The Dead Won't Let Me Rest

Chapter 3: A Dead Man's Last Memory

He spent the first hour sitting on the floor of the reception area with his back against the wooden counter, the intake ledger open across his knees. He read every entry his father had made in the last six months of his life. Dates, names, weights, causes of death as reported by the hospital or the coroner. Marginal notes in Gerald Arden's careful hand. Small observations: family requested closed casket, wife seemed frightened, no next of kin listed, police escorted the body.

Thomas Vail appeared once, eleven weeks ago, and then the ledger stopped. The remaining pages were blank.

His father had been preparing a body when everything ended.

Kael closed the ledger and set it on the counter above him. The building made the sounds old buildings made at night: settling joints, the tick of cooling pipes, the occasional soft percussion of something in the walls. None of it felt threatening. It felt, if anything, like the place was breathing.

He told himself that was not a comforting thought and went to find somewhere to make coffee.

The small kitchen behind the chapel still had a kettle and a tin of instant coffee that had gone slightly stale. He made it anyway and stood at the kitchen window looking out at the narrow yard behind the building. Weeds along the fence line. A rusted gate. Beyond it, the back wall of the parking structure, grey and blank.

He thought about Thomas Vail's voice. Find my killer. The same people killed your father.

He thought about the handwriting in the ledger that wasn't his father's.

He was still thinking about both when he became aware that he needed to go back to the embalming room.

Not wanted to. Needed to. The distinction was physical, a pull low in the chest, like the feeling of having left something important somewhere and not being able to name what it was. He'd had it before, usually when he was close to something in an investigation and hadn't yet identified which detail mattered. He'd learned not to ignore it.

He left the coffee on the windowsill and went back down the corridor.

Thomas Vail was exactly as he'd left him. Still. Hands flat. Eyes closed now, which Kael didn't remember happening but didn't want to examine too closely.

He stood at the foot of the table and looked at the man. Mid-forties, broad build, the kind of hands that suggested physical work. The suture at the neck was precise, professional. His father's work, probably, begun and then abandoned.

He prepared me, Vail had said. Before they came back for me.

Kael reached out and placed two fingers against the back of Vail's right hand.

He wasn't sure why he did it. Instinct, maybe, or some unconscious response to everything the building seemed to be asking of him. The skin was cold and slightly waxy and entirely, permanently still.

Then the room disappeared.

Not darkness. It was more like stepping sideways into somewhere that existed just behind the real world, thin as paper, every edge slightly too sharp.

He was in a car park. Night. Sodium lights overhead, two of them flickering. The air smelled like petrol and rain-damp concrete. He could see his own hands but couldn't feel the ground under his feet.

Thomas Vail was twenty feet away, walking fast toward a stairwell door. He had a jacket on, collar up, a folder of papers under one arm. He kept glancing back over his shoulder.

Kael tried to call out. Nothing came out of his mouth. He was watching, not participating. A recording, not a room.

A second man stepped out from behind a concrete pillar. Big, wearing a dark coat, face hidden under a hood. He moved quickly and without hesitation, the way people moved when they had decided something in advance.

Vail turned and saw him and had just enough time to raise one arm before the man was on him. No weapon that Kael could see. Just hands and weight and something efficient and brutal that was over in less than a minute.

Vail went down against the base of the pillar. The folder scattered across the concrete, pages sliding and spinning in a draft from somewhere.

The man in the dark coat crouched over him. He said something Kael couldn't hear. Then he reached into Vail's jacket pocket and took something out, something small and flat, and straightened up.

He turned, and Kael saw the ring.

On the middle finger of the right hand: heavy silver, with a flat black stone carved into the shape of a closed eye.

Then the man walked toward the stairwell, stepping over the scattered pages without looking down, and the memory began to dissolve at the edges the way dreams did, details softening and falling away until only the ring remained, sharp and clear and impossible to mistake.

Kael pulled his hand back.

He was in the embalming room. Fluorescent light. Cold tile. The smell of formaldehyde.

His fingers were numb where they had touched Vail's hand, and there was a pressure behind his eyes like the beginning of a headache, or like something trying to settle into a space it hadn't occupied before.

He stood very still for a moment, then looked down at his own hands. They were shaking slightly. He pressed them flat against the sides of his thighs until they stopped.

A car park. A hooded man. A ring with a closed eye on the stone.

He had just watched Thomas Vail die.

He didn't know how. He didn't know what to call it or what it meant about what he was becoming. But the memory was in him now, clear and detailed and completely real, and somewhere in Blackthorn City the man who wore that ring was still walking around.

Behind him, so quietly he almost missed it, Thomas Vail exhaled. A single slow breath, already fading. And in it, something that might have been: the papers. Find what he took.