“I wish you had called ahead.”
Shrugging, I jammed my hands in my jacket pockets, turned from the house once more, and walked past the Pietà.
Flecks of mica were in the mix from which the replica had been poured, and the big moon glimmered in those tiny chips, so that tears appeared to shimmer on the cheeks of Our Lady of Cast Concrete.
I resisted the urge to glance back at the undertaker. I was certain he was still watching me.
I continued down the lane between the forlorn, whispering trees. The temperature had fallen only into the low sixties. The onshore breeze was pure after its journey across thousands of miles of ocean, bearing nothing but the faintest whiff of brine.
Long after the slope of the driveway had taken me out of Sandy’s line of sight, I looked back. I could see just the steeply pitched roof and chimneys, somber forms against the star-salted sky.
I moved off the blacktop onto grass, and I headed uphill again, this time in the sheltering shadows of foliage. The pepper trees braided the moon in their long tresses.
6
The funeral-home turnaround came into sight again. The Pietà. The portico.
Sandy had gone inside. The front door was closed.
Staying on the lawn, using trees and shrubs for cover, I circled to the back of the house. A deep porch stepped down to a seventy-foot lap pool, an enormous brick patio, and formal rose gardens—none of which could be seen from the public rooms of the funeral home.
A town the size of ours welcomes nearly two hundred newborns each year while losing a hundred citizens to death. There were only two funeral homes, and Kirk’s probably received over 70 percent of this business—plus half that from the smaller towns in the county. Death was a good living for Sandy.
The view from the patio must have been breathtaking in daylight: unpopulated hills rising in gentle folds as far to the east as the eye could see, graced by scattered oaks with gnarled black trunks. Now the shrouded hills lay like sleeping giants under pale sheets.
When I saw no one at the lighted rear windows, I quickly crossed the patio. The moon, white as a rose petal, floated on the inky waters of the swimming pool.
The house adjoined a spacious L-shaped garage, which embraced a motor court that could be entered only from the front. The garage accommodated two hearses and Sandy’s personal vehicles—but also, at the end of the wing farthest from the residence, the crematorium.
I slipped around the corner of the garage, along the back of the second arm of the L, where immense eucalyptus trees blocked most of the moonlight. The air was redolent of their medicinal fragrance, and a carpet of dead leaves crunched underfoot.
No corner of Moonlight Bay is unknown to me—especially not this one. Most of my nights have been spent in the exploration of our special town, which has resulted in some macabre discoveries.
Ahead, on my left, frosty light marked the crematorium window. I approached it with the conviction—correct, as it turned out—that I was about to see something stranger and far worse than what Bobby Halloway and I had seen on an October night when we were thirteen….
A decade and a half ago, I’d had as morbid a streak as any boy my age, was as fascinated as all boys are by the mystery and lurid glamour of death. Bobby Halloway and I, friends even then, thought it was daring to prowl the undertaker’s property in search of the repulsive, the ghoulish, the shocking.
I can’t recall what we expected—or hoped—to find. A collection of human skulls? A porch swing made of bones? A secret laboratory where the deceptively normal-looking Frank Kirk and his deceptively normal-looking son Sandy called down lightning bolts from storm clouds to reanimate our dead neighbors and use them as slaves to do the cooking and housecleaning?
Perhaps we expected to stumble upon a shrine to the evil gods Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth in some sinister bramble-festooned end of the rose garden. Bobby and I were reading a lot of H. P. Lovecraft in those days.
Bobby says we were a couple of weird kids. I say we were weird, for sure, but neither more nor less weird than other boys.
Bobby says maybe so, but the other boys gradually grew out of their weirdness while we’ve grown further into ours.
I don’t agree with Bobby on this one. I don’t believe that I’m any more weird than anyone else I’ve ever met. In fact, I’m a damn sight less weird than some.
Which is true of Bobby, too. But because he treasures his weirdness, he wants me to believe in and treasure mine.
He insists on his weirdness. He says that by acknowledging and embracing our weirdness, we are in greater harmony with nature—because nature is deeply weird.
Anyway, one October night, behind the funeral-home garage, Bobby Halloway and I found the crematorium window. We were attracted to it by an eldritch light that throbbed against the glass.
Because the window was set high, we were not tall enough to peer inside. With the stealth of commandos scouting an enemy encampment, we snatched a teak bench from the patio and carried it behind the garage, where we positioned it under the glimmering window.
Side by side on the bench, we were able to reconnoiter the scene together. The interior of the window was covered by a Levolor blind; but someone had forgotten to close the slats, giving us a clear view of Frank Kirk and an assistant at work.
One remove from the room, the light was not bright enough to cause me harm. At least that was what I told myself as I pressed my nose to the pane.
Even though I had learned to be a singularly cautious boy, I was nonetheless a boy and, therefore, in love with adventure and camaraderie, so I might knowingly have risked blindness to share that moment with Bobby Halloway.
On a stainless-steel gurney near the window was the body of an elderly man. It was cloaked in a sheet, with only the ravaged face exposed. His yellow-white hair, matted and tangled, made him look as though he had died in a high wind. Judging by his waxy gray skin, sunken cheeks, and severely cracked lips, however, he had succumbed not to a storm but to a prolonged illness.
If Bobby and I had been acquainted with the man in life, we didn’t recognize him in this ashen and emaciated condition. If he’d been someone we knew even casually, he would have been no less grisly but perhaps less an object of boyish fascination and dark delight.
To us, because we were just thirteen and proud of it, the most compelling and remarkable and wonderful thing about the cadaver was also, of course, the grossest thing about it. One eye was closed, but the other was wide open and staring, occluded by a bright red starburst hemorrhage.
How that eye mesmerized us.
As death-blind as the painted eye of a doll, it nevertheless saw through us to the core.
Sometimes in a silent rapture of dread and sometimes whispering urgently to each other like a pair of deranged sportscasters doing color commentary, we watched as Frank and his assistant readied the cremator in one corner of the chamber. The room must have been warm, for the men slipped off their ties and rolled up their shirtsleeves, and tiny drops of perspiration wove beaded veils on their faces.
Outside, the October night was mild. Yet Bobby and I shivered and compared gooseflesh and wondered that our breath didn’t plume from us in white wintry clouds.
The morticians folded the sheet back from the cadaver, and we boys gasped at the horrors of advanced age and murderous disease. But we gasped with the same sweet thrill of terror that we had felt while gleefully watching videos like Night of the Living Dead.
As the corpse was moved into a cardboard case and eased into the blue flames of the cremator, I clutched Bobby’s arm, and he clamped one damp hand to the back of my neck, and we held fast to each other, as though a supernatural magnetic power might pull us inexorably forward, shattering the window, and sweep us into the room, into the fire with the dead man.
Frank Kirk shut the cremator.
Even through the closed window, the clank of the furnace door was loud enough, final enough, to echo in the hollows of our bones.
Later, afte
r we had returned the teak bench to the patio and had fled the undertaker’s property, we repaired to the bleachers at the football field behind the high school. With no game in progress, that place was unlighted and safe for me. We guzzled Cokes and munched potato chips that Bobby had gotten en route at a 7-Eleven.
“That was cool, that was so cool,” Bobby declared excitedly.
“It was the coolest thing ever,” I agreed.
“Cooler than Ned’s cards.”
Ned was a friend who had moved to San Francisco with his parents just that previous August. He had obtained a deck of playing cards—how, he would never reveal—that featured color photographs of really hot-looking nude women, fifty-two different beauties.
“Definitely cooler than the cards,” I agreed. “Cooler than when that humongous tanker truck overturned and blew up out on the highway.”
“Jeez, yeah, megadegrees cooler than that. Cooler than when Zach Blenheim got chewed up by that pit bull and had to have twenty-eight stitches in his arm.”
“Unquestionably quantum arctics cooler than that,” I confirmed.
“His eye!” Bobby said, remembering the starburst hemorrhage.
“Oh, God, his eye!”
“Gag-o-rama!”
We swilled down Cokes and talked and laughed more than we had ever laughed before in one night.
What amazing creatures we are when we’re thirteen.
There on the athletic-field bleachers, I knew that this macabre adventure had tied a knot in our friendship that nothing and no one would ever loosen. By then we had been friends for two years; but during this night, our friendship became stronger, more complex than it had been at the start of the evening. We had shared a powerfully formative experience—and we sensed that this event was more profound than it seemed to be on the surface, more profound than boys our age could grasp. In my eyes, Bobby had acquired a new mystique, as I had acquired in his eyes, because we had done this daring thing.
Subsequently, I would discover that this moment was merely prelude. Our real bonding came the second week of December—when we saw something infinitely more disturbing than the corpse with the blood-red eye.
Now, fifteen years later, I would have thought that I was too old for these adventures and too ridden by conscience to prowl other people’s property as casually as thirteen-year-old boys seem able to do. Yet here I was, treading cautiously on layers of dead eucalyptus leaves, putting my face to the fateful window one more time.
The Levolor blind, though yellowed with age, appeared to be the same one through which Bobby and I had peered so long ago. The slats were adjusted at an angle, but the gaps between them were wide enough to allow a view of the entire crematorium—into which I was tall enough to see without the aid of a patio bench.
Sandy Kirk and an assistant were at work near the Power Pak II Cremation System. They wore surgeons’ masks, latex gloves, and disposable plastic aprons.
On the gurney near the window was one of the opaque vinyl body bags, unzipped, split like a ripe pod, with a dead man nestled inside. Evidently this was the hitchhiker who would be cremated in my father’s name.
He was about five ten, a hundred sixty pounds. Because of the beating that he had taken, I could not estimate his age. His face was grotesquely battered.
At first I thought that his eyes were hidden by black crusts of blood. Then I realized that both eyes were gone. I was staring into empty sockets.
I thought of the old man with the starburst hemorrhage and how fearsome he had seemed to Bobby and me. That was nothing compared to this. That had been only nature’s impersonal work, while this was human viciousness.
During that long-ago October and November, Bobby Halloway and I periodically returned to the crematorium window. Creeping through the darkness, trying not to trip in the ground ivy, we saturated our lungs with air redolent of the surrounding eucalyptuses, a scent that to this day I identify with death.
During those two months, Frank Kirk conducted fourteen funerals, but only three of those deceased were cremated. The others were embalmed for traditional burials.
Bobby and I lamented that the embalming room offered no windows for our use. That sanctum sanctorum—“where they do the wet work,” as Bobby put it—was in the basement, secure against ghoulish spies like us.
Secretly, I was relieved that our snooping would be restricted to Frank Kirk’s dry work. I believe that Bobby was relieved as well, although he pretended to be sorely disappointed.
On the positive side, I suppose, Frank performed most embalmings during the day while restricting cremations to the night hours. This made it possible for me to be in attendance.
Although the hulking cremator—cruder than the Power Pak II that Sandy uses these days—disposed of human remains at a very high temperature and featured emission-control devices, thin smoke escaped the chimney. Frank conducted only nocturnal cremations out of respect for bereaved family members or friends who might, in daylight, glance at the hilltop mortuary from lower in town and see the last of their loved ones slipping skyward in wispy gray curls.
Conveniently for us, Bobby’s father, Anson, was the editor in chief of the Moonlight Bay Gazette. Bobby used his connections and his familiarity with the newspaper offices to get us the most current information about deaths by accident and by natural causes.
We always knew when Frank Kirk had a fresh one, but we couldn’t be sure whether he was going to embalm it or cremate it. Immediately after sunset, we would ride our bikes to the vicinity of the mortuary and then creep onto the property, waiting at the crematorium window either until the action began or until we had to admit at last that this one was not going to be a burning.
Mr. Garth, the sixty-year-old president of the First National Bank, died of a heart attack in late October. We watched him go into the fire.
In November, a carpenter named Henry Aimes fell off a roof and broke his neck. Although Aimes was cremated, Bobby and I saw nothing of the process, because Frank Kirk or his assistant remembered to close the slats on the Levolor blind.
The blinds were open the second week in December, however, when we returned for the cremation of Rebecca Acquilain. She was married to Tom Acquilain, a math teacher at the junior high school where Bobby attended classes but I did not. Mrs. Acquilain, the town librarian, was only thirty, the mother of a five-year-old boy named Devlin.
Lying on the gurney, swathed in a sheet from the neck down, Mrs. Acquilain was so beautiful that her face was not merely a vision upon our eyes but a weight upon our chests. We could not breathe.
We had realized, I suppose, that she was a pretty woman, but we had never mooned over her. She was the librarian, after all, and someone’s mother, while we were thirteen and inclined not to notice beauty that was as quiet as starlight dropping from the sky and as clear as rainwater. The kind of woman who appeared nude on playing cards had the flash that drew our eyes. Until now, we had often looked at Mrs. Acquilain but had never seen her.
Death had not ravaged her, for she had died quickly. A flaw in a cerebral artery wall, no doubt with her from birth but never suspected, swelled and burst in the course of one afternoon. She was gone in hours.
As she lay on the mortuary gurney, her eyes were closed. Her features were relaxed. She seemed to be sleeping; in fact, her mouth was curved slightly, as though she were having a pleasant dream.
When the two morticians removed the sheet to convey Mrs. Acquilain into the cardboard case and then into the cremator, Bobby and I saw that she was slim, exquisitely proportioned, lovely beyond the power of words to describe. This was a beauty exceeding mere eroticism, and we didn’t look at her with morbid desire but with awe.
She looked so young.
She looked immortal.
The morticians conveyed her to the furnace with what seemed to be unusual gentleness and respect. When the door was closed behind the dead woman, Frank Kirk stripped off his latex gloves and blotted the back of one hand against his left eye and then his right.
It was not perspiration that he wiped away.
During other cremations, Frank and his assistant had chatted almost continuously, though we could not quite hear what they said. This night, they spoke hardly at all.
Bobby and I were silent, too.
We returned the bench to the patio. We crept off Frank Kirk’s property.
After retrieving our bicycles, we rode through Moonlight Bay by way of its darkest streets.
We went to the beach.
At this hour, in this season, the broad strand was deserted. Behind us, as gorgeous as phoenix feathers, nesting on the hills and fluttering through a wealth of trees, were the town lights. In front of us lay the inky wash of the vast Pacific.
The surf was gentle. Widely spaced, low breakers slid to shore, lazily spilling their phosphorescent crests, which peeled from right to left like a white rind off the dark meat of the sea.
Sitting in the sand, watching the surf, I kept thinking how near we were to Christmas. Two weeks away. I didn’t want to think about Christmas, but it twinkled and jingled through my mind.
I don’t know what Bobby was thinking. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to talk. Neither did he.
I brooded about what Christmas would be like for little Devlin Acquilain without his mother. Maybe he was too young to understand what death meant.
Tom Acquilain, her husband, knew what death meant, sure enough. Nevertheless, he would probably put up a Christmas tree for Devlin.
How would he find the strength to hang the tinsel on the boughs?
Speaking for the first time since we had seen the sheet unfolded from the woman’s body, Bobby said simply, “Let’s go swimming.”
Although the day had been mild, this was December, and it wasn’t a year when El Niño—the warm current out of the southern hemisphere—ran close to shore. The water temperature was inhospitable, and the air was slightly chilly.
As Bobby undressed, he folded his clothes and, to keep the sand out of them, neatly piled them on a tangled blanket of kelp that had washed ashore earlier in the day and been dried by the sun. I folded my clothes beside his.