The Girl Who Sees

Chapter 5

Chapter FiveI’m disembodied. This reminds me of playing a virtual reality game, one where I look down and, instead of my breasts, see a futuristic gun, or whatever else the game designers decided. In this case, I see a wall with a large clock above rows upon rows of gray metal squares. It’s a sight CSI shows regularly feature—the inside of a morgue.

Unlike the disembodiment of VR, though, I can smell my surroundings, though I wish I couldn’t. The chlorine and faint perfume scents aren’t masking the stench of death, and the worst part is that I recognize the putrid fumes from somewhere.

According to the digital clock on the wall, it’s 5:29 a.m. on Monday morning. Does this mean I have to get up for work soon? And if so, wouldn’t I need to locate my body first?

A woman enters the room. She has a heart-shaped face, and the outline of her lips mirrors it, though her mouth reminds me more of a spade (as in, playing cards)—in part thanks to the blackness of the lipstick. Her eyes and hair are also black, with metallic undertones in the fluorescent lights. With her black skirt and white lacy top, her outfit is more fitting for a cocktail party than the morgue, but her earlobes are adorned with dangling earrings that end in little skulls.

Reaching into her tiny black purse, she takes out a smartphone and begins to look around.

I guess she doesn’t find whatever she’s looking for, because she grunts disapprovingly and reaches for the nearest metal square, pulling it out with a screech.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a dead body inside.

It’s a man in his forties. His gray skin hue looks oddly familiar and has something to do with the smell. I can’t recall what, though. My memory must not work as well without my physical brain.

The woman studies the corpse intently. Walking up to his head, she opens his mouth and puts her phone there, as if that were a perfectly reasonable perch for it.

The phone doesn’t stay put in the corpse’s mouth, and the woman’s lips purse in obvious annoyance.

With an angry motion, she reaches into her purse again and takes out a knife. It’s butterfly style, where the blade sits between two handles.

With a whoosh, she stylishly opens the knife with a well-rehearsed flourish that the performer in me can appreciate.

Knife in hand, she examines the body in front of her for a moment and then slices into the dead man’s chest—across the scars left from the embalming.

With my body gone, so is my ability to feel nauseous, it seems, because I watch in calm fascination as she finishes cutting a hole and jams her phone into the macabre holder, propping it up so it sits vertically inside the dead flesh.

She stares at the phone, then looks up at the digital clock, and the disgruntled look on her face deepens. She seems to be impatiently waiting for something.

Turning around, she pulls out another drawer with a body, this one a man in his nineties. Gently, she brushes the tips of her fingers over the man’s bald head and sagging muscles. She seems to dislike something about this corpse, though, because she closes the drawer and pulls out another one.

This guy is in his fifties and has a purplish tint to him.

She looks him up and down and nods approvingly.

Her phone begins to play the notes of Piano Sonata No. 2 by Chopin, commonly known as the Funeral March.

She stalks back over to the first corpse to face her grim phone stand and presses the screen to accept the call.

“Hello, Beatrice,” says an amused voice. “As I keep telling you, we don’t have to have a video conference every time. Especially when you’re in your natural habitat.”

“You’re late.” Beatrice’s voice is surprisingly perky. “I wanted to get a head start; the fresher the body, the better my lovelies turn out.”

“You must’ve used a very old one last night.” The amusement in the stranger’s tone is joined by a note of scorn. “I assume that’s your excuse for failure?”

“You never told me a seer would be involved in this.” Beatrice uses her knife to carve something on the skin of the corpse in front of her. “And you particularly failed to mention the vampires.”

“I’m offering you the chance to go under the Mandate and settle here in peace.” His voice is mocking now. “Did you think that would be easy? And besides, why should you worry about vampires? I thought they hated your kind because they fear what you can do.”

Beatrice’s face darkens. “I just don’t like having mortal enemies around. Since I’m new to this Mandate business, tell me, can it really make it so that they won’t try to kill me on sight?”

“No, it can’t pull off that kind of a miracle. But the Mandate makes it so that anyone who harms you will pay with their life. It marks you as one of us, and that provides you with something like the human rule of law. But nothing can undo their fear and hatred of your kind. Despite the Mandate, the seers still hate my kind and vice versa.” From the tone of his voice, you’d think he’s happy about the state of affairs he describes. “But, the Mandate does take the sting out of such hate. The vampires despised all werewolves back in the day, but look at things now. After centuries of the Mandate, there are marriages between them. Isn’t that what appeals to you here—our liberal attitudes?”

If I had eyebrows, I’d want to raise them at the mention of vampires and werewolves, but since I don’t, I just keep hanging.

“You’re a smooth talker, even for one of your kind.” Beatrice carves another symbol into the dead flesh. “Tell me, how am I supposed to outwit a seer?”

“He won’t risk involving himself after what she did on TV,” the voice on the phone responds, sounding serious for the first time. “He took a big enough risk setting it up. At least I assume he set that up, but I have no proof, courtesy of the vampires.”

“But isn’t she also a seer?” Beatrice stops her grisly work and makes eye contact with the phone’s camera. “Won’t she see me coming?”

“Even he didn’t see you coming,” the mystery man replies. “What can an untrained newbie hope to foresee? Despite what they want you to think, seers aren’t omniscient. If they were, free will would be but a distant memory. Keep in mind that by working for me, my powers rub off on you—which is why you’re not as dead as your ‘lovelies.’”

“Death doesn’t scare me.” Beatrice looks around the morgue as though it’s her living room. “It’s the only real mystery left in the world.”

“Is it? Well, I can help you uncover it if you keep failing like this.”

“How about instead of threats, you wire me another five hundred grand?” Her smile is all teeth. “Plus the expenses, obviously.”

“Anything else?” he asks sarcastically. “A key to a whorehouse full of virgins? Soup made from kittens?”

“There is something else,” she says, unruffled. “If I die on this job, I need you to take care of my body. I want it turned into fertilizer. I’ll email you the exact instructions.” Beatrice wipes her knife on the nearest corpse’s skin before folding it and stashing it in her purse. “It’s the ultimate recycling. When I think of how many nutrients are locked up in the ground instead of going back into—”

“I don’t have a lot of time.” The voice on the phone sounds amused again, but the command in it is clear. “Whatever you want, you will get. Just. Do. Your. Job.”

Instead of replying, Beatrice stands straighter and raises her arms toward the ceiling, as though she’s praying for sprinklers to rain down.

Multi-colored bolts of energy illuminate the room as they shoot from Beatrice’s fingers into the two dead bodies.

The lightning spreads through the corpses. They convulse like frog legs in Galvani’s electric experiments, and the chest carvings she’s made light up from the inside, as though she implanted bright LED lights under the skin.

After a moment, the bodies go still, but the carvings still shine.

“I know I’ll regret asking, but why aren’t they getting up?” the voice on the phone asks, and though I can’t see his face, I can tell there’s a smirk on it.

“These symbols are there to program in a little delay.” She points at one of the bright carvings. “I do this when I can afford the luxury.”

“Why?” It’s odd to hear an adult man sound so much like a teasing five-year-old. “Wouldn’t you want to be present when your lovelies get up? I thought you’d want to consummate the relationship when they rise to the occasion. No, wait, I’m thinking of another kind of necro.”

“This conversation is clearly over.” Beatrice slings her purse over her shoulder, grabs her phone, and without saying goodbye, hangs up.

She then looks at the two corpses with an unreadable expression and leaves the room.

I float for another second until I realize something that should’ve occurred to me in the beginning of this strange episode.

This has to be a dream.

As soon as I think the word ‘dream,’ I wake up.