This story was so much fun to write!
I’ve said that for a lot of these stories, but it’s still true. Little Men was written when I was on mat leave / pregnant with my second son. I’d been reading a lot of true crime (shocker!) and ended up stumbling on Emily Craig’s Teasing Secrets from the Dead. What a fantastic book about death and decay! I especially loved her last chapter where she investigated and did body recovery for 9/11; I directly borrowed her details to craft this story about a similar morgue worker snatched away to recover what can be from the rumble.
Beyond the morgue setting of this story, there is a Lovecraftian edge to the horror and paranormal elements. The initial people in her first morgue gig give the protagonist the creeps, and then the strange rituals she witnesses after such a complex tragedy makes her doubt her sanity. But rather than, you know, actually dealing with these issues or her feelings, my protagonist tries to find a hookup to affirm life when surrounded by death.
When Strange Aeon wanted this story, I felt honoured for it to be among many, many other cosmic horror stories and spooky authors. If you enjoy Little Men, you’ll probably love the others contained in this eerie anthology.
Little Men
By Eve Morton
The day Henry showed up, Emily was knee-deep in fatalities from a ten car pile-up on the upstate New York highway. She’d prepared for days like this—everyone in her medical school had gone through the same accident and multiple death training—but the volume of the bodies in her morgue still left her wonky on her feet. She stood outside in the hallway as the paramedics rolled the body bags into her room, and then detoured out to start stacking them in the hallway. She shook her head aimlessly.
“First car crash?”
Emily looked down to see a small man beside her. No more than four feet tall, his arms were long and lanky. He loped more than walked to Emily’s side as he gave her a crooked smile. He wore blue scrubs and a name tag clipped to the front of his shirt with the hospital’s logo on the front. “It’s not too bad,” he said, when Emily had remained silent. “I don’t want to say you’ll get used to it, but you will find ways to manage. Here.” He slipped a normal-sized hand—everything save for his legs, which were small and didn’t seem as if they fit into his body properly, was normal-sized—into the front pocket of his scrubs and pulled out Vick’s VapoRub. He added a dab to his finger and rubbed it under his nose, his neck stiff as he worked. His head was round, hair thinning at the back, and grey near his temples. His voice was youthful, almost chipper, despite the fact that there were a final number of seventeen dead wheeled into Emily’s examination room and the hospital hallway.
“You want some?” The small man extended his hand with the VapoRub to her.
Emily shook her head and some sense into herself. She needed to not stare at this man who clearly had some sort of disability. Dwarfism? Bad arthritis? Something else? She felt bad even running through the medical textbook in her mind trying to diagnose him. A tight fear stretched across her chest as she wondered if she would get in trouble with HR.
Then she remembered that she’d still not said a word, let alone a bad word that would get her into a PC mess. “I’m sorry,” she apologized anyway, channeling her Canadian schooling. “I’m just…”
“In shock. Like I said, it happens. The big guns upstairs,” the man said, gesturing with his arm well above his short stature, “called me in for some assistance today. They knew it was a hard crash and that anyone would need help. Not a reflection on your skills, let me be clear.”
Emily chuckled. Was he worried about offending her now? Oh, this was too great. She decided that she liked him then. They were both worried about stepping on proverbial landmines, when they should really attend to the one thing everyone always had in common: death.
“I’m Emily,” she said, introducing herself and producing her hand. “I don’t use Vick’s—never liked the smell to begin with—but I have some lemons in my desk that I use when the odor gets too bad. They blot out everything. Good to cut up and put in water too, since I swear I can taste the smell some days.”
“Me, too. I’m Henry. Henry Clarke,” he added hastily, as if the last name would give him credit. His hands were cold as they shook; Emily thought briefly of the clay that one of her first bodies had been covered in when it arrived in her morgue. His hands felt like that clay. But the thought was gone almost as fast as it arrived. Henry withdrew his hand and gestured to the morgue door. “Shall we begin?”
*
Henry remained after the car crash had been processed through the autopsies, paperwork, and body claims. Emily didn’t even notice at first. She’d been so used to arriving at work for those strained two weeks as they sorted through dental records and body parts that ended up in the wrong vehicles—and thus in the wrong bags—that she merely took Henry’s presence for granted. His cinnamon tea on the counter, along with his penchant for the Rolling Stones on the portable stereo he brought with him to work, became as regular as latex gloves, the smell of cleaner, and the crinkling sound body bags made when opened. Small quirks she adjusted to and then decided she liked, since she’d learned a long time ago when dealing with death that she had to take the little accidents and call them blessings instead.
So when she arrived, a month and a half after that first meeting, and found the morgue room empty of all his signs of life, she couldn’t help but feel disappointed. She put a stack of articles she’d been reading about heavy metal toxicity—they had their first true arsenic case this week—down on one of the metal counters not jammed with bags or other paperwork, and sighed. How was she supposed to get through the remaining few weeks of the busy summer season, when people drank and drove boats or motorcycles or cars and lost their hands or heads or other body parts in the process? She found herself turning on the radio to find a classic rock station, just so she could catch a song or two of the Stones. Maybe channel Henry’s efficiency for the day.
She didn’t have time to get through the first body—or find a song she enjoyed—before there was a strong knock on her door.
“Just a minute.” Emily shifted her plastic shield up from her face, making her feel space-aged every time she did.
The knocking persisted. Emily hurried, snapping off her gloves. “Be right there,” she said, now louder.
The knocking had turned to pounding by the time she opened up. The man’s hand was still planted in the air before he lowered it with a strong gaze. “You the morgue lady Henry?”
Emily blinked several times to make sense of the statement and the thick Russian accent of the man in front of her. He was older, maybe in his late seventies, and his shock of white hair framed dark eyebrows that had not lost their color or dramatic flair. He furrowed them, wrinkling his forehead even further, and held out a plastic bag filled with jewelry. “Is this something you did?”
“Sir,” she said, trying to step back but only bumping into the thick metal door that had shut behind her. She peeked around the man’s shoulder, wondering just how the hell he’d gotten past the receptionist or the security team of the hospital. She saw no one at Maddy’s desk, and sighed. She had gone out to lunch early. Again. “Sir. I need you to step away from the morgue. Please go down the hallway where you came from and speak to reception about all lost or damaged items.”
“Who is responsible for this?” he said, voice thick with rage, but a little slower this time around. He also took several steps back toward the hallway, but not enough to break his stare with Emily. “No one at front. Who is responsible for this?”
“What exactly is the problem?”
“This. This!” He shoved the jewelry in the bag to Emily. “It’s not my wife’s.”
“Like I said, all damaged or lost items can be reported to someone else. Even if someone is not there—”
“My wife’s! But not my wife’s!” The man shook the bag at her again, and though she knew she’d be wasting her time, Emily finally relented and examined the items. Maybe he’d leave faster.
The man had avoided cutting the seal at the top of the bag and instead snipped it from the bottom. She fished one of the rings out and looked closely at it. She recognized the sapphire in the center as belonging to a woman who had broken her hip, come to the hospital to get it fixed, but died on the surgery table. A sad death, but one that happened all the time. She examined the man before her and noted the same type of ring on his finger. Not a woman’s cut, but a sapphire in the center. She struggled to remember the woman’s name, but fumbled. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Mr. Rushkin. My wife, Ada. I loved her. That was her ring. But it’s not her ring now.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Rushkin,” she said, channeling a calm, practiced voice from her training. “But I don’t understand what’s going on.”
Mr. Rushkin gestured to the bag again. He took out a watch, one that seemed to be plated with gold, yet there was something off about it. Even Emily could see this now. “It no gold. It no work.”
Emily traded the ring for the watch, her curiosity now peaked. She examined the time piece closely. She was used to the sometimes spooky occurrence of watches stopping at the time of death; it was a side effect of a car crash, of being banged around on an ambulance gurney, not something paranormal or that predicted bad luck. Hell, her watch had stopped the first time she met Henry, during that series of car crash victims, simply because she’d struck it on the metal table a bit too hard. Gotta be careful, Henry had said when she complained later on. Not all of us are eternal. He’d told it with a cock-eyed grin, and with his head permanently cricked to the side, so it had seemed funny.
This watch, Ada Rushkin’s watch, was ticking. It was in perfect order. The gold looked strange, almost more like brass, but when Emily flipped it over, she saw the wife’s name engraved on the back of the timepiece. The name was not common. This had to be her watch. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Emily stated again, and now completed the standardized speech they taught in school. She handed back the watch and the jewelry bag when completed. “These are your wife’s items. I can’t tell you more about them.”
“They have been tainted. This is not her. This is not right.” Mr. Rushkin took in a deep breath. He gestured to the bag once again, and then to the name who had signed off on the sealed items. “Who is Henry? Are you lady Henry?”
“No,” Emily said. “I’m Dr. Mortimer. Henry was an assistant I had for a while. Unfortunately, he’s not here anymore.”
“He’s gone? He took my wife’s watch and now he’s gone?” Mr. Rushkin said a few things in Russian. Though Emily did not know the language, she understood the cadence of curses.
“Sir. Dr. Henry Clarke is a trained professional, as am I. It’s very likely that if there is a problem with your wife’s items, they preceded our intervention here. Maybe someone at the hospital can tell you more, at a different reception desk, but this is the medical examiner’s office and I’m going to ask you to leave. Henry and I were only together a short time and we—”
“He is short?” Mr. Rushkin interrupted. His facial expression had changed, something like fear passing across it. He gestured to his own waist, which was about Henry’s height. “He tall as this.”
“Um, well, yes,” Emily said, wondering where the translation between the two of them had gotten mixed up. “But he was only here for a small time period. A month or so. Your wife’s case—”
“Was handled by a short man. By a man like this?” Mr. Rushkin mimicked—almost exactly—the strange loping gait that Henry had. Emily’s eyes widened. She’d never seen it mimicked so effectively—nor did she want to. Wouldn’t fixating on the fact that Henry seemed to walk as if his knees didn’t bend, as if his legs had been jammed into his hip joints like an afterthought of some unknown creator, be enough to get her fired?
She didn’t answer Mr. Rushkin. But her widening eyes told him all he needed to know. He said more words in Russian she could not comprehend, and slipped the jewelry into his jacket pocket. He looked at Emily once, with a forlorn expression, as if he wanted to tell her something. Warn her? A joke? She had no idea.
Mr. Rushkin opened his mouth, but then shut it tightly. He walked down the rest of the hallway. Emily remained where she was until he disappeared around a corner she heard the beeps of the elevator buttons.
As she walked back into the morgue room, the radio was playing the Rolling Stones’ song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” She knew the tune and the lyrics; Henry had sung it whenever it came over his small stereo, and especially as he tended to the effects of the bodies that they sealed off in bags for those like Mr. Rushkin to claim later. Had Henry said anything else as he worked? Emily wondered now. Or did he merely sing about losing items that you never truly possessed in the first place? Like watches and sapphire rings and time itself?
Emily shivered. The examination room was so much colder than she remembered. She waited until the song was over before she returned to prepping her next body for the afterlife. When she lifted the sheet over the face, and touched the surface of the skin, all she felt was the cold embrace of clay.
“I know it’s not your fault,” Dr. Sanderson said the moment she stepped into the meeting. “But we’ve had a few complaints about personal effects going missing.”
“Mr. Rushkin,” Emily said, already figuring that the confrontation at the beginning of the week had brought them here.
Still wearing scrubs, she’d only just finished her shift when Dr. Sanderson—Gary, as he sometimes preferred to be called—asked to meet her in his office. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t think I handled the situation well. But his items were the same. None were missing, as far as I could tell. I asked him to leave when he became aggressive. Is he reporting anything else?”
“Nothing worth mentioning. It’s not your fault, like I said. Death makes people go a bit crazy. Loved ones especially need to find someone to blame. That’s why they sue, that’s why they claim items are not the same. That’s why people do a lot of strange things. We need to find someone holding the bag at the end of it. Hmm.” Dr. Sanderson fiddled with his own wedding ring as he spoke. “Perhaps I’m mixing metaphors here. All I’m saying is that I know you have done nothing wrong. We receive complaints of missing or damaged items all the time. We take them seriously not because we think that our doctors or examiners are corrupt, but because mistakes do happen. A car crash damages more than the body, but the watch and rings the body wears. And items like that fly off at the moment of impact, end up in other cars, any number of different scenarios. It is not our fault.”
“It’s good to hear you say that,” Emily said. “I’m sure Henry would appreciate it too.” She still replayed the conversation with Mr. Rushkin in her quiet moments in the morgue, and on the commute home. She’d even tried to look up some of the Russian phrases that Mr. Rushkin had used, but came up with only strange things about something called a homunculus, which literally translated into “little man.” A half-man creature from alchemy. She figured Mr. Rushkin was defaulting to old-world logic in his state of despair, and for a moment, the doctor became nothing more than a thief in the night. After all, she—and Henry—had done absolutely nothing wrong. They’d made not a single error sorting out the seventeen bodies from the crash, and if they could do that without making a mistake, then a woman dying of a broken hip shouldn’t be this much of a headache.
“Henry?”
“Dr. Clarke.” Emily wanted to mimic the walk that Mr. Rushkin had done so perfectly, knowing that Dr. Sanderson—or Gary, if you prefer—was good with his own name but no one else’s. He’d called her Emma for at least six months before finally realizing it was Emily. “Dr. Henry Clarke. He arrived to help me out with the car crash victims, and stuck around for a little while after. I figured you or someone else in the upper departments approved the extra help, because I sure needed it.”
“Oh.”
“He was the one who helped with Mr. Rushkin’s wife. So maybe Mr. Rushkin was upset that the person he wanted to talk to, the one he wanted to catch holding the bag as you say, was no longer around.” Emily shrugged, though it felt juvenile.
But Dr. Sanderson still seemed perplexed, like he had no idea of this strange name, this person, or even the approval form someone else higher up must have completed.
“You know,” Emily said, steeling herself from possible fall out. She held a hand up to her navel. “He was short. Yay big.”
“Oh.” Dr. Sanderson blinked slowly. Then he smiled widely. He held his own hand to his chest, mid-height, and asked again. “Yay big?”
“Yeah. And he walked a little strange. Nice guy, wonderful help. I sort of miss him, you know?” Emily added, just to be sure that her remarks at describing his disability were read correctly.
Her worries were unfounded. Dr. Sanderson was still smiling, and nodding along, repeating the name over and over so he couldn’t forget again. “Henry, Henry, Henry. Okay. That’s fantastic. That you had help, I mean. Always good to have an extra pair of hands around.” He smiled again, all teeth, and, Emily thought, a touch more sinister.
“Hey. You say he’s no longer around?” When she nodded, Dr. Sanderson let out a disappointed sigh. “Ah, well, I guess good things do come to an end.”
“You could see if there’s more money in the budget to hire him back,” Emily suggested. “Might help, especially if we’re receiving more complaints about the mistreatment of personal effects afterward. Just to demonstrate that we’ve taken the issue seriously, even if you’re sure that nothing is actually amiss.”
“You know? That’s a fantastic idea. I’ll make a note to run it by the department.” Emily couldn’t help but notice that in spite of Dr. Sanderson’s approval, he wrote nothing down. “In the interim, Emma, don’t worry. You’re a good doctor.”
“Emily.”
“Right. Well, Em, you’re a good doctor. And though I never want to say that you’ll get used to the work, it will get easier.”
Emily forced her smile. She wanted to say something else—I don’t go by Em, never have since I was teased after the class saw Wizard of Oz and called me Auntie Em—but she was stuck on Dr. Sanderson’s phrasing. It was exactly like Henry’s. Maybe they knew one another, maybe Dr. Sanderson had taught in Henry’s medical school, but if that was the case, it was odd for him to forget even his name. With such a distinctive body, too…
Emily shrugged it off, the rest of the meeting mere formality, and then left for the day. It was Friday, and though she had no plans, she was excited for the chance to shower and wear regular clothing again. She’d not yet completed her last body in the morgue, but she figured she may be able to get away with the weekend staff doing it. Or even leaving it for Monday. After all, hadn’t her boss just said things were going to get easier?
They were not going to, of course.
Over the weekend, a group of elderly patients on the ward had passed. Emily worked late into the night on Monday playing catch-up, and left the office just as her new watch chimed midnight and flipped over to display tomorrow’s date: September 11th, 2001.
By the time the news of 9/11 had spread to their small upstate hospital morgue, Emily and a bunch of other doctors, morticians, and anthropologists specializing in human remains were put on busses to go into the city. They would need all the help they could get in the coming weeks sorting out the aftermath.
And Emily was more than happy to go. She’d never been to New York City, despite her recent job placement in the state. Though this was definitely not a tourist mission, she couldn’t help but look out the windows of the bus with awe. She had grown up in Canada, done most of her schooling there, and only recently cashed in on her dual passport (thanks to her mother’s Midwestern blood) to expand her job search after she’d graduated. She’d never once felt any connection to the States over Canada, or Canada over the states, but once placed in the middle of the warzone that New York had become, she started to beam with pride. She started to fall in love with the people around her—the living and the dead—because there were just so many of them. Each one of them needed her, needed her knowledge, and needed to be discovered all over again.
The work never stopped. Trailers lined the streets of the city, usually adjacent or close to one of the surrounding hospitals, where most of their autopsies and body location/identification took place. Trucks and trucks of the dead arrived, all in body bags, but often mismatched or incomplete. One team of doctors would work side by side in the overheated environment, then switch off before finding the correct foot to go with a body, and then the whole process would continue with a new set of doctors, where they might be able to find who the foot or hand or bone belonged to; but more often than not, it was set aside for DNA testing later on. The doctors who had been relieved from the first shift would go to the bank of hotels and motels reserved for city workers, where they’d sleep or drink away their sorrows before the whole thing started all over again.
And this went on for weeks. Months.
Emily’s newfound patriotism and desire to help never quite waned, even as she watched the sun turn to gray skies and then disappear completely from her trailer window. But, after the seventh week in the pit, as she called the dank trailer she worked inside, the bar at the motel didn’t cut it anymore for stress relief. Nor did drinking alone, drinking with bad movies on TV, or drinking with others. Sleep was a joke, filled with nightmares that made her sweat into cheap bed sheets, or banal dreams of body parts that didn’t seem like nightmares at all, but a normal day at the office. Only when she described those banal dreams in language did she fully understand how macabre her life had become.
So she sought out men. She sought out touch. She needed someone, something to distract her from the horrible mess of death in front of her—the death that she had turned into her career, into her life. She sought out a different kind of life, one to hold temporarily between those same cheap bed sheets.
She slept with four men who also worked during her shift, all one night stands with mediocre bedside manner, before she found Craig. He was handsome and kind, but so were both Jacks and Dennis and Jiang. Craig’s brown hair and eyes, along with his roguish smile, didn’t make him attractive beyond the functionality of what he could give her at night. Emily liked him, and kept coming back to him after that first night because he’d had his own little man homunculus in his own morgue.
“I wish Henry were here,” she said the morning after they’d slept together for the first time. She’d been getting a coffee on her break and lingered by the station outside. He’d come up at the same time, smiled at her uneasily, and then broached small talk about the day, the weather. She hated the sound of something so trivial, and so instead of screaming that she needed to be bedded her way through New York so she could sleep at night, she simply said she needed help. “And heck,” she added when Craig hadn’t said anything in response, “I miss that weird imp.”
“Imp?”
Emily sighed. “Don’t go PC on me right now. I just want to describe someone and not sound like I’m being a jerk. I miss that short weird man who listened to the Rolling Stones as if it was the only band in the world, and drank so much cinnamon tea I’m shocked he didn’t gain inches in height from carrying so much in his kidneys. He did good work, never made a mistake. I need him. Where the hell is he? Why is he not helping out with this mess? I mean, didn’t they put up a Bat Signal for all the medical examiners in the state? So why isn’t he here? I can’t do this alone. I can’t—”
Craig had hugged her. Affection between doctors was not uncommon here—everyone needed a hug that first week and most people gave them out easily—but so much time had passed since the event had occurred, that though all the wounds still felt fresh every time a body bag was opened, people had developed their own routines and methods to deal with it. To change something now risked leaking through with pain upon pain.
“I’m sorry, I should be a professional,” Emily said, catching her breath and pulling away from the hug. She wiped a cheek, feeling sheepish as she thanked Craig once again. “You’re a good guy.”
“Yeah, yeah. But I want to talk about the imp.”
Emily couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, well then. What do you want to know? He didn’t live under a bridge, if that’s what you’re thinking. Though I suppose he did sort of look like how I would have imagined Rumplestiltskin.”
Much to her delight, Craig laughed. It was not that she wanted to insult Henry or all the little men in the world. But she and Craig needed gallows humor. She’d read, early in her medical training, about the techs who had unearthed Gacy’s basement full of horrors having a “ghoul pool” for how many bodies they would find. Everyone working with death had their thing, and if she wasn’t going to tell fairy tales about the impish man who stole gold from her former patients, she was convinced she may burst from sadness.
So she told him the story of Mr. Rushkin, the weird conversation she’d had with her boss, and the missing gold. “Well, not quite missing. Just a lot of people complaining that their jewelry wasn’t all there. When you consider the stuff that actually happens in disasters though,” Emily said, gesturing all around to the trailers, “how can you fixate on something so trivial as a watch?”
“It’s hard. You just want a piece of something,” Craig said, then quickly added, “but…this is strange.”
“I know, I know. Death does weird things to people. Spare me the lecture. I’ve heard it, and I think even Kubler-Ross is spinning in her grave, resisting that last stage of acceptance.”
Craig didn’t laugh. He bit his bottom lip—a bottom lip that Emily remembered kissing the night before—and then shook his head. “I had an imp, too, you know.”
“Henry? You had Henry in your morgue?”
“Yes and no. He said his name was Gully.” Craig went on to describe Gulliver Norton, another short man who sounded, right down to the grey hair and the Vick’s VapoRub, exactly like Henry Clarke.
“So they’re…what?” Emily asked. “Twins? But with different last names, so raised apart? Surely they have to be related to have something so similar deform them. I mean—”
“I know what you mean. But what are the odds of both of them becoming doctors in a morgue? And liking the Rolling Stones, too?”
Emily considered all the case studies about separated twins. “Sometimes their interests do converge.”
“Sometimes,” Craig agreed. A long silence spread between them. They’d both seen the same strange short man, who could barely walk without loping, who helped them out during a busy season in the morgue.
“It wasn’t a car crash for me. A bad flu epidemic. Knocked out a large amount of immunocompromised crowd. It was really sad, actually,” Craig said, then quickly corrected, “of course, all death is sad.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Emily said, making the gesture that meant go on. Their break had become long. She watched as another van full of bodies arrived at her trailer. She could already see them, so vivid and clear in her mind’s eye, stacked by the doorway like incoming and outgoing mail. Like those seventeen bodies had been during the first day she’d met this strange little man. She shuddered. “Tell me more. What happened with…Not Henry, but your imp. I can’t remember the name.”
“Gully.”
“Right.” Emily shook away the image from Gulliver’s Travels where the giant had been overcome by the Lilliputians. “Did he take the gold, too?”
“No. Even stranger.” Craig told the story in a clipped manner, clearly seeing his own trailer beginning to fill up. Gully didn’t take things, and didn’t even appear to show interest in anything but his tea and music, until one day Craig found him staring at the body of one of the flu victims. A young woman, no more than twenty five. Her presence had bothered Craig—why would a young girl be so afflicted?—but before either one of them could cut her open and perform the autopsy or run any tests, Gully pronounced that she was pregnant. Eight weeks, not far along, but enough that her immunocompromised status made her a target for the flu.
“And when I asked how he could know, after I checked her chart and saw nothing there about the fetus, Gully said he could smell it,” Craig said, shaking his head. “How can you smell it? I asked him that then, and I’m still asking it now.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t really answer me. He just did the autopsy, showed me that he was right, and then we had another case to do. Another one coming in. It’s always something.” Craig’s gaze faded into the distance. Other doctors were coming out of the trailer. One threw up around the corner, where someone had kindly placed garbage bins for just that purpose. Two more doctors walked toward them, where the coffee area was. “I guess we get so busy we forget the little details, you know? We only realize it all in hindsight, just how weird some of it is, I guess.”
“Little details,” Emily said. She wanted it to be a joke, but no one laughed. “Did anyone ever come back? And you know, complain about anything when Gully was gone?”
“I don’t know,” Craig said. “So far as I know, Gully’s still working at the hospital. He’s my replacement, more or less, while I’m here.”
Emily and Craig looked at one another. A frisson of fear—or maybe it was desire, desire that was caged and cloaked in their dangerous and sad environment—passed between them. Craig threw the rest of his cold coffee on the ground when the new doctors grabbed their own cups. He went back to work without another word, and so did Emily.
But when the buses came with their replacements that night, Craig was waiting for her. The first Jack had waited for her, too, but she’d bypassed him with some lame excuse about being tired, needing alone time. Not with Craig. She clasped his hands in her own and brought him to her mouth in a kiss. They went back to Emily’s hotel room. Had sex in a quick burst of passion, and then in a slower and more relaxed way. When they ordered dinner, eating it half naked on the bed, she brought up Gully again. She made him describe to her the entire story again, this time fleshing out the detailed parts he couldn’t before. Giving her color and texture and motion, so it was as if she was watching this strange man, this homunculus, inside her own mind.
“Do you know that word?” she asked. “Homunculus? It means ‘little man.’ It makes me laugh.”
“No, I don’t know it. But I like imp better anyway.”
She didn’t answer. She put his hand on her, but Craig pulled away. She must have seemed wounded, because Craig soon kissed her.
“Want to go and see him?” Craig asked. “I bet he’s still working at my hospital.”
There was no doubt in Emily’s mind. She wanted to see that imp. And she wanted to ask him, face to face, what he really was.
The drive took all night. They took Craig’s beat-up Chevy, which had the passenger window permanently rolled down. He had taped a plastic bag to cover that side, but it reminded Emily of body bags, so she tore it off. The late October air was cool as they began, and had turned chilly by the time they arrived in Ithaca where Craig’s hospital was located. As they parked the car in the hospital lot, and Emily felt the middle-of-the-night chill cut through her bones, she started to doubt this hastily-put-together plan.
“What if he’s not there?” Emily asked. “What if no one is there?”
“We can check his work papers,” Craig said. “We can see where he came from. I don’t know. Maybe even grab a fingerprint from the work station, slip it in with some of the others we’ve been taking, and run it. I just want to see who this guy is.”
Emily wanted to ask the question: What if he doesn’t have fingerprints? She bit it back, thinking it foolish, but she also knew deep down that it was a valid inquiry. When she’d shaken his hand that first day, he’d felt like clay. Not like death, but not like life, either. How could something so cold and so strange, something that seemed so half-formed, be anything like the two of them?
Craig held the door for her and they stepped into the warm hospital light, she wondered if these little men could love. Had someone loved them? Had there been a birth, and if so, where were their parents now? And if they were created from nothing, from small bundles of earth and something unknown, like the lore proclaimed, then who had made them? And did that creator love them, too?
Weeks later, Emily would do a pregnancy test realize this was probably the night she and Craig conceived. Her fleeting thoughts about love and creation and birth, as they stepped into the hospital, should have made the fact obvious, her body always one step ahead of her mind. All bodies are always one step ahead of the mind. Even in death.
But for now, it felt like yet another necessary part of the investigation. Were these men real? And if so, what were they? Who were they? Sinister or helpful? Good or bad? Familiar or strange? Terrorist or brave patriot?
Emily and Craig crept through the darkened hallways like burglars, though Craig had a key to every room. Even the HR office opened as he slid his key card inside. She flicked on the lights and stood lookout by the door while he opened the filing cabinets in an attempt to find Gulliver’s application form. A resume. His paystub. Something to prove he was real.
“Nothing,” Craig said.
“Check Henry Clarke.”
He did so, but still found nothing. “There’s a computer here, but I don’t have the password. I doubt it would have anything else, though. All the other employee files—like mine—were here.”
“And temp workers?”
“Still here. I looked up another intern I had a few years ago, and she was here. So was a student volunteer I had three years before that.” Craig read each name out with a baffled stare at their present paperwork before he met Emily’s eyes across the room. “We’re not going to find the imps here.”
Emily didn’t want to give up. She was still considering other rooms in the hospital to look for a possible paper trail, when a crash sounded. Craig dropped the files on the desk. “What was that?”
“No idea.”
Emily had no idea why—maybe she was trying to think like Gully—but her first thought was to sniff the air. Smoke cloyed at her lungs. Not like the nurses or janitors who sometimes snuck in the hallways of her own hospital for a cigarette fix, but something deeper and richer. Like an incinerator. She walked to the air vent in the office and sniffed again. More smoke. “You smell that?”
Craig was behind her, a palm on her back. She shuddered at his touch. Her nostrils flared and more smoke came through. “That leads to the morgue,” Craig said. His dark eyes glimmered. “Let’s go.”
They practically ran down the back stairs of the hospital, so they could come to the morgue from an unsecured entrance point. Maybe catch them—Henry and Gully? Someone else?—in the act. Craig reached the door first and stopped, a finger over his lips. He peered through the small window in the center. Emily rose on tiptoe to see a red-orange glow.
Craig entered the code for the room. The door swung open on an air-lock and smoke billowed out. So much of it, and so much like the Towers. Emily wondered if she and Craig would be covered in cement dust, walking statues, like so many of the dead and living in the aftermath of the collapse. She shook her mind free of the Towers and only thought of the many smokers’ lungs she’d examined over the years, lungs taken out of the holistic context of the body they had once been in, and laid on her table to identify. No image helped. Death upon death, only making it worse in each incarnation, each repetition.
Emily vomited in the corner, her body heaving out the aftermath of their meager dinner.
Craig was no longer around. He’d gone deep into the morgue. The smoke had dissipated, no more than a light haze now. None of the smoke alarms or sprinklers had gone off. Though Emily saw a red fire alarm at the end of the hallway only a few paces in front of her, she could not pull her body toward it. She needed to go into the morgue. She needed Craig.
When her eyes adjusted to the low lights, she realized the red-orange glow had been candles. Many, many candles. Like a music video from the 1980s, like the death scene in Romeo + Juliet. They lined every metal surface, the counter, even the sinks where they washed their hands and body parts.
Then she saw Craig. He stood, mouth agape in horror, as he stared at the three men, no more than four feet tall, each looking exactly like the other. Short, thinning hair, grey along the temples, hands and arms that were regular sized, but feet that seemed as if they had been screwed on backwards. All three of them wore scrubs. All three of them held a candle in front of them—but the similarities ended there. Over one candle, one of the men held a gold watch. Over another candle, another held a cube of salt or some other white crystal substance, one that burned and filled the room with smoke. Over the last candle, the last one held something red and slithery, something that belonged in a human body.
“A uterus,” Emily said softly. She looked to Craig, who now stood beside her. He held her shoulders like she was a small child. She looked into his big brown eyes and wanted to plead with him to stop this, stop this, stop this.
But there was nothing they could do. A forcefield would not let them get into the room any further. Emily saw chalk lines on the ground, strange symbols that she swore were Russian—or maybe Latin—circling the three men. They whispered to one another in a language she could not understand, that she was sure no one but each other could understand. Listening further, or going in too deep into this madness would only ensure that she and Craig could never leave. Breaking the divide between them and these strange creatures would seal off all exits, all hope of a future. Too much knowledge here would only bring on horrific results.
They’d seen enough of those already.
“We need to go, Emily,” Craig said to her.
She opened and closed her mouth. One of the men—Henry, she knew it to be Henry—started to hum. It pierced the force field and tickled her ear. Craig’s hand gripped her harder as the song got to him, too. It was the Rolling Stones intro for “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” but Henry had not yet gotten to the lyrics.
Emily was not going to let it. She started to run, with Craig falling in line behind her. They bolted up the back stairs and through the back door they’d entered the hospital through. They ran through the parking lot, the cool air of October now a boon to their overheated skin. Craig fell behind the wheel, she fell into the passenger seat, and they drove into the night. When the radio insisted on playing a Rolling Stones song, Craig kicked it so hard the radio broke.
“Good,” he said.
And Emily nodded: Good.
“I’ll be sorry to see you go,” Dr. Sanderson stated. He had received Emily’s resignation letter two weeks ago, but it was only now, on her last day in the hospital’s medical examiner’s office, that he had asked her in for a meeting.
Emily had relished the feeling of sliding that last body into the steel tray. It had been a normal death, as normal as any death could be: Heart attack in the sleep of an elderly pensioner. A known death, found by his son in the morning, a son who had come to get the personal effects not three minutes before Emily sat down for this meeting. The personal effects that had all been there and accounted for, nothing strange about them in the least. After such a bizarre and winding career, Emily had been relieved to escort this lovely death, as her last career death, to its natural conclusion.
Then she had to meet Dr. Sanderson. Her stomach flipped with fear and nausea all over again.
“I have to be honest,” Emily began slowly. She looked down at her scrubs, stained with fluid. She crossed her legs so she didn’t need to see the stain. “I won’t miss this place.”
Dr. Sanderson laughed as if it was the funniest joke. “I can understand that, after what you and so many other doctors have lived through. Your service has been commendable.”
Emily nodded, but didn’t comment. She didn’t like to talk about “her service” as so many put identifying the bodies in the wake of 9/11. At first, she’d deflected all praise by saying these tragedies were like all other natural or unnatural disasters, herself no different than those who suffered through and attended to victims of a Kansas Tornado or Oklahoma City, but that soon became too much of a lie in her mouth. Nothing would ever be the same again afterward, for known and unknown reasons.
Emily had returned from Ground Zero just after Christmas. She’d found out about her pregnancy over that break, informed Craig, and the two of them had picked up easily where they had left off. They never spoke about that strange night in the morgue, not since it had happened, but that didn’t seem to matter. Though they’d not slept together since that night, either, and had tried to work through the bodies stacked up in their trailer alone in the aftermath, they could not handle this part of life alone anymore: a baby. A shared future.
There was no doubt in Emily’s mind that he was the father, and no doubt in her mind that he’d be a good one. Their shared past, of both the strange little men and 9/11, made their relationship obvious and easy. They didn’t need to bicker or argue about small things like the type of milk to buy or who forgot to clean the bathroom sink because they’d been through so much already. They’d been living together in Emily’s apartment since the New Year, but they would eventually seek a house in another state not affected by either one of the tragedies that brought them together.
“Anyway,” Dr. Sanderson said, noticing Emily’s silence and her arms crossed firmly over her chest, “I can imagine you want to get going as soon as possible. And congratulations, by the way, for your bundle of joy.”
Emily had been about to dart to her car and into the arms of Craig, who most likely had made a lavish dinner, but she paused. She was halfway through her pregnancy now, but the scrubs and large coats had made it so she didn’t think it was obvious. She’d told no one. She raised a brow now as she regarded Dr. Sanderson.
“I know, yes; or at least, I know now.” He gave a small chuckle, one which Emily did not return. “There’s only so many reasons why people quit this work. They usually do so right away or after a tragedy. Or if they have some life inside them.”
Dr. Sanderson’s eyes went to Emily’s stomach. She thought of the slippery uterus one of the strange men had held and tried to keep a straight face as she added, “I’m not the only one to quit after 9/11. I’m no different than Dr. Sheldon or Dr. Wu.”
“Ah, yes, but you are different than Jack and Jiang. 9/11 was not your first tragedy. You survived the car crash, seventeen dead, before that. And those bodies, my goodness. More than a baker’s dozen! You survived with Henry, mind you,” Dr. Sanderson added. “But you still survived.”
Emily shuddered involuntarily at the mention of Henry. Dr. Sanderson smiled, his remark hitting its target. “I’m rather fond of Henry, and Gully too. But I think the true piece de la resistance was Markus. You know what they say in alchemy and everyday life—third time’s the charm.”
Emily swallowed hard. Her mouth tasted like bile, like the saliva that coated her mouth during the first trimester. She wanted to spit, to get the evil substance out, but she did not dare.
“I’m envious, you know. Not just of you but of all women who can create life so simply, so easily. Like that.” Dr. Sanderson snapped his fingers. “Just like that, from a random fling, you have something brand new inside of you. Of course, that life is still made from pieces scattered around by careless men, but it is still no less brand new. It’s amazing, truly amazing. I am envious.”
“Can I go?” Emily didn’t know why she was asking permission. Her work clock was done. Her job was over. Yet something kept her here. A low murmur from his office, so much like a familiar song.
“Yes, of course. I just wanted to congratulate you before you disappeared from us. I would say that you’ll be hard to replace, but as you can tell, I’ve been busy like you’ve been busy. I like to think I’m not as careless as any slut with open legs, but you know how these things get. Once you make one, you can’t stop.”
Dr. Sanderson rose and grabbed the door to his office. Emily was woozy on her feet as she stood, but she was determined to leave. She said nothing about his remarks, knowing deep inside they were meant to hurt. He called out to her—more well-wishing that seemed polluted by dust and venom—but she ignored him as she marched down the hall. If she could help it, she would never set foot in this hospital ever again. She’d already stayed too long. She grabbed her coat from her peg in the morgue, her purse, and the small radio she’d bought when she returned from 9/11 and Craig had insisted she needed one.
Just as Emily stepped out of the office, she ran into the small man.
“Hey doc,” Henry said. Or maybe it was Gully. Or Markus. Or another homunculus that her boss had conjured from the remnants of what people left behind. The little man smiled wide, then sniffed the air. “I hear there’s good news. Congrats on your bundle of joy. What are you having?”
Emily walked past the imp with her head held high. She thought of Craig. The dinner he’d made for them, all three of them. The house they would get in another state. The house she’d give birth in, because now she knew for sure, she could never trust any hospital, since there might be an imp doing the dirty work of death. In an age of terrorism and wars and disasters by men’s hands, there would need to be a thousand little men created to hold off the bodies as they stacked up in the hallway, as natural death tipped into unnatural life.
“That’s okay,” the homunculus said. “I know it’s a boy. Enjoy your little man while you can. They grow up so fast, and not all of us are eternal.”
Emily stopped just before she stepped outside. She turned to see the homunculus smile, sniff the air once more, and then reach into his pocket for Vick’s VapoRub. He rubbed it under his nose with that same crick in his neck. Then he waved goodbye as he stepped into the examiner’s room, a familiar song burning in Emily’s ears.
END
Eve Morton 