![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: History Lessons 3/8(Sheldon Hawkes)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Rating: FRM for graphic discussion of death and autopsies
Fandom: CSI:NY
Pairing: N/A; Gen
SPOILERS: Spoilers for 402, "The Deep; mentions of 309, "Here's to You, Mrs. Azrael".
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Written for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
all_hallows_fic ficathon. Sheldon was originally slated to draw zombies from the monster tarot, but he had other ideas. Prompt: the restless dead.
Part I-Lindsay Monroe
Part 1/2-Danny Messer Part 2/2-Danny Messer
Sheldon Hawkes had always wondered how he would die. He supposed it was natural, an expected consequence of spending most of his life surrounded by the dying and the dead. The illusion of immortality was hard to maintain when you were wrist-deep in a cadaver's lower intestine, holding a cold, blue-tinged loop of internal plumbing that would never complete the task for which it had been designed. Death was not subtle. It was gaudy and unapologetic and the most dependable of God's servants. It was also, he thought as he tugged fruitlessly on his unmoving, rapidly numbing arm, utterly unpredictable.
He had not expected to die today, trapped below the murky, brackish waters of Long Island Sound by the capricious shift of a rusting bulkhead. If he had had any inkling that his time was up, that his last breaths would taste of river water and recycled air and the plastic of his regulator, he wouldn't have squandered so many of them making small talk with Danny as they'd suited up, nor would he have ignored his urge earlier that morning to put some Miles Davis on the stereo while he'd gotten ready for work. He would've taken the time to pad across his bedroom floor and savor the rough, companionable rasp of the matt beneath his soles. He would've remembered to register the cool, smooth plastic of the CD jewel case. He would've put Miles into the player and let the music wash over him, would've breathed in the notes like incense.
Maybe he even would've danced, rocking and swaying and gliding to the music as he shaved and dressed. He certainly would've hummed along as he restocked and organized his field kit. He would've sprinkled half-formed words over the contents, gris gris dust to ward off evil spirits. He would've turned the music up until it rattled in his bones and vibrated in his teeth, a warning dimly recalled.
There were other things he would've remembered if he'd known. The taste of chicory coffee, strong and rich and laced with a bitterness that spiced the tongue. The fire of the scant leaves that clung to the skeletal branches of the lone tree visible from his small kitchen window. The leaves were the only brightness in a landscape of grey concrete, black asphalt, and grimy brick. They were fire amid the ashes, and they reminded him of a biochemistry professor he'd had in his Princeton days. Deborah Kleman, her name had been. He hadn't recalled her name in years, since he'd left her class with an A, if he was honest, and he knew deep in his guts that he wouldn't have thought of it now if he wasn't drowning. Dying brought all the dead from their graves to watch the spectacle. But he'd thought of her face often enough, and her unmistakable hair.
Dr. Deborah Kleman had been a fierce, brilliant woman with a quick tongue and red hair, or it had been red once upon a time. By the time their paths had crossed, it had been grey fading to white save for a thin, glossy ribbon of red. Every time he looked at the leaves clinging to the tree and dwindling in number by the day and hour, he'd thought of her, a fading goddess with a last vestige of her youthful beauty. If he'd known that he was going to die today, he would've paused by the kitchen window to wish her well and bid her wait for him on the other side of the river so that he might be greeted by a familiar face. Presumptuous, perhaps, considering that until now, he'd had no memory of her name, but beggars couldn't be choosers, and besides, he was only human beneath his civilized polish of an Ivy-league education and a genius IQ.
Deborah Kleman had died six years ago, when he'd been a coroner's assistant. She'd put the business end of her late father's Sig Sauer into her mouth and pulled the trigger, silenced her quick tongue forever to avoid the ravages of inoperable brain cancer. She'd left the tumor and most of her brain on the pillow and the headboard of her four-poster bed. He hadn't recognized her at first; she'd been just another nude body on the slab, naked and cold and anonymous without her human makeup. Then his fellow assistant had washed the blood and drying clumps of brain from her hair, and recognition had come like a thunderbolt, sparked by the familiar strands of red amid brittle, chemo-ravaged white. He'd been so surprised that he'd forgotten to wash her feet. He'd just stared at what had remained of her gaunt, papery face. Death had become perversely familiar, and he'd been glad he wasn't the one who would open her up and catalogue her parts, injuries, and final indignities, an archivist of the dead who reduced people to the sum of their pitiful ends.
He wondered where she was now, and if she regretted her decision not to stand and fight, not to wring a few more years from the well-oiled, ancient treadle of Clothos' loom. Logic and years of medical training whispered that Deborah Kleman regretted nothing because the dead ceased to exist the instant the brain died. Logic insisted that the soul was a human construct, a romantic name for those higher brain functions that made man different from his tree-dwelling forefathers. Logic insisted that the soul was just a synonym for hope. But logic was cold comfort when cold water was worming its way inside your wetsuit with eager, victorious fingers and your regulator was giving nothing but a dry, ominous death rattle.
Logic didn't count for beans as his Aunt Ruby would've said, and then she did say it, the words carried to him on the torpid, silty water that lapped at his ears with a frigid, lascivious tongue.
Logic don't count for beans, Sheldon, baby, she murmured in her gravelly, old woman's rasp that bore witness to fifty years of singing in the church choir on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and sometimes Thursdays, and to the shots of blackcurrant brandy that she took in the winter to warm her belly and keep her arthritic fingers limber. Oh, logic's nice and all, and it's important in its place-don't you go thinking your education isn't important, you hear? But hope is what gets you out of bed in the morning. Hope is what makes your heart beat.
In his mind's eye, he saw her as she'd been when he was young, before cancer and dementia had conspired to rob her of herself and leave her shriveled and without history in the same hospital where he'd later spent most of his residency. She was sharp-eyed and serene in her rocking chair by the living room window. That rocking chair had sat in the same place for thirty years, and the runners had cut twin grooves in the carpeting.
It was those grooves in the carpet that convinced you she was dead, interjected a droning, matter-of-fact, med school lecturer voice. After the battle was over and modern medicine came out on the losing end, you and your two cousins volunteered to go through her things so her sisters wouldn't have to rub salt in new and weeping wounds. You came on a Saturday morning and boxed and sorted and assigned value to the signposts of a finished life. Scraps of paper with names and long-ago dates on them. Pictures of people none of you recognized. Her box of recipes. The box of toys she kept in the closet for when nieces and nephews and grandchildren descended on her orderly life-dolls with missing eyes and limbs reattached with a surgeon's precision, Legos, Lincoln Logs with thirty-four roofs and ten logs, Hot Wheels, and teddy bears with quilt-patched bellies, mama bears who'd doubtlessly given birth by emergency C-section. The trashy bodice rippers that were her only vice. The degree she'd earned from Vassar at fifty-four because she'd been denied the chance at twenty-four.
You sorted and catalogued all day, and God only knows how many mistakes you made, how many priceless heirlooms and pieces of her you threw into the Goodwill basket with a careless toss of your young man's hand. The three of you had intelligence and respect in spades, but perspective on the life of another is hard to come by. In most cases, it never comes. The only one who can truly testify to the worth of a lifetime is the one who lived it. Everything else is speculation.
Your final duty was to remove her furniture. The lumbering grunts from the moving company you hired took most of it, but not the rocking chair. That was for you. The three of you stood around it in silence. You all knew it had to be done, but none of you wanted to be the first to touch it. It seemed sacrilegious, the desecration of a fallen queen's throne. You hemmed and hawed and looked out the window now stripped of its curtains and the window boxes she put out every spring and summer, and the moving men lingered in the hallway with impatient respect. You can't speak for the others, but you kept waiting for it to move, to rock to the rhythm of unseen, slippered feet swollen with fluid.
It was your cousin, Freddie, who finally profaned the sacred. Well, he said quietly as he looked out the naked window, and you knew he was picturing phantom tulips, it's got to be done. Then he retrieved her basket of unfinished knitting, crocheting, and needlepoint from beside the runner and placed it reverently in the center of the seat. Then you each grabbed an arm and lifted it, pallbearers at a second funeral.
You looked back as you carried the chair toward the door and the waiting movers, who were sidling towards the narrow staircase with visions of beer and brats dancing in their sweaty heads, and all that was left of Aunt Ruby's world were the runner tracks the rocker had left in the carpet. Start at Point A, end at Point B; the abridged life of Ruby Mae Nellis.
That was it; the spell was broken. This was Aunt Ruby's home no more, but just another sad, empty apartment waiting to be claimed by somebody desperate to own a slice of the Big Apple. Soon, the tracks carved by the runners and your footprints would be washed away like footprints in the sand, steamed into oblivion by a professional cleaning crew. By Monday, the super would have guys in coveralls laying down plastic and tearing down the wallpaper in flavor of glossy, white paint. Aunt Ruby was just another ghost in the walls.
Dead was dead, those runner impressions said. Death was a still rocking chair.
But in his mind, Aunt Ruby was alive and well, rocking to the clack of her knitting needles as a muffler took shape between her knowledgeable fingers and watching him with beneficent curiosity over the square, rimless lenses of her glasses. She was wearing her Sunday pearls, and her slippers were a deep, rich purple.
Royal purple, he thought distantly, and the dying regulator gave another gurgling wheeze. Mud through straw, and the white-coated scientist that pulled the levers in the command center of his brain noted that he was rapidly running out of time and air. If he didn't free himself soon, Stella would be bringing two corpses to Hammerback's table, but the image of Aunt Ruby was vivid and growing ever clearer and brighter.
Hypoxia, muttered the lab-coated scientist, and he dutifully made a notation on his data sheet. Also common in victims of strangulation and smoke inhalation.
Sheldon, you hear me? Aunt Trudy asked. Her knitting needles never slowed, but clacked in time to the slow trundle of the runners.
Yes, Aunt Ruby, he answered. He was fascinated by the vision and oddly comforted by it. He'd practically grown up in front of that rocking chair, learned many of life's truths at her knee. She'd doled them out on the blunted points of her needles, woven them into the fabric of her mittens and mufflers and afghans, and all the while she'd navigated the long, winding course of her life by the gentle rock of that chair, a tiny, black woman who'd rocked, rocked, rocked her boat gently down the stream with the tireless pedaling of her feet.
You've seen many injustices in your line of work, as a doctor, coroner, and prospector for the wrongly dead. You've seen infants riddled with bullets and tumors that killed and ravaged with equal impunity. You've seen young mothers robbed of the chance to raise their newborn children by catastrophic hemorrhages, and firefighters who lost the wager they made every day, snuffed out by the flames they so valiantly fought to extinguish. You've seen teenage girls who should've lived long, happy lives arranged upon your coroner's slab like butterflied chickens, works of art that would never be finished. You've seen forgotten people left to rot and liquefy in their apartments because no one cared to look for them. They were found only because they'd seeped through their downstairs neighbor's ceiling, or because the super had come to collect the $1350 their lives were worth. You've seen the indifference with which we treat one another, and you've spent your life trying to restore a small measure of balance to the chaos.
But when you think about it, which is too often though it is too seldom, you think that the greatest injustice you ever saw was the way Aunt Ruby died. She'd spent her life in that chair, gone around the world in an old, oak chair that had been a gift from her late husband, an uncle who was dead and gone long before you were born. Family history holds that he built it himself, lacquered it and varnished it and presented it to her as a wedding present. She'd been mad until he'd explained that it was for rocking all the babies they planned to have. Then she'd taken to it and the man who'd given it to her with her characteristic Ruby tenacity. She did rock babies in it, too, and grandbabies, and she might've rocked great-grandbabies in it if the cancer and the Alzheimer's hadn't torn her apart with their dirty, poisonous claws.
She'd lived her life in that chair, and so you thought she'd go to her death in it, too. It would be only fitting. Someone would discover her slumped in its cradling embrace with a pile of unfinished TLC in her lap, and that would be that. She'd've ferried herself across the river in a graceful exit, a storybook ending. Instead, she died in a hospital bed, far removed from her rocking chair, raving at shadows and stinking of her own urine and feces.
That wasn't the first face of injustice you ever saw-that dubious honor was reserved for the playground accident you witnessed when you were eleven, the one that began with the monkey bars and ended with a nine-year-old who would never walk again-but it was the truest. Throughout her life, Ruby Mae Nellis had carried herself with dignity, had never appeared at the Sunday dinner table in anything less than her best. She'd been sharp as a tack, with a razor wit and a fierce, smoldering pride that never left her eyes or her spine.
In the end, sixty-eight years of dignity were obliterated by six months of gabbling and ranting at sterilized shadows and marinating in her own shit. They say that the first impression is most important, and that may be so, but it's the last that you leave behind. Just ask any cop who's ever blown an impeccable thirty-year career on one mistake, one bad shoot or the one that got away. For years, the only image of Aunt Ruby you could conjure after her death was of her propped against pillows and wrapped like a breathing mummy in sheets that stank of piss and inevitable death.
Cancer and its treatments had decimated her, left her little more than a leathery husk inside her hospital smock. The proud woman who had once taught you hymns and Bible verses and the proper way to treat your elders in any situation was a mumbling, muttering crone who could no longer recall her name or the year. Sometimes she thought she was in 1964, raising her daughters and her son, and sometimes it was 1990 and she was cutting George Bush the I to ribbons with her tongue and the furious, authoritative clack of her needles. But mostly she lived in the darkness of her deteriorating mind, her internal clock stopped forever at the hour of none.
Cock-gobbling rapist shitfuck. Those were the last words she ever spoke to you. Your Aunt Ruby, who before then had never so much as uttered a damn after stubbing her toe or barking her shin on the coffee table. Cock-gobbling rapist shitfuck. Matter-of-fact, even congratulatory, a crazed queen conferring knighthood upon an unsuspecting champion. It would've been funny if had been anyone else, any time else, but it was Aunt Ruby, and the words issued from a mouth that carried with it the yellow reek of waning hours, and so you only blinked back the outraged tears and swallowed the lump in your throat and helped the nurse wrestle her onto her side, the better to check for bedsores and skin lesions. You'd already decided to be a doctor, you see, and you thought you could make a difference.
Aunt Ruby's death by degrees only strengthened your resolve. You powered through your pre-med requirements with the unshakeable conviction of zealots and lunatics. You were a Blues Brother, on a mission from God to cure the ills of the world. You were determined to rid the world of sorrow by force of will and the unrivaled power of your genius mind. It all seemed so simple, and why shouldn't it have been? You'd achieved every goal to which you'd ever set your heart and mind, overachieved, to be frank. History was on your side. This would be just another laurel with which to pad your considerable resume.
But you couldn't change a thing. You couldn't even stem the tide. Saving lives wasn't as easy, as cut and dried, as the textbooks and lectures made it sound. Diseases that were so simple in the black and white of text and grainy photos suddenly became complex and unknowable when you saw them in pink and red and bone white. It wasn't so easy to attach labels and prognoses to real lives instead of hypothetical case numbers. Three months wasn't so abstract when you were staring into the face of a seventeen-year-old girl who'd never make it to the prom and certainly wouldn't get a chance to trade that dress in for a wedding gown. Medicine was as ugly as the ills it was meant to cure.
You rode in Sir Galahad in green surgical scrubs, and three years later, you rode out just another disillusioned knight with too many notches in your armor. You lost as many as you saved, and the victories never canceled the losses. The blood on your arms to the elbows was the same, and too often, gratitude looked like grief on puffy, careworn faces. There wasn't any difference at all when you got down to the hard, ugly bottom. Grief and gratitude are two sides of the same worthless coin.
After you lost three in one week, thwarted in your efforts by bullets and the ill-advised union of booze with Goodyear, you bowed to the inevitable. Your failures haunted you, weighed down your nimble, acrobatic fingers. You couldn't stand to be little more than an educated Hermes, bringing the message of death to so many. It wasn't what you signed up for, being Charon's steward, so you traded the living for the dead.
It was better, safer in your necropolis of green tile and frigid steel. The patients on your tables had already passed into the hands of the Almighty. All that was left to you was to discover the whys and wherefores of the journey from the land of the living to the cold, loveless underworld of the dead. You cut and prodded and prospected, documented each hematoma and abrasion and pulmonary edema, and if, by chance, you stumbled upon a tumor spreading its spongy, strangling tendrils into bone or unsuspecting tissue, you pierced its black heart with your scalpel, duly noted it on the innocuous paper person that we all become at the sad, sorry end, and let it lie. It was no longer your enemy or your concern. The mantle of savior had been passed to more capable hands.
And it was enough, for a while. You thought you'd found your niche in the federally-funded catacombs of concrete and steel. You even carved one there for yourself, made a nest in an alcove not far from where your wayfarers slept in their temporary tombs. It was comfortable despite the frigidity of the climate-controlled air, a burrow hidden from the eyes of the city and the bureaucracy, and it wasn't uncommon for you to spend the night on the cot you'd set up at the far wall, cheap, metal frame abutting the grimy concrete brick in an effort to let the ambient heat of the still-breathing city above combat the cold. You tucked yourself in with a book and a cup of coffee or lost yourself in the backlog of unsigned death certificates. If it weren't for the corpses in the room proper, you might've called it homey. Sometimes you even did. Home away from home.
Mac found you in there one night, reading a book and heating a human rib in the microwave. God knows what he thought until you explained that the rib was actually from the victim in his latest case. For a moment, his expression was dismayed, as though he'd caught you peeping at Hustler on lab time. Disdainful, and more than a little wary. You were perplexed at the time, and bemused, but in hindsight, you can understand his reaction. You were a young, talented, attractive child of the brightest city in the world, an eligible bachelor who could've had his pick of women, and your idea of a good night was to read a book while the aroma of irradiated dead flesh tickled your nose. If you'd read the same anecdote in a forensic psychology journal, you'd have suspected it was a tale in the curriculum vitae of the next Jeffrey Dahmer. No wonder Mac looked at you askance. But you were happy.
But happiness never lasts with you. It's an unfortunate malaise of the genius, a constant, gnawing hunger that is never, and can never be, satisfied. It's a drive that runs parallel to the libido and deeper by miles and fathoms. Leagues. Twenty thousand leagues under the skin. You're compelled to greatness, seduced by it, and once you've conquered one kingdom, you seek out the next.
Or at least, that's how it usually works. But this time, it was the dead who'd wearied of you. Their formerly benign, cataracted gazes became accusatory, less the bland, stony gazes of cemetery monuments and more the sinister, implacable eyes of judges and Gorgons. Their stiff, blue-tinged lips fashioned themselves into knowing leers and puckered moues of disapproval. Suddenly, they demanded more than a simple, clinical accounting of their final hours. They were no longer content with just a mouthpiece, a scalpel-brandishing herald to catalogue their final indignities in the bloodless Greek of the autopsy. Now they would have justice.
You dismissed it at first, chalked up the phantom expressions and perceived grimaces to the workaholic's hours that you kept and to the vagaries of a mind fueled by adrenaline and caffeine in quantities sufficient to stunt growth in lab mice. Stress and insomnia played with the mind, arranged the myriad props of its internal theatre for its own amusements. Some of the residents with whom you'd worked in a galaxy far, far away had hallucinated during hectic rotations, had insisted that patients they'd pronounced dead and shunted to the morgue had reappeared in the hallways, cinder-eyed Jacob Marleys wrapped in medical gauze and shambling the hospital in search of their lost souls. Hell, in your final semester of med school, you were so tired that you saw your fingernails transform into maggots, wriggling and writhing on the ends of your fingers like Tom Savini's belly dancers at a gravedigger's ball. The illusion scared you so badly that you dropped your books and screamed like a girl. You would've crammed your knuckles into your mouth if you hadn't been worried that one of the dancers would find its way into your mouth and lodge in your soft palate, a hideous second uvula. You were halfway to sick and three-quarters of the way to the bathroom when you remembered to breathe and blink, and when you did, your fingernails were your fingernails again.
Even if you couldn't blame everything on stress and fatigue, science took care of the rest. Bodies move after death, twitch and jerk and sometimes sit up on the autopsy table. Life does not go gently, and when the soul departs, muscle memory lingers in the empty vessel, an echo of the past. You've seen fingers curl and jaws twitch, and even when movement ceases, the body continues the work of dying. Corpses fart and belch and rattle for hours after death. So, if a corpse seemed to glare balefully at you as you loomed over it with a scalpel, what of it? Maybe accusation was the only expression the muscles remembered. There was nothing odd or sinister in it, nothing new under the sun.
Until the voices, of course.
If only Mac had known about the voices. How strangely would he have looked at you then? You can guess; you've always had a knack for sussing out the truth, and it's a safe bet that if he had known about the voices you started hearing just before he dropped the ax on Aiden(and off came her head; the rest burned in the car, and wasn't that merry?), not only would he never have signed off on your transfer into the field, he would've ordered you to a psychiatric evaluation and frog-marched you to the office with stone-faced, Semper Fi gravitas. It's a short walk from boy wonder to madman, too short for comfort.
The dead have always spoken to you. That's old hat and standard operating procedure. In truth, you found it rather soothing to recreate them inside your head while you arranged them so artfully on your scales and in your specimen jars. It made it easier to expose their secrets and shames to the world if you could establish a temporary, internal rapport, pretend that you were making small talk like a general practitioner. You discussed hobbies and jazz albums and current events, and they revealed themselves inside your head, jovial and querulous and just plan asshole by turns. It was fun, a bit of diversion to distract you from the grimness of your task and a mental exercise to keep the cogs turning smoothly. But the voices were always, always inside your head.
You were washing up after a post the first time you heard it. It was almost lost under the thunder of water splashing into the stainless steel sink. You thought it was air hissing through the balky plumbing or the pitter patter of rat feet behind the walls. It was furtive, paper drifting to the ground on a careless, intemperate breeze. You registered it and let it go. Then it happened again, louder and more distinct. You blinked and turned off the tap in order to hear it more clearly. It was silent for the longest time, so long that you started to turn the faucet on again, convinced it was your imagination. Then it came, laughter from one of the drawers, dark and phlegmatic, the sucking, swamp-mud rasp of a lifelong smoker.
Your hand drifted from the tap handle to the paper towel dispenser, and you tugged a handful of sheets from its slack, cadaver mouth. You dried your hands, and the laugh bubbled from the drawers behind you, abetted by the dry shuffle of cheap, coarse paper over your damp hands. You turned to investigate, head cocked and soggy paper towels forgotten in your hand. You were more curious than afraid, a scientist presented with a new and unexpected hypothesis.
You moved from drawer to drawer, pressing your ear to cold steel that bit into the sensitive skin, a sharp, predatory nip that made the nautilus tingle and burn. Danger. Live contents inside. Which was impossible, since each inhabitant had had his birthday suit redesigned and marred by a ragged Y in ugly, black stitching. Nothing. No breathing. No frantic pounding of fists on the walls to signal that someone had been prematurely buried. No scrabbling clitter of fingernails on metal. Just the sedate hum of the refrigeration unit.
You waited five minutes just to be sure, though you felt like a fool, standing with your ear to the drawer like some spooked probie. Eventually, you got disgusted with yourself and pried yourself away, back to your books and your forms and the hypnotic rhythm of signing your name to the scrolls of the dead as though it were a royal seal that granted bearers the right of passage into the afterlife. You kept an ear out for the rest of the night, but the dead had fallen into dreams and did not stir, and when you finally signed the last certificate at quarter-past three, you'd neatly consigned the experience to the realm of the strange but untrue. For the first time in a long time, you didn't sleep on the cot in the alcove. You went to your apartment instead and tripped all the security locks behind you.
You were watchful for a while after that, ever alert for the sound of laughter from the bank of drawers, but none came, and after two weeks of starting at every echo of conversation admitted into the morgue by the swinging doors and every rustle of paper by a coroner's assistant, you put your foot down and rededicated yourself to the daily grind of tending the dead, reminded yourself that it was physiologically impossible for the dead to speak. The cerebral cortex dies within minutes if deprived of blood and oxygen. Minor brain damage begins at two minutes; major, irrevocable damage occurs at four. Five minutes is fatal. Even if the dead could coax their vocal cords to grinding speech, they'd lack the cognitive ability to communicate rationally or effectively. It would be so much gibberish. It was a comforting pep talk steeped in the tools of your trade, one designed to keep the bogeyman at bay. It should've worked, but it didn't.
You heard them again three months later. You were posting a bloater dredged out of the East River, a spaceman tethered to Earth in your coveralls, spatter guard, and air filtration mask. You were so much the prehistoric cosmonaut that you had reenacted the first moonwalk, complete with slow-motion, exaggerated hops and a performance of underwater ballet. Ironic, considering you're going to die underwater, to relive that giddy moment of coroner's humor by twitching and convulsing while your lungs and stomach fill with fluid. Death by drowning, it'll say on Sid's autopsy report, and maybe there'll be the corollary of death by misadventure, as though you'd stumbled off the pier and toppled headlong into the water instead of dying on the job with a fistful of old coins. At least you'll be ready for the ferryman.
The reenactment of the moon landing was several hours behind you when the voices came, however. The only sounds then were the percolating gurgle of your self-contained respirator and the wet, viscous rattle of your scalpel as you made an incision into the trachea, pudding sloshing inside a wet, rotten leather bag. The skin was a deep, mottled purple, and it sloughed despite your practiced delicacy. Water and thick foam beaded beneath the blade.
There was a ponderous thump from inside one of the drawers, and then the voices, an indistinct murmur that came from everywhere and nowhere, phantom voices like those that came from the radio when the tuner was on the fritz, whispers stolen from the roar of static.
-obbling -ist -ck.
-oing -on -bab
-ock -bling shi-
Word fragments spit from the silence, pebbles discarded from the thirst-shriveled mouths of wandering prophets and desert nomads. Snatches of madness and nonsense. Except that the nettlesome, barbed finger of truth kept scratching at the base of your brain, reminding you of a conversation, a parting curse, that you'd rather forget.
-obbling -ist -ck. You could fill in the blanks if you cared to, and even if you didn't, your mind, ever the inventive monkey, would help you along. It had no designs on being a traitor, but sometimes treachery can't be helped.
The voices knew you knew, must have known, because they got clearer and faster and colder, as though your trusty scalpel had learned to speak. -obbling -ist -ck -obbling -ist-ck -obbling -ist -ck, a Greek chorus prophesying doom to a traveler whose feet were already set upon the fatal path. Sharp and burning against your skin, and so insistent that you itched with the need to clap your gloved hands to your plastic-covered ears and hum to block them out. You almost did, almost punctured your eardrum with your blood-stained scalpel, and wouldn't that have been a story for Mac, a red flag that would've kept you out of the field and on his watch list until you retired and shuffled off to play backgammon in Palm Springs? Mac's nothing if not watchful for the mutant. He's been hunting monsters since seventeen. It's all he knows. You know he's watching this right now, watching your monsters rise from the abyss.
It was a constant babble, echoed in the crackle of your sterile scrubs, and then the power went out and you were plunged into a darkness so absolute that it had its own darkness underneath, a visual double exposure that made you wonder if it was the sight of the blind. It was the most unpleasant moment of your life to be lost in the dark with those voices and a dead man on the table. If the backup generators hadn't kicked in and bathed the morgue in dull amber light, you might've lost your mind, felt it slither from your overstuffed skull and disappear into the abyss, washed into the sewers with the bloater's rotting tissue.
But the lights flickered on and spared your sanity, and you were grateful until you glanced down at the bloater and saw that his previously closed eyes were now open and avid behind their milkglass shine. Dead facial muscles twitched with a terrible creak, overtaxed rawhide, and the blue-purple lips twisted in an obscene parody of a smile. You wanted the mercy of darkness then, oh, yes, you did, but the squat bunker of the morgue was ever the faithful soldier and did not falter, and so you kept right on seeing.
-obbling -ist -ck, said the larynx that should have been long past talking, and bits of skin bubbled and split in the corners of his water-swollen mouth. -oing -don- bab- Dark water and foam bubbled from his butterflied trachea.
You didn't stay to hear the rest. You just dropped your scalpel on the floor and blundered for the door. You were a cosmonaut again, but there was nothing funny about this space walk; this was life or death. The spaceship was leaving, and if you didn't make it inside, you were going to be left on the lightless, airless surface of the moon. You had one hand on the swinging door when Mr. River Man spoke again, this time with perfect clarity.
Aunt Ruby says hello.
You turned to face the slab. Mr. River Man grinned up at you with his filmy, grey teeth. His opaque, irisless eyes gleamed at you with a manic cheer that brought your heartbeat and your gorge into throat.
She says she'll see you real soon, and oh, the things you'll have to talk about. Won't it be fun? Then Mr. River Man laughed, and water erupted from his throat, water that wriggled and slithered as it spread across the floor.
You bolted from the room and sprinted into the nearest bathroom to heave your guts. You hadn't vomited at an autopsy since med school, and the coroner's assistants dragged the incident to the mysterious corners of their locker room for discussion and dissection. You were legendary for your Zen in the face of the messiest deaths, so a body that could part you from your dinner must have been legendary, indeed. Rumor had it that they pooled their collective intellectual resources to uncover the cadaver. If only they'd asked Dr. Pino, who finished the autopsy later that day. Mr. River Man was and still remains the only autopsy you never finished. It was also the first time you'd ever run from the morgue. At least you didn't run screaming, though you would have if you'd had the breath for it. Strangely, your lungs had been tight and heavy inside your chest, as if they'd been filled with sand. Or with river water that wriggled and slithered.
You thought it would also mark the only occasion for flight, but you were wrong on that count because two weeks later, the autopsy room became a track again. The voices came again, and that time, you got lucky enough to see what was behind the drawer, who-
But that wasn't a memory he wanted to relive, even if the visit was brief. The thought of facing it again galvanized him, and he redoubled his efforts to wrench his arm free of the ensnaring beam. A shadow drifted over him and disappeared, and something brushed his back.
She's got me, he thought frantically. She found her way out of that damn crypt, and I'm never leaving this bay. But then Danny was beside him, gesturing and reassuring and putting his shoulder to the stubborn beam. His relief was so profound that he laughed, an explosion of bubbles that plumed from his regulator, and a waste of precious air.
Not that it matters, insisted the relentless doctor inside his head. You passed the point of no return sixty seconds ago. You're going to drown, going to join Mr. River Man; it's only a question of time.
He'd always wondered if death hurt; not the manner of death-he'd seen far too many deaths that had been alloyed studies in agony. Aunt Ruby's, for instance. No, he wondered about the precise moment when the body was cleaved from the soul. Was it a clean sundering, or did one cling to the other with the single-minded tenacity of the dying? If it hurt, was it a quick pain, the needling burn of an incision made by an expert hand, or did it linger, an echo that continued to reverberate long after the preacher had folded his holy tent and the gravediggers had finished their work? Would he still feel the water in his lungs while two men with grave dirt under their nails were quaffing pints at a bar? Maybe the moment of separation was determined by the life you lived. Maybe that was the first and last measure of God's mercy for His exiled children blundering through the remnants of Eden. Maybe it was the only mercy He could grant after such a long and willful estrangement. Maybe His cup of grace was empty, nothing inside but drops and dregs.
Which death will He grant you, Dr. Hawkes? When the moment comes, will He consider your degrees and diplomas, the countless lives you've saved with the practice of your hallowed arts, the roll call of bad guys you've put away as a member of the CSI team? Or will He perhaps consider just two moments, two out of hundreds of millions? Maybe one failure is all it takes, one moment of weakness. If so, you're in very big trouble.
His mind formed images of his second sprint from the morgue, images of what he'd found when he'd so foolishly opened the door to Drawer 3 and peered inside. The thing inside, crouching over the corpse of Mrs. Madeline Guthrie, hit and run, crouching over her in a familiar floral-print caftan and peeling the flesh from her face like the peel from an orange. The thing that rocked and cackled and looked at him with black, dead eyes.
The thing that had placed Mrs. Madeline Guthrie's face over its own and smiled at him.
What's the matter, Sheldon, my boy? Don't like my new face? Cock-gobbling racist shitfuck. It's ever so much better than the one I was left with because-
He shut his eyes and tried to picture something else-his apartment, neat and clean despite the array of Miles Davis CDs fanned on his coffee table, the first girl he ever kissed, the first he'd ever bedded, the chocolate lab he'd had as a kid, the one that fetched sticks and tennis balls and was a master of the well-timed soundless fart that could clear a room of unwanted relatives in record time. But the only memory that heeded his call was of himself standing beside Mac behind the two-way mirror while Stella and Flack interrogated Julie Rollins. His own face reflected in the glass like an insubstantial truth as he'd told Mac that he'd done the right thing by not helping his bedridden, cancer-ravaged father escape the pain. Two faces in the mirror.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Something snagged the ankle of his neoprene wetsuit and tugged, and he knew it wasn't Danny, because he was still waging war against the stubborn beam, butting and tugging and willing it to move, goddamn fucking sonofawhore thing, move. Still trying to be Superman, to be dealt a hand he wouldn't lose on the last card. Danny would keep trying long after it was too late, and Sheldon found that comforting, even if it was too late for a last-minute miracle.
He looked over his shoulder and moaned. They were there, waiting for him with eager faces and clutching hands. Deborah Kleman and Aunt Ruby and Mr. River Man, who in life had been a lonely businessman with no one to keep him company and mourn his passing. Mr. River Man, who would no longer be the only bloater in the river. Deborah Kleman's hair was impossibly red and floated behind her like strands of kelp.
Aunt Ruby floated between them, floral caftan belled around her emaciated frame, an ancient jellyfish come to collect her prey.
You knew you couldn't outrun me forever, Sheldon, baby, Aunt Ruby said, though her mouth never moved. There are consequences to everything, even those actions we choose not to take. It won't hurt, baby. I can promise you that. Love is often merciful in its cruelty. She was closer now, close enough to touch his flippered foot, and he knew that when she did, she would keep him there forever.
The regulator gave a final gurgling hiss and quit, and he knew with the detached serenity of certainty that he was going to die. He wondered what they'd talk about at his Irish wake at Sullivan's, what jokes Danny would tell over three beers too many and what stories Mac wouldn't. He hoped they'd have the grace to grieve with laughter, as they'd done with Aiden. He was only sorry he wouldn't be there to join in.
Sheldon! Sharp and direct.
He faced forward again, and Aunt Ruby was there, not the batrachian jellyfish that clawed at his foot with her lethal tentacles and sought to drag him into the muddy deep, but the Aunt Ruby who'd spent her life lifting him up. She sat in her rocking chair and rocked and clacked and watched him over her glasses. She was still knitting, ever knitting, and the muffler had grown enormously, had become a slender, golden rope.
Sheldon, are you listening to me, boy? What did I tell you? There is always hope, even when you can't see it. Sometimes, you've just got to fight for it, that's all. She held out the miraculous, golden strand. You've got a choice to make now, baby. Make it quick. The rope danced just beyond his reach.
He reached for it with a leaden arm, stretched his fingers until they creaked with the effort, but the rope eluded him, and before he could redouble his effort, cold curled around his ankle and calf in a vise. Aunt Ruby of After had reached him at last, and if he dared look back, he would see here there, crabbed and hateful and burning with malice, Aunt Ruby reduced to bone and ash and twisted medical perversity.
I'm not going to make it, Aunt Ruby. Sometimes, your best isn't good enough, he told the Aunt Ruby of Before, who was rocking sedately in front of him, loosely holding the rope in her hand. She was graying at the edges, losing her vibrant color, and receding, and so was the rope.
He reached for it anyway, because he had always been an overachiever, had always exceeded expectations. There was no last-minute miracle this time; he'd passed wunderkind ten years ago. Aunt Ruby smiled sadly and drifted out of reach, and the rope followed her into the shadows, the tail of a dying comet.
Hale-Bopp won't come around again for seventy-five years, he thought distantly, and by then it'll be too late.
Suddenly, he was jerked from behind, a jolt that drove the breath he'd been holding from his aching lungs and dislodged his regulator. Water filled his mouth, metallic and silty.
Blood. The Long Island Sound tastes like blood. It was a horrid, morbid thought, but he had no chance to ponder it. His arm wrenched free of the beam under which it had been trapped with a hot, sprung flare of agony and an ominous crack that reminded him of the sound a nine-year-old boy's neck had made as he'd toppled from the monkey bars all those years ago, the flat, echoless pop of finality.
Then he was ascending, being dragged through the opening and toward the light by Danny, who'd grabbed him by the waist and was kicking furiously, clawing at the water as though it had offended him.
Too late, he thought dully. It was one hell of a try, Dan my man, and you've got nothing to be ashamed of, but it's thirty seconds too late. They were so close to the surface that he could see the blurry, astigmatic outline of a channel mark. So close, yet so far away. He laughed, and more water flooded his mouth. His diaphragm seized in a last-ditch effort to save him, and the world dimmed, grey, grainy, and indistinct. Irrelevant. He relaxed, and his head lolled bonelessly. Going, goin…
He erupted from the water, the world's most graceless Flipper, and his mouth opened wide to gulp the glorious air. For a moment, nothing happened, and then his diaphragm unclenched. Air, sweet, merciful air, filled his lungs, and his heart sang. Air was honey in his mouth, clove honey, rich and heady as a shot of bourbon in a Friday night jazz club. He took a deep breath and whooped.
"Take it easy there, Doc." Danny gripped him by the elbow and steered him toward the boat, where Mac and Lindsay were already peering over the side. He was still too shaken and winded to see clearly, but he knew how Mac would look-pinched and exhausted, tight-lipped and frayed at the edges.
Like he's seeing ghosts.
That brought to mind unwelcome images of Aunt Ruby of After and River Man and Deborah Kleman, and he put on a burst of speed. They were still waiting for him down there, tirelessly treading the deep currents, lightless eyes searching for his shadow on the water. As long as he was in the Sound, he was in danger. His giddy imagination supplied him with the image of them exploding from the water to drag him down, an undying and unkillable monster that would never rest while he was near.
"Hey, hey, Doc, slow down, all right?" Danny pleaded. "The worst is over now. You're gonna be all right."
Hawkes didn't blame Danny. He didn't know what was lurking underneath their feet. How could he when they didn't belong to him? He chanced a look over his shoulder as he struggled through the water and bit back a scream. Red on the water, a steadily spreading pool that he might have mistaken for blood if it hadn't been moving stealthily toward him, bobbing indolently on the obliging current. Not blood, but Deborah Kleman's crown of fire.
"We gotta get out of the water, Danny. Right now," he insisted, and tried to quicken his one-armed stroke.
"Yeah, Doc, we're goin', but you gotta take it easy. Your arm's messed up."
"If we don't get out of here now, I'm leaving you here," he replied resolutely. He didn't mean it, of course. He'd never leave any of them behind. They were the closest he had to anything that mattered, kin by the bloody bond of the mutual foxhole they inhabited, but now that he'd been given a second chance, he had no intention of letting it slip through his fingers.
"Well, when you put it that way, Doc, how c'n I refuse?" Danny sighed and kicked harder, his profile sharp and inscrutable.
"Sorry," Hawkes sputtered. "But I just want to get the hell out of here."
Danny's jaw relaxed. "I guess I can relate to that." Messer for "apology accepted."
He considered the matter closed, an incidental coda to the drama of his near-drowning, and so he was surprised when Danny broached the subject again while they were waiting for the ambulance. They were hunkered haphazardly on the shore, slouched and crouched on the asphalt by turns. His arm, which in his doctoral opinion was sprained and dislocated, throbbed in time to his heartbeat, and he counted to one thousand by prime numbers to keep the nausea at bay. Danny squatted beside him, nicotine-stained fingers dangling between his knees, and studied the boats on the horizon.
"Bad habit," Hawkes observed, and nodded at Danny's fingers.
Danny blinked and dropped his gaze to his fingers. He studied them as if they belonged to someone else. "Huh. Yeah. Well, some habits are hard to break, you know?"
"Yeah." He didn't, though. He was an Earthling Yoda. Do or do not. He could break habits as easily as he formed them. There was no try.
If Danny sensed the lie, he gave no sign. He simply squinted at a white fleck on the horizon and scraped a fleck of grime from beneath his ragged thumbnail. "So, Doc," he said at last, "What's the deal with you and the water? If you don't mind me sayin', I've never heard you so emphatic." Danny never looked at him, just followed the path of the boat as it sailed against the sun.
He doesn't want the whole truth, but just enough, whispered Aunt Ruby inside his head, the safe Aunt Ruby of Before.
For that, Hawkes was profoundly grateful.
He shrugged. "Bad memories. They have a way of creeping up on you."
Now Danny did look at him, shifted so that his feet crunched in the gritty asphalt. He pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose with a quick jab of his index finger. "Yeah, I gotta little experience with those myself," he said.
Hawkes opened his mouth to protest that he had certainly had no truck with this particular brand of recollection, recollections that rose from the muddy bottom of the bay to claim their rightful piece of flesh, then decided against it. It wasn't worth the effort, and besides, shadows flickered in Danny's eyes, danced and wavered like strands of seaweed brought up from below. They reminded of Deborah Kleman's hair as she'd drifted beside Aunt Ruby and Mr. River Man, and his mouth puckered with the mineral-water taste of the Sound.
He shuddered and gritted his teeth against the bolt of pain the movement inspired in his arm and looked anywhere but at the water.
Author:
laguera25Rating: FRM for graphic discussion of death and autopsies
Fandom: CSI:NY
Pairing: N/A; Gen
SPOILERS: Spoilers for 402, "The Deep; mentions of 309, "Here's to You, Mrs. Azrael".
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Written for the
all_hallows_fic ficathon. Sheldon was originally slated to draw zombies from the monster tarot, but he had other ideas. Prompt: the restless dead.Part I-Lindsay Monroe
Part 1/2-Danny Messer Part 2/2-Danny Messer
Sheldon Hawkes had always wondered how he would die. He supposed it was natural, an expected consequence of spending most of his life surrounded by the dying and the dead. The illusion of immortality was hard to maintain when you were wrist-deep in a cadaver's lower intestine, holding a cold, blue-tinged loop of internal plumbing that would never complete the task for which it had been designed. Death was not subtle. It was gaudy and unapologetic and the most dependable of God's servants. It was also, he thought as he tugged fruitlessly on his unmoving, rapidly numbing arm, utterly unpredictable.
He had not expected to die today, trapped below the murky, brackish waters of Long Island Sound by the capricious shift of a rusting bulkhead. If he had had any inkling that his time was up, that his last breaths would taste of river water and recycled air and the plastic of his regulator, he wouldn't have squandered so many of them making small talk with Danny as they'd suited up, nor would he have ignored his urge earlier that morning to put some Miles Davis on the stereo while he'd gotten ready for work. He would've taken the time to pad across his bedroom floor and savor the rough, companionable rasp of the matt beneath his soles. He would've remembered to register the cool, smooth plastic of the CD jewel case. He would've put Miles into the player and let the music wash over him, would've breathed in the notes like incense.
Maybe he even would've danced, rocking and swaying and gliding to the music as he shaved and dressed. He certainly would've hummed along as he restocked and organized his field kit. He would've sprinkled half-formed words over the contents, gris gris dust to ward off evil spirits. He would've turned the music up until it rattled in his bones and vibrated in his teeth, a warning dimly recalled.
There were other things he would've remembered if he'd known. The taste of chicory coffee, strong and rich and laced with a bitterness that spiced the tongue. The fire of the scant leaves that clung to the skeletal branches of the lone tree visible from his small kitchen window. The leaves were the only brightness in a landscape of grey concrete, black asphalt, and grimy brick. They were fire amid the ashes, and they reminded him of a biochemistry professor he'd had in his Princeton days. Deborah Kleman, her name had been. He hadn't recalled her name in years, since he'd left her class with an A, if he was honest, and he knew deep in his guts that he wouldn't have thought of it now if he wasn't drowning. Dying brought all the dead from their graves to watch the spectacle. But he'd thought of her face often enough, and her unmistakable hair.
Dr. Deborah Kleman had been a fierce, brilliant woman with a quick tongue and red hair, or it had been red once upon a time. By the time their paths had crossed, it had been grey fading to white save for a thin, glossy ribbon of red. Every time he looked at the leaves clinging to the tree and dwindling in number by the day and hour, he'd thought of her, a fading goddess with a last vestige of her youthful beauty. If he'd known that he was going to die today, he would've paused by the kitchen window to wish her well and bid her wait for him on the other side of the river so that he might be greeted by a familiar face. Presumptuous, perhaps, considering that until now, he'd had no memory of her name, but beggars couldn't be choosers, and besides, he was only human beneath his civilized polish of an Ivy-league education and a genius IQ.
Deborah Kleman had died six years ago, when he'd been a coroner's assistant. She'd put the business end of her late father's Sig Sauer into her mouth and pulled the trigger, silenced her quick tongue forever to avoid the ravages of inoperable brain cancer. She'd left the tumor and most of her brain on the pillow and the headboard of her four-poster bed. He hadn't recognized her at first; she'd been just another nude body on the slab, naked and cold and anonymous without her human makeup. Then his fellow assistant had washed the blood and drying clumps of brain from her hair, and recognition had come like a thunderbolt, sparked by the familiar strands of red amid brittle, chemo-ravaged white. He'd been so surprised that he'd forgotten to wash her feet. He'd just stared at what had remained of her gaunt, papery face. Death had become perversely familiar, and he'd been glad he wasn't the one who would open her up and catalogue her parts, injuries, and final indignities, an archivist of the dead who reduced people to the sum of their pitiful ends.
He wondered where she was now, and if she regretted her decision not to stand and fight, not to wring a few more years from the well-oiled, ancient treadle of Clothos' loom. Logic and years of medical training whispered that Deborah Kleman regretted nothing because the dead ceased to exist the instant the brain died. Logic insisted that the soul was a human construct, a romantic name for those higher brain functions that made man different from his tree-dwelling forefathers. Logic insisted that the soul was just a synonym for hope. But logic was cold comfort when cold water was worming its way inside your wetsuit with eager, victorious fingers and your regulator was giving nothing but a dry, ominous death rattle.
Logic didn't count for beans as his Aunt Ruby would've said, and then she did say it, the words carried to him on the torpid, silty water that lapped at his ears with a frigid, lascivious tongue.
Logic don't count for beans, Sheldon, baby, she murmured in her gravelly, old woman's rasp that bore witness to fifty years of singing in the church choir on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and sometimes Thursdays, and to the shots of blackcurrant brandy that she took in the winter to warm her belly and keep her arthritic fingers limber. Oh, logic's nice and all, and it's important in its place-don't you go thinking your education isn't important, you hear? But hope is what gets you out of bed in the morning. Hope is what makes your heart beat.
In his mind's eye, he saw her as she'd been when he was young, before cancer and dementia had conspired to rob her of herself and leave her shriveled and without history in the same hospital where he'd later spent most of his residency. She was sharp-eyed and serene in her rocking chair by the living room window. That rocking chair had sat in the same place for thirty years, and the runners had cut twin grooves in the carpeting.
It was those grooves in the carpet that convinced you she was dead, interjected a droning, matter-of-fact, med school lecturer voice. After the battle was over and modern medicine came out on the losing end, you and your two cousins volunteered to go through her things so her sisters wouldn't have to rub salt in new and weeping wounds. You came on a Saturday morning and boxed and sorted and assigned value to the signposts of a finished life. Scraps of paper with names and long-ago dates on them. Pictures of people none of you recognized. Her box of recipes. The box of toys she kept in the closet for when nieces and nephews and grandchildren descended on her orderly life-dolls with missing eyes and limbs reattached with a surgeon's precision, Legos, Lincoln Logs with thirty-four roofs and ten logs, Hot Wheels, and teddy bears with quilt-patched bellies, mama bears who'd doubtlessly given birth by emergency C-section. The trashy bodice rippers that were her only vice. The degree she'd earned from Vassar at fifty-four because she'd been denied the chance at twenty-four.
You sorted and catalogued all day, and God only knows how many mistakes you made, how many priceless heirlooms and pieces of her you threw into the Goodwill basket with a careless toss of your young man's hand. The three of you had intelligence and respect in spades, but perspective on the life of another is hard to come by. In most cases, it never comes. The only one who can truly testify to the worth of a lifetime is the one who lived it. Everything else is speculation.
Your final duty was to remove her furniture. The lumbering grunts from the moving company you hired took most of it, but not the rocking chair. That was for you. The three of you stood around it in silence. You all knew it had to be done, but none of you wanted to be the first to touch it. It seemed sacrilegious, the desecration of a fallen queen's throne. You hemmed and hawed and looked out the window now stripped of its curtains and the window boxes she put out every spring and summer, and the moving men lingered in the hallway with impatient respect. You can't speak for the others, but you kept waiting for it to move, to rock to the rhythm of unseen, slippered feet swollen with fluid.
It was your cousin, Freddie, who finally profaned the sacred. Well, he said quietly as he looked out the naked window, and you knew he was picturing phantom tulips, it's got to be done. Then he retrieved her basket of unfinished knitting, crocheting, and needlepoint from beside the runner and placed it reverently in the center of the seat. Then you each grabbed an arm and lifted it, pallbearers at a second funeral.
You looked back as you carried the chair toward the door and the waiting movers, who were sidling towards the narrow staircase with visions of beer and brats dancing in their sweaty heads, and all that was left of Aunt Ruby's world were the runner tracks the rocker had left in the carpet. Start at Point A, end at Point B; the abridged life of Ruby Mae Nellis.
That was it; the spell was broken. This was Aunt Ruby's home no more, but just another sad, empty apartment waiting to be claimed by somebody desperate to own a slice of the Big Apple. Soon, the tracks carved by the runners and your footprints would be washed away like footprints in the sand, steamed into oblivion by a professional cleaning crew. By Monday, the super would have guys in coveralls laying down plastic and tearing down the wallpaper in flavor of glossy, white paint. Aunt Ruby was just another ghost in the walls.
Dead was dead, those runner impressions said. Death was a still rocking chair.
But in his mind, Aunt Ruby was alive and well, rocking to the clack of her knitting needles as a muffler took shape between her knowledgeable fingers and watching him with beneficent curiosity over the square, rimless lenses of her glasses. She was wearing her Sunday pearls, and her slippers were a deep, rich purple.
Royal purple, he thought distantly, and the dying regulator gave another gurgling wheeze. Mud through straw, and the white-coated scientist that pulled the levers in the command center of his brain noted that he was rapidly running out of time and air. If he didn't free himself soon, Stella would be bringing two corpses to Hammerback's table, but the image of Aunt Ruby was vivid and growing ever clearer and brighter.
Hypoxia, muttered the lab-coated scientist, and he dutifully made a notation on his data sheet. Also common in victims of strangulation and smoke inhalation.
Sheldon, you hear me? Aunt Trudy asked. Her knitting needles never slowed, but clacked in time to the slow trundle of the runners.
Yes, Aunt Ruby, he answered. He was fascinated by the vision and oddly comforted by it. He'd practically grown up in front of that rocking chair, learned many of life's truths at her knee. She'd doled them out on the blunted points of her needles, woven them into the fabric of her mittens and mufflers and afghans, and all the while she'd navigated the long, winding course of her life by the gentle rock of that chair, a tiny, black woman who'd rocked, rocked, rocked her boat gently down the stream with the tireless pedaling of her feet.
You've seen many injustices in your line of work, as a doctor, coroner, and prospector for the wrongly dead. You've seen infants riddled with bullets and tumors that killed and ravaged with equal impunity. You've seen young mothers robbed of the chance to raise their newborn children by catastrophic hemorrhages, and firefighters who lost the wager they made every day, snuffed out by the flames they so valiantly fought to extinguish. You've seen teenage girls who should've lived long, happy lives arranged upon your coroner's slab like butterflied chickens, works of art that would never be finished. You've seen forgotten people left to rot and liquefy in their apartments because no one cared to look for them. They were found only because they'd seeped through their downstairs neighbor's ceiling, or because the super had come to collect the $1350 their lives were worth. You've seen the indifference with which we treat one another, and you've spent your life trying to restore a small measure of balance to the chaos.
But when you think about it, which is too often though it is too seldom, you think that the greatest injustice you ever saw was the way Aunt Ruby died. She'd spent her life in that chair, gone around the world in an old, oak chair that had been a gift from her late husband, an uncle who was dead and gone long before you were born. Family history holds that he built it himself, lacquered it and varnished it and presented it to her as a wedding present. She'd been mad until he'd explained that it was for rocking all the babies they planned to have. Then she'd taken to it and the man who'd given it to her with her characteristic Ruby tenacity. She did rock babies in it, too, and grandbabies, and she might've rocked great-grandbabies in it if the cancer and the Alzheimer's hadn't torn her apart with their dirty, poisonous claws.
She'd lived her life in that chair, and so you thought she'd go to her death in it, too. It would be only fitting. Someone would discover her slumped in its cradling embrace with a pile of unfinished TLC in her lap, and that would be that. She'd've ferried herself across the river in a graceful exit, a storybook ending. Instead, she died in a hospital bed, far removed from her rocking chair, raving at shadows and stinking of her own urine and feces.
That wasn't the first face of injustice you ever saw-that dubious honor was reserved for the playground accident you witnessed when you were eleven, the one that began with the monkey bars and ended with a nine-year-old who would never walk again-but it was the truest. Throughout her life, Ruby Mae Nellis had carried herself with dignity, had never appeared at the Sunday dinner table in anything less than her best. She'd been sharp as a tack, with a razor wit and a fierce, smoldering pride that never left her eyes or her spine.
In the end, sixty-eight years of dignity were obliterated by six months of gabbling and ranting at sterilized shadows and marinating in her own shit. They say that the first impression is most important, and that may be so, but it's the last that you leave behind. Just ask any cop who's ever blown an impeccable thirty-year career on one mistake, one bad shoot or the one that got away. For years, the only image of Aunt Ruby you could conjure after her death was of her propped against pillows and wrapped like a breathing mummy in sheets that stank of piss and inevitable death.
Cancer and its treatments had decimated her, left her little more than a leathery husk inside her hospital smock. The proud woman who had once taught you hymns and Bible verses and the proper way to treat your elders in any situation was a mumbling, muttering crone who could no longer recall her name or the year. Sometimes she thought she was in 1964, raising her daughters and her son, and sometimes it was 1990 and she was cutting George Bush the I to ribbons with her tongue and the furious, authoritative clack of her needles. But mostly she lived in the darkness of her deteriorating mind, her internal clock stopped forever at the hour of none.
Cock-gobbling rapist shitfuck. Those were the last words she ever spoke to you. Your Aunt Ruby, who before then had never so much as uttered a damn after stubbing her toe or barking her shin on the coffee table. Cock-gobbling rapist shitfuck. Matter-of-fact, even congratulatory, a crazed queen conferring knighthood upon an unsuspecting champion. It would've been funny if had been anyone else, any time else, but it was Aunt Ruby, and the words issued from a mouth that carried with it the yellow reek of waning hours, and so you only blinked back the outraged tears and swallowed the lump in your throat and helped the nurse wrestle her onto her side, the better to check for bedsores and skin lesions. You'd already decided to be a doctor, you see, and you thought you could make a difference.
Aunt Ruby's death by degrees only strengthened your resolve. You powered through your pre-med requirements with the unshakeable conviction of zealots and lunatics. You were a Blues Brother, on a mission from God to cure the ills of the world. You were determined to rid the world of sorrow by force of will and the unrivaled power of your genius mind. It all seemed so simple, and why shouldn't it have been? You'd achieved every goal to which you'd ever set your heart and mind, overachieved, to be frank. History was on your side. This would be just another laurel with which to pad your considerable resume.
But you couldn't change a thing. You couldn't even stem the tide. Saving lives wasn't as easy, as cut and dried, as the textbooks and lectures made it sound. Diseases that were so simple in the black and white of text and grainy photos suddenly became complex and unknowable when you saw them in pink and red and bone white. It wasn't so easy to attach labels and prognoses to real lives instead of hypothetical case numbers. Three months wasn't so abstract when you were staring into the face of a seventeen-year-old girl who'd never make it to the prom and certainly wouldn't get a chance to trade that dress in for a wedding gown. Medicine was as ugly as the ills it was meant to cure.
You rode in Sir Galahad in green surgical scrubs, and three years later, you rode out just another disillusioned knight with too many notches in your armor. You lost as many as you saved, and the victories never canceled the losses. The blood on your arms to the elbows was the same, and too often, gratitude looked like grief on puffy, careworn faces. There wasn't any difference at all when you got down to the hard, ugly bottom. Grief and gratitude are two sides of the same worthless coin.
After you lost three in one week, thwarted in your efforts by bullets and the ill-advised union of booze with Goodyear, you bowed to the inevitable. Your failures haunted you, weighed down your nimble, acrobatic fingers. You couldn't stand to be little more than an educated Hermes, bringing the message of death to so many. It wasn't what you signed up for, being Charon's steward, so you traded the living for the dead.
It was better, safer in your necropolis of green tile and frigid steel. The patients on your tables had already passed into the hands of the Almighty. All that was left to you was to discover the whys and wherefores of the journey from the land of the living to the cold, loveless underworld of the dead. You cut and prodded and prospected, documented each hematoma and abrasion and pulmonary edema, and if, by chance, you stumbled upon a tumor spreading its spongy, strangling tendrils into bone or unsuspecting tissue, you pierced its black heart with your scalpel, duly noted it on the innocuous paper person that we all become at the sad, sorry end, and let it lie. It was no longer your enemy or your concern. The mantle of savior had been passed to more capable hands.
And it was enough, for a while. You thought you'd found your niche in the federally-funded catacombs of concrete and steel. You even carved one there for yourself, made a nest in an alcove not far from where your wayfarers slept in their temporary tombs. It was comfortable despite the frigidity of the climate-controlled air, a burrow hidden from the eyes of the city and the bureaucracy, and it wasn't uncommon for you to spend the night on the cot you'd set up at the far wall, cheap, metal frame abutting the grimy concrete brick in an effort to let the ambient heat of the still-breathing city above combat the cold. You tucked yourself in with a book and a cup of coffee or lost yourself in the backlog of unsigned death certificates. If it weren't for the corpses in the room proper, you might've called it homey. Sometimes you even did. Home away from home.
Mac found you in there one night, reading a book and heating a human rib in the microwave. God knows what he thought until you explained that the rib was actually from the victim in his latest case. For a moment, his expression was dismayed, as though he'd caught you peeping at Hustler on lab time. Disdainful, and more than a little wary. You were perplexed at the time, and bemused, but in hindsight, you can understand his reaction. You were a young, talented, attractive child of the brightest city in the world, an eligible bachelor who could've had his pick of women, and your idea of a good night was to read a book while the aroma of irradiated dead flesh tickled your nose. If you'd read the same anecdote in a forensic psychology journal, you'd have suspected it was a tale in the curriculum vitae of the next Jeffrey Dahmer. No wonder Mac looked at you askance. But you were happy.
But happiness never lasts with you. It's an unfortunate malaise of the genius, a constant, gnawing hunger that is never, and can never be, satisfied. It's a drive that runs parallel to the libido and deeper by miles and fathoms. Leagues. Twenty thousand leagues under the skin. You're compelled to greatness, seduced by it, and once you've conquered one kingdom, you seek out the next.
Or at least, that's how it usually works. But this time, it was the dead who'd wearied of you. Their formerly benign, cataracted gazes became accusatory, less the bland, stony gazes of cemetery monuments and more the sinister, implacable eyes of judges and Gorgons. Their stiff, blue-tinged lips fashioned themselves into knowing leers and puckered moues of disapproval. Suddenly, they demanded more than a simple, clinical accounting of their final hours. They were no longer content with just a mouthpiece, a scalpel-brandishing herald to catalogue their final indignities in the bloodless Greek of the autopsy. Now they would have justice.
You dismissed it at first, chalked up the phantom expressions and perceived grimaces to the workaholic's hours that you kept and to the vagaries of a mind fueled by adrenaline and caffeine in quantities sufficient to stunt growth in lab mice. Stress and insomnia played with the mind, arranged the myriad props of its internal theatre for its own amusements. Some of the residents with whom you'd worked in a galaxy far, far away had hallucinated during hectic rotations, had insisted that patients they'd pronounced dead and shunted to the morgue had reappeared in the hallways, cinder-eyed Jacob Marleys wrapped in medical gauze and shambling the hospital in search of their lost souls. Hell, in your final semester of med school, you were so tired that you saw your fingernails transform into maggots, wriggling and writhing on the ends of your fingers like Tom Savini's belly dancers at a gravedigger's ball. The illusion scared you so badly that you dropped your books and screamed like a girl. You would've crammed your knuckles into your mouth if you hadn't been worried that one of the dancers would find its way into your mouth and lodge in your soft palate, a hideous second uvula. You were halfway to sick and three-quarters of the way to the bathroom when you remembered to breathe and blink, and when you did, your fingernails were your fingernails again.
Even if you couldn't blame everything on stress and fatigue, science took care of the rest. Bodies move after death, twitch and jerk and sometimes sit up on the autopsy table. Life does not go gently, and when the soul departs, muscle memory lingers in the empty vessel, an echo of the past. You've seen fingers curl and jaws twitch, and even when movement ceases, the body continues the work of dying. Corpses fart and belch and rattle for hours after death. So, if a corpse seemed to glare balefully at you as you loomed over it with a scalpel, what of it? Maybe accusation was the only expression the muscles remembered. There was nothing odd or sinister in it, nothing new under the sun.
Until the voices, of course.
If only Mac had known about the voices. How strangely would he have looked at you then? You can guess; you've always had a knack for sussing out the truth, and it's a safe bet that if he had known about the voices you started hearing just before he dropped the ax on Aiden(and off came her head; the rest burned in the car, and wasn't that merry?), not only would he never have signed off on your transfer into the field, he would've ordered you to a psychiatric evaluation and frog-marched you to the office with stone-faced, Semper Fi gravitas. It's a short walk from boy wonder to madman, too short for comfort.
The dead have always spoken to you. That's old hat and standard operating procedure. In truth, you found it rather soothing to recreate them inside your head while you arranged them so artfully on your scales and in your specimen jars. It made it easier to expose their secrets and shames to the world if you could establish a temporary, internal rapport, pretend that you were making small talk like a general practitioner. You discussed hobbies and jazz albums and current events, and they revealed themselves inside your head, jovial and querulous and just plan asshole by turns. It was fun, a bit of diversion to distract you from the grimness of your task and a mental exercise to keep the cogs turning smoothly. But the voices were always, always inside your head.
You were washing up after a post the first time you heard it. It was almost lost under the thunder of water splashing into the stainless steel sink. You thought it was air hissing through the balky plumbing or the pitter patter of rat feet behind the walls. It was furtive, paper drifting to the ground on a careless, intemperate breeze. You registered it and let it go. Then it happened again, louder and more distinct. You blinked and turned off the tap in order to hear it more clearly. It was silent for the longest time, so long that you started to turn the faucet on again, convinced it was your imagination. Then it came, laughter from one of the drawers, dark and phlegmatic, the sucking, swamp-mud rasp of a lifelong smoker.
Your hand drifted from the tap handle to the paper towel dispenser, and you tugged a handful of sheets from its slack, cadaver mouth. You dried your hands, and the laugh bubbled from the drawers behind you, abetted by the dry shuffle of cheap, coarse paper over your damp hands. You turned to investigate, head cocked and soggy paper towels forgotten in your hand. You were more curious than afraid, a scientist presented with a new and unexpected hypothesis.
You moved from drawer to drawer, pressing your ear to cold steel that bit into the sensitive skin, a sharp, predatory nip that made the nautilus tingle and burn. Danger. Live contents inside. Which was impossible, since each inhabitant had had his birthday suit redesigned and marred by a ragged Y in ugly, black stitching. Nothing. No breathing. No frantic pounding of fists on the walls to signal that someone had been prematurely buried. No scrabbling clitter of fingernails on metal. Just the sedate hum of the refrigeration unit.
You waited five minutes just to be sure, though you felt like a fool, standing with your ear to the drawer like some spooked probie. Eventually, you got disgusted with yourself and pried yourself away, back to your books and your forms and the hypnotic rhythm of signing your name to the scrolls of the dead as though it were a royal seal that granted bearers the right of passage into the afterlife. You kept an ear out for the rest of the night, but the dead had fallen into dreams and did not stir, and when you finally signed the last certificate at quarter-past three, you'd neatly consigned the experience to the realm of the strange but untrue. For the first time in a long time, you didn't sleep on the cot in the alcove. You went to your apartment instead and tripped all the security locks behind you.
You were watchful for a while after that, ever alert for the sound of laughter from the bank of drawers, but none came, and after two weeks of starting at every echo of conversation admitted into the morgue by the swinging doors and every rustle of paper by a coroner's assistant, you put your foot down and rededicated yourself to the daily grind of tending the dead, reminded yourself that it was physiologically impossible for the dead to speak. The cerebral cortex dies within minutes if deprived of blood and oxygen. Minor brain damage begins at two minutes; major, irrevocable damage occurs at four. Five minutes is fatal. Even if the dead could coax their vocal cords to grinding speech, they'd lack the cognitive ability to communicate rationally or effectively. It would be so much gibberish. It was a comforting pep talk steeped in the tools of your trade, one designed to keep the bogeyman at bay. It should've worked, but it didn't.
You heard them again three months later. You were posting a bloater dredged out of the East River, a spaceman tethered to Earth in your coveralls, spatter guard, and air filtration mask. You were so much the prehistoric cosmonaut that you had reenacted the first moonwalk, complete with slow-motion, exaggerated hops and a performance of underwater ballet. Ironic, considering you're going to die underwater, to relive that giddy moment of coroner's humor by twitching and convulsing while your lungs and stomach fill with fluid. Death by drowning, it'll say on Sid's autopsy report, and maybe there'll be the corollary of death by misadventure, as though you'd stumbled off the pier and toppled headlong into the water instead of dying on the job with a fistful of old coins. At least you'll be ready for the ferryman.
The reenactment of the moon landing was several hours behind you when the voices came, however. The only sounds then were the percolating gurgle of your self-contained respirator and the wet, viscous rattle of your scalpel as you made an incision into the trachea, pudding sloshing inside a wet, rotten leather bag. The skin was a deep, mottled purple, and it sloughed despite your practiced delicacy. Water and thick foam beaded beneath the blade.
There was a ponderous thump from inside one of the drawers, and then the voices, an indistinct murmur that came from everywhere and nowhere, phantom voices like those that came from the radio when the tuner was on the fritz, whispers stolen from the roar of static.
-obbling -ist -ck.
-oing -on -bab
-ock -bling shi-
Word fragments spit from the silence, pebbles discarded from the thirst-shriveled mouths of wandering prophets and desert nomads. Snatches of madness and nonsense. Except that the nettlesome, barbed finger of truth kept scratching at the base of your brain, reminding you of a conversation, a parting curse, that you'd rather forget.
-obbling -ist -ck. You could fill in the blanks if you cared to, and even if you didn't, your mind, ever the inventive monkey, would help you along. It had no designs on being a traitor, but sometimes treachery can't be helped.
The voices knew you knew, must have known, because they got clearer and faster and colder, as though your trusty scalpel had learned to speak. -obbling -ist -ck -obbling -ist-ck -obbling -ist -ck, a Greek chorus prophesying doom to a traveler whose feet were already set upon the fatal path. Sharp and burning against your skin, and so insistent that you itched with the need to clap your gloved hands to your plastic-covered ears and hum to block them out. You almost did, almost punctured your eardrum with your blood-stained scalpel, and wouldn't that have been a story for Mac, a red flag that would've kept you out of the field and on his watch list until you retired and shuffled off to play backgammon in Palm Springs? Mac's nothing if not watchful for the mutant. He's been hunting monsters since seventeen. It's all he knows. You know he's watching this right now, watching your monsters rise from the abyss.
It was a constant babble, echoed in the crackle of your sterile scrubs, and then the power went out and you were plunged into a darkness so absolute that it had its own darkness underneath, a visual double exposure that made you wonder if it was the sight of the blind. It was the most unpleasant moment of your life to be lost in the dark with those voices and a dead man on the table. If the backup generators hadn't kicked in and bathed the morgue in dull amber light, you might've lost your mind, felt it slither from your overstuffed skull and disappear into the abyss, washed into the sewers with the bloater's rotting tissue.
But the lights flickered on and spared your sanity, and you were grateful until you glanced down at the bloater and saw that his previously closed eyes were now open and avid behind their milkglass shine. Dead facial muscles twitched with a terrible creak, overtaxed rawhide, and the blue-purple lips twisted in an obscene parody of a smile. You wanted the mercy of darkness then, oh, yes, you did, but the squat bunker of the morgue was ever the faithful soldier and did not falter, and so you kept right on seeing.
-obbling -ist -ck, said the larynx that should have been long past talking, and bits of skin bubbled and split in the corners of his water-swollen mouth. -oing -don- bab- Dark water and foam bubbled from his butterflied trachea.
You didn't stay to hear the rest. You just dropped your scalpel on the floor and blundered for the door. You were a cosmonaut again, but there was nothing funny about this space walk; this was life or death. The spaceship was leaving, and if you didn't make it inside, you were going to be left on the lightless, airless surface of the moon. You had one hand on the swinging door when Mr. River Man spoke again, this time with perfect clarity.
Aunt Ruby says hello.
You turned to face the slab. Mr. River Man grinned up at you with his filmy, grey teeth. His opaque, irisless eyes gleamed at you with a manic cheer that brought your heartbeat and your gorge into throat.
She says she'll see you real soon, and oh, the things you'll have to talk about. Won't it be fun? Then Mr. River Man laughed, and water erupted from his throat, water that wriggled and slithered as it spread across the floor.
You bolted from the room and sprinted into the nearest bathroom to heave your guts. You hadn't vomited at an autopsy since med school, and the coroner's assistants dragged the incident to the mysterious corners of their locker room for discussion and dissection. You were legendary for your Zen in the face of the messiest deaths, so a body that could part you from your dinner must have been legendary, indeed. Rumor had it that they pooled their collective intellectual resources to uncover the cadaver. If only they'd asked Dr. Pino, who finished the autopsy later that day. Mr. River Man was and still remains the only autopsy you never finished. It was also the first time you'd ever run from the morgue. At least you didn't run screaming, though you would have if you'd had the breath for it. Strangely, your lungs had been tight and heavy inside your chest, as if they'd been filled with sand. Or with river water that wriggled and slithered.
You thought it would also mark the only occasion for flight, but you were wrong on that count because two weeks later, the autopsy room became a track again. The voices came again, and that time, you got lucky enough to see what was behind the drawer, who-
But that wasn't a memory he wanted to relive, even if the visit was brief. The thought of facing it again galvanized him, and he redoubled his efforts to wrench his arm free of the ensnaring beam. A shadow drifted over him and disappeared, and something brushed his back.
She's got me, he thought frantically. She found her way out of that damn crypt, and I'm never leaving this bay. But then Danny was beside him, gesturing and reassuring and putting his shoulder to the stubborn beam. His relief was so profound that he laughed, an explosion of bubbles that plumed from his regulator, and a waste of precious air.
Not that it matters, insisted the relentless doctor inside his head. You passed the point of no return sixty seconds ago. You're going to drown, going to join Mr. River Man; it's only a question of time.
He'd always wondered if death hurt; not the manner of death-he'd seen far too many deaths that had been alloyed studies in agony. Aunt Ruby's, for instance. No, he wondered about the precise moment when the body was cleaved from the soul. Was it a clean sundering, or did one cling to the other with the single-minded tenacity of the dying? If it hurt, was it a quick pain, the needling burn of an incision made by an expert hand, or did it linger, an echo that continued to reverberate long after the preacher had folded his holy tent and the gravediggers had finished their work? Would he still feel the water in his lungs while two men with grave dirt under their nails were quaffing pints at a bar? Maybe the moment of separation was determined by the life you lived. Maybe that was the first and last measure of God's mercy for His exiled children blundering through the remnants of Eden. Maybe it was the only mercy He could grant after such a long and willful estrangement. Maybe His cup of grace was empty, nothing inside but drops and dregs.
Which death will He grant you, Dr. Hawkes? When the moment comes, will He consider your degrees and diplomas, the countless lives you've saved with the practice of your hallowed arts, the roll call of bad guys you've put away as a member of the CSI team? Or will He perhaps consider just two moments, two out of hundreds of millions? Maybe one failure is all it takes, one moment of weakness. If so, you're in very big trouble.
His mind formed images of his second sprint from the morgue, images of what he'd found when he'd so foolishly opened the door to Drawer 3 and peered inside. The thing inside, crouching over the corpse of Mrs. Madeline Guthrie, hit and run, crouching over her in a familiar floral-print caftan and peeling the flesh from her face like the peel from an orange. The thing that rocked and cackled and looked at him with black, dead eyes.
The thing that had placed Mrs. Madeline Guthrie's face over its own and smiled at him.
What's the matter, Sheldon, my boy? Don't like my new face? Cock-gobbling racist shitfuck. It's ever so much better than the one I was left with because-
He shut his eyes and tried to picture something else-his apartment, neat and clean despite the array of Miles Davis CDs fanned on his coffee table, the first girl he ever kissed, the first he'd ever bedded, the chocolate lab he'd had as a kid, the one that fetched sticks and tennis balls and was a master of the well-timed soundless fart that could clear a room of unwanted relatives in record time. But the only memory that heeded his call was of himself standing beside Mac behind the two-way mirror while Stella and Flack interrogated Julie Rollins. His own face reflected in the glass like an insubstantial truth as he'd told Mac that he'd done the right thing by not helping his bedridden, cancer-ravaged father escape the pain. Two faces in the mirror.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Something snagged the ankle of his neoprene wetsuit and tugged, and he knew it wasn't Danny, because he was still waging war against the stubborn beam, butting and tugging and willing it to move, goddamn fucking sonofawhore thing, move. Still trying to be Superman, to be dealt a hand he wouldn't lose on the last card. Danny would keep trying long after it was too late, and Sheldon found that comforting, even if it was too late for a last-minute miracle.
He looked over his shoulder and moaned. They were there, waiting for him with eager faces and clutching hands. Deborah Kleman and Aunt Ruby and Mr. River Man, who in life had been a lonely businessman with no one to keep him company and mourn his passing. Mr. River Man, who would no longer be the only bloater in the river. Deborah Kleman's hair was impossibly red and floated behind her like strands of kelp.
Aunt Ruby floated between them, floral caftan belled around her emaciated frame, an ancient jellyfish come to collect her prey.
You knew you couldn't outrun me forever, Sheldon, baby, Aunt Ruby said, though her mouth never moved. There are consequences to everything, even those actions we choose not to take. It won't hurt, baby. I can promise you that. Love is often merciful in its cruelty. She was closer now, close enough to touch his flippered foot, and he knew that when she did, she would keep him there forever.
The regulator gave a final gurgling hiss and quit, and he knew with the detached serenity of certainty that he was going to die. He wondered what they'd talk about at his Irish wake at Sullivan's, what jokes Danny would tell over three beers too many and what stories Mac wouldn't. He hoped they'd have the grace to grieve with laughter, as they'd done with Aiden. He was only sorry he wouldn't be there to join in.
Sheldon! Sharp and direct.
He faced forward again, and Aunt Ruby was there, not the batrachian jellyfish that clawed at his foot with her lethal tentacles and sought to drag him into the muddy deep, but the Aunt Ruby who'd spent her life lifting him up. She sat in her rocking chair and rocked and clacked and watched him over her glasses. She was still knitting, ever knitting, and the muffler had grown enormously, had become a slender, golden rope.
Sheldon, are you listening to me, boy? What did I tell you? There is always hope, even when you can't see it. Sometimes, you've just got to fight for it, that's all. She held out the miraculous, golden strand. You've got a choice to make now, baby. Make it quick. The rope danced just beyond his reach.
He reached for it with a leaden arm, stretched his fingers until they creaked with the effort, but the rope eluded him, and before he could redouble his effort, cold curled around his ankle and calf in a vise. Aunt Ruby of After had reached him at last, and if he dared look back, he would see here there, crabbed and hateful and burning with malice, Aunt Ruby reduced to bone and ash and twisted medical perversity.
I'm not going to make it, Aunt Ruby. Sometimes, your best isn't good enough, he told the Aunt Ruby of Before, who was rocking sedately in front of him, loosely holding the rope in her hand. She was graying at the edges, losing her vibrant color, and receding, and so was the rope.
He reached for it anyway, because he had always been an overachiever, had always exceeded expectations. There was no last-minute miracle this time; he'd passed wunderkind ten years ago. Aunt Ruby smiled sadly and drifted out of reach, and the rope followed her into the shadows, the tail of a dying comet.
Hale-Bopp won't come around again for seventy-five years, he thought distantly, and by then it'll be too late.
Suddenly, he was jerked from behind, a jolt that drove the breath he'd been holding from his aching lungs and dislodged his regulator. Water filled his mouth, metallic and silty.
Blood. The Long Island Sound tastes like blood. It was a horrid, morbid thought, but he had no chance to ponder it. His arm wrenched free of the beam under which it had been trapped with a hot, sprung flare of agony and an ominous crack that reminded him of the sound a nine-year-old boy's neck had made as he'd toppled from the monkey bars all those years ago, the flat, echoless pop of finality.
Then he was ascending, being dragged through the opening and toward the light by Danny, who'd grabbed him by the waist and was kicking furiously, clawing at the water as though it had offended him.
Too late, he thought dully. It was one hell of a try, Dan my man, and you've got nothing to be ashamed of, but it's thirty seconds too late. They were so close to the surface that he could see the blurry, astigmatic outline of a channel mark. So close, yet so far away. He laughed, and more water flooded his mouth. His diaphragm seized in a last-ditch effort to save him, and the world dimmed, grey, grainy, and indistinct. Irrelevant. He relaxed, and his head lolled bonelessly. Going, goin…
He erupted from the water, the world's most graceless Flipper, and his mouth opened wide to gulp the glorious air. For a moment, nothing happened, and then his diaphragm unclenched. Air, sweet, merciful air, filled his lungs, and his heart sang. Air was honey in his mouth, clove honey, rich and heady as a shot of bourbon in a Friday night jazz club. He took a deep breath and whooped.
"Take it easy there, Doc." Danny gripped him by the elbow and steered him toward the boat, where Mac and Lindsay were already peering over the side. He was still too shaken and winded to see clearly, but he knew how Mac would look-pinched and exhausted, tight-lipped and frayed at the edges.
Like he's seeing ghosts.
That brought to mind unwelcome images of Aunt Ruby of After and River Man and Deborah Kleman, and he put on a burst of speed. They were still waiting for him down there, tirelessly treading the deep currents, lightless eyes searching for his shadow on the water. As long as he was in the Sound, he was in danger. His giddy imagination supplied him with the image of them exploding from the water to drag him down, an undying and unkillable monster that would never rest while he was near.
"Hey, hey, Doc, slow down, all right?" Danny pleaded. "The worst is over now. You're gonna be all right."
Hawkes didn't blame Danny. He didn't know what was lurking underneath their feet. How could he when they didn't belong to him? He chanced a look over his shoulder as he struggled through the water and bit back a scream. Red on the water, a steadily spreading pool that he might have mistaken for blood if it hadn't been moving stealthily toward him, bobbing indolently on the obliging current. Not blood, but Deborah Kleman's crown of fire.
"We gotta get out of the water, Danny. Right now," he insisted, and tried to quicken his one-armed stroke.
"Yeah, Doc, we're goin', but you gotta take it easy. Your arm's messed up."
"If we don't get out of here now, I'm leaving you here," he replied resolutely. He didn't mean it, of course. He'd never leave any of them behind. They were the closest he had to anything that mattered, kin by the bloody bond of the mutual foxhole they inhabited, but now that he'd been given a second chance, he had no intention of letting it slip through his fingers.
"Well, when you put it that way, Doc, how c'n I refuse?" Danny sighed and kicked harder, his profile sharp and inscrutable.
"Sorry," Hawkes sputtered. "But I just want to get the hell out of here."
Danny's jaw relaxed. "I guess I can relate to that." Messer for "apology accepted."
He considered the matter closed, an incidental coda to the drama of his near-drowning, and so he was surprised when Danny broached the subject again while they were waiting for the ambulance. They were hunkered haphazardly on the shore, slouched and crouched on the asphalt by turns. His arm, which in his doctoral opinion was sprained and dislocated, throbbed in time to his heartbeat, and he counted to one thousand by prime numbers to keep the nausea at bay. Danny squatted beside him, nicotine-stained fingers dangling between his knees, and studied the boats on the horizon.
"Bad habit," Hawkes observed, and nodded at Danny's fingers.
Danny blinked and dropped his gaze to his fingers. He studied them as if they belonged to someone else. "Huh. Yeah. Well, some habits are hard to break, you know?"
"Yeah." He didn't, though. He was an Earthling Yoda. Do or do not. He could break habits as easily as he formed them. There was no try.
If Danny sensed the lie, he gave no sign. He simply squinted at a white fleck on the horizon and scraped a fleck of grime from beneath his ragged thumbnail. "So, Doc," he said at last, "What's the deal with you and the water? If you don't mind me sayin', I've never heard you so emphatic." Danny never looked at him, just followed the path of the boat as it sailed against the sun.
He doesn't want the whole truth, but just enough, whispered Aunt Ruby inside his head, the safe Aunt Ruby of Before.
For that, Hawkes was profoundly grateful.
He shrugged. "Bad memories. They have a way of creeping up on you."
Now Danny did look at him, shifted so that his feet crunched in the gritty asphalt. He pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose with a quick jab of his index finger. "Yeah, I gotta little experience with those myself," he said.
Hawkes opened his mouth to protest that he had certainly had no truck with this particular brand of recollection, recollections that rose from the muddy bottom of the bay to claim their rightful piece of flesh, then decided against it. It wasn't worth the effort, and besides, shadows flickered in Danny's eyes, danced and wavered like strands of seaweed brought up from below. They reminded of Deborah Kleman's hair as she'd drifted beside Aunt Ruby and Mr. River Man, and his mouth puckered with the mineral-water taste of the Sound.
He shuddered and gritted his teeth against the bolt of pain the movement inspired in his arm and looked anywhere but at the water.
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