Bentley Little: The Summoning

He pulled back, nervous despite himself. The old man's bones were broken in several spots, his rib cage crushed, and in these places the skin had cracked open. None of the dermal layers had retained enough moisture to maintain flexibility. No blood had escaped from any of the openings.

What could have drained the body of all fluids so completely?

And in a single night. According to Chief Carter, Troy had said that Manuel worked until five o'clock yesterday evening.

I In the arroyo, Brad had given the body a cursory examination, visually inspecting the corpse for obvious signs of violence. That had been difficult enough. Surrounded by other people, by the police and the press, he had still not wanted to handle the body, still had to force himself to touch the old man. But now, here, alone, he was finding it almost impossible to begin his work.

Brad felt goose bumps on his arms and on the back of his neck. The bodies of the animals were in bags at the back of the room, and those he would examine later with

Ed Durham, the vet.

But Manuel Torres was his and his alone.

He turned on the tape recorder, picked up the scalpel, took a deep breath, then turned off the tape recorder, put down the scalpel, and took a drink of water from the squeeze bottle on the tray next to him.

He didn't want to do this autopsy. That's what it came down to. He'd been procrastinating for over a quarter of an hour, laying out instruments, testing his tape recorder, performing the ordinary prep duties that should have taken no more than five minutes. He wished he had an assistant or a coworker to help him. He wished he'd called Kim, his secretary, and told her to come in, although there was nothing she could do to help with the procedure.

He wished there was someone in the building besides himself.

He glanced around the room. Though it was empty and well lit, though there were no shadows, there was something about the room that put him on edge, that made him feel more than a little uneasy. He had never been one of those people who were afraid of death, or who considered a lifeless body something sacred to be left reverentially alone. To him, dignity and dissection were not mutually exclusive. The idea of cutting open a dead person had never bothered him, which was why he had not had any problem deciding upon his chosen profession. To him, a corpse had always been the shed husk of an individual, what was left after the soul had departed. A body had value only in its ability to shed knowledge upon death. Its sole function was to impart medical or criminal information to those qualified to look for it.

But Manuel Torres's body did not seem to him like a shed husk. Despite the fact that it was physically the most husk like corpse he had ever come across, it did not feel to him like an abandoned vessel, and he could not help thinking that the soul of Manuel Torres, whatever that spark might be that made a person a person, was still alive in this dried form and had not been able or allowed to escape.

It was a silly thought but one he could not shake. And it was why he could not seem to bring himself to cut into the body, why he kept postponing that first incision. It felt too much like murder. Each time he picked up the scalpel and looked at the body, preplanning the cuts and crosscuts he would make to open up the chest and abdominal cavities, he saw in his mind a scenario in which Manuel suddenly sat up and started screaming, howls of agony escaping from between those flattened lips as shriveled disintegrating organs fell out through the flaps of dried skin.

Brad's gaze darted quickly toward the old man's left foot. Had he seen a toe wiggle? He stared at the foot for a moment, but the pinkish toes remained stubbornly unmoving against the background of the silver steel table.

What frightened him the most was the fact that he kept expecting the body to move.

It was stupid, and he knew it was stupid. The reaction of a child who'd been watching too many fright flicks. But the feeling would not go away. He had opened up a hundred bodies in this room. Two hundred maybe. He'd worked mornings and nights, weekdays and weekends, but he had never experienced anything like this.

What the hell was the matter with him?

He told himself to maintain his professionalism, to simply go by the book and, step by step, objectively perform each of the simple medical procedures required for a legal autopsy. Again he turned on the tape recorder, again he picked up the scalpel. He breathed deeply, through his nose, in a conscious effort to calm himself. He looked again at Manuel Torres. He could see bone beneath the wrinkled translucent parchment skin, the white bone of skull and skeleton, and that was something he knew, that was something he could handle. There was no monster here, only a dead man. A body built around a structure of bone. The condition of the corpse might be unusual, but its composition was not.

It was time for him to put aside his foolishness and get to work.

This time, he used the scalpel to make an incision in the chest, and his chill abated, superstitious dread replaced by the familiar and welcome feeling of dispassionate competence.

He described each "procedure as it was performed, documenting the entire process on tape. The body was indeed dehydrated, and to an unbelievable degree, but this fact did not now seem as horrifying as it had only a few moments ago. He was again the coroner, doing his job, recording his findings, and while afterward he might again be affected by emotions, he was now on autopilot, observing and chronicling the facts as he encountered them.

He turned the body over to examine its lateral and posterior segments.

He adjusted the corpse, then blinked, staring down at Manuel Torres's neck. There was an open gash directly below the base of the head, a large missing chunk of flesh.

How could he have missed such an obvious wound in his preliminary examination?

He shook his head, embarrassed by his oversight, and described the wound in detail, carefully measuring its width and length. There was a dried residue around the opening, a crusty pinkish substance that he carefully excised and placed on a slide, setting it aside for later examination.

He already knew the makeup of the substance. He had seen the combination before, on the lips of people who had had seizures, dried on tongues that had been bitten. Blood and saliva.

He frowned. The combination might not be that unique, but a wound on the back of the neck was a very unusual place to find saliva in a concentration so large. Very unusual.

He looked more carefully at the wound. The skin around it was so dry that no specific finding could be verified as completely accurate, but he thought he could see the imprint of teeth on the epidermis.

Human teeth. His own mouth felt suddenly dry. Blood and saliva.

The chili was back, the fear, and he quicken cutting more quickly, talking faster, hastening the procedure. He knew it was important that he discover the true cause of Manuel Torres's death, but right now he just wanted to get this damn thing over with.

And he wanted to make sure he was out of the building before nightfall.

The buildings surrounding the church were run down almost to the point of condemnation. Entire painting histories were revealed in chipped layers on the peeling stucco walls of the tiny houses. The hard dirt ground was littered with the sparkling shards of broken bottles. In the building next door, a sagging wooden structure with wire mesh over the windows and a faded sign above the door identifying it as the

"South Phoenix Social Club," several black men wearing white T-shirts and gang colors stood in the doorway unmoving.

Pastor Wheeler did not notice the neighborhood or its inhabitants. His attention was concentrated solely on the church in front of him, which was remarkabl well preserved for its age and for this part of town. It wasn't the most beautiful church he'd ever seen---with its flat roof, squat structure, and lack of stained glass, it looked more like a government office than a house of worship but it could easily be moved, and its design could readily accommodate additions. The church was currently owned by the First Southern Baptists, but the land was owned by a developer out of Seattle, and the developer wanted to raze the whole block and put up an apartment complex. Despite all the pleas, pyers, and petitions, the developer had given the Baptists only two months to find a new home for the church. An impossible task.