Frank Tuttle - The Cadaver Client

My hearse rattled to a halt. A couple of stout, young men from the stagecoach behind us ran past, put fresh flowers in the gate urns, and mumbled the prayers begging mercy and rest for the one about to be interred. I could hear Mama muttering words of her own, but she was peppering her utterances with far too many curse words for them to be prayers.

The cemetery gates swung open with a pair of rusty screeches. Mama snapped the reins again, and I closed my eyes as we passed the threshold, since most corpses probably aren’t eyeing their lids with any kind of intense interest.

Nothing happened. We rolled uphill.

Mama got lost once, and the stages had trouble getting turned around, but we finally reached the wardstone.

I stirred, flexed my arms, but kept my lid closed.

“Granny ain’t here,” said Mama. Her tone was worried. “That ain’t right. She said she’d be here.”

I risked a whisper. “Have a couple of the boys look around.” I didn’t have a good feeling about what they were likely to find.

Either way, spook or spell, Granny Knot was a liability, once she’d served her purpose. Because if she could talk to the dead and help them enter the world of the living, she could also send them back where they belonged. At least according to Mama.

Shouts, and Mama cussed. My heart sank.

“Found her.” Mama was worried. “They’re seein’ if she’s dead.”

“Well?”

Mama clambered down, and I heard her stomp away. Someone called for water. Someone else called for a blanket.

Mama came rushing back to stand beside the rear of the hearse.

“Ain’t dead. Yet. Took a knock to the head. Pushed down into a wardstone, I reckon.”

“Is she conscious? Can she help?”

“Just you and me, boy.”

I bit back a curse. It was getting hot in the casket and sweat was pouring off me. I was tempted, so tempted to get out, to feel cool air, to at least open the lid. If Granny had been right, if spooks had nearly as much trouble seeing the world of the living as we did the spooks themselves, the risk would be small. All anything dead, alive, or ensorcelled would likely see was a hearse and a casket and a bunch of men milling around a grave.

“Let’s get this going then.”

Mama barked orders. I heard stage doors open and shut, the clang of shovels on shovels, the voices of a hundred wary young men.

And then I began to hear the thock-thock of shovels biting into the earth, and the thud of turned earth being cast out of the way, and I silently urged them to hurry.

It didn’t take them long.

I heard the first shovel strike the buried casket. It was a wet solid sound. Being shut in a casket myself gave the sound a certain memorable quality.

They went carefully, from that point on. I could hear them working in shifts-one man would take ten digs, then leap out of the grave and be replaced. Four men stayed down that way, all of them fresh. The others ringed us, facing outward, their shovels in one hand and plain sharp swords under their coats in the other.

Mama kept me updated in whispers. The crowd remained outside the fences, hooting and drinking and setting fires in the street and generally doing the things that might attract a bevy of thirsty halfdead and thus get them killed. The Watch, as far as Mama could tell, had lingered for a bit and then vanished, apparently deciding that if a whole neighborhood wished to commit mass suicide, it was no concern of theirs.

Still, no halfdead had appeared. I knew that by the lack of agonized screaming from the street.

“They’re ready to lift it out,” said Mama.

“Go ahead.”

Mama gave the word. Men grunted. Ropes strained. Clods of wet earth fell.

There was a thud, and it was done.

I slammed the lid of my coffin back and hauled my stiff, sweat-soaked body out of the damned thing. Mama had a half dozen of Mrs. Mays’s troops haul it out of my hearse, and put it on the ground next to the one they’d just dug up.

Everyone tensed. Mama had her dried owl in a white-knuckled death grip. Mrs. Mays floated to my side, her eyes wide and wet behind her veil. Her daughter stood with her, holding her hand. Natalie met my eyes and held onto her mother for dear life.

“We’re ready, Mr. Markhat.”

I nodded. Axes flashed. The lid of the coffin put up a fight, but six months of wet earth had done its work.

There, after a moment, was the man himself.

I’d expected a bundle of sticks and hair or a complex arrangement of bones and silver threads-anything of the sort sorcerers tend to favor when they’re fashioning their wonders.

But this was just a man. A dead man, a dead man buried for six months.

There wasn’t much left. The coffin had leaked. The smell wasn’t even what I’d expected. Instead, it was more wet, rich earth than a full and awful dose of the odor from the undertaker.

I doubt even the corpse of a kindly old granny ever looks benign and peaceful. But even after six months in the ground, I could still see the hate and fury in the set of the dead man’s jaw, and the shadowed gape of his hollow eyes. His skeletal hands were on his chest, but they were clenched as if holding something, or choking it.

“I speak your name, Horace Gorvis. You have no power over me,” said Mrs. Mays. Her voice shook, but she got the words out, just like Mama had written them. I hoped they were the right words. “You never did. I said no then, and I say no now. I spoke your true name. Trouble me no more.”

“I speak your name, Horace Gorvis. Your power died when you did,” intoned her daughter. “I spoke your true name. Trouble us no more.”

“I speak your name, Horace Gorvis. You’re dead and gone and good riddance,” said Mama. “Mr. Summers, knock his damned fool head off.”

Summers lifted his shovel high and let it fall.

The air around us went cold. Dead of winter cold. Our exhalations steamed and twisted in a wind none of us could feel.

Mrs. Mays’s hands went to her throat.

“Oh, I reckon not, Horace Gorvis.” Mama stood on her tiptoes and slipped a loop of string around Mrs. Mays’s throat. A little bag, twin to the one Mama had given me, settled at the base of Mrs. Mays’s throat.

“You ain’t got no business here, Horace Gorvis. Whatever you was when you lived, all that’s over. Over and done. Now git.”

Mama reached down into the coffin and held up the man’s freshly severed head. She eyed it critically and knocked it hard twice against the wardstone. Most of the clinging hair and remaining tissue fell away.

Mama wrapped what looked like a dirty rag around the skull’s vacant eye sockets. Then she drove thick iron spikes into the spots the ears had been, and she grunted as she tore the jaw away.

“We come to bury this sorry excuse for a man,” said Mama. She chunked the skull into the new casket. “He can rest in peace or not, for all I care, but he ain’t gonna walk no more.” The jawbone followed. Teeth came loose and bounced and rattled. “May Angels fly him to his rest and all that hogwash, amen. Mr. Summers, finish him.”

“More’n happy to.”

Summers and his shovel went to work. Mama hauled the parts out as they became available, saying a few words over each one. I didn’t think the somber Echols would have approved of Mama’s hostile running eulogy one bit.

The air grew colder. Torches flickered and wavered, and a few went out. Mama handed Natalie a bag of her own when she yelped and whirled as though she too had been touched.

“Mind me, Horace Gorvis. This is for them fires what you set,” said Mama. She tossed the man’s two severed hands into the coffin and then opened a bag of what appeared to be salt and poured it over the remains.

“And this is for all them you hurt.” Another bag, this one of ash.