on the landing walked rigidly to the top step. It stood very still and looked down at him with no face.

“Up yours,” Kurt said to it. “You’re wasting your time. I’m not afraid of a dream.”

“What if it’s not a dream?” the figure croaked. Its voice was shredded and bubbly, yet strangely familiar. “What if you’re wrong? What if this is real?”

“Fuck you.”

“See? You are afraid. You’re afraid to even go and see what I’ve left. It’s very important, but you’re too afraid.”

“Why should I be afraid? Whatever it is, it can’t be any uglier than you.”

The figure began to shiver, then convulse. It laughed fadingly and dissolved amidst the red, dark light.

The nerve of some people, Kurt thought. I guess this won’t end till I see what the fucker put in my room. He resigned to it. He walked up the stairs and opened his bedroom door.

A damp, meaty smell blew into his face. He traced his hand up the wall to find the light switch but found instead a worm-filled hole where the light switch used to be. He gagged, wanting to vomit. But even in the pale moonlight, he could see the long, bulky object lying on his bed.

It looked like—

“Oh, Christ.”

Behind the window, clouds lowered. More moonlight spilled into the room, and Kurt’s vision became acute. The object on the bed was a body bag, obviously complete with a body.

Kurt knew what the dream meant for him to do. “I’m not opening it!” he yelled aloud. “I’m not!”

The phone on the nightstand rang, as loud as a blast from his siren. It rang again, and again.

He knew he would not wake up until he had at least answered it. But when he went infuriated to the nightstand, he noticed that the phone was dusted over by some faint, white powder. It reminded him of chalk. Or talc.

He picked up the phone. “Pizza Wheel. May I help you?”

There was no answer at first, just layers of muttering. But then a voice said: “Who were they? I didn’t know them. Why did they do those things to me?” The voice was a young woman’s. She was sobbing.

“Who is this?” Kurt demanded.

“They did…awful things.”

“Who are you?”

The muttering rose, enlaced by moans and a sound like people marching through dense woods. Then the young woman’s voice answered, “You know me, I know you do. I’m…”

“Who are you!”

“I’m dead.”

Kurt’s blood lost all its heat at once; he couldn’t move. Why did the voice, or what it stood for, affect him so gravely? He felt sure he didn’t know the person. Had he forgotten that this was still just a dream?

“Open the bag,” the voice said.

“No.”

“Open it.”

“I’m not opening a goddamned body bag!” Kurt shouted.

“Open it,” the voice repeated, but now it was fading away. “Open it. Open the bag.”

Suddenly Kurt’s hand and ear and chin were wet. The phone was oozing blood. He threw it down in disgust, frantic to wipe off his face.

The dream had seeped into him now. He knew what he must do. He turned to the bed and looked down at what lay there.

“It’s Vicky,” he whispered to the dark. “I know it is. Stokes has murdered her.”

Trembling, his fingers touched the zipper’s metal tab. Again he was aware of the mad, rapid ticking he’d heard earlier in the den. With a gentle rasp, the zipper parted smoothly, and the sides of the bag fell away.

“Please don’t be Vicky,” he said. He shone his flashlight into the bag.

But it wasn’t Vicky at all. The gray, dead face which looked back at him was his own.

««—»»

Kurt felt blasted through layers of another dimension. The soaring motion shook him, threatened to shake him apart; but then as the velocity increased, his consciousness emerged, as if from a lake of sludge.

Gaseously, a face formed. It was small. He heard: “Kurt! Kurt!” and knew that the face belonged to Melissa. The real Melissa. At last, the nightmare was over.

“You can stop shaking me now,” he said. He didn’t know whether to hug her or kick her in the behind. He lay in the bed as if dropped from a great height. “I’m awake, or at least I better be.”

“What happened?”

“A real brain-broiler of a nightmare, that’s all.”

Melissa crouched by the bed. He felt relieved; she wore a dumpy pair of pajamas rather than the nightdress of the dream. And he was pleased to see she didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth.

“I’ll bet they heard you all the way from here to Bowie,” she told him.

“What?”

“You were screaming.”

“Come on, I was not.”

“You were screaming bloody murder. I was almost afraid to come in. It sounded like someone was doing a number on you with a blowtorch.”

Kurt refused to believe it. “I wasn’t screaming—men don’t scream. You’re lying, as usual.”

“Believe what you like.” Now she was giggling at him. “I told you those Mexican TV dinners give you bad dreams. But do you listen?”

“What time is it?”

“Way past two.” Grimacing, she looked at her hands and wiped them on her pajamas. “Gross. You’re all icky.”

“I probably lost ten pounds in sweat.”

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

Kurt and Melissa looked at each other.

“Someone’s at the door,” she whispered.

This was too much, too soon. The thunking was the same. “Be a sport and—” but he stopped short. He would not recite the dream verbatim. “Go see who it is,” he said.

“No way. I’m not answering the door in my pajamas.”

“Please. As a personal favor to me, just go answer the door. I’ll give you a dollar.”

“Forget it. Only nuts knock on doors at this hour. It could be some escapee from St. Elizabeth’s… It could be Hinkley.”

“You’re the nut,” he concluded. “I hope it’s the stork, coming to take you back.”

She gripped his shoulder, fretting. “But it could be one of the vampires!”

Kurt got out of bed. “Do they make corks big enough to fit your mouth?” He headed for the hall.

“You’re not going to answer the door in your boxers, are you?”

“Why shouldn’t I? It’s not the pope or the President. They came last week, didn’t they?”

“What are you taking that for?”

“Taking what?” he said. He was holding his service revolver; he’d taken it off the nightstand without even realizing it. “Impulse, my dear. If you’d had the dream I just had, you’d understand.”

Kurt went out and down the staircase, thinking that the only thing funnier than a man walking down the stairs in his underwear was a man walking down the stairs in his underwear with a gun.

In the foyer, he held the pistol behind him. He could feel the steel’s cold through his shorts. He opened the door a crack and wilted.

Chief Bard walked in. He held a large carry-out coffee and wore clothes that looked slept in. “Don’t dress up on my account,” he said.

“Sorry, Chief. If I’d known it was you, I would have put on my polka dots.”

“Quit yammering and get your suspended ass in gear. We’ve got to hustle.”

“Hustle?” Kurt said. “To where?”

“South County General. We’re meeting Glen at the body shop.”

“What the hell for?”

“I don’t know. The prick called me up a little while ago, said he found something at Belleau Wood.”

“Shit, Chief. I don’t want to go the morgue.”

“Well you’re going anyway,” Bard said. It had already been decided. “I’ll be damned if I’m going there alone at this hour.”

Kurt realized he had no choice. Defying Bard was equivalent to defying King Neptune. “Let me put some clothes on.”

“You can go nude for all I care. Just hurry the fuck up.”

Kurt trudged back upstairs. Melissa stood tensely in wait. “Let me go, too, Kurt,” she pleaded. “Please.”

“The only place you’re going is to bed.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Get out of my way, Roachface.”

“I wanna go to the morgue!”

“You’re a morbid little animal,” he informed her. He pushed the door to and pulled on his clothes. “I’ll stuff you in the toilet tank if you don’t shut up and go to bed!” That was that, but would she really fit? He slipped his off-duty 22 into his pants pocket, then went back down and left with Bard. Melissa did her twelve-year-old best to slam the door behind them as hard as she could.

They drove in Bard’s big T-bird. A light rain began as they turned off 154. It misted the windshield and made Route 50 shine like oil.

“Where’s Higgins?” Kurt asked.

Bard scowled at him. “Working your shift, remember?”

“Oh. Right.”

Kurt told the chief about his dream, hoping to exorcise it from his mind. Bard laughed uproariously at him, which lessened the severity of its effect, and that helped. “Don’t feel bad,” Bard said, as if to offer solace. “Nightmares are an occupational hazard for cops; it’s a curse that comes with the tin. One time I dreamed I was in bed with the best-looking blonde I’d ever seen. I mean, this girl was so beautiful she’d make Marilyn Monroe look like pimples on a gorilla’s dick. And this broad’s begging for it, right? She’s begging me to let her have it with the hoagie, but in the course of things, I come to find out that she’s got two vaginas. One was too small for me to get my hose in, and the other was full of gravel. I’d love to hear what a head doctor’d have to say about that one.”

Kurt winced.

“So who was the chick on the phone?” Bard asked.

“Beats me.”

“How about the skinny dude who left the body bag on the bed?”

Kurt’s throat tightened. “Swaggert, I think.”

That brought silence. Bard rolled down the window and spat, perhaps not wanting to reveal that the topic of Doug Swaggert inspired unease. Down the road, he said, “It’s fear.”

“What is?”

“The dream you had. The nightmare. It’s job-related fear, fear of violent death, fear of the unknown. That’s what a head doctor would tell you.”

Kurt smiled. “Since when are you a head doctor?”

“Hey, I took a psychology class in high school once. I know about these things. Fear is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s normal for those in our line. These days, a cop’d be crazy not to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid of death,” Kurt said. “Simply because I’ve got no intention of dying anytime soon.”

“Consciously, you’re not. But dreams are unconscious. It’s clear as day, I’m not blaming you. You’re afraid that you’re going to find out what happened to Swaggert, and you’re afraid that when you do, it’ll be too late.”

“You’re right, I am afraid,” Kurt said. It was a sudden, otherworldly response. “I’m scared shitless.”

“You and me both.”

Kurt lit a cigarette. Smoke gushed out of his mouth like an escaping spirit. “So level with me, then. Are you convinced that Doug’s dead?”

“Dead and buried. Murdered by stoners for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And ten to one his body’ll never be found, so we’ll never know exactly what went down. That’s the worst part, if you ask me. Never knowing.”

Kurt pictured Swaggert being buried in the woods by faceless men. He could hear the bite of the shovel.

“But what can you expect in this world?” Bard blabbed on. “The shit we see is nothing, it’s like a lunger in the ocean. We’ve got heroin rings in elementary schools now, child-pornography clubs, cyanide in your Halloween candy, and snuff films in New York for a hundred bucks a show. We’ve got day care centers in California where they sodomize four-year-olds, and we’ve got people in Texas digging up corpses for death orgies. So you tell me, what can you expect?”

“You should write inspirational books, Chief.”

“It’s a freak show.” Bard chuckled abruptly. “The whole fucking world is a fucking freak show.”

««—»»

They parked on the emergency-room side of the hospital. The front lot was scant with police cruisers and EMT trucks. The atmosphere here induced slow steps; they approached the high, lit building as though it were a slaughterhouse. Rain dotted their shoulders and heads. Out front, a county cop was arguing with a younger municipal officer. “It’s your 81, punk,” county said. “The potato chip factory is your jurisdiction.”

“Yeah, but you hogged the call,” the young cop accused. “You county crotch-heads are all the same. Always punting the work to someone else.”

“Town clown.”

“Fish sticks for brains.”

“Get fucked, punk.”

“I get fucked every night. Don’t believe me? Ask your mother.”

Kurt and Bard laughed. They’d heard it all before.

Double doors opened at the touch of their feet. A track line of exploded drops of blood veered right, toward the ER. The light in a candy machine flickered irregularly on and off, on and off. Glen Rodz rose from his seat in a small lobby on the left. He looked shell-shocked.

“Thought you’d never get here,” he said. “The M.E.’s waiting for us. County’s already been called.”

“Fuck the county,” Bard said. “Explain.”

Glen began to mouth a response, but words never materialized. He led them down a shiny, vacant hall to a black door with a chicken-wire window. Hovering on the glass were the words, OFFICE OF THE PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER. Glen entered without knocking.

In the anteroom, they found themselves hemmed in by dented file cabinets, bookshelves, and data processing equipment. Kurt stood unnaturally stiff, pinned to the wall by shadows. On a cork bulletin board ragged with crinkled notes and memos he noticed several misaligned bumper stickers. YES NUKES. GET IN THE SWIM. WARNING: I DON’T BRAKE FOR ANIMALS. Above the desk hung a framed eight-by-ten glossy of Moe, Larry, and Shemp.

“This place looks like a pawn shop,” Bard said. “Where’s the fucking M.E.?”

“Assistant M.E.,” a stocky shadow across the room corrected. “Only assistants get stuck with night duty.”

Glen introduced the shadow to Kurt and Bard as Dr. Greene.

At last moving into the light, Greene more resembled a college student torn between academics and barbells. Very short blond hair and thick glasses created in him a serious if not unfeeling outer cast, yet he dressed shoddily in jeans and desert boots, the kind with the seam down the middle. Beneath his open lab coat he wore an old gray T-shirt centered with the face of Eddie Haskell. Kurt detected an awkward prominence about him—Greene was shorter than average but stood firm as a fire hydrant, with a physique that could’ve been sculpted out of rock, massive shoulders and back tapering to a trim waist. Kurt could easily see this man bending tire irons during periods of extended boredom.

“You guys are cops,” Greene said. “So I assume you’ve been to morgues.”

Kurt and Bard nodded, neither admitting that it had been years.

“The only reason I ask is because I’ve seen it happen too many times.” Greene opened a pint carton of chocolate milk and sipped. “The county morgue isn’t exactly fun for the whole family, I realize that. But I’m always getting these county hot dogs coming in here thinking it’s going to be a lot of laughs. Next thing I know, they’re throwing up like gushers. One time I had a state sergeant come in. Big guy, macho, ‘Death Before Dishonor’ tattoo on his arm. He took one look around and just let ’er rip, running circles around the room with his hand over his mouth, vomit shooting out between his fingers, a regular volcano. He threw up on my lunch, my instruments, and a cadaver’s face.” Quickly, Greene doled to each of them a plastic-lined paper bag. “So that’s the rule of the house—nobody throws up in my morgue. I don’t throw up in your police station, so don’t throw up in my morgue.”

Greene walked to the other side of the room and opened a large gray metal door which no one had noticed in the anteroom’s slabs of shadows. Its doorknob was in the middle, and it bore a sign that read, KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Greene disappeared into a slant of white blaze. “The doorman to hell,” Bard whispered. “Get a load of this guy.” They followed reluctantly, single file.

A high fluorescent fixture veiled them all in flat light. Fumes in the air chafed Kurt’s eyes and reamed his sinuses; he thought of the hot sausages they sold in jars at the Jiffy. “Sorry about the horrible smell,” Greene apologized. “It’s fixation fluid. Trade hazard.”

Kurt felt the blood empty out of his face. The slightly cooler air made his skin tighten. There were no metal drawers here as he’d seen on TV. The room had a bare cement floor potted with crusty drains, and was walled all around by slate-gray tile. Metal shelves occupied one entire wall; they seemed bowed under the weight of countless white five-gallon buckets each taped with various labels as JORES’, ZENKER’S SOLUTION, PHENOL, FORMALIN 20%. A tin tray marked AMYLOID/FAT NECROSIS PREP held several bottles of iodine and copper sulfate. A large sink and heat-sealing iron hung on one wall, and at the opposite wall was another door. Kurt didn’t care to see what was behind it.

“Chief Bard, Officer Morris, Mr. Rodz,” Greene said, extending a hand, “I’d like you to meet Ollie, Nick, and Christine.”

Kurt didn’t get it at first, then it occurred to him that Dr. Greene’s sense of humor kept in line with his job. He’d been introducing them to cadavers which lay on three trough-like tables. All three corpses had been macabrely wrapped in white plastic bags from crotch to head, so that only bare legs were visible. They made Kurt think of bundled meat.

In the middle of the room was the autopsy table, brushed aluminum, with a total scale, inclination and height adjustment, suction lines, and a removable filter trap. “Here she is,” Greene said. He gestured toward the table’s slatted platform.

Kurt felt as though he were standing on someone’s roof when he looked. A skeleton lay stretched across the table—a skeleton for the most part at least, because the frail arrangement of bones seemed flecked and hanging with an indescribable matter which reminded him of creek scum. It was not a clean skeleton. Parts of it glistened wetly in the light.

“This is what I found tonight,” Glen said in a parched tone.

“Where?” Kurt asked. He contemplated his vomit bag.

“Right next to one of the back access roads. Less than a mile from where I found Drucker.”

Greene set his milk down on top of a compact cassette tape recorder. He looked at them, indifferent but speculative. “This could be the missing person you reported.”

“The Fitzwater girl’s only been missing a couple of days,” Kurt told him.

“There’s almost nothing left of it,” Bard added. “It’d take a lot longer than a few days to do this.”

“Not true,” Greene asserted. “This body’s been almost stripped to the bone. It would take weeks for it to rot to this state; putrefaction just doesn’t happen that fast… This body was devoured by animals, which isn’t all that strange in a heavily wooded area. It’s just a little surprising that it could happen so quickly, provided that this is the Fitzwater girl.” Lazily, Greene turned his head, immune to this environment of death. He pointed to the skull with unsettling detachment, and brought to light a rough hole at the back. Kurt felt his stomach flutter when he absorbed the implication. The skull had been bitten open, its contents evacuated.

Greene continued. “This is the only part that really bugs me—no brain. Very clean job, almost like it was scooped out through that hole. At least I’ve never seen a head trauma like this before; and don’t get me wrong, I’m not a zoological expert, but I couldn’t tell you what kind of animal could bite a hole like this in the cranial vault and then get the brain out so cleanly.” He arched a shoulder, unimpressed at even his own grisly revelations. “We’ll see what the boss says in the morning. If he doesn’t know, he’ll find someone who does.”

Kurt winced one last time at the opened skull. It conjured an image of huge, snapping jaws and teeth. “If this person died more than two days ago, then we know it can’t be Donna Fitzwater. Are you going to be able to give us a time of death?”

Greene leaned casually against a bracketed tray cluttered with clamps, scissors, and smudged scalpels. The light reflected off his glasses in opaque white discs and made him look like a misanthropic cartoon character. “This 81 of yours lacks all of the normal major factors by which we determine time of death. We can’t make muscle pH and glycogen readings because there’s not enough muscle left. No way to measure the extent of gas formation in the blood, no way to measure fixation, temperature, or rigor. We can usually narrow TOD down to two or three hours by graphing the potassium levels in the ocular fluids of the eyes. But as you can see—”

“No eyes,” Kurt said.

“No nothing,” Bard said.

“All I can tell you now is that she hasn’t been dead long. One thing we could measure was the state of H₂O retention in the ligaments and tendon ends, plus the absence of sufficient peroxidation—”

“Wait a minute,” Bard interrupted. “You said she. It’s a fucking skeleton. How do you know it’s a she?”

“Sex-chromatin test?” Kurt ventured.

“No,” Greene said. “What little tissue material is left has already turned karyolytic. But that’s all beside the point. You don’t need any of that for a complete skeleton. Basic osteology proves this is a woman. Broad os coxae. Improminent supercilliary ridge. Wide pelvic inlet… She’s a woman, all right. No bout a doubt it.”

No one laughed at Greene’s quip. Kurt could only stare at the twiglike thing on the table. It had been hollowed out, its bones gnawed. “What about age?” he asked. “Dead end?”

Greene seemed to be losing interest fast; he looked ready to fall asleep. “From this, exact age’ll be impossible to determine. We’ve only got guidelines. The fusion state of the epiphyseal plates indicates she’s older than eighteen, while the marginal fusion of the coronal and sagittal sutures in her orbital dome points out that she’s younger than, say, forty.” He picked up a long bivalving knife and tapped the stripped jaw, as if to test its solidity. “Most important of all is that her back row of molars are coming in, so unless she was subject to several superincumbent nutritional deficiencies, she’s more than likely in her early twenties.”

Kurt glanced glumly to Bard. “The Fitzwater girl was twenty-two.”

“Piss,” Bard said. He was a fat, angry mannequin in the ghastly light. “Piss. Cock.” Then, to Greene: “You’re sure of all this?”

“Sure I’m sure,” Greene said. He seemed amused that his competence had been questioned. “Now for the clincher. The most obvious atypical aspect of this 81 was the definite osteoporosis of the lower extremities. So I ordered some X rays and found positive evidence of complete spinal transection. Severe displacement of the upper lumbar group. Fractured neural arch.”

“In other words,” Kurt said, “she was crippled?”

Greene adjusted his glasses. His biceps made his sleeves look stuffed. “Exactly,” he verified. “But it wasn’t a recent fracture. This back injury occurred years ago, maybe many years. Was Donna Fitzwater paraplegic?”

“Yes,” Kurt droned. By now the fumes were making his eyes water. “Her father said she’d been crippled since she was young.”

“Then there’s no doubt that this is Donna Fitzwater,” Bard concluded, bile in his words.

“Unless you’ve got another missing person who’s a girl in her early twenties with a broken back,” Greene said in a long, laborious breath. “Bring in her dental records for positive ID. The M.E. will examine everything in the morning, but he won’t tell you any different.”

Bard glanced around, then looked into his vomit bag and gulped. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, pawing his gut. “My belly’s doing cartwheels.”

“Thanks for your time, Doc,” Kurt said. “We’ll give you a call tomorrow for the preliminary.”

Greene smiled faintly, shaking his head as Kurt, Bard, and Glen made a swift exit. They took long, nearly ludicrous strides until they were in the darkened lobby, a comfortable distance from Green’s facility.

“Fucking place is like a goddamned lab at Auschwitz.” Bard collapsed into a seat. “And how do you like that meat rack in there? You need a Ph.D. in anatomy just to understand the guy. He might as well be talking fucking Swedish.”

“Yeah, but that meat rack saved us a hell of a lot of time,” Kurt said. “At least we don’t have to rush being confused.” The light in the candy machine continued to flicker and buzz. Kurt couldn’t believe they’d put one this close to the morgue, of all places. He blinked rapidly till the sting in his eyes began to subside. He relished air that was free of fixators, and shortly the sick wooziness cleared from his head.

Bard looked like a limp sack in the seat. “For two days straight I’ve been praying that girl would turn up.” Then his voice roughened. “I should’ve known she’d turn up like that.”

“And how are we going to find out what happened to her?” Kurt drew on the complaint. “Unless we find something at Belleau Wood. We don’t even know the cause of death. How can we get a line on who’s responsible?”

Glen spoke for the first time since they’d entered the morgue. Dark circles under his eyes looked like smudges of soot. His voice was dull as wax. “What makes you think there was even a crime committed? Looks to me like she just got dragged off by some dogs or something. A crippled girl wouldn’t stand a chance against wild dogs, even in front of her own home.”

“Yeah, but she wasn’t in front of her own house,” Kurt reminded him. “She wasn’t even outside. Harley Fitzwater said her wheelchair was still by her bed, so even if she wanted to go outside for some fresh air or something, she would have been in the chair. There’s no way this is an accident. Someone entered that trailer and physically removed her.”

Bard and Glen finally surrendered to the conclusion. A drape of silence followed them down the corridor and out into the abandoned parking lot. They walked tilted, like drunks, still slightly warped by the state of affairs in Greene’s shop of horrors.

“I’ll have to call Choate, give him a complete report,” Bard complained. “The fucker’ll have county shirts all over my town.”

Emptiness amplified Glen’s otherwise subdued voice. “Somebody’s going to have to tell Harley Fitzwater that that skeleton back there is probably his daughter.”

“We’ll wait till positive ID is official,” Bard said. “And you’ll have to do some writing for this. County, too.”

“I know,” Glen said, and pulled open his Pinto’s door.

“You log trespassers at Belleau Wood, don’t you?” Kurt interjected.

“Sure.”

“Anything out of the ordinary last night?”

“No. No one on foot, at least.”

“Any smoochers?”

“A few, but that’s not out of the ordinary. I’ll give you the plate numbers tomorrow, and all my logs for the last couple of weeks.”

Kurt and Bard slid into the T-bird. Bard made no attempt to turn the ignition. Instead, he stared past Kurt, out the passenger window. He seemed to be staring at Glen.

“Something’s really starting to smell like a can of shit around here,” the chief said as Glen weaved off the lot.

“Elaborate, huh?”

“You know what I’m talking about.” Bard singled out the ignition key in the dark. “A dug-up coffin, a missing cop, and a crippled girl stripped down to the bones. And look what they all have in common.”

“Maybe I’m just naturally stupid this time of the morning,” Kurt said. “So how about telling me what you’re driving at.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Kurt. Open your fucking eyes. All this shit’s gone down at Belleau Wood. And Glen just happens to work there, and he just happens to be the one finding it all of a fucking sudden.”

“Unless I’m reading you wrong, you’re saying Glen’s got something to do with it, aren’t you? Look, Chief, I’ve known the guy for damn near my whole life; he’s practically a brother, and he’s straight. I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but whatever it is, the idea that Glen’s involved is ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?” Bard retorted, finally starting the car. “Just ’cause we’re friends with the guy doesn’t mean he can’t drop a few bolts. Now, I don’t know what he might be up to, and I’m not saying he’s the perper or anything. But one thing’s certain. Glen sure as hell knows something he’s not telling us.”

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