The Crescent

Chapter 6

"Hurry, he might wake up. Pull him by the ankle, not the pantleg."

"I'm trying, Carol, I'm trying."

A far-away sensation throbbed against Will's skull, his mind too muddled to identify it as pain. The voices were vaguely familiar.

"Get the door, Ruth."

"But –"

"Get the door."

There was a drawn scrape of metal and a flush of cold. He was certain he knew those voices. Ruth sounded naïve and frantic, while Carol sounded experienced and steadfast. But how do I know them? He blinked through leaden lids. A blurred pair of worn nurse heels. His eyes drooped shut as he struggled to remember where he was.

"This feels wrong."

Will became increasingly aware of his body. The throbbing in his skull sent an excruciatingly loud pulse that ricocheted pain between his temples and the back of his head. He felt himself travel jerkily across the wet floor, and with every lurch, pinpricks tore up the flesh of his back.

"Nonsense. We're just putting him in here until Dr. Baker arrives."

Baker. The stench of formaldehyde and the splinter of cold sharpened. Will clawed himself into consciousness. A groan escaped his lips. Carol gasped and Ruth let loose a small shriek.

"We can't put him in there, Carol, we just can't."

Put me where?

"It's just a few minutes," Carol snapped.

Will groaned again. He lifted his head weakly, the figures before him dark and hazy. The nurses he'd encountered earlier dragged him by his ankles. The younger one, who must be Ruth, was doe-eyed and teary, her slim frame shaking as she tentatively pulled his left ankle. Her senior, who must be Carol, maintained a vice-like grip on his right ankle, the lines of her face determined and contemptuous. Will blinked past them. Stacks of bodies loomed over either side of him like macabre mountains.

"No, no, no, no, no," he uttered. Ruth gaped at him and dropped his ankle.

"Ignore him. Hurry out of there," Carol ordered. She stepped over Will and into the light of the operating room, leaving him and Ruth in the cold of the freezer. "I said, hurry, Ruth."

Will tried to think, but the synapses in his brain wouldn't fire. He rolled onto his stomach, his camera pressing into the hollow of his chest. He attempted to pull himself up, but the movement made the morgue blear before him, and he collapsed limp against the concrete. Ruth snapped out of her stupor and hastened past Will towards the exit.

Do something. Do anything.

He threw out a hand and caught Ruth's ankle. She screamed and clasped onto the doorframe, kicking so fiercely her high heel flew off somewhere into the filled corners of the morgue.

"Please," Will said, gazing up at her. Ruth shook her head mutely, but she met his eyes. They swam with the turmoil between authority and ethics. She knows it's wrong. She knows I won't be in here for just a few minutes. "Don't leave me here. Please."

Carol stepped forward, and in one swift motion she stomped the heel of her shoe into Will's wrist. Reflexively he curled into himself, the shock spiking all the way up into his arm. He recovered too late and watched helplessly as the morgue door groaned close.

"No, please! I'll die in here!" His voice crescendoed to a tone of anguish he'd never heard from his own throat. "Please!"

The morgue door slammed shut with a resolute click. Will hefted himself up with the door handle and jangled it furiously, but to no effect. He pounded his fists against the metal until the skin of his knuckles cracked and bled. Finally, he slid to his knees and rested his head against the door. Carol said Baker would be here within minutes to turn him over to the authorities, but Will knew better. He was a liability now. Calm down. Think.

Like the operating room, the morgue had a single lightbulb near the entrance. The hum of a generator buzzed through the air, guaranteeing a cold both consistent and raw. Will cupped his hands to his mouth, his breath pouring from him in hot, visible clouds.

There was the creeping sensation that he wasn't alone. And he wasn't. Not really, he knew. Acknowledging the sensation seemed unfathomable – but worse would be to ignore it, and have his imagination conjure a scene grislier.

"I'm a journalist," he whispered, his voice a last comfort.

Will turned slowly. At first the only thing he could focus on was the single heel tipped on its side at the back of the room. Then he let his gaze travel up the saw-toothed elbows and knees layered over one another in two blasphemous heaps. His eyes fastened to the distinct color scheme of dead flesh, and realized that, while the bodies on the right had yet to be tampered with, the bodies on the left were crisscrossed in amateur stitches, some of them unraveling at their seams. The faces near the bottom of the stitched pile were caught in a slow rot, with blank eyes and half open maws. Their absence terrified Will, and he couldn't tell if he was shaking from the cold or fear.

One particular absent face caught his attention. He was on top of the untampered pile, a black man with purple beneath his eyes. His naked body splayed out like a dark starfish, and there was no mistaking him. Clyde.

Will pressed his face into the crooks of his elbows and screamed and screamed.