The Dead

laughed fiendishly.

At that moment, a compactly-built blond man in a police uniform came in the front door, hat in hand.

“Jeff Purzycki,” Max said. “Haven’t seen you in years.”

“Bad news about your folks,” Jeff said. “They were talking about your mother down at the station.”

“Any developments?” Gary asked anxiously.

“Not that I heard.”

Gary looked floorward.

“I didn’t know you were a cop,” Max said.

“Just for the summer,” Jeff answered. “Boardwalk patrol, but they’ve got me on emergency duty tonight.”

“What kind?” Max asked.

“Guarding the high school.”

“The high school?”

“So no one drops in on all those dead Italians in the body bags. There’s quite a bit of loot on them, I understand.”

“But why are they having a boardwalk cop watch them?”

“Manpower shortage. Haven’t you heard the sirens?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s been one car crash after another. Most of it’s been mechanical failure. But there’s been some wrecking, too. Oil on the roads. Booby-traps. A felled tree landed in front of a bus out in Pine Township an hour ago. Driver swerved into a lake. Thirty people dead…The meatwagons have been busy here too. Paramedics have been going bananas. This one guy put his head through a windshield, bounced back into his seat-off comes his whole face, rrripp! just like that. Was still on the outside of the glass.”

“Somebody’s face would just come off like that?” Gary asked.

“Sure,” Max said. “Your skin stays on your head because it’s like a bag over your skull. It’s loose. You can peel it right off.”

“Guy choked on his own blood,” Jeff said. “Medics didn’t reach him in time. Ambulance conked on ‘em-”

“About the wrecking,” Max said. “Is it just in this area?”

“Nope. It’s happening all over the state.” Jeff glanced at his watch. “Look, I’d love to stay here and talk with you guys, but I have to be over at the high school in a bit. Won’t be able to make the funeral, so I’d better pay my respects now.”

“No apology necessary,” Max said.

Jeff went inside.

Gary and Max eyed each other.

“You still think Linda’s wrong about all this shit being connected?” Gary asked.

“Let’s just say I’m less sure,” Max replied.

Father Ted arrived about a half hour before the viewing ended, accompanied by Father Chuck. He went up to the lectern near the catafalque; all eyes were on him.

He opened with two readings. The first was the story of Lazarus. The second was a passage on reincarnation from the Bhagavad-Gita, “One of the many Old Testaments,” as Father Ted put it.

All during the second reading, Gary heard Max muttering beside him; he was amazed his brother managed to control himself at all. But an even greater test of Max’s patience was to come.

“He is not dead,” Father Ted said, closing the Hindu holy book. “Max Holland has only passed on to a higher plane. He has merely been changed. He has gone back to that great World Soul-call it Brahma, call it Allah-”

“Mohammed would be going for his scimitar right now,” Max whispered to Gary.

“-Jesus, Buddha, or Diana of Ephesus. And being reunited with that Cosmic Oneness, the very ground of our being, he is reunited with us. When we speak to each other, we are speaking to him. When we pray, we are praying to him. When we make love, we are loving him-”

“Nothing like that old Pantheistic homosexual incest, huh?” Max asked Gary. “Don’t it make you want to rush right out and pick up a girl?”

Gary cracked a grin, almost against his will, then wiped it from his face.

“-His strength is in us even now. His zest is our thanksgiving, just as our oneness is his multiplicity-”

“No wonder we’re so confused,” Max said.

“He was a good man,” Father Ted went on. “Not in some moralistic sense, but in the sense that he was fully alive, trusting in himself and others, willing to listen to God, the voice of all of us in Him…”

“I can’t take this anymore,” Max said.

“Come on, Max,” Gary said. “Dad would’ve wanted it this way.”

“Gary, if I stay here a minute longer, I’m going to start yelling at that theological eunuch.” And with that, Max got up and walked out of the chapel.

Father Ted appeared to take no notice, and droned on for another fifteen minutes. When he was done, Gary heard Uncle Buddy say to his wife:

“Not a bad talker, for one of those Holy Joes. At least he’s open-minded.”

As it turned out, Mr. Van Nuys got word about the gravediggers before the viewing ended; there would be no wildcat strike Thursday, because it was almost certain the whole union would be going out on Friday. He gave this news to Gary as the chapel emptied out; Gary’s relief showed plainly on his face.

Once the mourners were gone, Van Nuys’s assistants closed the coffin, and left soon afterward. Van Nuys retreated to his office to pay some bills.

After an hour or so of invoices he paused, rubbing his eyes, and swiveled his chair, looking out the window that faced the Elk’s Hall, a large spotlit building across the parking lot.

The activity over there had died down. During the day, a flood of people had descended on the hall, relatives and friends come to claim bodies from the train-wreck. Their numbers had dwindled around dinner-time, but there was another surge after seven which had petered out around ten. At one time, the Elks’ parking lot, which was behind the hall, had been packed. Now there was only one cop car, and a dark sedan belonging to the town’s medical examiner.

Suddenly the sirens started up again, and before long a policeman came running out of the Elks’ Hall, got into his car, and sped off. The medical examiner followed soon after. What was going on now? And had anyone been left to watch the bodies? Van Nuys guessed there must be someone still in the building-the cop’s partner, perhaps.

The sirens howled for quite some time. Van Nuys watched Beichmann Avenue. Two police cars came screaming along, a couple of ambulances following shortly.

He turned back to his work, but made little progress; the lights began flashing on and off, something they’d done periodically all evening. Finally they went out altogether. The Elk’s Hall and every house nearby were totally dark. Moonlight shone from the hall’s windows and the white-painted border running around its base.

Can’t work if you can’t see, Van Nuys told himself. Think you should just go ho-

Across the way, a basement window was rising. He leaned forward, squinting.

Somebody lock himself in? he wondered. He knew the basement hall as well as the main level was being used for morgue space, and he could just imagine some poor cop locked up in the dark down there with fifty or a hundred stone-dead strangers. Used as he was to corpses, Van Nuys wouldn’t have been too upset, but he rather enjoyed the thought of a layman stuck in such a situation…

The window was all the way up now. He waited for someone to climb out, but there was no sign of movement.

Then, with feverish haste, something came scuttling through, dark against the painted border. Van Nuys’s first impression was that it was too spidery to be human, although it was far too big to be a spider…He blinked, shaking his head.

The shadow jittered upright, unmistakably human now, not a cop, but a guy in a sports jacket that hung loosely on his very skinny frame. He set off across Van Nuys’s parking lot, moving at a swift stiff-legged run toward the back of the funeral parlor, out of sight to the left.

Van Nuys sat awhile in silence. Presently he heard a banging from out behind the parlor, and a wrench like