Abby had been dreading this moment since ninth grade. Everyone knew it was coming, and the only thing you could do was pray it wasn’t as bad as you’d heard.
On Thursday morning, the school loaded all the tenth graders onto Albemarle’s one yellow school bus, put the ones who couldn’t fit inside the red sports van, and carted them over the West Ashley Bridge to downtown Charleston. It was time for that most feared and anticipated rite of passage: the gross anatomy lab field trip.
Gretchen and Glee made sure they were in the red van because it was being driven by Father Morgan, but Abby didn’t even try to join them. She sat on the big yellow bus with everyone else, crammed against the rear window next to Nikki Bull. All around her, students were nervous or scared or excited, and they talked nonstop. Mostly they were talking about Geraldo Rivera.
His two-hour special Exposing Satan’s Underground had aired the night before during prime time on NBC. It sent Geraldo up against the forces of satanism, talking to serial killers (and Ozzy Osbourne) as he proved (or strongly implied) that a secret network of over one million satanists was responsible for murdering fifty thousand children a year. The special made Abby feel corroded. It was streaked with dirt from shallow graves, smeared with blood from crime scene photos, splattered with hot saliva from possessed men in white sweaters foaming at the mouth as they snarled “Get out of here” at crosses being waved in their faces during exorcisms. Geraldo stood in front of a wall of TV screens, sickened by what he heard: women identified as “breeders” calmly explaining that their babies were born to be eaten in satanic communions, their tiny corpses burned, buried in concrete, hacked into pieces, and scattered at sea.
The next day, satanism was all anyone could talk about.
“There was a senior last year,” Nikki Bull said, “she had a baby, and devil worshippers made her drown it behind the school. The marsh is full of dead babies. Sometimes their bones wash up but the administration says they’re seagull bones, and the maintenance staff burns them in the incinerator.”
“The custodians know what’s going on, but they’re too scared to say anything,” Eric Frey added.
“My uncle’s in law enforcement and he says you couldn’t pay him a million dollars to go to Northwoods Mall this time of year,” Clyburn Perry said. “Right before Halloween, they walk around with a needle hidden under their watchbands, and it’s got a tiny bit of AIDS blood on it. They scratch the back of your hand as you walk by and you don’t think it’s a big deal but then six months later you’ve got AIDS.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Dereck White asked, turning around in his seat. “Who’s this mysterious ‘they’ doing all these terrible things?”
Everyone felt sorry for him because it was so obvious.
“Satanists,” Nikki Bull said. “It was on TV.”
The bus rumbled into downtown Charleston and cars stacked up behind it, the drivers too polite to honk their horns. Abby listened to low-hanging branches scrape the roof as they pulled into the medical university’s parking lot. As they were packed into the enormous elevator to go up to the fifth floor, Nikki Bull was still talking about satanists.
“So the last headmaster? Some satanists broke into the graveyard and stole his mom’s body. Then they went to the haunted house he always put up in his front yard at Halloween, and they dressed her corpse up as a witch and hung it from a tree by a noose. He thought it was one of his decorations and left it up there for three days. When he went to take it down, he saw that it was his mom and he went insane.”
“Can it, Bull,” Mrs. Paul said from the other side of the elevator.
The elevator cage rattled once, hard, and then the doors slammed open and the students spilled out on a floor that was cold and smelled like pickle juice. Up ahead was the first bunch of kids, giggling and nervous and jostling one another. Abby’s group got sandwiched between the students ahead and those coming in behind as more kids piled off the elevator and squeezed into the narrow corridor, trying to stay as far away as possible from the door to the gross anatomy lab. Now that the hall was full, they all lapsed into expectant silence. Everyone knew what was coming next.
“Hello,” the doctor said. He had a chicken-skin neck and a vulture’s bald head covered with liver spots. He wore a white lab coat with loaded pockets that sagged halfway down his thighs, and he was thrilled to be there. “I’m Dr. Richards and I run the Medical University of South Carolina’s Gross Anatomy Lab. Today, you are about to see what’s eventually going to happen to every single one of you. So let’s dive right in and meet your future.”
The students shuffled and pushed and shoved through the double doors after him, flooding into the vast room; then they saw what lay inside and jammed up in the doorway, pressing themselves to the wall. The room stretched into the distance, with green marbled linoleum on the floor and plastic tiles on the walls. Down the center were sixteen steel tables, each one a hard bed on which lay a single partially peeled cadaver.
“The first class that new medical students take is Gross Anatomy,” Dr. Richards said, grinning. “They’re split into groups of four and assigned a donor. The donor is anonymous, and while in the old days we might get the occasional uncle or friend of the family popping up on the table, we haven’t had a surprise like that since 1979. All the donors are carefully screened. In the spring, when class is over, the students gather at the chapel and have a memorial service for their donors, because it is a great thing to leave your body to science. I hope some of you will choose to do so after today. It would be a pleasant change to get some younger donors into the rotation.”
The doctor was relaxed and easy around these jigsaw bodies. They made him happy.
“But between the first day of class and the memorial service,” Dr. Richards continued, “the students work each donor down to the bone and learn what makes them tick.”
Kids were giggling and shoving each other, and the smell of pickles drove all the oxygen out of the room. Abby forced herself to look at the dead bodies. Their skin was covered in bristles and their toenails were thick and yellow. Their dusty gray skin was peeled back to reveal layers of beef jerky muscles and a fruit basket of internal organs. Mottled gray lungs, dark red hearts, glistening links of lavender intestines, brown livers, a cornucopia of meaty fruit piled up inside.
Dr. Richards kept talking, full of macabre observations and corny jokes. When a cadaver’s hand slipped off a table and dropped into his pocket, he mugged a startled reaction.
“Get out of there,” he said, chuckling, and he plucked out the dead hand by its hairy wrist and dropping it back on the table. Everyone laughed too hard as he said, “I think he was going for my wallet.”
Dr. Richards was eager to give the students his best stories: a balloon of cocaine found inside a stomach cavity, a donor whose feet were mysteriously crossed every morning when they opened the lab, a donor who was the class valedictorian’s long-lost aunt. Abby saw Gretchen and Glee standing behind Father Morgan on the other side of the circle, whispering to each other. Before she could start to feel left out, Dr. Richards changed the subject.
“And this,” he said, leading them to the wooden shelves in the back of the room, “this is our little cabinet of curiosities.”
It was exactly as Wallace had advertised. Floating inside jars of yellow pickle juice were a disembodied breast, a two-headed baby with its sternum laid open so they could see its bifurcated spinal column, a tongue distended by a tumor the size of a baseball, a severed hand with six fingers.