Dead Still

A very late entry for L. C. Schafers Spooktacular Dollar challenge!

Silence had been Ellen Campbells friend for as long as she could remember, and because most of the people she dealt with on a daily basis were dead she got plenty of it. Running a mortuary was no-ones idea of glamour, but someone had to do it; her mother had always said if there was something to be done it was better to get it over with than put it off... That, she told herself, was what she was doing as she undertook a stock check while studiously ignoring the body in bay four. She was not putting off dealing with bay four, she was making sure she had everything she needed to get the job done.

Then she cleaned the morgue because even the dead deserved to be held in hygienic conditions. Still the body in bay four waited. That's the thing about the dead; they have patience. When the odd jobs ran dry and the silence got too heavy, Ellen picked up the paperwork with cold, shaking fingers.

Daniel Campbell. 18. Abdominal haemorrhage, fractures, severe blunt force trauma.

The words jumped out in aberrant order, not waiting their turn. So many words when 'road traffic accident' would have been simpler and 'killed by drunk driver' would have been more honest. The door opened smoothly, presenting its macabre contents without consideration for the captive audience. Ellen pushed the door closed, carefully put the paperwork down, and walked the three steps to the bin in a daze, leaning over to vomit as if it wasn't really her body.

The top of the cabinets, she reasoned as the smell hit her, could use dusting. And the bookshelves were full of old tomes that really had no place in a modern morgue. The body in bay four could wait a little longer. After all, it's not like he was going anywhere.

*

There is no difference between day and night in a mortuary, but as darkness gathered outside the building like an army the air inside seemed to still and thicken like cold syrup. Coated in dust and sweat, she pulled the last book from the top shelf and coughed as the musty smell caught in her dry throat. Unlike the others, this book wasn't an aging medical tome or obscure treatise on things that could kill; it was a nondescript cloth bound notebook filled with neat lines of scrawling text. At first the words seemed to make no sense, but as Ellen stared she realized it was describing some kind of older burial ritual, referencing academic texts and primary sources like whoever wrote it had been preparing to write a thesis.

She flipped to the yellowing cover page,

Anabelle Carver. 1878.

The mortuary was old, passed from person to person in her family... still the fact she had never heard the name was surprising. On the last page there was a single entry, six words, scrawled in haste and clearly cut short,

"The dead know only one thing-"

Ellen shifted, the back of her neck prickling with cold sweat as she leaned forward. A scent was rising from the old book. Musty, sweet... not the smell of old pages kept in poor conditions. Something much... meatier. She snapped it shut with a thud and put it back on the shelf, hurrying to bay four to pull the body free from its chilly isolation.

As the clock struck eleven, Ellen catalogued the distinguishing marks on the body without looking. She knew them by heart; a scar on the left wrist from a childhood fall, a mole in the centre of the back... a small, heart shaped birth mark behind the left knee that had faded within hours of birth only to reappear with puberty. No need for further investigation; the hospital was very clear about what had killed Daniel Campbell. She cleaned him in slow, gentle movements before lifting the eye caps with shaking hands,

"you'll know too..."

The voice was almost inaudible. Cold and soft, like the first breath of winter. I'm imagining things, she thought as her body locked up, I'm tired and overworked. Its been a hard day. I am alone-

"and you'll wish you didn't." This whisper couldn't be ignored. Something primeval had taken control of her body, forcing her to turn slowly despite the small, screaming voice in her head that said she shouldn't. His milky eyes were fixed on her, swivelled to the side.

"Shit," Ellen gasped and dropped the eye caps, her stomach lurching as she ran to the small bathroom and locked the door.

No rattle of chains followed, no scratching at the door. Time crept by slowly, but the silence was deep and thick. She crept back into the preparation area like a whipped dog, expecting to find the doors open and the bodies posed around like actors... but it was as she had left it.

His eyes were still swivelled to the side,

"Just a quirk," she whispered to herself, "bodies don't act like people."

A trite consolation given to her by her mother when she was fourteen and a death rattle sent her running for the hills, but it worked. She didn't need to understand what sequence of chemical events and muscle atrophies had caused his eyes to slide... it didn't matter. Stranger things happened in mortuaries and morgues across the world every day. She scooped the box of eye caps up and began her work.

She put her son back together piece by piece, and only when his jaw was wired shut did she feel she could look at him again.

*

The nights drew in quicker as the solstice approached, and her job became almost lively. In this little slice of nowhere the roads were narrow and angled, the villages few and far between, and the sea harr rolled in like pea soup at intervals. Winter was high season for mortality, and every body in a sixty mile radius tended to make its selcouth way to Ellen Campbells ivy wrapped home, tucking itself in the basement with its kith and kin.

The dead are all related once the embalming fluid floods in.

On some nights, Ellen could feel them downstairs in their refrigerated bays, waiting for hearses and crematorium vans like soldiers in a line... but these days she heard them more and more often,

"wait-"

She didn't flinch anymore, nor did she hurry to wire the jaws. Whatever made the sound, it wasn't their bone white tongues or concrete hard throats. A trick of the mind, she assured herself, nothing more.

"don't-"

"You can't do that!"

"You want to know, don't you?"

The voices overlapped until she slammed her hand on the table,

"Be quiet," Ellen shouted and the whispers receded for a blessed moment. The old woman on the slab, sucked dry by cancer, twitched,

"You want to know." The sentence came from nowhere, delivered to her ears like poison, and she backed away. The weathered face seemed to smirk. I am not going to talk to a corpse, she thought and picked up the fine wire to begin securing the toothless jaws,

"You don't need to..."

She hammered the pins home with a little too much force and finished the preparation, resisting the urge to padlock the old woman's bay door by the skin of her teeth. The next day she bought a Dictaphone and a video camera from the nearest pawnshop.

*

"can you turn the light on?"

"Please don't put me back in..."

"Wait, don't..."

"You want to know, Ellen..."

The voices seeped from the recording like pus, each voice distinct despite the uniformity of their monotone speech. Ellen leaned back, her eyes drawn once more to the small, clothbound book tucked in a hidden corner of the shelving. Her fingers tingled and itched, but the book would not be denied. Armed with a cup of coffee and a notepad, she took the high stool at her desk and flipped it open, delving into the dusty pages, nose wrinkled against the pervasive smell of rot and decay that seeped from its pages.

Part diary, part study, it spoke about old rituals for interring the pagan dead. Ways to make sure they didn't wander, didn't dream. Didn't speak... and at first it recorded how these old practises tied to the modern ways. Yet as the pages passed the neat script began to waver and become a spidery, cramped thing, slanting this way and that as if the words were thrashing to escape the paper holding them in place.

Annabelle Carver had started to reverse engineer these old practices.

"if placing a tied strip of cloth in the mouth of the dead prevents the devil from using their tongue, why should soaking that same cloth in oil and rubbing it around the mouth not loosen the tongue? If death is the realm of God, surely the dead must know all the multitudes of the world? What would we learn if they could speak?"

The question was as ludicrous as it was infantile, but Ellen jotted down a few notes anyway. Silver repelled the dead, or so Annabelle thought, but copper was their friend. She touched the copper coin she kept in her pocket for luck and looked at the door to the mortuary.

Ellen flicked to the last page again,

"The dead know only one thing-"

The spreading stain at the bottom of the page was dark brown and coppery. She had to know.

Finishing her coffee with a practices flick, Ellen abandoned the cup and took the steps two at a time, pulling the old woman's body from bay one. She cut away the wire holding her jaw shut and rubbed oil onto the copper coin before she pried her jaw open once more and placed it inside.

"I want to know," Ellen whispered, speaking back for the first time. Images of Daniel on the slab filled her mind as she watched the bloodless face intently. Silence. "Tell me. Tell me what the dead know." She whispered. His was the first body to speak, but his body was gone. Long gone into the fire of the crematorium. "He said I would know too..." She whispered, her voice cracking, but the old woman was still as stone.

Ellen straightened up and took the coin from her mouth, eyes stinging as oily tears welled. She retrieved fresh wire and wiped her eyes.

"The dead know only one thing..." The voice had substance now, and it was terrible in its weight. Like grinding stone or cracking ice. Her spine turned to steel, rigid and cold as she turned slowly, her eyes fixed on the spool of wire in her hands,

"And what is that?" She asked softly as a shadow shifted at the edge of her vision,

"That they should not be disturbed," the body of Esme Wilson, 83, killed by laryngeal cancer said despite the fact it had no vocal chords left with which to speak.

Ellen raised her eyes and saw the terrible curve of the thin, wrinkled mouth a moment before a hand like carved ice clamped down on her arm.

*

The mortuary on the peninsula was quiet. For two days it kept its secrets; the ivy covered face was serene as the world passed it by. Only when the hearse driver got no response were the police called. Initially to liberate the body of Esme Wilson so she could be carried, finally, to her eternal resting place in the Kirklees graveyard.

When they broke down the door they found nothing. No blood. No mess. No bodies... which is usually the what they would expect to find when completing a wellness check. But since there were fifteen bays marked as in use in the Campbell Mortuary this was very little comfort.