Spawn of Man (8 page)

Chapter Ten

2036. October, Sunday. 2.00 a.m.

Robert walked reluctantly down another corridor like a man being led to his appointment with the grim reaper. Indeed Robert wished it was himself about to face his own mortality and shake hands with death. The walk to the morgue was transported into a surrealistic world where the corridor elongated itself into impossibly protracted dimensions. He was sure he had passed the same door moments earlier. It was as if he was trapped in a cartoon where the characters run past the same features again and again, caught in an inked-in loop. His wife and child were dead.

A new feature appeared on the repeating wall. A ridiculously large clock, functional and white with big, solid numbers. It was the kind of timepiece hung on the wall of an infants’ school where the children gazing at it would still be unaccustomed to telling the time. Robert wondered who needed such assistance down here. The dead?

Maybe it helps
, he thought,
when you are wheeled down here and you lie staring at that exaggerated face. Maybe cold, dead eyes need a bit of assistance focusing on the numbers, when they are trying to determine and mentally record their time of arrival at the morgue. Maybe arriving in the afterlife mirrored the mildly chaotic arrival at the Accident and Emergency Department of any large hospital, complete with harassed, over-worked clerical staff.

And maybe the first question on the obligatory form to be completed was ‘time of death please?’ Then, that disproportionate clock would have proven itself invaluable.

Robert realized he was bordering on hysteria and was contemplating anything except what he was about to face. The giant fingers ticked slowly round the disc until they arrived at 2.00 a.m. Synchronized with the fall of the morgue technician’s footsteps on the smooth, clean floor. The technician walked slightly in front of Robert. His bearing was ironically apt to his employment and he fitted his circumstances with a delicious suitability. He was a tall man, as tall as Robert, a six foot assembly of bones and taut pallid skin.

He had a bald, narrow head that looked like it had attained its gleam through the medium of polishing. He looked no older than fifty, but it seemed like he may have been fifty for a very long time. And he appeared to have little, if any, muscle definition to his frame. He had been constructed and fashioned on a budget that allowed only for the barest covering of his skeleton. His complexion was so wan and bloodless that Robert wondered if maybe he had died here himself, then carried on his duties in death. The dead attending to the dead.

The attendant shuffled forward until he arrived at a door, not dissimilar to the many other doors they had already passed in the long corridor. Although Robert knew what awaited him on the other side of that door, he now felt a terrible dread and uncertainty. The apprehension brought a cold film of sweat out on his skin and he suddenly became aware of the intensity of his own heartbeat. It seemed to thud and thump so loud in his chest that he was sure the barely animated attendant could hear it too. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with air to try and steady himself.

Inside the morgue waited a coroner, the officer in charge, and a uniformed officer. The uniform waited by the door, a young, dark-haired, long-faced woman, tall and thin. She looked comfortable with her assignment, but she also looked like she could invest in discomfort just as readily. The officer in charge was speaking conspiratorially to the coroner in a corner of the sparse, austere room. The place felt sterile, efficient, somber, very business-like, devoid of hope and clean, with a hint of bleach pervading the air. Robert half imagined partially rotting corpses sat in the chairs that were placed in the periphery of the room, waiting to be processed patiently.
Why did they need so many chairs anyway?
There it was again, mild hysteria removing his focus from the present.

Small metal tables were positioned uniformly around the room, impossibly neat and tidy and burnished to a stainless steel reflective finish that held distorted images of the room on their surfaces. The clock in this room was just as large as its counterpart in the corridor outside and it showed the time to be 2.02 a.m. The officer in charge approached Robert with his hand held out.

He looked earnest and a little sad. A sadness that did not link to this event, but to life in general. He was about fifty years old, maybe older, average height, and his dark hair had the hint of a curl and was unkempt. He looked like he was weary, but retained a keen intellect, possibly the look of a man who was destined for greater things but then somewhere along the way destiny forgot him.

‘Mr. Douglas, my name is Detective Inspector Andrews, pleased to meet you,’ and Robert noticed the man’s self-reproach at using the word ‘pleased’ in the present circumstances.

‘I’m very sorry for your loss, may I offer my condolences to you?’ and they shook hands.

Closer to him now, Robert identified fine lines around his brown, intelligent eyes and creases about his mouth that lent coarse intensity to his face, and his grip mirrored this intensity. Robert felt the man actually was sorry and that it had not been said out of a sense of duty and a regard for procedure.

‘Yes,’ Robert replied and it was all he could think to say as the two men stood hand in hand.

The skeletal morgue technician had ghosted to the two stainless steel tables that held the bodies of Alex and Jake and he was standing impassively holding a corner of the white sheet that covered one of the bodies. He had the air of a butler, standing stiff-backed and contemptuous, holding a tray of champagne glasses at a function. A thin look of scorn almost, but not quite, betraying him. Robert felt he was a little
too
eager to perform his duties now.

‘This is the coroner, Doctor Jennings,’ Detective Andrews continued, and the coroner moved to the side of the technician and nodded reverently to Robert, like a somber priest stood by his altar and about to dispense Mass.

The coroner was the antithesis of the technician. Where the technician was tall, gaunt and the very essence of animated death, the coroner was a pleasant-faced, fleshy man of sixty years or so.

He was small, round and had a full head of wiry red hair that added a comical aspect to his demeanor, setting him at odds with his position. Robert half expected him to produce a test tube of frothing liquid and laugh hysterically like the archetypal mad scientist from a 1950s B movie. A tear formed in the corner of Robert’s eye.

Detective Andrews said, ‘Mr. Douglas, I realize this is difficult for you.’

As he spoke, Detective Andrews placed one hand gingerly at Robert’s elbow and gently began to guide him to the table where the rotund coroner and his ghoulish sidekick technician waited.

‘But we need you to try and help us in identifying the… bodies.’ Detective Andrews stumbled over the end of the sentence as Robert arrived at the first table.

Robert noticed two heavy steel doors about two and a half-feet square, set in a row of identical units. Two mouths waiting to ingest the two bodies as soon as the formalities of identification were resolved. Robert shuddered and the lifeless morgue technician drew the first stiff, white sheet back.

It was Jake. Only it wasn’t Jake. It was an imitation of Jake, as if a talented artist had manipulated and molded life-like clay into an approximation of his son. This was not Jake, this something crawling up from the morbid world of the morgue. Although Jake’s face had obviously been “prepared” for viewing (probably by the bloodless hands of the technician) and his hair was neat and tidied, he still looked unreal. The eyes were shut and the mouth slightly parted. The lips were normal and the skin, where it wasn’t bruised, held the vigor of life. But the thing was a shell nonetheless, and Robert recoiled at the sight of it.

‘Mr. Douglas?’ Detective Andrews said, managing to convey both the question he officially needed answering and a genuine degree of concern for Robert and the harrowing ordeal he was enduring.

Robert could not tear his eyes from the corpse. However, subliminal images from the second stainless steel table, the one that supported the body of his wife Alex, were seeping into his consciousness, slashing at it with little cuts of dread. He had noticed that the sheet covering Alex’s body fell away in certain parts. In those areas there seemed to be no substance below the surface, to hold the sheet in the correct shape.

‘Mr. Douglas,’ repeated Andrews, his worn, intelligent face exuding sympathy with Robert’s condition. ‘If you would confirm this is your son, Jake Douglas?’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s my son, that’s Jake.’ Robert felt his throat go dry as the words fell waterless from his lips, dusty and rasping.

Andrews nodded quickly at the morgue technician, who wore a name badge on the left breast pocket of his white coat, “Martin Price.”

Fucking Vincent Price,
thought Andrews. The technician replaced the sheet and folded his hands as if in prayer. Though whom he prayed to, Andrews did not dare consider.

Now the macabre circus rolled on to the second venue and the table that the body of Alex Douglas reposed on. Robert felt every sinew in his body tighten. All his grief now washed over him with renewed power and energy, squeezing his throat until it felt impossibly tight. There was no aperture, no room for the vital air to gain access to his lungs and he gagged. Andrews caught Robert’s arm and gripped it, supporting the momentary loss of resolve suffered by Robert.

‘I’m okay. I’m okay,’ croaked Robert. He wasn’t and he had to cough three or four times to help get the words out past the coarse, aged parchment that now lined the inside of his throat.

‘I know you are, Mr. Douglas,’ replied Andrews, and he turned to the young policewoman by the door and instructed, ‘Get Mr. Douglas a glass of water.’

The young officer gave a sigh that was almost audible as a groan when amplified by the acoustics of the morgue. It was as if she had been holding her breath since Robert had entered the room and now, with the impending freedom her errand afforded, she could at last breathe. She did not want to look at the first body, but did not want to look away, in case Andrews saw that and made a mental note of it. So the unexpected reprieve of leaving the room to obtain a glass of water for the poor, laboring relative was now a lifeline she grabbed with both hands. She was gone before Andrews could tag her name onto the end of the order.

Robert knew Alex had been dismembered. He had not been officially told and he had not asked. He had been informed she had survived long enough after the crash to make it to the hospital, but then had died of her extensive injuries. Robert could now tell by the way the cloth covering Alex’s body was not draped symmetrically that her left leg and right arm were missing. Thankfully he would not be required to witness those horrific affronts to Alex’s body. The technician waited by the table, once again holding one corner of the white covering, and once again looking slightly too enthusiastic.

Andrews had the disgusting notion that when this terrible business was concluded and the morgue was again silent, the technician would then entertain himself with Alex’s body in some necrophiliac obscenity. The impression almost made him want to protect his wife’s dignity by staying in the bright, soulless room until morning. The coroner had joined the technician now and he signaled for the cloth to be pulled back to expose Alex’s dead form.

Although Robert saw Alex’s face for a few moments, the memory would haunt him for the rest of his life. Death had not dared take the beauty that was intrinsic to Alex. The angular, definite shape of her features. The full, definite line of her lips. The masses of unruly auburn hair tied back now, and the jaw line, projecting strongly, yet femininely. All these things were still evident. But etched into that sublime face was the work of a frenzied butcher. Lacerations crisscrossed her face. Deep, angry fissures of tissue that, although they had been skillfully manipulated to appear less blatant, still wrenched the skin apart.

The force of multiple impacts had shifted the bone and muscle beneath the skin. A massive, deep incision formed a ravine from Alex’s hairline to the corner of her mouth. It crossed one eye and the bridge of the nose where it had obviously smashed the bone. On one side of the mouth the lips were slightly parted, where the chin-bone below had been forced inwards and had pulled the skin with it. Robert could see that Alex’s teeth were missing or smashed into ragged fangs like that of a mutated, laboratory-born monster.

Robert lowered his eyes and wept as his hand stretched out searchingly, as if the sight of Alex’s disfigurements had blinded him and he was now trying to feel his way to her face. But unable to control his trembling, Robert dropped his hand to his side and stood eyes closed, and chest convulsing, with each suppressed sob. Andrews placed his hand on Alex’s shoulder and looked at the coroner.

The sheet was quickly replaced, and before Andrews could speak, Robert uttered, ‘That’s Alex. Christ sake, that’s her. That’s my wife.’

Andrews nodded to the coroner and things were set in motion. Funeral homes would now be contacted, arrangements would be made and Robert would move through these functions like a lifeless shell, guided by the detective and the coroner. And when he stood in the little corridor again, he knew he was less of a person. He was older now and somehow diminished. He tried to imagine a life without the images of his dead wife and child burned onto his mind and found he could not envisage such a life. So he turned and walked away. No fanfares, no grand music accompanying the loneliest minutes of his existence. Just the fall of his footsteps on the polished floor and the soft splash of one tear.