CHAPTER 7

Once upon a time, a little boy named Simon had a compulsion.

Simon entered the bathroom.

Whensoever little Simon entered any bathroom, familiar or strange, he had to comply with this compulsion before any urine could occur.

Simon stood in front of the shower, the plastic curtain closed, a portal to things unknown. Little Simon reached up and parted the curtain of black hair that hung down just over his eyes. He took two handfuls of shower curtains, took two deep breaths—careful breaths. He had hyperventilated once, in front of the shower, before he could take care of his business. That had been embracing and messy.

Simon squeezed the curtains, a soothing lavender color with a seashell pattern, and he tore them open.

Nothing.

Little Simon shrugged, took care of his business, even washed his hands with the seashell-shaped soap, and left, flipping the light off on another mystery. Then Simon grew up. The fear went away, but the compulsion remained, just as powerful. One can still hear the swish of the curtains flying open in any bathroom Simon visits. Perhaps Simon was not so very afraid of what he would find if he parted the curtains, but of what would remain if he did not.

*   *   *   *   *

Monday.

He had flushed the fish. He’d buried the dog.

Last night, he’d made a promise. Last night, he had kissed a corpse.

Later, they will ask me what else I did, Jane—ask if I did that. Not a polite question, not polite at all. . . .

Monday and he feels apprehensive. Not the regular Monday Blues most of the population wakes up to at the dawn of every week. Simon never quite understood that sacrament—the exalted joy of Friday and the quiet despair and death of dreams on Monday. Gangrene-infected hope. The constant cycle of joy to sorrow, over and over, as if it were the first time, each time, again and again, like an alien signal everyone else picked up on, like the chemical-pheromone hypnotism the queen bee uses to control the drones. The cycle of sadness and then renewal and back again, like a snake shedding dead skin, choking on its own tail. See them all flounder in the maw, the jagged-fanged underbite of Chicago’s skyline, the skeletons rotting in the cavities and a putrid river of gum disease flowing between broken teeth. See them all scurry in their cement-steel-grid hive, the tallest lightning rods giving the finger to the Prime Mover and passing storm clouds.

What is the honey, Jane, and who are the harvesters?

The Mondays.

He is apprehensive, unsure of how to keep his promises to the dead. Yet Monday also brings new hopes: DNA work on the blood and skin he found under her nails and possibly new findings in the police investigation. Maybe Jane would confide her secrets tonight. Yes. Tonight had a hopeful ring to it.

He made a promise.

They had to pay.

He had to set her free.

Apprehension . . . but Monday has brought him a new subject, and this is helping. Down in his basement, at his personal autopsy table—oh, he did not use it often enough—with his own tools. First the scalpel. Then the hand saw. Then the brain knife. Cut the flesh. Stab into the eye sockets. Pull out handfuls of wet viscera.

Cut and grin.

Cut and grin.

Gut and grin.

When it is over, and Simon cleans up, he has to admit that it is a damn fine Jack O’Lantern.

*   *   *   *   *

The sun grows shyer and shyer in the October sky, and it is already dark when Simon gets to work. No Officer Polhaus—a good omen. Simon walks with an extra spring in his scarecrow stride. He can almost taste the Dead Water hit. Not just any hit, the exquisite rush of Jane, the peace and clarity of Jane. So many things he wants to ask, so many things he wants to tell—to carve Happily Ever After with surgical steel.

Anticipation causes him to commence drinking the moment he gets out of his car, gulping sips from his Thermos, already laying in the wormwood root-work that will sprout and bloom into lucid madness.

Sometimes, Jane, I wonder if absinthe makes my eyes greener.

Spring-heeled Simon even waves to peers and colleagues, regardless of the potentially terrifying ramifications of such gestures—the dread possibility of small talk. As he walks down the linoleum hallways, the colors already undulate—lights slither, lines melt. A grade school crayon-drawn Dracula waves at Simon with waxy arms of preposterous proportion. Simon waves back. The person at the desk, the mother displaying her child’s drawing, waves at Simon, thinking she is somehow involved in this exchange.

The wormwood tree grows in his head, the ghost tree and Corbies all upside down in his skull.

Sometimes, Jane, I wonder if the dead tree is rightside up and everything else is upside down.

The Corbies chant limericks—their mausoleum poetry, their necro-beatnik rhymes—as Simon walks, passing colleagues, faces and name tags, sipping secret poisons from his Thermos, and waving. His eyes dance over his peers and the office, doors and florescent lights, faces and Halloween decorations distorted by chemical love. His mind is elsewhere, on her golden eyes and her September-cool lips.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” ask the Corbies as they watch the surroundings through Simon’s eyes. “This scene be bugged.”

Simon ignores them. He walks to the humming refrigerator units and the familiar smell of entropy held back but seeping through the cracks. He touches the stainless steel of Jane’s door. Manias are born and fates are sealed in the time it takes to open a door . . .

Empty.

Empty?

Empty!

Simon closes the door and opens it again. He slides out the tray, slides it in and out again. Empty. Over-exaggerated, silent-film surprise plays on Simon’s face. He tears open all the freezer doors, sliding out the trays and shutting them again, finding cadavers and friends, but no Jane. He opens and closes doors, in and out, in an unconscious vaudevillian routine. Only the Corbies notice, from their perches in the ever-after branches, and they cackle at the gallows humor slapstick of it all.

“Jane?” Simon calls, aloud, but no one answers. Even his friends are silent. No murmurs tonight. No whispers back and forth between their cold beds.

I think they kept quiet to protect me. They did not want me to take things any deeper. Eh, Jane?

In Autopsy Room 6, Simon searches for his scribbled notes. Gone! He drops the binder, goes to the computer. Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack go his agitated fingers over the ivory keys like ten tiny carrion bird beaks on a skull. Click-clack-click-clack. Gone! No digital files on Jane, not even the folder.

No audio files either. No trace of Jane.

Simon’s chin quivers. He adjusts his glasses. He adjusts them again. He runs his long fingers through his dark, tangled hair. He paces the room, both hands clenching fistfuls of hair—pacing the room in the wobbling throes of absinthe—our delirious silent film hero, our defeated Charlie Chaplin.

This had happened before. Cadavers have gone missing. Reeves.

“He never stole my files before,” Simon says to no one but the Corbies. “He never erased them.”

Simon has a young face, smooth with no lines, for he rarely scrunches his face, mostly wears a wide-eyed Buster Keaton expression. But now his lip does a funny thing; it curls in rage, the mouth muscles quivering from lack of use. He squeezes his scalpel.

This has happened before. Bodies have disappeared—absorbed by Reeves, their dead flesh making him a little younger, a little richer. Simon had been angry, then as now, but the anger never lasted, always turned to lime Jell-O in the limbs. Who would believe him anyway? Who would believe the Ghoul? And the lime Jell-O would melt and he would slump in his chair.

Simon slumps.

“Jane . . .”

Yet his Thermos is already empty. The ghost tree is grown in his brain, the Plutonian antenna ready to transmit to the Dead Water—but there’s no body, no glistening entrails, no Y-shaped doorway. The Corbies peck at the dead bark, agitated. All Simon can see is Dr. Reeves’s ever-grinning face. And the Corbies caw:

“Click-clack-crack—this carrion worm,” they say.

“This necro-pirate corpse plunderer.”

“This handsome-handsome vulture!”

“Mother Hubbard!” Simon screams, for Simon never cusses. He flicks his wrist and the scalpel flies, burying itself between the eyes of Dr. Reeves, in a photo, on a press clipping pinned to the cork bulletin board.

“That’s a boy, Simon,” the Corbies caw.

“That’s a sport, Simon.”

“Shriek-shrike-scythe—act! Get the girl.”

Simon stands. Simon grabs the door—lets go—grabs it again—lets go and paces the room. Who would he talk to? What would he say?—he, the Ghoul, the guy who had difficulty answer questions like, “What’s up?”

Doubts wriggle in his head and down his spine in maggoty nativity.

“Jane . . .”

He thinks of her golden eyes. Her lips. The sound of her faint voice, his breath, through those lips. He thinks of the girl he knows in Dead Water and the giggling games in pre-October playgrounds.

And that is enough.

The Corbies swoop down and devour the doubt maggots.

Simon opens the door.

Simon walks out.

The wraith crows in his head are the only ones who realize the dread importance of portals.

*   *   *   *   *

We need to talk.

—Simon

—says the toe tag pinned to the message board on Dr. Reeves’s locked office door.

*   *   *   *   *

She had been crying.

Her name tag says Amy.

Something loud and fast vibrates out of her iPod earbuds and she does not notice Simon approach from within her cocoon of sound.

“Amy.”

“Ahh!” Amy screams, jumping back.

Simon jumps back farther, landing him, crouched, on a chair in front of Amy’s desk, one foot on the seat, the other stretched up on top of the headrest. Normal interaction was terrifying to him enough without the screaming.

“Oh . . . Simon,” Amy says with relief, pulling out the earbuds. “Wow. You’re a good jumper.” Her eyes are puffy and red; her breathing carries the hiccupy echoes of past sobs.

“Is everything all right?” Simon asks, fairly certain this was the proper question to ask in this social situation.

“I don’t know, I just . . .”

“Are you menstruating?”

“What?”

“I mean—uh. . . ,” Simon stammers. Wrong question.

Amy’s face softens. “That’s the weird thing. I just can’t stop crying tonight. I mean, I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I woke up today. I had a good lunch. I’m not even . . . on my period or anything. Everything’s great. Just a case of the Mondays, I guess.”

Simon wonders at the sheer dread power of this day of the week.

“Amy, where did the Jane Doe cadaver go?”

“Who?”

“Jane Doe. She came in before the end of last week. Hanging victim. She is not in her unit.”

Amy punches a few keys on her computer, checks through some clipboards on her desk.

“No, I’m not showing anything like that.”

“Don’t you remember her? She had the most beautiful—I mean, everyone in the office called her Dangling Jane.”

“Nnnnoo. You sure about that?”

“You have to! She—”

“Simon, I’ve got no Jane Doe, hanging or otherwise, from last week.” The hiccup spasms hit Amy again. Her facial expressions are no help to Simon; facial expressions are a mystery to him. But he looks at her hands and the tension there says something is deeply wrong.

“I’m—sor—ry,” Amy says through the sobs. “I—don’t know—what’s—wrong with me—today.” Sobs and tears and stringy snot. Simon, petrified, backs away, as if from a grease fire.

Amy puts her earbuds back in her ears with the speed of a child pulling a blanket over her head.

*   *   *   *   *

“The fuck!”

A vein in his head stands out, pulsing.

His name tag says Jason.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Fucking shit, fuck-shit, fuck!” Jason stomps through the breakroom.

“Where is it? It was right here. It has to be here! I looked in every fucking place it could possibly be.”

“Jason?”

“Fuck! Ghoul. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“Sorry.”

Jason looks up to the ceiling. “All right, this is getting fucking annoying. Where is my coffee mug? It was right here, just now—just now! It was full of coffee. I poured it in—just now! It can’t walk away. Full of fucking coffee!”

Simon notes that the coffee machine light is not even on.

“Jason do you—?”

“It has to be here!” Jason turns, suddenly looking right at Simon. “Did you take it?”

“No.”

Jason nods curtly, continues searching the breakroom.

“Jason, do you know what happened to the Jane Doe cadaver.”

Jason shakes his head without looking, hunting for his mug.

“Everyone called her Dangling Jane,” Simon continues.

Jason shakes his head.

“You called her Dangling Jane. You started it.”

“What are you fucking talking about? Look, Ghoul, you find me my mug and I’ll find you a cadaver. Agh!” Jason kicks the edge of a table, tipping it over with a terrible bang, as he backpedals on an obviously hurt foot. Back slamming into the wall, he slides down to a sitting position on the floor. A single tear slides down his face, and Simon hears teeth grind together. Jason slams his hand into the wall, again and again.

“Has to be here! Fucking here. Why can’t I fucking find it! Fucking—mug—nothing—nothing makes sense. Gotta fucking be here . . .”

Simon creeps out of the breakroom.

*   *   *   *   *

There is a gash in his forehead.

His name tag says Brad.

“No. . . ,” says Brad, distantly. “I . . . don’t remember Dangling Jane. You sure that . . . uh . . .”

“You have a—” Simon makes a motion at his head “—a gash.”

The blood droplets dribble down into Brad’s eyebrow. He touches the blood with a finger.

“Oh, man. Huh . .  wow. Guess I do.”

“How did that happen?”

“I . . . uh . . . man.” Brad chuckles weakly. “Funniest thing. I don’t even know. Maybe . . . I must of bashed it on a cabinet or table corner or something and not . . . not even known. Weird.”

“No girlfriend tonight?” Simon asks, noticing the empty leather woman’s coat on the table.

“She left . . . or something. I think . . . to . . .” Brad trails off, the blood trailing down his cheek now.

Simon leaves the room, feeling a sudden anxiety to not be there when the blood drops hit the floor—though he could not tell you why.

*   *   *   *   *

She looks like she is about to fall over.

Simon does not need to see her tag.

“Dr. Fulani?”

“Oh. Simon,” she says in a flat voice, none of its syrupy sound or power. “I just . . . I feel . . . so light headed. I don’t know why. Like . . . low blood sugar . . . or—”

Her knees start to give and Simon drags a chair to her, puts a hasty hand to her shoulder.

“No!” she screams, eyes suddenly wide, lips quivering. “Don’t touch me! Don’t! Oh-no-no-no-no!”

Simon freezes, both from the suddenness of the outburst and at seeing such a strong and willful person in a state like this. Oba Fulani shivers violently, falling into the chair, head tilting from side to side, dragged down by its own weight.

“Oh. I am sorry. I did not mean—I don’t know why I’m just . . . dizzy. I don’t know what is wrong with me today.”

Simon nods, leaving the room. He knew. The Corbies yell it through his eardrum.

“Case of the Mondays!”

“The Mondays got her, too.”

“Pray they never come for you.”

*   *   *   *   *

Somewhere, down the hall, he yells, “Where the fuck is it!”

Somewhere, down the hall, she sobs, “Why—can’t—I stop—crying?”

The Mondays.

The Mondays!

A sudden realization and despair hooks and rends Simon’s thoughts. Is he the most stable person in the building? Four familiar faces—four name tags—four minor arcana in the tarot deck of the Weird. Something is deeply wrong. None of them see it in each other, each lost in his or her own head. Was Simon the only one out of his head? He longed so to hide in his head, but, if he was the only one . . .

“The Mondays!” caw the Corbies.

Jason banging. Amy sobbing. And our Charlie Chaplin hero walking in uneven circles about the morgue, unsure of where he was going.

“Jane?”

He longs to hide in his head, but something is—

“The Mondays!” hiss the Corbies.

He plays with his black bowler hat and whistles as he walks, to chase away the deepening dread. His malachite eyes dart wide, here and there, with chameleon paranoias.

There.

Simon stops whistling. Something lurks, just achingly outside the periphery of vision. A figure. Approaching. Simon stares straight down the hall. Nothing.

The Halloween decorations hiss and reach out at Simon. Inexplicable woe bleeds in his stomach like a spectral ulcer. His absinthe high harshes into ominous vibrations.

“Hello?” he says.

“The Mondays!” shriek the Corbies. “They’re coming for you.”

Something. Moving. At the edge of periphery. And Simon feels it—that fear.

Remember it, lovelings—that fear? That pure, in-the-closet-under-the-bed-passing-a-mirror-in-the-dark-spook terror? We have it as children. We grow out of it, give to youngsters as worn hand-me-downs in the form of pranks and ghost stories. We almost miss the pureness of the sensation. We don’t turn on the light as often. We don’t run when our spines are tickled anymore. These things are silly. We trade those fears for complexes and addictions. We sacrifice those instincts on that bloody altar of adulthood and to that most insidious god, Social Embarrassment. We forget. We forget the games—that killing monsters in giggling effigy has power. We forget to leap over cracks. We forget that in this dark, dark world, embarrassment can kill.

But Simon, the misfit, does not hesitate when he feels that fear.

Simon bolts.

“Shriek-shrike-scythe—fly, Simon!” the Corbies caw.

Simon runs, full sprint, down the halls of his employer. Confused stares and peers do not slow him. Embarrassment does not faze him. Scarecrow legs have long strides and his Buster Keaton feet beat light. He sprints, skids through corners, hurdles obstacles, and rolls over a counter. It isn’t easy running from a spine shiver. Our nimble, silent film hero evades the ambiguous horror.

“Simon?” calls a nameless co-worker.

“It’s the Mondays—they’re coming—run!” Simon yells between breaths.

Simon ducks into Autopsy Room 6—the familiar space—the familiar hum of his refrigerator units and friends. Simon grabs a scalpel off the tray, clutches it, cold and reassuring.

A moment passes.

And another.

What was he running from? Anything? The Corbies give no answer, only peck at the branches in his head, hungry for Dead Water. Simon looks at the list of scheduled autopsies, longingly caresses the metal doors. He too was hungry for dead love. Oh, just one. It was more difficult to be afraid in the familiar room.

Then his friends, all his friends in their cold little beds, murmur all at once.

It’s coming! they whisper, all echoing in their murmuring chorus: coming-coming-coming-coming.

Simon shuts off the light, ducks behind the stainless steel table, and holds his scalpel like a rosary.

A moment passes.

And another.

It’s passed, whisper his friends in their cold little beds. Passed-passed-passed-passed.

Simon rises, tucking the scalpel away.

“This house is made of straw,” says a Corbie.

“You should find one of sticks,” says another.

“Or bricks!” says a third.

Simon looks out the door. Nothing to the right. Nothing to the left. He almost misses it, a shimmer on the linoleum—the slight traces of wet footprints trailing down the hall, passing Autopsy Room 6.

Simon runs in the opposite direction. He runs while looking behind.

A hand pokes him in the chest.

The reaction is automatic, barely a half-spark in a synapse and his hand makes the honed, trained, conditioned, and impossibly quick motion. Empty fingers rise up, a wrist flick, and then a shiny, shiny scalpel held threateningly.

“Nifty finger skullduggery,” coos a Corbie.

“Whoa—hey, Simon,” says Brad. “Cool trick. How’d you do that?”

Simon lowers the scalpel. “It’s just a—blood,” he says, pointing to Brad’s face.

Brad still has the open gash in his forehead, the blood still dribbling lazily down his face. It’s now dripping off his chin. Touching his cheek, he traces the sticky blood up to the gash.

“Ow! Oh, man. I don’t . . . I don’t even remember where I got that . . .”

Simon examines Brad’s eyes.

“No, not concussed,” proclaims a Corbie.

“I concur,” says another.

“I concur.”

Down the hall, Jason bangs on a wall, yelling, “Where the fuck?! Why can’t—why doesn’t anything make sense?”

Down the hall, Amy sobs, “What’s—wrong—with—me-ee-ee?”

“Simon,” Brad says lazily, confusedly, with blood-slicked face, “have you seen my girlfriend?”

“The Mondays,” shriek the crows. “They’re coming!”

The absinthe high takes another harsh turn as all the Halloween decorations now bleed from their various heads. All of them murmur, asking Simon pleading questions, questions all bleeding together.

Then Simon sees it again: something moving, just outside of his periphery, advancing closer.

A wrist flick and the scalpel vanishes. Both hands grab Brad’s shirt and Simon flings the two of them through the nearby door of a public restroom.

“The Mondays,” shriek the Corbies.

Simon pushes the door shut.

“Simon, what the hell?” asks Brad.

“You should clean that wound,” says Simon.

“Right . . .” Brad turns on the tap and cleans the blood from his face. “Man . . . how did I do that?”

Simon makes a long and exaggerated production of washing his hands, taking off his hat and smoothing the dark, tangled briar patch of sweaty hair, then straitening his black necktie. Before he knows it, Brad has finished cleaning his wound.

“Later, Simon.”

“Brad, wait!”

“What?”

“I . . .” But no more words come to Simon’s mouth.

“Man, what is wrong with you?”

“Case of the Mondays,” answers Simon, defeated.

Brad shakes his head and leaves. His footsteps clap down the hall. Nothing interrupts them.

Wrist flick. Scalpel. Duck into a stall. Latch the door. Simon perches on a toilet, legs pulled up onto the seat, so they don’t dangle in view, in that space between floor and stall partition.

I remember, Jane, I remember as a boy tumbling into bed and that terror of a leg dangling over the edge.

White knuckles and stainless steel blade and silence. Not even the Corbies dare make a sound.

A moment passes.

And another.

Cornstalks whisper murder plots in this quality of silence.

Did the door just open and close? Did he imagine the sound?

Silence.

The lights click off.

Eyes wide, unadjusted in the dark. Hold scalpel. Hold breath. Look down. Dark. Look up. Dark—

No . . .

Simon thinks he imagines it, a flare in the mind’s eye, a scratch on the cornea. But there are two of them, and they luminesce faintly, very faintly. Two eyes.

Simon falls off the toilet, landing on the floor on his rump. The scalpel clanks then splashes into the unseen toilet water.

The eyes are still there—faint, pale blue bioluminescence, like those fish that live miles down in the ocean, glass fangs, impossible symmetry, and glowing bits. Creatures that never see the sun. The eyes look down into the dark, peaking over where the open space between the ceiling and partition must be. The eyes look down, gigantically down, and Simon cannot breathe under the Jupiter pressure of their gaze, cannot look away. But his hand snakes into the toilet in search for the scalpel.

The eyes have no face or body in the dark. They slowly hover into the stall. Slowly, so horribly slowly, they lower, lower toward Simon. His hand sifts through wet toilet paper and filth, searching. But he can’t find it. The eyes lower and Simon still can’t see the face. Only the eyes. The planets. Simon is an insect. His hand churns through the chum of cold water, wet paper, and shit.

Barely a foot away and all he can see are the eyes.

Simon still cannot breathe, cannot look away; it will not let him. Some deep, deep jungle instinct, buried under generations of fast food and easy living, screams at him to flee.

“Forget the Jane Doe cadaver,” says a wet, ear-shattering whisper. It vibrates all the cavities in Simon’s body, like he was camped in front of the speakers at a nightclub. “She never existed—yes? I never existed—yes? You will loathe these memories and despair—yes? You will hide from the trauma and forget—yes?”

The voice and the eyes are the only things that exist, until the Corbies peck at the wormwood tree, to get Simon’s attention.

“Where’s Jane?” he asks. It’s the only question he can hear above the fear.

The eyes cock to the side, perplexed—then redouble their effort. Simon gasps. He can feel the thing’s disdain for him, like demonic free radicals tearing about his molecules, hate on a subatomic level.

“Sleep,” says the whisper. The basilisk eyes focus, dissolving all they survey.

At one juncture, his parents had tried hypnotherapy to cure his imbalance, but, much to that doctor’s frustration, he could never put Simon in a proper trance.

“Sleep,” says the whisper.

Simon’s obsessive mind latches on to Jane. Her golden eyes are his world.

“Where is she?” he asks through clenched teeth, his hand digging deep into feces and despair and finally finding cold steel.

The baleful eyes squint and dart toward Simon’s head—

And stop. They look to the side, sensing something Simon could not sense. The thing, the presence, hisses at the intrusion. The entire bathroom fills with the susurrus. Simon feels his heart beat dangerously fast, his body cooling in pre-shock, a little urine escaping.

The shower curtains were wide, wide open. Eh, Jane?

The eyes turn back to Simon, glaring, always staring, floating back up and out in a horrible rewind of their entry.

The bathroom door opens and closes.

Silence.

Simon lets out a loud intake of air, as if surfacing from the bottom of a dark lake. His hand splashes out of the fetid water, not holding Excalibur, but the scalpel and the shit. He kicks the stall door open, stumbles through the darkness, out of the bathroom door, down the halls, winding and winding to the lobby.

He bursts through the doors and out into the night—an immense night that seems to have turned over and sleepily taken notice of him.

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.