Dead Americans (16 page)

“Yes. Close the door, William.”

Gently, I eased the door shut.

“You’re on me,” Ves said. “Why you on me? There’s no need for the knife.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I wouldn’t hurt you.”

A tiny smile stole across Jonas’ face.

“I wouldn’t,” Ves repeated.

“You’ve been stealing bodies.” The knife pressed against his throat, enough to crease the skin. In response, I pressed myself against the wall, though I doubted that either man knew I was in the room anymore. “You’ve been working for Surgeons. I told you that it was unacceptable to do their work, didn’t I?”

“Ye—yeah.” Quiet. Barely audible. “But I—but I haven’t been—”

“Don’t lie.” Jonas’ voice remained at a whisper. “I know you stole a body last night.”

“It weren’t marked.”

“So?”

“
So
?”

“So I told you no more.”

“You.” Ves’ voice cracked. He swallowed against the knife’s blade. “You can’t tell me how to live. I just took the body. Unmarked body. I left everything that was buried with her. You ain’t got
no right
to punish me for this.”

“The dead are sacred, Ves.”

The man was silent.

“I told you if you did this again, I would stop marking you.”

The man didn’t respond.

“Ves?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want that?”

“God’ll not judge me proper, Jonas.”

A thin bead of blood ran down the blade. “Who paid you?”

“A—a Surgeon from the Academy on Baker Street.” Ves’ dark eyes began to water. “It was just money for a clean girl. I didn’t see no harm in it.”

“Who’s the Surgeon?”

“Frances Dillon.”

“Why does he want the body?”

“He said it was a job. Payment.” The blood slipped off the edge of the blade, stronger now. “I—I won’t ever do it again.”

I opened my mouth, ready to press for more details, but Jonas’ free hand shot up, palm flat, stopping me before I could speak. His gaze, however, never left the man beneath him. “There are no more warnings, Ves. If I hear that you have snatched another body, your history will end. God will judge you on the recorded mess of life. There is no more patience in me for you. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” The knife slipped away. “Thank you.”

Jonas rose above him, a tall, cold man who, given his position, could easily have been flung to the side and attacked. But Ves didn’t react. The man above him had marked his skin, had inherited the job from his Father and would pass him to his apprentice, and no one other than those three would mark him. Ves, his body limp, the life drained out of it, knew this; knew the threat, felt it more keenly than I could ever imagine. It was a threat against the soul. To do anything but agree to Jonas’ demands would be to damn himself.

“I have come today to show you life that makes us equal,” the Surgeon said. “I have come to show you that you need not fear a thing.”

Outside the hotel, Jonas said that he needed to sleep. I wanted to go straight to the Academy, but he told me, rightly, that it would be easier to find Fiona, or the Surgeon, Dillon, without crowds. We wouldn’t be able to take her body out of the grounds in the middle of the day, he said, and added that I should also rest if I wished to come in the evening.

At Mother’s house, the inside was still, the air stale. I found Ellie in the kitchen, standing in the open back door. I asked her why the house was so closed.

“Your mother told me to shut everything,” she said, without turning to face me. The red sky stretched out beneath her gaze. “She grows frail, William. She turns the house into a coffin.”

I could not argue. Instead, I turned and made my way through the stuffy rooms to Mother. Her room smelled of apple, but too thickly, and she lay on her back, her breathing shallow. Quietly, I walked to the window, but she stopped me before I could open it.

“It is not good for you,” I said.

“Nothing is good for me. Not anymore.”

“That’s not true.” I sat on the edge of her bed. “You must look after yourself.”

“I am damaged.” Her pale blue eyes opened. “You know that. I am damaged and have damaged everything around me.”

“Mother—”

“I damaged what he loved!” The strain on her vocal cords sent her into a coughing fit, rolling onto her side. I poured her a glass of the pale orange water, and she drank it down quickly. Once she had finished, she sighed deeply, and sank into the bed. “He loved her,” she whispered. “He loved her more than me.”

“Mother—”

“Go.” Her hand lifted, fell down. “Please. Go.”

Frustrated, unable to find any words to explain how important she was, how I needed her to be strong, I did as she asked. In my own room, I dug through my drawer of pills and vials until I found a bottle of sleeping pills. They were white, not orange, and I wondered what Mother was taking. Did it matter? Sighing, I washed down two pills and fell asleep beneath the afternoon’s red sky.

He revealed a tiny cage with a mouse in it. It was a brown mouse, docile as he took it in his hands, docile as the Surgeon suffocated it. Then, after showing it to us to prove that it was dead, the Surgeon lifted a small metal box up. Wires fell from its sides and, efficiently, he hooked them to the mouse’s body. Then there was a hum, a shock, a second shock, and the mouse twitched and returned to life.

“William.”

I had bought the sleeping pills from Jonas. Drugs were how I was introduced to him, originally. It was through a friend, a simple exchange of cash for pleasure. Just another way to pass the time. It wasn’t uncommon work for Morticians, and Jonas made the various pills and powers and fluids that he sold in his workshop, mixing the chemicals next to the pots that he mixed the ink he used to mark men and women with history for God. In my childhood, a lean, grey haired Mortician would visit Mother; I still had memories of his long hands pouring dark blue ink into glass vials, and the red cuts those needles made in my Mother . . . but after Father’s second death, she stopped having herself inked. Her history, she said, was finished. God could judge her on the fact that she had brought herself out of poverty, married well, and had three children. We nodded, humoured her, but didn’t understand it fully. In the years after, her faith returned in parts—a response to her own sickness—but no needle ever pierced her skin again.

“William.”

Jonas’ voice.

“Wake up, William.”

My eyes opened slowly. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to find you.” His hand was resting heavily on my chest, a familiar weight, a comfortable one, a weight that, despite myself, I missed. “The door was open,” he continued. “I came in. I’m sorry, William, something has happened downstairs.”

“What do you mean?”

He shook his head gently. “Get dressed first.”

The pressure of his hand lifted and, immediately after, I felt its absence most keenly. But then Jonas’ words returned to me, spoken in a soft, gentle tone, a tone I had never heard, not even when I had laid beside him.
The door was open
. It was never open. Mother made the servants lock it. She made her children lock it. If the door was open then—then what? My thoughts were blocked. The reality would be much worse. Quickly, I pulled on a pair of pants and, shirtless and bootless, stepped out of my room.

Jonas was waiting for me on the balcony. In the white tiling of Mother’s house, his brown and red colouring cast him as an intrusion, a stain; with that thought in my mind, his strong, patterned hand pulled me to the railing. His face, usually so cold, so impersonal, was etched with sympathy like lines of silvered age.

I looked down:

And in the middle of the white tiles, my brother lay face first, the back of his skull broken open. The blood around him had spilled into an anonymous pattern, his body having expelled all that it wished to signal his end. It was such a trifle amount, in consideration.

“He has been dead for about two hours,” Jonas said. “Stiffness has begun to set into the joints. His skin is changing. The blood does not flow.”

No. It was dark and still.

“There is another body in the kitchen.”

Around him were dry, blood stained footsteps.

“Mother?” I asked hoarsely.

“No. Ellie.”

Was that relief? It was difficult to know staring at Henry.

Quietly, Jonas added, “I was marking her. She was one of mine.”

I faced him. “Where’s my mother?”

Jonas’s gaze narrowed, a still green growing cold.

“Tell me,” I asked, my hand squeezing his. “Please. She’s important.”

“She’s not here.”

“What do you mean?”

With a deliberately slow movement, he lifted my hand from his. When he spoke next, his voice was empty of the sympathy he had previously shown, each word now sharply pronounced, a tiny knife that he meant to drive into me. “She’s gone, William. She’s not here. Your brother has been murdered. Ellie has been murdered. Your Mother has not. Instead, she is absent. Her wheelchair is gone, and if you look back down closely, you’ll see a tire track through your brother’s blood. A tiny rail at the edge crossing over it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, reaching for him, but he stepped back. “What is going on?”

“I thought it was your father.” Turning, he began walking down the stairs. “You talked about him so much, William. About his death, about how he loved his daughter. I asked myself,
Who else would have interest her
? Is it possible that your father didn’t kill himself? That it was simply staged. An elaborate lie to leave the family that rejected him? I’ve seen it before. And who else, when you think about it, would want the body of a girl who had wasted away? She had no lover. Your mother hated her. Your brother barely knew her. There was only you, and you—you would not do this to her.”

“Jonas—please—don’t—”

“Most snatches are done by family members. Just like any other crime, William.” Jonas stepped around the stairwell and approached Henry’s body. “To hear you speak of your Father and Fiona is to hear the hint of a second story. A not unusual one, true, but one that would explain why a Returned man would want to bring the body of his daughter back to life.” He stopped next to Henry’s corpse. “But there are faults in the story. There’s no soul in an empty body. It doesn’t matter if you have faith or not, William. You can’t bring back what was there. And why would your father have someone else in her body? But the bigger problem to my logic is that your father is dead. He has been dead for six years now. Dead since he ripped his heart out. The Surgeon that performed his initial return told me this. Under your mother’s angry eye, he came to this house and checked every part of the body, but there was nothing left. Nothing that he could salvage.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I cried out.

“There is a dead girl in your kitchen, William.”

“I know!”

“But you do not care.”

“I just want to know where my mother is!”

“She’s at the Academy of Surgeons,” Jonas replied, his voice like bladed ice. “That’s where she went after killing your brother and Ellie.”

“He has lived and died and lived again. For him, death is empty. It is nothing. We do not need it. I know this intimately, for I too have lived and died and lived again.”

“Jonas!”

I ran down the stairs, calling his name, but he paid me no heed as he stalked out. By the time I reached the doorway, he had disappeared into the deepening shadows of the night and houses in my neighbourhood. It did not matter, however, for I knew where he was going. I did not understand nearly enough of what he had said: that Mother had stolen Fiona’s body, that she had killed Henry, that she
had hired a Surgeon . . .
it was ridiculous. We were family. She would not do this. She
could
not. Mother had not been able to lift herself out of her wheelchair for nearly two years and was dependent on servants to prepare her food. But Jonas believed that she was at the Academy of Surgeons and, logically, that was where he was going. I quickly pulled on a shirt and boots and, avoiding the sight of my brother, left the house in pursuit.

I caught a carriage to the Academy and sat in the back, my hands twisted into one lump of flesh, and my pulse refusing to slow even when the sharp towers appeared before me.

While not the geographical centre of Ledornn, the Academy of Surgeons had been known as the heart of the city for hundreds of years. A designed, built, and cared for heart. It had begun as an institution where Surgeons were trained and returns were performed, but in the years since its initial opening it had expanded in both size and concept. Returns were still handled on the campus, but its expanding dark bricked form had sprawled into yellow pavements and courses on math and science and disease as well as others. Henry had attended the three years of his apprenticeship within its walls, a mark of prestige for even Mother.

Henry
. . . 

I stepped out of the carriage outside the Academy’s bronze gates. It was closed, but in the centre was a silver crest of two galloping horses. On the left was an open gate that led me onto the hard red-brown stones of the campus, my footsteps echoing in the empty, stained night.

As I drew closer to the main building, my approach was smothered by sounds of boots hitting the ground, of grunts, and unclear words. The centre of the campus was dominated by a large building shaped like an obelisk and scattered with bright yellow lights across its form like weeping sores. It was in the light of that building that I saw three men fighting across the pavement. The first was Jonas, and he moved with a quick fluidity, ducking beneath attacks from two clean skinned men holding blunt nightsticks. I slowed as I approached, but my arrival caused the two men fighting Jonas to pause and, using that, Jonas drove his fist into the head of the man to his right. He stumbled, and Jonas kicked his feet out from under him. The second man hit Jonas across the side of the face.

There followed, suddenly—as if it were the physical manifestation of Jonas’ rage—a glint. Then the man that had hit him stumbled backwards, clutching at his throat, trying to stop blood that was spraying from his neck. Once he had fallen, Jonas walked back to the second man and stomped viciously on his head until he went limp.