The Laughing Corpse

Her spell shredded on the wind, but I didn’t need her urging now. The power had me. I was riding it like a bird on a current of air. It held me, lifted me. It felt solid and insubstantial as air.

The dry sunken earth cracked open over Gaynor’s ancestor’s grave. A pale hand shot skyward. A second hand came through the crack. The zombie tore the dry earth. I heard other old graves breaking in the still, summer night. It broke its way out of his grave, just like Gaynor had wanted.

Gaynor sat in his wheelchair on the crest of the hill. He was surrounded by the dead. Dozens of zombies in various stages of decay crowded close to him. But I hadn’t given the order yet. They wouldn’t hurt him unless I told them to.

“Ask him where the treasure is,” Gaynor shouted.

I stared at him and every zombie turned with my eyes and stared at him, too. He didn’t understand. Gaynor was like a lot of people with money. They mistake money for power. It isn’t the same thing at all.

“Kill the man Harold Gaynor.” I said it loud enough to carry on the still air.

“I’ll give you a million dollars for having raised him. Whether I find the treasure or not,” Gaynor said.

“I don’t want your money, Gaynor,” I said.

The zombies were moving in on every side, slow, hands extended, like every horror movie you’ve ever seen. Sometimes Hollywood is accurate, whatta ya know.

“Two million, three million!” His voice was breaking with fear. He’d had a better seat for Dominga’s death than I had. He knew what was coming. “Four million!”

“Not enough,” I said.

“How much?” he shouted. “Name your price!” I couldn’t see him now. The zombies hid him from view.

“No money, Gaynor, just you dead, that’s enough.”

He started screaming, wordlessly. I felt the hands begin to rip at him. Teeth to tear.

Wanda grabbed my legs. “Don’t, don’t hurt him. Please!”

I just stared at her. I was remembering Benjamin Reynolds’s blood-coated teddy bear, the tiny hand with that stupid plastic ring on it, the blood-soaked bedroom, the baby blanket. “He deserves to die,” I said. My voice sounded separate from me, distant and echoing. It didn’t sound like me at all.

“You can’t just murder him,” Wanda said.

“Watch me,” I said.

She tried to climb my body, but her legs betrayed her and she fell in a heap at my feet, sobbing.

I didn’t understand how Wanda could beg for his life after what he had done to her. Love, I suppose. In the end she really did love him. And that, perhaps, was the saddest thing of all.

When Gaynor died, I knew it. When pieces of him stained almost every hand and mouth of the dead, they stopped. They turned to me, waiting for new orders. The power was still buoying me up. I wasn’t tired. Was there enough to lay them all to rest? I hoped so.

“Go back, all of you, go back to your graves. Rest in the quiet earth. Go back, go back.”

They stirred like a wind had blown through them, then one by one they went back to their graves. They lay down on the hard dry earth and the graves just swallowed them whole. It was like magic quicksand. The earth shuddered underfoot like a sleeper moving to a more comfortable position.

Some of the corpses had been as old as Gaynor’s ancestor, which meant that I didn’t need a human death to raise one three-hundred-year-old corpse. Bert was going to be pleased. Human deaths seemed to be cumulative. Two human deaths and I had emptied a cemetery. It wasn’t possible. But I’d done it anyway. Whatta ya know?

The first light of dawn passed like milk on the eastern sky. The wind died with the light. Wanda knelt in the bloody grass, crying. I knelt beside her.

She jerked back at my touch. I guess I couldn’t blame her, but it bothered me anyway.

“We have to get out of here. You need a doctor,” I said.

She stared up at me. “What are you?”

Today for the first time I didn’t know how to answer that question. Human didn’t seem to cover it. “I’m an animator,” I said finally.

She just kept staring at me. I wouldn’t have believed me either. But she let me help her up. I guess that was something.

But she kept looking at me out of the edge of her eyes. Wanda considered me one of the monsters. She may have been right.

Wanda gasped, eyes wide.

I turned, too slowly. Was it the monster?

Jean-Claude stepped out of the shadows.

I didn’t breathe for a moment. It was so unexpected.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Your power called to me, ma petite. No dead in the city could fail to feel your power tonight. And I am the city, so I came to investigate.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I saw you kill the men. I saw you raise the graveyard.”

“Did it ever occur to you to help me?”

“You did not need any help.” He smiled, barely visible in the moonlight. “Besides, would it not have been tempting to rend me to pieces, as well?”

“You can’t possibly be afraid of me,” I said.

He spread his hands wide.

“You’re afraid of your human servant? Little ol’ moi?”

“Not afraid, ma petite, but cautious.”

He was afraid of me. It almost made some of this shit worthwhile.

I carried Wanda down the hill. She wouldn’t let Jean-Claude touch her. A choice of monsters.

Chapter 40

Dominga Salvador missed her court date. Fancy that. Dolph had searched for me that night, after he discovered that Dominga had made bail. He had found my apartment empty. My answers about where I had gone didn’t satisfy him, but he let it go. What else could he do?

They found Gaynor’s wheelchair, but no trace of him. It’s one of those mysteries to tell around campfires. The empty, blood-coated wheelchair in the middle of the cemetery. They did find body parts in the caretaker’s house: animal and human. Only Dominga’s power had held the thing together. When she died, it died. Thank goodness. Theory was that the monster got Gaynor. Where the monster came from no one seemed to know. I was called in to explain the body parts, that’s how the police knew they’d once been attached.

Irving wanted to know what I really knew about Gaynor’s vanishing act. I just smiled and played inscrutable. Irving didn’t believe me, but all he had were suspicions. Suspicions aren’t a news story.

Wanda is waiting tables downtown. Jean-Claude offered her a job at The Laughing Corpse. She declined, not politely. She’d saved quite a bit of money from her “business.” I don’t know if she’ll make it or not, but with Gaynor gone, she seems free to try. She was a junkie whose drug of choice was dead. It was better than rehab.

By Catherine’s wedding the bullet wound was just a bandage on my arm. The bruises on my face and neck had turned that sickly shade of greenish-yellow. It clashed with the pink dress. I gave Catherine the option of me not being in the wedding. The wedding coordinator was all for that, but Catherine wouldn’t hear of it. The wedding coordinator applied makeup to the bruises and saved the day.

I have a picture of me standing in that awful dress with Catherine’s arm around me. We’re both smiling. Friendship is strange stuff.

Jean-Claude sent me a dozen white roses in the hospital. The card read, “Come to the ballet with me. Not as my servant, but as my guest.”

I didn’t go to the ballet. I had enough problems without dating the Master of the City.

I had performed human sacrifice, and it had felt good. The rush of power was like the memory of painful sex. Part of you wanted to do it again. Maybe Dominga Salvador was right. Maybe power talks to everyone, even me.

I am an animator. I am the Executioner. But now I know I’m something else. The one thing my Grandmother Flores feared most. I am a necromancer. The dead are my specialty.