The Resurrectionist E-Book

Jack O'Connell

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: The Quinsigamond Quintet
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 544

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Your only child is lost between this world and the next, and more than anything you want him back. A controversial doctor and a mysterious stranger claim they have the answer. Who do you trust? Are you willing to risk everything? Are you prepared to enter Limbo? Part classic noir thriller, part mind-bending fantasy, The Resurrectionist is a wild ride into a territory where nothing is as it appears. It is the story of Sweeney, a druggist by trade, and his son, Danny, the victim of an accident that has left him in a persistent coma. Hoping for a miracle, they have come to the forbidding, fortress-like Peck Clinic, whose doctors claim to have 'resurrected' other patients who were lost in the void. What Sweeney comes to realize, however, is that the real cure for his son's condition may lie in Limbo, a fantasy comic book world into which his son had been drawn at the time of his accident. Plunged into the intrigue that envelops the clinic, Sweeney's search for answers leads to sinister back alleys, brutal dead ends, and terrifying corners of darkness and mystery. With The Resurrectionist, Jack O'Connell has crafted a breakout thriller that's gripping, suspenseful, and all-out heart-pounding.

Leseprobe

THE RESURRECTIONIST

Your only child is lost between this world and the next, and more than anything you want him back. A controversial doctor and a mysterious stranger claim they have the answer. Who do you trust? Are you willing to risk everything? Are you prepared to enter Limbo?

Part classic noir thriller, part mind-bending fantasy, The Resurrectionist is a wild ride into a territory where nothing is as it appears. It is the story of Sweeney, a druggist by trade, and his son, Danny, the victim of an accident that has left him in a persistent coma. Hoping for a miracle, they have come to the forbidding, fortress-like Peck Clinic, whose doctors claim to have ‘resurrected’ other patients who were lost in the void. What Sweeney comes to realize, however, is that the real cure for his son’s condition may lie in Limbo, a fantasy comic book world into which his son had been drawn at the time of his accident. Plunged into the intrigue that envelops the clinic, Sweeney’s search for answers leads to sinister back alleys, brutal dead ends, and terrifying corners of darkness and mystery.

With The Resurrectionist, Jack O’Connell has crafted a breakout thriller that’s gripping, suspenseful, and all-out heart-pounding.

About the Author

Jack O’Connellis the author of five critically acclaimed novels, which have earned him something of a cult status. He won the Mysterious Press Discovery Contest for the Best First Crime Novel forBox Nine, which launched his career.Box Nineand his other novelsWireless, The Skin Palace,Word Made FleshandThe Resurrectionistare all published by No Exit Press. His work has been praised by James Ellroy, Nail Gaiman, Katherine Dunn, George Pelecanos and Jonathan Carroll, among others. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

Praise for Jack O’Connell

‘Hyper-real noir. A grotesque romance about genocide, language, bibliomania, doubt, obsession, worms, epidermis and sanctuary!’ –James Ellroy

‘The most electrifying debut crime novel you are likely to read all year’ –GQ

‘A feast of unsettling pleasures’ –Independent

‘A surrealistic noir epic that’s part David Lynch and part Bret Easton Ellis’ –Booklist

‘has a kind of hallucinatory fascination. . .amazing in its density, power, richness of detail, humour and irony. . .a dazzling piece of work. One of the year’s 10 best!’ –LATimes

‘Mesmerizing. . . light-years away from your garden-variety thriller.The Skin Palacemay remind you of Blade Runner or the novels of William Gibson, but O’Connell has his own dazzling tale to tell. . . Wickedly clever’ –Seattle Times

‘It’s a measure of O’Connell’s immense talent that, while creating his absolutely original and hyperbolic world, he also paints a striking vision of the haunting ways in which life and art mirror each other’ –Publishers Weekly

‘It’s a helter-skelter, a roller-coaster, a ride on a ghost train—if the fairground had been designed by Philip K Dick, Stan Lee and Edgar Allan Poe’ –Independent on Sunday

‘No one does the improbable like O’Connell’ –Guardian

‘Jack O’Connell has riffed on language, fire-cleansed genre conventions, and stripped the artifice from the modern noir novel, creating a body of work both exciting and entirely original’ –George Pelecanos

‘A masterpiece, O’Connell’s tour de force has a dose of the uncertainty of Kafka, the fantasy of Bradbury, the crisp prose of Greene, and the noir of Chandler’ –Strand Magazine

‘brilliant writing, original concepts, emotional resonance’ –Washington Post

‘A brilliantly tuned, mesmerizing labyrinth of a quasi-real world as only a master artist could draw it’ –James Ellroy

To James Daniel

Mea maxima culpa

—Menlo

1

Alone in the doctor’s office, Sweeney’s eyes lingered on the final panel and, once again, he found himself feeling something close to sympathy for the cartoon strongman, exiled and adrift, the world torn down in a random instant and supplanted with a precarious replacement.

Closing the comic book, Sweeney tried to bring himself back to the here and now. But in seconds he found himself studying the cover, this grotesque family portrait of circus freaks that an artist had elevated into icons. Then he heard the door open and, immediately, he rolled the book and slipped it into his back pocket, covering it with the tail of his sport jacket.

“Sorry for the interruption,” Dr. Peck said, coming around the desk and sliding back into his seat.

“Not a problem,” Sweeney said.

Dr. Peck was one of those individuals whose voice, on the phone, had conveyed his appearance: entirely bald, bordering on gaunt, well groomed but with lips that were too thin and pale. He looked as if his grandfather had owned the most efficient general store on the prairie. But Sweeney knew this wasn’t the case.

“We were speaking, I believe, about the accident,” Peck said as he reopened Danny’s file, then sat back and waited.

Like everyone else, Dr. Peck wanted a recounting. One more smug little prick who had to have the story. He sat and waited, actually folded his hands across the hollow that passed for his belly and assumed a position of clinical concern. His vision seemed to focus on the knot of Sweeney’s necktie, a Christmas present festooned with chicken boys.

Sweeney cleared his throat and tried to stay calm.

“As I was saying, it’s been a difficult year. But I think this move will be a step in the right direction for us.”

“The doctor in Cleveland — ”

“Lawton.”

“He will be forwarding the rest of the boy’s records?”

“Daniel.”

Peck squinted as if he didn’t understand. As if the name weren’t on the file in front of him.

“The boy’s name is Daniel,” Sweeney said and crossed his legs. “You should have received the records already. I’ll call this afternoon to remind Dr. Lawton.”

Peck nodded and opened the manila folder on his desk.

“Coma is a complex condition, Mr. Sweeney. The word itself is used incorrectly more often than not.”

Sweeney nodded back. He needed the job and he’d burned all his bridges back in Ohio. But there was still a limit to the amount of patronizing shit he’d endure.

“As you might imagine, doctor,” he said, “I’ve immersed myself in the literature since the accident.”

Peck sniffed and closed Danny’s file, pushed back just a bit from the desk and lifted the coffee mug that featured a line drawing of the Clinic.

“I’m not trying to be difficult, Mr. Sweeney,” Peck said. “I understand what you’ve been through. This is a heartbreaking situation — ”

“This is my life, doctor. This is not a situation, this is my life. And I don’t mean to be disrespectful or ungrateful. But your associates offered me this position and I accepted it. I pulled my son out of the St. Joseph and moved us eight hundred miles from home. And now you’re sitting here telling me I might not have the job.”

Peck put the mug down on Danny’s file.

“That’s not what I’m saying, Mr. Sweeney. Not at all. I simply want to make sure things are clear here at the start. I’m certain we both have some natural concerns and — ”

“I have one concern and that’s the well-being of my boy. You tell me what your concerns are and I’ll address them.”

Peck picked the mug up and Sweeney saw that it had left a brown circle on Danny’s folder. The doctor was quiet for a minute and then he sniffed again. His voice, when it came, was lower.

“I want to make sure you have a realistic picture of what we can and cannot do here. Your son, Daniel, has had minimal brain activity since the day of the accident. According to the records I’ve received, the doctors at the St. Joseph have administered all the standard and appropriate therapies. We’re a research facility and we do good work. But the last thing I would want is to give you false hope.”

“I can promise you,” Sweeney said, “I’m a realist.”

They looked at each other until Peck blinked.

“All right,” the doctor said, putting on the weary voice. “I’ll take you at your word.”

“I appreciate that,” Sweeney said.

Peck looked at his watch and then slid another file out from beneath Danny’s. Sweeney felt some relief — the interview was coming to an end.

“Your CV looks fine,” Peck said. “You studied at Ohio State?”

A nod, waiting.

“Concentration in pharmacognosy?”

Another nod.

“But you never went into research?”

“I had intended to,” Sweeney said, trying not to sound defensive, “but it didn’t work out that way.”

Peck smiled as if he understood, then asked, “What made you decide on pharmacology in the first place?”

“My father had his own shop.”

“You liked working for the big outfits?”

Sweeney shrugged. “They paid well. They moved you along. I was thinking of buying my own franchise before the accident.”

Peck let the last sentence hang for a beat or two.

“And your wife was a pharmacist as well?”

A nod, thinking, Just ask, you little hump. When the doctor refused, Sweeney said, “We met in school.”

“May I ask if you’ve pursued any counseling in the last year?”

It was not what Sweeney expected and he took a moment before saying, “May I ask how that’s pertinent to my job here at the Clinic?”

Peck maintained a bland expression but scratched his nose.

“You’ve suffered extraordinary stress and grief. You’ve lost your wife and, for all intents and purposes, your son. And I’m about to put you in charge of the Clinic’s drug room. Which is to say, I’m giving you responsibility for all of the Clinic’s patients.”

Sweeney wanted to stand up. He wanted to move around the desk and pick up the coffee mug and break the man’s stuffy nose with it. He wanted to put the fucker on the floor and kick him in the head until Dr. Peck was a patient at his own Clinic.

He did none of those things. He folded his hands on his knee and said, “You’ve got my letters of reference there, doctor. You’ve got my employment history and you’ve probably got the results of your inquiry to the Ohio board. I’ve never been cited for anything. My performance reviews have all been excellent. This position means a pay cut for me. But it seems to be the best place for my son. Now either I have the job that was promised me or I don’t. If I don’t, please let me know. Because if that’s the case, I have to phone my lawyer and make new arrangements for my boy.”

Peck let the room go quiet before he stood up.

“I apologize,” he said, “if you feel my question was inappropriate.”

He extended his hand. Sweeney stood and took it across the desk.

A smile now, as the doctor moved to the exit.

“You’ll call Cleveland and see about those missing records?”

“I’ll call,” Sweeney said.

Peck opened the door to the office.

“You’ll find human resources downstairs. They’ll have some paperwork for you to fill out and you’ll need to have your photo taken.”

Sweeney stepped into the reception area and said, “Thank you, Dr. Peck.”

Dr. Peck nodded and said, “Welcome to the Clinic.”

the personnel manager was an older woman named Nora Blake. She wore a white summer suit and a perfume that Sweeney hadn’t smelled in twenty years. She filled out his paperwork in the basement cafeteria, where she bought him coffee from an antique vending machine.

The coffee was wretched but Nora Blake was delightful and Sweeney almost sprayed their table when she called Dr. Peck a vain little bastard.

“Do you talk like this to all the new hires?” Sweeney asked.

“I’m retiring in three months,” she said. “I’ve been at the Peck for thirty years. I’ve met a lot of arrogant doctors. But Peck is just a shit.”

“I wish I could disagree.”

Nora actually patted his free hand. “Not to worry, Mr. Sweeney. You’re working nights. You won’t see much of him.”

“You can just call me Sweeney,” he said. “Everyone does.”

“All right, Sweeney,” pulling a pack of Virginia Slims from a jacket pocket and lighting up. “You want to tell me why you asked to work third shift?”

He shrugged. “I’m a night owl.”

“Okay,” mouth working around the cigarette. “You want to tell me why you left the senior pharmacist position at the largest CVS in Cleveland to come to this nightmare?”

Sweeney sat back in the chair. It moved and the legs screeched a little against the linoleum.

“You’re really the personnel manager, right?”

“For another twelve weeks.”

“Why’d you stay for thirty years if it’s such a nightmare?”

“I got bored,” Nora said, contorting her lips to blow her smoke away from him, “living off the trust fund.”

“Ms. Blake,” Sweeney said, “I’ve never had a job interview quite like this.”

“This isn’t an interview. According to this,” indicating his paperwork with her cigarette, “you already got the job.”

He decided to let himself banter.

“You’re allowed to smoke in here?” he asked.

“This is the smoking section,” she said.

“I don’t see a sign, Ms. Blake.”

“When I’m sitting here,” Nora said, “it’s the smoking section. And knock off the Ms. Blake, all right? You make me feel like a stenographer.”

“Well,” Sweeney said and drained the last of the coffee, “you’ve sold me on the place so far.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Nora said. “For another ninety days, anyway.”

She squinted at him through her smoke, shifted in her seat, and stifled a wince. Then she pointed at him with the cigarette and said, “In the beginning, I came here for the same reason you did.”

“Your son?” Sweeney asked.

She shook her head. “My husband, Ernie.” She threw out a hand and leaned toward him, an instant confidant. “He was a gorgeous man, let me tell you.”

“Your husband’s a patient?”

She smiled at him and he saw some of her lipstick had smudged across her front teeth. He wasn’t sure whether or not he should tell her.

“He was,” she said. “For almost twenty years. Industrial accident. He worked the line over at the Gordon Brothers. It was a slip and fall. We got a little settlement, but what am I going to do? Sit home and feel awful?”

“Twenty years,” Sweeney repeated.

Nora shrugged. “You know they can go that long. Don’t tell me you haven’t read all the books. That’s what the families do. We read all the books. We look for the answers. We become goddamned specialists, don’t we? Twenty years isn’t so unusual. Ernie was young and strong.”

Sweeney had nothing to say to that.

“You know, he didn’t hurt anything else. No broken bones. Just his head. The first doctor says to me It’s a fluke. If he’d hit the floor at another angle, who knows? A concussion. A week off from the mill. As if this is supposed to make me feel better. All these years later, I’m still frosted.”

Sweeney had a response to that. “Their job isn’t to make you feel better,” he said. “You find that out immediately.”

Nora saw the opening and used it. “How’d it happen to you? Your son, I mean. Do you mind me asking? I know some of the general details, but . . .”

He did mind. He hated it every time and it never got easier. But he’d found a way to tell it. He’d made it into a story. Like a joke you’ve memorized so that you use the same words. The same tone and the same pauses with each telling. He took a breath, got himself ready.

“I was working,” he began and wished he hadn’t finished the coffee. “It was about seven o’clock. I’d gotten called in. The night shift guy — Anwar — he’d phoned in sick. I couldn’t get anybody. So Kerry was home alone with Danny. This was early summer and we’d just gotten the pool going. We’d had a barbecue on Memorial Day. Invited the neighbors. We were new to the neighborhood.”

But this wasn’t how he normally told it. Why did he mention the barbecue? He looked across the table at Nora, took another breath, and started again.

“Danny had just turned six that spring. Kerry had gotten him started with swimming lessons at the Y.”

The instructor had been nineteen. He couldn’t remember her name. She wore a red lifeguard’s suit and had blond hair, chopped at the neck. He’d made it to the lessons only that one time. The lifeguard had freckles and a tattoo on her ankle.

“And he loved it. He was a real waterdog.”

He remembered Danny in the girl’s arms. Holding these colored plastic rings in each fist. Danny would scoop them off the bottom of the pool. He was so light — thirty pounds on his sixth birthday — that the lifeguard had to help him dive down to grab the rings.

“You were at work,” Nora said, nudging him along.

“I was at work,” he said. “I must’ve filled a dozen asthma inhalers that night. The air quality was terrible all week. I had all these parents hovering in front of the counter. They haven’t had dinner, you know, and the kid’s gone from a wheeze to a real gasp.”

He sees the black woman, young, her first child, terrified. She can’t find her insurance card. She dumps her purse into her lap.

“And your wife,” Nora said, “was home with your boy.”

He felt the coffee start to churn in his stomach.

“He was in his pajamas already. Kerry had gone out to the patio to turn on the grill. She was going to throw a kabob on for dinner. She left the sliders open. And she went back in and poured herself a glass of wine.”

He stopped then and stared at the old woman in her white summer suit, with lipstick on her front tooth. He swallowed and changed his voice and said, “I’m sorry. Is there a restroom around here?”

Nora Blake motioned with her head.

“Turn left out of here and go to the end of the corridor.”

the men’s room was empty. He walked into a stall and closed the door. He put a hand across his mouth and tried to breathe through his nose. He felt his pulse hammering in his neck. He felt his bowels going loose and that instant jet of perspiration breaking under his arms and across his groin. He pulled down his tie, unbuttoned the shirt. The room tilted and he leaned against the green metal partition. He could smell something like bleach. Some old-fashioned disinfectant. Then the pain broke across his forehead and temples. His vision blurred. He bent, went down on one knee, and vomited.

Afterward, he splashed his face with cold water, washed out his mouth, and popped a peppermint candy. He bought the candies in bulk and always kept a half dozen in his pocket. He put a hand on the sink and steadied himself, then looked in the mirror. He rebuttoned the shirt and adjusted the tie.

He stood up straight, brushed at the knee of his pants, and walked back to the cafeteria. Nora Blake was still seated at their table, writing something in his employment file. She closed the file as he sat down.

“You all right?” Nora asked.

Sweeney bit into the peppermint and nodded.

“The first year after Ernie’s accident,” she said, “I lost twenty-five pounds.”

He was still breathing heavily, but the sweats and the pain in the head were gone.

Nora watched him as she tongued her front teeth. Then she added, “And I’ve never put one of them back on.”

he spent the rest of the morning getting the Nora Blake Tour. It was an amazing performance, one part architectural lecture, three parts stand-up routine. And all of it seasoned with a little social commentary and a lot of staff gossip. Nora could spiel. Nora knew her shtick. Three decades showing new recruits the inside of the nightmare had honed her travelogue. She delivered it with a dry and deadpan voice that had been refined into gravel by years of cigarette smoke and stoicism.

The Clinic was a sandstone monster on fifty acres of private land near Quinsigamond’s western border. It sat between a wildlife preserve and an abandoned quarry. The Peck family had owned it from the beginning. Generations of doctors begetting doctors, a priestly clan of cool Yankees elected by God to care for the sick and the dying. They made their money in cotton and wool, but they gave their hearts to disease and deformity. And over time, the family hospital became the model for American health care, the kind of place where charity and science could lie together in order to breed healing.

This history weighed heavily on the current Pecks. They knew their tradition and they let it guide their decisions. Especially the decision, made a little more than thirty years ago, to alter their mission, to specialize. Many felt it was a radical break with the past, but Dr. Peck has never looked back. And today, the Peck Clinic is breaking new ground once again, setting the standard as the finest long-term care and research facility for patients trapped inside coma and persistent vegetative state.

What others might call grand or stately, Sweeney saw as ominous. The Clinic was heavy and dark on the outside, a Romanesque mausoleum with a central manse and two dark wings that fanned out from each side. And the inside was even worse, a maze of cavernous rooms and bad lighting and narrow, vertigo-inducing corridors.

At full capacity, the Clinic could maintain a hundred patients. But fees were so high and Dr. Peck’s criteria for admittance so stringent that there were rarely more than fifty sleepers at any time.

That was how Nora referred to the patients. Even though she knew the term was medically inaccurate and annoyed most of the staff doctors. “Drives them crazy,” she said. “As if I was insulting someone. But for twenty years I sat next to my husband’s bed. Room 103, I’ll show you. And that’s how I did it. I sat there and I held his hand and I told myself he’d just finished a plate of stuffed cabbage and was dozing. I told myself we were in the living room and he was watching his Red Sox and he’d just drifted off. And any minute he’d start up with the snoring and I’d have to wake him and send him up to bed.”

“But isn’t it harder that way?” Sweeney asked as they rode the elevator up to the third floor.

“How so?” Nora asked.

“If you tell yourself they’re just sleeping, then aren’t you also telling yourself that one day they’re going to wake up?”

Nora got a little stiff.

She said, “Mary Rowlands.”

Sweeney said, “Pardon me?”

“Of Rockhurst, Maryland. Went through the windshield of a ’72 Camaro. Severe head trauma. Fourteen years in PVS. One morning she wakes up and says, ‘Is my husband all right?’ ”

“I read about that case,” Sweeney said. “She died a week later.”

“So she died a week later. The point is, she woke up. She regained consciousness and she talked to her people.”

“I don’t know,” Sweeney said. “For me it would be harder. Imagining Danny’s dreaming about some cartoon or something.”

“Maybe he is,” Nora said.

“But they don’t dream.”

She gave a laugh that carried just a touch of pity.

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

Ordinarily he would have let it go. But two days away from Danny had him edgier than usual.

“No, I’m sorry, they do not dream,” he said. “They just don’t. There’s no activity in that area of the brain. It’s documented. If they’re dreaming, then it’s not true coma.”

The elevator came to a stop with a jerk that one of them finessed and the other did not. The doors slid open and as she unlatched the mesh gate, Nora said, “Jesus, we got to you just in time.”

They stepped out into a small foyer that led to the nurses’ station. No one was at the desk, but a tall black man in green scrubs was just beyond it, mopping the floor of the corridor.

“Hey, Romeo,” Nora called to him, and Sweeney cringed at her volume. “Where’s the princess?”

The janitor had a thick accent that Sweeney couldn’t place. “She gone to get the coffee,” he said.

Nora rolled her eyes for Sweeney’s benefit and in a mock whisper said, “We’d pay her in coffee but we couldn’t afford it.”

She led him down the hall and into the first wardroom. And though a year of daily visits to the St. Joseph should have steeled him to the sight, he had to fight the impulse to run as soon as he stepped into the room.

A shaft of sunlight pouring through the oversized windows made everything seem ethereal. Six beds were filled with six bodies. Men and women. Old and young. Dressed uniformly in hospital johnnies. White sheets covering them to the waist. Some skulls were heavily bandaged, the heads mummified. Some were intact but fully and freshly shaven. Others sported luxurious hair that looked newly washed and styled.

All of them were hooked to IVs. One young girl wore a crown of electrodes that coalesced into a fat braid that, in turn, fed into a machine at the side of her bed. Harsh respiration came from a shriveled old man, the only one turned on his side, his face bathed in sun. The noise did things to Sweeney’s stomach.

The first week that Danny was at St. Joe’s, the boy had shared a room with what the nurse called “a hard breather.” The sound never stopped, that chronic, laborious gasping and one night Sweeney caught himself in a suffocation fantasy, imagining himself holding the pillow over the roommate’s face until the lungs at last gave up and the brain, finally, shut down.

He realized Nora was watching him.

“You can see they’re well taken care of,” she said.

And it was true. The room and its patients were clean and well tended. There was nothing immediately horrific here. At least nothing particularly visceral. And he knew that this was exactly what unnerved him, this outward appearance of tidiness and normalcy. As if he’d wandered into some Victorian napping parlor and the lot of them would awake at three when the bell was rung for tea and cake.

“Third floor,” Nora said, lowering her voice again, “is for the short-timers. Or, at least, those diagnosed as possible short-timers. They’ve indicated moments of consciousness since their incident.”

He flinched at the word incident.

“These are Dr. Peck’s prime candidates for arousal. Good brain activity. Promising response to therapies. These are the ones who have the best chance of walking out of here and suing somebody.”

Sweeney motioned to the young girl with the mane of wires.

“What happened to her?”

“Thrown from her horse,” Nora said. Then she began to point to each bed in turn. “Car crash. Car crash. Stroke. Car crash.” And turning to the last one, a woman about her own age, “And I think she was a fall down the stairs. The cellar stairs, I think. Her son found her.”

Sweeney led the way back into the corridor and started for the elevator before Nora could show him another ward.

“For a personnel manager,” he said, “you know an awful lot about the patients.”

“I spent time on all these floors,” she said. “Ernie started out on three. After a month, they downgraded his condition and moved him to two. He spent his last ten years on the first floor.”

He stopped walking and waited for her to do the same. When she turned to him, he asked, “Do you know what floor Danny will be on?”

She said, “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t?”

He shook his head.

All the wiseass gone now, she said, “He’ll be in my husband’s old room.”

they didn’t spar much after that. They breezed through the second floor, the patients looking paler and more fragile than their counterparts upstairs. Nora had a penchant for narrating the proximate cause of each catastrophe before them. He heard about drug overdoses and viral attacks, embolisms and encephalitis and diabetes, hepatitis and botched suicide.

He was brought to the bedside of Mr. Lawrence Belmonte, who got lost in the woods during a hunting trip in Maine last March and suffered a near fatal case of hypothermia. He lost both his feet and all trace of consciousness. Sweeney was paraded before the bed of Mrs. Honey Lieb, who’d been shipped up from Fort Myers after she failed to wake from her gallstone procedure. He gazed upon the comely face of Ms. Tara Russell, a twenty-four-year-old media consultant from Atlanta who fell ill at a conference in Michigan, was hospitalized for what one doctor still insists was Legionnaires’ Disease, slipped into a coma the night she was admitted, and ended up unaware, alone, and in the void, floating here in the Peck Clinic.

“Such a shame,” Nora said, patting Ms. Russell’s leg through the sheet. “You say it over and over. It becomes a little prayer.”

things were different on the first floor. There were only three wardrooms and only three beds to each room. And though the rooms had long ago been gutted and refitted for such purposes, they retained a residential feel. It was darker down here. The walls preserved a lot of the house’s original heavy wood and the floors were covered with an old-fashioned carpeting rather than tile or rubber.

The wardrooms were located in the rear of the building and as they walked down the central hall, Sweeney could feel Nora tensing. She stopped in the door of 101 and Sweeney entered first. There were three beds, two on the back wall and one on the front. All three of the patients had gone decerebrate, the arms rigid, bent at the elbow and locked. The hands clenched into fists and pulled up to the chest. The legs raised up into a fetal crouch.

Sweeney made himself move deeper into the room. He stopped at the foot of the first bed and saw a middle-aged woman, eyes blasted open, staring at the ceiling. His eyes followed down her body. When he came to the gastrostomy tube snaking out from beneath the sheet, he turned to another bed. A young man, maybe early twenties, though it was hard to say. The gauntness obscured age, made them all into skeletal angels.

Nora had stopped volunteering stories, so Sweeney asked, “What’s his deal?”

“Spring break,” she said. “Daytona. About five years ago. He tried to jump into the hotel swimming pool from his balcony.”

The third patient was suspended in a Stryker frame.

Nora saw him looking and said, “Bedsores.”

Sweeney said, “Take me to Danny’s room.”

They exited 101, moved past 102 without looking inside, and entered 103.

“Do they always leave the lights on?” Sweeney asked.

“It’s easier,” Nora said, “on the doctor’s eyes.”

The first two beds were empty.

“Which one will be his?” Sweeney asked.

“I’m sure you can take your pick,” Nora said. “Would you like to meet his roommate?”

Instead of answering, he approached the occupied bed. He began to run through the routine, to pull in the deep breath and crack the first two knuckles of his right hand with his thumb. But what he found at the far end of the room was not what he expected.

“She’s been here three years,” Nora said, at his side now. “Her name’s Irene Moore.”

There was no decerebrate rigidity here. No swollen or shaven head. No sunken cheeks, no mummified extremities. The eyes were closed. She was turned on her side, dressed in a white cotton nightgown.

“And what’s her story?” Sweeney heard himself say.

“Unfortunately,” Nora said, “no one really knows. She went to sleep one night and she never woke up. There was no head trauma. No drug or alcohol overdose. And as far as they can tell, no stroke or seizure. Dr. Peck says it’s got to be viral. But he’s guessing if you ask me.”

“Does she have family?”

“She’s got a husband. Ex-husband now. In the beginning he was here all the time. He took an apartment in the city. He’s a lawyer in New York. Lots of money. He tried to commute back and forth for a while. But after a year, when she wasn’t responding to any of the therapies . . .”

She trailed off, then added, “He still pays the bills, though. I’ll give him that.”

Sweeney asked, “No kids?”

“No. And her parents have been gone forever.”

He nodded, started to turn toward the empty beds and heard Nora say, “Irene, dear?” as if she were talking to someone with a hearing impairment. She was leaning over the comatose woman, rubbing her arm and tucking some hair behind an ear. “Irene, this is Mr. Sweeney. But we just call him Sweeney. His boy Danny is going to be sharing the room. You’ll be meeting Danny tomorrow.”

Normally, Sweeney found such displays patronizing and showy. He’d seen a lot of it at the St. Joseph and thought it more for the benefit of the visitor than the patient. As if she sensed his disdain, Nora looked backward at him, still rubbing Irene’s arm, and said, “She hears me, you know.”

“Just like your husband,” he said before he could catch himself.

“That’s right,” Nora said and turned her face back to Irene Moore. “Just like my husband.”

The window for apology slipped past and, not knowing what else to do, Sweeney walked down to the first bed in the ward and said, “I think this one will be good for Danny.”

Then he took the rolled comic book from his back pocket and placed it under the bed’s pillow.

they were silent on the ride down to the basement. But when the elevator opened onto a dim junkyard, Nora said, “Oh, this is going to be just charming.” They stepped into a storage area crammed with piles of furniture and equipment — gurneys, desks, IV poles — some of them shrouded with tarps and sheets.

“One of these days,” Nora said, “somebody’s got to clean this place out.” She fished in her jacket pocket and brought out a set of keys and they made their way through the maze to the door in front of them. She had a little trouble with the lock. Sweeney took the keys from her and managed to turn the bolt.

They stepped into the apartment.

Nora said, “I’m guessing you got a bargain on the place.”

Sweeney found a light switch, flipped it, and said, “This is what closed the deal.”

He’d meant it to be funny. The ceiling light flickered, then caught, and the room took on a yellow tinge.

“It’s not as big as I expected,” he said.

“That’s always been my experience,” Nora said, moving to the box windows up near the ceiling, pulling back the minidrapes and sending clouds of dust into the air. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “You’ve got a real talent for punishing yourself.”

Over the phone, Dr. Peck had called it a “three-room efficiency” and used the word “cozy.” But the kitchen was really just a galley along the rear wall that housed an antique stove and refrigerator. In general, the apartment looked like the set of a 1950s sitcom about a bachelor janitor.

The air was close and stale. Sweeney pointed to the windows and asked, “Do those open?” Then went to check on the bedroom before Nora could answer. He found a nice four-poster with matching bureau that sported a mirror. Sitting on the bureau was what looked like a Sears catalog but turned out to be TheBig Book of Logic Problems. There was a coat post in one corner of the room and a calendar nailed into the wall above the bed. The calendar featured Miss January 1973, a naked brunette kneeling on a white shag rug.

Nora came to the doorway and said to Sweeney’s back, “Let me find you a place in the city.”

Sweeney shook his head without turning around. “It’s fine,” he said. “I won’t be in here much. And I’ll be right below Danny.”

“Let’s see what we find in that refrigerator,” Nora said, “before you make any final decisions.”

2 – Limbo Comics

issue# 1: “Exile”

They came from the city of Maisel in the heart of Old Bohemia, land of pogroms and demonology. They became a family in the most binding way of all, through a shared and pitiless suffering. Make no mistake, the oldest truths are the most reliable: persecution ties a people together. To be different is to invite oppression. To wear your difference on your body, on your face, this is to invite eradication. Unless, of course, your difference is so grotesque that the crowds will pause to study, to celebrate, to marvel at your misfortune for a short time before they smite you. Then, and only then, will you have a chance to escape.

What does it mean to be a freak? For the Goldfaden Freaks it meant, for a time, a brief period in the beginning, that they were stars. They had been handpicked, assembled over years and miles by Tedeo Bluett, showman extraordinaire and inheritor of the Goldfaden Carnival, the premier — and, perhaps, the most notorious — of all the traveling circuses in all of Old Bohemia. The circus featured the standard fare of all the major bazaars — acrobats and aerialists, fortune-tellers and magicians, trained beasts and juggling clowns, games of chance and skill. So what was it that set the Goldfaden apart from the many other cavalcades of garish drama and comedy that patrolled the gypsy circuits? Its tents were no larger or more colorful than those of the Theatre Magika. Its rings of fire no hotter than those of Valli’s Cabaret. Its gorillas were no more savage than those of the Kabalist’s Revue and its human cannon was no braver than that of the Circus Herman Nevi.

No, the single feature that separated the Goldfaden from all the other touring spectacles was the infamous Freaks’ Promenade. Staged just before the finale of each evening’s show, this procession of unsightliness and deformity was unmatched in the history of sideshow lore. Truly, the Goldfaden Freaks were the stars of not just Tedeo Bluett’s circus but the entire carny world. Legendary monstrosities, they were the only freaks whose appearance in the flesh was more unsettling than even their most hyperbolic promotional posters. And because of this, Bluett saved their act for the climax of each performance and kept it short and simple.

Every night, after all the lions had been tamed and all the swords had been swallowed, after the clown king had chased his nemesis, the thief of hearts, around and into the rolling fountain, after one of the Flying Zhilinskis had dropped Little Sonya into the arms of Count Leonid and the Weatherman had been electrocuted and revived by his curvaceous assistant, and the Halloween Killer had lost his head to the Magic Guillotine, then, and only then, did Ringmaster Bluett unleash his freaks. And they marched around the perimeter of the center ring and then up, up, into the audience, right up close and personal, where the customers could see for themselves the horrible mistakes that nature makes on rare occasions.

Physically, it was not a tough gig. And this proved to be the freaks’ downfall. Because while their “act” consisted solely of a ten-minute nightly stroll of ogling and groping amid shrieks and curses, the freaks’ pay and accommodations rivaled those of the acrobats and lion tamers — a fact that triggered no end of jealousy among the rest of the Goldfaden performers. And nowhere was that jealousy more inflamed than in the spleen of Shoshone McGee, the infamous “Blade of Zürau,” a half-Cherokee, half-Irish, and fully psychotic knife thrower who functioned as the Goldfaden’s resident diva.

McGee lived in a state of perpetual crisis, a melodrama of alcoholism, amphetamine abuse, manic depression, and bad karma. He went through assistant-wives like sour candies and his colleagues agreed that he approached anything like happiness only in the midst of performance, throwing his blades at a human target. He was a tall, muscular man of dark, movie idol looks, except for an enormous protruding brow that was never quite mitigated by the black, luxuriant hair, which he wore long and swept back. His cheekbones caused marital discord in the towns through which he toured. He lived his life barefoot and bare-chested, though he favored expensive leather trousers, the tighter the better. The bulk of his salary from Bluett went to liquor, pills, and knives. But when the throwers of Old Bohemia talked shop, most agreed that McGee had the finest collection of steel in the business. He may or may not have been the most skilled bladesman on the circuit, but he was certainly the most daring. He fired his daggers while blindfolded and drunk and from distances that no Entertainers’ Guild would ever sanction.

All of this, however, is mere addendum to the central fact of the knife thrower’s existence: Shoshone McGee hated freaks.

No, this is too generous. Truth be told, McGee abhorred freaks. He despised freaks. He loathed them with an antipathy that seemed to grow with each new day. Freaks lay at the center of a furious rage that boiled, year after year, in the heart of the knife thrower. And though there were many legends regarding the source of the man’s fury, no one could say with any certainty which one was closest to the truth.

But as far as the Goldfaden Freaks were concerned, the reason for McGee’s hatred was an academic mystery. What mattered was staying away from the madman and his cutlery. And so a system of avoidance grew up organically within the troupe. The freaks’ trailers were always parked at the opposite end of the campsite from the knife thrower. They dined in separate mess tents. And Bluett slipped Glomo the clown an extra kroner and a bottle of schnapps each week just to make sure that McGee was absent from the big top when the Freaks’ Promenade occurred each night.

And yet, for all of these precautions, Shoshone McGee’s hatred only grew as the years went by. And, over time, that hatred slowly poisoned the rest of the Goldfaden troupe against what the knife thrower, in his inimitable way of turning bile into poetry, called the devil’s putrid afterbirth.

And so it was the fate of the freaks that, even within the liberal world of a circus clan, they became outcasts, exiled from the bosom, show dogs kept forever beyond the warmth of the family fire. Of course, it was natural that they would build their own fire, their own family, constructed of their ill-fitting parts and bound together by an empathy that knew no limits. That family was comprised of:

Fatos, the mule-faced boy, guileless and playful and dreamy despite his large and perpetually infected ears and the mange that spread across his cheek each spring;

Aziz, the human torso, the stoic of the family, swinging himself forward on his thickly callused knuckles, a fat lower lip tucked up over his mouth;

Nadja, the lobster girl, whose claws could clip a cigar neatly in two, who relished a good party and hinted, in the small hours of too many drunken nights, of love affairs with princes and opium;

Durga, the fat lady, a half ton of matriarchal earth goddess, who dressed in flowing silk and would listen to any problem and provide counsel and solace and Bavarian chocolate;

Jeta, the skeleton, outfitted, always, in a navy singlet, so shy that the nightly Promenade could reduce her to tears;

Milena, the hermaphrodite, proud and testy, with a wit as sharp and fine as a German scalpel;

Antoinette, the pinhead, who adored gingham dresses and piano music, and who tended to wander if not properly supervised;

Marcel and Vasco, Siamese twins who loved and squabbled by the phases of the moon and who once passed a full year without speaking to each other — though today, neither can recall the source of their argument;

Kitty, the elegant, delicate, raven-haired dwarf, with just a touch of the femme fatale, of which she was mostly unaware;

And Chick, the chicken boy, the conscience and spirit of the freak clan, with his patchy coat of feathers and the hard cartilage that formed a beak of a mouth. Chick, the boy without a past, whose mother had given him to Tedeo Bluett to raise. The chicken boy whose spirit was so pure and whose soul was so wise that his tenure in this foul world was forever problematic. With a tendency to fugues and trances, with a notion of a long-lost father, with his tender love for the dwarf, his Kitty, and a knowledge that his destiny lay beyond the borders of Old Bohemia, in the legendary country of Gehenna.

We know little about the chicken boy’s origins. And, as usually happens in the absence of fact, legend has descended to fill in the gaps. Chick himself will not dignify the legends with discussion. But late at night, walking in the woods or huddled in a trailer with his beloved Kitty, he sometimes allows himself a nip of analysis and a shooter of speculation. Tedeo Bluett has told him the same simple tale from the start.

The troupe, stranded outside of Worgl when a show had fallen through, was camped on the edge of town, on a bluff overlooking the River Kalda. It was a season of recession and grippe and people were not venturing to the theaters. Troubled by another bout of worry and insomnia, the ringmaster had taken a walk to clear his mind. He was thinking that night of getting out of the circus business altogether. Selling the Goldfaden to Herman Nevi or Kalli Kraus or one of his other competitors. Lost in thought, stumbling through the fog, a young woman’s wailing suddenly startled him. He made his way toward her cries and found himself on a slimy jetty that protruded into heaving winter waters. And at the end of the rocks, he found her.

She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years, he told Chick. She was hysterical and distraught and, beyond this, Bluett would say, somehow he knew that she was the saddest creature he had ever encountered. This is a bold statement for a circus man to make and it is the one part of the story that Chick has never doubted. The girl was dressed —hidden was the word that Bluett used most often — in the kind of flowing, hooded cape that had been fashionable many years previously. Beneath the cape, she wore a serving girl’s frock, the tattered uniform of someone’s maid. A washerwoman-in-training, was Tedeo’s initial guess, but when he saw her face peek out from the hood, he knew he was wrong. No, even in this hysterical state, with her hair tangled and matted by the spray, this one was a beauty of rare breeding and grace.

Her crying ceased when she saw Bluett approaching on the jetty. But she was silenced for only a moment.

“Don’t try to stop me,” she screamed over the wind.

And Bluett knew that she meant to throw herself into the chop.

He halted and held a hand up, both to reassure the girl that he understood and to block the water blowing into his eyes.

The girl looked from the ringmaster to the river, as if suddenly unsure of her next move. And that was when Bluett saw she was holding a package, something the size of a bread loaf, wrapped in a rapidly decomposing newspaper — what he would later discover to be a medical tabloid known as The Journal of Physical Abnormality.

“Please,” he yelled over the screeching winds, “let me help you.”

With this, the girl threw back her hood. And even in the darkness, Tedeo Bluett could see that she had eyes as striking as the emperor’s emeralds.

“You want to help me?” she asked, her contempt cutting through the gale. “Get him to Gehenna.” And with that, she tossed the bread loaf at the ringmaster and threw herself off the rocks.

Instinct born of a lifetime in the circus caused Bluett to go down on one knee and catch, perfectly, the tossed burden that he understood, at once, to be something other than a loaf of bread, something alive and moving and making sounds of its own. Torn, he ran to the jetty’s end before allowing himself to inspect the creature in his arms. His eyes swept the water but there was no sign of the jumper. He called out to her but knew, as he called, that it was futile.

Then he peeled back the news wrap and took his first look at the child inside.

“I have lived a life in show business,” he would tell Chick over the years that followed that night. “I have trafficked all my days in spectacle. I come from a people who have made their living mining the most curious parts of this astounding world. But in all my time, in all my travels, I had never seen anything like you.”

it was this very chicken boy, born into tragedy and mystery, who drew the bulk of the “normal” performers’ wrath. Too innocent and pure-hearted for his own good, Chick had become the crowd’s favorite absurdity, a creature whose deformity could not camouflage his deep sense of compassion and truth. That Chick was a religious seeker, given, rumor said, to prophetic dreams, made him only more suspect and, ultimately, despised by the rest of the Goldfaden troupe.

During the final tour with the Bluett show, the freaks’ popularity peaked. It was in the city of Smetano that the problem came to a head. The audience had been impatient all week and even the master showmen had trouble commanding full attention. During Magda Zhilinski’s neck twist there had been catcalls, genuine boos and hisses, though Magda had performed perfectly. When Grendal Romain attempted to put his horses through the synchronized folk dance, the music could not be heard above the crowd’s impatient grumbling. But the last straw was heaved on during Shoshone McGee’s knife-throwing exhibition, when someone yelled, “Bring on the freaks!” and the crowd cheered at an inopportune moment — causing McGee to nick, for the first time, his latest wife’s inner thigh.

At this, McGee’s long-seething rage boiled over into murderous rebellion and the Goldfaden troupe revolted en masse. They issued Bluett an ultimatum: choose the freaks or choose the rest. One or the other. To share a stage with these blunders of God was one thing. To be upstaged by them was something else entirely. Something evil and unnatural and, finally, intolerable.

That Bluett was not a stupid man goes without saying. He had the savvy of a fifth-generation showman. True, the freaks were his finale, the most popular attraction of the whole circus. But their act consisted of nothing more than a ten-minute parade. And you cannot book a tent with ten minutes of deformity. As a climax, the freaks were gold. As a beginning and an end and everything in between, they were death.

And so, on a cold autumn night, when a harvest moon blasted the forests with blue light and the fog rolled in cold and wet, Tedeo Bluett banished the freaks from the only home that most of them had ever known. To his credit, he paid them a month’s wages and let them keep their costumes.

The freaks were dumbfounded. By and large, these were not wily individuals. Most had been coddled throughout their lives, tended and managed by Bluett like prized sheep. They were not idiots but they were all spoiled to a greater or lesser degree and had little sense of how to take care of themselves in the wider world.

So, when Bluett abandoned them at a campsite on the edge of Village Odradek, the freaks were confused and terrified. Fat Durga went to work at once, playing the mama to her misshapen brood. She draped her gargantuan arms over several sloping shoulders and dispensed a rosy future. The freaks would stay together, she proclaimed, and remain a family. They would apply for a state license and get out on the road, on their own. This was the best thing that could have happened to them. No more suffering the pettiness of the mundane jugglers. No more living off an allowance from the ringmaster. They would form their own troupe and control their own destiny.

Jeta and Antoinette were comforted by Durga’s prophecy. And most of the others were at least calmed enough to sleep. But Chick and Kitty weren’t fooled by the big lady’s dreams of blue skies and gravy. They said nothing aloud, but they exchanged a lovers’ knowing look across the evening’s campfire. The look said: what do we know about licensing? What do we know about bookings and ticket sales? About promotion and advertising? About tent riggings? About union rules? About the twisting back roads of Old Bohemia?

The look said: what do we know about putting together an act?

Chick appreciated, even loved, Durga’s optimism and her way with a cheerful story. But what the family needed most in this instance was a new patron. Someone strong and smart who could guide them, keep the clan together and manage the business aspect of their collective life. While Durga sketched out the details of their gleaming future, Chick wracked his brain trying to think of a new and worthy patriarch. It was not an easy task — most of the circus owners in Old Bohemia made Tedeo Bluett look like a saint — and Chick fell asleep before he could conjure a candidate. And woke an hour before dawn with a hand clamped over his beak and a knife tip poking into his neck.

His eyes, wide with shock and betrayal, opened and looked out on Bruno Seboldt, the Goldfaden strongman, an authentic Hercules who had joined the troupe a year before, hiring on during a matinee in Krappl. Bruno, who could burst iron chains and heave a dozen clowns the length of the tent and lift a small horse straight over his head, was said, from the start, to be a wanted man. He had never warmed to the freaks. And now it looked like he was ready to murder at least one of them.

But after a horrible moment of mutual staring, Bruno sheathed his knife into his boot, brought a sausage of a finger to his mustache-hidden lips and made a shushing sound. Then he released Chick’s beak and motioned to the trees beyond the campfire. Chick rose silently, stepped over a sleeping Kitty and followed the strongman into the woods.

“You almost scared me to death,” Chick said to Bruno’s back.

Bruno found a stump and sat on it, which brought his head even with the still-standing Chick’s. Despite the nighttime cool, the big man wore a training shirt that exposed his enormous arms and the identical tattoos on each — pictures of Atlas hoisting the earth. Bruno kept his eyes on the ground, as if, even in the shadows, he could not bring himself to look at the chicken boy.

“If I had wanted you dead,” Bruno said, “I would be roasting you on a spit right now.”

It was always an unsettling image, no matter how often he heard it, and Chick allowed himself a shudder.

“What’s all this about?” he asked. “You’re rid of us. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Bruno shook his head.

“It’s McGee,” he said, scratching the back of his skull. “He says you’re all abominations. That if we just let you go free, you’ll only find another circus that will take you in.”

It was as if someone had read Chick’s mind, though he knew that Flora Kino, the troupe’s resident gypsy, was more grifter than psychic.

“And what business is that of yours?” Chick asked. “You don’t have to look at us anymore. You don’t have to share the tent or the trailers with us. You got what you wanted.”

Moonlight reflected off Bruno’s forehead.

“McGee says it’s too dangerous. The competition is fierce these days. We can’t afford to lose our audience to the monsters.”

Chick nodded, unable to hide from the logic. At a loss, he simply said, “And what do you think, Bruno?”

The strongman scratched at his cheek, pulled on his mustache. Finally he rose from the stump, came forward, and towered over Chick.

“I don’t like the lot of you,” he said. “But McGee is on his way. He plans on butchering every last one of you. And I couldn’t let that happen.”

“What will you do,” Chick asked, trying to look into the dark woods behind Bruno, “when he gets here?”

Bruno’s hands went to his hips and his head tilted just a bit toward a shoulder.

“I was thinking,” he said, “that there might be a solution to this problem.”

It was at this moment that Chick felt the first symptoms of the seizure. It came as an instantaneous wallop of déjà vu, accompanied by a cold rush of current up his spine and into his brain. He staggered, regrouped, and asked, “What do you mean?”

Maybe it was the darkness or perhaps his self-absorption in the moment, but Bruno didn’t notice the change in the chicken boy.

“I mean,” Bruno said, “what if you left?”

“Left?” repeated Chick as his stomach began to churn and his eyes to lose focus.

“Yes,” said Bruno, warming to his idea as it took on weight with his words. “What if you left the country? Got out of Bohemia? Especially you. You’re always reading those newspapers and pamphlets about Gehenna. You could go there. You could take all of them with you.”

“Go to Gehenna?” in a breathy whisper, as if voicing a dangerous heresy.

“I know a man,” said Bruno, anxious to keep talking, to continue rolling out his plan. “He used to come by the gym in Maisel. We would play cards together sometimes. He has a boat. A ship. He owes me a favor. I could get you passage. To Gehenna.”

“Why would you do this for us?” Chick asked.

And Bruno muttered, “I won’t have murder on my hands again.”

No man ever spoke with more sincerity or better intention. But the vow proved impossible. Before they could wake the rest of the freaks and decamp the area, they were ambushed by Shoshone McGee, nastily drunk and thirsty for freak blood. He came out of the tree line with a knife in each hand, raving, screaming like a demon, promising rape and dismemberment and lingering death to the filthy abominations. And then he saw Bruno Seboldt.

“Betrayer,” he screamed and charged with both knives outstretched.

For a huge man, Bruno was nimble and fast. And, of course, it helped that McGee was wretched with alcohol. Bruno sidestepped the attack, knocked the madman to the ground with a blow to the neck, came down on the knife thrower’s back as if genuflecting, and in a single, fluid motion, took McGee’s head in his bulging arms, like a soccer ball, and twisted it until the neck snapped. It happened in an instant, a child quieting a baby goose.

The sleeping freaks woke with McGee’s war cry just in time to witness the killing. Everyone remained on the ground, silent and in shock, except for Antoinette, who crawled into Durga’s arms and began to whimper.

Bruno got to his feet and heaved a sigh and said to Chick, “We don’t have much time. Help me bury him.”