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Souls of The Night – Vol 3

59.

"Prepare these for the colleagues on the morning shift, Harp. I've had enough. What a horror night. Typical New York."

"Yeah - typical," Harper echoed as she watched Chester, the head pathologist on weekday evenings, remove his rubber gloves with a wet squeak and dump them in the hazardous waste garbage can. He would go - she would stay - as she had so many times before. And she didn't mind so much. Her father wouldn't miss her and she would hardly be able to eat anything and would sleep even worse. No, staying here after bodies had been coming in all evening - all night - would be the lesser evil. She could do with the night shift. Besides, she actually preferred to be alone with the corpses, even if the intensely smelling tiger balm, which she had to constantly smear under her nose against the stench of decay and burnt flesh, was gradually etching away her mucous membranes.

Corpses were disgusting - but unobtrusive, apart from their smell and the fluids they oozed. No corpse had ever told her that she was an ugly scrawny thing. No corpse had ever accused her of being stupid or befuddled by her medication. No corpse wanted anything from her and she could do everything at her own pace when she was alone. Handling, moving, and cleaning the corpse, helping a pathologist or physician examining and reconstructing cadavers, handling and cleaning tools and supplies, preparation of the deceased before and after autopsy, record keeping of identification and documentation of deceased in the form of items such as death certificates were her job- but not without higher trained professionals. It wasn't quite right to let a diener (or morgue worker) handle the corpses alone for several hours at a time, but it happened again and again. Harper had earned that trust over the years and the tiny shreds of self-esteem she had came from the little praise she sometimes got. Not for a job well done. Not for diligence or quick perception - just for devotion and trustworthiness - like a tool that needed little external care and always worked ... or like a dog. She didn't even mind. She didn't like this job, but there was no shortage of bodies in New York, so it was safe. Harper loved safe. Even on a night like this, when the city's morgues were increasingly "booked up" because there had been a fire at a major company and the smell of blood and burnt flesh hung everywhere, so much so (and as morbid as it was) that Harper's stomach rumbled. Sometimes she didn't know whether her stomach was churning with hunger or nausea.

"The early shift comes in three hours. Then all the organs are weighed, the bodies are clean and yada yada yada. Usual procedure, fill everything out, get your colleagues to sign off on everything, put them in the picture, okay?"

"Okay, Chester," said Harper, and reflexively bowed her head as her boss patted her on it. It would have been humiliating for other people. Harper, who could count on two hands the number of times she had been touched by other people in the last year (apart from rough pushes on the subway) shuddered to the core and smiled gratefully. Chester wasn't a bad guy - he was about to retire and would ogle Jennifer's cleavage whenever they crossed paths, and Harper could practically smell the middle-aged male craving for much more than ogling. But he just looked. Men just looked after beautiful women and imagined things. And it wasn't as if Chester would do something like that with her. He had never tried anything with her. Why should he? - she didn't have much of a bosom to show for it and no ass, had dull hair and a gaunt goat face. Not that she wanted to be desired by Chester or anyone at work - that would take away the security she felt here. She was mostly content to be invisible here. Less stress- less reason to lock herself in the restroom to cry. Once Chester was out the door and Harper heard the upstairs front door slam shut quietly, she turned to the next set of bodies.

Like the last ones, they were packed in thick black body bags, which sealed in some of the odor but certainly kept any liquids inside. Four of the nine corpses they had received had been quite crispy and dry. The others had died of smoke inhalation. One had been blown to bits by a bomb or grenade according to the colleagues' written note (what a job, where you weren't even really horrified by something like that) and man, had this one been messy - but light because they'd only scraped together the biggest bits like arms and legs and half a head before bringing it in.

Harper checked her braid again, put another thick layer of balm under her nose, got the instruments she needed ready, put on her face mask and gloves which she slipped under her plastic apron covering her arms so that no skin was exposed. Then she unzipped the body bag from bottom to top. She covered the head with a large cloth before she could even take a look at the features - as she always did when she was alone. Some dead people stared at her - she didn't like that and didn't bother examining the head until she had cleaned the rest. Although Harper was scrawny and didn't have much muscle mass, she rarely found it really difficult to move dead bodies. Rigor mortis hadn't even set in on this one yet. She could almost ... she could almost imagine he was still warm. Perhaps she was just a little chilled herself from the long shift behind her. It was no effort to remove the body bag completely.

This dead man was not burnt, but his clothes were soaking wet. And yes, his dark garments were discolored. Blood? Not crusty enough. Diluted blood? Harper huffed and shook her head. Yes- extinguishing water- of course. Damn, her pills were making her stupid again. This had to be one of the SWAT team. He was wearing a uniform and a Kevlar vest. Poor guy- dying in the line of duty for his city and his country. But one of Harper's shrinks had always told her not to see her "clients" as people with families and lives and lost dreams andandand - she'd do better to steer clear of such thoughts or it would drag her into a downward spiral. The one in front of her was not a human. It was her latest task.

She looked at the hastily written note from the colleagues who had bagged him. Male, age undeterminable - no identification papers, face torn apart by assault, projectile in his side. Harper frowned in irritation. Strange choice of words. Assault- animal attack? Then why not write that? Or a human assault - but human fingernails didn't torn up a face. Well. Oh, not the address of the fire. Then this one probably wasn't related to that. But okay, this was New York and she had already realized that evening that the moon was full. A full moon in New York - there was always extra hustle and bustle. That's when all the crazies crawled out of their holes and a lot of people were also more irritable. Damn, sometimes even Harper felt this inner restlessness during a full moon - although she thought it was just psychosomatic because she imagined there would be more going on than usual. Whatever.

She took off her project's dark shoes, his socks - and set about cutting open his pants with special scissors, then the seams of the Kevlar vest on the side. On the left, between the ribs, there was something stuck in the person's flesh, one of the few places where the Kevlar vest did not protect. Harper cut up more material, gradually exposing the pale body of a man of about fifty. The projectile in question. The project itself? Not well-trained, but not chubby either. When she had also cut away and removed the undershirt and underpants and packed them in transparent bags for possible further examination, she began to wash the body. Many dying people wet themselves or lost faeces. When all the muscles went limp, this usually happened automatically. This one was no different.

She liked washing corpses. It sounded strange, but Harper knew she was strange. It just felt good that she could clean a tiny part of the world. That she could restore some lost purity to the dead and with it a modicum of dignity. After she had rinsed away the excrement and blood and all the dirt had disappeared over the shiny metal table in the sink, she could also see the injury to the ribs better. She frowned, pushed the arm away on that side, grabbed the adjustable retractor pliers and, after jiggling something hard in the wound, managed to pull something out of the body that wasn't a bullet but a piece of wood with an arrowhead hanging from it that looked kind of strange.

"Wow, always something new," Harper muttered, shuddering at her own voice echoing in the large semi-sterile room. She dropped the "projectile" into one of the kidney dishes and it clinked tinnily. Half-coagulated blood ran sluggishly from the wound. Harper stuck a measuring stick into it to record the depth of the wound. Then she switched on the oscillating saw and placed the round drill head on the man's chest. As always, while she made the Y-cuts through skin, flesh and bone, she blanked out what she was really doing and thought back to Grandpa Walter's garage in Florida where he had always tinkered with devices that made sounds like this. Perhaps he had done more crafts in the summer of her ninth year simply to get the child, distraught by her parents' divorce, out into the fresh air. Harper had still been sad, had still cried a lot. But building a birdhouse or a wooden garden bench together had been fantastic, even if she hadn't appreciated it at the time.

If she could travel back in time again, Harper thought to herself - then she would appreciate every minute with Grandpa Walter. With the knowledge she had today - she would have known that nothing better awaited her. Nothing better than the summer of her ninth year. Perhaps the idea of time travel would be a bad one after all. Child-Harper would probably have killed herself at the prospect of returning to a cold family home to a paranoid father on a crusade against Gargoyles only to end up as a corpse washer who couldn't function without strong medication.

As a child ... before she was nine, Harper had envisioned meeting a nice boy who would bring her into a family that didn't fight all the time. A real, big family with a big house where she would have her own room and she would be part of a nice family and she would be stable enough that the others could really get to know her and not just see her as a shadow of a person to be pitied at best. It hadn't been her childhood dreams because she had really believed it would happen one day. Now she knew better. No shining knight was coming. Even if she would have the strength to go looking for someone like that - who would want her? No one. No one. No one. Harper cringed at her own stifled yips echoing off the hard, smooth materials in the room. Damn it, she was weeping again! It was probably the moon-she was always a little more thin-skinned and emotional under a full moon. Harper turned away from the corpse, whose open chest was now held open by large pincers. She needed a break, tugged the gloves off her hands and the mask off her face. Her tears dripped onto the autopsy report where she had captured all the moles, possible tattoos and other recognizable features of the body. One clumsy movement and the clipboard landed on the floor with the kidney dish underneath, and Harper stiffened under the loud noise. She reflexively stepped on the gold ring she had pulled off the corpse's finger earlier and which was about to roll away. Gasping for breath, Harper crouched down on the floor, rubbing a sweaty hand over her face.

"Pull yourself together, Harper. Don't be such a whiny stupid cow!" she said out loud, took a deep breath and grabbed the ring. Frowning, she looked at the delicate inscription on the inside. Great. Not only had she not bagged the ring like the other items the dead man had been carrying - but she should have noted the inscription in case it might give a clue to the identity. Super Harper - great work.

She stood up, turned the ring and deciphered it:

10/19/2000

"Hah!" Harper exclaimed, bewildered. That was her parents' wedding anniversary. Even the right year. She had been born on January 28th 2001 and her father had blamed her during his first really drunken episode after she had come back from Miami that the marriage and the beginning of all misery had been HER fault anyway. And after that, every now and then when he had drunk too much. Her mother's parents had been forcing him to marry her mom for months before Harper was born. Hence the wedding so close to her birthday. So how could she forget that date?

Some coincidences really were weird. But her uncertain smile slipped from her face after a few seconds. Slowly, she turned her head towards the corpse. Her father had never taken the ring off, despite the bad memories. Not because he had had a sentimental streak, but because he could pretend to be a well-balanced married man with a healthy private life - something that had often been useful in his investigations. Suddenly Harper felt warm despite the chill in the room. Hot, even. She ran her eyes over the pale, naked corpse she'd just cleaned, the chest she'd just opened, the sheet still over his head, showing red marks from the presumably gruesome mush beneath. As if the seconds were slowing down, Harper moved, reached out her shaky hand with a pounding heart and pulled the cloth away.

She gasped as she saw the torn flesh. It was gruesome. But she endured it the way she had endured hundreds of horrific looking corpses. In her first year, she had often vomited - as most people in this line of work did. Water corpses were bigger nightmare material, and just last month they'd had someone on the table who'd thought it would be a good idea to stick a firecracker in their mouth when they were drunk. Yeah, his face here - which could hardly be called a face anymore - certainly wasn't ... Harper forced herself not to even finish the thought. It was IMPOSSIBLE. She reached past the plastic gown with a shaky hand and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. She - she would call her father and he would - he would surely pick up and give her a good thrashing for waking him. Yes, he would berate her and Harper would of course feel awful and silly but SO relieved at the same time. She couldn't stop staring at this mass of gristle, bone and flesh caked with coagulated blood. What had the power to drag its claws through tissue like that? A bear? A panther? After the beep, the voicemail went off and Harper's voice sounded completely insane and almost hysterical, even to her ears. "Da-Da-Dad! Here- ah- this is Harper and- so you're sleeping or- or you're gargoyle hunting but I-"

She cried out as a hand suddenly grabbed her!

Rough fingers, but warmer than her own skin, pressed so hard into the joint of her elbow that she dropped the cell phone and would be left with bruises. But that didn't matter because the hand was attached to an arm and the arm was attached to a shoulder and the shoulder belonged to the corpse. And he was just turning his crushed head with the torn face and the one remaining eye - blue like her father's - staring at her. The mouth opened - so many teeth even though half of them were ripped away - and a gurgling "Gaaaaargrlssssss" was emitted that could only be heard because Harper had to catch her breath for the next bloodcurdling scream.

She tried to tear herself away, pulling the corpse off the table because he wouldn't loosen his grip, knocking the autopsy table over behind her, falling to the floor. And the dead man on top of her. Harper writhed screeching on the floor, unintentionally tearing away the forceps that had been holding the corpse's chest open. And while she was finally able to crawl away because the formerly dead man was now clawing at his open chest, she saw that this very flesh was beginning to contract. The hole from which she had pulled the strange arrowhead glowed with an icy blue light before it closed and Harper, backed against the wall, saw his chest and face reassemble within seconds. Bone "sprouted" where it used to be before the assault. Cartilage grew, tissue multiplied and mended itself in fast motion, and the previously gurgling groan became a cry that was deeper but as deafening as Harper's as tongue, teeth and lips recreated themselves. And then he was intact again- her father, squatting naked on the floor, staring at her from two functioning eyes, bloody but unharmed.

By now Harper was breathing frantically, her mouth open but still struggling for air.

"Da-Daddy?" she squealed. And Jim Miller's face showed recognition and more than that because his features turned into an angry grimace. He opened his mouth to say something, but instead of words, Jim Miller curled up into himself and groaned in agony as if he was only now feeling pain. Harper's first impulse was to crawl to him, but all at once she heard a loud crack. And she didn't have to look far to find the source because it cracked again, and again, because every single one of Jim Miller's spine vertebrae made that sound as they broke out of the skin. And her father cried out, flexing his deforming spine as more and more bones broke, reassembling at the wrong angle, dark fur suddenly sprouting all over his pale body. With a wet tearing sound, his rump burst open and a tail grew. Jim Miller's scream turned into a piercing howl that no human could produce and when he finally lifted his head to Harper, despite being bent over the entire time, he no longer had a human face. Not even the bloody mass from before. He had the elongated snout of a wolf. His eyes were those of a human, but he was no longer human. Where he'd had his hands and knees pressed to the ground before, a pony-sized wolf-like creature now stood on four paws.

"Dad?" Harper asked almost tonelessly, but the thing heard her, understood her, because one of its pointed ears twitched. And just like that, Jim Miller bared his new chaps, exposing long yellow fangs and growled in a drawn-out, threatening manner that made Harper's blood run cold. Slowly the thing began to move, striding towards Harper with outlandish elegance.

And those eyes - Jim Miller's eyes. Against common sense, Harper began to stammer reassurances like she would have done to her human father.

"Da-Daddy. I-I know you're s-scared. I am, too. But- but- If GaGargoyles have done that, then-" She stretched out her arms and pulled them back to her chest with a squeak as the wolf snapped at her with a hateful, loud bark. Harper felt something warm leak between her legs and soak her pants. The wolf glared at her, his sniffing nose picking it up too. And just like that - with a disparaging, belittling huff toward Harper that was clearly Jim Miller's attitude, the thing that had just been her father turned away, ran on all fours out of the room, nearly ripping the double doors off their hinges. Upstairs, Harper heard the front door shatter and further in the distance, a car braked sharply and crashed into something hard. Then there was silence all around her. That was, of course, until a giggle emerged from Harper's throat, first quiet and then increasingly shrill and unrestrained.


Yes, I know that no diener is allowed to perform forensically relevant examinations alone, even if others sign everything in the end.

My universe - my rules.

But isn't it really disturbing to imagine Harper working on her own father? And Harper is such a poor baby. WHAT the furry fuck happened to her father? Could this have something to do with the needle of destiny that is supposed to either lock away or unlock a person's true potential? Or are there other reasons? And what am I going to do with my wolfed out villain? For now, I have to tie all the loose ends back together.

Apart from that ... I should include Body Horror in the tags.

But the original series was already body horror at every nook and cranny. What was done with Coldstone? And the pack? And everything to do with the Labyrinth Clan?

Thanks for reading, Q.T.