Wolf at the Door
“You know me, my sources always stay anonymous.”
Yeah, most of them stay anonymous because they never existed in the first place.
The quick comeback, the zinger that leaves the room gasping. Signature moves to be sure, and also the kind that left Larry stuck in a bed up at St. Ignatius for three weeks.
They had a couple of baseball bats, an old lead pipe, a length of bike chain, and a whole lot of fists and kicking feet. All Larry brought to the party was his mouth and the first solid punch.
Five broken bones including his left forearm, his right wrist, two ribs, and his left cheek bone. It all healed up, and quick enough to impress the docs but there was stuff the docs couldn’t fix.
Larry gets these blinding headaches, migraines really. The miserable things set on him constantly and for seemingly ridiculous reasons. Too much direct sun light means a bad day. Too long between meals, bad day. Too much food at once, bad day. Too much of any food that actually tastes good? Real bad day. Neighbors too noisy, bad day. Car horns blaring incessantly out on the avenue, bad day. Neighbors dog barks for hours? You guessed it, bad day.
There’s also the anxiousness, the constant anxiety that grips at Larry’s nerves and leaves them frayed and on end. He doesn’t sleep much anymore and when he does the nightmares are astounding. It wasn’t the first beating Larry took for speaking up, speaking out, or just plain old picking a fight, but it was the worst beating he ever took.
A significant part of Larry, something that seems to live deep in his head somewhere behind his eyes, looks at everyone and everything as if it might lead to the next and even worse beating. That shitty part of his brain left him being a fence sitter these days, a milquetoast, a real yes, and fuddy duddy.
“I just got past probation with this job. I’m not in a hurry to go start another one just yet.”
“Larry, it’s like you aren’t even hearing me. You’re off the record, no one is going to know who spilled. I’m just looking to confirm what everybody already knows.”
“Then just go ahead and write it, Ronnie. I’m not talking about what came in today.”
The jackass actually had the audacity to look hurt until Larry finished talking. “So, it is a what. Not a he or a she?”
Larry looked up at the sickly pale light above the door and motioned over to the two wagons that deliver the days goods. “Everything that comes in here is a what. There’s no point using polite formalities in a place like this.”
Ron kept on squawking but it was barely worth paying attention to. Their relationship was longer than most in Larry’s life yet Ron had a way of blustering and threatening when he didn’t get his way.
“Alright, you’re outta here in, what, four hours? I’ll just ask the day shift for the scoop then.”
Yep, right on time, the bluster, and the threat.
“Yeah, okay, Ron. You do that.”
The day shift was the big cheese and a nervous little man named Higgins, with a name like that, is it even worth explaining? Ron won’t be getting any scoops from the day crew and he knows it.
Larry already has the door open, the distinct odor of his latest dead-end job greeting him and making him wince instinctively, when Ron shouts: “Hey, you coming to Barb’s party on Friday?”
No. Nope. Definitely no chance in hell. Larry wasn’t particularly fond of people before the beating of a lifetime, but now? The idea of a room full of people clamoring around a buffet table trying to imitate some private social variation on water cooler talk made Larry’s neck feel stiff and his guts feel loose.
“Yeah, unless something happens here and they need…me.”
“Jesus Larry, you were going to say more bodies, weren’t you?”
Larry didn’t respond beyond shrugging his head and stepping through the door into the pale yellow/green light that always washed over the interior of the place.
“Just show up, ok. Barb will be pissed if you don’t at least make an appearance.”
Ron wasn’t wrong. Barbara would be pissed, on the other hand she was practically a stranger now, everyone felt like a stranger these days.
The signs near the side exit door explained everything the particularly unobservant would have failed to notice outside, to the left there is:
Chemical Storage
Dressing Room/Showers
Coolers
Loading Dock
And dead ahead:
Lobby and Viewing
Coroner’s Office
Records Room
The place was small by industry standards, especially for the size of the city. If they had to bring everyone in all at once, say a car pileup or a building collapse, the best they could manage would be six a day, maybe eight if no one cared if things got sloppy. As for the coolers, twenty-four decedents maximum but if we’re being honest, more like eighteen. One of the coolers is always on the way out waiting for a new compressor to get budgeted in for the month and there were always a few unclaimed wretches waiting to collect frost in every joint and fold until the city relented and paid to have them buried in the potter’s field.
Larry makes sure to shut the door behind him, no use in letting Ron or some other ghoul have a wayward peek at the goods. Strangers taking peeks is what got Larry his last pink slip. The son of a bitch sounded so sincere, he had a worn looking little teddy bear and an I.D. that matched the name of the deceased, fucker even had a ready to go sob story about being an estranged relative who wasn’t going to be welcome at the funeral but who just wanted to pay his last respects.
Son of a bitch even offered to seal the deal with a crisp $50 dollar bill and knew to act slightly put off that it took money to loosen Larry’s sense of dedication to his work. Still, Larry knew better than to just screw off reading a magazine or taking a smoke break. There were some real sickos out there in the world, working in a morgue taught you that much, and not just the obvious sort of sickos.
You had your treasure hunters who wanted something off of them, your keepsake takers who just wanted a trophy from the room. The specialty cases that wanted to talk to the things and pet their hair, or the ones that wanted to just shout at or slap one because they were too meek to do that sort of thing to someone who was still living. Some of it sounded innocent enough, at first, but it all came from the same sick, dark place.
Solemn reverence in the front of the house, solemn slaughterhouse in the back.
Jack Newman, the cutter at the first morgue Larry worked at, that was his slogan and the old guy really knew the industry and what he was talking about. Dead people were meat; gross, smelly, oozy meat, but they used to be people and you couldn’t forget that. You had to remain detached, solemn.
Larry stayed solemn in the back of the dressing room with the son of a bitch, still feeling the edge of the bill stuffed in his pants pocket when the guy started apologizing to the body about missing its last birthday and how he and its mom had a falling out over loaned money that never got repaid. The son of a bitch started coughing and asked Larry for a drink of water. That should have been the giveaway. Once people, break the ice, so to speak, they can’t stop. People who can’t even carry a conversation with other people learn that the dead are downright pleasant to talk to. Everyone wants a still, stayed face to whisper their dark secrets too. Someone they could pretend was the father who never apologized for what they did. A mother who died on them way too early in life. That was the biggest pitfall in the body game. Something ole’ Jack didn’t tell Larry about but then again, Jack used to call all the younger female ones Martha and Larry would hear ole’ Jack talking to them, pretending they were all her, the one love of the old man’s life, the one who died on him and left a giant whole where love and life should have been.
The nearest sink anyone would want a cup of water from was the washroom and Larry nearly jogged there and back. It didn’t matter. The son of a bitch was already there at the table, both of his traveling hands running up underneath the sheet that covered the corpse.
Larry didn’t think about his next move once he entered the room with the paper cup of water in hand. The beating was thorough, the look on the son of a bitch’s face went from the embarrassed shock of being caught in the act to abject terror before the cup of water hit the floor. Larry hit the man until he stopped raising his arms to block the punches, he hit the man until the sounds of his fist became wet, like the sound of a large chuck roast being tenderized, only with the occasional whimper and the log snoring sound of the son of a bitch trying to suck in air through all the blood and the snot.
Two broken fingers, a sprained wrist, and his job, that was his cost and the lesson learned for Larry. The son of a bitch never pressed charges, but who would under those circumstances?
The walk to the coolers wasn’t a long one but Larry took his time. This one was different than most, hell, it was downright off putting. Harlan brought it in just as Larry was coming on and Dr. O’Shea was standing calmly next to the grotesquerie by the time Larry came into the viewing area.
“Mr. Zolinski, please come in. I’m aware that Mr. Marschke has already mentioned the obvious state of the decedent to you since you have entered without being called. I hope I don’t have to remind you that as a very recent employee of this municipality you, as are we all, sworn to protect not only the identities but the details of the conditions of all our decedents here.”
There was no question at the end of that very long sentence. The coroner was a snob and an officious prick but as was often the case, the asshole wasn’t wrong. Harlan had a big mouth, Higgins was a tattle tale, and Larry, well, Larry was a problem and the good Dr. had made sure right from jump street to let Larry know he was hired and retained only on suffrage.
The radio hasn’t said anything outright, yet, just a mention of a body found out by the gorge but Ronnie has already come calling and he’s just the local paper.
Larry took a deep breath at the thought of what his shift the next night might look like. More guys like Ronnie, but worse, real sharks with money to wave around and probably real threats to make as well.
The body was in cooler number nine. Larry didn’t have to go open the door and take a peek to know what was there. He was pretty sure the image of it would be locked in his memory for a few months at least, especially when he tried to close his eyes in the vain attempt to sleep come morning.
The body wasn’t dry but it hadn’t been found near water. The whole mess was covered in a fine sheen of fluid that the good Dr. hadn’t decided to officially ascertain before he left for the day.
“Maybe it’s sweat, I heard they can do all kinds of shit, you know, after.” Harlan had stuck around to gawk and offer his own unwarranted opinions on the odd case after the body had been sealed and stored for the mornings autopsy.
“They fart, all the damn time, some burp too. I know a guy over in Emerson who swears one of them talked, just like, a few words, but still.”
It wasn’t sweat. The body hadn’t decomposed but it was dead, good and. Corpses didn’t sweat. The sheen of the stuff might have been easy to recognize as sweat but given the state of the skin, well.
“Plasma, it was leaking it out of every pore. You saw the thing, there was just burnt, brown, garbage where all the skin should have been.”
Harlan had been a body man for a few years, he knew a burn victim when he saw one, he also knew well enough to know about floaters and the ones nearly so far gone by rot that they tried to come apart on you when you moved them.
“Fuck that, Larry. There was no char on that thing. It wasn’t burnt, more like burst, like from the inside maybe, but still, that was still skin. I know, I had to touch it when I went out to bag it. It was leathery, tough too. I think it was sweat, that’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
Larry nodded along. More out of a sense of wanting the grim conversation to be over with than agreeing. Corpses didn’t sweat, he didn’t know everything, maybe not even as much as Harlan with all his years of bagging and boxing them but he knew that much.
“That face too, am I right? Deformed, he had to be.”
Even remembering the conversation seemed an awful hill to climb. Harlan pointed out the awful, rictus visage of the grand grotesque.
In life the man must have been bald, during a fire hair burns into the skin around it leaving little patterns of curls and squiggly lines most of the time. The top of the head looked smooth, and yet thick, maybe Harlan was onto something with the whole leathery remark. The ridge of the brow was prominent, so much so that the corpse could have been mistaken for some Cro-Magnon display at a museum. The ears were elongated with exaggerated lobes, they reminded Larry of something you might give to a dog as a chew toy. The eyes were narrow and set back behind that massive brow. In life the man likely looked fierce or very intent at the least. The nose by contract was flat and wide, comically so, it was the only feature that gave any levity to the whole affair.
The wound however, the size and sheer amount of damage done by the shotgun made properly explaining the man’s jaw and mouth difficult. Not only was the wound gruesome and hard to look at on its own but the size of the man’s mouth must have been outrageous. If left intact there is no doubt in Larry’s mind that the man’s jaw would have been half again as wide as the rest of his face. He would have looked like Mr. Hyde from the monster movie, only not quite. Most of the mouth and right side of the man’s jaw had been mangled beyond recognition by the gun blast but there were still a few teeth stuck stubbornly in their gums along the left side of the man’s exasperated and grim grin.
Larry knew dogs, he grew up around them, most of the kids on his block had one or two and there were always strays running around, especially out by the dump and the mill. The corpse had too many sets of teeth that looked like canines, he had three of those stumpy dagger teeth, upper and lower, just like a dog.
Thankfully, the rest of the corpse was covered by a sheet from the chest down. Larry didn’t even want to consider what the rest of the man looked like but there was no arguing that burned or no, plasma or sweat, deformed or simply very, very ugly, the man was the color of clay mud, reddish brown and yes, leathery all over like a well-worn coat.
Larry found himself lost in uneasy thoughts and making unnatural conclusions. He was at work and he had work to do. Dr. O’Shea would arrive in the morning along with his lick spittle assistant and the grotesque man would be examined, dissected, studied, and left in Larry’s care to be washed, bagged, and left in long term cold storage until the cops found some next of kin or the county coughed up the cash to have the body planted on the cheap.
“Solemn reverence in the front of the house, solemn slaughterhouse in the back.”
Larry whispered the slogan and continued past the coolers to the washing station were Mrs. Collier awaited him. Eighty-three and died in her sleep from natural causes, postman noticed the milk was still sitting on her stoop and knocked and called out and here we are. No oddity, no disaster, no suddenly saddened loved ones hovering around and making ridiculous demands. Best part too, for Larry, no private mortuary ghouls to have to contend with either. Collier’s kids were grown and moved far away and they seemed perfectly happy to pay the county a modest fee to do what it does best.
Washing them was easy, dressing them less so, the county didn’t employ stylists so that awful spectacle was left up to the best intentions of men like Larry. Most of Larry’s nights after cleaning and disinfecting the morgue was spent rinsing, drying, and dressing, well, dead meat.
The family wanted a final photo, easy enough to do and it added an extra two dollars to Larry’s wallet but it also meant he had to put the old lady in a dress the family picked out. The dress in question was probably twenty years and twenty pounds prior to the saggy state Mrs. Collier found herself in at death but well, being dead did wonders for one’s figure. He had four hours for this job and that should be more than enough time. Yet, there was the awful specter of the thing in cooler number nine to contend with.
Mrs. Collier awaited and Larry began by dutifully pulling at her corpse until it was in the right position on the drain table. A quick rinse, she didn’t have any wounds and there was thankfully no need to avoid fresh autopsy stitches as there was certainly no need to do an autopsy on an eighty-three-year-old woman who died of natural causes. The family was okay with paying to have the old woman buried but they balked at the embalming costs. Even better than no autopsy incisions to have to worry about filling up with water, there would be no embalming channels to avoid or have to cover up with the spackling compound.
Larry saw a hand.
The hose was already pulled out of its catch atop the sink basin at the end of the drain table and the cold water was already washing over the corpse as Larry realized he saw the grotesque’s hand, if briefly.
Dr. O’Shea had said his peace and was pushing past the grotesque body, leaving Harlan to transfer the awful thing to a cooler slab. The Dr.’s coat caught something and there was a moment of hesitation before he got free from the thing.
The hand was long, too long by far for a normal human hand, the palm was longer than the fingers and they were thick sausages each worthy of a bun at a baseball game. There was hair there too. So much for the fire theory. There were weedy patches of black, wiry hair running up and down the back of the hand and down to the spaces between the finger joint and the first knuckle.
Larry felt a migraine coming on. That wasn’t fair. Sometimes the lights did him in, the dim yellow bulbs overhead would force him to strain to see, that only happened when he was trying to read though, the shower room and the coolers were brighter than the rest of the place. He turned off the water and closed his eyes, it was happening, one of his little episodes. He nearly had one when Ronnie was getting shitty outside. The anxiety began to chew at the wiring in his head and the panic threatened to roll over him like a tidal wave.
The sound of water dribbling in the sink, that was something to focus on. There was the sound of a radio in the distance as well. Larry liked to catch the last news cast of the night while eating his lunch and often as not he would forget to turn it off. The sound was too far away to make out but given the time it was likely one of the old talkies, some radio play or comedy hour that was already old news when Larry was a kid before the war.
The worst of the personal torments was beginning to subside when Larry heard a thump.
Everyone in Larry’s line of work had their run ins with the heebie jeebies. It paid to be a scientific and rational man. Best to close one’s eyes; screw ‘em shut’s more like it. Best to just breath, long and deep, keep those eyes shut and those breaths coming and more than anything else, keep that miserable, angry brain quiet.
Another thump sounds out and Larry is suddenly sure he knows were it’s coming from. Could there be any wonder? Someone, something, has woken up in the darkest dark, the smallest space, the cold coffin before the real one that waits down in the earth with the hungry worms. Something is working to get out and let’s face it folks, no one is putting in too much work making sure the dead stay put. The coolers don’t even have locks here, why would they?
Larry opens his eyes and resists the urge to run. Run from what? There is nothing making a thumping sound. The lack of sleep is catching up, the problems that came after that last and worst altercation are simply leaking out into the real world and trying to grow teeth. No. Best to have it over with and shut the devil up for the remainder of his nights work.
First though, and yes, before meeting up with the gnashing undead awaiting their next squirming meal. Finish the rinse. Larry turns the water back on and finishes rinsing the body down before leaving it to air dry so it can be transferring for dressing.
The walk to the coolers is done with a very thin air of confidence as Larry tries not to hyperventilate or let his watery bowels loosen any further. There is no third thump. No awful pounding as though something beyond comprehension has come back from the dead to wreak havoc on mankind.
Larry walks up to the drawer door of cooler number nine and reaches out to open it before he remembers that opening the door would mean seeing the grotesque once more and this time far closer up than the last time. Instead, he opts to walk out and up the hall to shut the radio off. Was the thumping coming from the radio? Of course not, but then again, was there any real thumping to begin with.
Larry whispers to himself as he makes his way back to the dressing room. “Great. I get to add hallucinations to the growing pile of bullshit my life has become.”
Toweling off the corpse and slowly trying to get its heavy limbs and many folds to press into the sausage casing of the avocado-colored dress became the focus of the next hour or so. Larry labored slowly to get nearly every flabby pound of Mrs. Collier pressed between two thick layers of a dress that felt and looked like couch upholstery. There were three wigs that Larry had to choose from because let’s face it, no one wanted to see the patchy piles of thin grey straw that the old lady still had clinging to her flakey scalp. Light blonde was the go-to for the younger ones whose hair was too far gone to just comb through. The brown wig was for everyone darker than buttermilk, and that left Larry with the dark blonde wig.
Dishwater blonde was an ugly term but it wasn’t inaccurate. Larry somehow doubted that Mrs. Collier had ever been a blonde but well, any wig is better than none at all when it concerns most of the dead that came through there. Plus, the wig was only for the photo, hopefully no one compared too many side by sides of the last photos of their dearly departed taken at the country morgue or there might be some questions.
Larry’s trusty Polaroid was both the camera of choice and the only one on hand. A quick staging of some silk plants from the lobby and the dark brown curtain pulled closed over a window that mostly overlooked a brick wall made a somewhat convincing back drop. The scene looked enough like a funeral home showing room that you didn’t have to know it was just some props and a corpse still loaded on a rolling table that would be taken from the dressing rooms next door directly into the coolers.
The last faces that would look upon Mrs. Collier would be Harlan as he struggled to load her into the wagon and then the faces of the groundskeepers at the cemetery who would load her into a thin pine box before unceremoniously plopping her into the cold, cold ground.
If ever there was a grim thought to mull over while taking a picture of a freshly washed and Sunday best dressed corpse. Even more grim, what was the last thing Mrs. Collier looked at?
No. Those kinds of thoughts were as pointless as they were counterproductive. It’s already been a hell of a shift, long and fraught with the sorts of publicity that men like Larry get into the body game to avoid for oh so many reasons.
Larry puts the camera down on a side table and prepares to move the silk plants back into the lobby when he notices the eyes. Mrs. Collier’s heavy lids are open. Not slowly slid up to half mast like the eyes of corpses are sometimes known to do unless properly glued shut. No, the corpses lifeless eyes are rolled open wide and looking at everything and nothing all at once.
Did I fucking forget to use the glue?
Did Mrs. Collier forget to die?
Larry pondered a few hard-hitting questions before he looked down at his camera. The film wasn’t that expensive but every negative he had to get developed was another cut out of his two-dollar bump for the nights added labor.
The rim of the glue container in his kit looked gummy, it always did. He glued her shut, he always did, just after fixing the jaw shut, just before putting on the wig.
Larry gloved up and dabbed his glue directly onto the dry, milky spheres of Mrs. Colliers lifeless eyes before pushing the lids down over them and then pinching it all closed, just a little longer that second time around. The family was paying two dollars for a final photo, one last, slightly exaggerated version of their departed mothers last form of life. No one was paying two dollars for a black and white photo of a corpse with its unnerving, everywhere and nothing stare.
No sooner had Larry snapped the shot and lowered the camera than he saw those cursed milky eyes once more. Mrs. Collier wasn’t staring off into nowhere though. Those awful eyes, gluey and runny and…wet. Those eyes stared directly at Larry with a look of reprisal, loathing, and yes, rage.
Mrs. Collier lurched, just a bit, her gnarled right hand twitched and she moaned, it wasn’t much, barely enough to register above the sickening pounding of Larry’s heart as it thumped in his throat.
Larry didn’t need to consider the situation. Harlan had loaded her up, he had a running mouth but he was a professional. Dr. O’Shea pronounced her and set her out for Larry to prepare and store, Dr. O’Shea was certainly a professional. People being pronounced dead who weren’t was a Victorian era thing, a myth body men spread around to scare the piss out of the new guys. Larry had washed and dressed the body, he had gotten closer, more intimate with the old lady than anyone had likely been in years, hell decades maybe. Mrs. Collier was waxy, clammy, cold to the touch, fucking dead.