LAST WEEK: Lisa, the girl River saved from rape, saves him from herself, only to turn to dust in the morning light.
Read last week’s installment here. See all installments here. Read the next installment here.
Chapter 93
River
San Francisco — 1985
Expansion
San Francisco Chronicle
Castro Killer Expands His Range. Teens found Dead in Bernal Heights
Police found the bodies of Stacy Smith (17), and Davie Jones (18), this morning between Bocanna & Bennington Streets in Bernal Heights. The pair had been seen earlier in the night drinking at the Stray Bar, a neighborhood hangout.
Both were in possession of fake driver’s licenses.
Both, according to witnesses, were seen leaving the bar at around 1:00 am.
The bodies had been drained of blood.
“This is very disturbing,” said Officer Johnson of SFPD. “These kids appear to have been murdered in the same way as the Castro Street killings, but these kids were not gay.”
Could this be a copycat killer, or has the Castro Killer expanded his range?
River wonders if their necks had been marred by chains. He peers closely at the grainy black and white photo in the paper, trying to see if there is a white icicle shaped mark on either neck, but the picture is too blurry to tell.
That night, River makes his way to the city morgue. He wonders if they still have Jackson’s body. He wonders if there is a special room for…. He shudders.
It’s way past midnight; the night is cold and clear. A wind blows in from the bay. The morgue is locked. River presses the night button. He hears a distant ring echoing from below. It sounds hollow. He wonders if it is reverberating from the grave. He has no plan besides need. No campaign or strategy, only curiosity and a bag containing a spice muffin and six brownies.
“Yes?” says a voice from a metal box beside the door. It sounds mechanical, inhuman. River is speechless. He has no idea what to say. He is better with his hands, which always seem to find a way his words cannot. If only he could reach through the door and offer the voice a spiced muffin, which yields trust and amity, if only he could extend one of his brownies which promise peace and happy slumber, he knows he would be welcome.
“Jackson,” a voice behind River says. River jumps as Huck swoops down onto his shoulder.
“What,” says the voice. It is flat and metallic, but River hears a question beneath the monotone.
“Jacksonnnn,” Huck repeats, keening the last syllable. The door opens a crack. A fat man peers out. He must be over four hundred pounds. River wonders how he can move. He wonders how he can breathe.
“Slim?” he asks, remembering Jackson’s buddy at the morgue “Slim Ferguson?”
The fat man scowls. The edges of his mouth draw down, causing ripples in the flesh, reminding River of freshly mixed dough.
“Who are you?” he growls.
“I—I—I’m a friend of Jackson’s,” River says.
“Jackson,” Huck echoes. “Jackson.”
“Well if it ain’t the crow man,” Slim says. “Jackson mentioned you. His eyes seem slightly friendlier, but he makes no move to stand aside and let River in.
“I was… uh… Have a muffin?” River says, extending the bag containing the spice muffin and six brownies. Slim’s eyes narrow suspiciously, but his nostrils expand with the aromas of spice, chocolate, and friendship.
“Well,” he says. “Jackson did say you were a mighty fine baker.” He eats the muffin in two bites. Before he even swallows, a grin breaks over his face.
“I just wanted to meet you,” River says, “Jackson always talked about you. About what a great friend you were and… I miss him. I just kind of wanted some contact with someone else who was his friend.”
“Well…” Slim says. “It’s against regulations but…” The bag is open between them. Without Slim even noticing, his hands reach for a brownie.
“I guess it won’t hurt if you just come in and sit at the front desk for a bit.”
“Go, Huck,” River raises his arm, shaking Huck skyward. With a squawk of indignation, Huck shoots upward.
Slim opens the door and waddles over to a desk. River wonders how he’ll fit behind it, but Slim squeezes in. He appears boneless. On the desk is a clipboard, an old-fashioned black phone, and a large set of keys. To the left of the desk is a metal door.
“Do you still have Jackson here?” River asks. He’s not sure if this is a proper question. He doubts that Slim will answer, but the muffins have worked their magic.
“Yep,” Slim replies mournfully. “They’re all still here.”
Slim eats the brownies—all six. His eyelids droop from the weight of waiting dreams. They flutter and close. His mouth opens; bits of chocolate line his gums like dark mortar. A loud snore escapes his throat, fluttering the papers on the clipboard.
River slowly reaches over and picks up the keys. He creeps to the door and inserts a key, cupping the others in his hand to keep them silent. It doesn’t turn.
“Hey,” Slim growls, “What…” River freezes, holding his breath.
“What the… kittens,” Slim coos happily. “Furry orange kittens.” He is sleeping.
River exhales and tries another key. It goes in but won’t turn either. River tries a third, accompanied by the guttural music of Slim’s dreams. It too fails to budge. He inserts a fourth, panic rising. This one works.
The door is heavy, about four inches thick. A long narrow staircase leads down into darkness. River wonders how Slim manages to fit down it. He wonders how Slim can climb up it. He closes the door softly behind him. He is in total darkness. Feeling his way slowly along the wall, carefully tapping his feet to see where the stairs begin, he finds a light switch. Harsh fluorescence floods the stairwell.
This light would make anyone look dead, River thinks. As he descends the stairs, it grows colder.
The stairs end in a dim blue hallway with three doors on either side. The first squints at him with an unfriendly metal keyhole. River tries three keys before he finds the right one. His fingers are white with cold.
I wonder if this is how Pamela always feels, he thinks. He wants to warm Pam in his arms right now. He wants to be away from the blue, unnatural light, and the shadow of death. He wants to feel less and know more.
Inside the room are three tables. White sheets lie over bodies. They look like snow-covered mountains. Pairs of pale blue feet extend toward River, a metal tag attached to each big toe. He feels sick.
On the wall is an open shelf divided by bars. Each cubby contains a body. The sickly-sweet smell of meat and rot lies under the harsh astringent scent of antiseptic. River tries not to gag. He holds his breath. Walking to the first body, he pulls down the sheet.
A face white as bone stares back behind lidded eyes. The sight of that face, so soulless, so empty, wrenches his heart and turns his stomach. He hurriedly covers it and peeks under the next sheet. It is a young girl; golden hair frames her face. She looks like a beautiful waxen doll. River turns away, trying to swallow the bile that rises in his throat. In trying to pull the sheet over her without looking, his hand brushes her skin. It’s cold and clammy. He rushes from the room and bends over in the corridor, inhaling deeply, trying to calm his body, trying to forget.
After a moment, he straightens and walks to the next door. He reaches for the knob and shudders. His hand slides off and hangs limply at his side. He looks down the corridor: six rooms in all. He doesn’t think he can bear to go through six more rooms in the halls of the dead. The blue light reminds him of pictures he’s seen of ice caves. He’s shivering now, teeth chattering, but whether from cold or fear, he isn’t certain.
He walks to the last door, inserting a key. It opens on the first try. This room is larger than the other. Cots lie in rows. River pulls back a sheet. A young man lies before him. It is hard to tell what age he is. Death has made him timeless. He seems cut of marble, finely boned face trimmed by a neat dark beard. Around his neck is the delicately engraved indentation of a chain. Over his breastbone, an absence of pigment forms a pale stalactite mark that glows like a star. River’s nose twitches. The smell is fragrant, redolent of the white gardenias so popular at high-school dances. But no one is dancing here. The smell seems wrong, out of place, a mockery. The more River smells it the worse it seems, worse even than the too, too sickly-sweet scent of rotting flesh.
River covers the man. He pulls back another cloth and the ashen face of Jackson lies before him. He is almost unrecognizable, all that pink color gone. Tears drop from River’s eyes, scarring Jackson’s chest with regret and words left unspoken. River blinks, shaking his head. Jackson’s neck is unmarked. But over his heart is a white pointed scar.
“Good-bye, my friend,” River murmurs, “Rest in peace.”
River pulls the sheets from the next two cots at once. He needs to see more, but longs to go. He wants to be out in the air. He wants to see Huck, flying with abandon in an endless sky. He wants to be away from the never-ending stillness.
A girl and boy not more than sixteen, he thinks, though death has made them ageless, lie side by side. River looks at their young, pale faces. He’s seen such white flesh, but before it has always been radiant, glowing from within like a star covered by skin. They are alabaster, luminous as the perfect strangers who dance with Gabriel in the night, flawless as Gabriel himself, perfect and unmarked as Pamela’s body under moonlight.
The girl has short, spiky, black hair, obviously dyed. Her nose and lip are pierced. As River brushes the sheet from the girl’s neck, his fingers graze her skin. It’s cold and firm. He sees holes, dark points in her neck, and there, just below her ear, so faint it is like a shadow of light, is a white scar.
River wonders if the chain marks have something to do with sexuality. All the victims before Jackson had been gay, and all the victims had been marked. But neither Jackson nor the teens have been so branded. That small icicle scar that seems to glow with inner fire is there… on all but the boy. River reaches out to pull the sheet further down. Maybe the scar is there and he has just missed it.
He hears a noise. He hurriedly pulls the sheets over them. Footsteps are advancing toward the room. He hears a key in the lock. He is trapped. He feels like one of the young, cornered animals he’d used to find in the woods. One of the tables is empty. The sheet is thrown back. He vaults onto it, pulling the covering over his face, lying as still as the quick and the dead.
The door opens. He hears footsteps, voices, the sounds of metal scraping metal and the rasp of sawing. He does not want to understand the sound. The scent of death, of flesh, of formaldehyde, and rotting gardenias cloud his mind like premonition. He tries not to picture what is happening, to close his mind to sound and scent. He fights to keep from retching. He battles to keep silent. Finally, the noises cease. He hears the snap of plastic gloves and running water. The door opens and closes. Footsteps recede down the hall, the sound growing fainter and fainter like a fading heartbeat.
River throws off the sheet and rolls off the table. In the metal sink is a bucket. It’s filled with something he does not want to see, something pale and twisted, something from a butcher’s shop in a nightmare.
He vomits violently, splattering the spotless floor and gleaming metal instruments with coffee colored bile.
Muttering an apology to empty space, he staggers toward the door. The hallway is empty. He stumbles up the stairs, feeling his way in the dark.
Slim is still asleep at his desk, the papers on the clipboard quivering with dreams. River sets the keys on the desk.
He runs into the welcoming night, stomach heaving, bent double, sick with the stench of mortality. With a happy caw, Huck circles down, gently landing on his shoulder.
How did those people get into the morgue when I had the key? Why didn’t they wake Slim? River wonders. And then he knows. They must have been down there the entire time.
The thought of them walking in while he was bent over the dead makes him feel even sicker.
Of course there would be people at work; it is, after all, a public morgue.
He feels like an idiot. His body needs to expel the fear of capture, the smell of death, and the sensation of emptiness. He heaves again and again, but there is nothing inside.
Watch the author read this week’s installment in the video below:
NEXT WEEK: Where do old gods and vanquished monsters go, these creatures born from fear around a night fire? Do they wither under the fluorescent reality of a light bulb, or do they linger in the imagination, leaving an after-image burned onto the retina?
Edited by Mitchelle Lumumba and Sophie Gorjance.
E.E. King is cohost of the MetaStellar YouTube channel's Long Lost Friends segment. She is also a painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld and Flametree. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on MetaStellar's YouTube channel. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at ElizabethEveKing.com and visit her author page on Amazon.