Nearafter (D.E.A.T.H. bk. 1)

Chapter Two [Gustav]

Gustav clasped Jenny Cartman's cold dead hand in his. 

He stared into her eyes without blinking, without shying away. Her eyes were blank and already beginning to gloss over, but he did not care. Where others saw a dead, empty gaze, he saw life and magic. He remembered how she was when she was alive. Energetic. Enthusiastic. Funny, in a good way, and kind. She was the only thing he looked forward to about school, but now she was dead. School would go back to sucking again. But at least now he would have her here, at the funeral home. His home.

He squeezed her hand at the thought.

"We get to be together," he whispered to Jenny. "Can you believe it?"

He paused and leaned an ear closer to her mouth, as if the dead girl had something to say. She, of course, could not speak. She was dead, and dead people did not speak. But Gustav chuckled as if she had just whispered something anyway.

"I know, I know," he said. "It is ironic, isn't it?"

Pause.

His smile faded.

"I know it's only for a few short weeks, Jenny.... I-I wasn't trying to bring that up," he said.

He was toying with her hand now. Her fingers were still stiff, as were her arms and legs, but later he would get to massage the rigor mortis from her joints. For now, she lay on the table, under a single white sheet, flat on her back, staring up at the darkness above. He knelt at her side, while gripping her hand and gently working her knuckles between his fingers.

He liked the texture of dead skin. Cold and rough. Somehow that brought comfort to Gustav, and it was not just because it was Jenny's cold, dead fingers that he was holding. It was that way with every corpse he touched.

He always knew that he had a less than healthy fascination with dead things. When he was younger, he used to collect the flattened carcasses of animals from the road by his home. He would carry them away, cut them open and study them.

It did not take his parents long at all to discover what it was that he was up to behind the shed, when the scalpels started going missing. He was young then, and not very good at hiding it, and not very shy about letting it all show. He learned quick that sleeping with dead animals (or dead things in general) was not normal. His mother had freaked. His dad had tried to rationalize Gustav's strange behavior.

"He just wants to be like dad," he overheard his father explain to his mother late one night. He remembered his father gripping his mother's hand at the dinner table, and he peered at them through the crack in his door. "There's nothing wrong with our son..." his father had insisted, and he had consoled his wife until she smiled, reassured. His father was good at that. He used to even joke that Gustav's fascination was more of an inherited affinity than a sick obsession.

But that was before his mother died.

His father became a different man after that. And somewhere deep down, Gustav knew that somehow, one way or another, he was to blame. His father became cold and distant. He started working alone and working late, locking himself in the embalming room until morning. Gustav would curl up by the door and fall asleep waiting for his father to come out. He always woke up in his bed though, angry that he could not stay up long enough to see his father scoop him up in his arms and carry him off to bed. Even the nights when he did awake in his father's arms on the way up the stairs to his bedroom, in the mornings the memory just always felt like a quickly forgotten dream.

Eventually he stopped falling asleep alone in the hall outside his father's work room. He stopped wanting to have anything to do with the man altogether. Gustav was a ghost at home. Gustav was a ghost at school, the creepy kind of ghost that everyone stared at and made up stories about. He was practically invisible unless he was being shoved out of the way by someone or tripped in the hall. In the work room with all the bodies was where he liked to be, where he preferred to dwell because dead people did not judge. Dead people did not make fun of him, they did not slap him around or disapprove of his activities.