Part 37 (1/2)

Mira nodded for him to go on, while resisting the urge to take out her notebook and pen.

”I've seen, for instance, corpses sit up and sound as if they were screaming. Of course, it's biological. It's utterly explainable. But let me tell you-” He laughed, and so did she. ”And there have been bodies that seemed to withstand decay for strangely long periods of time, Professor. Others that disintegrated even as I moved them from their deathbed to a stretcher. And the differences have so little to do with age, with disease. Certainly, a more primitive people would have needed a way to explain this, along with other things, such as the sense one sometimes has of a presence. Sometimes malevolent. Sometimes desperate.”

”How do you explain it?” Mira asked.

”Well, I don't,” Ted Dientz said a little sheepishly. ”It might surprise you to know,” he added, raising his eyebrows, clearly hoping that it would, ”that Mrs. Dientz and I traveled to Thailand after the tsunami and a.s.sisted in the preparation and disposal of bodies. The need for morticians and others in the death arts was extraordinary at that time. It was perhaps the most important work I've ever been able to offer.”

It did surprise Mira. It was easier to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Dientz of Bad Axe on a travel tour of Dracula's castle than taking a plane to one of the most devastated places in the world.

Ted Dientz went on to tell Mira that during the weeks he'd spent in Thailand he'd met many people who believed they'd seen drowned corpses rise from the waters, walk onto sh.o.r.e, stride past horrified onlookers, and even hail cabs to be driven away.

”Did they think they were ghosts?” Mira asked.

”Some believed they were ghosts, yes. In fact, most cab drivers refused to make their rounds down by the beach in those early weeks, claiming they were being hailed by ghosts, or that they could see the dead tourists on the beach still looking for each other, or playing obliviously in the sea. One told me, 'They think they're still on vacation.' But most people seemed to think these were actually reanimated corpses. It's not an unusual belief, Professor, as you know. I have to tell you, you'd think a man like me, having spent his whole life in this business, would find that laughable, but I don't.”

She nodded.

She felt her eyes welling stupidly with tears.

The simple honesty of this man, with her, a stranger. He had waited, she felt, a long time to tell someone other than Mrs. Dientz about all this. It meant something to him that she was nodding. He rested his hand patiently on the envelope containing the bloodstain card. He was a man made of patience, she thought.

Now she owed him her own story, she felt-or, she realized, too, that she needed to tell it, just as he'd needed to tell someone. So she started, the day she had stayed home from school, the vision of her mother in the pantry, the funeral years later, the strange and terrifying images that had inspired her entire life's work. She had just finished speaking, and Mr. Dientz was nodding, quiet but fully attentive, when Perry came back through the door, out of breath, gasping for breath, holding the handle of a hairbrush wrapped in tissue and trailing a little white blizzard behind him.

91.

Craig was halfway up the stairs to his apartment when he heard a door open and someone clomping unevenly toward the stairwell. ”Oh, h.e.l.lo,” he said, when he recognized her, and then covered his face in his down jacket, which he'd taken off, when he recognized the look of horror on her face.

”Holy s.h.i.+t,” Deb said, rus.h.i.+ng to him, holding the back of his head in one hand and his coat in the other, pressing his face into the jacket even harder, to the point that he was a little afraid that the tiny, goosey feathers might smother him. ”What the f.u.c.k did they do to you?”

She hurried him as quickly as a girl on crutches could hurry someone into her apartment, pulled the door closed behind him, shoved him toward her bedroom, where, it appeared, she hadn't done anything-changed the sheets, made the bed-since rousing him from sleep there the day before.

”It looks worse than it is,” Craig told her, but he knew the words were m.u.f.fled by his jacket, and that there was blood all over the top of his head, so who knew what she thought he was saying to her?

”Oh, my G.o.d,” she was saying. ”Oh, my G.o.d. Oh, my G.o.d. I'll be right back. I'll get some towels.”

Craig felt bad about it-he would ruin her towels with his b.l.o.o.d.y nose, he might stain her sheets with the blood running down his neck-but he let himself fall backward, hard, onto her bed, and the room swirled around him like a warm bath. Never in his life had a bed felt this comfortable. It would be fine, he thought, if she came back with the towels, but it would also be fine if someone just came in here and turned off the lights and let him lie like this forever.

”Here!” she screamed, tossing the towels toward him. And then, again, ”Oh, my G.o.d!”

”It's just a b.l.o.o.d.y nose, maybe broken,” Craig said-although he also knew that with his current nasal intonation, she probably had no idea what he'd said. ”No big deal. I've had one before. Just gotta put a bandage on it if it's broken. Maybe I'll have black eyes.”

He took the jacket off his face, grabbed a towel, and could tell by the way she inhaled that he must already have black eyes.

”What happened?” she asked, and the way she said it was so serious that he felt, somehow, the need to suppress his own laughter. He pressed the towel harder against his face. He could almost hear the snow falling outside. Those flakes, big as little hands, had slapped him upside the head the entire walk home from Greek Row. The whole way there'd been the gasping of girls when they saw the little trail of blood he was leaving in the snow, and the ”Whoa, dude” of the guys, and the whole time he'd felt this same urge to laugh right along with the urge to hit someone, to pummel someone, to punch someone in the face, the feeling he imagined boxers had-a profound love and joy and urge to do violence all wrapped up in one profound physical desire.

But he didn't do it. He'd just kept walking. Laughing, and maybe weeping (was that tears or blood, and what was the difference now?) as he kept walking, thinking of her taking one look at him, running. She wasn't dead. He'd seen her with his own eyes: The f.u.c.king lying, cheating b.i.t.c.h hadn't died.

She was the one who'd been calling. The postcards were hers. The beautiful girl he'd loved and killed had come back to life.

Deb left and reemerged above him with what looked like a washcloth full of rocks, or ice, and sat beside him on the bed, moving the towel gently away from his face and lowering her little frozen surprise toward his nose, making noises of empathy and disgust as she did it and demanding that he tell her something he had no idea how to begin to tell her, or anyone, because there were no words with which to express such a thing.

92.

”I saw her, too,” Perry said, holding out the brush to them. ”At the same time. Here. I saw her with my own eyes.”

”Perry,” Professor Polson said, taking a step toward him. ”What do you mean?”

”I went back there. I left the car, and I got down on my hands and knees, and I crawled through the Barbers' backyard, and I found a window with a little crack in the curtain, and I put my hands up to it-”

At first, he could see almost nothing through that crack, but every other window had a shade pulled so tight he could see nothing at all through those. So he'd stood there with his hands pressed against the pane long after his hands had gone numb, staring at a little place between what appeared to be a china hutch and the dangling chains of a cuckoo clock, watching the shadows come and go against it, listening to the muttering of voices, and a few high notes of laughter, but mostly serious-sounding voices.

Now and then Mrs. Werner pa.s.sed before him-Perry recognized the gray-blue dress she'd been wearing, and then another female form: Mary? Constance?

There was a soft gray sweater.

There was what looked like a plaid skirt.

He saw one pair of female arms bearing what must have been Grouch in her arms, and a few times Mr. Werner came and went in a yellow s.h.i.+rt. Finally, Perry was about to leave. (What the h.e.l.l am I doing? he'd thought.) The snow had soaked through his jacket all the way to his skin, and he realized that he was standing in the perfect place where, if one of the neighbors decided to turn on their porch light, he'd be illuminated for everyone to see, and there would be no way to get away except by scaling their picket fence, and then- And then she was leaning over.

She was picking up something she'd dropped on the floor.

Her hair was the flaxen blond he remembered from elementary school-whispering around her face, curling around the curve of her upper arm.

Volleyball. Reaching up with that arm, to serve, to spike.

His bed.

She'd rolled over and swung it over his chest and said, ”Craig would just die if he walked in here now.”

And he'd said into the nape of the neck he was staring at now, ”And why does that make you laugh?”

And she'd laughed.

Now she laughed. Her familiar laugh. She managed to pick up whatever it was she'd dropped and stick it back into her flossy hair (a comb, a barrette), and just at that moment she turned to the window and fixed him with a look he also knew: Hide and Seek in the c.o.xes' backyard.