John Lindqvist - Handling The Undead

Mahler took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. It was cooler down here but the hike had taken its toll. He leaned against the green concrete wall, pleasantly cool against his hand.

Ludde opened the iron door. In the distance, through one or more walls Mahler could hear cries, clanking metal. The first and only time he had ever been here it had been as quiet as… the grave. Ludde looked at him with a what did I tell you grin. Mahler nodded, held out the wrinkled bills and Ludde softened, made a generous gesture toward the open door.

'Be my guest. Your scoop awaits you.' He glanced swiftly down the corridor. 'The rest of them use the other entrance so you don't have to worry.'

Mahler tucked his handkerchief in his pocket, adjusted his bag.

'Aren't you coming?'

Ludde snorted. 'How long do you think I'd keep my job after that?' He pointed around the corner inside the door. 'Take the elevator down one floor-that's it.'

As the door banged shut behind him Mahler started to feel uncomfortable. He walked up to the elevator and hesitated before he pressed the call button. He was starting to get twitchy in his old age. The cries and clatter could still be heard below and he stood still, willing his heart to calm down.

It was not the thought of seeing dead people wandering around that unsettled him as much as the fact that he had no right to be here. When he was younger, he couldn't have cared less about all that. 'The truth must be told,' he would think, and plunge into the fray.

But now…

Who are you, what are you doing here?

He was rusty, and much too uncertain to be able to fake the authority you needed in such situations like that. He pressed the button anyway.

Have to see what's going on.

The elevator rumbled into action and he bit his lip, backing away from the door. He was a little afraid after all, had seen too many movies. Elevators that arrived and someone… something is inside. But the elevator arrived and through the narrow window in the door he could see it was empty. He stepped in and pressed the button for the level below. As the elevator descended he tried to empty his mind, switch modes to become simply descriptive, a camera whose images develop words.

The elevator starts with a jerk. Through thick concrete walls, I can hear screams. The morgue level comes into view through the window and through it I can see…

Nothing.

A bit of a corridor, a wall and nothing more. He pushed open the elevator door.

The chill came at him. The corridor he was standing in was several degrees colder than the rest of the hospital. The sweat on his body congealed into a cold film, made him shiver. The elevator door shut behind him.

To his right, an open door gave onto a cold storage room. Outside two people were sitting on the floor, embracing with bowed heads.

What are they doing?

The clatter of metal from the autopsy room to the left made one of them raise her head and Mahler now saw that it was a young nurse. Her face was panic-stricken.

She was holding a very old woman in her arms; white hair like a halo around her head, delicate body and spindly legs that moved over the floor, trying to gain a foothold in order to stand up. She was naked apart from a white sheet that hung around her neck and down one side of the body. Someone's mother and grandmother; perhaps a great-grandmother.

Her face was nothing but hard bones under a pale yellow skin and her eyes… her eyes. Two windows opening onto the great Nothing. Theywere a translucent blue and seemed to be covered in a film of white slime, gelatinous, expressing absolutely no emotion.

From the sunken lips-a mouth robbed of dentures-there came only a single mournful note,'Oooooommmm… ooommm…'

And Mahler knew, with immediate comprehension, what it was she wanted. The same as everyone wants.

To go home.

The nurse caught sight of Mahler. She looked at him in entreaty as she said, 'Can you take over?' and inclined her head toward the old woman. When Mahler made no reply she added, 'I'm freezing to death…'

Mahler crouched down, put his hand on the old woman's foot. It was ice cold, stiff; it was like putting your hand on an orange that has been in the freezer. At his touch, the woman's lament began to rise-

'OOOOOOMMM!'

– but Mahler stood up with a groan while the nurse screamed at him, 'You've got to help me! Please!'

He couldn't. Not right now. Had to see what was going on. Shamed, he staggered away to the autopsy room; the photographer who takes pictures of the famine victims, goes back the hotel room and drinks to assuage his guilt.

Photographs… the camera…

As he walked toward the large brightly lit room, he opened the bag. White sheets lay spread along the corridor.

Later he would have trouble sorting out the scene that was laid out in front of his eyes. It was as if it should have been staged in half darkness, a battle between the living and the dead pitched in the Goya-esque lighting of some cave.

But everything was clinically precise and illuminated. The large neon tubes in the ceiling spewed light across the stainless steel counters and over the people who moved around in the room.

Bare skin everywhere. Almost all of the dead had managed to rid themselves of their shrouds, and the sheets lay strewn across benches and floor. A toga party that had spiralled out of control into an orgy.

There were around thirty people there, living and dead. Doctors and nurses and morgue staff in white, green and blue coats who struggled to hold onto the bare bodies. All of the dead were very old, many had large, roughly stitched autopsy scars that stretched from the lower abdomen to the throat.

The dead were not violent. But they were striving, wanted to get away. Lined faces, bodies with the proportions of ill-health. The waving bird-fingers of old ladies, old men who slung their club-fists in the empty air. And the bodies pulled, strained but were embraced, held in check.

And the din, the din.

A whimpering and howling as if a football team of newborns had been thrown into the same room and told to express their terror and astonishment at the world they'd come to. Come back to.

The doctors and nurses talked continuously, soothing-

'Take it easy it will be all right everything is fine take it easy'

– but their eyes were wild. Some of them had cracked. A nurse was huddled into a corner, her face in her hands, her body shaking. A doctor was standing at a sink, washing his hands calmly and methodically as if he was at home in his bathroom. When he was done he took a comb out of his breast pocket, started to comb his hair.

Where is everyone?

Why weren't there more…living people here? Where were the reinforcements, the agencies-the things that despite everything worked so well in Sweden in the year 2002?

And Mahler had been here once before. Therefore he knew that the majority of the bodies were stored in refrigerated boxes one floor down. This was only a small proportion. He took a step into the room and fumbled for his camera.

Just then a man broke free. One of the few whom the process of decomposition had not had time to work on. He was big and strong, with hands that looked like they were used to heaving rocks. Maybe a retired and prematurely deceased construction worker. He moved toward the exit on mottled white legs, jerkily as if on stilts of rough-cut birch trunks.

The doctor who had lost it shouted, 'Take him!' and Mahler didn't think, simply obeyed the command and barricaded the doorway with his body. The man moved toward him and their eyes met. His were watery brown; it was like staring into a muddy pool where nothing was stirring. No response.

. Mahler's gaze slid down to the throat, to the small scar above the collar bone where the formaldehyde had been injected and for the first time in this room of horrors Mahler became… afraid. Afraid of touch, of infection, fingers that groped. Wished that he could pull out his press card and shout, 'I'm a reporter! I have nothing to do