Excerpt
Hayley was mopping blood off the floor.
That was a big part of her job, it seemed. Keeping the mortuary clean. Wiping off blood and bodily seepage. Spraying surfaces with disinfectant. She wore nose plugs some days. The sweet smell of death was with her always. It followed her home too. Even when she was in the bath, she could smell putrefaction through the scent of lavender bath oil. It was fortunate, she sometimes felt, that she was already a solitary misanthrope; otherwise this job would make her so.
The blood on the floor was not visible; there weren't huge gobbets of scarlet gore pooled upon the plastic parquet. But every time the pathologist cut open a body with an electric saw, colloids of plasma and flesh filled the air in an invisible miasma. So the floors had to be cleaned every day with immaculate care. The microscopic splashes couldn't be left to fester. The blood had to be mopped away.
Hayley wore a white coverall over her jeans and T-shirt. Her head was shaven. Every now and then she twitched her head, to reorient her lazy eye.
When Hayley was eight years old she had walked into a moving swing in the park, with bloody and painful consequences. After three days in what her Mam always called the 'hospital for stupid children', she was told she had to wear an eyepatch for six months. When the patch came off the eye had a mind of its own. She could see fine with it but it had a tendency to drift, to eerie effect.
When she was sixteen she had the huge tunnel piercings in her ears, which her Mam said made her look like a [racist expletive deleted]; and soon after that she started shaving her head. The nose piercings came next, then the tattoos, including a map of Terra Incognita on her left arm, and a more restrained blue butterfly on the soft skin under her chin.
Hayley was now twenty-six years old and no longer lived with her Mam, thank Christ; and she was wearing, beneath her mortuary-issue white coverall, on strict orders of the management, a long-sleeved top that covered the arm tattoos. The invisible blood on the floor was a bugger to get off but she was persisting.
She was thinking about songs she would sing if she could only sing. She was on stage at Glastonbury. In that context, her look was a killer. Her band was all girl and hardcore and they were playing driving chords. Hayley was singing Paranoid, and killing it. Her sister was in the crowd, crushed with jealousy. And –
She heard a sound – a groan? She ignored it. Another groan. The groan became a stifled scream.
She turned around.
The female corpse on the autopsy table was sitting up. Looking at Hayley, bold as brass. The corpse was a young woman – mid-twenties or thirties, Hayley guessed. Slim, verging on skinny, with ribs you could count. Her face was smashed in and disfigured by some terrible accident. Her mouth was open in a ghastly rictus, like a silent scream. And when she spoke, her lips barely moved.
This must be a try on. Is this bitch wearing horror movie makeup?
'Help me,' the dead woman said, softly.
The dead woman had raven black hair and very pale skin and Hayley realised that she must have been beautiful, when alive, and when her face was intact. She had a soft whispery voice. The voice said: 'Please, whoever you are, help me.'
No. No! This can't be happening. Maybe I fell asleep in front of the telly again? Hayley, wake the fuck up!
'Help me, please. People are coming for me. Bad people. I have to get out of this place. Help me. I'm begging you. Help!'
Hayley tried to scream but couldn't.
'Save my baby,' whispered the corpse and Hayley flinched.
The corpse's eyes rolled, and the body slumped back down on to the stainless steel dissecting table, and was once more inert.
And now, finally, Hayley screamed.
