wrong with his body. Certainly his stride was impeded in some way, although his physique looked strong, powerful, those shoulders broad if stooped and tilted, his hands and wrists large, his booted feet also big, suggesting thick legs. His face was almost completely hidden by the woollen scarf and hat, his bulging black eyes peering out from between. Although the covered cavity where there should have been a nose and mouth was gristled and raw, seepage constantly leaking so that the night before he had been forced to hold a large soiled cloth to it constantly, I had the feeling that this was no new injury, if injury it was. He appeared to be too competent with his method of eating for the orifice to have been recently created, placing the straw perfectly into whatever receptacle lay beyond the rough edges, with no hint of pain or discomfort, sucking up the blended food with practised ease. Several people, uniformed nurses, gave him odd glances as he passed by, but none spoke to him. I kept to his heels, wondering if he was seeking treatment at the hospital, or if he was employed there, perhaps as a porter or boilerman, any kind of job that did not involve the public. Cruel as the thought was, I felt pretty certain that his work would not bring him into much contact with the public.
He approached a double door marked “MORTUARY—RESTRICTED AREA”, and pushed one side of it open, passing through and entering a long, wide and dismal corridor, the walls painted a turgid olive green, the lights in its ceiling behind wire guards for some reason, as if the corpses wheeled along this way might rise up and try to break them. I still kept close to him, walking not gliding behind him, as though I remained part of the real world. A man wearing green overalls approached from the opposite direction, a surgeon’s mask, also green, hanging around his neck. He nodded at the man I followed as he went by and was greeted with a muffled grunt that could have meant anything.
Soon we arrived at plastic doors, the kind that overlapped and were easy to push trolleys and gurneys through, and I saw that we were in a long room, floor-to-ceiling white wall tiles and overhead strip lighting giving an air of clinical cleanliness. To one side there was a whole wall filled with refrigerated steel cabinets, the door to each one approximately three feet by two. There must have been at least forty of them. Three stainless-steel tables, carts filled with surgical tools standing next to each one, occupied the concrete floor; only one had a naked body stretched out on its surface. Another man, also wearing gown and mask, as well as latex gloves, was working on the pale carcass.
“Ah, good,” the masked man said, looking up. “You’ve got the evening shift tonight, have you, Moker?”
A familiar grunt from my man.
“Well, there’s not much going on, unless anything fresh is brought in.” The man standing by the dead body pulled his surgical mask free from his face. “This one’s all done, so just clean him up before you put him away for the night. I understand the relatives are coming in in the morning for a last look and positive ID, so make sure you do a good job.”
There was no friendliness in the mortician’s tone as he spoke to the man he’d called… what was it? Moter? No, Moker. I’m sure he said Moker. In fact, he eyed the muffled man with disdain, and I was sure it wasn’t because of the way Moker looked, not in these politically correct times. Moker didn’t seem to be too popular, and I could well understand that. With or without his deformity, there was just something plain unpleasant about the guy.
The mortician began peeling off his latex gloves, studying the corpse before him as he did so, lost in thought for the moment. As he dropped the gloves into a pedal bin, he noticed Moker had not yet moved. He glared at him through wire-framed spectacles.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” he said gruffly. “Get yourself changed and don’t forget to wear gloves tonight. I’ve told you enough times that all kinds of diseases can be picked up from cadavers. Now get on with it.”
Moker shuffled away, going through a door that I hadn’t noticed on one side of the long sparse room. I went with him out of curiosity. This was a locker room, tall cabinets set along the wall, where a youngish guy, who looked as if he enjoyed too many Big Macs, was just closing the door of one of them. Moker went to a locker, produced a key from his raincoat pocket, and opened it; but not before I’d had the chance to read the small name card on the door. “A. MOKER” it read in badly written capital letters. So, the name was confirmed, not that it would help me in any way. Why had I even bothered to follow him? I asked myself. What was I supposed to do? Not only could I not physically touch him, I could not even haunt him. He might seem aware of my presence at times, but there had been no indication that he’d actually seen me.
The mortician who had given Moker his instructions came in behind us holding a rumpled apron in front of him by the fingers of one hand as if it carried the plague.
“Whose is this?” he barked at both men in the locker room.
The tubby guy was shrugging on a jacket and his hand appeared from a sleeve to point at Moker.
“Alec’s,” he said, without a trace of betrayal.
The mortician gave Moker a withering look and pushed the offending garment towards him.
“I’ve told you before,” the mortician reprimanded as Moker took the grubby apron, “don’t leave soiled aprons lying in the cabinet room. This looks as if it should have been laundered weeks ago.”
He wheeled away without another word and Tubby Guy followed him from the room, leaving Moker alone.
I watched as he threw the apron in the bottom of the locker and took out green overalls, a long linen coat of the type worn by the mortician himself. He laid it over the back of a hard chair then unwound the choker from his neck. I flinched again at the sight of his poor ravaged face, but he quickly reached inside the locker again and took out a surgical mask, this one white, which he pulled over most of his face, hiding the hole beneath. Even so, with no shape of a nose and mouth, the cloth mask looked odd. It puffed out as he breathed, shrinking concavely as he took a breath.
Donning the overalls, he put his own coat, scarf and hat inside the locker and closed the door. Picking up a dry sponge and cloth he returned to the main room which, apart from the body on the metal table, was now empty. Moker approached the corpse, considered it for a minute or two, examining the plain stitching on its chest and groin where the mortician had removed organs for inspection. I noticed there were labelled jars on a shelf nearby, each one containing interior body parts. A brown clipboard filled with handwritten details hung from the side of the stainless-steel table. The corpse itself had a label with more details attached to the big toe of the right foot. I heard a muted cough and glanced over to a doorway leading to a small and, from what I could see, cramped office where the person who had greeted Moker sat bent over a desk. He still wore his green overalls and was busy with more paperwork, no doubt filling out forms appertaining to the deceased. At the sound, Moker busied himself swabbing down the body and I drifted away. The dead man was pallid beyond belief, with blue stains around his eyes and lips, similar stains blemishing his skin in other places. It was an awful sight, particularly with the stitched Y-shaped wound running down his chest and stomach, and I had no morbid interest in watching Moker at work. I drifted around, peering into glass cabinets containing all kinds of liquids, powders and creams, even body deodorants, wound fillers and body plugs. There was an embalming machine nearby with dials and tubes attached, its large glass container filled with pinkish fluid mounted on top. In the small office next door where the mortician continued his form filling, there was a desk crammed with upright files, a computer keyboard and screen, two lamps, a telephone, and various pieces of paperwork and folders. The mortician barely had room to write. Around the walls were more clipboards bearing various other forms, framed morticians’ licences, a calendar and some kind of printed schedule with days of the week and allotted work times inked in. I saw Moker’s name entered for all that week’s evening shifts.
The mortician finally laid down his pen with a grumble of relief and pushed back his chair, which was on castors. I stepped away as if the chair might knock into me (instinctive reactions were still hard to overcome), retreating into the mortuary itself, and the mortician followed me through. He didn’t bother to bid Moker goodnight as he made his way to the plastic doors, and Moker, who was busy swabbing down the corpse, didn’t look up from his work.
I still felt very uneasy in Moker’s presence, even though I could not be seen (although it chilled me whenever Moker seemed to sense that something was with him and he peered around the room, seeking out whatever it was that disturbed him), and I would have loved to have left that place. I couldn’t go though—the spirit’s words at the seance had had too much of an effect on me. Maybe I was on some path towards redemption, a path that would take me from this purgatory I was in. After all, I was a Catholic, even if a lapsed one, and I was supposed to believe in that kind of thing. Besides, incorporeality had to have some effect, didn’t it?
So I stuck with the situation, not having a clue as to the purpose of my vigil, but trusting that something important might come of it. The evening drew on and the later it got, the more the mortuary seemed isolated from
