The Dead Won't Let Me Rest

Chapter 5: The Man Who Didn't Stay Dead

Kael stood very still and waited for the knock to come again.

It didn't.

He counted thirty seconds. The floor was silent. The building was silent. Thomas Vail lay on the table with his eyes closed and his hands flat and his chest completely, finally still. Whatever brief and strange window had allowed him to speak seemed to have closed for good.

Kael looked at the floor. Old white tile, grouted in grey, with the drainage channels running in shallow V's toward the center. Solid. No visible seams or joins beyond the ordinary ones. He crouched and pressed his palm flat against the tile near the base of the table.

Nothing. Just cold ceramic and the faint chemical smell rising from the drain.

He straightened up, made a note in the ledger, and went upstairs to wash his face.

The upper floors were largely empty. A small office on the first floor had been his father's, the desk cleared but the shelves still holding binders and reference books and a framed photograph Kael didn't look at directly yet. A narrow bedroom further down the hall had a bed with no linen and a window overlooking Crabtree Street.

He found a towel in the bathroom cupboard that was clean enough, washed his face and hands in cold water, and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. He looked like someone who had not slept properly in a chair beside a corpse, which was accurate.

The grey marks on his fingertips were still there. He held them up to the light. They hadn't spread, but they hadn't faded either. Fine lines, almost like the whorl of the fingerprints themselves had been traced over in a color that had no business being there.

He pulled his sleeve down and went to find something to eat.

There was nothing in the kitchen worth eating. He locked the front door behind him and walked three streets over to a corner shop that was just opening, bought a sandwich and a bottle of water, and stood outside eating it in the grey morning air while traffic built slowly on the main road.

Blackthorn City in the early morning had a particular quality he'd always noticed without being able to name. The old parts of it, the Victorian terraces and the narrow service roads and the buildings with their carved stone lintels, sat underneath the modern city like something that hadn't quite agreed to be replaced. Like it was tolerating the rest of it. On mornings like this, with the light flat and the streets still quiet, you could almost feel the older version of the place pressing through.

He thought about Harwick Logistics. He'd heard the name before, vaguely, in the context of port expansion arguments two or three years ago. A freight company with contracts across three counties, unremarkable on paper. He needed access to their records, or at least to whatever was publicly available. He needed to find the journalist Vail had been going to meet.

He needed, first, to check on Vail.

He walked back to the funeral home, unlocked the door, and went directly to the embalming room.

The table was empty.

He stood in the doorway for a full ten seconds just looking at it.

The sheet that had been beneath Vail was still there, slightly creased where a body had lain on it. The room was otherwise undisturbed. No sign of the door having been forced from outside. No window in the embalming room. No other exit.

He checked the rest of the ground floor in under two minutes. The back door was locked from the inside, bolt thrown. The chapel was empty. The corridor storage rooms were empty. He went upstairs and checked each room, which took longer and produced nothing.

Thomas Vail was gone.

Kael sat on the bottom stair with his elbows on his knees and thought about that.

A dead man had spoken to him twice. Had provided specific, detailed information about his own murder. Had then apparently stood up from an embalming table and walked out of a locked building, leaving no trace of how.

He rubbed the grey marks on his fingers against his palm.

The intake ledger was still on the kitchen table where he'd left it. He went and picked it up and read the entry again. Thomas Vail. 47. Delivered from Blackthorn General, unclaimed. Blackthorn General would have a record of the transfer. A transfer required paperwork, a signature, a name.

He had a starting point. Several, actually. What he didn't have was time to sit in an empty building waiting for the situation to clarify itself.

He was pulling on his jacket in the front reception area when he heard it. Outside, on Crabtree Street. Not traffic. Footsteps, slow and dragging, with an uneven rhythm that suggested something wrong with the gait. He went to the window and looked through the dusty glass.

A man in a pale green hospital gown was walking up the center of the road.

Broad across the chest. Moving with the stiff, effortful motion of someone operating a body that wasn't cooperating fully. His feet were bare on the wet tarmac. His head was down.

An early delivery van had stopped twenty meters back. The driver was leaning out of his window, watching.

Kael grabbed the door handle.

The man in the road lifted his head, and the face was Thomas Vail's, slack and blank and pointing at nothing in particular, and the eyes when they caught the light were wrong, not the focused ordinary brown from the night before but something flat and reflective and entirely empty of the person who had spoken to him.

Whatever was wearing Thomas Vail's body was not Thomas Vail.

Behind Kael, from the bottom of the stairs, came the knock again. Three times. Patient and deliberate, rising up through the floorboards like something that had been waiting all morning for him to be looking the wrong way.