Speak the Dead Read online

  The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Grant McKenzie

  Cover, jacket and interior design by Damonza

  ISBN 978-1-940610-54-233-7

  eISBN 978-1-940610-62-745-0

  First hardcover publication: September 2015

  1201 Hudson Street

  Hoboken, NJ 07030

  www.PolisBooks.com

  Other books by Grant McKenzie

  Writing as Grant McKenzie

  No Cry For Help

  Port of Sorrow

  K.A.R.M.A. (Polis Books)

  The Fear In Her Eyes (Polis Books)

  Speak The Dead (Polis Books)

  Writing as M.C. Grant

  Angel With A Bullet

  Devil With A Gun

  For

  Karen and Kailey

  who I love

  even more

  than wine gums

  “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.”

  — Apple founder Steve Jobs’ final words

  on his deathbed

  Twenty-five years ago

  The blast shattered the night’s silence, ripping the six-year-old girl from restful slumber into blind, terrified panic. Sally bolted upright, her heart hammering so fast that it pained her ribs.

  She strained to listen… heavy footsteps in the hall shuffling along the floor as though fighting gravity. Something hard and meaty slammed into her bedroom door, cracking the wood and rattling the flimsy brass handle. She covered her mouth and froze in place, but whoever was outside didn’t seem intent on entering.

  A mumbled curse escaped unpliant lips before the unknown intruder shoved away from the door and shambled on.

  In its wake, Sally grimaced at the uncomfortable wet warmth that seeped around her, soaking through her cotton nightdress and pooling on the protective rubber sheet her mother had fitted over her mattress. This time it wasn’t one of her night terrors, however. This was really happening.

  Sally climbed out of bed, both embarrassed and afraid.

  Before looking for a new nightdress, she crept to the door and carefully turned the knob. The handle wasn’t locked—it didn’t have the capability—and it opened both silently and easily. Whoever had fallen against it could have entered her room with no effort at all.

  Despite her growing fear, Sally peeked into the hallway and gasped—a bloody handprint oozed down the shiny white surface of her painted door. Its finger trail elongated as the handprint slid, becoming something other than human.

  Sally fought her panic as she glanced up and down the dark hallway. The washroom light was on, and she could hear the sound of heavy grunting, like an animal.

  She didn’t want to see what was making the noise.

  Instead, Sally darted in the opposite direction and pushed open the door to her parents’ bedroom at the rear of the house. The room was in darkness except for a shaded bedside lamp, and what it illuminated filled Sally with overwhelming despair. Her eyes filled with tears as she rushed forward to climb on the four-poster bed beside her mother.

  With her ravaged nightdress drenched in blood from a double-barreled wound that had ripped open her chest with unimaginable, close-range fury, Sally’s mother was no longer contained within her shattered, fleshy shell.

  Sally wept as she cradled her mother’s limp head against her tiny chest, mindless of the blood and the cloying stench of death. She closed her own eyes, wanting it to be nothing more than a nightmare, a horrible dream that she could wake from and everything would be okay again—when her mother’s trapped voice finally released in a pent-up groan: “Run, Sally! Run!”

  Her skin prickling with painful, electrified goose bumps, Sally stared open-mouthed into her mother’s lifeless green eyes. Another face seemed to stir underneath the dead flesh, and without moving a muscle it repeated the warning.

  Sally released her mother’s head back onto its pillow and scrambled off the bed. At the bedroom door, she turned around again, unsure. Her mother hadn’t moved. The other face was no longer visible, but its urgent warning still echoed inside her head.

  “Be brave,” she told herself. “You’re a big girl now. Do as your mother tells you.”

  Sally opened the door and started down the hallway toward the stairs. When she neared the washroom, she slowed, fear making every footfall sound like the clatter of a dropped soup pot as her bare feet struck the floor.

  “Just run,” she told herself. “Don’t look inside.”

  Sally glanced inside and saw her father standing in the bathtub. He was wearing drawstring pajama bottoms, but no shirt. His bare torso was covered in blood, and the twin barrels of a well-oiled shotgun were jammed in his mouth. The glistening oil mixed with dribbling blood to turn his saliva into a frothing purple beard.

  Her father’s eyes were rolled back in his head, the orbs white and stormy. A dark shadow filled the room and the incessant chanting of a repetitive voice echoed from every direction.

  Sally hesitated, wanting to stop and help, to wake her father from this seizure, to save one of her parents—but the urgency of her dead mother’s warning propelled her onward. As Sally bolted down the stairs, racing toward the front door, a final bone-jarring BOOM erupted behind her.

  With tears streaming down her face, Sally did the only thing she could.

  She kept running.

  Six months ago

  The woman ran until her lungs threatened to burst. She had lost both her shoes in the undergrowth when she diverted off the footpath, and now the soles of her feet were cut, bruised, and bleeding with every step.

  Leaping over a mossy log, her feet sank ankle-deep into marshy soil—and stuck.

  She screamed as her right foot twisted and the sickening snap-crunch of cartilage ripping from bone fired a white-hot jolt of pain directly into her brain.

  The woman collapsed face first in the dirt, unable to breathe, the crippling hurt blurring her sight, her reason, and her will to survive.

  Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

  The river was close. She could hear it. She scrunched up her face and gritted her teeth.

  An escape. People. There were often fishermen wading in the shallows in their ridiculous rubber pants. She had made fun of them so often, but now—

  Come on! Get up! You’re tougher than this!

  Whimpering, she ran her hands down her leg to gently pull her injured foot from the soft ground. She did the same with her other foot and then rolled over onto her back. She wanted to lie in the cold mud forever, allow the pain to subside and her breath to catch, but she couldn’t. With a prayer on her lips and her face awash in cold sweat, she found the strength to sit up and cradle her twisted ankle in her hands.

  The pain, the dirt, the cold, the fear… it was too much.

  And why?

  Walking home from work, she took the same path through the woods that she traveled every day, her ever-present iPod drowning out the birdsong and the labored gurgling of the Spokane River.

  She didn’t hear the stranger approach.

  Suddenly, a gloved hand wrapped around her mouth and the terrifying lick of cold steel pressed against her throat.

  She froze, her mind unable to fathom what was happening. And then the stranger spoke: “If you run, I’ll slit your fucking throat.”

  It was the kind of warning that screams: You’re dead.

  The woman drove her elbow hard into the stranger’s gut and took off down the path at full speed. The knife had slid across her skin and blood had flowed, but she felt the wound wasn’t deep, no worse than her legs had suffered w
hen she first learned to shave.

  If she had been wearing runners, the stranger wouldn’t have stood a chance, but the damn heels she wore to the office to make her butt look pert beneath her tight skirt were useless.

  She lost the shoes when she diverted off the path and into the thick, bug-infested foliage. The stranger’s panting breath was so close behind her that she hadn’t dared turn around.

  She had simply run.

  Pushing up from the dirt, the woman attempted to stand. She placed most of her weight on her left foot, but the moment she tried to balance herself with her right, pain brought her back to her knees with an agonized squeal.

  The crunch of breaking branches nearby made her swallow the pain and crawl toward the river. If she couldn’t make the water, maybe she could at least find a large bush or a fallen tree to crawl under. Hide until the stranger gave up.

  She pulled herself along the ground, nails digging into the soft earth, fingers clawing for purchase. Desperate.

  The river was close. The noise of it. The smell of it. The cool–

  A heavy weight landed on her back, hard knees on either side of her spine, the surprise load crushing her chest into the dirt, snapping ribs.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but a second weight pushed down on her skull, forcing her face deep into the moist earth. Dirt and worms and dead leaves flowed into her mouth and up her nose.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  She couldn’t ask why.

  The stranger yanked her head out of the dirt before she lost consciousness. The woman spat and struggled, but her efforts were so pitiful that she felt ashamed.

  “I told you not to run.”

  The woman’s eyes went wide as the knife stabbed deep into her neck and was pulled hard across her throat.

  When released, her head flopped onto the ground, her breathing strangled, her blood pouring out to stain the earth. She wanted to speak, but her mouth, her body, no longer worked. Only her brain was alive, and that wouldn’t be for long.

  She was flipped over onto her back.

  “You’re not her are you?” asked the stranger, disappointed.

  The tip of the knife flicked toward her eyes.

  With her larynx severed, the woman couldn’t scream.

  One week ago

  Sister Fleur wept tears of blood.

  The monster stood above her, his breathing labored, his face spattered in sweat and gore.

  Beside her, Sister Emily had stopped moving, her throat grotesquely swollen and her battered face locked in agony rather than the serenity she deserved.

  Mercifully, she was beyond pain now.

  Sister Fleur stared up at a visage ripped from nightmare and prayed for him to stop. His fists were a storm of agony, each blow measured to inflict maximum humiliation and pain.

  The left side of her attacker’s face was smooth and handsome, but the right side sunk fear into her heart. Twisted and torn, folds of rubbery, dead-belly skin drooped over a lifeless eye and sunken cheek. Muscle and fat had been eaten away as if by rats, and his ear was nothing more than a ragged hole.

  It was the face of evil or hell or the devil himself.

  “Where’s Salvation?” the deformed man screeched.

  It was a question he had asked a dozen times, and with every shake of her head he had landed another blow. Sister Emily had endured the worst, but Sister Fleur couldn’t make herself answer.

  Gasping for breath, the man grabbed Sister Emily’s leg and dragged her close. Her unseeing eyes stared at Sister Fleur as the man’s large hands tore at her clothing. Hot spittle flew from malformed lips.

  “I’ll rape her corpse while you watch,” he threatened. “And that is not yet the worst I can do.”

  Sister Fleur shook her head in panic. No more, please Lord, no more.

  “Where’s Salvation?”

  And, God forgive her, she told him.

  1

  Talking to the dead isn’t as creepy as people might imagine.

  Sally knew most people liked to think of the dead as empty vessels; the corpse nothing but leftover meat, fat, and juices that the soul leaves behind like unwanted baggage after it has moved on to bigger and better things. She just happened to disagree.

  The dead had feelings. They responded to music and speech and the touch of the living. She didn’t know what it was, leftover energy maybe? But when she talked to the dead, they responded in subtle ways. The gray flesh became more pliant, the air around them grew less frigid, and this allowed the makeup—foundation, rouge, eyeliner, lipstick—to go on smoother and emit a more natural glow.

  Sally often got the feeling that the time she spent with a guest was the first he or she had been touched by a gentle hand in a long, long time.

  “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Shoumatoff?” Sally said as she rinsed shampoo from the dead woman’s brittle hair.

  Mrs. Shoumatoff was having her funeral that afternoon, but the director had confided in Sally that he didn’t know if anyone was going to attend. No one had responded to the notice he wrote and placed in the local newspaper, and so he was planning to contact the local Mourners Club to see if it could send some members to fill a few seats.

  Mr. William Payne, senior director of Paynes’ Funeral Home, disliked an empty funeral. But with the promise of pots of coffee and Earl Grey tea, china cups, and his wife’s delicious home baking, he could usually guarantee at least a half-dozen, white-haired or blue-rinsed mourners on short notice.

  Using the parlor’s much advertised and very popular installment package, Mrs. Shoumatoff had paid for her funeral in advance. She had requested an open coffin (“If possible,” she wrote in the contract). Her handwriting was elegant and spoke of a formal European education, but under occupation she had written: cleaning lady, retired.

  Her husband hadn’t known about the funeral arrangements. It was the county coroner’s assistant who found the contract for Paynes’ Funeral Home inside Mrs. Shoumatoff’s apron pocket. She had been wearing the apron when she died and, according to her husband, was rarely seen without it.

  In the death certificate that accompanied Mrs. Shoumatoff from the morgue the coroner had ruled the death as accidental. Mrs. Shoumatoff had tripped on the living room carpet and struck her head on the corner of a brick fireplace. Death was not instantaneous but neither was it lingering. The only puzzle was why, especially for a retired cleaning lady, was she rushing through the living room with her apron and hands covered in white flour.

  When the husband was told of the funeral arrangements, he asked if he could go with a cheaper option instead, and have the difference refunded to him in cash. Mr. Payne politely informed him that was not an option.

  Mr. Shoumatoff had not taken the news well, and when Mr. Payne asked if he would like to provide one of his wife’s favorite dresses for the funeral, he had cursed the Payne family lineage and stormed out.

  Mr. Payne did not believe he would return. Not even for the funeral.

  This was not an entirely new situation. Sometimes it was grief, other times it was anger or denial or bitterness. Sally had even known jealousy to play a part. Whatever the reason, Sally never allowed her guests to look anything but their best.

  To that end, she had established a wonderful rapport with the ladies at the Salvation Army thrift store, conveniently located less than half a block from the funeral home. This afternoon, Mrs. Shoumatoff would be wearing a lovely green dress with subtle gold accents. The lace embroidery on collar and hem—which the Sally Ann ladies had mended perfectly—had a definite European flavor, and Sally believed Mrs. Shoumatoff would approve.

  Her one dilemma was the apron. It had become so much a part of the woman’s identity, but Sally didn’t know if that was of her own choosing. She could tell from the scars on the woman’s body as she cleaned and dressed her that life had been a hardship, but Sally didn’t know if the apron brought her comfort or was yet another form of domestic bondage.

  “What do you say, Mrs. Shoumatoff?�
�� Sally asked as she combed the corpse’s damp hair.

  As was to be expected, Mrs. Shoumatoff didn’t answer.

  Sally rubbed in another dab of conditioner and combed out the last stubborn flakes of dried blood. It had taken a thin layer of molding wax and a few extra dabs of foundation to fill the dent from her fall. The flesh had split down to the bone, but it was nothing that couldn’t be fixed, especially in the talented hands of the parlor’s lead mortician, Jesús Moroles.

  “I think we’ll leave the apron off,” Sally said.

  She touched Mrs. Shoumatoff’s cheek. The flesh was stiff and cold.

  “But I’ll put it in the casket beside you, how’s that?”

  Sally touched the woman’s cheek again. A barely perceptible warmth had softened and relaxed the skin. Sally beamed.

  After gently blow-drying the woman’s hair and adding a few soft curls with an iron, Sally moved on to makeup.

  As Sally explained to Mrs. Shoumatoff, makeup for the dead is not the same as for the living. The skin—which is just another organ, albeit with a surface area of around two square meters—no longer breathes; it is kept chilled and the natural dehydration that begins at death destroys elasticity.

  To preserve the body, as decomposition happened faster than most people thought, a surgical tube was inserted into the carotid artery, giving direct access to the heart. Approximately two to three gallons of formaldehyde-based embalming fluid was then pumped into the arterial system. This procedure flooded the capillaries and forced all the blood in the body out of a second tube in the jugular vein. At Paynes, the embalmer added a special pink dye to the fluid as a way to counteract death’s dull pallor. The pungent fluid looked rather like Pepto Bismol.

  After embalming, Sally’s secret to reviving natural beauty was done in four stages. The first was a hydrating layer of cold cream. The second was a flesh-colored layer of oil-based foundation, applied carefully to hands and face in short, quick strokes.

  Once the base was dry, the third stage was a translucent water-based cosmetic that allowed for a variation in tone to show through. This was the layer that returned life to the bloodless skin.