“If she really did it, and if no one noticed, she must have been very, very good. She would have treated the bodies to resist decomposition, then sealed and moulded them to the precise shape of the murder victims they were meant to displace on display. It’s all like a gruesome parody of something. Of death itself?”
“Murder victims disguised as murder victims — it’s unspeakably grotesque.” In spite of herself, Miranda could see the black humour. “Can you imagine her hanging out at The Nag’s Head or The Bunch of Grapes? She’d be eyeballing the clientele for who would make the best corpse.”
“Picking up Shelagh would have been a deadly affair.”
“She picked up women, too, you know. By my count she did five, altogether: two men and three women.”
“If you can trust her notes,” said Morgan, who would have preferred not to. “She even enjoyed the existential implications of dealing with the discards. Stripped of their bloodied costumes and rouged to make them appear less dead, they became anonymous in the storage rooms among fallen rock stars, disgraced royalty, and yesterday’s politicians.”
“Surely disgraced royals were kept on view.”
“The hard part was getting the bodies there, I would think.”
“You were reading too quickly, Morgan. Her victims came of their own accord, after hours. She did a Ph. D. at Oxford, postdoc at London; she knew how to turn on the charm, English-wise. She would lead them on an esoteric adventure, their visits shrouded in secrecy. Who could resist the chance for a clandestine tour of the Chamber of Horrors? That was her lure: not sex — morbid curiosity. Death on display.”
“That seems familiar! What I find upsetting is how easily I entered into the story.”
After a contemplative period of silence, Miranda spoke. “Did you ever think about how the way death is experienced was changed by twentieth-century technology?”
“I’ll assume you’re not talking about embalming and the art of the mortuary.”
“No. Being dead.”
“So, we’re not talking about the collapse of religion and the downgrading of heaven and hell to moral analogies?”
“No. From the point of view of the living, death has lost its absolute edge.”
“You are about to launch into a discourse on war as entertainment, the ultimate opiate of the masses?”
“Yeah, partly. World War I, grainy black-and-white photographs. World War II, photo essays by Frank Capra and Margaret Bourke-White. Vietnam, television. A generation later, we watch the wretchedness of Afghanistan as virtual reality. Buffy the Vampire Slayer elicits a more visceral response. No, that’s not what I mean. I was thinking about how different death is since we’ve been able to record our live presence electrically and electronically. The dead aren’t dead in the same way. Death is no longer an absolute.”
“It is for the dead,” said Morgan.
“But not for the living. I have tapes of my mother’s voice, photographs of my father. I can turn on television and see Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. I can watch old Bette Davis in a horror flick, and then watch young Bette Davis devouring long-gone leading men with her inimitable eyes, and so on, flipping back and forth through her life by the press of a button on my remote control.”
“Not through her actual life, Miranda. Don’t confuse the person with the roles she plays.”
“Yes! Her life. I know she was an actress — but it’s the actress who ages, rejuvenates, plays many parts. Of course, my mother’s voice on tape is not my mother, my father’s pictures are not my father. But they connect me to them — the ways she sounded, the ways he looked.”
“It’s still the living who provide narrative context for the dead to endure. I would see and hear the same images very differently. Technology doesn’t change death, it only allows for different illusions than the ones offered by the past.”
“It always comes down to the story, doesn’t it?” said Miranda.
“Renaud’s Chamber of Horrors re-enacts crimes. Stories. The display of mutilated bodies and faces distended with horror wouldn’t mean much without a narrative context. It would be gratuitous, and in very bad taste.”
“That’s why her waxworks project was a failure, not because she had no witnesses to celebrate her prowess. That may have been part of it, but, really, it’s because the stories were already determined. Jack the Ripper, Dr. Crippen… They weren’t hers. She had to animate her own story. Or stories; the ghoulish complexity of her Hogg’s Hollow project was only a prelude to what she had in store for you, Morgan. Or, at least, for your charred remains. I wonder if she’d have been clever enough to leave a few bones missing. For authenticity. I wonder what she’d leave out.”
They drove without talking for a while, enjoying the quiet, which was broken only by the hum of the tires and the low rumble of the engine. Trees and fields swept by, hills carried them high and dropped away. Occasionally one would speak, and the other would nod.
Before they reached Penetanguishene, Miranda directed Morgan to turn off onto a sideroad. After several more turns and a sharp descent into a valley that broke the grid pattern of the concession roads, they rose high onto a limestone plateau where they could see in the distance a stone church and rectory rising imperiously above the landscape. There was not a barn or a farmhouse in sight. They pulled up between the two buildings, beside a midnight blue van with the name Alexander Pope in cursive script on the driver’s door. Morgan leaned forward to peer up at the steeple.
“This is eerie,” he said as he got out of the car. “A deserted church, an empty manse, in the middle of nowhere. So much for a hamlet called ‘Beausoleil.’ No cross on the steeple, no sign of a cross or crucifix except in the graveyard.” He nodded in the direction of the derelict cemetery on the far side of the church, surrounded by a tumbledown stone wall. “Do Catholics call it a manse?”
Morgan walked over to the low wall. It struck him as strange, when the church building itself appeared to be in good repair, that graves should be left unattended, with brambles and weeds running riot among toppled monuments, the occasional spire still thrusting toward heaven, although most were on precarious angles. The rectory, on the other side of the church, was a standing ruin.
“I don’t get it,” he said as he returned to where Miranda was standing in front of the church.
“What don’t you get?”
He did not respond. The parts didn’t fit; it was like they had entered a world gone slightly askew.
“Alexander told me it was deconsecrated in the late 1800s,” Miranda explained. “Maybe the graves were emptied, the bodies dug up and reburied.”
“Looks to me more like selective neglect. The church itself is okay.”
Miranda spread her arms wide to take in the empty horizon. “Not much call for bingo or euchre in Beausoleil.”
“The windows are intact. There’s no sign of vandalism. The grass is cut, the shrubs are trimmed.” He gazed up and down the concession road. “There’s no reason for a church to be here. It’s not an intersection, there’s no river for a village to grow on. No railway. There’re just miles and miles of miles and miles.” From close to the building he looked upwards, his eyes following the rough stone to the sky. “It’s imposing. I guess that was the idea, but who in God’s name would want to restore it?”
“I don’t think God had much to do with it,” Miranda quipped.
“Well, let’s take a look inside.”
CHAPTER TEN
The interior of the church had been gutted, but it was immaculate, and still irredeemably a sacred place by virtue of the Gothic windows, soaring roof, and stone-slab floor. At first they did not see Alexander Pope working on a scaffold raised between two windows. They heard small sounds and, walking in that direction, they discovered him partially hidden by pillars. His back was to them and he seemed almost motionless. There was a large floodlight aslant to the ceiling, illuminating the wall in such a way as to cast no shadows. As they approached closer, they saw he was working with a scalpel, scraping away bits of plaster in small, delicate movements.
