I thought of husband-murders from the time of Ruth Snyder. Quiet women, delicate women. Women who had trod the marriage path with gentleness. But one day the monotony had become suffocating. The routine and dull respectability had become unbearable. And the smoldering fires had erupted, all the more violent because they had been buried so long and so deep within here.
Let me finish dying. Let this be over. There must be an end even to this horrible torture…
The purring of the engine ceased. A man grunted. Light came again, like milk splashed in water. There was a fresh mumble of voices.
“The D. A. says leave him on a slab until Charlie Markham gets back in town and can make an autopsy.”
“Looks terrible, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, I’ve fixed ’em for the casket when they looked worse. Fixed a farmer once who’d used a shotgun.”
“Well, you’re the undertaker. Me, I wish I’d never studied medicine. I don’t like this interning.”
“Oh, undertaking’s all right. But right now I want to get back to bed. I’ll undress him and throw a sheet over him. I’m glad that Markham won’t start the autopsy ’til morning.”
Time passed and light faded again. I lay naked on the slab and each marching minute brought the autopsy closer. My mind crawled away from the knowledge of that experience. The deadly quiet about the autopsy table. Then the click of a scalpel, the gleam of it…
My mind stopped working for a terrible moment.
CHAPTER THREE
The Death of Me
The slab on which I lay was cool. That fact in itself was not surprising. Santa Maria’s leading undertaking establishment was also the town morgue, as is often the case in small cities. And the stone slab supporting me was just as cool as the air conditioning of the place had made it. Yet it was not the workings of my mind alone that told me the slab was cool. I was aware of the coolness. I could feel the coolness.
Alone in this dark, silent house of death, my mind screamed a question. How could this be? What was happening to me? The dead do not return.
I lay there with a fresh urge to move a muscle, to flick an eye. I was powerless to do that; yet I could feel the coolness of the slab against my calves and buttocks.
How much time passed I have no way of knowing. I was too caught up in the grip of a new, fearful knowledge to think of anything else. With the coming of day, Charlie Markham would arrive. The autopsy would be performed on a living man!
Every post mortem that I’d ever witnessed came marching across my thoughts. The slash of the knife, the removal of the vital organs, the splitting of the scalp, the sawing of the skull…my thoughts became a wild, silent screaming.
A pain began to ooze from the right side of my head through my brain. A tingling touched my toes. Still I could not move or bring my eyes in focus.
Light began coming back into the room, slowly, grayly. Dawn. How much longer until Markham came? I almost wished he would hurry and get it over with.
Then I gradually realized that the ceiling over my face was of plaster—I could see it. And I could feel the clammy sheet clinging to me from my waist downward. The pain in my head was excruciating now; so great that it brought a gasp from me. A gasp—which meant that my lungs were functioning normally.
My hands were like two dead weights as I tried to move them. I tried again and the effort succeeded.
My heart was pounding now, rocketing blood through every artery, bringing a singing sensation through the pain in my head.
It took me perhaps five minutes to sit up. I was dizzy and almost fell from the table. I clung to my senses until the dizziness had passed, pulled my feet around, and felt them drop to the floor. The pain in them, through my toes, was almost unbearable as I tried to stand.
I next took cognizance of my surroundings. The room was bare, the table in its center, two doorways leading from it.
I drew the sheet around me, stood up, and fell to the floor. I spent several gasping moments in a prone position before I was able to clutch at the leg of the table and crawl to my feet again.
Like a baby tottering through its first steps, I made my way to the doorway across the room. It opened into a hallway, and I closed it again. The second door opened into a small washroom. My clothes were there on hangers.
Before I tried to put my clothes on, I looked at myself in the mirror of a medicine cabinet on the wall. I almost retched at the grey-faced man who stared back at me. Blood had run down the side of my head, matting my hair. There was a heavier, uglier clot on my right temple. I bathed it gently in the corner wash basin. It was too sore to stand washing thoroughly, but I got most of the blood off.
I looked again in the mirror. Color was seeping back to my cheeks now. The wound was a nasty gash in the flesh and the bullet had torn its way along the bone, but had not penetrated the skull.
I slipped into my clothes, weak, gasping. I stood a moment before leaving the room, gathering strength. I was seething now with a fierce hatred that sent ripples of heat out through my being. I didn’t know how it had happened. I didn’t know why.
I knew only that I was back in the land of the living. I had returned—to find my murderer!
Gray dawn hung over the alley behind the funeral home. I reached the mouth of the alley. The streets were still deserted
