the basics.
The coffin looks older beneath the white lights, as if the car ride aged it by a quarter of a century. Plus it’s all busted up. There are cracks along the side, and the top is all dented in. The whole thing has been brushed down before being delivered, but it hasn’t been cleaned. There is dirt and mud caked to the edges of it, and there are also signs of rust. It’s resting on a knee-high table, which puts the lid of the coffin a little below chest height.
I tighten my hands in a failing effort to ward off the cold. My headache has become my sidekick; it beats away with varying
tempos. I wish it would leave. I wish I could leave too. The
smell of chemicals is balancing on a tightrope between being too overpowering and not overpowering enough to hide the smell of
the dead. I can never remember the smell; all I can remember is my reaction; yet for those few minutes, whenever I used to come down here, I thought I’d never be able to forget it. The bodies aren’t rotting, they’re not decaying and stinking up the place, but the smell is still here — the smell of old clothes and fresh bones and old things that can no longer be.
The lid on the coffin is still closed, and it’s easy to imagine there ought to be a chain wrapped around it with one of those
big old-fashioned padlocks attached. I can barely make out my
smeared reflection in places, especially on the brass handles, my face broken up by pit marks made of rust. I run a finger across the shovel marks that the digger and truck drivers pointed out to me earlier. They’re right in the middle of a long concave dent.
‘She’s been opened before,’ the medical examiner says, stepping out of her office and into the morgue behind me, and even though I knew she was there her appearance still startles me. “I wonder what’s inside.’
‘Or what isn’t inside,’ I say.
I put my hand out, expecting hers to be cold when she shakes
it, but it isn’t. ‘Good to see you, Tracey.’
‘What’s it been, Tate? Two years? Three?’
‘Two,’ I answer, letting her hand go, trying to look her over
without appearing to look her over. Though Tracey Walter must
be my age, she looks ten years younger. Her black hair is pulled back and tied into a tight bun; her pale complexion is bone white in the morgue lights; her green eyes stare at me from behind a set of designer glasses. I think about the last time I saw her, and figure she’s doing the same thing.
‘Sure got busted up falling off that truck,’ I say, looking at the long cracks. ‘Caretaker was in a hell of a hurry’
‘You’ve never seen an exhumed coffin before, have you?’
‘Yeah? You can tell that?’
She smiles. ‘Movies don’t show how much weight coffins are
under once they’re in the ground. Often it’s enough to do serious damage. Part of this is from falling off the truck, but most of it will be from the pressure of being in the ground.’
‘So, is there anything you need me to do?’ I ask.
‘Just sign this and you can go,’ she says.
‘You’re not going to open it while I’m here?’
‘It was only your job to be at the cemetery, Tate. It was never meant to extend beyond that.’
“but my job was to make sure Henry Martins made it
here, and those shovel marks on the coffin suggest otherwise.’
She sighs, and I realise she knew all along she would never be putting up much of an argument.
‘Put these on,’ she says, and hands me some gloves and a face
mask. ‘The smell isn’t going to be pretty. But you better not tell anybody you were here for this.’
We shift a little closer to the coffin, and suddenly I don’t want to see what’s inside. This is a topsy-turvy world where corpses bubble up from lakes and coffins are full of empty answers. I pull on the latex gloves and slip the mask over my nose and mouth. If Henry Martins is inside, his fingernails may or may not be blue.
If he isn’t inside and the coffin is empty, then Martins is one of the bodies on the bank of the lake, or deep within its belly.
Tracey sprays some lubricant into the hinges before shifting a small crowbar into place and pushing down.
The coffin lid sticks because of simple physics. They were
designed to take people into the ground, not to bring them back out, and the structure of this coffin has been altered with all that dirt pressing down on it for the last two years. I lean some weight onto the crowbar to help. It starts to groan, then creak; then it pops open. From inside, darkness escapes, along with it the smell of long-dead flesh that reaches through the pores on my mask and right up into my sinuses. I almost gag. Tracey lifts the lid the rest of the way open. I stand next to her and stare inside.
It isn’t at all what either of us is expecting.
chapter five