Ronnie’s body was found by a jogger, out before seven on the following Monday. In the day between his being dumped and being found his corpse had already begun to deteriorate.
But the pathologist had seen far, far worse. He watched dispassionately while the two mortuary technicians stripped the body, folded the clothes and placed them in tagged plastic bags. He waited patiently and attentively while the wife of the deceased was ushered into his echoing domain, her face ashen, her eyes swelled to bursting with too many tears. She looked down at her husband without love, staring at the wounds and at the marks of torture quite unflinchingly. The pathologist had a whole story written behind this last confrontation between Sex-King and untroubled wife. Their loveless marriage, their arguments over his despicable way of life, her despair, his brutality, and now, her relief that the torment was finally over and she was released to start a new life without him. The pathologist made a mental note to look up the pretty widow’s address. She was delicious in her indifference to mutilation; it made his mouth wet to think of her.
Ronnie knew Bernadette had come and gone; he could sense too the other faces that popped into the mortuary just to peer down at the Sex-King. He was an object of fascination, even in death, and it was a horror he hadn’t predicted, buzzing around in the cool coils of his brain, like a tenant who refuses to be ousted by the bailiffs, still seeing the world hovering around him, and not being able to act upon it.
In the days since his death there had been no hint of escape from this condition. He had sat here, in his own dead skull, unable to find a way out into the living world, and unwilling, somehow, to relinquish life entirely and leave himself to Heaven. There was still a will to revenge in him. A part of his mind, unforgiving of trespasses, was prepared to postpone Paradise in order to finish the job he had shared. The books needed balancing; and until Michael Maguire was dead Ronnie could not go to his atonement.
In his round bone prison he watched the curious come and go, and knotted up his will.
The pathologist did his work on Ronnie’s corpse with all the respect of an efficient fish gutter, carelessly digging the bullet out of his cranium, and nosing around in the stews of smashed bone and cartilage that had formerly been his knees and elbows. Ronnie didn’t like the man. He’d leered at Bernadette in a highly unprofessional way; and now, when he was playing the professional, his callousness was positively shameful. Oh for a voice; for a fist, for a body to use for a time. Then he’d show this meat merchant how bodies should be treated. The will was not enough though: it needed a focus, and a means of escape.
The pathologist finished his report and his rough sewing, flung his juice-shiny gloves and his stained instruments on to the trolley beside the swabs and the alcohol, and left the body to the assistants.
Ronnie heard the swing doors close behind him as the man departed. Water was running somewhere, splashing into the sink; the sound irritated him.
Standing beside the table on which he lay, the two technicians discussed their shoes. Of all things, shoes. The banality of it, thought Ronnie, the life-decaying banality of it.
“You know them new heels, Lenny? The ones I got to put on my brown suedes? Useless. No bleeding good at all.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“And the price I paid for them. Look at that; just look at that. Worn through in a month.” “Paper thin.”
“They are, Lenny, they’re paper thin. I’m going to take them back.”
“I would.”
“I am.”
“I would.”
This mindless conversation, after those hours of torture, of sudden death, of the post mortem that he’d so recently endured, was almost beyond endurance. Ronnie’s spirit began to buzz round and round in his brain like an angry bee trapped in an upturned jam-jar, determined to get out and start stinging—
Round and round; like the conversation.
“Paper bloody thin.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Bloody foreign. These soles. Made in fucking Korea.”
“Korea?”
“That’s why they’re paper thin.”
It was unforgivable: the trudging stupidity of these people. That they should live and act and be: while he buzzed on and on, boiling with frustration. Was that fair?
“Neat shot, eh Lenny?”
“What?”
“The stiff. Old what’s his name the Sex King. Bang in the middle of the forehead. See that? Pop goes the weasel.”
Lenny’s companion, it seemed, was still preoccupied with his paper thin sole. He didn’t reply. Lenny inquisitively inched back the shroud from Ronnie’s forehead. The lines of sawn and scalped flesh were inelegantly sewn, but the bullet hole itself was neat.
“Look at it.”
The other glanced round at the dead face. The head wound had been cleaned after the probing pincers had worked at it. The edges were white and puckered.
“I thought they usually went for the heart,” said the sole searcher.
“This wasn’t any street fight. It was an execution; formal like,” said Lenny, poking his little finger into the wound. “It’s a perfect shot. Bang in the middle of the forehead. Like he had three eyes.” “Yeah.. .”
The shroud was tossed back over Ronnie’s face. The bee buzzed on; round and round.
“You hear about third eyes, don’t you?”
“Do you?”
“Stella read me something about it being the center of the body.”
“That’s your navel. How can your forehead be the center of your body?”
“Well...”
“That’s your navel.”
“No, it’s more your spiritual center.”
The other didn’t deign to respond.
“Just about where this bullet hole is,” said Lenny, still lost in admiration for Ronnie’s killer.
The bee listened. The bullet hole was just one of many holes in his life. Holes where his wife and children should have been. Holes winking up at him like sightless eyes from the pages of the magazines, pink and brown and hairlipped. Holes to the right of him, holes to the left—
Could it be, at last, that he had found here a hole that he could profit by? Why not leave by the wound?
His spirit braced itself, and made for his brow, creeping through his cortex with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Ahead, he could sense the exit door like the light at the end of a long tunnel. Beyond the hole, the warp and weft of his shroud glittered like a promised land. His sense of direction was good; the light grew as he crept, the voices became louder. Without fanfare Ronnie’s spirit spat itself into the outside world: a tiny seepage of soul. The motes of fluid that carried his will and his consciousness were soaked up by his shroud like tears by tissues.
His flesh and blood body was utterly deserted now; an icy bulk fit for nothing but the flames.
Ronnie Glass existed in a new world: a white linen world like no state he had lived or dreamed before.
Ronnie Glass was his shroud.
Had Ronnie’s pathologist not been forgetful he wouldn’t have come back into the mortuary at that moment, trying to locate the diary he’d written the Widow Glass’ number in; and, had he not come in, he would have lived. As it was—
“Haven’t you started on this one yet?” he snapped at the technicians.
They murmured some apology or other. He was always testy at this time of night; they were used to his tantrums.
“Get on with it,” he said, stripping the shroud off the body and flinging it to the floor in irritation, “before the fucker walks out of here in disgust. Don’t want to get our little hotel a bad reputation, do we?”
“Yes, sir. I mean, no sir.”
“Well don’t stand there: parcel it up. There’s a widow wants him dispatched as soon as possible. I’ve seen all I need to see of him.”
Ronnie lay on the floor in a crumpled heap, slowly spreading his influence through this new found land. It felt good to have a body, even if it wa
s sterile and rectangular. Bringing a power of will to bear he hadn’t known he possessed, Ronnie took full control of the shroud.
At first it refused life. It had always been passive: that was its condition. It wasn’t use to occupation by spirits. But Ronnie wasn’t to be beaten now. His will was an imperative. Against all rules of natural behavior it stretched and knotted the sullen linen into a semblance of life.
The shroud rose.
The pathologist had located his little black book, and was in the act of pocketing it when this white curtain spread itself in his path, stretching like a man who has just woken from a deep sleep.
Ronnie tried to speak; but the only voice he could find was a whisper of the cloth on the air, too light, too insubstantial to be heard over the complaints of frightened men. And frightened they were. Despite the pathologist’s call for assistance, none was forthcoming. Lenny and his companion were sliding away towards the swing doors, gaping mouths babbling entreaties to any local god who would listen.
The pathologist backed off against the post mortem table, quite out of gods.
“Get out of my sight,” he said.
Ronnie embraced him, tightly.
“Help,” said the pathologist, almost to himself. But help was gone. It was running down the corridors, still babbling, keeping its back to the miracle that was taking place in the mortuary. The pathologist was alone, wrapped up in this starched embrace, murmuring, at the last, some apologies he had found beneath his pride.
“I’m sorry, whoever you are. Whatever you are. I’m sorry.”
But there was an anger in Ronnie that would not have any truck with late converts; no pardons or reprieves were available. This fish-eyed bastard, this son of the scalpel had cut and examined his old body as though it was a side of beef. It made Ronnie livid to think of this creep’s oh-so-cool appraisal of life, death and Bernadette. The bastard would die, here, amongst his remains, and let that be an end to his callous profession.
The corners of the shroud were forming into crude arms now, as Ronnie’s memory shaped them. It seemed natural to recreate his old appearance in this new medium. He made hands first: then digits: even a rudimentary thumb. He was like a morbid Adam raised out of linen.
Even as they formed, the hands had the pathologist about the neck. As yet they had no sense of touch in them, and it was difficult to judge how hard to press on the throbbing skin, so he simply used all the strength he could muster. The man’s face blackened, and his tongue, the color of a plum, stuck out from his mouth like a spear head, sharp and hard. In his enthusiasm, Ronnie broke his neck. It snapped suddenly, and the head fell backwards at a horrid angle. The vain apologies had long since stopped.
Ronnie dropped him to the polished floor, and stared down at the hands he had made, with eyes that were still two pin pricks in a sheet of stained cloth.
He felt certain of himself in this body, and God, he was strong; he’d broken the bastard’s neck without exerting himself at all. Occupying this strange, bloodless physique he had a new freedom from the constraints of humanity. He was alive suddenly to the life of the air, feeling it now fill and billow him. Surely he could fly, like a sheet in the wind, or if it suited him knot himself into a fist and beat the world into submission. The prospects seemed endless.
And yet... he sensed that this possession was at best temporary. Sooner or later the shroud would want to resume its former life as an idle piece of cloth, and its true, passive nature would be restored. This body had not been given to him, merely loaned; it was up to him to use it to the best of his vengeful abilities. He knew the priorities. First and foremost to find Michael Maguire and dispatch him. Then, if he still had the time left, he would see the children. But it wasn’t wise to go visiting as a flying shroud. Better by far to work at this illusion of humanity, and see if he could sophisticate the effect.
He’d seen what freak creases could do, making faces appear in a crumpled pillow, or in the folds of a jacket hanging on the back of the door. More extraordinary still, there was the Shroud of Turin, in which the face and body of Jesus Christ had been miraculously imprinted. Bernadette had been sent a postcard of the Shroud, with every wound of lance and nail in place. Why couldn’t he make the same miracle, by force of will? Wasn’t he resurrected too?
He went to the sink in the morgue and turned off the running tap, then stared into the mirror to watch his will take shape. The surface of the shroud was already twitching and scurrying as he demanded new forms of it. At first there was only the primitive outline of his head, roughly shaped, like that of a snowman. Two pits for eyes: a lumpen nose. But he concentrated, willing the linen to stretch itself to the limits of its elasticity. And behold! it worked, it really worked! The threads complained, but acquiesced to his demands, forming in exquisite reproduction the nostrils, and then the eyelids; the upper lip: now the lower. He traced from memory the contours of his lost face like an adoring lover, and remade them in every detail. Now he began to make a column for the neck, filled with air, but looking deceptively solid. Below that the shroud swelled into a manly torso. The arms were already formed; the legs followed quickly on. And it was done.
He was remade, in his own image.
The illusion was not perfect. For one thing, he was pure white, except for the stains, and his flesh had the texture of cloth. The creases of his face were perhaps too severe, almost cubist in appearance, and it was impossible to coax the cloth to make a semblance of either hair or nails. But he was as ready for the world as any living shroud could hope to be.
It was time to go out and meet his public.
“Your game, Micky.”
Maguire seldom lost at poker. He was too clever, and that used face too unreadable; his tired, bloodshot eyes never let anything out. Yet, despite his formidable reputation as a winner, he never cheated. That was his bond with himself. There was no lift in winning if there was a cheat involved. It was just stealing then; and that was for the criminal classes. He was a businessman, pure and simple.
Tonight, in the space of two and a half hours, he’d pocketed a tidy sum. Life was good. Since the deaths of Dork, Henry B. Henry and Glass, the police had been too concerned with Murder to take much notice of the lower orders of Vice. Besides, their palms were well crossed with silver; they had nothing to complain about. Inspector Wall, a drinking companion of many years’ standing, had even offered Maguire protection from the lunatic killer who was apparently on the loose. The irony of the idea pleased Maguire mightily.
It was almost three a.m. Time for bad girls and boys to be in their beds, dreaming of crimes for the morrow. Maguire rose from the table, signifying the end of the night’s gambling. He buttoned up his waistcoat and carefully reknotted his lemon water-ice silk tie.
“Another game next week?” he suggested.
The defeated players agreed. They were used to losing money to their boss, but there were no hard feelings amongst the quarter. There was a tinge of sadness perhaps: they missed Henry B. and Dork. Saturday nights had been such joyous affairs. Now there was a muted tone over the proceedings.
Perlgut was the first to leave, stubbing out his cheroot in the brimming ashtray. “Night, Mick.”
“Night, Frank. Give the kids a kiss from their Uncle Mick, eh?”
“Will do.”
Perlgut shuffled off, with his stuttering brother in tow.
“G-g-g-goodnight.” “Night, Ernest.”
The brothers clattered down the stairs.
Norton was the last to go, as always.-
“Shipment tomorrow?” he asked.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” said Maguire. He never worked on Sundays; it was a day for the family.
“Not, today’s Sunday,” said Norton, not trying to be pedantic, just letting it come naturally. “Tomorrow’s Monday.”
“Yes.”
“Shipment Monday?”
“I hope so.”
“You going to the warehouse?”
“Probably.”
“I’ll pick you up then: we can run down together.”
“Fine.”
Norton was a good man. Humorless, but reliable.
“Night then.”
“Night.”
His three-inch heels were steel-tipped; they sounded like a woman’s stilettos on the stairs. The door slammed below.
Maguire counted his profits, drained his glass of Cointreau, and switched out the light in the gaming room. The smoke was already staling. Tomorrow he’d have to get somebody to come up and open the window, let some fresh Soho smells in there. Salami and coffee beans, commerce and sleaze. He loved it, loved it with a passion, like a babe loves a tit.
As he descended the stairs into the darkened sex shop he heard the exchange of farewells in the street outside, followed by the slamming of car doors and the purring departure of expensive cars. A good night with good friends, what more could any man reasonably ask?
At the bottom of the stairs he stopped for a moment. The blinking streetsign lights opposite illuminated the shop sufficiently for him to make out the rows of magazines. Their plastic-bound faces glinted; siliconed breasts and spanked buttocks swelled from the covers like overripe fruit. Faces dripping mascara pouted at him, offering every lonely satisfaction paper could promise. But he was unmoved; the time had long since passed when he found any of that stuff of interest. It was simply currency to him; he was neither disgusted nor aroused by it. He was a happily married man after after all, with a wife whose imagination barely stretched beyond page two of the Kama Sutra, and whose children were slapped soundly if they spoke one questionable word.
In the corner of the shop, where the Bondage and Domination material was displayed, something rose from the floor. Maguire found it hard to focus in the intermittent light. Red, blue. Red, blue. But it wasn’t Norton, nor one of the Perlguts.
It was a face he knew however, smiling at him against the background of “Roped and Raped” magazines. Now he saw: it was Glass, clear as day, and, despite the colored lights, white as a sheet.