the game of solitaire that was occupying the screen on the computer at the reception desk.
The dim lighting at this time of night lent an eerie feel to the corridors of the city morgue. Pale shadows tempted your mind into playing sadistic tricks on your eyes, seeing movement where there was nothing to move.
Seeing light where there was dark.
Seeing dark where there was light.
In reality, some of those sadistic tricks weren’t tricks at all, but anomalies within the veil between the worlds.
If they chose to listen, even those with closed minds could hear the tortured cries of spirits in transition-some in acceptance of their fate, some in utter disbelief, but all with one thing in common. Each of them was trapped between the worlds of life and death, never making it fully to the other side.
Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have the luxury of choosing to listen, or to ignore. It had been made for me. A relentless cacophony echoed from the walls to assault my senses even before we passed through the door. It was much like walking into a crowded party; only this party was one where most of the guests are screaming and sobbing with pain. It took almost everything I had to put up a mental shield and block them out. Even then they remained, a static-plagued radio, tuned between stations and set at low volume, interrupted every now and again with a burst of angry noise.
A brief glance told me that Felicity was feeling a similar buzz inside her own head.
Earlier this year I had actually spent the night in this place when the worst snowstorm we’d had in a decade had brought Saint Louis to all but a complete standstill. Ben and I had been trapped here with the chief medical examiner and a severely charred corpse whose spirit staunchly refused to move on. My ethereal dealing with that victim was yet another piece of the puzzle that made up the current fractured state of my psyche. I can say without a doubt that, to date, those dark hours had been the longest night of my life.
In the back of the building, we were met by the night morgue attendant. Ben simply flashed his badge and told him that we needed to view the remains of Debbie Schaefer. The pallid young man never even uttered a word and simply handed a clipboard to my friend so he could sign us in. That completed, he mutely led us into the cold storage area, flipping on the overhead lights as we entered.
The right wall of the tiled room was lined with rectangular stainless steel doors. Each of them was a gateway to an individual compartment where a corpse would spend its stay with the medical examiner. On the opposite wall there were two large sinks, each equipped with a table capable of holding a body. Here were also such things as examination gloves and implements I wasn’t the least bit interested in knowing the purpose of.
At the back of the room was another set of doors that led, as I was told later, to the garage which was accessible from the back of the building. This was where recovered bodies were brought in and would begin their journey through the various stages of the postmortem process.
The attendant took us to a wheeled table positioned near the individual storage compartments. On it was a rubberized body bag, an identification tag affixed to the heavy-duty zipper pull. The faint malodor of decay had been noticeable ever since we entered the back area of the building. Upon entry into the cold room, the intensity of the strange funk began to increase several fold. Now as our proximity to the remains was within a matter of feet, the foulness was thick in the atmosphere.
“That’s great, thanks,” Ben told the attendant who was just starting to pull on a pair of latex gloves. “We can handle it from here.”
The young man stopped in the middle of sheathing his hands. Frozen in place like a statue, he simply stared at Ben as if waiting for him to say that he was only kidding.
“Really.” My friend nodded and coughed, wrinkling his nose at the smell. “We’ll call ya’ when we’re finished.”
I was right there with my friend, and I’m sure Felicity wasn’t far behind. My stomach was already starting to churn, and it was all I could do to keep from screwing up my face in disgust.
Giving a slight shrug the attendant pointed toward the sinks and, displaying perceptible effort, muttered, “Gloves.”
With the one syllable utterance out of the way, he left us alone in the chilled room.
“That was a little bizarre,” Felicity commented quietly after the young man disappeared out the door.
“If ya’ ask me, all of ‘em that work here are fuckin’ nut cases,” Ben asserted as he stepped across the room and began pulling a pair of oversized latex gloves onto his hands. With a nod, he indicated for us to do the same then turned his attention directly on my wife. “You said there were some precautions we need ta’ take for this?”
“Do you think he’s going to come back anytime soon?” She cocked her head toward the door.
For some wholly bizarre and unknown reason, I took great notice of the way her hair almost shimmered in the light when she tossed her head. The perfection of her auburn mane as it cascaded down her back in a fiery plume of loosely spiraling curls. The way it softly brushed against the ivory skin of her neck when she tilted her head to the side.
“You mean Mister Personality? Not likely,” he answered.
“It would be best if he doesn’t,” she continued. “Because what I need to do might look a bit strange to someone who doesn’t understand.”
“What, like he’s not strange enough on ‘is own?” Ben offered a rhetorical answer.
“Aye, but that’s beside the point.”
I watched her closely-observing the way the layered cut of her hair framed her face and accented her dainty features. I was amazed that I had never noticed it in such intense detail before.
“So how strange are you gonna get?”
“Not terribly. I just need to cast a spell.”
“Cast a spell? I thought you guys didn’t do shit like that.”
“No,” Felicity explained, “we do cast spells, just not the way most people think we do.”
“So you’re not gonna whip out some bat wings and crap like that, right?”
“Just some salt, Ben.”
She used the back of her hand to brush a tousle of her feathery coif back from the side of her face, and I was entranced as she let it linger there.
“Salt?” he queried with a shake of his head.
“Salt.”
“Where are you gonna get salt?”
Felicity rummaged about in one of the many pockets of her photo vest, and when she withdrew her hand she was holding some individual condiment packets of the substance. “Not exactly sea salt, but it’ll do.”
I felt a rush of excitement course through my body, and my skin literally prickled with the energy of overwhelming desire. I wanted to simply reach out and touch her.
“You always carry that stuff around with you?”
“Pretty much.”
“What, so ya’ can do shit like this?”
“No, not really. I just happen to like salt and you don’t always get any when you order at a busy drive- thru.”
I was beginning to have trouble containing the intense burst of longing for the woman in front of me. I couldn’t turn my gaze away, and if I continued to stare I was certain to embarrass myself.
“Yo, Rowan!” My friend’s urgent and concern-tinged voice slapped me hard in the face, breaking the trance. I felt his hand on my shoulder as he started to shake me lightly. “You all right? You aren’t goin’ all Twilight Zone, are ya’?”
“Wh-wh-what? No… No, I’m okay,” I managed to stammer as I blinked.
I had no idea what had just happened. I did know that I wasn’t about to tell the two of them that I had been standing there having some sort of disconnected, uncontrolled psychosexual fantasy about my wife’s hair. That was odd enough in and of itself, but considering where we were and what we were supposed to be doing, I was certain
