The Mortician of Cannon Beach

by Kim Holland

George limped over the cracked and buckled street in the dark, his head on swivel, messenger bag clutched to his chest. It had been months since the last assault and robbery, but the limp kept the memory fresh in his mind and he wished to avoid a repeat. The predawn provided better cover for thieves and sadists, but he preferred to arrive at the mortuary before first light. People seemed less apt to bring out their dead in the dark, and George required time to himself before his customers arrived.

He breathed deeply of the cool salty air, the crashing waves creating their usual white noise in the background, lulling his thoughts into the rhythm of contemplation. His bag contained the ingredients for a new essential oil recipe and he was eager to get to work. It had taken months for the Widow Harkness to cultivate enough lavender for his needs and he had paid a steep price for the cuttings. Cannon Beach no longer dealt in currency; theirs was strictly a barter society since the Cataclysm, and the widow had taken her satisfaction in the payment. George less so.

He reached the building he would forever think of as Lucky Strike Lanes and unlocked the heavy padlock on the front door. It was hard to imagine what bandits hoped to gain from breaking into a mortuary, but try they did. Graverobbers of the past had stolen jewelry and coin, both now worthless. Food and medicine were the prizes of the present and what use did the dead have for those?

The creaking door hinges reminded George he needed to replenish his store of rat grease. Walter Smythe at the butcher’s had a mother suffering from the blight. A promise of future services might be enough to secure what he needed, but how to offer the trade when the intended recipient was not yet in the grave had always been the tricky—

A voice from the shadows. “Mr. Undertaker, I need your help.”

George startled but managed not to scream, though it was a close thing. A girl of about twelve emerged from the alley between his establishment and the abandoned arcade. Filthy clothes, hard eyes, and a familiar raw-boned appearance told him she was one of the street children, most likely an orphan of the blight, though she could have been the product of Cannon Beach’s only booming industry—prostitution.

“Mortician.” George peered into the shadows behind her. Was she acting as a cat’s paw for one of the local ruffians?

The girl cleared her throat with a rough rasp and spat, nearly hitting his foot. “Wut?”

“I find the term undertaker to be distasteful. I prefer mortician.”

She rolled her eyes and stepped forward, pulling a small, rusted wagon behind her. The wagon contained George’s greatest dread—the small, wrapped bundle.

Still watching the shadows, George braced for the hidden blow. It wasn’t difficult to make a pile of blankets look like a dead child. “You have my condolences. Who is she to you? Family?”

The girl shuffled her feet and contemplated the wagon’s contests. “Nuh uh. Just a girl from the Hen House I talk to sometimes. She got the blight and couldn’t work no more, so King kicked her out. One of the little ‘uns found her behind the grocer’s, dead as a light bulb.”

King, the town’s whore-monger-in-chief, was not someone George wished to tangle with. “I’m afraid my services are not free, Miss. Take your friend to the junkyard and they will… take care of her for you.”

The girl dropped the wagon handle with a loud clang and shook her fist at him, fire blazing in her eyes. “She ain’t trash to burn at the junkyard, Mr. Mortician! She deserves a proper doin’ up.”

“I can’t eat tragedy or trade good intentions, Miss. Now move along.” He turned his back on the girl.

He heard her shuffling through the street debris and felt a tug at his sleeve. “I don’t have nothing to pay with,” she said, keeping her voice even with obvious effort, “but I can run your errands or carry things. I can even steal if you like. I’m a top thief! What do you need? I’ll get it.”

Upon closer inspection, he realized he’d seen the girl before, stationed outside the Hen House, picking pockets for food ration chits. He decided to ignore that part of her offer. For now.

“Carry things?”

At his raised eyebrow, she cocked her right arm in a bodybuilder’s pose. “I’m stronger than I look.”

“No doubt in my mind, Miss. However, I fear your services are promised elsewhere, and I have no wish to cause a kerfuffle with your… guardian.”

“Pimp’s the word you’re looking for, and King ain’t mine. Not yet.” Her flinty eyes seemed to pin him in place. “Not never if you take me on.”

George was surprised to learn King had not already pressed the child into service. He doubted the delay was due to any moral compunctions—the man was as despicable as he was dangerous. Maybe it had to do with her rather ferrety face. Either way, George needed this inconvenient street girl like he needed more of the Widow Harkness’ attention. That was to say, not at all. He reached for the mortuary door.

“I want to learn, Mr. Mortician!” The girl’s voice burst forth in a torrent. “I want to know how you do it! How you make the bodies look like they’re still breathing, with pink skin and peaceful faces. Before the blight took Momma, she said you work magic in that bowling alley, and I want to see it!”

George had been serving as Cannon Beach’s mortician since the Cataclysm, when the world chose violence and the skies rained invisible poison over their small Oregon town. There hadn’t been time in those early days for him to ply his trade; the bodies had been quarantined and disposed of with haste. But once the deaths slowed, he was able to focus again on the ceremony of life’s ending, to provide some comfort in a comfortless world, and to satisfy his own need for order and closure.

He stared at the girl, now breathing heavily from her outburst. No one in twenty-one years had ever asked him to share his secrets, and he discovered that he very much wished to. After a long pause for thought, which the girl spent shifting impatiently from foot to foot, George made a decision.

“Come inside and bring your friend.” As the words left his mouth, George felt a pang in his middle. His mother would’ve said a goose had walked over his grave. He chose to ignore it. Superstition was for simple folk who believed some god in the clouds held their destiny in the palm of his hand. George made his own luck.

The girl trailed him into the building, pulling the wagon, her wide eyes and parted lips giving her a rather gormless aspect. George found himself warming to the idea of an apprentice and hoped she was smarter than she looked.

In the girl’s defense, the old bowling alley was a sight to see with its colorful—though nonfunctional—glass lighting, a ceiling painted to look like the night sky, and narrow wooden lanes, still intact though their once waxy sheen had long since dulled and cracked in the humid sea air. In the immediate aftermath of the Cataclysm, he’d used the lanes to display the personal belongings taken from the dead to use as a means of identification for next of kin. There had been no time to waste in disposing of the contaminated bodies, but if a weeping mother or brother found a wallet or personal token that confirmed their loss, he’d considered it worth the effort.

A loud sniff brought George back to the present. The girl was walking up and down Lane 3, her nose crinkled like a rabbit’s. “It don’t stink in here; the air smells like flowers and chicory ciggies. Why don’t it stink like dead people?”

“That would be the essential oils I use on the bodies. Also, the preservation methods I apply to the departed halt the deterioration process, for a time. Long enough to lay them to rest properly.”

She ran up the lane and stopped at his side, bouncing on her toes. “I want to know how you do it. Show me, Mr. Mortician!”

George limped to one of his three long worktables, lit one of the aforementioned chicory cigarettes, and extended a hand to the girl. “My name is George Underwood. You may address me as Mr. Underwood. What is your name, Miss?”

“Underwood! Ha! Like undertaker.” The girl grinned, displaying yellowed, incomplete dentition. “My name’s Lydia. You may address me as Lydia.” She stuck her hand out and they shook.

“Very well, Lydia.” George patted a stool and she hopped up with alacrity. “I do not currently have any customers. Would you feel comfortable if I showed you what I do by preparing your friend?”

Lydia bit her lip but nodded. “I want to see.”

George lifted the blanket-wrapped corpse from the wagon and laid it gently on a worktable. From the odor level and lack of rigor mortis, he guessed Lydia’s friend had died less than two days ago. He peeled the blanket back to reveal a tow-headed girl of no more than fourteen, half her once-pretty face a ruin, her skull crushed by a mighty blow. George slipped on a pair of gloves and palpated the back of the girl’s head as one of her sky-blue eyes stared at him. The weapon had been a blunt object of some sort, possibly a large stick or cudgel. She’d been struck multiple times.

King, the proprietor of the Hen House, carried a wooden cricket bat he’d taken from one of the johns who wouldn’t pay up—a trophy of sorts. George had never seen him without it.

“I thought you said she died of the blight?”

“King kicked her out the Hen House ‘cause she got the sores and started hocking up blood and couldn’t turn tricks. But then he got mad she wasn’t making him money no more, so he went and put his anger on her.” Lydia grimaced, the sheen of tears in her eyes. “Did it hurt? Did she feel it?”

It was a childish question and George could see that she already knew the answer, but some things were best left unspoken.

“You want to see what I do, yes?”

Lydia mopped up her tears with a filthy sleeve and took deep breaths until her lower lip stopped trembling. “Yeah. Yes.”

A strong girl, then. George didn’t have much use for the living, especially children, but this one had potential.

He began by undressing the corpse and showing Lydia the removal of the bodily fluids and replacement of the blood with the preservative solution he brewed in his lab. The formaldehyde had run dry a few months into his new practice and he’d needed to invent a replacement. The answer had resided in his books on ancient embalming practices and the great, ever-churning body of salt water that lapped at the shores of Cannon Beach.

After he’d cleaned the blood and filth from the corpse, he turned to the mess of her skull.

“Now I use my needle and thread to close her wounds.” George worried the girl would become emotional again as he stitched closed her friend’s torn tissue and stuffed her sunken eye sockets with cotton, but she watched with interest and a touch of the hungry fascination he knew well. After the makeup application, which George applied with a light touch—the girl had been a beauty and though King had tried, he had not stolen that beauty away completely, just marred it, like an occlusion in a gemstone—he brought out the essential oils.     

Lydia closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose. “Orange. I ate an orange once; it tasted like crabgrass, but that smells like heaven.”

“These days, it’s much easier to grow an orange that smells nice than it is to grow one that tastes good.”

Lydia had far exceeded his expectations in the hours they’d spent together. She’d asked astute questions and had not displayed any squeamishness, despite the victim lying on his table being more important to her than she initially let on.

“Would you care to do the honors?” George asked.

She stepped up without hesitation and applied the oils to her friend’s body as he instructed, her movements careful and reverent. When Lydia was finished, she retreated from the table and allowed George to clothe the girl in a spare dress from his customer inventory. When he was done, he felt another tug at his sleeve.

“Almost forgot. Shelby needs these to see.” Lydia reached into the pocket of her shabby dress and produced a pair of cheap plastic eyeglasses. Though not a complete ruin, the glasses had not survived the attack unscathed. One lens was a spiderweb of cracks and the bridge had snapped in two.

“She didn’t wear them when she turned tricks; said her clients were hardly worth looking at, but when Shelby took her rest, she loved to read. King’s cook taught her. She read to me out loud whenever I asked—all sorts of delicious stories.” The girl’s voice took on a note of naked yearning, of loss. “One about a girl who got picked up by a twister and dropped in a topsy-turvy land, another about a worn-out toy rabbit that came to life. My favorite was about a bossy spider and her pig friend Wilbur. It was sad but true. Shelby said the best stories are true, even if they’re about wizards and talking animals and nonsense.” 

George wondered how a whore had obtained even a cheap pair of eyeglasses. They were a scarce commodity since the Cataclysm when most of the optometrists and all the factories died. He mended the bridge with glue. There was nothing to be done about the cracked lens. He placed the eyeglasses on the corpse’s face, repositioning them until they looked natural, and was awarded with a watery smile from Lydia. He made a mental note to procure an assortment of children’s books.

“She’s perfect now,” the girl breathed. “Looks like she might hop up off that table and read me a story.” Lydia’s eyes fluttered shut and she swayed on her feet. The late afternoon sun had slid its seeking fingers through the boards covering the window to paint the girl’s exhausted face in golden stripes. It was time for her to go.

“That’s about enough for today, Lydia,” George said. “We will lay your friend to rest tomorrow. But I wonder if you’d like one more lesson before you leave?”

She jerked upright like a puppet with its string yanked, eyes popped comically wide. “I ain’t sleepin’!”

“Indeed.” He went to a high, locked cabinet where he kept his most precious—and dangerous—materials and withdrew a small glass vial. The girl watched him, no longer sleepy. He held the vial up to a beam of sunlight.

“This is Amanita phalloides, otherwise known as the death cap mushroom. It can be used to kill nasty pests that one does not wish to confront head-on.”

Lydia stared at the vial, transfixed. “Like rats?”

“Oh, no. You wouldn’t want to use this on anything you plan to eat. It would kill you just as surely as it would kill the pest.” George tapped the vial against his palm. “This would be for bigger prey, the kind you need to take by surprise. Simply slip it into something you know they’ll consume.”

He watched the wheels turn in the girl’s mind and had to hide a smile of satisfaction when he saw understanding click into place.

Lydia bared her teeth. “Would it hurt? Would he feel it?”

George held her fierce gaze with his own. “He would die like a dog, writhing and screaming, begging God for mercy.”

She nodded once and slipped the vial into her pocket. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Mr. Underwood, to do whatever you need doing. And to learn more of your secrets.” Her eyes flicked to her friend’s body, now resting with small hands folded neatly over her small bosom, eyeglasses in their rightful place. “Thanks.”

Lydia slipped out the door and was gone before George could respond. He limped to his workbench and began planning his new apprentice’s next lesson.