The Dead (The Thaumaturge Series Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Dead

  Cal Matthews

  Copyright © 2015 Cal Matthews

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons and places, except those that exist in the public domain, are unintentional and entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the author.

  Edited by Annetta Ribken. You can find her at www.wordwebbing.com

  Cover Art by Natasha Snow © 2015

  Dedication

  For D.J. N.

  Always for you.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the amazing Annetta Ribken, for your thoughtful critiques and invaluable advice. I feel privileged to have worked with you.

  Thank you to Marguerite Floyd, my talented and timely copy editor.

  Thank you to Natasha Snow, for the gorgeous cover.

  Thank you to my long-suffering but always supportive best friend and husband.

  ‘Till the wheels fall off, babe.

  Thank you to my mom, for her unwavering support and love.

  Chapter One

  They brought me the dead girl ten minutes before closing time. I let them in with reluctance, frowning as the blood and slush slicked over the floor I had just mopped.

  “Put her back there,” I said, motioning to the back of the shop. I looked longingly out at my truck, half buried under fresh snow. My breath plumed out into the crisp air and the palm of my hand burned from the touch of the icy glass door. The ride home would be a cold one. I closed the door and locked it. I pulled the chain on the blinking “open” sign and shut the blinds tight.

  The three of them stood awkwardly behind me, the corpse slung between them. I gave them a cursory once over, but I had learned not to look too closely. I disliked recognizing these faces later.

  Two teenagers - a boy, a girl - and an older man. The girl wept steadily, a hand clasped over her mouth and her eyes fixed on the small body held clumsily between the other two. The boy just stared with the glazed bewilderment of shock. Both of them had blood on their hands and coats, but the boy even had it in his hair and smeared across his face. I could have made assumptions based on that, but he looked like he was going to pass out. The man addressed me first.

  “They said you could help,” he said, his voice gravelly, almost breaking. It sounded almost like an accusation.

  “Put her back there,” I said, pointing to the large butcher-block counter. I watched them haul the body through the store and struggle to heave it up onto the table. I saw right away the body belonged to a girl - the long hair and the skinny legs clad in multi-colored tights gave it away. In spite of her small stature, they weren't having an easy time moving her. The boy kept jerking his hands away, like he could hardly stand to touch her. As I watched, they arranged her on the table and one of her arms flopped to the side, making them all jump. I wasn't without sympathy, but come on - getting her up there wasn't my job.

  I fixed the old man with a steady gaze. He was nearing his sixties, from the look of him. Or the years hadn’t been kind. He looked like an aging bulldog, all jowls and runny eyes. He breathed heavily through pale lips ringed by a thick beard. The beard matched the thinning, salt and pepper hair clinging to his sweaty brow. When he wiped his hands on his flannel coat, I saw the ragged patches on the elbows. He looked like every other rural Montana guy I knew, minus all the blood.

  “She your daughter?” I asked, though I knew she wasn’t.

  His eyes shot to the boy and back to me in quick flashes.

  “My boy’s girlfriend,” he said. “They were out at the reservoir “

  I raised one hand. “I don’t need to know,” I said. “Let me look at her.”

  They stepped away from me as I drew close, giving me space more out of fear than respect. Carefully, I pulled the soft knit scarf away from her face.

  She was several hours dead and only just starting to stiffen, her eyes open and her jaw gone tight. For a moment I couldn’t see what had killed her; plenty of blood soaked her clothes and hands, but no wounds on her face or neck that I could see. It wasn’t until I pulled open her coat that I saw that her stomach gaped open and her guts trailed half-outside of her, like a puddle of chewed-up meat.

  “Whoa!” I drew back with a hiss, and then let out a small, nervous laugh. The small crowd around me shuffled a bit, moving uneasily. They exchanged glances, getting nervous, wondering if they had made a mistake bringing her to me and if I was going to be a problem. They all wondered that.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Surprised me.” I took a deep breath, then another, and looked back at her stomach, at the globs of Dinty Moore stew that had once been her organs. “I need a few materials,” I said to the old man, my voice louder than I intended, making him jump again.

  “You – you can fix her?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said simply. “But it will cost you.”

  I tried to say that as gently as possible, but it still came out a little harsh. We looked at each other for a moment, he and I, and there was accusation in his eyes now for real, and anger too, but mostly panic. Because she was dead, and obviously if she stayed that way there were going to be real problems. But they always blamed me, at least for a little while. Like I was the asshole for capitalizing on my one fucking marketable talent.

  He nodded finally. His son stared at me with an open mouth, and the girl made strangled huffing noises, trying hard to get herself under control. I wondered which one of them had known about me, which one had heard the rumors and given them some consideration. I wondered how long these three had argued while the dead girl grew cold in their car before they finally caved and decided I was better than the police.

  I nodded back at him and moved to the shelves along the side of my store, pulling down jars and gathering various items. I had already turned off the front lights by the time they showed up. The only illumination was from the office, and the gentle blue glow from the under shelf lighting. I didn’t need light to see what I grabbed. I knew this place by touch and memory, every jar, every box.

  They watched in silence, even the girl quieting down, her sobs turned down to soft hiccups. I felt no looks pass between them now. I had their full attention.

  “Step back, please,” I said, coming back to stand beside the dead girl with my arms laden. They did, moving together as they did so, shoulder to shoulder as though to present a united front.

  “She’ll be okay?” the young Romeo asked suddenly. I looked at him, his face so pale even his lips were bloodless. I recognized him, I realized, noticing the scattering of birthmarks along the left si
de of his neck, like a constellation. I watched them ripple as he struggled to swallow. He worked the window at the drive-through burger joint.

  “She’s dead,” I said to him harshly, and he made a tiny, breathless noise. The old man put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and the girl gave another sob, her face crumpling like a tissue.

  “But I can fix it,” I said, and smiled.

  I laid a circle of salt around her, murmuring prayers as I did so. “For protection from evil spirits” I said to them, and their eyes went wide.

  “You mean – something else could come back instead?” the old man asked, an interesting assumption, and the first time I noted any sort of trepidation.

  “Best to be safe,” I replied, and spread rosemary over her as well, sprinkling it liberally on her torso. I tried to ignore how the herbs settled down in the globby, congealed blood, like I was seasoning a piece of pot roast. That was not a visual I wanted to take home with me. Everyone else carefully looked away from that big red gash with the coiled tubes of intestines hanging out. Fortunately, the light was dim enough to ignore those mounds of guts. You could almost dismiss them as abstract shapes. Almost.

  I'd had the girl light some candles, and they made a soft white glow in the room. Next I lit a bundle of sage and wafted the aromatic smoke around the room, paying particular attention to the doorways.

  “Was she Catholic?” I asked the boyfriend. It was a safe bet; most people around here were.

  “I don’t know, I think so,” he stammered, looking around wildly as though someone else could give him the answer.

  “Her folks go to Saint Lawrence’s,” the old man supplied, which was what I’d expected. My family did, too. My mom guilted me into going every Christmas. I’d probably stood in the communion line with this poor dead girl. I just nodded though, keeping my face blank, and took a crucifix from a velvet pouch, laying her stiffening fingers over it. Her lifeless limbs remained pliable enough to move around, but the rubbery texture of dead flesh made me want to throw up. I let go of her hand as quickly as I could.

  This was part of the show, part of what they paid for. Ritual put them at ease, even rituals that they didn’t understand. The candles, the herbs, the burning sage – all of it part of a production. I had found out the hard way that it had to look like work. But I needed none of it.

  “I need you to be completely quiet now,” I told them. “Don’t talk to me, don’t talk to each other. It could go wrong, you understand?” More bullshit. There could have been a marching band playing a rousing rendition of “Tequila” and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference.

  They nodded, though, obedient and slack-jawed.

  “What was her name?” I asked.

  The boy swallowed heavily, his throat working hard to get the spit down. “Aubrey,” he said.

  “Okay. Quiet now.”

  I turned back to her, laying rose quartz crystals in a line across her chest.

  “Aubrey,” I whispered, spreading my hand across the ruin of her belly.

  “Come back now, Aubrey,” I said, feeling only vaguely ridiculous. “I humbly pray, come back to us from the Gates of Heaven, to this Earth where you are still needed. Aubrey, come back now by the will of the saints and all the archangels. God our Father, light the way, in company with Christ, to bring Aubrey home.”

  I didn't always say the same thing. I tailored it, as best I could, to each person. Because I was all about customer service.

  No more needed to be said. My audience stood as silent and as still as the dead themselves, frozen in fascination and horror. I bowed my head over the dead girl, like a genuflection, almost touching my forehead to hers. And I opened the part of myself that could work this magic, that could reach into Death’s very heart. I wouldn’t say it was like entering a trance – rather than sinking into a deep meditative state, I felt myself lifted. I could see a little farther from up there.

  I turned my attention to the ghastly wound on her stomach. It wasn’t the worst I had seen. Gunshots were bad – one so bad that I hadn’t been able to help. Car wrecks were usually pretty awful, with body parts smashed and torn away. The one house fire I’d attended had been unsalvageable. Sometimes I couldn’t heal the body, and sometimes the soul didn’t want to come back. I couldn’t blame them for that.

  But this one was still pretty unpleasant, the loose entrails falling out of the open gash below her naval, the jagged lips of the serrated skin. Generally, I didn't ask questions, but I couldn’t help but wonder how the hell this poor girl ended up disemboweled after an after school drive to lovers' lane. I would say that I couldn’t have imagined the scared-shitless boyfriend doing anything to her, but truthfully, nothing surprised me. Humans were animals, after all. We bite.

  Motes swum in the air in front of my face, tiny reflective shimmers of light that may or may not have existed on the lower planes. As I watched, they came together into a clump, the glowing pinpricks crawling over and around each other as though they were alive. The clump condensed, then stretched, and I lifted a hand to guide the clump down onto the girl’s belly.

  From there I only had to guide the process, lending my strength as the light spread over her core. My customers - for want of a better word - couldn’t see it, but they could see the slow crawl as her intestines retracted into her abdominal cavity. They could hear the damp squelching noise her entrails made as they stitched themselves back together. The layers of her skin – pulled back and exposed like a dissected frog – began to shiver just slightly. I applied a little more force, ignoring the resulting bloom of pain in my left temple.

  All my senses were focused on her, the lower world reducing to a faded blur. I heard my own heart beating, making my headache throb a little in tandem. My eyes burned, but I was seeing and not seeing at the same time, as though I was simultaneously looking through a microscope and from very far away.

  Her skin loosened suddenly, the rigor mortis giving way to living cells, and I watched – supervised – as her guts packed themselves neatly back into the body cavity, as her skin reached across the gaping wound. With a sound like a kiss, it met and melded together. I pressed her stomach with my fingers, felt a pulse and a shake, and then the steady and familiar beat of blood. The body under my fingers warmed, softened, and then took a breath.

  A chorus of gasps burst from behind me, and a startled cry, but I couldn’t spare any attention to them now. The light was dissipating, coming apart, showering over her and melting where it touched her skin. Her fingers, lying over the rosary, gave a twitch.

  I took a breath, bowing my head to rest for a minute. My head throbbed in time with my heartbeat. A wave of nausea washed over me.

  And having restored the body, I then reached for the dead girl’s soul.

  She – the dead girl, Aubrey – wasn’t far off, and easy to reach. I felt her flutter close like a moth. When I extended my touch to her, she grasped with firm determination. Sweat trickled down my back and pooled in my armpits. My breath came in shallow gasps. Pain flared in the center of my chest and I ruthlessly trampled it down, keeping my focus on the task at hand.

  Touching the spirit brought me up higher, into a place of warmth and light. The dark shop faded a bit, the edges blurring and everything went slightly out of focus. I thought I saw stars, somewhere high above me, a brilliant spray of them in an ink-blank sky. It was so beautiful up here. So peaceful. The soul huddled beside me, and with some reluctance, I dropped down a bit, keeping the way open.

  I pulled her in, coaxing her gently towards her own body. She fluttered tentatively, confused and unsure. Despite my general annoyance at the living customers, I felt an almost overwhelming tenderness for this poor, piteous soul, so lost and alone.

  “Here,” I said out loud, pressing my hand over her heart. She trailed along behind my mental touch, her first hesitant probings growing stronger as she recognized the body she’d left behind.

  With the spirit lingering, waiting to be let in, I released my hold on both
of them, settling firmly back into my body. I couldn’t see the soul anymore, but I knew it worked when the dead girl sat up and screamed.

  The old man handed me a wad of sweaty cash, which I accepted without comment or counting it. He couldn’t stop staring at me, and I thought about reaching out to shake his hand, just to watch him recoil.

  “Thanks again,” he said gruffly, glancing out the front door of the shop, where Aubrey walked on shaky legs to the car, her friends supporting her on either side. “I'll go to the bank tomorrow and get the rest to you.”

  “It's all right,” I said softly. “I take payments.”

  He gave me a long, measured look, all traces of hostility gone now. “Thanks.”

  I gave him a nod, eager to get them out so that I could clean up and go home.

  He pulled open the door, then stopped on the welcome map, glancing nervously at me. A gust of cold wind curled around him, brushing against the sweat on my face and I shivered.

  “Uh, you won’t say anything?” he asked.

  “About what?” I said, giving him a significant look and he nodded once, firmly.

  “See ya around then,” he said, and followed after the kids, not looking back.

  “No, you won’t,” I replied, and locked the door behind him.

  Chapter Two

  By the time I got home to the trailer park, my windshield wipers swished in overtime, just barely keeping up with the wet, fast falling snow. I carefully eased my truck over the speed bump and past the sign that read “Children at play.” It wasn’t late, just past six, but nights come early in November in Montana. Only a few porch lights remained on at the neighbors.’ Televisions flickered through cheap vertical blinds, but it was so still that I might as well have been the last person on earth.