CHAPTER 22 SPARE PARTS #2
“I want to be what I was and I don’t care what I have to do to get it!” Camille shouts. “You will do this for me! You will restore my body and you will do it as many times as I order it!”
My dad shakes his head. “I won’t.” He sets the book on the platform near the woman’s head and he gently touches her forehead. “You will never be the way you were before. You don’t even deserve to be. My father made a mistake reanimating all of you. You are abominations.”
A pair of hands clamp down on my shoulders and suddenly I’m being pulled violently from my hiding spot.
I’d been so focused on my dad I hadn’t realized the last man to enter the room, the one who brought the book in, had moved around and spotted me.
He wrenches my arm behind my back as he shoves me forward.
The tall figure at the altar turns around but doesn’t raise their head. I still can’t see their face.
“Meka?” my dad asks, confused. “Morris, let her go right now!”
I shove Morris and he lets go of me. As I turn, I get a good look at him and realize he’s the blond guy who’d been in the movie theater with me and Noah and who’d attacked us at home. I run to my dad and he puts his arms around me.
“What are you doing here?” he asks as he takes my face in his hands. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Of course she should!” says Camille. She reaches out and grabs me by the wrist. Her icy cold fingers dig into my skin. “It’s a family reunion, in more ways than one, isn’t that right, Jonathan?”
I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean but I don’t care. Camille reaches into the folds of her robe and produces a knife. She presses it to my throat and I almost stop breathing.
“Don’t!” my dad yells. He steps forward but the other reanimates hold him back.
“I’ll kill her,” Camille growls. “And I will see to it that your other—what did you call us, abominations?—are unmade.”
Unmade.
The look on my dad’s face as Camille says these words scares me.
“Dad?” I ask, my throat tight.
“They cannot be unmade,” my dad says.
“You think we don’t know what is in that book?” Camille asks angrily. “You think your forebears didn’t leave an out?”
“Nothing like that exists in the book,” Dad says. “You can’t even read it! You don’t know what it contains! That power lies with me and me alone.”
Camille grabs my hair and yanks my head back. “Not you alone,” she shouts. “Isn’t that right, Meka? You’ve got something special in you too, don’t you?”
My dad steps toward me.
“We know all about that night in the hearse,” Camille whispers against my ear. “We know what you did. We know why your funeral home has the reputation it does. And she’s a mortuary assistant? It’s perfect.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I say, but as the words leave my mouth I know they are a lie.
Camille laughs. “And she didn’t even know. But now, well, now things are different, aren’t they, Meka?”
Dad takes another step closer.
“Get to work!” Camille shouts. “Or I’ll cut her up so bad there won’t be anything left to reanimate.”
My dad seems to implode on himself. His shoulders roll forward and the light goes out of his eyes.
I glance toward the altar and catch a glimpse of Noah’s sneaker sticking out from behind it.
Camille presses the knife into my skin and a warm rivulet of blood dribbles down the front of my sweater.
For a second, I think it’s all over and I wonder if my dad will bring me back.
But the blood stops flowing after a few moments and the fear seated in my gut won’t let me feel any pain.
“Last chance, Jonathan,” Camille says.
“All right!” my dad screams. “I’ll do it! Please. Please don’t hurt her.”
I try to push Camille’s hand away from my neck but she’s stronger than I would have imagined. A surge of adrenaline pumps through me. Time slows to a crawl.
The man called Langan approaches and drapes a black cloak over my father’s shoulders.
My dad opens the book on the platform next to the dead woman.
Morris produces a small brass orb, the top of which opens on a hinge.
He lights whatever is inside and smoke begins to billow out in thick waves.
The smell is the same one that clung to Grandpa Redwood’s robe and it sparks something in my memory.
I know what is about to happen and it has all happened before. Everything has come back around.
Langan hands my dad a quill that looks like it’s been crafted from the feather of a raven. My dad’s gaze flits to me and in his eyes there is a solemn sort of regret, and fear.
He pages through the book, mumbling an incantation under his breath. The smoke billows and begins to fill the room. The firelight cuts odd shapes in the haze. The tall person at the altar is still unmoving and silent, a statue.
The book glows green and my hands feel like they’re burning. Camille grips me tight. She’s saying the same words as my father. She knows the incantations, but she can’t do this work herself. It’s not just about the book, it’s about my dad, it’s about us .
My dad speaks the incantation faster and his voice gets louder.
He’s almost yelling now, and the green glow of the book illuminates his face and the body of the young woman at the same time.
The haze of smoke makes everything blurry.
The tall figure at the altar shifts their weight from one foot to the other, remaining silent.
My dad presses the quill to the woman’s shoulder and when he pulls it away, the tip is soaked in thick, red-black blood.
He touches the pen to a blank page of the book.
A jolt of electricity cuts through the air and my vision goes white for a second.
My head is buzzing and the shock of it makes me stumble back.
I reach for the edge of the platform but accidentally touch the dead woman instead.
She sits straight up. Her eyes pop open and the milky-white orbs dart around wildly.
Her mouth opens and the smell of rot wafts out.
Vomit makes its way up the back of my throat.
The tall figure at the altar shifts. I think I hear whoever it is gasp.
There’s a sudden yelp and when I blink, my vision clears. Noah is out from behind the altar and is grappling with Morris.
My dad slams the book shut and picks it up as my mom rushes to him.
I remove my hand from the dead woman and she flops back onto the platform.
Camille lowers her knife just long enough for me to sidestep her.
I spin around and punch her directly in the face.
Her nose explodes in a hail of greasy pieces of waxy skin but no blood.
Pain blooms in my knuckles as she stumbles back and I dart away from her.
I reach my dad as Roger lands a glancing blow on his cheek.
My dad stumbles. Mom picks up the brass orb and cracks Roger over the head with it.
His skull collapses in on one side. I cup my hands over my mouth to stifle a scream.
Roger lurches sideways, then catches himself.
I can’t understand how he is still upright.
He turns around and when I catch a glimpse of his face through the billowing smoke I do scream.
I can’t hold back. His left eye is dangling from its socket by a bundle of twisted nerves . . . no. Strings? Wires?
My heart backflips into my throat as Roger scoops up the eye and shoves it back into his now deformed head. He is reanimated. Just like my mom. Just like Noah. He is one of them.
There is a sudden, thunderous boom, like the clap of thunder.
Everyone turns toward it at once. The tall figure who’d been standing at the altar has clapped their massive hands together sending Camille, Langan, Morris, and Roger into a strange, almost reverential silence.
They bow their heads. The one called Langan even takes a knee.
My dad pushes me and my mom behind him. Noah stands just a few feet away from me. I stare up at the hooded figure.
“What have we come to?” the figure asks.
The voice is the most awful thing I’ve ever heard. It’s less of a voice and more of a noise—grating and harsh and unnatural.
My mom cowers at my dad’s side. My dad doesn’t move but when I put my hand on his back I can feel him trembling uncontrollably. I glance at Noah, who looks like a statue—frozen where he stands.
We should be running. We should be making our way back to the car and driving away. I never wanted to be here in the first place. An anger uncoils itself inside me and I don’t try to hold it in. I step in front of my parents.
“Who are you?” I ask. “What do you want?”
The figure lifts his head slightly and while the shadow and smoke are thick, I can see the eyes—one brown, one blue, the sclera yellow and shot through with blackened veins. My blood turns to ice.
He leans toward me and the overwhelming and unmistakable stench of rotted flesh wafts into my face. “You don’t know what you are,” he says. “The truth of it all has been kept from you.”
“Don’t,” my father says quietly. “She’s just a child.”
“As am I,” the man says, his voice grating and inhuman.
“The child of a selfish and hollow man.” He steps toward me and I get a real sense of how disproportionate he is compared to every other person in the room.
He is taller than all of us, broader too.
His footfalls make the floor rumble under my feet.
He stands in front of me and I don’t look up into his face right away. I can’t.
I can feel him looming over me. Maybe this is where it all ends.
All these things have come to light only for me to die before I can fully understand them.
I swallow my fear and turn my face up to his.
He is still cloaked in shadow, the cowl and hood of his robes swallowing the important details of his face.
I can’t see him clearly but I still want to scream.
The feeling is like being in the presence of a wild animal—dangerous, unpredictable.
“If you, Meka, are the last in a long line of reanimators descended from the man who started all of this then you and I are as close as any creator and their creation could possibly be,” he says.
I want to run but I can’t make myself move.
“I have crossed oceans and endured the relentless passage of time to keep you near. Frankenstein was the doctor. The original reanimator. But I—I am the monster. His greatest creation.”