FINALE:
WHO SHALL I SAY IS CALLING?

 

"There it seemed to burn, and I with it,
And so hot was that imagined blaze
That my sleep could not help but be broken."

--Dante Aligheri, Purgatorio

 

 

It wasn't supposed to end like this.
I wasn't supposed to end like this.
I wasn't supposed to end.

But everything ends in its time. Without endings, nothing can begin. All life involves learning to let go, and the Final Exam means the most of all...

 

My phone started ringing at 0315 on the day I was supposed to return to provisional duty with a very long note from that goof Dr. McQuiddick, who told me to just take the damn Valium when I couldn't calm down.

I hate Valium, and all benzodiazepenes, for the rage-filled hangovers they usually generate in me. Like this one. I mashed the ON button, silencing Ralph Stanley's great a capella tune "Old Death".

That was the ringtone I'd assigned to Rich's number. (Maura got Edith Piaf, Floryan "The Pennsylvania Polka", and so on...)

Every time I heard that Ralph Stanley song, it meant it was time to suit up, boot up and maybe even throw on exam gloves, a slicker, a splatter-shield about the face like some sort of bizarre Darick Roberts-style riot cop in a graphic novel, if I knew any of what I was walking into...

Time to charge out the door with my laptop, dropping my car keys six times on the way. Time to summon my own ringtone as soon as the damn engine turned over and the stereo came on: an old Ministry album called "The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste" that was so guitar-heavy the neighbors groaned in their sleep when I rolled out, even when I had all my windows up.

Time to not think about the flap of a black duster like demon wings, or what waited for me at the other end of the long mile we trod, he and I, Ego and Id, Ike and Mike, Wanna and Gotta...

"Rich?"

Heavy silence on the phone. "Schiya, I need you down here right now." He gave the address. "That new fire marshall, whatshisname, Chinaski, he's been here and gone already. Chiefie's got more ropes around this site than the Orpheum downtown, and that..." He cleared his throat. "Photographer, she's already back t'th' station house, thank Christ. Just us and the cops."

I took a deep breath, trying to peel my tongue from the roof of my mouth. It almost worked. "The fuck you need me for then? I was havin' this dream--"

I heard Rich waiting, making that weird little bark in the back of his throat that meant I shouldn't laugh now, it's not professional, but God dammit...

"I have no doubt of that, kid, and you start tellin' me about whoever it was in your dream and what they were doin' to ya, you and me are gonna go. Hurry on down here. I'm sittin' on a decedent for you."

"Why?" I heard myself respond from somewhere (as the wired-up-backward part of me that runs to a crisis and not away from it responds to all emergiencies). "Is he gonna hatch?"

That time, Rich went ahead and laughed. "You know, a lotta folks see you as my future replacement? I could... ahh, disabuse them... of that notion... pretty quick. This ain't... this ain't instructional, Schiya. I'm..."

Now he wasn't laughing at all. "Floryan told me everything a few minutes ago. You know, I been workin' with Floyan Kowalczyk since Christ was a kid,and I... I never saw that old Polack with no shirt on? Never knew he even had any tattoos but the ones on his arms. I... I got a science background. This kinda shit makes my head explode. It's not my first. I seen plenty, up the Mountain. This is just the weirdest."

He waited. "Yeah, new one's one of those. One of yours. We got another one for your Book of the Dead, there. Are you... gonna be okay?"

I felt my eyes go wide and fill with tears.

"On my way."

I was, too. And I never dropped my keys once.

 

 

617 Annabel Street was a little bungalow near the river, down at the long end of Wayne Alley. The winds off the river were freaky that night. The tenements and leaning, rotting old Canal-era wrecks up and down that waterfront block all felt wrong, but 617 Annabel felt wrong beyond repair.

I was smelling all the usual smells from a structure fire as I rolled up and bailed out: the toxic stew of carbons and chlorides and polyglot nastiness that comes when half a bazillion disparate compounds that aren't supposed to melt and mix ignite and do so under the most savage conditions possible. Once a flame gets loose, it likes to stick around and do as much as it can, because it knows it only has one shot.

As I thought about that, the thought gave way to thoughts of several other kinds. But Rich was standing before me like a brick shithouse in an old loden coat, a Marlboro parked in his mustache. Those big square bifocals he hadn't upgraded since his wife died made his eyes unreadable behind their smoked lenses.

"Nice to see you back," he said laconically. "We'll go have a beer whenever something that ain't This is hap... Aw, hell, I could use a beer right now, if Sam would ever open up the Rattler before Happy Hour. Fuck a stuck duck, kid, this one is over my head..." Seeing a land mammal of Rich's size look that scared was in no way reassuring. "Literally."

Two-thirds of the bungalow was still standing, and there was a front door and most of a roof. He followed me in, as we lifted up the tape, and said hello to Jay Reade and the other Powersburg cops still bagging things and writing paperwork. (Jay looked like he wondered what I was doing back on duty, but he's got a lot of heart and knew better than to pick the scab.)

Everything was still steaming, and the stink was god-awful. We had respirators to use whenever we wanted them, but I didn't see OSHA anywhere in sight, so I skipped it.

I really managed to fake sanity a lot better than I let on in those writings. Truly. Even to the shrinks. I just... I just snapped, that's all. Like there was something coming that was so big I couldn't understand it, and couldn't make anyone else see it either, and drove myself nuts trying to cough up something someone could put in a report...

It's like a house in a nightmare, I thought as I followed Rich to the back bedroom, past a flotilla of cindery cardboard boxes spilling melted junk every which way but home. Like Heinlein's crooked house, where no angle added up to anything our third-dimensional minds could comprehend...

 

 

The little boy was six. He was hiding under his bed and he was six. By the time I got there, he wasn't under his bed any more, but on a rubber sheet. Waiting. Waiting for me to look at him. Waiting to tell me a story.

The little boy was six. His tweaker bitch of a mom lit their house on fire while he was in bed and took off in a red Toyota. Mother left two IDs, four Social Security numbers, enough black foil and little stem pipes with the blown glass ball on the end to see her either in jail or treatment for most of the rest of her life...

And the stench of gasoline everywhere in the house, so many windows open that the fumes dissipated... funny. Half the house was toast, a third of it melted, some apparently exploded, and...

Without palpating the esophagus, or even putting on my glasses, I already knew what toxic smoke inhalation looked like. The kid's lips were black, the flawless marble freckle-dusted cheeks as gray as the storm outside that fell too little and too late to extinguish much of anything.

The house looked to have last been renovated around the same time Rich got new glasses, and before that probably pre-Maura and almost pre-me. Most of the furniture in that dump still had price tags from the Salvation Army Thrift Store.

Factory Recall City. PCB Central. Asbestos in the pipes and kitchen tile and a hundred different kinds of pathogenic flame retardants that would kill every child I could ever produce (if I even wanted to).

But I could have given this child a much better home than the one I saw burned down around him. There were too few toys here, and too many empty liquor bottles. Even under the black smoke that had come and gone, the plaster in the walls stank of desperation and generic cigarettes and words you can't take back.

In houses like that, Death is a merciful caseworker, come round on a bad night to spirit away a child from a world full of weeping. Haya, hoveh, v'yihyeh.

The kid was tattooed from head to foot with a story I couldn't tell.

Another America, another Pennsylvania, another Callaight County. Another Powersburg, in the multiplicity of them I see across Time in my dreams, some nights when I dream too deep. There was no way this would fit on a minidisk, or half a ream of paper, or by human gift of tongues...

I saw Rich perched in a tree in his own backyard, firing his beloved 1940s-vintage Colt revolver at something that crawled up out of Hell onto his back deck. There were others out there with Rich, too, kids... and something that looked like a walking corpse held together with an Erector-set. Something that stood between Rich and the thing on the deck, and stared the top-hatted bogeyman down.

Something that looked like it was about to call the bogeyman by its name, just as Rich took a bullet in the lung and fell from the tree...

It was too much. The ink writhed and undulated on the skin, the images, the word-balloons, the story itself flipping forward, changing...

I closed my eyes, and rubbed them, hoping that when I opened them again this would make sense. I did. It didn't. Life never does.

"What have you brought us?" Rich croaked behind me, his Central Pennsylvania twang taking on a life of its own in the extremity of his terror. "Schiya, we need to call a priest, or somethin'. That... that's me. Me! Can't you see, there, shootin' at... Jesus, Christ, that's that old man that Maura used to have nightmares about when she was a little girl, just like she drew'eem, but..."

His jaw was hanging down, exposing his worn white teeth. "My gorsh, no offense, but I thought you was just goin' nuts!"

 

Then something went BANG, and I tried to duck.

I wasn't quick enough, but I...

 

 

09 FEB 2003 0359 APPROX
CAUCASIAN MALE AGE 23
MIELNIK, SCHIYA JAROSLAV
5'8", 168 LB
HAIR BLK
EYES GRN
PA DR LIC# 6510229-MS...
[...]

 

Ducked, anyway, and watched the sliver of glass as it didn't stop. Rich rolled to the floor and tried to sweep my knee with his fist and take me down with him, but it was too late...

 

CAUSE OF DEATH:

 

I didn't watch the sliver long. Not with that eye, which extinguished, and...

 

AT 0358 APPROX WATER HEATER IN FRONT CLOSET RUPTURED AND APPARENTLY EXPLODED. CHEMICALS ON SITE USED IN METHAMPHETAMINE MANUFACTURE, POSSIBLY STORED IN CLOSET AS WELL. INVESTIGATION ONGOING. SEE PPD CASE FILE#0301519-MS

 

No pain no pain all gauzy gray-white light, the whoosh of letting go--

 

FATAL PUNCTURE, LEFT EYE
4" X 1.5" OBLONG FRAG AIRBORNE GLASS
FROM WINDOW NEAREST CLOSET
PENETRATED LATERUL RECTUS TO OPTIC CHIASM...

 

I was standing. I had on my best black suit.

I was standing there ten feet away from me, and I was lying on the floor, but it was someone else now, melting, rendering down into a small child as I watched, an embryo, a zygote, a cell, a sperm, an egg...

 

DEPUTY MEDICAL EXAMINER MIELNIK PRONOUNCED DOA 0400 APPROX.

 

And the kid, oh God the kid... Off in the living world, the one next door, I saw the tattoos on him vanish like squid ink in a sea-storm, out, gone and away.

I saw Rich working over me on the floor. He didn't notice. I saw him try to start CPR, in the middle of a circle of those cops.

And then I saw him stop.

Somehow, I knew then that my whole Book of the Dead was blank, all accounts reset to zero, every debt satisfied, every payment...

Balanced. My heart felt as light as a feather, as bright as the hottest part of this horrid arson that had just washed me clean. Someone cleared his throat.

I heard the thud of wingtip heels on melted carpet. I felt his fetid breath fan my neck...

 

****REMARKS:

 

But it wasn't fetid at all. It smelled like Black Jack chewing gum, I mused wonderingly, as the pale boy with no tattoing-gun anywhere threw his arms around my neck and hugged me, and cried. A lot.

I didn't understand, but he wasn't long about it. (He was long about giving my hand back, though, heheh.)

 

AUTOPSY UNREMARKABLE. DECEDENT IN ABOVE AVERAGE HEALTH, DESPITE PREV. MH HISTORY SELF AFFIRMED. HAD SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED THERAPY FOR STRESS-INDUCED EPISODE DUE TO LACK OF BASIC SELF CARE AND EXHAUSTIVE, GENIUS-LEVEL FORENSIC WORK; SEE FILE "BOOK OF THE DEAD". MURDERS, CLOSED.

 

"Sssssh," Death's henchman whispered. "We're all candles in the hurricane now. I was trying to mark the most tragic cases for you, so you'd remember what they looked like. I was sure if I weirded you out enough before you died, you'd be ready..."

My hand's didn't want to move, though my heart wanted me to sock him. Hard.

"Why?" I sobbed. It was all I could get out.

He looked uncomfortable, fidgeting with his skinny black tie. I glanced at the clip, and snickered. It was some kind of company tag, made of old brass, with tiny ornate letters: DEATH, INC.

"My orders came from Big Man and Boss Lady. I hate this shit. You think I had something to do with it? Please. I just want to get done and go goof off. I've been trying to get the tow-rope around you for over a year, so you'd come when I called you, maybe, gods forbid, adjust to the Job when it was finally your turn to take the test and--"

But I got that part just fine.

"He sees the light," Death's henchman rasped, studying my face, turning this way and that like he was reading a holographic record of every wrinkle around my eyes and how it got there.

"Yes, you took to this well. You were in a state of grace when you died, and..." He snapped his fingers, smirking. "It was seeing the tattoos go away on that poor little boy that made you do it. Sorry, thinking out loud. I just won a couple of bets."

He talked too much, but under the circumstances it behooved me to keep listening. "What faith were you, Russian Orthodox?"

 

DEPUTY M.E. SCHIYA MIELNIK DIED IN THE LINE OF DUTY. LIKE A MAN. RECOMMENDING FOR POSTUMOUS CITATION THROUGH POWERSBURG PD. (EFFICACIOUS METHOD OF ASSEMBLING PERSONNEL FOR DECEDENT'S WAKE AND FUNERAL.)

 

I shook my head. "Reform Jewish. What, you didn't know?"

He beamed, and I ground my teeth at the way he bit his lower lip to hold the laugh, like some kind of weird tantra. "Please. You ask too much of your civil servants. Somethimes I like to learn things through conversation, Schiya. Anyway, who the hell wants to know everything?"

 

HE WAS MY FRIEND.

 

In that moment, I understood my people's sense of humor. The more it hurt, the more I laughed.

Tap. Tap. Tap. The tip of that severe black wingtip was the only thing making any noise.

"Hurry up, please. It's time."

 

FINAL NOTE: AT THE TIME OF DEATH, AND AFTERWARD,

 

I let him lead me by the arm.

 

DECEDENT HAS NO TATTOOS OF ANY KIND.

 

I was the one looking where we were going, out another door that no one saw. Overhead, the ripe aubergine light of a witchy Goya sky pulsed down from far above, full of nearby stars whose like I'd ever seen.

 

CALLAIGHT COUNTY CORONER RICHARD MALLORY

*******RETIRED*******

 

 

THE END

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Mercury Retrograde Press.

Copyright © 2010 by Edward Morris

First Electronic Edition—published 2009/2010

ISBN 978-0-9819882-9-0