Chapter 5
Idon’t leave the mortuary, though I absolutely should. I’m not scheduled to work at Kindred Pines tonight, and I could go home and go back to bed to attempt another round of sleep before the sun wakes me up.
But I don’t.
I stay; waiting for Jenkins to remove Andrew Elliot’s body from the table.
I help a little, though he scowls at me the whole time, and the last thing I see is the paler skin around Andrew’s middle finger on his right hand, like he’s missing a ring he always wears.
My glove strokes along the paleness before he’s zipped into the body bag.
As he’s shoved into the back of the coroner’s van, Jenkins mumbles something I refuse to listen to and Adele leaves with one last glance back at me that’s concerned and caring all at once.
“I’m fine,” I reply, answering her unspoken question.
“I need to clean up, then I’ll head home for the rest of the night.
Try to, I don’t know, salvage some sleep?
” I doubt I’ll be doing that, but it satisfies her, and I’m left standing alone on the loading dock.
Waiting for something that won’t appear tonight. Or any night, really.
My heart seems to throb harder than usual against its cage of ribs, and I sigh as I stare out at the darkness of the small town of Still Pines. This late—or early—I can’t see any lights on. No one is moving around or driving down the lonely street that’s more suburb than town.
I’m alone again.
But I never mind being alone.
This way, at least, no one is around to notice if I accidentally speak to someone who isn’t there. There’s no one around to see how my smile fades to something melancholic, or the way sometimes I just stare down at the scalpel in my hands and wonder—
No.
I won’t let myself go there again. It’s too easy to spiral. Too easy to dream of things I don’t need to be thinking of anymore. Hell, that I promised my psychiatrist I wouldn’t consider anymore.
Finally, I turn and head back inside, staring at the empty table and the supplies that I set out for embalming Andrew Elliot. Half of them have been used, and for a moment I feel just a little guilty that Jenkins is going to have to work around my preparations.
But that’s not really my problem.
“Sucks to suck,” I whisper under my breath.
It’s really not on me that Jenkins didn’t do his job in the first place.
Pulling my headphones back over my ears, I start my music once again, heading to my playlist labeled The Mortuary that’s decorated with a photo of an antique embalming set.
Maybe it makes me a nerd, and I’m fully okay if it does, but God I love learning about old embalming and preservation techniques.
From the nose hook to the scalpel, all of it is interesting as hell. To me, anyway.
With “Middle of the Night” drowning out anything else that could possibly be happening, I work methodically and meticulously.
It’s easy to lose myself in the music and the routine of putting things up.
It’s easy, and mostly mindless. Pick up one thing and put it back.
Dump any unused chemicals back into bigger storage jugs, and clean the table with a disinfectant that makes the place smell of bleach.
It’s only by chance that I catch the computer screen lighting up with an alert.
I can’t hear anything, after all, and the room is bright enough that the notifications usually go unnoticed if I’m not looking right at the screen.
I pause, setting down the wipes I’ve been using and move to look at the laptop screen.
It’s always open and usually on, thanks to Cecil’s weird, tech-phobic fear of not being able to turn the old thing on if it goes off.
Though by this point, I’m sure he’s fried the battery badly enough that he’s right, and that it wouldn’t turn on again without being connected to the power cord.
“The heck?” I murmur as I bend over the lower part of the double-tier desk. The notification comes up again, coming from the motion detector outside at the loading dock.
Did Jenkins forget something? God, I hope he hasn’t come back just to chew me out for being stupid or making a mistake.
Anxiety coils in my stomach, becoming something like nausea.
“Fuck.” The word is a soft sigh as I slip my headphones down to my neck, the music going soft while I move to the door of the loading dock.
“Hey, did you forget—”
The light flicks on when I walk outside, but there’s no one there. Just an empty loading bay with no cars, and old metal railings that really need to be replaced.
The warm August night is alive with the sound of crickets and frogs, prompting me to just stand there and stare at the darkness around the mortuary.
Maybe it was an insect flying too close to the motion detector.
Cecil has said that happens sometimes. Especially if something makes a nest up there. While I haven’t seen it happen in the last few months that I’ve been here, that doesn’t mean anything. Especially since there’s definitely nobody here.
Shaking my head, I turn and push my way back inside, putting my headphones on again. Though as I work, I can’t help sneaking looks at the computer, making me go a bit slower with how I’m distracted.
I’m putting the last few things away—a new box of eye caps I found stashed with the sewing kit and a cleaned trocar—when I catch it again. Just barely, and just from the corner of my eye. I see the notification pop up in the corner before sliding off the screen.
Motion detected: Loading dock
Automatically, I head back outside, pushing through the door to find the light already on, as though I’ve just missed whatever triggered it in the first place.
This time I head straight for the light and sensor, going up on my toes to see if I can see anything that would cause it to go off multiple times tonight.
But as far as I can see, there’s nothing there. No sign of insects or a bird, or any kind of nest. Just the light and the sensor that’s blinking red. “This is ridiculous,” I murmur as I reach upward, fingers straining as if I could reach the light that’s at least eight feet off the ground.
“Do you really think you know better than the coroner?”
My fingers twitch in surprise, though that feeling fades quickly. I don’t turn around. I don’t need to. The ambiguously masculine voice behind me knows he has my attention. Though I remind myself this isn’t real. No matter how much it feels like it is.
When I turn, I see Andrew Elliot standing behind me, his brown hair a mess above the bruising around his throat. He’s also naked, which I don’t really expect, but I suppose it’s not really a surprise to see a body I’d been working on to be without clothes.
“If you were really here, then you’d want me to be thorough. If you were murdered, then you deserve vengeance. But we both know you aren’t here, Andrew,” I insist with a sigh as I study his blotchy, pale face.
He doesn’t respond to that at first. He tilts his head a little, straight into the floodlight above me that lends clarity to the blown blood vessels in his eyes from being strangled.
Then Andrew glances around the loading dock like he’s trying to see what set off the motion alarms as well.
But obviously, he won’t see anything I can’t.
“Think it’s a bird or some shit?” he drawls, his voice changing slightly from deeper to more youthful.
This isn’t new, either. When I don’t know what the person sounded like, my brain attempts to fill in the gaps by trying different voices until settling on one. Like it’s looking for a proper fit.
“What else could it be?” Looking around again proves fruitless.
There’s nothing here for me to find. The light only extends so far into the back parking lot, and beyond that all I can see are the shadows of trees and peaks of a few houses across the street.
“There’s no one else here. Just me and, well, not really you.
” I roll my eyes at the specter of Andrew Elliot, not at all enthused by his presence here.
Not that he seems to mind my irritation, or the fact he’s intruding. His grin grows wider, and his eyes shift to something more menacing. “Wouldn’t that just be the cherry on top of everything, Eleanor?” he asks, the sound of my real name even from a hallucination making my stomach twist.
“Nell,” I correct automatically, but I don’t have any sway over hallucinations, unfortunately. Somehow, my brain always seems to work against me when it comes to them. “You know I hate it when you call me Eleanor.”
Andrew Elliot wouldn’t know that. Not the real one. But this one knows everything that I do, and nothing else.
He just smiles and I look around again, as if I’ll see something that I didn’t see before. But there really isn’t anything. No movement. No reason for the lights to come on and flood the parking lot with white hot LED illumination.
Just me. Just Andrew.
Just the empty dark that I feel better existing in than any light of day.
“Maybe you weren’t murdered,” I admit finally. “Seems like someone else was with you, though. That bite went almost all the way through your tongue. And it wasn’t from your teeth. Do you think—” My question cuts off when I turn to find the loading dock completely empty now.
“Well, fuck you too,” I grumble. Then, a little louder. “And don’t come back without some clothes on. You’re not my type.”
I’m only bold enough to speak openly to my ghosts when I’m alone.
Otherwise, I’d never do it on purpose. The last thing I need is people realizing—again—that I probably need more mental help than the United States healthcare system can provide.
But when I’m alone, I let myself indulge in this little guilty pleasure.
After all, the ghosts are the only thing that make me feel less alone, unless she shows up to ruin it all like she does once in a while.
But I refuse to think about that. I push thoughts of family members I won’t put a face or name to out of my head, knowing that if I think too much about them, then she really will show up to ruin my year.
I blink once. Then again, and realize I’m just stupidly standing here in the middle of the night, on the loading bay of a mortuary when I need to be finishing up my work.
“Fuck.” Just like always. My hands come up and jerk my headphones back over my ears, letting my playlist take over as I head back into the mortuary to finish my work and hope the motion light stops going off.