He circles the gurney on which the approximate shape of a man lies under a sheet. He hasn’t seen this customer, and he wants to be able to describe the deceased to Gifford, as absolute proof that he didn’t just plant the Hershey’s Kiss and hastily retreat. He’s seen many dead people, of course, mostly in their open coffins after they have been spruced up and dressed for Heaven. For the most part, he doesn’t find cadavers scary, but instead boring. It’s an unusual situation, however, this being Halloween and the body freshly dead and Durand alone with it, so that the skin on the nape of his neck crawls, and his throat feels tight.
Three times, young Durand pinches the sheet between his thumb and forefinger, intending to peel it back and reveal the face of the corpse. Again and again and again, he releases the shroud without fulfilling his intention. He grips the pull on one of the morgue drawers. But he has previously seen the two deceased who came in during the late afternoon. Describing them to Gifford will only reveal that, in spite of having come this far with the Hershey’s Kiss, he lacks the courage to confront, one to one, the corpse for whom no drawer is available.
He’s embarrassed by his fear. He has never before been alone with the dead here in the basement at such a late hour, only in viewing rooms on the main floor. This is somehow different. Maybe because here they are underground. That’s where the dead go when they are done with life. Underground. It’s their territory. Especially from midnight to dawn. Durand is trembling. His dread angers him. Other kids his age, even older kids, treat him with respect, almost with awe, all because he lives with dead people, sleeps upstairs untroubled while in the basement dead people are doing who knows what. Some kids are even a little scared of him. They’re eager to hear his latest stories about living with corpses, although after an unusually weird or gruesome anecdote, he can see they regard him with some trepidation. He enjoys being respected, and being feared is even better. Just seven, he already understands that being feared is a source of power, and that people who are fearful can more often be made to do what he wants rather than what they want. Fear is for the weak. His fear infuriates him, and he is shamed by the rapid, frosty exhalations that plume from him. At last he flips the sheet back, revealing a deader that is, at first, no more to be feared than any other.
The head is crowned with a thin tangle of white hair, and the forehead is mostly smooth except for a purplish cut above the left eye, which he might have sustained by falling against something when the stroke hit him. There is a wound, a gap in the flesh, but no blood, maybe because someone washed it off after the old man died, as they were preparing to send him to the funeral home. He’s flat on his back, facing the ceiling, but his eyes are closed. Durand likes it better when the eyes are open, allowing him to gaze into them; he never fails to win a staring contest with a corpse, regardless of how big and mean-looking it is. This one’s face is as pale as chalk, wrinkled, bristling with beard stubble. His mouth is open, not wide, less than an inch, as if he intends to reveal some secret but has forgotten what he meant to say. Durand is just tall enough to look down on the gurney and see the whole face of this latest quiet and respected guest. Confident that he can adequately describe the man to Gifford, he pinches the sheet to draw it back into place—which is when the head turns toward him and the eyes open and the corpse makes a croaking noise as if a frog has taken up residence in its throat.
Durand drops the sheet and startles backward. The deader’s eyes aren’t empty, as have been so many eyes that he has stared into, and they fix on him. From the mouth issues a pearly vapor much fainter than the rich exhalations that steam from Durand. A word whispers from between the cracked, pale lips: “You.”
Although he feels compelled to run, Durand is unable to move. The fear he despises has returned, along with shame that burns in his cheeks in spite of the deep chill in the chamber, shame at the fright that coils around his bones and cinches his joints and immobilizes him, shame at the weakness the fright represents.
The blue eyes of the respected but no longer quiet guest are so bright and hot with intention that it seems they ought to burn twin holes through Durand. The man says, “Give me.”
Durand’s father has shared tales of the mortician’s trade from times long gone, prior to his own practice of the arcane art, when on occasion a person thought to be dead, delivered for embalming, suddenly regained consciousness, sat up, and asked for a shot of whiskey or a roast-beef sandwich, the whereabouts of his wife or the location of the nearest bathroom. As modern medicine advanced and the certainty of the patient’s passage could be confirmed by cardiac monitors and electroencephalograms, such rare occurrences became rarer still and eventually unknown in the developed world.
What lies before Durand, its grizzled face turned toward him, is so extraordinary that it represents one of the worst errors by a physician in this decade—or here, as midnight nears, evil Halloween energy has conjured a dead man back to life with wicked purpose.
Although not rising from the gurney or moving other than his head, the apparition contorts his face from a beseeching expression into something less benign. His eyes narrow, and his mouth twists into a cruel snarl. “You, you, you, GIVE ME!”
Months earlier, Durand’s great-aunt Pelagia suffered a massive stroke that left her paralyzed until she died a few days later. If that is the condition of the man on the gurney, he poses no threat.
As Durand’s fear subsides somewhat, he is overcome with the feeling that this bizarre event is not about the old man and not about some doctor who might have screwed up, that it’s about Durand and only Durand because he’s special. Not just special—unique. He’s heard the word destiny; with his IQ of 178, he understands it far better than would a seven-year-old of lesser intelligence. This strange encounter is a challenge, a test. There’s something he is meant to do, something that will determine whether he’ll become a superhero or a supervillain. He has known for a while that he is going to be a super something. He doesn’t care which it is, just as long as it’s a lot more exciting than growing up in a funeral home.
The paralyzed man’s angry expression fades into puzzlement. He rolls his eyes, taking in as much of the cold-holding chamber as he can from his position.
“Give you what?” Durand asks.
Puzzlement sinks into bewilderment. “I . . . how . . . where?”
Taking a step toward the gurney, Durand says, “Give you what? Tell me. Tell me what you want.”
The fluorescent light is a bleaching radiance. The respected guest is as white as the shroud had been when Durand first entered the room, and the shroud grows whiter by the minute. The walls are alabastrine, as though this frigid chamber is built of snow, an Inuit construct. The floor could be no whiter if it were paved with bone. Durand’s remaining fear evaporates like a scrap of dry ice, and he is filled with the conviction that there’s an action he can take to ensure he’ll become the super something that he dreams of being. He must get it done before whiteness fills the chamber to such an extent that it is as blinding as pitch-blackness. The blue eyes are beacons in the ghastly face, the only color in the seamless eggshell that is forming around Durand, a blue that draws him toward the gurney and the burden on it.