“P—people,” she stuttered, pointing to the wall: a jigsaw pattern of cabinets, all fitted together. Now that she was focusing, she could see beyond them—inside them. She saw bodies, each draped in a sheet, all cold and sad like slabs of beef on a butcher’s counter. “It’s full of people.”
“Over here.” Sam’s voice echoed a little in the big, dim space. He had moved into the adjoining room. Pippa saw three steel-legged tables, each draped in clean white linen, under which she could see more bodies, silhouetted: the lines of the chest and knees and even, in one case, a foot protruding from the sheet. Her stomach turned over. One of them was a woman, and one of them a girl not much older than Pippa herself, with blond hair the color of new straw.
“I wonder if one of them is Potts . . . ?” Even though Sam spoke quietly, his voice was amplified by the emptiness of the room, so Pippa felt as though he were shouting.
“That one,” she said, raising a shaking hand toward the middle of the three tables. Even without lifting the linen she could see. It was effortless, far easier than looking in someone’s pockets—perhaps because she did not have the resistance of another person’s mind to contend with.
Recently, she had noticed a shift, a change in the way that her mind’s vision worked. It was becoming easier to slide behind locked drawers and into suitcases, to feel what was there so strongly that it became a picture in her brain.
Sam peeled back the sheet, holding it carefully between two fingers, as if death were a germ and he were in danger of catching it. Thomas sucked in a breath and took a step closer to the body. Potts’s face was ghastly and pale. His chest was as white as milk, and dark stitching crisscrossed his chest and stomach, where the doctors must have opened him up. His hands, which Pippa had seen so often clutching a mop, holding an old rag, or jiggling a toilet handle, now lay flat and useless on the table.
Footsteps echoed from somewhere above them. Sam made a strangled noise.
“Someone’s coming,” Pippa said, feeling a sudden surge of terror.
“Look.” Thomas seized a piece of paper lying next to Potts; it was covered in densely packed writing. “It’s the report on his death.”
The footsteps were coming down the stairs.
“Take it,” Pippa said. “And let’s get out of here.”
“We can’t just steal it,” Thomas said. His eyes were clicking rapidly along the page, left to right, like the Underwood typewriter in Anderson’s office. “They’ll know someone was here.”
“And they’ll know we’re here if they catch us,” Pippa said.
By now, they could hear voices. A man was saying: “Should be illegal, bodies turning up at all hours. Nine to five, I say, and let the rest of ’em wait.”
A second, higher voice, squeaked, “Absolutely, sir. Very true, sir.”
The first voice snapped, “Don’t be an idiot! Of course we can’t expect dead people to maintain regular hours! Inconsiderate, every one of them. For God’s sakes hold up the feet.”
They were coming down the stairs. Sam flipped the sheet back over Potts’s head. Thomas stuffed the report into his pocket. Pippa looked around wildly for a second exit, but there was none. They were trapped.
“We have to hide,” Thomas whispered. And before Pippa could argue, he was drawing her into the first room, toward the large wall full of body-size cabinets.
“No.” Pippa stopped short when she realized what Thomas expected of her. “No way.”
“There’s no other choice,” he said.
Sam wrenched open a cabinet and, finding it empty, practically dove inside it.
“I won’t,” Pippa repeated. Thomas slid open the nearest cabinet, and the face of a dead man stared up at them. Pippa nearly screamed. He moved on to the next one. Also occupied, this time by a monstrously fat woman.
“A little help, Pip?” he whispered. He was sweating.
There was a scuffling sound on the stairs. One of the men exploded: “What did I tell you about his feet?”
Pippa’s stomach was filled with lead. She knew that Thomas was right. They had no choice. “Over here,” she whispered to Thomas. There was another empty cabinet, and she and Thomas squeezed in together. Pippa had to lie down on her back. It was very cold.
To keep them fresh, she thought, like vegetables, and felt the hysterical desire to laugh. She forced herself to breathe.
But as Thomas eased the cabinet closed, and they were swallowed in darkness, she couldn’t help feeling as though they might never get out; they would get stuck here forever and die and end up just like the others.
Only a second later, the men stepped into the morgue. Their voices were very loud; they were less than three feet away.
“All right, what do you want to do with ’im?”
Pippa knew they must be bringing in another body. She prayed that the men would not think of placing him in a cabinet; she and Thomas would surely be discovered. Even though it was cold, her palms were sweating. She could hear Thomas breathing and, though she was comforted by his presence, wished she could tell him to shut up.