CHAPTER 5



Simon watches the silver wraiths.

The sepia wraiths.

The monochromatic wraiths.

“They are all dead, you know,” he tells the sleepy crows in his cranium. He drinks green. He watches the screen. They are all dead. Purgatories run in circles. The Corbies are sated but not satisfied.

Organ music. A monochrome skeleton dances on top of a gear-work clock. Onscreen text reads: Blood! Your precious blood!

He watches Count Orlok, all rodent fangs and spider hands, stalking the wide-eyed heroine. Simon watches Nosferatu, the 1922 horror classic—thrills at the hungry corpse stalking through the flicker-flash world. Finally, the sun comes up and kills the vampire.

Simon changes discs and sips from his Thermos.

He watches Our Hospitality, the 1923 comedy classic—thrills at the slapstick antics of Buster Keaton, the Michelangelo of silent comedy. He watches the deadpan-faced hero perform pratfalls and physical gags.Silent, bodily, vaudevillian soliloquies.

They buried Buster Keaton with a rosary in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other, to prepare for both eternal possibilities. Did you know that, Jane?

They’re all dead. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on digital discs. Simon puts the two discs away, like two giant coins for the ferryman. Sometimes two discs will get you where you’re going. The Corbies caw in the wormwood branches. This is not the addiction. This is a byproduct of the addiction. This is not the drug. This is rummaging through your medicine cabinet while waiting for your source to call.

Simon closes his eyes and lets the green fairy magic do its work, projecting waking dreams on the inner eyelids, a new movie with symphonic score, a merging of memories. The hideous vampire versus the slapstick hero, claws and fangs against pratfalls and perfect timing. How wonderfully incongruous, the scary comedy, the comedic horror . . .

His thoughts drift back to her golden eyes.

Damn.

Late, Saturday night, and Simon sits in his house, banished from work, unable to be with Jane, unable to concentrate on anything else, unable to sleep.

“Your biorhythms be bugged,” cackle the Corbies.

Simon paces his home, tours the dead plants and empty fish tanks while obsession teases his spine with that amphetamine tickle. Again and again he pulls out a tiny white lock of Jane’s hair from his pocket.

This is not an ideal relationship.

He paces and thinks of her pallid face, her cool hands. He takes out a scalpel and examines it, lovingly. It was the scalpel. Her autopsy scalpel. Their scalpel.

They do not make Hallmark cards for this situation.

Simon paces.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon walks a coin up and down his hands, between dexterous fingers. Then he walks the scalpel. And then he walks them both, scalpel chasing coin, up and down and around his hand.

“You have an imbalance in your head,” the doctors said, but they never really knew what to do, Jane.

Medications never seemed to work, rarely had any effect on young Simon. Not like absinthe.

It tickles my innards. Eh, Jane?

Simon grabs the devil’s prayer book—a deck of cards—and performs lifts and double lifts and shuffles. He moves cards about the deck invisibly, makes cards appear and vanish. He manifests coins from nowhere and sends them back. He tries the scalpel, making it appear and vanish with wrist flicks. Simon practices card throwing, sinking queens and kings and jacks into yielding targets, cutting the stems of dead houseplants from across the room.

One doctor, who young Simon actually liked, prescribed exercises of manual dexterity. So Simon took up various arts and hobbies. He learned sleight of hand. He took up juggling, card throwing, knife throwing, carving, calligraphy, and various crafts, anything to keep his hands busy, to demand precision from them. He had his father’s surgical hands, better hands.

Simon runs out of cards. He walks to the spare bedroom, the one with mats on the floor, and starts his tumbling exercises.

The hand exercises helped, a bit. They certainly kept the glass shards out of his brain better than the drugs. But Simon was always hungry for more. As a boy, he had appreciated the physical comedians of his beloved silent films: Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Lloyd, and the others. He read their biographies, admired their dedication to their craft, their practiced, expert control of their bodies—how, in the name of a laugh, they performed much more dangerous and impressive demonstrations of physicality than any modern, musclebound action star does in his or her explosive stunts. So Simon took up vaudeville, slapstick, and physical comedy. Teachers were harder to find, but his parents had the money and they indulged their boy. Simon learned from performers and clowns, from books and videos, and mimicked what he saw in his movies. He took several classes in the martial arts, mostly for the tumbles and breakfalls—judo rolls, jujutsu rolls, aikido rolls.

Simon rolls, tumbles, and somersaults on the mat. He takes painful-looking falls. He slips on banana peels that are not there, save for what the wormwood shows him. Simon has slapstick boxing matches with imaginary foes. He reenacts the routines he has memorized from DVDs, the backgrounds and piano music supplied by absinthe and imagination, odd ballets and comic grace. He battles the ghoulish Nosferatu with pratfalls and gags, a slapstick duel with a Gothic horror.

After years of repetition, our hero has the speed, dexterity, and skill that can only come from obsessive compulsion and no social life. His cuts at the morgue are the most precise. He may be the most skilled sleight of hand performer in the city, though he would never know it. Simon never performs for others, only the shadows in his head and the ones that leak out.

People see Simon lost in his thoughts and assume he is slow, but his mind moves very quickly. People see Simon’s awkward nature and assume he is physically inept, but he is much more flexible and athletic than they could imagine.

Simon defeats the Gothic monster with slapstick and the movie he has created with wormwood in his head is good, distracting. Still, his mind wanders back to her golden eyes.

The Corbies whisper.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon flushes another fish.

They always make him cry.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon writes a love sonnet. Then he smashes a mirror when he sees Toby Reynolds’s bloated, putrescent face.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says to the fragments of glass. “I’m so sorry about Twiss.”

Do you know about Myer Twiss?

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night, still.

Simon carves her name into the wall, over and over, but the black birds keep squawking. Somewhere he can hear Count Orlok’s silent chuckle. His belly growls for the dead love.

There is a ghost tree, Jane, that grows in my head, and the Corbies are always hungry.

Simon grabs his hat, his coat, and his Thermos. He does what every absinthe-pickled gentleman necrophile has done, when troubled, since time immemorial.

He goes for a walk.

*   *   *   *   *

The swings sway vacantly in the wind on squealing chains. Empty slide, empty seesaw, and empty monkey bars. Simon removes his shoes and digs his feet deep into autumn sand. It does feel good.

The dark of the world spins and blurs. The Wheel of Fate turns. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on squeaky playground steel. Simon kicks harder and the merry-go-round spins faster. Faster. He stands and hops up, perching and balancing on the steel handhold rails that run like spokes through the merry-go-round. Still spinning, Simon stands, and then walks, over the merry-go-round, from steel bar to steel bar, at the rate of the spin, walking with perfect balance, an absurd, circular treadmill in the dark.

“Simon-go-round. Simon-go-round,” chant the Corbies.

He balances his black hat on his nose, head tilted up, still walking, still spinning. Was it comical? Was it impressive? He tries hard to be impressive, to show off.

But Jane does not laugh.

Jane does not clap.

Jane is not here.

Simon cannot hear the ebony sea. He slumps, sits back down on the spinning wheel, folding up like a sad, dapper ragdoll, resting his chin on his knees. No Dead Water and no Jane, just a neighborhood playground on the mugger side of the A.M. divide. He shakes with dead-love withdrawal. “It’s not fair,” Simon says to the crows in his head. “My friends always go where I can’t follow.”

He feels nostalgia pangs, big as coffin nails, in the chest.

Simon tiptoes through the playground on bare feet, conscious of broken glass. He deftly avoids a used condom half submerged in the sand. The place is empty and desolate—not another soul in the park, just Simon and a kingdom of dead sperm. Simon stares through his green, green buzz and, in monomania, focuses down and down to the molecular level, considers whole worlds contained within the crinkled latex, whole cities of wriggling beings—some screaming, “The end is nigh,” some reveling in the moment of their writhing Danse Macabre, all their millions upon millions of little dramas playing out in micro-time to the coming spermicidal apocalypse.

“There could be as many as six hundred million of them,” Simon tells the Corbies.

Our hero has a career in finding the stories hidden in rotting bits of aftermath.

He slides down the slide. He swings on a swing, reaches out for a hand that is not there. He kicks harder, swings higher. Higher.

What would happen if I went all the way, Jane? Could I get you back? Could I pull a three-sixty? If I went that high, would you see me?

Simon leaps off the swing, paces the playground, chasing afterimages of Jane, memory fragments. He’s not chasing echoes, but echoes of Jane’s echoes from the Dead Water. Simon flutters through life like a bat, pursuing the echoes of things but never the thing—the aftermath of events, not the event; the ghosts of people, not the person; the corpses, not the ghosts. For someone with a whole squawking, sardonic murder in his head, he feels pretty alone.

“Ain’t got no body. . . ,” sing the shady crows, laughing in the wormwood tree.

Simon sits on the seesaw. He kicks up, but crashes right back down. Alone. Wind and moon and cold sand and noisy metal. Who was Jane? Who were the four men who played hangman with her? What did they want? Did they get it? Where was this going? Simon closes his eyes and chases Jane, chases her golden eyes and white hair down a black hole of questions. Where did it go? How deep?

Simon kicks up—

And stays up, on the seesaw, feet dangling above the sand.

The crows stop singing and joking, all their beady eyes staring intently through Simon’s glasses. It takes the black eyes of a thousand-thousand phantom crows to form the pupils in Simon’s green eyes.

They see a boy—a boy sitting at the low end of the seesaw.

He is just the sort of boy Simon would expect to see in a playground, so average that Simon, later, would have trouble guessing his age or even describing him.

“You’re up late,” says Simon, shyly.

“I’m third shift,” says the boy. “Like you.”

He kicks up, rising.

Simon touches down on the ground.

“I like the hat,” says the boy.

Simon kicks up.

The boy goes down.

Simon nods. He wants to know what happens next. He does not know how this conversation is supposed to go. Is it an absinthe hallucination?

“I don’t know how this conversation is supposed to go.”

“This, Simon Meeks, is the part where I show you how the world would be if you were never born!” says the boy, holding out his arms in presentation.

Simon stares.

“Just kidding,” says the boy. “Hated that movie.”

Up.

Down.

“Your boss. He’s kind of a dick-hole,” says the boy.

“I . . . yes.” Simon would never have put it like that, but he could not deny it either.

Up.

Down.

“He does naughty things with the stiffs,” observes the boy. “But then, you do some pretty strange things yourself.” The boy’s aloofness reminds Simon, very much, of a cat’s.

Up.

Down.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she, Simon—the golden-eyed cadaver?”

“Yes. Beautiful.”

Up.

Down.

“Do you know her name?”

“Yes.”

“What?” The boy leans in, suddenly very interested.

“Jane Doe.”

The boy pauses, leans back, and then smiles very big.

He had a great many teeth, Jane. A great many teeth.

Up.

Down.

“So you never knew her before. Mystery girl,” says the boy. “No suspects.”

“There were four of them. One man was very large. He held the rope. Another asked questions. Another laughed. Another cried. They hoisted her three times. They wanted to scare her. She had something they wanted.” Simon wants to keep the conversation going, hoping answers will beget answers.

“How did you know that, Simon?”

“She told me.”

“Is that what happens when you—? Hmm. You gave off the wildest colors . . .” The boy looks lost in a memory, but only for a moment. “I don’t suppose she told you what possessed her to get that shade of nail polish, did she?”

“I like her nail polish,” Simon says, a little defensively.

“Do you know what they wanted from her?”

“No.”

Up.

Down.

“What’s your interest in all this, Simon?”

“Her.”

“What?”

“I love her.”

“No, really—what? Huh? Huh?!” The boy watches Simon intently, but not in the eye. He stares at Simon’s entirety. “No way! You’re telling the truth.” The boy looks amused.

Up.

Down.

“Simon, if you go any further into this, things are going to get very weird and very scary.”

“I don’t care.”

The boy continues looking into Simon. “No, I guess not. You’re not going to stop, no matter what, are you?”

“No, I’m never going to stop.” The words feel liberating in Simon’s mouth, decisive. The Corbies hop up and down in his head, excited and agitated by something.

It’s the boy’s turn to descend. “You want the ones that did this to Jane to pay, right?”

The words sound more like a persuasion than an observation. The boy does not talk like a boy. His mannerisms seem . . . off. Suddenly all the Corbies shriek and caw:

“Not a boy!”

“Danger, Simon!”

“Danger!”

“It’s not a boy!”

“It hasn’t breathed, Simon!”

“Hasn’t taken a breath in ninety-eight seconds!”

“Ninety-nine seconds!”

“Danger!”

Simon looks down at the boy. Through the green haze there’s something superimposed, something sharing the same space with the boy, something taller, something slender. It notices Simon noticing and the boy-thing’s head tilts to the side, tilts too far. Simon flinches, uncontrollably, as if something were thrown at his face.

“Simon?” the boy-thing purrs.

“What are you?”

“I’m a shadow,” say two separate voices fighting for control of Simon’s ears. “Right now, I’m your shadow.”

A blur.

Gone.

Simon crashes down, hard, on the seesaw. Without thinking he goes into a well-practiced backward roll and ends up back onto his feet. It is only force of will that prevents him from completing the slapstick routine with a comedic stagger. The Corbies continue to keen and cry.

“Danger!”

“Run, Simon!”

“Ah, hasten!”

“Ah, let us not linger!”

“Ah, fly!”

“Let us fly!”

Simon grabs his hat and runs.

My shadow, Jane! My shadow split away from me and I did not know how to sew it back on.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon is fairly certain that a strange thing happened at the playground. He also knows that he has a lousy point of reference for “normal,” so it’s hard to gauge just how strange.

But he had made a decisive choice. Hadn’t he? He would not let Jane just drift away. He would find out what had happened, sew together the corpses of the three wise monkeys, if he had to—feed them lightning and resurrect them to see and hear and speak the evil that had happened.

But how?

“Green light!” yell the Corbies.

“Oh,” says Simon. He crosses the street.

The crows jabber agitatedly. The glass shards press his brain. Simon needs to be able to think clearly. He needed a—

“There!” cry the Corbies.

“There—there—there!”

A dead dog in the predawn alley. Fresh. When times are tough, addicts can be creative in scoring a hit. Simon enters the alley and remembers . . .

When I was a boy, Jane, I used to give animals Viking funerals.

An inquisitive boy, Simon often explored the area around his home. Sometimes, he came across the cadavers of animals: roadkill wildlife, pigeons, cats, dogs, even a turtle once. He found them in their odd poses and looked into their filmy eyes. This was the closest he allowed himself to animals, afraid of killing living creatures with his very presence, like his fish.

I didn’t like leaving their bodies like that, Jane—on the ground, undignified, abandoned to bloat and decay.

Simon gave them sendoffs. He longed to give them a proper Viking funeral, to burn them on proper funeral pyres. But fire is not something adults let children like Simon have.

Still, he was a creative boy. An acquaintance at school often showed off his collection of smashed pennies—pennies left on railroad tracks and crushed by the trains. Such trinkets are valuable treasures to schoolchildren and they inspired Simon. He brought his dead animal friends to the El tracks by his home and he gave them the dignity, if not the form, of a Viking funeral.

I left them on the tracks, Jane, to be blown to oblivion by the impossible pressure of the iron world-snake careening down the tracks, taking my friends to the underworld. They came like dragons down the mountain.

Simon walks quietly toward the dog. It has been years since he staged a Viking funeral. He has a much different purpose for—

“Oh, no.”

Simon jumps back.

The dog is still alive. Barely. Lying on its side, too weak to lift its head, only twitch, and breathe shallowly, and watch Simon with frightened eyes.

Simon swallows. He paces from alley wall to alley wall. He has no idea what to do.

“Hello . . . boy,” he says.

The dog’s tail twitches once. Simon looks the animal over—deep lacerations, a severed artery. The blood had all but stopped flowing. It would not be long now. Simon kneels by the dog. The beast lets out a barely audible whine.

“Hey, boy. Don’t be scared.”

Simon reaches out a shaking hand, strokes the dogs head. Oh. Still warm. So warm. He pets the dog.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

The dog’s tail wags, weakly, thumping against the ground.

“That’s a boy. Good dog. Good, good dog. Don’t be scared.” Simon cradles the animal’s head in his lap, stroking it and whispering to it. “Don’t be scared. It’s all right. It’s all right. Don’t be scared. It’s okay; I’m here.” Just like Molly did with her cadaver back in school. The dog looks up at Simon with liquid eyes, too weak to move, but still wagging its tail.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

“That’s a boy. Such a good dog,” says Simon as the tears stream down his face—not just because the dog is dying, but because this is the most affection Simon has given and received from an animal. He so wanted a dog as a boy. And here this animal was afraid, in its death throes, and it still spent its waning energy to wag its tail, to give Simon a sign of acceptance. Simon was sure if the dog were stronger, it would lick his face. Oh, that would be wonderful! Warm, licking, accepting love.

“Such a good dog. Good boy. It’s all right. Don’t be scared.”

Simon sits with the animal. A few minutes later, it dies in relative peace in his arms. He dries his face and caries the dog home.

*   *   *   *   *

In Simon’s basement, there is a stainless steel autopsy table, with working drainage system. He has a complete set of dissection tools—scalpels, brain knives, and the rest. He has hardly ever used them, but he feels better knowing they are there.

The ghost tree groans, branches swaying in the wind of a synaptic storm. The Corbies bob their heads and flap their wings in hungry anticipation.

“Oh-oh-oh, did Simon bring us a pig?” sings a crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” answers the Corbie chorus.

“No-no-no, Simon brought us a dog,” sings another crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.”

Simon slips on blue latex gloves.

“Subject is male.”

He picks up his scalpel.

“Subject is . . . a good dog.”

I’d never had a patient I knew alive, Jane.

Sadly, Simon pets the animal. He drinks from his Thermos. He cuts his way to the Dead Water.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

“Good boy!”

*   *   *   *   *

The Corbies are content. Simon’s mind is at ease. A nip of the Dead Water keeps the jagged glass at bay. Simon cleans the instruments, watches the diluted red flow down the drain. Vague memories of playing fetch on the bone-powder beach by the dark water.

“Cause of death: coyote,” Simon says.

They came into the city. They not only survived, but thrived. People rarely realized such large predators could go unseen. They were crafty animals, adapting to new environments, new food supplies. In the suburbs, they learned to hunt in packs to take down the surplus deer. In the city, they learned to hunt rats and eat trash.

But something else got into the Dead Water, Jane.

It happened sometimes, some stray signal invaded, an image, a bit of information unrelated to the patient or the case in any way. Already he has trouble remembering. Something moving under the sand, moaning, growling, like before, with Jane. Something that burst from the sand, a blur of claws, razor teeth, and black doll’s eyes.

Simon misses the dog already.

He drifts to sleep in the predawn. An infomercial plays on the TV, a program by a local self-help guru, Arthur Drake—a combination self-actualization and get-rich program called Apex Consumers.

“Be a more powerful consumer! Don’t get consumed in today’s fast-paced world, be the one to consume. Change your life today!”

Simon drifts off to dreams of pyramid schemes and razor-filled mouths and doll’s eyes.

*   *   *   *   *

Every window is a story. You have but to peek.

On the other side of the city, a television. Thick blood oozes down the screen. Never mind why. Is that really important now?

Trapped inside this TV, Charlton Heston tries desperately to warn the people of Chicago. “It’s people!” he screams. But no one notices. “It’s people!”

The crimson curtain slowly comes down on his scene.

CHAPTER 6

Dear diary, Simon will write. Today I kissed a corpse.

*   *   *   *   *

“That’s when the first plastic baggie of children’s teeth washed up on shore. Back in 2001. March.”

“Yeah?”

“Since then, we’ve found about twenty more baggies.”

“No shit?”

“I shit you not. Over twenty freakin’ bags and no fucking answers. This fucking town, man. Once upon a time, a body washing up off the Lake was a big deal. Now, it don’t even make the first, second, or third page of the Trib.”

“Weird, man.”

“Weird?” Officer John Polhaus swallows a barely chewed mouthful of Italian beef. “Rookie, when we’re through with you, the needle on your ‘Weird’ barometer is going to be looser than two dollar snatch. Weird? Christ. This fucking town. I swear, if they didn’t make the world’s greatest Italian beef and hoagies, I’d be in Arizona by now. Jesus, that’s good. . . .”

Polhaus continues talking, but all his younger colleague can hear, through the mouthful of sandwich, are vowels and slurping sounds.

“Two sandwiches, John?”

“I’m on a fucking diet.”

“So, can we go?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“Kid, there are two things in my day that make this hard life worth it. One is to gorge on an Italian beef with sweet peppers and provolone. The other is to fuck with Meeks.”

“The Ghoul?”

“The Ghoul.”

“Heard he fucked up the Twiss case. You guys had him dead to rights, right?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if Twiss and Meeks trade congratulatory e-mails. Wouldn’t be surprised if they celebrate, in Boy’s Town, with dinner and pillow biting. And I certainly wouldn’t have a goddamn heart attack if I discovered Meeks spends his nights in the autopsy room, strip dancing for stiffs with a toe tag twirling on his dick.” Polhaus speaks through beef and bread, spraying his fellow with wet fragments.

“Freak,” says the younger officer, wiping off his face.

“Freak.”

Polhaus’s radio squawks to life. “John, you there?”

“Yeah,” says Polhaus. “Where are you?”

“Have you seen your car?”

“What?”

“I think your tires have been slashed, man.”

“Motherfucker!” Polhaus storms outside, the younger officer following.

Simon manifests from around a corner. He can hear his scalpel laughing in his pocket as he creeps toward the elevators.

“Oh! You startled me, Simon.” That is what his mother said to him countless times, as he was growing up. Teachers, as well. Simon spent his life walking so quietly that people would not notice him, leaving him to sneak up on others without even meaning to. Getting into the building unseen now was not difficult at all.

Sunday night and still part of Simon’s enforced weekend, but Dr. Reeves would not be in. Reeves never came in on Sunday nights, reserving that time to meet with his contacts in the laborious enterprise of black market cadaver sales—always conducted away from the morgue. He kept to that routine religiously.

Simon sneaks toward the autopsy rooms. He needs information. In a movie, a clever character always seems to be able to hack into an office computer to find secrets. Simon’s methods require different sources to be hacked.

*   *   *   *   *

She still gives him butterflies. Wonderful, horrible butterflies.

Sometimes nausea and joy meet in the strangest places. Misfit, yes. But when was the last time you had butterflies? They flutter and flutter in his guts.

“Third date?” Simon says to the humming room. His friends murmur encouragements from their cold spaces. They whisper in the refrigerated hum. He holds her hand and looks into her eyes.

That is enough.

Peace.

The absinthe begins to take hold. The colors sharpen and bleed as lines and boundaries fade away and the world becomes easier to control in its liquid alchemy. Simon closes his eyes and watches the wormwood tree grow and the sleeping wraith crows awaken in his skull. He can see the butterflies turn into moths, spasming in the dark of his stomach. He can reach out and pluck the negative moths, leave the positives. He skewers them with pins, puts them up on display, gives them fancy Latin names—here is Doubtis totalis and Nervous uneasious and Phobos maximus—and then they cease to matter.

His other distractions are not so easily silenced and catalogued. The Corbies caw angrily to one another. They peck their branches in raucous racket. They caw and call.

“Simon!”

“Simon!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

“This one will cost you!”

“Third drink!”

“Cost you!”

“Won’t let you get off on the cheap!”

“Price!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

Simon ignores the ghost crows in his head and the remaining witch moths in his stomach, and he dives down that Y-incision that spells love.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs against the Night’s Plutonian shore. Invisible symphonies. Moonlight sonatas in the dim. Lily in hand, the vaudevillian, raggedy-scarecrow hero walks in the bone-powder sand, moving at silent film frame rates, searching for his ladylove.

She is not there.

He looks high and low in the lunar glow and nostalgia pull. But where, oh where. . . ?

“Jane?”

All alone in a region of sighs. All alone and he searches and he walks and everything is far away as the crow flies.

But wait.

Something stirs.

“Jane?”

Something crawls out of the black water. Something small. Something bloated.

A little boy.

Little Toby Reynolds drags himself out of the ebony sea. All the filth and putrescence of the Chicago River leak from his pale, puffy face, muffling his words to a choked gurgle.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Toby lurches forward, dragging a cement block wired to a large fishhook that pierces his right foot. He drags himself toward Simon.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” says Simon, frozen.

Somewhere, very distant, maybe in a dream, Simon tries to vomit and purge and escape back into his sleepwalk life.

*   *   *   *   *



Have you heard the story of Myer Twiss?

Sometimes, Jane, a Dead Water trip can go bad.

Certainly, you’ve read the newspaper clippings, seen that eerie mugshot.

Sometimes, Jane, I pull the wrong memory, the wrong story.

But have you heard the rhyme that children still sing, while playing jump rope, in certain neighborhoods of Chicago—all those words that rhyme with “Twiss”?

Sometimes bad things wander into the Dead Water.

Stories are doorways. You have but to knock.

“Subject: Toby Reynolds,” Simon once said, calling the little boy’s name, beginning the ritual. “Caucasian, eight years old.”

They sat together, in the Dead Water, fishing by the ebony sea, and Simon made a pinky promise with Toby, promised to help.

Toby was a difficult case. Water can wash away evidence. Police fished the boy out of the Chicago River, the stretch they call Bubbly Creek, where the water still bubbles from the gases emitted by the rotting flesh the meat packing companies dumped a hundred years ago. They say that mutant fish and sins swim there. They say that once upon a time, the water was so bloody birds could walk on the floating scabs.

Myer Twiss, local pedophile, child killer, and man-about-town, had taken Toby in the night. When Myer was done with his victims he hooked cement blocks to their feet and threw them into Bubbly Creek. Fluid and filth in the lungs told Simon that Toby was still alive when he hit the water.

Toby told me everything, Jane, everything I needed. He was my friend.

Simon found the needed secrets to help a frustrated police force to build a case. They said words like “linchpin” and “expert witness” and called Simon to the stand. It would be the first and last time. The defense attorney had gotten hold of details regarding Simon’s “disturbing methods” and he dissected Simon before judge and jury.

“Show your work!” Always, Jane, always: “Show your work!” “People skills, Simon.” “A smile and a handshake save lives!”

Simon broke and had an outburst on the stand, the poor, sensitive boy. An artery in the district attorney’s case had been cut, and it bled to death. Myer Twiss walked free.

He still walks.

Bubbly Creek still bubbles.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs.

Little Toby Reynolds looks at Simon with milk-shroud eyes that leak something viscous onto his ruined Bulls shirt.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Little Toby stumbles toward Simon, reaches out to Simon with bloated, burst, sausage fingers—reaches out like a toddler who wants something.

Somewhere distant, maybe in a dream, Simon writhes on a tile floor.

Little Toby drags the heavy cement block up the Night’s Plutonian shore. Maybe he will drag it forever. His mouth opens and closes in clammy noodle cadence. He falls at Simon’s feet, grabs Simon’s legs, and pulls himself up, slowly, pulls himself up Simon’s body with the patient deliberation of stagnant water seeping up cloth.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Out of the black water lurch dozens more little bodies. Each one of them drags a cement block. The children of Twiss. None of them can swim away like Simon’s patients usually do. All of them sank, dragged down by cement blocks and Simon’s failure.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says. “I mucked it all up. They make me pay, though it’s never enough. I’m sorry. I wanted to set you free.”

And somewhere, maybe in a dream, Simon convulses on a tile floor and swallows his tongue.

Little Toby coughs up sewage as he reaches for Simon’s face, mouth opening and closing, liquid and mute—when something shifts in the ivory sand.

A moaning cacophony breaks the rhythm of the ebony sea, drowns out the sound of cement blocks dragging in the sand. All the bloated, putrid children stop dragging the little cubes of purgatory hooked to their feet. Everything is still for a moment.

The ivory sands shift.

Simon falls backward.

Little Toby lets out an amphibian-mucus scream as white arms and jagged claws pull him under the sand.

Sand explodes.

Faces rise.

White faces, black doll’s eyes, and their mouths—jagged razor teeth—their mouths open as wide as perdition. They can never have enough. They are hungry. They are Hunger. Manifest Destiny hunger.

They surge.

Feeding frenzy.

They devour the putrid little children. Teeth and claws and doll’s eyes. They gorge. Still hungry. Still Hunger. Their distended stomachs growl like a billion maggots begging for meat.

They surge.

Toward Simon.

Cool hands—cool like September sand—wrap around him from behind. Protecting. They pull Simon away from frenzy and madness and melancholy.

*   *   *   *   *

Autopsy Room 6.

Simon.

Wakes.

Up.

Choking and gasping on the green, green tiles.

“Bad trip, man,” chant the Corbies in singsong I-told-you-so’s.

Simon feels the cool hands. Lying on the floor, next to the stainless steel autopsy table, and Jane is turned, dangling over the side, arms draped protectively over Simon.

“What was that?” asks Simon, still gasping. “Was . . . was that some of your secret, Jane? Were you protecting me by not saying?”

Gasps.

Breathe.

In.

Out.

Simon rises. He lays Jane back on the table. Looks into her eyes. And . . . slows . . . his . . . breathing. He paces the autopsy room, the fluorescent lights, green tiles, and stainless steel—the green and the steel bleed together. The power of the dead love floods his molecules, surges. A bad trip is still a trip.

Breathe.

Memories of the bloated little children come back with a bubbling rush. He bends down, hot forehead against cool forehead.

“It’s hard, Jane. When the cases go bad. Unsolved. And you already know the answer. But you can’t . . . you can’t show your work. They can’t swim away, Jane. They’re stuck.”

He opens his eyes, green malachite an inch away from her gold. Her eyes help. They dissect the guilts, perform a postmortem on his pains. He breathes. Things are clear for the moment. The crows go silent and take heed.

“That is not going to happen to you. They will not get away, Jane, not like Myer Twiss. Promise.”

Simon kisses her lips, cool like September sands, like the time in the year when everything turns sad and sweet. He blows living air down her mouth. Most of it escapes, but some rebounds, rushes back, just a little, the faintest bit; it echoes in her throat, just the tiniest bit, expels in the quietest of sighs.

It is her voice.

It is enough.



INTERLUDE:

Fortunes

“What’s your fortune say?”

“If I tell you, it might not come true.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Nope.”

“What do I have to do to make you tell me?”

“Now that is an interesting question.”

The man in the box does not react when I make faces at him, just smiles his Punch-’n’-Judy grin. A moment ago, I fed the box two coins and the man inside came to life, grinning. A wizard, he waved his hands as his gloves flashed to the distorted sound of antique lightning. A slip of paper slid out.

“Just tell me your fortune already,” she says.

“I think he winked at me.”

“You’re being silly. And you’re changing the subject.”

“You bring out the silly in me.”

“Navy Pier was a good idea.”

“Happy anniversary.”

She leaps into my arms and I grab her butt, the butt that still makes my toes curl, and the slip of paper is crushed between my hand and that butt, and we kiss as the wind picks up off of the Lake.

“Mmmmm . . . very good idea,” she says.

“Well, I am brilliant, you know.”

“So what is the brilliant agenda?”

“Well, I thought we might check out the live band and swing dancing at the end of the pier, work up a sweat and, later on, make out on the Ferris wheel.”

We both look up at the luminous immensity of the wheel. She smiles and my toes curl again.

“Mmmmm. There will, of course, be copious amounts of overpriced goodies purchased throughout.”

“Of course, m’lady.”

“You’re not going to tell me your fortune?”

“Nope.”

“You know, I could seduce it out of you.”

“Couldn’t hurt to try. Maybe you’ll get it out of me later.”

We take hands and walk toward the sounds of the big band, under the glow of the wheel. In my other hand, I feel the slip of paper. It says:

She is cheating on you.

She is fucking Richard.

I suspected as much. When I read it, I saw the words, but I also saw images: Me standing over her, panting, clutching my baseball bat, cracked and stained. The rush of the curtains on the canopy bed come down on us like the end of a show.

We walk off, hand in hand. I keep my fortune safely in my pocket.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.

CHAPTER 5



Simon watches the silver wraiths.

The sepia wraiths.

The monochromatic wraiths.

“They are all dead, you know,” he tells the sleepy crows in his cranium. He drinks green. He watches the screen. They are all dead. Purgatories run in circles. The Corbies are sated but not satisfied.

Organ music. A monochrome skeleton dances on top of a gear-work clock. Onscreen text reads: Blood! Your precious blood!

He watches Count Orlok, all rodent fangs and spider hands, stalking the wide-eyed heroine. Simon watches Nosferatu, the 1922 horror classic—thrills at the hungry corpse stalking through the flicker-flash world. Finally, the sun comes up and kills the vampire.

Simon changes discs and sips from his Thermos.

He watches Our Hospitality, the 1923 comedy classic—thrills at the slapstick antics of Buster Keaton, the Michelangelo of silent comedy. He watches the deadpan-faced hero perform pratfalls and physical gags.Silent, bodily, vaudevillian soliloquies.

They buried Buster Keaton with a rosary in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other, to prepare for both eternal possibilities. Did you know that, Jane?

They’re all dead. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on digital discs. Simon puts the two discs away, like two giant coins for the ferryman. Sometimes two discs will get you where you’re going. The Corbies caw in the wormwood branches. This is not the addiction. This is a byproduct of the addiction. This is not the drug. This is rummaging through your medicine cabinet while waiting for your source to call.

Simon closes his eyes and lets the green fairy magic do its work, projecting waking dreams on the inner eyelids, a new movie with symphonic score, a merging of memories. The hideous vampire versus the slapstick hero, claws and fangs against pratfalls and perfect timing. How wonderfully incongruous, the scary comedy, the comedic horror . . .

His thoughts drift back to her golden eyes.

Damn.

Late, Saturday night, and Simon sits in his house, banished from work, unable to be with Jane, unable to concentrate on anything else, unable to sleep.

“Your biorhythms be bugged,” cackle the Corbies.

Simon paces his home, tours the dead plants and empty fish tanks while obsession teases his spine with that amphetamine tickle. Again and again he pulls out a tiny white lock of Jane’s hair from his pocket.

This is not an ideal relationship.

He paces and thinks of her pallid face, her cool hands. He takes out a scalpel and examines it, lovingly. It was the scalpel. Her autopsy scalpel. Their scalpel.

They do not make Hallmark cards for this situation.

Simon paces.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon walks a coin up and down his hands, between dexterous fingers. Then he walks the scalpel. And then he walks them both, scalpel chasing coin, up and down and around his hand.

“You have an imbalance in your head,” the doctors said, but they never really knew what to do, Jane.

Medications never seemed to work, rarely had any effect on young Simon. Not like absinthe.

It tickles my innards. Eh, Jane?

Simon grabs the devil’s prayer book—a deck of cards—and performs lifts and double lifts and shuffles. He moves cards about the deck invisibly, makes cards appear and vanish. He manifests coins from nowhere and sends them back. He tries the scalpel, making it appear and vanish with wrist flicks. Simon practices card throwing, sinking queens and kings and jacks into yielding targets, cutting the stems of dead houseplants from across the room.

One doctor, who young Simon actually liked, prescribed exercises of manual dexterity. So Simon took up various arts and hobbies. He learned sleight of hand. He took up juggling, card throwing, knife throwing, carving, calligraphy, and various crafts, anything to keep his hands busy, to demand precision from them. He had his father’s surgical hands, better hands.

Simon runs out of cards. He walks to the spare bedroom, the one with mats on the floor, and starts his tumbling exercises.

The hand exercises helped, a bit. They certainly kept the glass shards out of his brain better than the drugs. But Simon was always hungry for more. As a boy, he had appreciated the physical comedians of his beloved silent films: Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Lloyd, and the others. He read their biographies, admired their dedication to their craft, their practiced, expert control of their bodies—how, in the name of a laugh, they performed much more dangerous and impressive demonstrations of physicality than any modern, musclebound action star does in his or her explosive stunts. So Simon took up vaudeville, slapstick, and physical comedy. Teachers were harder to find, but his parents had the money and they indulged their boy. Simon learned from performers and clowns, from books and videos, and mimicked what he saw in his movies. He took several classes in the martial arts, mostly for the tumbles and breakfalls—judo rolls, jujutsu rolls, aikido rolls.

Simon rolls, tumbles, and somersaults on the mat. He takes painful-looking falls. He slips on banana peels that are not there, save for what the wormwood shows him. Simon has slapstick boxing matches with imaginary foes. He reenacts the routines he has memorized from DVDs, the backgrounds and piano music supplied by absinthe and imagination, odd ballets and comic grace. He battles the ghoulish Nosferatu with pratfalls and gags, a slapstick duel with a Gothic horror.

After years of repetition, our hero has the speed, dexterity, and skill that can only come from obsessive compulsion and no social life. His cuts at the morgue are the most precise. He may be the most skilled sleight of hand performer in the city, though he would never know it. Simon never performs for others, only the shadows in his head and the ones that leak out.

People see Simon lost in his thoughts and assume he is slow, but his mind moves very quickly. People see Simon’s awkward nature and assume he is physically inept, but he is much more flexible and athletic than they could imagine.

Simon defeats the Gothic monster with slapstick and the movie he has created with wormwood in his head is good, distracting. Still, his mind wanders back to her golden eyes.

The Corbies whisper.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon flushes another fish.

They always make him cry.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon writes a love sonnet. Then he smashes a mirror when he sees Toby Reynolds’s bloated, putrescent face.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says to the fragments of glass. “I’m so sorry about Twiss.”

Do you know about Myer Twiss?

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night, still.

Simon carves her name into the wall, over and over, but the black birds keep squawking. Somewhere he can hear Count Orlok’s silent chuckle. His belly growls for the dead love.

There is a ghost tree, Jane, that grows in my head, and the Corbies are always hungry.

Simon grabs his hat, his coat, and his Thermos. He does what every absinthe-pickled gentleman necrophile has done, when troubled, since time immemorial.

He goes for a walk.

*   *   *   *   *

The swings sway vacantly in the wind on squealing chains. Empty slide, empty seesaw, and empty monkey bars. Simon removes his shoes and digs his feet deep into autumn sand. It does feel good.

The dark of the world spins and blurs. The Wheel of Fate turns. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on squeaky playground steel. Simon kicks harder and the merry-go-round spins faster. Faster. He stands and hops up, perching and balancing on the steel handhold rails that run like spokes through the merry-go-round. Still spinning, Simon stands, and then walks, over the merry-go-round, from steel bar to steel bar, at the rate of the spin, walking with perfect balance, an absurd, circular treadmill in the dark.

“Simon-go-round. Simon-go-round,” chant the Corbies.

He balances his black hat on his nose, head tilted up, still walking, still spinning. Was it comical? Was it impressive? He tries hard to be impressive, to show off.

But Jane does not laugh.

Jane does not clap.

Jane is not here.

Simon cannot hear the ebony sea. He slumps, sits back down on the spinning wheel, folding up like a sad, dapper ragdoll, resting his chin on his knees. No Dead Water and no Jane, just a neighborhood playground on the mugger side of the A.M. divide. He shakes with dead-love withdrawal. “It’s not fair,” Simon says to the crows in his head. “My friends always go where I can’t follow.”

He feels nostalgia pangs, big as coffin nails, in the chest.

Simon tiptoes through the playground on bare feet, conscious of broken glass. He deftly avoids a used condom half submerged in the sand. The place is empty and desolate—not another soul in the park, just Simon and a kingdom of dead sperm. Simon stares through his green, green buzz and, in monomania, focuses down and down to the molecular level, considers whole worlds contained within the crinkled latex, whole cities of wriggling beings—some screaming, “The end is nigh,” some reveling in the moment of their writhing Danse Macabre, all their millions upon millions of little dramas playing out in micro-time to the coming spermicidal apocalypse.

“There could be as many as six hundred million of them,” Simon tells the Corbies.

Our hero has a career in finding the stories hidden in rotting bits of aftermath.

He slides down the slide. He swings on a swing, reaches out for a hand that is not there. He kicks harder, swings higher. Higher.

What would happen if I went all the way, Jane? Could I get you back? Could I pull a three-sixty? If I went that high, would you see me?

Simon leaps off the swing, paces the playground, chasing afterimages of Jane, memory fragments. He’s not chasing echoes, but echoes of Jane’s echoes from the Dead Water. Simon flutters through life like a bat, pursuing the echoes of things but never the thing—the aftermath of events, not the event; the ghosts of people, not the person; the corpses, not the ghosts. For someone with a whole squawking, sardonic murder in his head, he feels pretty alone.

“Ain’t got no body. . . ,” sing the shady crows, laughing in the wormwood tree.

Simon sits on the seesaw. He kicks up, but crashes right back down. Alone. Wind and moon and cold sand and noisy metal. Who was Jane? Who were the four men who played hangman with her? What did they want? Did they get it? Where was this going? Simon closes his eyes and chases Jane, chases her golden eyes and white hair down a black hole of questions. Where did it go? How deep?

Simon kicks up—

And stays up, on the seesaw, feet dangling above the sand.

The crows stop singing and joking, all their beady eyes staring intently through Simon’s glasses. It takes the black eyes of a thousand-thousand phantom crows to form the pupils in Simon’s green eyes.

They see a boy—a boy sitting at the low end of the seesaw.

He is just the sort of boy Simon would expect to see in a playground, so average that Simon, later, would have trouble guessing his age or even describing him.

“You’re up late,” says Simon, shyly.

“I’m third shift,” says the boy. “Like you.”

He kicks up, rising.

Simon touches down on the ground.

“I like the hat,” says the boy.

Simon kicks up.

The boy goes down.

Simon nods. He wants to know what happens next. He does not know how this conversation is supposed to go. Is it an absinthe hallucination?

“I don’t know how this conversation is supposed to go.”

“This, Simon Meeks, is the part where I show you how the world would be if you were never born!” says the boy, holding out his arms in presentation.

Simon stares.

“Just kidding,” says the boy. “Hated that movie.”

Up.

Down.

“Your boss. He’s kind of a dick-hole,” says the boy.

“I . . . yes.” Simon would never have put it like that, but he could not deny it either.

Up.

Down.

“He does naughty things with the stiffs,” observes the boy. “But then, you do some pretty strange things yourself.” The boy’s aloofness reminds Simon, very much, of a cat’s.

Up.

Down.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she, Simon—the golden-eyed cadaver?”

“Yes. Beautiful.”

Up.

Down.

“Do you know her name?”

“Yes.”

“What?” The boy leans in, suddenly very interested.

“Jane Doe.”

The boy pauses, leans back, and then smiles very big.

He had a great many teeth, Jane. A great many teeth.

Up.

Down.

“So you never knew her before. Mystery girl,” says the boy. “No suspects.”

“There were four of them. One man was very large. He held the rope. Another asked questions. Another laughed. Another cried. They hoisted her three times. They wanted to scare her. She had something they wanted.” Simon wants to keep the conversation going, hoping answers will beget answers.

“How did you know that, Simon?”

“She told me.”

“Is that what happens when you—? Hmm. You gave off the wildest colors . . .” The boy looks lost in a memory, but only for a moment. “I don’t suppose she told you what possessed her to get that shade of nail polish, did she?”

“I like her nail polish,” Simon says, a little defensively.

“Do you know what they wanted from her?”

“No.”

Up.

Down.

“What’s your interest in all this, Simon?”

“Her.”

“What?”

“I love her.”

“No, really—what? Huh? Huh?!” The boy watches Simon intently, but not in the eye. He stares at Simon’s entirety. “No way! You’re telling the truth.” The boy looks amused.

Up.

Down.

“Simon, if you go any further into this, things are going to get very weird and very scary.”

“I don’t care.”

The boy continues looking into Simon. “No, I guess not. You’re not going to stop, no matter what, are you?”

“No, I’m never going to stop.” The words feel liberating in Simon’s mouth, decisive. The Corbies hop up and down in his head, excited and agitated by something.

It’s the boy’s turn to descend. “You want the ones that did this to Jane to pay, right?”

The words sound more like a persuasion than an observation. The boy does not talk like a boy. His mannerisms seem . . . off. Suddenly all the Corbies shriek and caw:

“Not a boy!”

“Danger, Simon!”

“Danger!”

“It’s not a boy!”

“It hasn’t breathed, Simon!”

“Hasn’t taken a breath in ninety-eight seconds!”

“Ninety-nine seconds!”

“Danger!”

Simon looks down at the boy. Through the green haze there’s something superimposed, something sharing the same space with the boy, something taller, something slender. It notices Simon noticing and the boy-thing’s head tilts to the side, tilts too far. Simon flinches, uncontrollably, as if something were thrown at his face.

“Simon?” the boy-thing purrs.

“What are you?”

“I’m a shadow,” say two separate voices fighting for control of Simon’s ears. “Right now, I’m your shadow.”

A blur.

Gone.

Simon crashes down, hard, on the seesaw. Without thinking he goes into a well-practiced backward roll and ends up back onto his feet. It is only force of will that prevents him from completing the slapstick routine with a comedic stagger. The Corbies continue to keen and cry.

“Danger!”

“Run, Simon!”

“Ah, hasten!”

“Ah, let us not linger!”

“Ah, fly!”

“Let us fly!”

Simon grabs his hat and runs.

My shadow, Jane! My shadow split away from me and I did not know how to sew it back on.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon is fairly certain that a strange thing happened at the playground. He also knows that he has a lousy point of reference for “normal,” so it’s hard to gauge just how strange.

But he had made a decisive choice. Hadn’t he? He would not let Jane just drift away. He would find out what had happened, sew together the corpses of the three wise monkeys, if he had to—feed them lightning and resurrect them to see and hear and speak the evil that had happened.

But how?

“Green light!” yell the Corbies.

“Oh,” says Simon. He crosses the street.

The crows jabber agitatedly. The glass shards press his brain. Simon needs to be able to think clearly. He needed a—

“There!” cry the Corbies.

“There—there—there!”

A dead dog in the predawn alley. Fresh. When times are tough, addicts can be creative in scoring a hit. Simon enters the alley and remembers . . .

When I was a boy, Jane, I used to give animals Viking funerals.

An inquisitive boy, Simon often explored the area around his home. Sometimes, he came across the cadavers of animals: roadkill wildlife, pigeons, cats, dogs, even a turtle once. He found them in their odd poses and looked into their filmy eyes. This was the closest he allowed himself to animals, afraid of killing living creatures with his very presence, like his fish.

I didn’t like leaving their bodies like that, Jane—on the ground, undignified, abandoned to bloat and decay.

Simon gave them sendoffs. He longed to give them a proper Viking funeral, to burn them on proper funeral pyres. But fire is not something adults let children like Simon have.

Still, he was a creative boy. An acquaintance at school often showed off his collection of smashed pennies—pennies left on railroad tracks and crushed by the trains. Such trinkets are valuable treasures to schoolchildren and they inspired Simon. He brought his dead animal friends to the El tracks by his home and he gave them the dignity, if not the form, of a Viking funeral.

I left them on the tracks, Jane, to be blown to oblivion by the impossible pressure of the iron world-snake careening down the tracks, taking my friends to the underworld. They came like dragons down the mountain.

Simon walks quietly toward the dog. It has been years since he staged a Viking funeral. He has a much different purpose for—

“Oh, no.”

Simon jumps back.

The dog is still alive. Barely. Lying on its side, too weak to lift its head, only twitch, and breathe shallowly, and watch Simon with frightened eyes.

Simon swallows. He paces from alley wall to alley wall. He has no idea what to do.

“Hello . . . boy,” he says.

The dog’s tail twitches once. Simon looks the animal over—deep lacerations, a severed artery. The blood had all but stopped flowing. It would not be long now. Simon kneels by the dog. The beast lets out a barely audible whine.

“Hey, boy. Don’t be scared.”

Simon reaches out a shaking hand, strokes the dogs head. Oh. Still warm. So warm. He pets the dog.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

The dog’s tail wags, weakly, thumping against the ground.

“That’s a boy. Good dog. Good, good dog. Don’t be scared.” Simon cradles the animal’s head in his lap, stroking it and whispering to it. “Don’t be scared. It’s all right. It’s all right. Don’t be scared. It’s okay; I’m here.” Just like Molly did with her cadaver back in school. The dog looks up at Simon with liquid eyes, too weak to move, but still wagging its tail.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

“That’s a boy. Such a good dog,” says Simon as the tears stream down his face—not just because the dog is dying, but because this is the most affection Simon has given and received from an animal. He so wanted a dog as a boy. And here this animal was afraid, in its death throes, and it still spent its waning energy to wag its tail, to give Simon a sign of acceptance. Simon was sure if the dog were stronger, it would lick his face. Oh, that would be wonderful! Warm, licking, accepting love.

“Such a good dog. Good boy. It’s all right. Don’t be scared.”

Simon sits with the animal. A few minutes later, it dies in relative peace in his arms. He dries his face and caries the dog home.

*   *   *   *   *

In Simon’s basement, there is a stainless steel autopsy table, with working drainage system. He has a complete set of dissection tools—scalpels, brain knives, and the rest. He has hardly ever used them, but he feels better knowing they are there.

The ghost tree groans, branches swaying in the wind of a synaptic storm. The Corbies bob their heads and flap their wings in hungry anticipation.

“Oh-oh-oh, did Simon bring us a pig?” sings a crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” answers the Corbie chorus.

“No-no-no, Simon brought us a dog,” sings another crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.”

Simon slips on blue latex gloves.

“Subject is male.”

He picks up his scalpel.

“Subject is . . . a good dog.”

I’d never had a patient I knew alive, Jane.

Sadly, Simon pets the animal. He drinks from his Thermos. He cuts his way to the Dead Water.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

“Good boy!”

*   *   *   *   *

The Corbies are content. Simon’s mind is at ease. A nip of the Dead Water keeps the jagged glass at bay. Simon cleans the instruments, watches the diluted red flow down the drain. Vague memories of playing fetch on the bone-powder beach by the dark water.

“Cause of death: coyote,” Simon says.

They came into the city. They not only survived, but thrived. People rarely realized such large predators could go unseen. They were crafty animals, adapting to new environments, new food supplies. In the suburbs, they learned to hunt in packs to take down the surplus deer. In the city, they learned to hunt rats and eat trash.

But something else got into the Dead Water, Jane.

It happened sometimes, some stray signal invaded, an image, a bit of information unrelated to the patient or the case in any way. Already he has trouble remembering. Something moving under the sand, moaning, growling, like before, with Jane. Something that burst from the sand, a blur of claws, razor teeth, and black doll’s eyes.

Simon misses the dog already.

He drifts to sleep in the predawn. An infomercial plays on the TV, a program by a local self-help guru, Arthur Drake—a combination self-actualization and get-rich program called Apex Consumers.

“Be a more powerful consumer! Don’t get consumed in today’s fast-paced world, be the one to consume. Change your life today!”

Simon drifts off to dreams of pyramid schemes and razor-filled mouths and doll’s eyes.

*   *   *   *   *

Every window is a story. You have but to peek.

On the other side of the city, a television. Thick blood oozes down the screen. Never mind why. Is that really important now?

Trapped inside this TV, Charlton Heston tries desperately to warn the people of Chicago. “It’s people!” he screams. But no one notices. “It’s people!”

The crimson curtain slowly comes down on his scene.

CHAPTER 6

Dear diary, Simon will write. Today I kissed a corpse.

*   *   *   *   *

“That’s when the first plastic baggie of children’s teeth washed up on shore. Back in 2001. March.”

“Yeah?”

“Since then, we’ve found about twenty more baggies.”

“No shit?”

“I shit you not. Over twenty freakin’ bags and no fucking answers. This fucking town, man. Once upon a time, a body washing up off the Lake was a big deal. Now, it don’t even make the first, second, or third page of the Trib.”

“Weird, man.”

“Weird?” Officer John Polhaus swallows a barely chewed mouthful of Italian beef. “Rookie, when we’re through with you, the needle on your ‘Weird’ barometer is going to be looser than two dollar snatch. Weird? Christ. This fucking town. I swear, if they didn’t make the world’s greatest Italian beef and hoagies, I’d be in Arizona by now. Jesus, that’s good. . . .”

Polhaus continues talking, but all his younger colleague can hear, through the mouthful of sandwich, are vowels and slurping sounds.

“Two sandwiches, John?”

“I’m on a fucking diet.”

“So, can we go?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“Kid, there are two things in my day that make this hard life worth it. One is to gorge on an Italian beef with sweet peppers and provolone. The other is to fuck with Meeks.”

“The Ghoul?”

“The Ghoul.”

“Heard he fucked up the Twiss case. You guys had him dead to rights, right?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if Twiss and Meeks trade congratulatory e-mails. Wouldn’t be surprised if they celebrate, in Boy’s Town, with dinner and pillow biting. And I certainly wouldn’t have a goddamn heart attack if I discovered Meeks spends his nights in the autopsy room, strip dancing for stiffs with a toe tag twirling on his dick.” Polhaus speaks through beef and bread, spraying his fellow with wet fragments.

“Freak,” says the younger officer, wiping off his face.

“Freak.”

Polhaus’s radio squawks to life. “John, you there?”

“Yeah,” says Polhaus. “Where are you?”

“Have you seen your car?”

“What?”

“I think your tires have been slashed, man.”

“Motherfucker!” Polhaus storms outside, the younger officer following.

Simon manifests from around a corner. He can hear his scalpel laughing in his pocket as he creeps toward the elevators.

“Oh! You startled me, Simon.” That is what his mother said to him countless times, as he was growing up. Teachers, as well. Simon spent his life walking so quietly that people would not notice him, leaving him to sneak up on others without even meaning to. Getting into the building unseen now was not difficult at all.

Sunday night and still part of Simon’s enforced weekend, but Dr. Reeves would not be in. Reeves never came in on Sunday nights, reserving that time to meet with his contacts in the laborious enterprise of black market cadaver sales—always conducted away from the morgue. He kept to that routine religiously.

Simon sneaks toward the autopsy rooms. He needs information. In a movie, a clever character always seems to be able to hack into an office computer to find secrets. Simon’s methods require different sources to be hacked.

*   *   *   *   *

She still gives him butterflies. Wonderful, horrible butterflies.

Sometimes nausea and joy meet in the strangest places. Misfit, yes. But when was the last time you had butterflies? They flutter and flutter in his guts.

“Third date?” Simon says to the humming room. His friends murmur encouragements from their cold spaces. They whisper in the refrigerated hum. He holds her hand and looks into her eyes.

That is enough.

Peace.

The absinthe begins to take hold. The colors sharpen and bleed as lines and boundaries fade away and the world becomes easier to control in its liquid alchemy. Simon closes his eyes and watches the wormwood tree grow and the sleeping wraith crows awaken in his skull. He can see the butterflies turn into moths, spasming in the dark of his stomach. He can reach out and pluck the negative moths, leave the positives. He skewers them with pins, puts them up on display, gives them fancy Latin names—here is Doubtis totalis and Nervous uneasious and Phobos maximus—and then they cease to matter.

His other distractions are not so easily silenced and catalogued. The Corbies caw angrily to one another. They peck their branches in raucous racket. They caw and call.

“Simon!”

“Simon!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

“This one will cost you!”

“Third drink!”

“Cost you!”

“Won’t let you get off on the cheap!”

“Price!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

Simon ignores the ghost crows in his head and the remaining witch moths in his stomach, and he dives down that Y-incision that spells love.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs against the Night’s Plutonian shore. Invisible symphonies. Moonlight sonatas in the dim. Lily in hand, the vaudevillian, raggedy-scarecrow hero walks in the bone-powder sand, moving at silent film frame rates, searching for his ladylove.

She is not there.

He looks high and low in the lunar glow and nostalgia pull. But where, oh where. . . ?

“Jane?”

All alone in a region of sighs. All alone and he searches and he walks and everything is far away as the crow flies.

But wait.

Something stirs.

“Jane?”

Something crawls out of the black water. Something small. Something bloated.

A little boy.

Little Toby Reynolds drags himself out of the ebony sea. All the filth and putrescence of the Chicago River leak from his pale, puffy face, muffling his words to a choked gurgle.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Toby lurches forward, dragging a cement block wired to a large fishhook that pierces his right foot. He drags himself toward Simon.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” says Simon, frozen.

Somewhere, very distant, maybe in a dream, Simon tries to vomit and purge and escape back into his sleepwalk life.

*   *   *   *   *



Have you heard the story of Myer Twiss?

Sometimes, Jane, a Dead Water trip can go bad.

Certainly, you’ve read the newspaper clippings, seen that eerie mugshot.

Sometimes, Jane, I pull the wrong memory, the wrong story.

But have you heard the rhyme that children still sing, while playing jump rope, in certain neighborhoods of Chicago—all those words that rhyme with “Twiss”?

Sometimes bad things wander into the Dead Water.

Stories are doorways. You have but to knock.

“Subject: Toby Reynolds,” Simon once said, calling the little boy’s name, beginning the ritual. “Caucasian, eight years old.”

They sat together, in the Dead Water, fishing by the ebony sea, and Simon made a pinky promise with Toby, promised to help.

Toby was a difficult case. Water can wash away evidence. Police fished the boy out of the Chicago River, the stretch they call Bubbly Creek, where the water still bubbles from the gases emitted by the rotting flesh the meat packing companies dumped a hundred years ago. They say that mutant fish and sins swim there. They say that once upon a time, the water was so bloody birds could walk on the floating scabs.

Myer Twiss, local pedophile, child killer, and man-about-town, had taken Toby in the night. When Myer was done with his victims he hooked cement blocks to their feet and threw them into Bubbly Creek. Fluid and filth in the lungs told Simon that Toby was still alive when he hit the water.

Toby told me everything, Jane, everything I needed. He was my friend.

Simon found the needed secrets to help a frustrated police force to build a case. They said words like “linchpin” and “expert witness” and called Simon to the stand. It would be the first and last time. The defense attorney had gotten hold of details regarding Simon’s “disturbing methods” and he dissected Simon before judge and jury.

“Show your work!” Always, Jane, always: “Show your work!” “People skills, Simon.” “A smile and a handshake save lives!”

Simon broke and had an outburst on the stand, the poor, sensitive boy. An artery in the district attorney’s case had been cut, and it bled to death. Myer Twiss walked free.

He still walks.

Bubbly Creek still bubbles.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs.

Little Toby Reynolds looks at Simon with milk-shroud eyes that leak something viscous onto his ruined Bulls shirt.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Little Toby stumbles toward Simon, reaches out to Simon with bloated, burst, sausage fingers—reaches out like a toddler who wants something.

Somewhere distant, maybe in a dream, Simon writhes on a tile floor.

Little Toby drags the heavy cement block up the Night’s Plutonian shore. Maybe he will drag it forever. His mouth opens and closes in clammy noodle cadence. He falls at Simon’s feet, grabs Simon’s legs, and pulls himself up, slowly, pulls himself up Simon’s body with the patient deliberation of stagnant water seeping up cloth.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Out of the black water lurch dozens more little bodies. Each one of them drags a cement block. The children of Twiss. None of them can swim away like Simon’s patients usually do. All of them sank, dragged down by cement blocks and Simon’s failure.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says. “I mucked it all up. They make me pay, though it’s never enough. I’m sorry. I wanted to set you free.”

And somewhere, maybe in a dream, Simon convulses on a tile floor and swallows his tongue.

Little Toby coughs up sewage as he reaches for Simon’s face, mouth opening and closing, liquid and mute—when something shifts in the ivory sand.

A moaning cacophony breaks the rhythm of the ebony sea, drowns out the sound of cement blocks dragging in the sand. All the bloated, putrid children stop dragging the little cubes of purgatory hooked to their feet. Everything is still for a moment.

The ivory sands shift.

Simon falls backward.

Little Toby lets out an amphibian-mucus scream as white arms and jagged claws pull him under the sand.

Sand explodes.

Faces rise.

White faces, black doll’s eyes, and their mouths—jagged razor teeth—their mouths open as wide as perdition. They can never have enough. They are hungry. They are Hunger. Manifest Destiny hunger.

They surge.

Feeding frenzy.

They devour the putrid little children. Teeth and claws and doll’s eyes. They gorge. Still hungry. Still Hunger. Their distended stomachs growl like a billion maggots begging for meat.

They surge.

Toward Simon.

Cool hands—cool like September sand—wrap around him from behind. Protecting. They pull Simon away from frenzy and madness and melancholy.

*   *   *   *   *

Autopsy Room 6.

Simon.

Wakes.

Up.

Choking and gasping on the green, green tiles.

“Bad trip, man,” chant the Corbies in singsong I-told-you-so’s.

Simon feels the cool hands. Lying on the floor, next to the stainless steel autopsy table, and Jane is turned, dangling over the side, arms draped protectively over Simon.

“What was that?” asks Simon, still gasping. “Was . . . was that some of your secret, Jane? Were you protecting me by not saying?”

Gasps.

Breathe.

In.

Out.

Simon rises. He lays Jane back on the table. Looks into her eyes. And . . . slows . . . his . . . breathing. He paces the autopsy room, the fluorescent lights, green tiles, and stainless steel—the green and the steel bleed together. The power of the dead love floods his molecules, surges. A bad trip is still a trip.

Breathe.

Memories of the bloated little children come back with a bubbling rush. He bends down, hot forehead against cool forehead.

“It’s hard, Jane. When the cases go bad. Unsolved. And you already know the answer. But you can’t . . . you can’t show your work. They can’t swim away, Jane. They’re stuck.”

He opens his eyes, green malachite an inch away from her gold. Her eyes help. They dissect the guilts, perform a postmortem on his pains. He breathes. Things are clear for the moment. The crows go silent and take heed.

“That is not going to happen to you. They will not get away, Jane, not like Myer Twiss. Promise.”

Simon kisses her lips, cool like September sands, like the time in the year when everything turns sad and sweet. He blows living air down her mouth. Most of it escapes, but some rebounds, rushes back, just a little, the faintest bit; it echoes in her throat, just the tiniest bit, expels in the quietest of sighs.

It is her voice.

It is enough.



INTERLUDE:

Fortunes

“What’s your fortune say?”

“If I tell you, it might not come true.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Nope.”

“What do I have to do to make you tell me?”

“Now that is an interesting question.”

The man in the box does not react when I make faces at him, just smiles his Punch-’n’-Judy grin. A moment ago, I fed the box two coins and the man inside came to life, grinning. A wizard, he waved his hands as his gloves flashed to the distorted sound of antique lightning. A slip of paper slid out.

“Just tell me your fortune already,” she says.

“I think he winked at me.”

“You’re being silly. And you’re changing the subject.”

“You bring out the silly in me.”

“Navy Pier was a good idea.”

“Happy anniversary.”

She leaps into my arms and I grab her butt, the butt that still makes my toes curl, and the slip of paper is crushed between my hand and that butt, and we kiss as the wind picks up off of the Lake.

“Mmmmm . . . very good idea,” she says.

“Well, I am brilliant, you know.”

“So what is the brilliant agenda?”

“Well, I thought we might check out the live band and swing dancing at the end of the pier, work up a sweat and, later on, make out on the Ferris wheel.”

We both look up at the luminous immensity of the wheel. She smiles and my toes curl again.

“Mmmmm. There will, of course, be copious amounts of overpriced goodies purchased throughout.”

“Of course, m’lady.”

“You’re not going to tell me your fortune?”

“Nope.”

“You know, I could seduce it out of you.”

“Couldn’t hurt to try. Maybe you’ll get it out of me later.”

We take hands and walk toward the sounds of the big band, under the glow of the wheel. In my other hand, I feel the slip of paper. It says:

She is cheating on you.

She is fucking Richard.

I suspected as much. When I read it, I saw the words, but I also saw images: Me standing over her, panting, clutching my baseball bat, cracked and stained. The rush of the curtains on the canopy bed come down on us like the end of a show.

We walk off, hand in hand. I keep my fortune safely in my pocket.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.CHAPTER 5



Simon watches the silver wraiths.

The sepia wraiths.

The monochromatic wraiths.

“They are all dead, you know,” he tells the sleepy crows in his cranium. He drinks green. He watches the screen. They are all dead. Purgatories run in circles. The Corbies are sated but not satisfied.

Organ music. A monochrome skeleton dances on top of a gear-work clock. Onscreen text reads: Blood! Your precious blood!

He watches Count Orlok, all rodent fangs and spider hands, stalking the wide-eyed heroine. Simon watches Nosferatu, the 1922 horror classic—thrills at the hungry corpse stalking through the flicker-flash world. Finally, the sun comes up and kills the vampire.

Simon changes discs and sips from his Thermos.

He watches Our Hospitality, the 1923 comedy classic—thrills at the slapstick antics of Buster Keaton, the Michelangelo of silent comedy. He watches the deadpan-faced hero perform pratfalls and physical gags.Silent, bodily, vaudevillian soliloquies.

They buried Buster Keaton with a rosary in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other, to prepare for both eternal possibilities. Did you know that, Jane?

They’re all dead. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on digital discs. Simon puts the two discs away, like two giant coins for the ferryman. Sometimes two discs will get you where you’re going. The Corbies caw in the wormwood branches. This is not the addiction. This is a byproduct of the addiction. This is not the drug. This is rummaging through your medicine cabinet while waiting for your source to call.

Simon closes his eyes and lets the green fairy magic do its work, projecting waking dreams on the inner eyelids, a new movie with symphonic score, a merging of memories. The hideous vampire versus the slapstick hero, claws and fangs against pratfalls and perfect timing. How wonderfully incongruous, the scary comedy, the comedic horror . . .

His thoughts drift back to her golden eyes.

Damn.

Late, Saturday night, and Simon sits in his house, banished from work, unable to be with Jane, unable to concentrate on anything else, unable to sleep.

“Your biorhythms be bugged,” cackle the Corbies.

Simon paces his home, tours the dead plants and empty fish tanks while obsession teases his spine with that amphetamine tickle. Again and again he pulls out a tiny white lock of Jane’s hair from his pocket.

This is not an ideal relationship.

He paces and thinks of her pallid face, her cool hands. He takes out a scalpel and examines it, lovingly. It was the scalpel. Her autopsy scalpel. Their scalpel.

They do not make Hallmark cards for this situation.

Simon paces.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon walks a coin up and down his hands, between dexterous fingers. Then he walks the scalpel. And then he walks them both, scalpel chasing coin, up and down and around his hand.

“You have an imbalance in your head,” the doctors said, but they never really knew what to do, Jane.

Medications never seemed to work, rarely had any effect on young Simon. Not like absinthe.

It tickles my innards. Eh, Jane?

Simon grabs the devil’s prayer book—a deck of cards—and performs lifts and double lifts and shuffles. He moves cards about the deck invisibly, makes cards appear and vanish. He manifests coins from nowhere and sends them back. He tries the scalpel, making it appear and vanish with wrist flicks. Simon practices card throwing, sinking queens and kings and jacks into yielding targets, cutting the stems of dead houseplants from across the room.

One doctor, who young Simon actually liked, prescribed exercises of manual dexterity. So Simon took up various arts and hobbies. He learned sleight of hand. He took up juggling, card throwing, knife throwing, carving, calligraphy, and various crafts, anything to keep his hands busy, to demand precision from them. He had his father’s surgical hands, better hands.

Simon runs out of cards. He walks to the spare bedroom, the one with mats on the floor, and starts his tumbling exercises.

The hand exercises helped, a bit. They certainly kept the glass shards out of his brain better than the drugs. But Simon was always hungry for more. As a boy, he had appreciated the physical comedians of his beloved silent films: Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Lloyd, and the others. He read their biographies, admired their dedication to their craft, their practiced, expert control of their bodies—how, in the name of a laugh, they performed much more dangerous and impressive demonstrations of physicality than any modern, musclebound action star does in his or her explosive stunts. So Simon took up vaudeville, slapstick, and physical comedy. Teachers were harder to find, but his parents had the money and they indulged their boy. Simon learned from performers and clowns, from books and videos, and mimicked what he saw in his movies. He took several classes in the martial arts, mostly for the tumbles and breakfalls—judo rolls, jujutsu rolls, aikido rolls.

Simon rolls, tumbles, and somersaults on the mat. He takes painful-looking falls. He slips on banana peels that are not there, save for what the wormwood shows him. Simon has slapstick boxing matches with imaginary foes. He reenacts the routines he has memorized from DVDs, the backgrounds and piano music supplied by absinthe and imagination, odd ballets and comic grace. He battles the ghoulish Nosferatu with pratfalls and gags, a slapstick duel with a Gothic horror.

After years of repetition, our hero has the speed, dexterity, and skill that can only come from obsessive compulsion and no social life. His cuts at the morgue are the most precise. He may be the most skilled sleight of hand performer in the city, though he would never know it. Simon never performs for others, only the shadows in his head and the ones that leak out.

People see Simon lost in his thoughts and assume he is slow, but his mind moves very quickly. People see Simon’s awkward nature and assume he is physically inept, but he is much more flexible and athletic than they could imagine.

Simon defeats the Gothic monster with slapstick and the movie he has created with wormwood in his head is good, distracting. Still, his mind wanders back to her golden eyes.

The Corbies whisper.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon flushes another fish.

They always make him cry.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon writes a love sonnet. Then he smashes a mirror when he sees Toby Reynolds’s bloated, putrescent face.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says to the fragments of glass. “I’m so sorry about Twiss.”

Do you know about Myer Twiss?

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night, still.

Simon carves her name into the wall, over and over, but the black birds keep squawking. Somewhere he can hear Count Orlok’s silent chuckle. His belly growls for the dead love.

There is a ghost tree, Jane, that grows in my head, and the Corbies are always hungry.

Simon grabs his hat, his coat, and his Thermos. He does what every absinthe-pickled gentleman necrophile has done, when troubled, since time immemorial.

He goes for a walk.

*   *   *   *   *

The swings sway vacantly in the wind on squealing chains. Empty slide, empty seesaw, and empty monkey bars. Simon removes his shoes and digs his feet deep into autumn sand. It does feel good.

The dark of the world spins and blurs. The Wheel of Fate turns. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on squeaky playground steel. Simon kicks harder and the merry-go-round spins faster. Faster. He stands and hops up, perching and balancing on the steel handhold rails that run like spokes through the merry-go-round. Still spinning, Simon stands, and then walks, over the merry-go-round, from steel bar to steel bar, at the rate of the spin, walking with perfect balance, an absurd, circular treadmill in the dark.

“Simon-go-round. Simon-go-round,” chant the Corbies.

He balances his black hat on his nose, head tilted up, still walking, still spinning. Was it comical? Was it impressive? He tries hard to be impressive, to show off.

But Jane does not laugh.

Jane does not clap.

Jane is not here.

Simon cannot hear the ebony sea. He slumps, sits back down on the spinning wheel, folding up like a sad, dapper ragdoll, resting his chin on his knees. No Dead Water and no Jane, just a neighborhood playground on the mugger side of the A.M. divide. He shakes with dead-love withdrawal. “It’s not fair,” Simon says to the crows in his head. “My friends always go where I can’t follow.”

He feels nostalgia pangs, big as coffin nails, in the chest.

Simon tiptoes through the playground on bare feet, conscious of broken glass. He deftly avoids a used condom half submerged in the sand. The place is empty and desolate—not another soul in the park, just Simon and a kingdom of dead sperm. Simon stares through his green, green buzz and, in monomania, focuses down and down to the molecular level, considers whole worlds contained within the crinkled latex, whole cities of wriggling beings—some screaming, “The end is nigh,” some reveling in the moment of their writhing Danse Macabre, all their millions upon millions of little dramas playing out in micro-time to the coming spermicidal apocalypse.

“There could be as many as six hundred million of them,” Simon tells the Corbies.

Our hero has a career in finding the stories hidden in rotting bits of aftermath.

He slides down the slide. He swings on a swing, reaches out for a hand that is not there. He kicks harder, swings higher. Higher.

What would happen if I went all the way, Jane? Could I get you back? Could I pull a three-sixty? If I went that high, would you see me?

Simon leaps off the swing, paces the playground, chasing afterimages of Jane, memory fragments. He’s not chasing echoes, but echoes of Jane’s echoes from the Dead Water. Simon flutters through life like a bat, pursuing the echoes of things but never the thing—the aftermath of events, not the event; the ghosts of people, not the person; the corpses, not the ghosts. For someone with a whole squawking, sardonic murder in his head, he feels pretty alone.

“Ain’t got no body. . . ,” sing the shady crows, laughing in the wormwood tree.

Simon sits on the seesaw. He kicks up, but crashes right back down. Alone. Wind and moon and cold sand and noisy metal. Who was Jane? Who were the four men who played hangman with her? What did they want? Did they get it? Where was this going? Simon closes his eyes and chases Jane, chases her golden eyes and white hair down a black hole of questions. Where did it go? How deep?

Simon kicks up—

And stays up, on the seesaw, feet dangling above the sand.

The crows stop singing and joking, all their beady eyes staring intently through Simon’s glasses. It takes the black eyes of a thousand-thousand phantom crows to form the pupils in Simon’s green eyes.

They see a boy—a boy sitting at the low end of the seesaw.

He is just the sort of boy Simon would expect to see in a playground, so average that Simon, later, would have trouble guessing his age or even describing him.

“You’re up late,” says Simon, shyly.

“I’m third shift,” says the boy. “Like you.”

He kicks up, rising.

Simon touches down on the ground.

“I like the hat,” says the boy.

Simon kicks up.

The boy goes down.

Simon nods. He wants to know what happens next. He does not know how this conversation is supposed to go. Is it an absinthe hallucination?

“I don’t know how this conversation is supposed to go.”

“This, Simon Meeks, is the part where I show you how the world would be if you were never born!” says the boy, holding out his arms in presentation.

Simon stares.

“Just kidding,” says the boy. “Hated that movie.”

Up.

Down.

“Your boss. He’s kind of a dick-hole,” says the boy.

“I . . . yes.” Simon would never have put it like that, but he could not deny it either.

Up.

Down.

“He does naughty things with the stiffs,” observes the boy. “But then, you do some pretty strange things yourself.” The boy’s aloofness reminds Simon, very much, of a cat’s.

Up.

Down.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she, Simon—the golden-eyed cadaver?”

“Yes. Beautiful.”

Up.

Down.

“Do you know her name?”

“Yes.”

“What?” The boy leans in, suddenly very interested.

“Jane Doe.”

The boy pauses, leans back, and then smiles very big.

He had a great many teeth, Jane. A great many teeth.

Up.

Down.

“So you never knew her before. Mystery girl,” says the boy. “No suspects.”

“There were four of them. One man was very large. He held the rope. Another asked questions. Another laughed. Another cried. They hoisted her three times. They wanted to scare her. She had something they wanted.” Simon wants to keep the conversation going, hoping answers will beget answers.

“How did you know that, Simon?”

“She told me.”

“Is that what happens when you—? Hmm. You gave off the wildest colors . . .” The boy looks lost in a memory, but only for a moment. “I don’t suppose she told you what possessed her to get that shade of nail polish, did she?”

“I like her nail polish,” Simon says, a little defensively.

“Do you know what they wanted from her?”

“No.”

Up.

Down.

“What’s your interest in all this, Simon?”

“Her.”

“What?”

“I love her.”

“No, really—what? Huh? Huh?!” The boy watches Simon intently, but not in the eye. He stares at Simon’s entirety. “No way! You’re telling the truth.” The boy looks amused.

Up.

Down.

“Simon, if you go any further into this, things are going to get very weird and very scary.”

“I don’t care.”

The boy continues looking into Simon. “No, I guess not. You’re not going to stop, no matter what, are you?”

“No, I’m never going to stop.” The words feel liberating in Simon’s mouth, decisive. The Corbies hop up and down in his head, excited and agitated by something.

It’s the boy’s turn to descend. “You want the ones that did this to Jane to pay, right?”

The words sound more like a persuasion than an observation. The boy does not talk like a boy. His mannerisms seem . . . off. Suddenly all the Corbies shriek and caw:

“Not a boy!”

“Danger, Simon!”

“Danger!”

“It’s not a boy!”

“It hasn’t breathed, Simon!”

“Hasn’t taken a breath in ninety-eight seconds!”

“Ninety-nine seconds!”

“Danger!”

Simon looks down at the boy. Through the green haze there’s something superimposed, something sharing the same space with the boy, something taller, something slender. It notices Simon noticing and the boy-thing’s head tilts to the side, tilts too far. Simon flinches, uncontrollably, as if something were thrown at his face.

“Simon?” the boy-thing purrs.

“What are you?”

“I’m a shadow,” say two separate voices fighting for control of Simon’s ears. “Right now, I’m your shadow.”

A blur.

Gone.

Simon crashes down, hard, on the seesaw. Without thinking he goes into a well-practiced backward roll and ends up back onto his feet. It is only force of will that prevents him from completing the slapstick routine with a comedic stagger. The Corbies continue to keen and cry.

“Danger!”

“Run, Simon!”

“Ah, hasten!”

“Ah, let us not linger!”

“Ah, fly!”

“Let us fly!”

Simon grabs his hat and runs.

My shadow, Jane! My shadow split away from me and I did not know how to sew it back on.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon is fairly certain that a strange thing happened at the playground. He also knows that he has a lousy point of reference for “normal,” so it’s hard to gauge just how strange.

But he had made a decisive choice. Hadn’t he? He would not let Jane just drift away. He would find out what had happened, sew together the corpses of the three wise monkeys, if he had to—feed them lightning and resurrect them to see and hear and speak the evil that had happened.

But how?

“Green light!” yell the Corbies.

“Oh,” says Simon. He crosses the street.

The crows jabber agitatedly. The glass shards press his brain. Simon needs to be able to think clearly. He needed a—

“There!” cry the Corbies.

“There—there—there!”

A dead dog in the predawn alley. Fresh. When times are tough, addicts can be creative in scoring a hit. Simon enters the alley and remembers . . .

When I was a boy, Jane, I used to give animals Viking funerals.

An inquisitive boy, Simon often explored the area around his home. Sometimes, he came across the cadavers of animals: roadkill wildlife, pigeons, cats, dogs, even a turtle once. He found them in their odd poses and looked into their filmy eyes. This was the closest he allowed himself to animals, afraid of killing living creatures with his very presence, like his fish.

I didn’t like leaving their bodies like that, Jane—on the ground, undignified, abandoned to bloat and decay.

Simon gave them sendoffs. He longed to give them a proper Viking funeral, to burn them on proper funeral pyres. But fire is not something adults let children like Simon have.

Still, he was a creative boy. An acquaintance at school often showed off his collection of smashed pennies—pennies left on railroad tracks and crushed by the trains. Such trinkets are valuable treasures to schoolchildren and they inspired Simon. He brought his dead animal friends to the El tracks by his home and he gave them the dignity, if not the form, of a Viking funeral.

I left them on the tracks, Jane, to be blown to oblivion by the impossible pressure of the iron world-snake careening down the tracks, taking my friends to the underworld. They came like dragons down the mountain.

Simon walks quietly toward the dog. It has been years since he staged a Viking funeral. He has a much different purpose for—

“Oh, no.”

Simon jumps back.

The dog is still alive. Barely. Lying on its side, too weak to lift its head, only twitch, and breathe shallowly, and watch Simon with frightened eyes.

Simon swallows. He paces from alley wall to alley wall. He has no idea what to do.

“Hello . . . boy,” he says.

The dog’s tail twitches once. Simon looks the animal over—deep lacerations, a severed artery. The blood had all but stopped flowing. It would not be long now. Simon kneels by the dog. The beast lets out a barely audible whine.

“Hey, boy. Don’t be scared.”

Simon reaches out a shaking hand, strokes the dogs head. Oh. Still warm. So warm. He pets the dog.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

The dog’s tail wags, weakly, thumping against the ground.

“That’s a boy. Good dog. Good, good dog. Don’t be scared.” Simon cradles the animal’s head in his lap, stroking it and whispering to it. “Don’t be scared. It’s all right. It’s all right. Don’t be scared. It’s okay; I’m here.” Just like Molly did with her cadaver back in school. The dog looks up at Simon with liquid eyes, too weak to move, but still wagging its tail.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

“That’s a boy. Such a good dog,” says Simon as the tears stream down his face—not just because the dog is dying, but because this is the most affection Simon has given and received from an animal. He so wanted a dog as a boy. And here this animal was afraid, in its death throes, and it still spent its waning energy to wag its tail, to give Simon a sign of acceptance. Simon was sure if the dog were stronger, it would lick his face. Oh, that would be wonderful! Warm, licking, accepting love.

“Such a good dog. Good boy. It’s all right. Don’t be scared.”

Simon sits with the animal. A few minutes later, it dies in relative peace in his arms. He dries his face and caries the dog home.

*   *   *   *   *

In Simon’s basement, there is a stainless steel autopsy table, with working drainage system. He has a complete set of dissection tools—scalpels, brain knives, and the rest. He has hardly ever used them, but he feels better knowing they are there.

The ghost tree groans, branches swaying in the wind of a synaptic storm. The Corbies bob their heads and flap their wings in hungry anticipation.

“Oh-oh-oh, did Simon bring us a pig?” sings a crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” answers the Corbie chorus.

“No-no-no, Simon brought us a dog,” sings another crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.”

Simon slips on blue latex gloves.

“Subject is male.”

He picks up his scalpel.

“Subject is . . . a good dog.”

I’d never had a patient I knew alive, Jane.

Sadly, Simon pets the animal. He drinks from his Thermos. He cuts his way to the Dead Water.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

“Good boy!”

*   *   *   *   *

The Corbies are content. Simon’s mind is at ease. A nip of the Dead Water keeps the jagged glass at bay. Simon cleans the instruments, watches the diluted red flow down the drain. Vague memories of playing fetch on the bone-powder beach by the dark water.

“Cause of death: coyote,” Simon says.

They came into the city. They not only survived, but thrived. People rarely realized such large predators could go unseen. They were crafty animals, adapting to new environments, new food supplies. In the suburbs, they learned to hunt in packs to take down the surplus deer. In the city, they learned to hunt rats and eat trash.

But something else got into the Dead Water, Jane.

It happened sometimes, some stray signal invaded, an image, a bit of information unrelated to the patient or the case in any way. Already he has trouble remembering. Something moving under the sand, moaning, growling, like before, with Jane. Something that burst from the sand, a blur of claws, razor teeth, and black doll’s eyes.

Simon misses the dog already.

He drifts to sleep in the predawn. An infomercial plays on the TV, a program by a local self-help guru, Arthur Drake—a combination self-actualization and get-rich program called Apex Consumers.

“Be a more powerful consumer! Don’t get consumed in today’s fast-paced world, be the one to consume. Change your life today!”

Simon drifts off to dreams of pyramid schemes and razor-filled mouths and doll’s eyes.

*   *   *   *   *

Every window is a story. You have but to peek.

On the other side of the city, a television. Thick blood oozes down the screen. Never mind why. Is that really important now?

Trapped inside this TV, Charlton Heston tries desperately to warn the people of Chicago. “It’s people!” he screams. But no one notices. “It’s people!”

The crimson curtain slowly comes down on his scene.

CHAPTER 6

Dear diary, Simon will write. Today I kissed a corpse.

*   *   *   *   *

“That’s when the first plastic baggie of children’s teeth washed up on shore. Back in 2001. March.”

“Yeah?”

“Since then, we’ve found about twenty more baggies.”

“No shit?”

“I shit you not. Over twenty freakin’ bags and no fucking answers. This fucking town, man. Once upon a time, a body washing up off the Lake was a big deal. Now, it don’t even make the first, second, or third page of the Trib.”

“Weird, man.”

“Weird?” Officer John Polhaus swallows a barely chewed mouthful of Italian beef. “Rookie, when we’re through with you, the needle on your ‘Weird’ barometer is going to be looser than two dollar snatch. Weird? Christ. This fucking town. I swear, if they didn’t make the world’s greatest Italian beef and hoagies, I’d be in Arizona by now. Jesus, that’s good. . . .”

Polhaus continues talking, but all his younger colleague can hear, through the mouthful of sandwich, are vowels and slurping sounds.

“Two sandwiches, John?”

“I’m on a fucking diet.”

“So, can we go?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“Kid, there are two things in my day that make this hard life worth it. One is to gorge on an Italian beef with sweet peppers and provolone. The other is to fuck with Meeks.”

“The Ghoul?”

“The Ghoul.”

“Heard he fucked up the Twiss case. You guys had him dead to rights, right?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if Twiss and Meeks trade congratulatory e-mails. Wouldn’t be surprised if they celebrate, in Boy’s Town, with dinner and pillow biting. And I certainly wouldn’t have a goddamn heart attack if I discovered Meeks spends his nights in the autopsy room, strip dancing for stiffs with a toe tag twirling on his dick.” Polhaus speaks through beef and bread, spraying his fellow with wet fragments.

“Freak,” says the younger officer, wiping off his face.

“Freak.”

Polhaus’s radio squawks to life. “John, you there?”

“Yeah,” says Polhaus. “Where are you?”

“Have you seen your car?”

“What?”

“I think your tires have been slashed, man.”

“Motherfucker!” Polhaus storms outside, the younger officer following.

Simon manifests from around a corner. He can hear his scalpel laughing in his pocket as he creeps toward the elevators.

“Oh! You startled me, Simon.” That is what his mother said to him countless times, as he was growing up. Teachers, as well. Simon spent his life walking so quietly that people would not notice him, leaving him to sneak up on others without even meaning to. Getting into the building unseen now was not difficult at all.

Sunday night and still part of Simon’s enforced weekend, but Dr. Reeves would not be in. Reeves never came in on Sunday nights, reserving that time to meet with his contacts in the laborious enterprise of black market cadaver sales—always conducted away from the morgue. He kept to that routine religiously.

Simon sneaks toward the autopsy rooms. He needs information. In a movie, a clever character always seems to be able to hack into an office computer to find secrets. Simon’s methods require different sources to be hacked.

*   *   *   *   *

She still gives him butterflies. Wonderful, horrible butterflies.

Sometimes nausea and joy meet in the strangest places. Misfit, yes. But when was the last time you had butterflies? They flutter and flutter in his guts.

“Third date?” Simon says to the humming room. His friends murmur encouragements from their cold spaces. They whisper in the refrigerated hum. He holds her hand and looks into her eyes.

That is enough.

Peace.

The absinthe begins to take hold. The colors sharpen and bleed as lines and boundaries fade away and the world becomes easier to control in its liquid alchemy. Simon closes his eyes and watches the wormwood tree grow and the sleeping wraith crows awaken in his skull. He can see the butterflies turn into moths, spasming in the dark of his stomach. He can reach out and pluck the negative moths, leave the positives. He skewers them with pins, puts them up on display, gives them fancy Latin names—here is Doubtis totalis and Nervous uneasious and Phobos maximus—and then they cease to matter.

His other distractions are not so easily silenced and catalogued. The Corbies caw angrily to one another. They peck their branches in raucous racket. They caw and call.

“Simon!”

“Simon!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

“This one will cost you!”

“Third drink!”

“Cost you!”

“Won’t let you get off on the cheap!”

“Price!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

Simon ignores the ghost crows in his head and the remaining witch moths in his stomach, and he dives down that Y-incision that spells love.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs against the Night’s Plutonian shore. Invisible symphonies. Moonlight sonatas in the dim. Lily in hand, the vaudevillian, raggedy-scarecrow hero walks in the bone-powder sand, moving at silent film frame rates, searching for his ladylove.

She is not there.

He looks high and low in the lunar glow and nostalgia pull. But where, oh where. . . ?

“Jane?”

All alone in a region of sighs. All alone and he searches and he walks and everything is far away as the crow flies.

But wait.

Something stirs.

“Jane?”

Something crawls out of the black water. Something small. Something bloated.

A little boy.

Little Toby Reynolds drags himself out of the ebony sea. All the filth and putrescence of the Chicago River leak from his pale, puffy face, muffling his words to a choked gurgle.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Toby lurches forward, dragging a cement block wired to a large fishhook that pierces his right foot. He drags himself toward Simon.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” says Simon, frozen.

Somewhere, very distant, maybe in a dream, Simon tries to vomit and purge and escape back into his sleepwalk life.

*   *   *   *   *



Have you heard the story of Myer Twiss?

Sometimes, Jane, a Dead Water trip can go bad.

Certainly, you’ve read the newspaper clippings, seen that eerie mugshot.

Sometimes, Jane, I pull the wrong memory, the wrong story.

But have you heard the rhyme that children still sing, while playing jump rope, in certain neighborhoods of Chicago—all those words that rhyme with “Twiss”?

Sometimes bad things wander into the Dead Water.

Stories are doorways. You have but to knock.

“Subject: Toby Reynolds,” Simon once said, calling the little boy’s name, beginning the ritual. “Caucasian, eight years old.”

They sat together, in the Dead Water, fishing by the ebony sea, and Simon made a pinky promise with Toby, promised to help.

Toby was a difficult case. Water can wash away evidence. Police fished the boy out of the Chicago River, the stretch they call Bubbly Creek, where the water still bubbles from the gases emitted by the rotting flesh the meat packing companies dumped a hundred years ago. They say that mutant fish and sins swim there. They say that once upon a time, the water was so bloody birds could walk on the floating scabs.

Myer Twiss, local pedophile, child killer, and man-about-town, had taken Toby in the night. When Myer was done with his victims he hooked cement blocks to their feet and threw them into Bubbly Creek. Fluid and filth in the lungs told Simon that Toby was still alive when he hit the water.

Toby told me everything, Jane, everything I needed. He was my friend.

Simon found the needed secrets to help a frustrated police force to build a case. They said words like “linchpin” and “expert witness” and called Simon to the stand. It would be the first and last time. The defense attorney had gotten hold of details regarding Simon’s “disturbing methods” and he dissected Simon before judge and jury.

“Show your work!” Always, Jane, always: “Show your work!” “People skills, Simon.” “A smile and a handshake save lives!”

Simon broke and had an outburst on the stand, the poor, sensitive boy. An artery in the district attorney’s case had been cut, and it bled to death. Myer Twiss walked free.

He still walks.

Bubbly Creek still bubbles.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs.

Little Toby Reynolds looks at Simon with milk-shroud eyes that leak something viscous onto his ruined Bulls shirt.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Little Toby stumbles toward Simon, reaches out to Simon with bloated, burst, sausage fingers—reaches out like a toddler who wants something.

Somewhere distant, maybe in a dream, Simon writhes on a tile floor.

Little Toby drags the heavy cement block up the Night’s Plutonian shore. Maybe he will drag it forever. His mouth opens and closes in clammy noodle cadence. He falls at Simon’s feet, grabs Simon’s legs, and pulls himself up, slowly, pulls himself up Simon’s body with the patient deliberation of stagnant water seeping up cloth.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Out of the black water lurch dozens more little bodies. Each one of them drags a cement block. The children of Twiss. None of them can swim away like Simon’s patients usually do. All of them sank, dragged down by cement blocks and Simon’s failure.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says. “I mucked it all up. They make me pay, though it’s never enough. I’m sorry. I wanted to set you free.”

And somewhere, maybe in a dream, Simon convulses on a tile floor and swallows his tongue.

Little Toby coughs up sewage as he reaches for Simon’s face, mouth opening and closing, liquid and mute—when something shifts in the ivory sand.

A moaning cacophony breaks the rhythm of the ebony sea, drowns out the sound of cement blocks dragging in the sand. All the bloated, putrid children stop dragging the little cubes of purgatory hooked to their feet. Everything is still for a moment.

The ivory sands shift.

Simon falls backward.

Little Toby lets out an amphibian-mucus scream as white arms and jagged claws pull him under the sand.

Sand explodes.

Faces rise.

White faces, black doll’s eyes, and their mouths—jagged razor teeth—their mouths open as wide as perdition. They can never have enough. They are hungry. They are Hunger. Manifest Destiny hunger.

They surge.

Feeding frenzy.

They devour the putrid little children. Teeth and claws and doll’s eyes. They gorge. Still hungry. Still Hunger. Their distended stomachs growl like a billion maggots begging for meat.

They surge.

Toward Simon.

Cool hands—cool like September sand—wrap around him from behind. Protecting. They pull Simon away from frenzy and madness and melancholy.

*   *   *   *   *

Autopsy Room 6.

Simon.

Wakes.

Up.

Choking and gasping on the green, green tiles.

“Bad trip, man,” chant the Corbies in singsong I-told-you-so’s.

Simon feels the cool hands. Lying on the floor, next to the stainless steel autopsy table, and Jane is turned, dangling over the side, arms draped protectively over Simon.

“What was that?” asks Simon, still gasping. “Was . . . was that some of your secret, Jane? Were you protecting me by not saying?”

Gasps.

Breathe.

In.

Out.

Simon rises. He lays Jane back on the table. Looks into her eyes. And . . . slows . . . his . . . breathing. He paces the autopsy room, the fluorescent lights, green tiles, and stainless steel—the green and the steel bleed together. The power of the dead love floods his molecules, surges. A bad trip is still a trip.

Breathe.

Memories of the bloated little children come back with a bubbling rush. He bends down, hot forehead against cool forehead.

“It’s hard, Jane. When the cases go bad. Unsolved. And you already know the answer. But you can’t . . . you can’t show your work. They can’t swim away, Jane. They’re stuck.”

He opens his eyes, green malachite an inch away from her gold. Her eyes help. They dissect the guilts, perform a postmortem on his pains. He breathes. Things are clear for the moment. The crows go silent and take heed.

“That is not going to happen to you. They will not get away, Jane, not like Myer Twiss. Promise.”

Simon kisses her lips, cool like September sands, like the time in the year when everything turns sad and sweet. He blows living air down her mouth. Most of it escapes, but some rebounds, rushes back, just a little, the faintest bit; it echoes in her throat, just the tiniest bit, expels in the quietest of sighs.

It is her voice.

It is enough.



INTERLUDE:

Fortunes

“What’s your fortune say?”

“If I tell you, it might not come true.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Nope.”

“What do I have to do to make you tell me?”

“Now that is an interesting question.”

The man in the box does not react when I make faces at him, just smiles his Punch-’n’-Judy grin. A moment ago, I fed the box two coins and the man inside came to life, grinning. A wizard, he waved his hands as his gloves flashed to the distorted sound of antique lightning. A slip of paper slid out.

“Just tell me your fortune already,” she says.

“I think he winked at me.”

“You’re being silly. And you’re changing the subject.”

“You bring out the silly in me.”

“Navy Pier was a good idea.”

“Happy anniversary.”

She leaps into my arms and I grab her butt, the butt that still makes my toes curl, and the slip of paper is crushed between my hand and that butt, and we kiss as the wind picks up off of the Lake.

“Mmmmm . . . very good idea,” she says.

“Well, I am brilliant, you know.”

“So what is the brilliant agenda?”

“Well, I thought we might check out the live band and swing dancing at the end of the pier, work up a sweat and, later on, make out on the Ferris wheel.”

We both look up at the luminous immensity of the wheel. She smiles and my toes curl again.

“Mmmmm. There will, of course, be copious amounts of overpriced goodies purchased throughout.”

“Of course, m’lady.”

“You’re not going to tell me your fortune?”

“Nope.”

“You know, I could seduce it out of you.”

“Couldn’t hurt to try. Maybe you’ll get it out of me later.”

We take hands and walk toward the sounds of the big band, under the glow of the wheel. In my other hand, I feel the slip of paper. It says:

She is cheating on you.

She is fucking Richard.

I suspected as much. When I read it, I saw the words, but I also saw images: Me standing over her, panting, clutching my baseball bat, cracked and stained. The rush of the curtains on the canopy bed come down on us like the end of a show.

We walk off, hand in hand. I keep my fortune safely in my pocket.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.

CHAPTER 5



Simon watches the silver wraiths.

The sepia wraiths.

The monochromatic wraiths.

“They are all dead, you know,” he tells the sleepy crows in his cranium. He drinks green. He watches the screen. They are all dead. Purgatories run in circles. The Corbies are sated but not satisfied.

Organ music. A monochrome skeleton dances on top of a gear-work clock. Onscreen text reads: Blood! Your precious blood!

He watches Count Orlok, all rodent fangs and spider hands, stalking the wide-eyed heroine. Simon watches Nosferatu, the 1922 horror classic—thrills at the hungry corpse stalking through the flicker-flash world. Finally, the sun comes up and kills the vampire.

Simon changes discs and sips from his Thermos.

He watches Our Hospitality, the 1923 comedy classic—thrills at the slapstick antics of Buster Keaton, the Michelangelo of silent comedy. He watches the deadpan-faced hero perform pratfalls and physical gags.Silent, bodily, vaudevillian soliloquies.

They buried Buster Keaton with a rosary in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other, to prepare for both eternal possibilities. Did you know that, Jane?

They’re all dead. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on digital discs. Simon puts the two discs away, like two giant coins for the ferryman. Sometimes two discs will get you where you’re going. The Corbies caw in the wormwood branches. This is not the addiction. This is a byproduct of the addiction. This is not the drug. This is rummaging through your medicine cabinet while waiting for your source to call.

Simon closes his eyes and lets the green fairy magic do its work, projecting waking dreams on the inner eyelids, a new movie with symphonic score, a merging of memories. The hideous vampire versus the slapstick hero, claws and fangs against pratfalls and perfect timing. How wonderfully incongruous, the scary comedy, the comedic horror . . .

His thoughts drift back to her golden eyes.

Damn.

Late, Saturday night, and Simon sits in his house, banished from work, unable to be with Jane, unable to concentrate on anything else, unable to sleep.

“Your biorhythms be bugged,” cackle the Corbies.

Simon paces his home, tours the dead plants and empty fish tanks while obsession teases his spine with that amphetamine tickle. Again and again he pulls out a tiny white lock of Jane’s hair from his pocket.

This is not an ideal relationship.

He paces and thinks of her pallid face, her cool hands. He takes out a scalpel and examines it, lovingly. It was the scalpel. Her autopsy scalpel. Their scalpel.

They do not make Hallmark cards for this situation.

Simon paces.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon walks a coin up and down his hands, between dexterous fingers. Then he walks the scalpel. And then he walks them both, scalpel chasing coin, up and down and around his hand.

“You have an imbalance in your head,” the doctors said, but they never really knew what to do, Jane.

Medications never seemed to work, rarely had any effect on young Simon. Not like absinthe.

It tickles my innards. Eh, Jane?

Simon grabs the devil’s prayer book—a deck of cards—and performs lifts and double lifts and shuffles. He moves cards about the deck invisibly, makes cards appear and vanish. He manifests coins from nowhere and sends them back. He tries the scalpel, making it appear and vanish with wrist flicks. Simon practices card throwing, sinking queens and kings and jacks into yielding targets, cutting the stems of dead houseplants from across the room.

One doctor, who young Simon actually liked, prescribed exercises of manual dexterity. So Simon took up various arts and hobbies. He learned sleight of hand. He took up juggling, card throwing, knife throwing, carving, calligraphy, and various crafts, anything to keep his hands busy, to demand precision from them. He had his father’s surgical hands, better hands.

Simon runs out of cards. He walks to the spare bedroom, the one with mats on the floor, and starts his tumbling exercises.

The hand exercises helped, a bit. They certainly kept the glass shards out of his brain better than the drugs. But Simon was always hungry for more. As a boy, he had appreciated the physical comedians of his beloved silent films: Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Lloyd, and the others. He read their biographies, admired their dedication to their craft, their practiced, expert control of their bodies—how, in the name of a laugh, they performed much more dangerous and impressive demonstrations of physicality than any modern, musclebound action star does in his or her explosive stunts. So Simon took up vaudeville, slapstick, and physical comedy. Teachers were harder to find, but his parents had the money and they indulged their boy. Simon learned from performers and clowns, from books and videos, and mimicked what he saw in his movies. He took several classes in the martial arts, mostly for the tumbles and breakfalls—judo rolls, jujutsu rolls, aikido rolls.

Simon rolls, tumbles, and somersaults on the mat. He takes painful-looking falls. He slips on banana peels that are not there, save for what the wormwood shows him. Simon has slapstick boxing matches with imaginary foes. He reenacts the routines he has memorized from DVDs, the backgrounds and piano music supplied by absinthe and imagination, odd ballets and comic grace. He battles the ghoulish Nosferatu with pratfalls and gags, a slapstick duel with a Gothic horror.

After years of repetition, our hero has the speed, dexterity, and skill that can only come from obsessive compulsion and no social life. His cuts at the morgue are the most precise. He may be the most skilled sleight of hand performer in the city, though he would never know it. Simon never performs for others, only the shadows in his head and the ones that leak out.

People see Simon lost in his thoughts and assume he is slow, but his mind moves very quickly. People see Simon’s awkward nature and assume he is physically inept, but he is much more flexible and athletic than they could imagine.

Simon defeats the Gothic monster with slapstick and the movie he has created with wormwood in his head is good, distracting. Still, his mind wanders back to her golden eyes.

The Corbies whisper.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon flushes another fish.

They always make him cry.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon writes a love sonnet. Then he smashes a mirror when he sees Toby Reynolds’s bloated, putrescent face.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says to the fragments of glass. “I’m so sorry about Twiss.”

Do you know about Myer Twiss?

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night, still.

Simon carves her name into the wall, over and over, but the black birds keep squawking. Somewhere he can hear Count Orlok’s silent chuckle. His belly growls for the dead love.

There is a ghost tree, Jane, that grows in my head, and the Corbies are always hungry.

Simon grabs his hat, his coat, and his Thermos. He does what every absinthe-pickled gentleman necrophile has done, when troubled, since time immemorial.

He goes for a walk.

*   *   *   *   *

The swings sway vacantly in the wind on squealing chains. Empty slide, empty seesaw, and empty monkey bars. Simon removes his shoes and digs his feet deep into autumn sand. It does feel good.

The dark of the world spins and blurs. The Wheel of Fate turns. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on squeaky playground steel. Simon kicks harder and the merry-go-round spins faster. Faster. He stands and hops up, perching and balancing on the steel handhold rails that run like spokes through the merry-go-round. Still spinning, Simon stands, and then walks, over the merry-go-round, from steel bar to steel bar, at the rate of the spin, walking with perfect balance, an absurd, circular treadmill in the dark.

“Simon-go-round. Simon-go-round,” chant the Corbies.

He balances his black hat on his nose, head tilted up, still walking, still spinning. Was it comical? Was it impressive? He tries hard to be impressive, to show off.

But Jane does not laugh.

Jane does not clap.

Jane is not here.

Simon cannot hear the ebony sea. He slumps, sits back down on the spinning wheel, folding up like a sad, dapper ragdoll, resting his chin on his knees. No Dead Water and no Jane, just a neighborhood playground on the mugger side of the A.M. divide. He shakes with dead-love withdrawal. “It’s not fair,” Simon says to the crows in his head. “My friends always go where I can’t follow.”

He feels nostalgia pangs, big as coffin nails, in the chest.

Simon tiptoes through the playground on bare feet, conscious of broken glass. He deftly avoids a used condom half submerged in the sand. The place is empty and desolate—not another soul in the park, just Simon and a kingdom of dead sperm. Simon stares through his green, green buzz and, in monomania, focuses down and down to the molecular level, considers whole worlds contained within the crinkled latex, whole cities of wriggling beings—some screaming, “The end is nigh,” some reveling in the moment of their writhing Danse Macabre, all their millions upon millions of little dramas playing out in micro-time to the coming spermicidal apocalypse.

“There could be as many as six hundred million of them,” Simon tells the Corbies.

Our hero has a career in finding the stories hidden in rotting bits of aftermath.

He slides down the slide. He swings on a swing, reaches out for a hand that is not there. He kicks harder, swings higher. Higher.

What would happen if I went all the way, Jane? Could I get you back? Could I pull a three-sixty? If I went that high, would you see me?

Simon leaps off the swing, paces the playground, chasing afterimages of Jane, memory fragments. He’s not chasing echoes, but echoes of Jane’s echoes from the Dead Water. Simon flutters through life like a bat, pursuing the echoes of things but never the thing—the aftermath of events, not the event; the ghosts of people, not the person; the corpses, not the ghosts. For someone with a whole squawking, sardonic murder in his head, he feels pretty alone.

“Ain’t got no body. . . ,” sing the shady crows, laughing in the wormwood tree.

Simon sits on the seesaw. He kicks up, but crashes right back down. Alone. Wind and moon and cold sand and noisy metal. Who was Jane? Who were the four men who played hangman with her? What did they want? Did they get it? Where was this going? Simon closes his eyes and chases Jane, chases her golden eyes and white hair down a black hole of questions. Where did it go? How deep?

Simon kicks up—

And stays up, on the seesaw, feet dangling above the sand.

The crows stop singing and joking, all their beady eyes staring intently through Simon’s glasses. It takes the black eyes of a thousand-thousand phantom crows to form the pupils in Simon’s green eyes.

They see a boy—a boy sitting at the low end of the seesaw.

He is just the sort of boy Simon would expect to see in a playground, so average that Simon, later, would have trouble guessing his age or even describing him.

“You’re up late,” says Simon, shyly.

“I’m third shift,” says the boy. “Like you.”

He kicks up, rising.

Simon touches down on the ground.

“I like the hat,” says the boy.

Simon kicks up.

The boy goes down.

Simon nods. He wants to know what happens next. He does not know how this conversation is supposed to go. Is it an absinthe hallucination?

“I don’t know how this conversation is supposed to go.”

“This, Simon Meeks, is the part where I show you how the world would be if you were never born!” says the boy, holding out his arms in presentation.

Simon stares.

“Just kidding,” says the boy. “Hated that movie.”

Up.

Down.

“Your boss. He’s kind of a dick-hole,” says the boy.

“I . . . yes.” Simon would never have put it like that, but he could not deny it either.

Up.

Down.

“He does naughty things with the stiffs,” observes the boy. “But then, you do some pretty strange things yourself.” The boy’s aloofness reminds Simon, very much, of a cat’s.

Up.

Down.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she, Simon—the golden-eyed cadaver?”

“Yes. Beautiful.”

Up.

Down.

“Do you know her name?”

“Yes.”

“What?” The boy leans in, suddenly very interested.

“Jane Doe.”

The boy pauses, leans back, and then smiles very big.

He had a great many teeth, Jane. A great many teeth.

Up.

Down.

“So you never knew her before. Mystery girl,” says the boy. “No suspects.”

“There were four of them. One man was very large. He held the rope. Another asked questions. Another laughed. Another cried. They hoisted her three times. They wanted to scare her. She had something they wanted.” Simon wants to keep the conversation going, hoping answers will beget answers.

“How did you know that, Simon?”

“She told me.”

“Is that what happens when you—? Hmm. You gave off the wildest colors . . .” The boy looks lost in a memory, but only for a moment. “I don’t suppose she told you what possessed her to get that shade of nail polish, did she?”

“I like her nail polish,” Simon says, a little defensively.

“Do you know what they wanted from her?”

“No.”

Up.

Down.

“What’s your interest in all this, Simon?”

“Her.”

“What?”

“I love her.”

“No, really—what? Huh? Huh?!” The boy watches Simon intently, but not in the eye. He stares at Simon’s entirety. “No way! You’re telling the truth.” The boy looks amused.

Up.

Down.

“Simon, if you go any further into this, things are going to get very weird and very scary.”

“I don’t care.”

The boy continues looking into Simon. “No, I guess not. You’re not going to stop, no matter what, are you?”

“No, I’m never going to stop.” The words feel liberating in Simon’s mouth, decisive. The Corbies hop up and down in his head, excited and agitated by something.

It’s the boy’s turn to descend. “You want the ones that did this to Jane to pay, right?”

The words sound more like a persuasion than an observation. The boy does not talk like a boy. His mannerisms seem . . . off. Suddenly all the Corbies shriek and caw:

“Not a boy!”

“Danger, Simon!”

“Danger!”

“It’s not a boy!”

“It hasn’t breathed, Simon!”

“Hasn’t taken a breath in ninety-eight seconds!”

“Ninety-nine seconds!”

“Danger!”

Simon looks down at the boy. Through the green haze there’s something superimposed, something sharing the same space with the boy, something taller, something slender. It notices Simon noticing and the boy-thing’s head tilts to the side, tilts too far. Simon flinches, uncontrollably, as if something were thrown at his face.

“Simon?” the boy-thing purrs.

“What are you?”

“I’m a shadow,” say two separate voices fighting for control of Simon’s ears. “Right now, I’m your shadow.”

A blur.

Gone.

Simon crashes down, hard, on the seesaw. Without thinking he goes into a well-practiced backward roll and ends up back onto his feet. It is only force of will that prevents him from completing the slapstick routine with a comedic stagger. The Corbies continue to keen and cry.

“Danger!”

“Run, Simon!”

“Ah, hasten!”

“Ah, let us not linger!”

“Ah, fly!”

“Let us fly!”

Simon grabs his hat and runs.

My shadow, Jane! My shadow split away from me and I did not know how to sew it back on.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon is fairly certain that a strange thing happened at the playground. He also knows that he has a lousy point of reference for “normal,” so it’s hard to gauge just how strange.

But he had made a decisive choice. Hadn’t he? He would not let Jane just drift away. He would find out what had happened, sew together the corpses of the three wise monkeys, if he had to—feed them lightning and resurrect them to see and hear and speak the evil that had happened.

But how?

“Green light!” yell the Corbies.

“Oh,” says Simon. He crosses the street.

The crows jabber agitatedly. The glass shards press his brain. Simon needs to be able to think clearly. He needed a—

“There!” cry the Corbies.

“There—there—there!”

A dead dog in the predawn alley. Fresh. When times are tough, addicts can be creative in scoring a hit. Simon enters the alley and remembers . . .

When I was a boy, Jane, I used to give animals Viking funerals.

An inquisitive boy, Simon often explored the area around his home. Sometimes, he came across the cadavers of animals: roadkill wildlife, pigeons, cats, dogs, even a turtle once. He found them in their odd poses and looked into their filmy eyes. This was the closest he allowed himself to animals, afraid of killing living creatures with his very presence, like his fish.

I didn’t like leaving their bodies like that, Jane—on the ground, undignified, abandoned to bloat and decay.

Simon gave them sendoffs. He longed to give them a proper Viking funeral, to burn them on proper funeral pyres. But fire is not something adults let children like Simon have.

Still, he was a creative boy. An acquaintance at school often showed off his collection of smashed pennies—pennies left on railroad tracks and crushed by the trains. Such trinkets are valuable treasures to schoolchildren and they inspired Simon. He brought his dead animal friends to the El tracks by his home and he gave them the dignity, if not the form, of a Viking funeral.

I left them on the tracks, Jane, to be blown to oblivion by the impossible pressure of the iron world-snake careening down the tracks, taking my friends to the underworld. They came like dragons down the mountain.

Simon walks quietly toward the dog. It has been years since he staged a Viking funeral. He has a much different purpose for—

“Oh, no.”

Simon jumps back.

The dog is still alive. Barely. Lying on its side, too weak to lift its head, only twitch, and breathe shallowly, and watch Simon with frightened eyes.

Simon swallows. He paces from alley wall to alley wall. He has no idea what to do.

“Hello . . . boy,” he says.

The dog’s tail twitches once. Simon looks the animal over—deep lacerations, a severed artery. The blood had all but stopped flowing. It would not be long now. Simon kneels by the dog. The beast lets out a barely audible whine.

“Hey, boy. Don’t be scared.”

Simon reaches out a shaking hand, strokes the dogs head. Oh. Still warm. So warm. He pets the dog.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

The dog’s tail wags, weakly, thumping against the ground.

“That’s a boy. Good dog. Good, good dog. Don’t be scared.” Simon cradles the animal’s head in his lap, stroking it and whispering to it. “Don’t be scared. It’s all right. It’s all right. Don’t be scared. It’s okay; I’m here.” Just like Molly did with her cadaver back in school. The dog looks up at Simon with liquid eyes, too weak to move, but still wagging its tail.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

“That’s a boy. Such a good dog,” says Simon as the tears stream down his face—not just because the dog is dying, but because this is the most affection Simon has given and received from an animal. He so wanted a dog as a boy. And here this animal was afraid, in its death throes, and it still spent its waning energy to wag its tail, to give Simon a sign of acceptance. Simon was sure if the dog were stronger, it would lick his face. Oh, that would be wonderful! Warm, licking, accepting love.

“Such a good dog. Good boy. It’s all right. Don’t be scared.”

Simon sits with the animal. A few minutes later, it dies in relative peace in his arms. He dries his face and caries the dog home.

*   *   *   *   *

In Simon’s basement, there is a stainless steel autopsy table, with working drainage system. He has a complete set of dissection tools—scalpels, brain knives, and the rest. He has hardly ever used them, but he feels better knowing they are there.

The ghost tree groans, branches swaying in the wind of a synaptic storm. The Corbies bob their heads and flap their wings in hungry anticipation.

“Oh-oh-oh, did Simon bring us a pig?” sings a crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” answers the Corbie chorus.

“No-no-no, Simon brought us a dog,” sings another crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.”

Simon slips on blue latex gloves.

“Subject is male.”

He picks up his scalpel.

“Subject is . . . a good dog.”

I’d never had a patient I knew alive, Jane.

Sadly, Simon pets the animal. He drinks from his Thermos. He cuts his way to the Dead Water.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

“Good boy!”

*   *   *   *   *

The Corbies are content. Simon’s mind is at ease. A nip of the Dead Water keeps the jagged glass at bay. Simon cleans the instruments, watches the diluted red flow down the drain. Vague memories of playing fetch on the bone-powder beach by the dark water.

“Cause of death: coyote,” Simon says.

They came into the city. They not only survived, but thrived. People rarely realized such large predators could go unseen. They were crafty animals, adapting to new environments, new food supplies. In the suburbs, they learned to hunt in packs to take down the surplus deer. In the city, they learned to hunt rats and eat trash.

But something else got into the Dead Water, Jane.

It happened sometimes, some stray signal invaded, an image, a bit of information unrelated to the patient or the case in any way. Already he has trouble remembering. Something moving under the sand, moaning, growling, like before, with Jane. Something that burst from the sand, a blur of claws, razor teeth, and black doll’s eyes.

Simon misses the dog already.

He drifts to sleep in the predawn. An infomercial plays on the TV, a program by a local self-help guru, Arthur Drake—a combination self-actualization and get-rich program called Apex Consumers.

“Be a more powerful consumer! Don’t get consumed in today’s fast-paced world, be the one to consume. Change your life today!”

Simon drifts off to dreams of pyramid schemes and razor-filled mouths and doll’s eyes.

*   *   *   *   *

Every window is a story. You have but to peek.

On the other side of the city, a television. Thick blood oozes down the screen. Never mind why. Is that really important now?

Trapped inside this TV, Charlton Heston tries desperately to warn the people of Chicago. “It’s people!” he screams. But no one notices. “It’s people!”

The crimson curtain slowly comes down on his scene.

CHAPTER 6

Dear diary, Simon will write. Today I kissed a corpse.

*   *   *   *   *

“That’s when the first plastic baggie of children’s teeth washed up on shore. Back in 2001. March.”

“Yeah?”

“Since then, we’ve found about twenty more baggies.”

“No shit?”

“I shit you not. Over twenty freakin’ bags and no fucking answers. This fucking town, man. Once upon a time, a body washing up off the Lake was a big deal. Now, it don’t even make the first, second, or third page of the Trib.”

“Weird, man.”

“Weird?” Officer John Polhaus swallows a barely chewed mouthful of Italian beef. “Rookie, when we’re through with you, the needle on your ‘Weird’ barometer is going to be looser than two dollar snatch. Weird? Christ. This fucking town. I swear, if they didn’t make the world’s greatest Italian beef and hoagies, I’d be in Arizona by now. Jesus, that’s good. . . .”

Polhaus continues talking, but all his younger colleague can hear, through the mouthful of sandwich, are vowels and slurping sounds.

“Two sandwiches, John?”

“I’m on a fucking diet.”

“So, can we go?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“Kid, there are two things in my day that make this hard life worth it. One is to gorge on an Italian beef with sweet peppers and provolone. The other is to fuck with Meeks.”

“The Ghoul?”

“The Ghoul.”

“Heard he fucked up the Twiss case. You guys had him dead to rights, right?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if Twiss and Meeks trade congratulatory e-mails. Wouldn’t be surprised if they celebrate, in Boy’s Town, with dinner and pillow biting. And I certainly wouldn’t have a goddamn heart attack if I discovered Meeks spends his nights in the autopsy room, strip dancing for stiffs with a toe tag twirling on his dick.” Polhaus speaks through beef and bread, spraying his fellow with wet fragments.

“Freak,” says the younger officer, wiping off his face.

“Freak.”

Polhaus’s radio squawks to life. “John, you there?”

“Yeah,” says Polhaus. “Where are you?”

“Have you seen your car?”

“What?”

“I think your tires have been slashed, man.”

“Motherfucker!” Polhaus storms outside, the younger officer following.

Simon manifests from around a corner. He can hear his scalpel laughing in his pocket as he creeps toward the elevators.

“Oh! You startled me, Simon.” That is what his mother said to him countless times, as he was growing up. Teachers, as well. Simon spent his life walking so quietly that people would not notice him, leaving him to sneak up on others without even meaning to. Getting into the building unseen now was not difficult at all.

Sunday night and still part of Simon’s enforced weekend, but Dr. Reeves would not be in. Reeves never came in on Sunday nights, reserving that time to meet with his contacts in the laborious enterprise of black market cadaver sales—always conducted away from the morgue. He kept to that routine religiously.

Simon sneaks toward the autopsy rooms. He needs information. In a movie, a clever character always seems to be able to hack into an office computer to find secrets. Simon’s methods require different sources to be hacked.

*   *   *   *   *

She still gives him butterflies. Wonderful, horrible butterflies.

Sometimes nausea and joy meet in the strangest places. Misfit, yes. But when was the last time you had butterflies? They flutter and flutter in his guts.

“Third date?” Simon says to the humming room. His friends murmur encouragements from their cold spaces. They whisper in the refrigerated hum. He holds her hand and looks into her eyes.

That is enough.

Peace.

The absinthe begins to take hold. The colors sharpen and bleed as lines and boundaries fade away and the world becomes easier to control in its liquid alchemy. Simon closes his eyes and watches the wormwood tree grow and the sleeping wraith crows awaken in his skull. He can see the butterflies turn into moths, spasming in the dark of his stomach. He can reach out and pluck the negative moths, leave the positives. He skewers them with pins, puts them up on display, gives them fancy Latin names—here is Doubtis totalis and Nervous uneasious and Phobos maximus—and then they cease to matter.

His other distractions are not so easily silenced and catalogued. The Corbies caw angrily to one another. They peck their branches in raucous racket. They caw and call.

“Simon!”

“Simon!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

“This one will cost you!”

“Third drink!”

“Cost you!”

“Won’t let you get off on the cheap!”

“Price!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

Simon ignores the ghost crows in his head and the remaining witch moths in his stomach, and he dives down that Y-incision that spells love.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs against the Night’s Plutonian shore. Invisible symphonies. Moonlight sonatas in the dim. Lily in hand, the vaudevillian, raggedy-scarecrow hero walks in the bone-powder sand, moving at silent film frame rates, searching for his ladylove.

She is not there.

He looks high and low in the lunar glow and nostalgia pull. But where, oh where. . . ?

“Jane?”

All alone in a region of sighs. All alone and he searches and he walks and everything is far away as the crow flies.

But wait.

Something stirs.

“Jane?”

Something crawls out of the black water. Something small. Something bloated.

A little boy.

Little Toby Reynolds drags himself out of the ebony sea. All the filth and putrescence of the Chicago River leak from his pale, puffy face, muffling his words to a choked gurgle.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Toby lurches forward, dragging a cement block wired to a large fishhook that pierces his right foot. He drags himself toward Simon.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” says Simon, frozen.

Somewhere, very distant, maybe in a dream, Simon tries to vomit and purge and escape back into his sleepwalk life.

*   *   *   *   *



Have you heard the story of Myer Twiss?

Sometimes, Jane, a Dead Water trip can go bad.

Certainly, you’ve read the newspaper clippings, seen that eerie mugshot.

Sometimes, Jane, I pull the wrong memory, the wrong story.

But have you heard the rhyme that children still sing, while playing jump rope, in certain neighborhoods of Chicago—all those words that rhyme with “Twiss”?

Sometimes bad things wander into the Dead Water.

Stories are doorways. You have but to knock.

“Subject: Toby Reynolds,” Simon once said, calling the little boy’s name, beginning the ritual. “Caucasian, eight years old.”

They sat together, in the Dead Water, fishing by the ebony sea, and Simon made a pinky promise with Toby, promised to help.

Toby was a difficult case. Water can wash away evidence. Police fished the boy out of the Chicago River, the stretch they call Bubbly Creek, where the water still bubbles from the gases emitted by the rotting flesh the meat packing companies dumped a hundred years ago. They say that mutant fish and sins swim there. They say that once upon a time, the water was so bloody birds could walk on the floating scabs.

Myer Twiss, local pedophile, child killer, and man-about-town, had taken Toby in the night. When Myer was done with his victims he hooked cement blocks to their feet and threw them into Bubbly Creek. Fluid and filth in the lungs told Simon that Toby was still alive when he hit the water.

Toby told me everything, Jane, everything I needed. He was my friend.

Simon found the needed secrets to help a frustrated police force to build a case. They said words like “linchpin” and “expert witness” and called Simon to the stand. It would be the first and last time. The defense attorney had gotten hold of details regarding Simon’s “disturbing methods” and he dissected Simon before judge and jury.

“Show your work!” Always, Jane, always: “Show your work!” “People skills, Simon.” “A smile and a handshake save lives!”

Simon broke and had an outburst on the stand, the poor, sensitive boy. An artery in the district attorney’s case had been cut, and it bled to death. Myer Twiss walked free.

He still walks.

Bubbly Creek still bubbles.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs.

Little Toby Reynolds looks at Simon with milk-shroud eyes that leak something viscous onto his ruined Bulls shirt.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Little Toby stumbles toward Simon, reaches out to Simon with bloated, burst, sausage fingers—reaches out like a toddler who wants something.

Somewhere distant, maybe in a dream, Simon writhes on a tile floor.

Little Toby drags the heavy cement block up the Night’s Plutonian shore. Maybe he will drag it forever. His mouth opens and closes in clammy noodle cadence. He falls at Simon’s feet, grabs Simon’s legs, and pulls himself up, slowly, pulls himself up Simon’s body with the patient deliberation of stagnant water seeping up cloth.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Out of the black water lurch dozens more little bodies. Each one of them drags a cement block. The children of Twiss. None of them can swim away like Simon’s patients usually do. All of them sank, dragged down by cement blocks and Simon’s failure.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says. “I mucked it all up. They make me pay, though it’s never enough. I’m sorry. I wanted to set you free.”

And somewhere, maybe in a dream, Simon convulses on a tile floor and swallows his tongue.

Little Toby coughs up sewage as he reaches for Simon’s face, mouth opening and closing, liquid and mute—when something shifts in the ivory sand.

A moaning cacophony breaks the rhythm of the ebony sea, drowns out the sound of cement blocks dragging in the sand. All the bloated, putrid children stop dragging the little cubes of purgatory hooked to their feet. Everything is still for a moment.

The ivory sands shift.

Simon falls backward.

Little Toby lets out an amphibian-mucus scream as white arms and jagged claws pull him under the sand.

Sand explodes.

Faces rise.

White faces, black doll’s eyes, and their mouths—jagged razor teeth—their mouths open as wide as perdition. They can never have enough. They are hungry. They are Hunger. Manifest Destiny hunger.

They surge.

Feeding frenzy.

They devour the putrid little children. Teeth and claws and doll’s eyes. They gorge. Still hungry. Still Hunger. Their distended stomachs growl like a billion maggots begging for meat.

They surge.

Toward Simon.

Cool hands—cool like September sand—wrap around him from behind. Protecting. They pull Simon away from frenzy and madness and melancholy.

*   *   *   *   *

Autopsy Room 6.

Simon.

Wakes.

Up.

Choking and gasping on the green, green tiles.

“Bad trip, man,” chant the Corbies in singsong I-told-you-so’s.

Simon feels the cool hands. Lying on the floor, next to the stainless steel autopsy table, and Jane is turned, dangling over the side, arms draped protectively over Simon.

“What was that?” asks Simon, still gasping. “Was . . . was that some of your secret, Jane? Were you protecting me by not saying?”

Gasps.

Breathe.

In.

Out.

Simon rises. He lays Jane back on the table. Looks into her eyes. And . . . slows . . . his . . . breathing. He paces the autopsy room, the fluorescent lights, green tiles, and stainless steel—the green and the steel bleed together. The power of the dead love floods his molecules, surges. A bad trip is still a trip.

Breathe.

Memories of the bloated little children come back with a bubbling rush. He bends down, hot forehead against cool forehead.

“It’s hard, Jane. When the cases go bad. Unsolved. And you already know the answer. But you can’t . . . you can’t show your work. They can’t swim away, Jane. They’re stuck.”

He opens his eyes, green malachite an inch away from her gold. Her eyes help. They dissect the guilts, perform a postmortem on his pains. He breathes. Things are clear for the moment. The crows go silent and take heed.

“That is not going to happen to you. They will not get away, Jane, not like Myer Twiss. Promise.”

Simon kisses her lips, cool like September sands, like the time in the year when everything turns sad and sweet. He blows living air down her mouth. Most of it escapes, but some rebounds, rushes back, just a little, the faintest bit; it echoes in her throat, just the tiniest bit, expels in the quietest of sighs.

It is her voice.

It is enough.



INTERLUDE:

Fortunes

“What’s your fortune say?”

“If I tell you, it might not come true.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Nope.”

“What do I have to do to make you tell me?”

“Now that is an interesting question.”

The man in the box does not react when I make faces at him, just smiles his Punch-’n’-Judy grin. A moment ago, I fed the box two coins and the man inside came to life, grinning. A wizard, he waved his hands as his gloves flashed to the distorted sound of antique lightning. A slip of paper slid out.

“Just tell me your fortune already,” she says.

“I think he winked at me.”

“You’re being silly. And you’re changing the subject.”

“You bring out the silly in me.”

“Navy Pier was a good idea.”

“Happy anniversary.”

She leaps into my arms and I grab her butt, the butt that still makes my toes curl, and the slip of paper is crushed between my hand and that butt, and we kiss as the wind picks up off of the Lake.

“Mmmmm . . . very good idea,” she says.

“Well, I am brilliant, you know.”

“So what is the brilliant agenda?”

“Well, I thought we might check out the live band and swing dancing at the end of the pier, work up a sweat and, later on, make out on the Ferris wheel.”

We both look up at the luminous immensity of the wheel. She smiles and my toes curl again.

“Mmmmm. There will, of course, be copious amounts of overpriced goodies purchased throughout.”

“Of course, m’lady.”

“You’re not going to tell me your fortune?”

“Nope.”

“You know, I could seduce it out of you.”

“Couldn’t hurt to try. Maybe you’ll get it out of me later.”

We take hands and walk toward the sounds of the big band, under the glow of the wheel. In my other hand, I feel the slip of paper. It says:

She is cheating on you.

She is fucking Richard.

I suspected as much. When I read it, I saw the words, but I also saw images: Me standing over her, panting, clutching my baseball bat, cracked and stained. The rush of the curtains on the canopy bed come down on us like the end of a show.

We walk off, hand in hand. I keep my fortune safely in my pocket.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.CHAPTER 5



Simon watches the silver wraiths.

The sepia wraiths.

The monochromatic wraiths.

“They are all dead, you know,” he tells the sleepy crows in his cranium. He drinks green. He watches the screen. They are all dead. Purgatories run in circles. The Corbies are sated but not satisfied.

Organ music. A monochrome skeleton dances on top of a gear-work clock. Onscreen text reads: Blood! Your precious blood!

He watches Count Orlok, all rodent fangs and spider hands, stalking the wide-eyed heroine. Simon watches Nosferatu, the 1922 horror classic—thrills at the hungry corpse stalking through the flicker-flash world. Finally, the sun comes up and kills the vampire.

Simon changes discs and sips from his Thermos.

He watches Our Hospitality, the 1923 comedy classic—thrills at the slapstick antics of Buster Keaton, the Michelangelo of silent comedy. He watches the deadpan-faced hero perform pratfalls and physical gags.Silent, bodily, vaudevillian soliloquies.

They buried Buster Keaton with a rosary in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other, to prepare for both eternal possibilities. Did you know that, Jane?

They’re all dead. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on digital discs. Simon puts the two discs away, like two giant coins for the ferryman. Sometimes two discs will get you where you’re going. The Corbies caw in the wormwood branches. This is not the addiction. This is a byproduct of the addiction. This is not the drug. This is rummaging through your medicine cabinet while waiting for your source to call.

Simon closes his eyes and lets the green fairy magic do its work, projecting waking dreams on the inner eyelids, a new movie with symphonic score, a merging of memories. The hideous vampire versus the slapstick hero, claws and fangs against pratfalls and perfect timing. How wonderfully incongruous, the scary comedy, the comedic horror . . .

His thoughts drift back to her golden eyes.

Damn.

Late, Saturday night, and Simon sits in his house, banished from work, unable to be with Jane, unable to concentrate on anything else, unable to sleep.

“Your biorhythms be bugged,” cackle the Corbies.

Simon paces his home, tours the dead plants and empty fish tanks while obsession teases his spine with that amphetamine tickle. Again and again he pulls out a tiny white lock of Jane’s hair from his pocket.

This is not an ideal relationship.

He paces and thinks of her pallid face, her cool hands. He takes out a scalpel and examines it, lovingly. It was the scalpel. Her autopsy scalpel. Their scalpel.

They do not make Hallmark cards for this situation.

Simon paces.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon walks a coin up and down his hands, between dexterous fingers. Then he walks the scalpel. And then he walks them both, scalpel chasing coin, up and down and around his hand.

“You have an imbalance in your head,” the doctors said, but they never really knew what to do, Jane.

Medications never seemed to work, rarely had any effect on young Simon. Not like absinthe.

It tickles my innards. Eh, Jane?

Simon grabs the devil’s prayer book—a deck of cards—and performs lifts and double lifts and shuffles. He moves cards about the deck invisibly, makes cards appear and vanish. He manifests coins from nowhere and sends them back. He tries the scalpel, making it appear and vanish with wrist flicks. Simon practices card throwing, sinking queens and kings and jacks into yielding targets, cutting the stems of dead houseplants from across the room.

One doctor, who young Simon actually liked, prescribed exercises of manual dexterity. So Simon took up various arts and hobbies. He learned sleight of hand. He took up juggling, card throwing, knife throwing, carving, calligraphy, and various crafts, anything to keep his hands busy, to demand precision from them. He had his father’s surgical hands, better hands.

Simon runs out of cards. He walks to the spare bedroom, the one with mats on the floor, and starts his tumbling exercises.

The hand exercises helped, a bit. They certainly kept the glass shards out of his brain better than the drugs. But Simon was always hungry for more. As a boy, he had appreciated the physical comedians of his beloved silent films: Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Lloyd, and the others. He read their biographies, admired their dedication to their craft, their practiced, expert control of their bodies—how, in the name of a laugh, they performed much more dangerous and impressive demonstrations of physicality than any modern, musclebound action star does in his or her explosive stunts. So Simon took up vaudeville, slapstick, and physical comedy. Teachers were harder to find, but his parents had the money and they indulged their boy. Simon learned from performers and clowns, from books and videos, and mimicked what he saw in his movies. He took several classes in the martial arts, mostly for the tumbles and breakfalls—judo rolls, jujutsu rolls, aikido rolls.

Simon rolls, tumbles, and somersaults on the mat. He takes painful-looking falls. He slips on banana peels that are not there, save for what the wormwood shows him. Simon has slapstick boxing matches with imaginary foes. He reenacts the routines he has memorized from DVDs, the backgrounds and piano music supplied by absinthe and imagination, odd ballets and comic grace. He battles the ghoulish Nosferatu with pratfalls and gags, a slapstick duel with a Gothic horror.

After years of repetition, our hero has the speed, dexterity, and skill that can only come from obsessive compulsion and no social life. His cuts at the morgue are the most precise. He may be the most skilled sleight of hand performer in the city, though he would never know it. Simon never performs for others, only the shadows in his head and the ones that leak out.

People see Simon lost in his thoughts and assume he is slow, but his mind moves very quickly. People see Simon’s awkward nature and assume he is physically inept, but he is much more flexible and athletic than they could imagine.

Simon defeats the Gothic monster with slapstick and the movie he has created with wormwood in his head is good, distracting. Still, his mind wanders back to her golden eyes.

The Corbies whisper.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon flushes another fish.

They always make him cry.

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night.

Simon writes a love sonnet. Then he smashes a mirror when he sees Toby Reynolds’s bloated, putrescent face.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says to the fragments of glass. “I’m so sorry about Twiss.”

Do you know about Myer Twiss?

*   *   *   *   *

Still Saturday night, still.

Simon carves her name into the wall, over and over, but the black birds keep squawking. Somewhere he can hear Count Orlok’s silent chuckle. His belly growls for the dead love.

There is a ghost tree, Jane, that grows in my head, and the Corbies are always hungry.

Simon grabs his hat, his coat, and his Thermos. He does what every absinthe-pickled gentleman necrophile has done, when troubled, since time immemorial.

He goes for a walk.

*   *   *   *   *

The swings sway vacantly in the wind on squealing chains. Empty slide, empty seesaw, and empty monkey bars. Simon removes his shoes and digs his feet deep into autumn sand. It does feel good.

The dark of the world spins and blurs. The Wheel of Fate turns. Purgatories run in circles, sometimes spinning on squeaky playground steel. Simon kicks harder and the merry-go-round spins faster. Faster. He stands and hops up, perching and balancing on the steel handhold rails that run like spokes through the merry-go-round. Still spinning, Simon stands, and then walks, over the merry-go-round, from steel bar to steel bar, at the rate of the spin, walking with perfect balance, an absurd, circular treadmill in the dark.

“Simon-go-round. Simon-go-round,” chant the Corbies.

He balances his black hat on his nose, head tilted up, still walking, still spinning. Was it comical? Was it impressive? He tries hard to be impressive, to show off.

But Jane does not laugh.

Jane does not clap.

Jane is not here.

Simon cannot hear the ebony sea. He slumps, sits back down on the spinning wheel, folding up like a sad, dapper ragdoll, resting his chin on his knees. No Dead Water and no Jane, just a neighborhood playground on the mugger side of the A.M. divide. He shakes with dead-love withdrawal. “It’s not fair,” Simon says to the crows in his head. “My friends always go where I can’t follow.”

He feels nostalgia pangs, big as coffin nails, in the chest.

Simon tiptoes through the playground on bare feet, conscious of broken glass. He deftly avoids a used condom half submerged in the sand. The place is empty and desolate—not another soul in the park, just Simon and a kingdom of dead sperm. Simon stares through his green, green buzz and, in monomania, focuses down and down to the molecular level, considers whole worlds contained within the crinkled latex, whole cities of wriggling beings—some screaming, “The end is nigh,” some reveling in the moment of their writhing Danse Macabre, all their millions upon millions of little dramas playing out in micro-time to the coming spermicidal apocalypse.

“There could be as many as six hundred million of them,” Simon tells the Corbies.

Our hero has a career in finding the stories hidden in rotting bits of aftermath.

He slides down the slide. He swings on a swing, reaches out for a hand that is not there. He kicks harder, swings higher. Higher.

What would happen if I went all the way, Jane? Could I get you back? Could I pull a three-sixty? If I went that high, would you see me?

Simon leaps off the swing, paces the playground, chasing afterimages of Jane, memory fragments. He’s not chasing echoes, but echoes of Jane’s echoes from the Dead Water. Simon flutters through life like a bat, pursuing the echoes of things but never the thing—the aftermath of events, not the event; the ghosts of people, not the person; the corpses, not the ghosts. For someone with a whole squawking, sardonic murder in his head, he feels pretty alone.

“Ain’t got no body. . . ,” sing the shady crows, laughing in the wormwood tree.

Simon sits on the seesaw. He kicks up, but crashes right back down. Alone. Wind and moon and cold sand and noisy metal. Who was Jane? Who were the four men who played hangman with her? What did they want? Did they get it? Where was this going? Simon closes his eyes and chases Jane, chases her golden eyes and white hair down a black hole of questions. Where did it go? How deep?

Simon kicks up—

And stays up, on the seesaw, feet dangling above the sand.

The crows stop singing and joking, all their beady eyes staring intently through Simon’s glasses. It takes the black eyes of a thousand-thousand phantom crows to form the pupils in Simon’s green eyes.

They see a boy—a boy sitting at the low end of the seesaw.

He is just the sort of boy Simon would expect to see in a playground, so average that Simon, later, would have trouble guessing his age or even describing him.

“You’re up late,” says Simon, shyly.

“I’m third shift,” says the boy. “Like you.”

He kicks up, rising.

Simon touches down on the ground.

“I like the hat,” says the boy.

Simon kicks up.

The boy goes down.

Simon nods. He wants to know what happens next. He does not know how this conversation is supposed to go. Is it an absinthe hallucination?

“I don’t know how this conversation is supposed to go.”

“This, Simon Meeks, is the part where I show you how the world would be if you were never born!” says the boy, holding out his arms in presentation.

Simon stares.

“Just kidding,” says the boy. “Hated that movie.”

Up.

Down.

“Your boss. He’s kind of a dick-hole,” says the boy.

“I . . . yes.” Simon would never have put it like that, but he could not deny it either.

Up.

Down.

“He does naughty things with the stiffs,” observes the boy. “But then, you do some pretty strange things yourself.” The boy’s aloofness reminds Simon, very much, of a cat’s.

Up.

Down.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she, Simon—the golden-eyed cadaver?”

“Yes. Beautiful.”

Up.

Down.

“Do you know her name?”

“Yes.”

“What?” The boy leans in, suddenly very interested.

“Jane Doe.”

The boy pauses, leans back, and then smiles very big.

He had a great many teeth, Jane. A great many teeth.

Up.

Down.

“So you never knew her before. Mystery girl,” says the boy. “No suspects.”

“There were four of them. One man was very large. He held the rope. Another asked questions. Another laughed. Another cried. They hoisted her three times. They wanted to scare her. She had something they wanted.” Simon wants to keep the conversation going, hoping answers will beget answers.

“How did you know that, Simon?”

“She told me.”

“Is that what happens when you—? Hmm. You gave off the wildest colors . . .” The boy looks lost in a memory, but only for a moment. “I don’t suppose she told you what possessed her to get that shade of nail polish, did she?”

“I like her nail polish,” Simon says, a little defensively.

“Do you know what they wanted from her?”

“No.”

Up.

Down.

“What’s your interest in all this, Simon?”

“Her.”

“What?”

“I love her.”

“No, really—what? Huh? Huh?!” The boy watches Simon intently, but not in the eye. He stares at Simon’s entirety. “No way! You’re telling the truth.” The boy looks amused.

Up.

Down.

“Simon, if you go any further into this, things are going to get very weird and very scary.”

“I don’t care.”

The boy continues looking into Simon. “No, I guess not. You’re not going to stop, no matter what, are you?”

“No, I’m never going to stop.” The words feel liberating in Simon’s mouth, decisive. The Corbies hop up and down in his head, excited and agitated by something.

It’s the boy’s turn to descend. “You want the ones that did this to Jane to pay, right?”

The words sound more like a persuasion than an observation. The boy does not talk like a boy. His mannerisms seem . . . off. Suddenly all the Corbies shriek and caw:

“Not a boy!”

“Danger, Simon!”

“Danger!”

“It’s not a boy!”

“It hasn’t breathed, Simon!”

“Hasn’t taken a breath in ninety-eight seconds!”

“Ninety-nine seconds!”

“Danger!”

Simon looks down at the boy. Through the green haze there’s something superimposed, something sharing the same space with the boy, something taller, something slender. It notices Simon noticing and the boy-thing’s head tilts to the side, tilts too far. Simon flinches, uncontrollably, as if something were thrown at his face.

“Simon?” the boy-thing purrs.

“What are you?”

“I’m a shadow,” say two separate voices fighting for control of Simon’s ears. “Right now, I’m your shadow.”

A blur.

Gone.

Simon crashes down, hard, on the seesaw. Without thinking he goes into a well-practiced backward roll and ends up back onto his feet. It is only force of will that prevents him from completing the slapstick routine with a comedic stagger. The Corbies continue to keen and cry.

“Danger!”

“Run, Simon!”

“Ah, hasten!”

“Ah, let us not linger!”

“Ah, fly!”

“Let us fly!”

Simon grabs his hat and runs.

My shadow, Jane! My shadow split away from me and I did not know how to sew it back on.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon is fairly certain that a strange thing happened at the playground. He also knows that he has a lousy point of reference for “normal,” so it’s hard to gauge just how strange.

But he had made a decisive choice. Hadn’t he? He would not let Jane just drift away. He would find out what had happened, sew together the corpses of the three wise monkeys, if he had to—feed them lightning and resurrect them to see and hear and speak the evil that had happened.

But how?

“Green light!” yell the Corbies.

“Oh,” says Simon. He crosses the street.

The crows jabber agitatedly. The glass shards press his brain. Simon needs to be able to think clearly. He needed a—

“There!” cry the Corbies.

“There—there—there!”

A dead dog in the predawn alley. Fresh. When times are tough, addicts can be creative in scoring a hit. Simon enters the alley and remembers . . .

When I was a boy, Jane, I used to give animals Viking funerals.

An inquisitive boy, Simon often explored the area around his home. Sometimes, he came across the cadavers of animals: roadkill wildlife, pigeons, cats, dogs, even a turtle once. He found them in their odd poses and looked into their filmy eyes. This was the closest he allowed himself to animals, afraid of killing living creatures with his very presence, like his fish.

I didn’t like leaving their bodies like that, Jane—on the ground, undignified, abandoned to bloat and decay.

Simon gave them sendoffs. He longed to give them a proper Viking funeral, to burn them on proper funeral pyres. But fire is not something adults let children like Simon have.

Still, he was a creative boy. An acquaintance at school often showed off his collection of smashed pennies—pennies left on railroad tracks and crushed by the trains. Such trinkets are valuable treasures to schoolchildren and they inspired Simon. He brought his dead animal friends to the El tracks by his home and he gave them the dignity, if not the form, of a Viking funeral.

I left them on the tracks, Jane, to be blown to oblivion by the impossible pressure of the iron world-snake careening down the tracks, taking my friends to the underworld. They came like dragons down the mountain.

Simon walks quietly toward the dog. It has been years since he staged a Viking funeral. He has a much different purpose for—

“Oh, no.”

Simon jumps back.

The dog is still alive. Barely. Lying on its side, too weak to lift its head, only twitch, and breathe shallowly, and watch Simon with frightened eyes.

Simon swallows. He paces from alley wall to alley wall. He has no idea what to do.

“Hello . . . boy,” he says.

The dog’s tail twitches once. Simon looks the animal over—deep lacerations, a severed artery. The blood had all but stopped flowing. It would not be long now. Simon kneels by the dog. The beast lets out a barely audible whine.

“Hey, boy. Don’t be scared.”

Simon reaches out a shaking hand, strokes the dogs head. Oh. Still warm. So warm. He pets the dog.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

The dog’s tail wags, weakly, thumping against the ground.

“That’s a boy. Good dog. Good, good dog. Don’t be scared.” Simon cradles the animal’s head in his lap, stroking it and whispering to it. “Don’t be scared. It’s all right. It’s all right. Don’t be scared. It’s okay; I’m here.” Just like Molly did with her cadaver back in school. The dog looks up at Simon with liquid eyes, too weak to move, but still wagging its tail.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

“That’s a boy. Such a good dog,” says Simon as the tears stream down his face—not just because the dog is dying, but because this is the most affection Simon has given and received from an animal. He so wanted a dog as a boy. And here this animal was afraid, in its death throes, and it still spent its waning energy to wag its tail, to give Simon a sign of acceptance. Simon was sure if the dog were stronger, it would lick his face. Oh, that would be wonderful! Warm, licking, accepting love.

“Such a good dog. Good boy. It’s all right. Don’t be scared.”

Simon sits with the animal. A few minutes later, it dies in relative peace in his arms. He dries his face and caries the dog home.

*   *   *   *   *

In Simon’s basement, there is a stainless steel autopsy table, with working drainage system. He has a complete set of dissection tools—scalpels, brain knives, and the rest. He has hardly ever used them, but he feels better knowing they are there.

The ghost tree groans, branches swaying in the wind of a synaptic storm. The Corbies bob their heads and flap their wings in hungry anticipation.

“Oh-oh-oh, did Simon bring us a pig?” sings a crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” answers the Corbie chorus.

“No-no-no, Simon brought us a dog,” sings another crow.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.”

Simon slips on blue latex gloves.

“Subject is male.”

He picks up his scalpel.

“Subject is . . . a good dog.”

I’d never had a patient I knew alive, Jane.

Sadly, Simon pets the animal. He drinks from his Thermos. He cuts his way to the Dead Water.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

“Good boy!”

*   *   *   *   *

The Corbies are content. Simon’s mind is at ease. A nip of the Dead Water keeps the jagged glass at bay. Simon cleans the instruments, watches the diluted red flow down the drain. Vague memories of playing fetch on the bone-powder beach by the dark water.

“Cause of death: coyote,” Simon says.

They came into the city. They not only survived, but thrived. People rarely realized such large predators could go unseen. They were crafty animals, adapting to new environments, new food supplies. In the suburbs, they learned to hunt in packs to take down the surplus deer. In the city, they learned to hunt rats and eat trash.

But something else got into the Dead Water, Jane.

It happened sometimes, some stray signal invaded, an image, a bit of information unrelated to the patient or the case in any way. Already he has trouble remembering. Something moving under the sand, moaning, growling, like before, with Jane. Something that burst from the sand, a blur of claws, razor teeth, and black doll’s eyes.

Simon misses the dog already.

He drifts to sleep in the predawn. An infomercial plays on the TV, a program by a local self-help guru, Arthur Drake—a combination self-actualization and get-rich program called Apex Consumers.

“Be a more powerful consumer! Don’t get consumed in today’s fast-paced world, be the one to consume. Change your life today!”

Simon drifts off to dreams of pyramid schemes and razor-filled mouths and doll’s eyes.

*   *   *   *   *

Every window is a story. You have but to peek.

On the other side of the city, a television. Thick blood oozes down the screen. Never mind why. Is that really important now?

Trapped inside this TV, Charlton Heston tries desperately to warn the people of Chicago. “It’s people!” he screams. But no one notices. “It’s people!”

The crimson curtain slowly comes down on his scene.

CHAPTER 6

Dear diary, Simon will write. Today I kissed a corpse.

*   *   *   *   *

“That’s when the first plastic baggie of children’s teeth washed up on shore. Back in 2001. March.”

“Yeah?”

“Since then, we’ve found about twenty more baggies.”

“No shit?”

“I shit you not. Over twenty freakin’ bags and no fucking answers. This fucking town, man. Once upon a time, a body washing up off the Lake was a big deal. Now, it don’t even make the first, second, or third page of the Trib.”

“Weird, man.”

“Weird?” Officer John Polhaus swallows a barely chewed mouthful of Italian beef. “Rookie, when we’re through with you, the needle on your ‘Weird’ barometer is going to be looser than two dollar snatch. Weird? Christ. This fucking town. I swear, if they didn’t make the world’s greatest Italian beef and hoagies, I’d be in Arizona by now. Jesus, that’s good. . . .”

Polhaus continues talking, but all his younger colleague can hear, through the mouthful of sandwich, are vowels and slurping sounds.

“Two sandwiches, John?”

“I’m on a fucking diet.”

“So, can we go?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“Kid, there are two things in my day that make this hard life worth it. One is to gorge on an Italian beef with sweet peppers and provolone. The other is to fuck with Meeks.”

“The Ghoul?”

“The Ghoul.”

“Heard he fucked up the Twiss case. You guys had him dead to rights, right?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if Twiss and Meeks trade congratulatory e-mails. Wouldn’t be surprised if they celebrate, in Boy’s Town, with dinner and pillow biting. And I certainly wouldn’t have a goddamn heart attack if I discovered Meeks spends his nights in the autopsy room, strip dancing for stiffs with a toe tag twirling on his dick.” Polhaus speaks through beef and bread, spraying his fellow with wet fragments.

“Freak,” says the younger officer, wiping off his face.

“Freak.”

Polhaus’s radio squawks to life. “John, you there?”

“Yeah,” says Polhaus. “Where are you?”

“Have you seen your car?”

“What?”

“I think your tires have been slashed, man.”

“Motherfucker!” Polhaus storms outside, the younger officer following.

Simon manifests from around a corner. He can hear his scalpel laughing in his pocket as he creeps toward the elevators.

“Oh! You startled me, Simon.” That is what his mother said to him countless times, as he was growing up. Teachers, as well. Simon spent his life walking so quietly that people would not notice him, leaving him to sneak up on others without even meaning to. Getting into the building unseen now was not difficult at all.

Sunday night and still part of Simon’s enforced weekend, but Dr. Reeves would not be in. Reeves never came in on Sunday nights, reserving that time to meet with his contacts in the laborious enterprise of black market cadaver sales—always conducted away from the morgue. He kept to that routine religiously.

Simon sneaks toward the autopsy rooms. He needs information. In a movie, a clever character always seems to be able to hack into an office computer to find secrets. Simon’s methods require different sources to be hacked.

*   *   *   *   *

She still gives him butterflies. Wonderful, horrible butterflies.

Sometimes nausea and joy meet in the strangest places. Misfit, yes. But when was the last time you had butterflies? They flutter and flutter in his guts.

“Third date?” Simon says to the humming room. His friends murmur encouragements from their cold spaces. They whisper in the refrigerated hum. He holds her hand and looks into her eyes.

That is enough.

Peace.

The absinthe begins to take hold. The colors sharpen and bleed as lines and boundaries fade away and the world becomes easier to control in its liquid alchemy. Simon closes his eyes and watches the wormwood tree grow and the sleeping wraith crows awaken in his skull. He can see the butterflies turn into moths, spasming in the dark of his stomach. He can reach out and pluck the negative moths, leave the positives. He skewers them with pins, puts them up on display, gives them fancy Latin names—here is Doubtis totalis and Nervous uneasious and Phobos maximus—and then they cease to matter.

His other distractions are not so easily silenced and catalogued. The Corbies caw angrily to one another. They peck their branches in raucous racket. They caw and call.

“Simon!”

“Simon!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

“This one will cost you!”

“Third drink!”

“Cost you!”

“Won’t let you get off on the cheap!”

“Price!”

“Click-clack-crack!”

Simon ignores the ghost crows in his head and the remaining witch moths in his stomach, and he dives down that Y-incision that spells love.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs against the Night’s Plutonian shore. Invisible symphonies. Moonlight sonatas in the dim. Lily in hand, the vaudevillian, raggedy-scarecrow hero walks in the bone-powder sand, moving at silent film frame rates, searching for his ladylove.

She is not there.

He looks high and low in the lunar glow and nostalgia pull. But where, oh where. . . ?

“Jane?”

All alone in a region of sighs. All alone and he searches and he walks and everything is far away as the crow flies.

But wait.

Something stirs.

“Jane?”

Something crawls out of the black water. Something small. Something bloated.

A little boy.

Little Toby Reynolds drags himself out of the ebony sea. All the filth and putrescence of the Chicago River leak from his pale, puffy face, muffling his words to a choked gurgle.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Toby lurches forward, dragging a cement block wired to a large fishhook that pierces his right foot. He drags himself toward Simon.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” says Simon, frozen.

Somewhere, very distant, maybe in a dream, Simon tries to vomit and purge and escape back into his sleepwalk life.

*   *   *   *   *



Have you heard the story of Myer Twiss?

Sometimes, Jane, a Dead Water trip can go bad.

Certainly, you’ve read the newspaper clippings, seen that eerie mugshot.

Sometimes, Jane, I pull the wrong memory, the wrong story.

But have you heard the rhyme that children still sing, while playing jump rope, in certain neighborhoods of Chicago—all those words that rhyme with “Twiss”?

Sometimes bad things wander into the Dead Water.

Stories are doorways. You have but to knock.

“Subject: Toby Reynolds,” Simon once said, calling the little boy’s name, beginning the ritual. “Caucasian, eight years old.”

They sat together, in the Dead Water, fishing by the ebony sea, and Simon made a pinky promise with Toby, promised to help.

Toby was a difficult case. Water can wash away evidence. Police fished the boy out of the Chicago River, the stretch they call Bubbly Creek, where the water still bubbles from the gases emitted by the rotting flesh the meat packing companies dumped a hundred years ago. They say that mutant fish and sins swim there. They say that once upon a time, the water was so bloody birds could walk on the floating scabs.

Myer Twiss, local pedophile, child killer, and man-about-town, had taken Toby in the night. When Myer was done with his victims he hooked cement blocks to their feet and threw them into Bubbly Creek. Fluid and filth in the lungs told Simon that Toby was still alive when he hit the water.

Toby told me everything, Jane, everything I needed. He was my friend.

Simon found the needed secrets to help a frustrated police force to build a case. They said words like “linchpin” and “expert witness” and called Simon to the stand. It would be the first and last time. The defense attorney had gotten hold of details regarding Simon’s “disturbing methods” and he dissected Simon before judge and jury.

“Show your work!” Always, Jane, always: “Show your work!” “People skills, Simon.” “A smile and a handshake save lives!”

Simon broke and had an outburst on the stand, the poor, sensitive boy. An artery in the district attorney’s case had been cut, and it bled to death. Myer Twiss walked free.

He still walks.

Bubbly Creek still bubbles.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

The ebony sea sighs.

Little Toby Reynolds looks at Simon with milk-shroud eyes that leak something viscous onto his ruined Bulls shirt.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Little Toby stumbles toward Simon, reaches out to Simon with bloated, burst, sausage fingers—reaches out like a toddler who wants something.

Somewhere distant, maybe in a dream, Simon writhes on a tile floor.

Little Toby drags the heavy cement block up the Night’s Plutonian shore. Maybe he will drag it forever. His mouth opens and closes in clammy noodle cadence. He falls at Simon’s feet, grabs Simon’s legs, and pulls himself up, slowly, pulls himself up Simon’s body with the patient deliberation of stagnant water seeping up cloth.

Step-drag.

Step-drag.

Out of the black water lurch dozens more little bodies. Each one of them drags a cement block. The children of Twiss. None of them can swim away like Simon’s patients usually do. All of them sank, dragged down by cement blocks and Simon’s failure.

“I’m sorry, Toby,” Simon says. “I mucked it all up. They make me pay, though it’s never enough. I’m sorry. I wanted to set you free.”

And somewhere, maybe in a dream, Simon convulses on a tile floor and swallows his tongue.

Little Toby coughs up sewage as he reaches for Simon’s face, mouth opening and closing, liquid and mute—when something shifts in the ivory sand.

A moaning cacophony breaks the rhythm of the ebony sea, drowns out the sound of cement blocks dragging in the sand. All the bloated, putrid children stop dragging the little cubes of purgatory hooked to their feet. Everything is still for a moment.

The ivory sands shift.

Simon falls backward.

Little Toby lets out an amphibian-mucus scream as white arms and jagged claws pull him under the sand.

Sand explodes.

Faces rise.

White faces, black doll’s eyes, and their mouths—jagged razor teeth—their mouths open as wide as perdition. They can never have enough. They are hungry. They are Hunger. Manifest Destiny hunger.

They surge.

Feeding frenzy.

They devour the putrid little children. Teeth and claws and doll’s eyes. They gorge. Still hungry. Still Hunger. Their distended stomachs growl like a billion maggots begging for meat.

They surge.

Toward Simon.

Cool hands—cool like September sand—wrap around him from behind. Protecting. They pull Simon away from frenzy and madness and melancholy.

*   *   *   *   *

Autopsy Room 6.

Simon.

Wakes.

Up.

Choking and gasping on the green, green tiles.

“Bad trip, man,” chant the Corbies in singsong I-told-you-so’s.

Simon feels the cool hands. Lying on the floor, next to the stainless steel autopsy table, and Jane is turned, dangling over the side, arms draped protectively over Simon.

“What was that?” asks Simon, still gasping. “Was . . . was that some of your secret, Jane? Were you protecting me by not saying?”

Gasps.

Breathe.

In.

Out.

Simon rises. He lays Jane back on the table. Looks into her eyes. And . . . slows . . . his . . . breathing. He paces the autopsy room, the fluorescent lights, green tiles, and stainless steel—the green and the steel bleed together. The power of the dead love floods his molecules, surges. A bad trip is still a trip.

Breathe.

Memories of the bloated little children come back with a bubbling rush. He bends down, hot forehead against cool forehead.

“It’s hard, Jane. When the cases go bad. Unsolved. And you already know the answer. But you can’t . . . you can’t show your work. They can’t swim away, Jane. They’re stuck.”

He opens his eyes, green malachite an inch away from her gold. Her eyes help. They dissect the guilts, perform a postmortem on his pains. He breathes. Things are clear for the moment. The crows go silent and take heed.

“That is not going to happen to you. They will not get away, Jane, not like Myer Twiss. Promise.”

Simon kisses her lips, cool like September sands, like the time in the year when everything turns sad and sweet. He blows living air down her mouth. Most of it escapes, but some rebounds, rushes back, just a little, the faintest bit; it echoes in her throat, just the tiniest bit, expels in the quietest of sighs.

It is her voice.

It is enough.



INTERLUDE:

Fortunes

“What’s your fortune say?”

“If I tell you, it might not come true.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Nope.”

“What do I have to do to make you tell me?”

“Now that is an interesting question.”

The man in the box does not react when I make faces at him, just smiles his Punch-’n’-Judy grin. A moment ago, I fed the box two coins and the man inside came to life, grinning. A wizard, he waved his hands as his gloves flashed to the distorted sound of antique lightning. A slip of paper slid out.

“Just tell me your fortune already,” she says.

“I think he winked at me.”

“You’re being silly. And you’re changing the subject.”

“You bring out the silly in me.”

“Navy Pier was a good idea.”

“Happy anniversary.”

She leaps into my arms and I grab her butt, the butt that still makes my toes curl, and the slip of paper is crushed between my hand and that butt, and we kiss as the wind picks up off of the Lake.

“Mmmmm . . . very good idea,” she says.

“Well, I am brilliant, you know.”

“So what is the brilliant agenda?”

“Well, I thought we might check out the live band and swing dancing at the end of the pier, work up a sweat and, later on, make out on the Ferris wheel.”

We both look up at the luminous immensity of the wheel. She smiles and my toes curl again.

“Mmmmm. There will, of course, be copious amounts of overpriced goodies purchased throughout.”

“Of course, m’lady.”

“You’re not going to tell me your fortune?”

“Nope.”

“You know, I could seduce it out of you.”

“Couldn’t hurt to try. Maybe you’ll get it out of me later.”

We take hands and walk toward the sounds of the big band, under the glow of the wheel. In my other hand, I feel the slip of paper. It says:

She is cheating on you.

She is fucking Richard.

I suspected as much. When I read it, I saw the words, but I also saw images: Me standing over her, panting, clutching my baseball bat, cracked and stained. The rush of the curtains on the canopy bed come down on us like the end of a show.

We walk off, hand in hand. I keep my fortune safely in my pocket.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.