James Swain - Dark Magic

“Are you leaving?” Carr asked.

“Yes.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

Peter was not going to lie, and shook his head.

“Just wait,” Carr said. “You will.”

Peter entered the hallway outside the interrogation room to find the two overweight detectives waiting for him. Both were smoking cigarettes. It was against the law to smoke inside buildings, but these were not the kind of men you said something like that to. Peter started to tell them that Carr was crazy, but stopped the words from coming out. He’d been reading minds since childhood, and not once had a person been able to substitute an image. Why should it be different for a crazy person?

“Learn anything?” one of the detectives asked.

“He told me a dead man took the knapsack from him,” Peter said.

“Hah,” the detective said.

Peter returned to the viewing room where Garrison and Perry were waiting. Garrison stood in the corner with his cell phone pressed to his face. The veins were popping on his forehead, and he looked like a candidate for a stroke.

“What’s going on now?” Peter asked.

“I’m not sure,” Perry admitted. “Garrison is talking to some cops downtown, and keeps swearing under his breath. This case is going to kill him if he’s not careful.”

Him and me both, Peter almost said.

“Did you hear what Carr told me? He said the man who stole the knapsack was a corpse.”

“Yeah, we heard him,” Perry replied. “There’s a hidden mike in the light fixture in the ceiling. It’s sensitive enough to pick up a fly buzzing around.”

“He was telling the truth.”

“Excuse me?”

“Carr was telling the truth. I looked inside his head, and saw the dead guy. That’s what caused Carr to flip out.”

Perry’s face betrayed her. She didn’t believe him. Peter wasn’t going to argue with her. When it came to the supernatural, nothing would change a nonbeliever. Perry didn’t believe in the spirit world, or that the forces of evil regularly did battle with the forces of good, often in plain view of people just like herself.

“I’m just telling you what I saw, that’s all,” Peter said.

“Right,” she said under her breath.

“I’m not making it up. Carr saw a dead person.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

Garrison had finished his call. He said something to himself that sounded like “So help me, God.” He jerked open the door, and looked back at them.

“You coming or not?” he asked.

“Where are we going?” Perry replied.

“To the morgue,” he said. “There’s a dead man on the loose.”

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York was located in Kip’s Bay, in a steel-and-glass building overlooking the East River. Garrison remained silent during the drive. He looked shaken to the core. Something had happened inside the morgue that rocked him. Peter had tried to glimpse Garrison’s thoughts to find out what it was. The wall of resistance he’d encountered was impenetrable.

They parked on the street in front of the building. Several uniformed cops stood on the sidewalk, blocking anyone from entering. Garrison identified himself and had a brief conversation with them. The cops looked equally rattled.

They went inside. The lobby looked like a cyclone had run through it. An employee stood on a ladder, righting a sign that hung on the wall. It read, LET CONVERSATION CEASE, LET LAUGHTER FLEE. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS IN HELPING THE LIVING. Looking around, Peter didn’t think that death had delighted anyone recently.

They took an elevator to the basement. Peter felt the cold return to his bones as they entered the harshly lit autopsy room, an antiseptic chamber with eight steel examining tables where the city’s dead revealed their secrets. The same cyclone had run through here as well, with broken equipment scattered about, the TV monitors used to film autopsies pulled off the walls and ripped apart. A maintenance man stood in the room’s center, mopping chemical preservative off the floor. “Can I help you?” he inquired.

“Who’s in charge here?” Garrison asked.

“That would be the chief medical examiner, Dr. Fiesler,” the maintenance man said.

“Where can I find her?”

“She’s down the hall, trying to calm everybody down.”

“What do you mean? What exactly happened here?” Garrison asked.

“I’m not allowed to say.”

“Why not?”

“Dr. Fiesler’s orders. I’m sure you’re somebody important, otherwise you wouldn’t be down here. But I could lose my job, so I’m not saying anything.”

Garrison turned to Perry. “See if you can charm this guy into telling you something.”

“Will do,” Perry replied.

Peter and Garrison went to a room at the end of the hall. Garrison entered without bothering to knock. Six physicians wearing lime-green scrubs stood in the center, talking in hushed tones. Behind them were the stainless-steel coolers where the newly dead were stored. Inside the coolers was a construction worker who’d had a heart attack, a homeless man who’d died peacefully in his sleep, and a house painter who’d fallen off a ladder. Their spirits whispered to Peter as he entered, telling him their darkest secrets. Normally, Peter would have talked to them, but today there was no time. He tuned out their voices.

“I’m looking for Dr. Fiesler,” Garrison announced.

“That’s me,” replied a smallish woman with sun-bleached hair.

“Special Agent Garrison, FBI. I want to know what happened here.”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me,” Fiesler said gravely.

“Try me.”

“We had a corpse come back to life while being cut open on an autopsy table.”

“Name?”

“Wolfe. He was brought in yesterday. Fell from an apartment building.”

“Dead people don’t come back to life,” Garrison said. “There has to be something else going on here. I’m sure you’ve considered that.”

“We have,” Fiesler replied. “There’s no other explanation. Not one that we can think of, anyway.”

“If you’ll excuse me, I need to speak with my associate,” Garrison said.

Garrison pulled Peter into the hallway and dropped his voice.

“Is this possible?” the FBI agent asked.

“The dead don’t come back to life,” Peter said. “It’s one of the rules of the game. The only other explanation is that Wolfe’s body is possessed.”

“Is that possible?”

“It is if a group of psychics are involved. No one will admit to it, but that’s what really started the witch trials in Salem. A group of witches were possessing dead people’s bodies.”

“How do we find out for certain? I need to know what we’re dealing with.”

“The TV monitors inside the autopsy room were pulled out of the walls. Maybe they were filming Wolfe when it happened, and he tried to destroy them.”

“Would you know if you saw a film?”

“I think so.”

Garrison went back into the room. The doctors were still in a huddle. Peter sensed they were having a hard time dealing with what had happened. The things I could tell you, he thought.

“Was Wolfe filmed during his autopsy?” Garrison asked.

“All our autopsies are filmed,” Fiesler replied. “So was Wolfe’s.”

“I’d like to see it. It may explain what happened.”

Fiesler took them to her office. It was a messy affair with stacks of papers hiding her desk. She got onto her computer and made magic on the keyboard. Soon they were watching a film of Wolfe’s autopsy. The dead man lay naked on an autopsy table. Rigor mortis had set in, and his body had gone stiff, his mouth open like someone in a deep sleep. Looking at him, there was no doubt that his spirit had left this earth long ago. A doctor holding a scalpel began to slice open Wolfe’s sternum. The tattoo on the dead man’s neck began to glow.