The Dead Won't Let Me Rest

Chapter 2: The Body on the Table

The embalming room was at the end of a short corridor on the ground floor, behind a door with a frosted glass panel. Light leaked through it. Pale and steady, not flickering. Not a fault in the wiring.

Someone had left a light on. That was the reasonable explanation. His father's last employee, maybe, or whoever had locked up when the business stopped. Kael told himself this while he walked toward the door and didn't entirely believe it.

He pushed it open.

The room was tiled in white, floor to ceiling, with a single stainless steel table in the center. A fluorescent strip ran the length of the ceiling. Drainage channels cut into the floor in a shallow V. The smell was stronger here, sharp enough to settle at the back of the throat.

On the table lay a man.

Late forties, broad across the chest, in a pale green hospital gown. His hands were folded at his sides, not across his chest. His face was turned slightly toward the door, toward Kael, as though he had arranged himself that way to wait.

Kael did not move.

The man was dead. Obviously, completely dead. The skin had the flat, waxy quality that no living person ever had, and there was a sutured incision visible at the base of the neck. Someone had already begun preparing him. Someone who was no longer here.

Kael backed up one step, then stopped himself.

He was not going to run from a dead body in a funeral home. That would be a deeply stupid way to start.

He found the secondary light switch near the door and turned on the additional overheads, flooding the room properly. Nothing changed. The man on the table remained exactly as he was. Still. Arranged. Dead.

Kael let out a slow breath and pulled his phone from his pocket. He would call the lawyer. Or the police, maybe. Someone needed to explain why there was an unidentified body in a property that had supposedly been closed for months.

He had just unlocked the screen when the man's chest moved.

Not breathing. That wasn't it. It was more like something shifting beneath the surface, like water disturbed from below. Then the hands, which had been flat at the sides, flexed once. Fingers spreading and curling. A slow, deliberate movement, nothing like the involuntary twitch of cooling muscles.

Kael's back hit the doorframe.

The man's head turned. Fully, smoothly, until the face was directed at the ceiling. Then the eyes opened. They were brown, ordinary, and completely focused. Not the clouded, fixed stare he'd seen in photographs of the dead. These eyes moved. They found him.

Kael could not have said how long he stood there. It felt like a long time. It was probably four seconds.

"You're the son," the man said.

The voice was wrong. Too deep, too slow, like sound traveling through water. The lips barely moved. But the words were clear.

"I'm," Kael started. Stopped. Tried again. "What?"

"Gerald Arden's son." The eyes hadn't blinked. "You have his mouth. He always looked like that too, when something surprised him."

"You knew my father."

"He prepared me." A pause. "Three months ago. Before they came back for me."

Kael's grip on the phone tightened. "Before who came back."

The man didn't answer that. His gaze drifted to the ceiling, and for a moment he looked like what he was: someone dead, lying on a table, doing something he had no business doing.

"I don't have long," he said. "Whatever this is, it's costing something. I can feel it going."

"What do you want?"

The eyes came back to him. Direct. Urgent in a way that had nothing to do with expression and everything to do with weight.

"Find my killer," the man said. "His name is in what I left behind. You'll know it when you see it."

Kael pressed his back flat against the doorframe. The tile floor. The drainage channels. The smell of chemicals and cold air. He was not dreaming. He knew what dreaming felt like, and it didn't feel like this.

"Why me?" he said.

"Because you're here." A pause. "And because this place chose you. The same way it chose your father."

"My father is dead."

"I know." Something shifted in the man's face. Not quite grief. Recognition, maybe. "They killed him too. The same people." The voice was thinning now, losing its strange resonance, becoming something frail and far away. "Find my killer, and I'll tell you everything I know about who murdered your father."

The fingers went still.

The chest stopped its subtle movement.

The eyes remained open, but the focus drained out of them in a matter of seconds, like water leaving a glass, until they were fixed and blank and exactly what they should have been from the start.

Kael stood in the doorway of the embalming room for a long time after that. The fluorescent light buzzed faintly overhead. Outside, a car passed on Crabtree Street, its headlights sweeping briefly across the frosted glass, and then it was gone.

He looked down at his phone. The screen had gone dark. He unlocked it again, stared at it, then put it back in his pocket.

He was not going to call the police.

Not yet.

He found the intake ledger on a shelf beside the supply cabinet, a battered cloth-bound book his father had kept by hand. The last entry was dated eleven weeks ago.

Thomas Vail. 47. Delivered from Blackthorn General, unclaimed. Preparation incomplete.

Below it, in different handwriting, smaller and hurried: Do not release. Do not contact next of kin. Await instruction.

Kael read that line twice.

The handwriting wasn't his father's.

He turned back to look at Thomas Vail on the table, at the sutured incision at his neck, and thought: someone knew he was here. Someone had been in this building after his father died, and they had left instructions for a body they had no legal claim over.