When I was in college, I spent two summers working at a local funeral home. I learned a lot during that time—the embalming process, the stitching and wax used in reconstruction, and even odd tricks like running condensed milk through the circulatory system to reduce the yellow tint of jaundiced skin. I’d gone into the job with a fair amount of dread and squeamishness, but by the end of the first month, I was half-convinced I wanted to do it for a living.
It was the respect that had taken me by surprise. Respect for the body, but also respect for the grief of those left behind. There was such care taken to present this decaying collection of meat and bone in the best light possible—not because it was still a person, but because it was the last reminder that had been left behind. A reminder of who had been lost, and what waits for all of us at the end of the road.
The idea of comforting people through their grief was appealing to me, and once I realized how much the work relied on appearances, it made the work easier—even appealing. I just had to detach myself from the emotions and distasteful aspects of the job. Remind myself that this wasn’t about me, or even the departed, it was about the people who had loved them—what would give them peace or lessen their despair, the things that they could see, hear or smell.
Which is why I found it so strange when I noticed my boss, Mr. Wallace, marking something in the roof of a man’s mouth before sewing it shut. If I had seen it the first summer, I likely would have ignored it. But I was comfortable with Wallace by that second year, and there had already been some talk about me coming back after I finished school. So I asked why. Why was he putting a mark that no one would ever see?
Wallace glanced up at me with a startled expression, licking his lips several times before giving a small, embarrassed smile. “You noticed that, did you? I suppose I’ve gotten too used to you being around, my boy. I should have sent you upstairs before taking up that little task.” He studied me for a moment, seeming to weigh something in his mind before going on. “But you are a good boy, and you’ve shown me you can be trusted. Be discreet.” He stepped forward and put his hand on my shoulder as he met my eyes. “If I share this with you now, will you keep it only for yourself? No telling your friends or anyone. It is very serious and very important, and if I share it, it will be a violation for you to spread it any farther. Do you understand?”
Swallowing, I nodded.
He returned my nod. “Good, good. I think you do understand.”
Wallace turned back to the body as he went on. “There is a secret truth that most undertakers and coroners know, though no one will admit it. In old times, it wasn’t a problem most places—the bodies rotted quickly enough, you see. Only in certain climates and locations did you ever hear tell of it happening. But now, with air conditioning and refrigeration, embalming and powders, we can make the body last far longer.” He looked at the body as he began trailing off. “Too long, some would say.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t get what you’re saying.”
He glanced back and waived his hand. “I’m rambling, forgive me. The point I’m trying to make is this: When something dies, the body is meant to rot away. This is part of the natural order of things, and not just because it saves space or feeds worms or whatever. It’s necessary because dying gives the body over.”
I frowned at him, and giving me a humorless chuckle, he went on. “I know how this sounds. But if a body doesn’t decay quickly enough or is not disposed of in a way that prevents it, the corpse can become a vessel, a receptacle of sorts, for something else.” I kept waiting for him to crack a smile or let me in on the fact that he was fucking with me, but he looked solemn and more than a little afraid.
“What, like a zombie or something?”
He rolled his eyes in exasperation. “That’s all you kids fucking know nowadays is a damn zombie. Zombie this, zombie that. No, not a zombie. The body comes back to a kind of life, but it’s not some brainless monster. It’s just not the person that died either.” Puffing out a long breath, he shook his head. “I don’t know what it is, honestly. A spirit of some kind? Some kind of animal we don’t know about or understand? I don’t know.” He pulled a cigarette from his pants, glanced around, and then stuffed it awkwardly in his shirt pocket. “But they’re slow, and they have to crawl. They can smell or sense a dead body from a long distance, like a shark or something smelling blood, but it takes them a long time to get there and get inside.”
I felt my heart hammering, less from his story and more from what it must mean. I was working for someone who was either insane or had some kind of substance abuse problem. What other explanation could there be? But then again, maybe this was just a practical joke, even if Wallace wasn’t known for them. Besides, it was too good of a job for me not to play along for at least a bit longer.
“Um, okay. So have you ever seen one of these things before?”
He lowered his eyes, but not before I saw the haunted look there. “I…not the thing itself, no. They’re invisible, or at least I don’t know how you see them. But I’ve seen the signs of them twice before, and the end result just once.” He looked back up. “You think I’m crazy. That’s why this isn’t how you should learn about it.”
“What do you mean?”
He sat down on a nearby stool, and I felt a wave of sympathy as I watched at him. He looked old and tired, and crazy or not, I could tell talking about this was hard for him. Still, his voice stayed steady as he began telling me about what had happened to him forty years earlier.
“It’s like a weird kind of club, I guess. Once they know you’re dedicated, that you’re in it as a profession, someone, usually a mentor or friend, will invite you to help them with a special body preparation. For me, it was my boss, Oscar Lews. He asked me to stay late one night with a vagrant’s body that had come in that afternoon. Those are the ones you have to watch the most—with no one to pay for cremation or a proper burial in consecrated ground, they wind up going to a potter’s field with no real sense of urgency from a grieving family.”
I raised my hand and he stopped for me to ask a question. “So this doesn’t happen if they’re cremated or buried at a church?”
Wallace shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a church, or what religion blessed it, at least as far as I can tell. It just needs to be consecrated or the body needs to be so far gone from rot or fire or what have you that it’s past the point of use.” He waved away another question. “The point is, I was like you. I wouldn’t have believed any of this unless I saw it with my own eyes, and when I went down into the basement with Oscar and saw that hobo’s body on a gurney, surrounded by a circle of flour on the floor, my first thought was that it was a joke. My second was that Oscar had slipped a gear and I needed to find the nearest door out.”
“But he convinced me to stay. To wait with him and watch, said that he would explain everything after. So we sat in the corner for three hours. He said it shouldn’t take too long, as the man had been dead probably two days when a railroad cop had found him frozen to death in the back of a supply shed. He was already starting to decay despite the cold conditions both before and after we got him.”
“Still, I was bored and sleepy, and while I was getting paid to sit on my ass, I was about ready to call it a night. That’s when Oscar grabbed my arm and pointed toward the wide white circle surrounding the body. It was moving, or at least a strip of it was. It was like an invisible hand was flicking the flour this way and that, scattering it as it reached the body at long last. I let out a yell and Oscar seemed satisfied I’d seen enough. He went to the body and pushed the gurney toward the oven, yelling for me to get it open and punch the button. I did as he said, and within twenty seconds we were sliding the body toward the flames.”
Wallace shivered. “But that was still enough time for the body to grab my arm. This wasn’t an involuntary muscle spasm or trapped gas moving around. It grabbed my arm, and when I looked up, it was staring at me. Staring at me and saying my name.”
“I don’t know what would have happened if Oscar hadn’t broken its grip and pushed it the rest of the way into the oven. I heard it scream for a moment, but then we were alone again, and everything was silent except for our panicked breathing and the roar of the fire.”
He pointed back at the body. “That’s the night Oscar taught me the other way you prevent a body from being used. There is a symbol—I don’t know where it comes from or what it means, so don’t bother asking—but it looks kind of like three stars touching each other. If you put that into the roof of a body’s mouth, it protects it the same as fire or holy ground. Most people don’t know it, but there are thousands of bodies all around that have that mark in their mouth or somewhere else no one will ever see it.” Rubbing his cheek distractedly, he turned back. “And that’s for the best. People don’t need to know that things like that can exist.”
When he met my eyes again, I could see he knew I didn’t believe him. I liked him, even respected and trusted him, but this? It was too much.
I called in sick the next day, and the following week I slid my resignation through the mail slot on his front door. I felt like a coward and a traitor, but I won’t deny that I felt relief too. I told myself it was just because I was free from having to worry about working around a crazy old man with sharp instruments. But I think that was a lie. I think I was glad I didn’t have to keep worrying that maybe he wasn’t crazy after all.
I moved away after college, and three years later I was living in a cheap apartment in a bad part of Chicago. I was between jobs, had no money, and while I would have eventually called my family for help anyway, one night in November made me go ahead and ask to come home.
I’d been sick with the flu for nearly two weeks, and my last fevered trip out to get food and medicine had been days earlier. I was low on supplies, but I also felt so bad that I didn’t care. I slept most of the time, and in between periods of unconsciousness, I shuffled back and forth to the bathroom, occasionally glancing out the window at the street below. A bleak early winter had been sending snow blowing past for the last few days, and though my grasp of time was warped by being sick, I could still see the progress of white, icy banks of snow accumulating around the steps, alleyways, and mounds of trash dotting the sidewalk on the far side of the street.
I don’t know how long he’d been there when I first saw him, but over my next few trips past the window, I kept seeing the same figure—a man sitting up against a red dumpster in an alley right across from my apartment. He never moved, and as hours turned into days, I saw snow pile up around him until I couldn’t see his legs any more.
There was no question that he was dead, and I didn’t know what I should do about it. If I had felt better, been more myself, I likely would have called 911 and asked them to go check on him—or more realistically, come pick up the body. But instead, I just watched him for a few more seconds before stumbling back to bed.
Another day passed, and I was feeling better. Sipping on some broth, I walked back to the window to check on the body. If it was still there, I was going to call and…
There was movement down there at the dumpster. Not from the man himself, not at first. But from the snow next to him. It looked as if it was rolling down or being pushed aside. My first disquieting thought was that a rat was under the snow getting at the body. But why would it go down into the cold when it could get at his stomach and chest just as easy?
And while it was hard to tell at a distance and in the limited glow of the street lights, it didn’t seem like something was under the snow. It looked more like something I couldn’t see was crawling across it to get to the dead man.
The snow stilled, but a moment later the body gave a quick jerk followed by a smaller shudder. Then, as I watched, the corpse rose to its feet. I wanted to back away, to get away, from the awful thing I was witnessing. Just seeing it, I felt somehow unclean in a base, instinctual way that I can’t fully explain or describe.
But I couldn’t. I was transfixed, staring in horror as this thing clambered to its feet and brushed the remaining snow off its frozen pants and stiff, blue hands. I had the desperate hope that the cold and time had done too much damage, that it would be forced to leave the body or be trapped there as the rotten meat collapsed around it.
That hope died as it turned its head to look up at me.
It just stared for several moments, a smile slowly spreading across its face like a time-lapse of some hideous flower in bloom. Its eyes seemed to shine, even at a distance, and I could feel its gaze boring into me as it raised a hand and gave a long and limber wave. I had the frantic thought that I didn’t know what that meant.
Goodbye? Or hello?
The smile fell from its lips as it lowered its arm, and after staring up at me a second longer, it sank back into the shadows. I imagined I could still see its eyes on me, shining up out of the dark, if only for a moment. And then, it was gone.
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