Exquisite Corpse Read online

  The almost-forgotten but instantly familiar thrill of the sagging weight in my arms … the rapturous glaze slicking the half-closed eyes … the little way the fingers would stiffen, tremble with some dying palsy, then curl into the palms … the sweet face lost in its endless empty dream. I always liked blonds. Their complexions are naturally milky, so that the tender veins show blue at the temples, and their blood-soaked hair is like pale silk seen through ruby glass.

  I leaned over Waring and kissed him, reacquainting myself with the textures of lips and teeth, the rich metallic flavour of a mouth full of blood. He felt so good, I wanted to lie down next to him on the cold tiled floor of the morgue and play with him awhile. But I didn’t dare. For all my studies of autopsy procedure, I had no idea how long a real autopsy should take. The door was locked, but sooner or later someone would turn up with a key, and I had to assume it would be sooner rather than later.

  For the first time in five years I had a beautiful dead boy at my disposal, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

  I let my gaze leave him for a quick look round. We were in a small rectangular room, apparently some antechamber of the morgue. Low concrete ceiling, tile walls, no windows. Drummond’s greasy leavings were crumpled at the foot of a metal dissecting table, while young Waring and I lay entwined in a corner among a tangle of dark-stained rubber hoses that disappeared into the underside of a sink. There seemed to be no way out but the door.

  I was stark naked and bleeding profusely. If employees of the hospital knew I had been brought in for autopsy, my face would be freshly imprinted on their brains. Still, I would have to brazen my way through. I thought I could do it; in fact, I knew I could do it. Of course it wasn’t as if I had much choice.

  I put on a pair of rubber gloves and raked through cabinets and drawers, found a first-aid kit and packed my wound with cotton, then taped gauze over it. Blood began to star the gauze almost at once, but there was nothing I could do except be thankful it was flowing again. As I wiped myself down with paper towels at the sink, I was still uncomfortably sure I had trespassed on the edge of irrevocable death.

  Drummond’s lab coat was soaked with every sort of foul fluid in his suppurating sac of a body. But Waring had hung his on a peg near the door, and died in his hospital greens. Silently I blessed the boy. Then I slipped off his shoes and socks, tried on one of the ugly rubber-soled loafers. It fit like a boat, but I thought if I laced the shoes tightly and stuffed them with paper towels, I could keep them on my feet.

  With much tugging and heaving, I managed to remove his greens. In the pants pocket I found a small purse containing two twenty-pound notes and a few coins, which I kept. Waring’s body in its clean cotton briefs was smooth, pink, hairless but for a fine golden floss on his legs and lower belly. I no longer felt any attraction toward him; he reminded me of nothing so much as a newborn rat.

  It had been the same with my boys now and then. I’d have one freshly laid out and ready for the night, but instead of diving into his passive body, I would abruptly lose interest in him. This happened most often with boys who had died without any struggle at all.

  Waring’s greens were much too large, of course, and quite bloody. But beneath the clean lab coat I thought this might go unnoticed. I was in a hospital, after all. I saw his gold-rimmed spectacles on the floor, smeared with bloody fingerprints but undamaged. I wiped them and put them on, expecting the room to become a watery migraine blur. But at once my vision seemed sharper, the edges of things more clear. Imagine: this strapping lad’s astonished china-blue orbs were defective in just the same way as mine!

  Unsurprisingly, there was no proper mirror in the room. Who wants to examine his own face after slicing open chests and skulls all day? But some vain junior doctor (I suspected) had hung a small round glass on a nail above the sink. I studied my reflection, decided that the spectacles changed the look of my face a great deal, but I could still do better. Though prisoners’ hair is supposed to be kept quite short, I hadn’t seen a barber in weeks. My dark mane grew halfway down the back of my neck and hung messily over my forehead.

  I found a pair of surgical shears in the mess and began hacking away. I left the back long, but chopped several inches off the front and sides until my coarse hair stood up spikily. This seemed a plausibly trendy hairdo for an aging pathologist. I’d seen a character on TV sporting the very same style last time I’d been allowed into the lounge.

  I pulled the scalpel out of Waring’s throat and used surgical tape to bind it to the inside of my calf, where it would be easy to get at later. I was humming, pleased with my new look. With the spectacles and the haircut I thought I looked five years younger, and very much unlike England’s most notorious killer since Jack stalked whores in Whitechapel.

  Murderers are blessed with adaptive faces. We often appear bland and dull; no one ever passed the Ripper in the street and thought, That chap looks as if he ate a girl’s kidney last night. Years before my arrest I had seen several newspaper photos of an American killer of young women, all taken within a few months of one another. Without his name beneath them, you would not have recognized any two photos as the same man. He seemed able to alter the lines in his face, the shape of his eyes, his very bone structure. I could do none of this—at least I didn’t think so—but I’d done all right with what I had.

  When I pulled Waring’s lab coat off its peg, two things fell out of the pocket. One was a well-thumbed paperback called America’s Favourite Cannibal: The Ed Gein Story. The other was a set of car keys.

  I picked up the keys and ran my thumb over the buttery leather tab stamped Jaguar. Keys had been forbidden objects for so long that they felt dangerous in my hand now. I had scarcely seen car keys at all. I knew how to drive, but had never owned a car. Driving in London is nerve-racking and, with the extensive tube system, unnecessary.

  All I had to do now was find the doctors’ car park and the right Jaguar. I went to the door, tried the handle. It was locked, and I felt a bright thread of panic. They know I’m in here, the only one left alive, trapped. But then I remembered that Drummond had told Waring to lock it from the inside.

  I turned the deadbolt lock, and the heavy door clicked open, the first door I had opened for myself in five years.

  The little room stank of formaldehyde, excrement, and terror, a musky sickish scent. I was glad to take my leave of it, this dank cubicle where an appalling man had thought to remove and pickle my innards, assisted by a boy scarcely old enough to be worth killing.

  The door had nearly closed when I remembered that Drummond had been talking into a cassette recorder. Presumably it had recorded everything that had happened since my resurrection. I dashed back in, retrieved the cassette, exited again, and locked the door behind me. The deserted corridor seemed to stretch away forever. I wondered where all the other, real corpses were. But I hadn’t time to think of that.

  Doors loomed in shadowy recesses on either side of me. The few rooms not closed off were dark and empty. One turned out to be a lift. I pressed the button and stood waiting for the car. There was still no one in the corridor, no one anywhere in sight, though I heard faint echoing voices.

  It seemed a rather sleepy country hospital Painswick had shipped me off to, perhaps trying to avoid publicity as long as possible. I supposed they wanted to know what killed me before the vultures of the press swooped down to rip the flesh from my bones. How those same vultures would feast now! But not on the tainted meat of Andrew Compton!

  The lift door slid back like a thick metallic tongue, and the maw of the car disgorged two long pale figures, one vertical and one horizontal. I very nearly stumbled backward in surprise. But it was only a sullen spotty-faced theatre porter pushing a gurney covered with a white sheet. There was a twisted shape beneath the sheet, a shape that seemed not to have all its parts, to be caving in and crumbling even as I looked. But I did not let my eye linger on it, and if the porter was anxious to snub me, I was anxious to be snubbed.
/>   I pushed the button marked G. A burnt smell lingered in the air. The lift rose, and my stomach felt the tiniest bit queasy. Then the door slid open on a scene of chaos: people running and shouting, trolleys rocketing past, blood fountaining from a table surrounded by white and green backs, and from their midst a writhing hand that shot into the air, trembled at the end of its arm as if straining to touch God, then disappeared again. And everywhere, much stronger now, that same smell of burning. I had taken the lift to the emergency ward.

  I saw some white masks on a cart, took one and tied it over my nose and mouth. I took a pair of rubber gloves as well, thinking they were bound to help me sooner or later. Then I edged through the Danteësque milieu toward a set of double doors I could dimly make out on the other side of the room.

  The doors only led to another wing of the hospital, but beyond them was a nurse at a desk, fingers flying over the keyboard of a computer. Her face was calmer and kinder than any I had seen so far. “Sorry,” I said through the mask, “but I’m new and I’ve got a bit turned around. Which way is the doctors’ car park?”

  “It’s just along this hallway and to your left, up two flights of stairs. Level Three. But can’t you stay, Doctor? We’ve just had this horrid crash come in and we need the help.”

  “I’ve been on for twenty hours,” I improvised. “My supervisor ordered me to go home and rest—said I was bound to snip the wrong tube if I didn’t.”

  The sister blinked, then gave me an understanding (if slightly frozen) smile. I turned away and walked quickly down the hall. A few doctors were hurrying in the opposite direction, but none of them paid the slightest attention to me. I heard one of them saying, “… have a look at Compton …” and another replying, with a certain smugness, “Drummond’ll never let you in.”

  Minutes later I let myself into a multilevel car park, as deserted as the morgue and seemingly full of nothing but Jaguars. There were Jaguars of every colour and vintage, convertibles, coupes, roadsters, and sedans, some lovingly maintained, some utterly decrepit. Here and there I saw a Ferrari or MG, as if to ease the repetition, and off in an obscure corner I thought I could make out one pathetic Mini. But for every other sort of automobile, there were at least three or four Jaguars.

  I tried the key in thirty-seven car doors before one finally clicked open. As I slid into the driver’s seat, I saw a stack of books on the seat. Well-thumbed paperbacks, with lurid covers of pain red and void black. The Acid Bath Murders. The Butcher of Hanover. Zodiac. Killing for Company. The New York Vampire. Buried Dreams.

  I fitted the key into the ignition, and the engine came on with a smooth low roar. A glowing gauge assured me that the tank was full of petrol.

  London was less than two hours away. I would be there before the hospital knew I was gone, with a little luck.

  And on this day it looked as if I had more than a little luck.

  2

  Jay Byrne left the cold stone comfort of Charity Hospital late in the afternoon and hurried down traffic-choked Tulane Avenue in the direction of the French Quarter. At Carondelet he turned left, crossed the gaudy thoroughfare of Canal, ducked down Bourbon Street, and was soon in the heart of the Quarter.

  Even in November there were days when New Orleans was balmy, almost tropical. This was one of those days. Over his gray T-shirt Jay wore a jacket made of some matte-dull black fabric that seemed to absorb and consume all light. It was an expensive piece of clothing, but it hung on him awkwardly, his thin wrists jutting from the sleeves like chicken bones. Clothes had fit him badly for most of his twenty-seven years; his limbs never quite seemed to match up, and no fabric or cut was comfortable to him. He preferred being naked whenever possible.

  Jay’s fine-textured, longish blond hair blew about in the breeze coming off the river. As he walked, he trailed one hand along the ornate spikes of a wrought-iron railing, then along the timeworn texture of old brick. The afternoon light had taken on a golden cast by the time he reached Jackson Square.

  A small figure was waiting for him on the steps of St. Louis Cathedral, faded red shirt with a trippy-looking flower on it, baggy black shorts, glossy black hair. A Vietnamese kid perhaps seventeen or eighteen; Jay thought his name was Tran. He’d seen him around the Quarter a lot. The boy’s face put Jay in mind of a delicate scrimshaw mask in a museum, exotic-boned, not so much androgynous as beyond gender entirely.

  But this mask was topped with a trendy haircut, a shiny shoulder-length sheaf tumbling into his eyes. He palmed the two crisp hundred-dollar bills Jay offered with no flicker of surprise, then slipped Jay a sealed, unmarked manila envelope.

  “It’s real clean,” the boy said cheerfully. “Something called ‘Nuke,’ out of Santa Cruz. You won’t need to take more than one at a time.” His accent was like some strange gumbo, part Vietnam, part New Orleans, part the wisecracking American Generic young foreigners often picked up—from television, Jay guessed, though he had never watched it enough to be sure.

  “Then I’m stocked up.” Jay tucked the envelope into the silk lining of his jacket. He took a deep breath, then made the plunge. “I’m a photographer. I do nudes, you know, males, art studies. Would you want to pose for me tonight?”

  The boy looked surprised, then something else—alarmed? Amused? His eyes were too dark for Jay to read.

  “I can’t do it tonight,” he said. “There’s a big rave in the Warehouse District, and I have a great dress. But maybe some other time?”

  “Uh … sure. Fine.” Jay knew he should suggest a date, but he had expended all his nerve on the first proposition. Without some sort of drink or drug in him, he could not make another.

  “OK, see you ‘round.” Tran blessed Jay with a sunny grin, then turned and walked away down one of the cobblestone alleys that led away from the square. The spires of the cathedral loomed oppressively overhead.

  That smile … it was as sweet as sex, as succulent as meat. But the boy’s refusal had been too quick, and Jay thought he’d seen a glimmer of something distasteful—pity, revulsion?—in the elegantly tilted recesses of his eyes.

  It was humiliating to be brushed off by a Quarter brat nearly ten years his junior. But through his shame Jay still felt a flicker of desire. He wished he could have brought the Vietnamese boy back to his house on Royal Street, his house set behind a locked iron gate, nestled like a dark jewel in a courtyard fringed with leaves and shadows. There he could have borne those insouciant lips, those slyly condescending eyes. He could have photographed and catalogued them, examined them, discovered exactly how they broke down, how they came apart.

  The boy-children of the French Quarter didn’t trust Jay, though they allowed him into their circle occasionally because he bought them vast quantities of drinks and drugs without batting an eye. Sometimes they posed for his Polaroids too, but with the locals that was as far as it went. He never touched them in any of his more arcane pursuits. If he couldn’t find a tourist, there were always stragglers from the housing projects. He’d offer a kid money to pose, make sure little homey wasn’t carrying a gun, then get him fucked up …

  Jay often wondered why the local boys tolerated him at all. Certainly there were plenty of well-heeled men around the Quarter, ready with the price of a drink or a meal for a smooth-skinned, long-limbed boy. Probably there were women too, a little older, uncertain of their own allure, wanting the ego boost of a younger lover. The boys didn’t need Jay; in fact, he knew he gave them the creeps. He had heard them saying so when they thought he wasn’t around. He had a knack for not being noticed, for hearing things he wasn’t meant to hear, for blending in and observing.

  He supposed he was something of a curiosity to the boys. Probably they would ignore him altogether if they didn’t know his last name. Even his notoriety wasn’t his own; he stood exposed and shivering in the few scraps of notoriety tossed to him by his lusciously clothed family.

  Lysander Devore Byrne, he’d signed in a small crabbed hand at the hospital desk before going up to see hi
s mother, with her shriveling, collapsing face and her rotting brain behind it. He’d never answered to Lysander, which was his father’s name. He had been Junior to his family as long as he would tolerate it, then just Jay.

  The pain-besotted skeleton in the hospital bed had once been Mignon Devore, daughter of an old uptown family, former Queen of Comus, ostensible beauty. She had married a rich boy from Texas and brought him home to get richer. Ensconced in a Gothic mansion on St. Charles, she had put up with Lysander’s mistresses as long as he didn’t open bank accounts in their names. She had consumed quantities of Pernod, an ersatz form of absinthe that was equally loathsome but legal. She had paid little attention to her only child. She had entombed her husband in style, and she would fill an equally handsome place in the family crypt.

  When the cancer was discovered marbling his mother’s temporal lobes like the fat on a particularly tender cut of beef, Jay had installed her in Charity Hospital rather than the posh private place where Lysander had died of the same cancer five years earlier. Mignon didn’t want to go; she was terrified of the place and scandalized by the thought of dying there, so Jay figured she would go faster. It was an act of mercy, a small evil for the greater good.

  He was halfway across Jackson Square, heading toward Café du Monde for a cup of au lait, when he heard sneakered feet running up behind him. Jay turned so quickly he surprised himself. Tran stopped, uneasy surprise flickering across the fine planes and hollows of his face.

  “I was just wondering,” he said, and stopped. Smiled. Toyed with the hem of his shorts, exposing the smooth skin of one knee. “I was just wondering if you’d like to go to that rave with me. I mean, to take pictures or something,” he added as the surprise registered on Jay’s face.

  “To take … ?” Jay felt his heart racing, apparently trying to batter its way out of his chest. He imagined it bursting through bone, smacking wetly into Tran’s face, leaving a streak of lurid maroon across those perfect rose-almond lips. “Uh … what exactly happens at a rave?”