I think we must have been driving for ten minutes or so (not being sure of time anymore, I found this hard to judge) when the car pulled into the forecourt of a huge grey stretch of a building, and I just glimpsed the word ‘HOSPITAL’ on a big noticeboard as we passed by. Which London hospital it was I had no idea, but there were two wings on either side of the main block and its façade was grubby with city pollution. My unwitting chauffeur drove around to the back of the grey edifice and eased the Hillman into a crowded staff car park. Climbing out, he took time to check on the wrapped package on the floor, pushing it back further out of sight with the guttural kind of grunt I was getting used to from him. I followed as he slammed the door shut, locked it, and shambled away. He had a peculiar shuffling gait, one hunched shoulder higher than the other, and I wondered what other things were wrong with his body. Certainly his stride was impeded in some way, although his physique looked strong, powerful, those shoulders broad if stooped and tilted, his hands and wrists large, his booted feet also big, suggesting thick legs. His face was almost completely hidden by the woollen scarf and hat, his bulging black eyes peering out from between. Although the covered cavity where there should have been a nose and mouth was gristled and raw, seepage constantly leaking so that the night before he had been forced to hold a large soiled cloth to it constantly, I had the feeling that this was no new injury, if injury it was. He appeared to be too competent with his method of eating for the orifice to have been recently created, placing the straw perfectly into whatever receptacle lay beyond the rough edges, with no hint of pain or discomfort, sucking up the blended food with practised ease. Several people, uniformed nurses, gave him odd glances as he passed by, but none spoke to him. I kept to his heels, wondering if he was seeking treatment at the hospital, or if he was employed there, perhaps as a porter or boilerman, any kind of job that did not involve the public. Cruel as the thought was, I felt pretty certain that his work would not bring him into much contact with the public.
He approached a double door marked ‘MORTUARY – RESTRICTED AREA’, and pushed one side of it open, passing through and entering a long, wide and dismal corridor, the walls painted a turgid olive green, the lights in its ceiling behind wire guards for some reason, as if the corpses wheeled along this way might rise up and try to break them. I still kept close to him, walking not gliding behind him, as though I remained part of the real world. A man wearing green overalls approached from the opposite direction, a surgeon’s mask, also green, hanging around his neck. He nodded at the man I followed as he went by and was greeted with a muffled grunt that could have meant anything.
Soon we arrived at plastic doors, the kind that overlapped and were easy to push trolleys and gurneys through, and I saw that we were in a long room, floor-to-ceiling white wall tiles and overhead strip lighting giving an air of clinical cleanliness. To one side there was a whole wall filled with refrigerated steel cabinets, the door to each one approximately three feet by two. There must have been at least forty of them. Three stainless-steel tables, carts filled with surgical tools standing next to each one, occupied the concrete floor; only one had a naked body stretched out on its surface. Another man, also wearing gown and mask, as well as latex gloves, was working on the pale carcass.
‘Ah, good,’ the masked man said, looking up. ‘You’ve got the evening shift tonight, have you, Moker?’
A familiar grunt from my man.
‘Well, there’s not much going on, unless anything fresh is brought in.’ The man standing by the dead body pulled his surgical mask free from his face. ‘This one’s all done, so just clean him up before you put him away for the night. I understand the relatives are coming in in the morning for a last look and positive ID, so make sure you do a good job.’
There was no friendliness in the mortician’s tone as he spoke to the man he’d called . . . what was it? Moter? No, Moker. I’m sure he said Moker. In fact, he eyed the muffled man with disdain, and I was sure it wasn’t because of the way Moker looked, not in these politically correct times. Moker didn’t seem to be too popular, and I could well understand that. With or without his deformity, there was just something plain unpleasant about the guy.
The mortician began peeling off his latex gloves, studying the corpse before him as he did so, lost in thought for the moment. As he dropped the gloves into a pedal bin, he noticed Moker had not yet moved. He glared at him through wire-framed spectacles.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ he said gruffly. ‘Get yourself changed and don’t forget to wear gloves tonight. I’ve told you enough times that all kinds of diseases can be picked up from cadavers. Now get on with it.’
Moker shuffled away, going through a door that I hadn’t noticed on one side of the long sparse room. I went with him out of curiosity. This was a locker room, tall cabinets set along the wall, where a youngish guy, who looked as if he enjoyed too many Big Macs, was just closing the door of one of them. Moker went to a locker, produced a key from his raincoat pocket, and opened it; but not before I’d had the chance to read the small name card on the door. ‘A. MOKER’ it read in badly written capital letters. So, the name was confirmed, not that it would help me in any way. Why had I even bothered to follow him? I asked myself. What was I supposed to do? Not only could I not physically touch him, I could not even haunt him. He might seem aware of my presence at times, but there had been no indication that he’d actually seen me.
The mortician who had given Moker his instructions came in behind us holding a rumpled apron in front of him by the fingers of one hand as if it carried the plague.
‘Whose is this?’ he barked at both men in the locker room.
The tubby guy was shrugging on a jacket and his hand appeared from a sleeve to point at Moker.
‘Alec’s,’ he said, without a trace of betrayal.
The mortician gave Moker a withering look and pushed the offending garment towards him.
‘I’ve told you before,’ the mortician reprimanded as Moker took the grubby apron, ‘don’t leave soiled aprons lying in the cabinet room. This looks as if it should have been laundered weeks ago.’
He wheeled away without another word and Tubby Guy followed him from the room, leaving Moker alone.
I watched as he threw the apron in the bottom of the locker and took out green overalls, a long linen coat of the type worn by the mortician himself. He laid it over the back of a hard chair then unwound the choker from his neck. I flinched again at the sight of his poor ravaged face, but he quickly reached inside the locker again and took out a surgical mask, this one white, which he pulled over most of his face, hiding the hole beneath. Even so, with no shape of a nose and mouth, the cloth mask looked odd. It puffed out as he breathed, shrinking concavely as he took a breath.
Donning the overalls, he put his own coat, scarf and hat inside the locker and closed the door. Picking up a dry sponge and cloth he returned to the main room which, apart from the body on the metal table, was now empty. Moker approached the corpse, considered it for a minute or two, examining the plain stitching on its chest and groin where the mortician had removed organs for inspection. I noticed there were labelled jars on a shelf nearby, each one containing interior body parts. A brown clipboard filled with handwritten details hung from the side of the stainless-steel table. The corpse itself had a label with more details attached to the big toe of the right foot. I heard a muted cough and glanced over to a doorway leading to a small and, from what I could see, cramped office where the person who had greeted Moker sat bent over a desk. He still wore his green overalls and was busy with more paperwork, no doubt filling out forms appertaining to the deceased. At the sound, Moker busied himself swabbing down the body and I drifted away. The dead man was pallid beyond belief, with blue stains around his eyes and lips, similar stains blemishing his skin in other places. It was an awful sight, particularly with the stitched Y-shaped wound running down his chest and stomach, and I had no morbid interest in watching Moker at work. I drifted around, peering
into glass cabinets containing all kinds of liquids, powders and creams, even body deodorants, wound fillers and body plugs. There was an embalming machine nearby with dials and tubes attached, its large glass container filled with pinkish fluid mounted on top. In the small office next door where the mortician continued his form filling, there was a desk crammed with upright files, a computer keyboard and screen, two lamps, a telephone, and various pieces of paperwork and folders. The mortician barely had room to write. Around the walls were more clipboards bearing various other forms, framed morticians’ licences, a calendar and some kind of printed schedule with days of the week and allotted work times inked in. I saw Moker’s name entered for all that week’s evening shifts.
The mortician finally laid down his pen with a grumble of relief and pushed back his chair, which was on castors. I stepped away as if the chair might knock into me (instinctive reactions were still hard to overcome), retreating into the mortuary itself, and the mortician followed me through. He didn’t bother to bid Moker goodnight as he made his way to the plastic doors, and Moker, who was busy swabbing down the corpse, didn’t look up from his work.
I still felt very uneasy in Moker’s presence, even though I could not be seen (although it chilled me whenever Moker seemed to sense that something was with him and he peered around the room, seeking out whatever it was that disturbed him), and I would have loved to have left that place. I couldn’t go though – the spirit’s words at the séance had had too much of an effect on me. Maybe I was on some path towards redemption, a path that would take me from this purgatory I was in. After all, I was a Catholic, even if a lapsed one, and I was supposed to believe in that kind of thing. Besides, incorporeality had to have some effect, didn’t it?
So I stuck with the situation, not having a clue as to the purpose of my vigil, but trusting that something important might come of it. The evening drew on and the later it got, the more the mortuary seemed isolated from the rest of the world. Footsteps, a cough from Moker, the dribble as he squeezed out the sponge – all sounded hollow, echoey, and louder than they should have been. I knew it was the acoustics created by the tiled walls and metal cabinets, but nevertheless, it was kind of ghostly. I suppose the hidden rows of dead bodies and the sight of the corpse that Moker worked on added to the creepiness, but I had to remind myself that I was the one doing the haunting. No one disturbed Moker in his work, nobody at all entered the mortuary that night; the telephone didn’t ring, there were no extraneous noises from beyond the four walls. The silence was relieved only by his grunts and occasional harsh breathing. It was both depressing and nerve-wracking.
At last he finished his labours and threw the sodden sponge and cloth into a plastic water bucket at the foot of the metal table. He gazed at his handiwork for a few moments, then traced with his thick fingers the stitched scar that ran from chest to groin. It was a sickening thing to do and I could only wonder at the man’s mentality and motive. Finally, he shuffled away, left shoulder higher than the right, and went over to a tall freestanding cupboard, from which he took a large folded white sheet. This he spread over the body, covering it from head to ankles, allowing only the feet to show. After this, he wheeled over a gurney and, effortlessly, it seemed to me, transferred the corpse onto it. He pushed it to the end of the row of closed cabinets, read the card on one, before pulling the cabinet all the way out. Naturally, it was empty and he came back to the body on the gurney and pushed it towards the exposed shelf of the cabinet. Again, effortlessly, it seemed, he lifted the corpse and laid it out on the shelf, tidily tucking the sheet around its outline so that he could close the cabinet once more. This he did, and when the shrouded body was out of sight, he tapped the cabinet front twice with the flat of his hand as if bidding the dead man goodnight.
This was cavalier at best, but what followed was far worse. My God, it was far, far worse; disgustingly so. First, he went to the plastic double door, pushing it open a fraction and peering out as if to see if the coast was clear. Then he came back to the closed cabinets and walked along them, tapping each door that was at chest level. He stopped, took another swift look at the plastic doors, then pulled open one cabinet. It slid out easily, only the low rumble of its runners breaking the silence, and I could see that the figure it held was smallish. Although the head was fully covered, I could tell by the dainty, colourless feet and the two slight chest bumps that a woman or girl lay beneath the shroud.
Moker pulled back the white sheet, slowly, as if relishing every stage of exposure, pausing as the breasts were uncovered. The surgical mask he wore puffed in and out with increased labour and I saw a dark saliva stain spread across it. The unveiling continued and I wanted to turn away from the obvious necrophilia. Instead, as if mesmerized again, I continued to stare in horror.
When, at last, the folds of sheet lay around the girl’s feet – I saw she could only be in her early twenties – Moker raised his thick, and now trembling hands and ran them over her chalky-white figure. Apart from her deathly whiteness and the blueness of her lips, she looked unharmed, as though whatever had ended her young life remained hidden within the vessel that was her body; her hair was golden blonde and it lay in matted ringlets around her head and neck.
I yelled a high-pitched protest when I saw what Moker was doing and tried to grab his arms, wanting to pull him away, wanting to prevent his desecrating this beautiful but lifeless girl. Nothing I could do would stop him though and, although I was aware of my inadequacy, I could not still my arms and I beat at him, tore at him, desperately tried to force him away. His big hand delved between her thighs, which were now spread in a revealing pose, and I screamed again and again.
Eventually, I gave up and went into the small office next door. I sank into the desk chair and lay my head in my hands, covering my ears.
I could still hear the brute noises coming from next door, the animal moans of Moker as he abused the body that had been left in his charge.
But shocked and repulsed though I was by the depravity, nothing could have prepared me for the horror that was to follow later that night.
28
It was a long wretched night and more than once I had to force myself to remain in the presence of this monster. I kept to the little office, desperately trying to close my mind to the activity next door. Other cabinets had been opened, but I refused to think of what might be happening to other cadavers. Perhaps having finished with the girl, Moker was merely carrying out his normal duties; I could only hope. Twice he came into view through the doorway, pushing a floor mop, a metal bucket by his feet, and I supposed that not only was it his job to clean the corpses, but also the mortuary itself. Once he came into the office and I had to back away into a tight corner to avoid his touch – I shuddered at the idea of sharing any of his sick thoughts – and I remained there as he shuffled through paperwork on the desk. I got the feeling that he was just snooping rather than working, because he added nothing to the various forms he browsed through, nor did he instigate new paperwork himself. He looked into the desk drawers and I had the impression he was still prying and not actually searching for something. And strangely, all the while he wore the surgical mask over the gaping hole in his face, as if visitors might drop in any moment and he did not want anyone to see the disfigurement. I had no idea how long he’d worked in this hospital mortuary, but I thought it pretty certain that other staff in the hospital knew of his deformity. In some strange way, perhaps he was hiding it from himself: I had noticed there were no mirrors in his grubby flat, but there were bound to be in other places he visited; in fact, there was a small one in this very room, stuck on a wall at about head level, obviously for morticians to groom themselves before they went about their business. Moker, deliberately it seemed to me, had refrained from glancing into the mirror all the while he was in the office.
It was a relief when he went outside again and carried on with whatever duties he was paid to do – cleaning and sweeping mostly, I’d have said, and not just tending bodies. I s
tayed where I was, sitting in the chair and closing my eyes, ready to jump up should he return. Occasionally I checked the time on the round clock fixed to the wall above the desk and only when the hands approached 10 p.m. and I heard Moker pouring water away into one of the mortuary’s stainless-steel sinks, and then the clatter of the bucket and mop as they were stored away, inside a cupboard, did I guess his shift was nearly up and he was getting ready to leave.
I went back into the long white-tiled morgue and trailed him to the locker room. He shed the green overalls and put the surgical mask into his raincoat pocket. Then he wound the long woollen scarf around his neck and face, and donned the coat and wide-brimmed hat. He was ready to leave and some inner instinct told me he was not immediately returning home.
I was right: he didn’t go back to his basement flat. Instead he drove to a twenty-four-hour underground car park in Bayswater.
We’d been sitting there quite some time, Moker slumped in the driver’s seat, me in the back, an impalpable passenger. I hated being so close to him – I was sure that if I had the sense of smell, his stench would have been unbearable – but there was no other option. I sensed he was up to no good (finely attuned instinct again?) – why else would he sit in the darkness of the car park’s lowest level, studying every person (and there weren’t that many at that time of night) who returned to collect their vehicle.