bad.
“Hey, Kulk. Wanna see something new?”
“I already seen your suit,” Kulky said.
“No, this ain’t the suit. This is something so new, nobody except me’s ever seen it. So when you see it, you’ll be the second.”
“Take much time? I’m busy.”
“A minute.”
“Cost me anything?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Finlayson reached into his inside coat pocket. From it, he pulled a good-sized rat.
“Get that fuckin’ thing outta here!” Kulky snapped. “Ya want me to lose my license?”
“Just wait a second, Henry boy, please.”
Kulky reached beneath the bar for his bat but before he could grab it, Fin placed the rat on the worn wood and clapped his hands. The rat stood at attention like a rookie cop.
“Hut!”
With a squeak, the rat ran over his right hand, up his coat sleeve, across his shoulders, and down his left arm. Finlayson again shouted, “Hut,” and the rat stopped cold.
Kulky brought the bat from beneath the bar but didn’t raise it.
“Hut, hut!”
Fin held his arms a few inches above the bar and the rat jumped over them both and then returned, jumping to and fro until he whistled for it to stop. He took an old baseball from his pocket, placed it on the bar, and clapped again. The rat leaped onto the ball, rolling it across the bar like an elephant in the circus. He double-clapped and the rat turned, rotating the ball back toward him. Finlayson opened his coat and whistled once more. With a powerful spring, the rat leaped from the bar and back into the pocket, where it disappeared.
“Hey,” Kulky said, “that’s pretty good.”
“It’ll be better,” Finlayson said, “with an orchestra.”
GHOST WALK BY CARY HOLLADAY
I.
In a basement in a stone house in Chestnut Hill, Frances Watkins, aged seventeen, and her mother are treated to a tour of an unusual collection: a group of preserved bodies owned by Vaughan Beverly, who is the widowed Mrs. Watkins’s fiance.
Vaughan gestures to a glass-topped casket and says, “This woman turned to soap.”
Frances feels sick. The dinner at the restaurant where Vaughan took them was rich and heavy, and she drank too much champagne. She wishes her mother had never met Vaughan Beverly on his mysterious trips to Baltimore, where Frances and her mother resided. Tomorrow, her mother will marry Vaughan Beverly, and this is the house where they will live together. I won’t stay here, Frances vows. Not with dead people in the basement. She and her mother have known about them: Vaughan boasted of them at the party where Frances and her mother first met him, at the home of wealthy relatives. Vaughan is a man of science, everyone says.
Her mother acts as if it’s a grand joke, these bodies. Maybe after the wedding, her mother will come to her senses and have them taken away. Surely it is wrong to have them here, as if they are of no more consequence than Vaughan’s display cases of butterflies and beetles, with their carefully printed labels. Vaughan collects many things-guns, knives, and trophies of exotic animals. Last night, Frances stayed up late in his extraordinary library, reading about birds.
The basement is furnished as beautifully as the rest of the house, with electric lights, upholstered couches, and paintings on the walls. Frances can’t help but be intrigued. “She turned to soap?” she asks, peering through the glass. The cadaver is naked except for strips of cloth over its breasts and loins, and it appears whitish- gray.
“Tell us about her, Vaughan,” says Mrs. Watkins gleefully. She sips from a glass of wine and places a hand confidingly on her fiance’s arm.
Vaughan pats her hand and says, “She died of yellow fever, probably in the epidemic of 1792, and was buried near the river. Some of those old cemeteries filled up with water. This woman, being rather rotund, well, her fat combined with chemicals in the wet earth. The substance is called adipocere. It’s much like lye soap.”
Frances’s mother repeats, “Adipocere. What a lovely word. It sounds French. Like an exclamation,
To look at a dead body is shocking, Frances thinks. To look at a person dead more than a hundred years is astonishing. She asks Vaughan, “How do you know she’s soap?” She imagines Vaughan in a bathtub, humming and lathering. She heard him humming last night, while she searched for towels in a cupboard in the hallway outside his lavatory. Strange that in a house so ornate and well-appointed, there are no servants.
“I have washed with her,” says Vaughan. He laughs, and Frances’s mother joins in. Vaughan adds, “If you mix a bit of this body with some crushed lavender, it’s the finest soap you’ll ever have. I can open the case, Frances, and you can pinch off a piece.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right,” Frances says.
Frances feels light-headed, and she assumes it’s from the company of the dead. Vaughan’s collection includes a mummified woman and baby, a pickled horror of indeterminate gender floating in formaldehyde, and a remarkably fresh-looking boy about Frances’s age.
Vaughan thumps the glass cover of the casket holding the boy. “Meet the Young Master,” he says. “He was almost certainly a soldier. He turned up near the site of the Mower Hospital, a Civil War hospital in this neighborhood which was torn down after the war.”
“Turned up?” asks Frances, determined to challenge him. “Did you dig for him?”
“He was brought to me,” says Vaughan, “and I have given him a home. He was already embalmed. Someone did a first-rate job. All I had to do was clean him up and put clothes on him. He was naked. I found this uniform in the attic, and it fits as if made for him.”
Frances dares to ask, “Does the constable know these people are here?”
Frances’s mother frowns at her.
“The authorities have enjoyed this same tour,” says Vaughan. He points to a table pushed into a corner. “We’ve played poker here, with the soap lady and the Young Master looking on.”
Frances feels Vaughan’s fingers on her back, just the lightest pressure. She has felt the fingertips before, and has assumed the touch was an accident. Does her mother see? No, her mother is absorbed by the Young Master. Vaughan takes the empty wine glass from her mother’s hand and slips an arm about her shoulders.
He says, “He’s one of those people who just don’t rot.”
“Who brought him to you?” Frances asks.
“An old fellow who used to be a guard at the hospital. I’ll introduce you to him, if you like. He has wonderful stories. The hospital was the best in the nation. If you got shot or got sick, it was where you hoped to go. We’ll stroll over to the grounds some time.”
Frances returns to the soap woman and gazes at the mute face, its closed, webbed-looking eyes, the dark pit of the slightly open lips. The glass is cloudy over the mouth, as if the soap woman breathes now and again.
