Work Text:
The embalming room was cold. It always was. Sixty-one degrees to keep the tissues from decaying without freezing the fingers of the mortician. The cooling system droned above, a white noise so heavy it weighed on you. Aseptic, frigid air whistled through wall vents long past desperate for cleaning, sucked away through the floor.
The two of them stood facing each other, silent. Staring.
He was taller than she would have guessed from the way he presented himself online. Christine didn’t know what she had expected, really—a pervert, a nut, a murderer. All the thoughts had crossed her mind. But she hadn’t quite imagined what he was.
Treat me like one of them.
What do you mean?
I want to know what it’s like.
Please.
It was illegal, what they were doing. What she was allowing.
She flicked her acrylics against each other, hard, the pointed tips pressing fine needles into the pads of her fingers. Click. Click. Click.
I want to know how it feels.
Click.
To be touched.
“Get on the table.” Her voice was rough, and she coughed, shivering in a place she had never shivered in her life.
He gestured towards the long slab of metal in the middle of the room, and she nodded.
Wordlessly, he contorted his long legs onto the table, palming the cold steel as he slid his shoes towards the end and rested his head on the thin elevated block meant for the skull. He stared at the ceiling. Waiting.
In person, he didn’t talk. He had arrived at her door after dark, as they had arranged, and said nothing, a stark difference from the endless messages he had sent her online. The wind and rain pelted against his black jacket and hood, his face covered with a thin plaster mask hidden under a mop of choppy black hair.
The mask seemed silly, given why he had come. Given what she had seen.
Christine pulled on a pair of gloves and tied her apron behind her back. She wouldn’t need her face shield or respirator, because she wouldn’t be using any actual chemicals. But still, she wore the gloves.
Turning to the table, she assessed him. He hadn’t moved. He hardly breathed. She could almost believe he was dead.
“First,” she said, a half-whisper, “the limbs.”
He didn’t nod. He knew the procedure from her videos. This is what he had wanted. What he had asked for. And yet, as she approached, fingers hesitating over the fabric of his shirt, she wondered if she should have made him sign a contract. An NDA. Anything to prove his consent for what was about to happen.
As if the fifty thousand dollar check wasn’t enough.
Fringe had pitched a YouTube spot on their channel to Christine as “promoting her profession” and “gaining new business through interaction” but she had ignored them for months. Funeral directors didn’t usually need to do much to gain new business, as long as their name was known and respected in the community. People died every day, no matter how much social media she engaged in.
But things had changed after her father had died, when Christine, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, had inherited the family business and become the director of her great-grandfather’s funeral home. Gerald Daae had been a regular town figure, a kindly man with a big smile and a bushy grey mustache, always ready to open his arms wide to those in need and grieving, to those who didn’t even know how to start, didn’t even know the difference between a coffin and a casket. Christine had been in mortuary school for most of Gerald’s illness, only stopping by periodically for the holidays, and nobody had gotten to know her further than “You’re all grown up now” and “I remember when you were just a tiny little thing.”
The Daae Brothers Funeral Home was a staple in their rural Michigan town. People were born at St. John’s Episcopal, they lived in the same stretch of townhomes and single-families that their forebears had, and when they died, they were buried by the Daaes. So it had been, and so it was always meant to be, as her grandfather had once been quoted in the church circular. He had been a religious man who celebrated all of the feasts of the Saints, even the ones the nuns at her Sunday school had never heard of.
Christine did not celebrate any of them. People noticed.
So she, the inheritor of three generations of Daae business acumen, found herself chatting on YouTube Live like a regular influencer to promote her business, because it was failing, and because she couldn’t let her father’s legacy die within three years of taking it over.
Despite worrying it would be a flop, another stupid, useless tactic to throw on her pile of failures, she couldn’t argue with the fact that her Instagram had gotten a lot of attention, and even though she had hated the makeup artist in the Fringe studio who had touched up her roots without asking, she had agreed to a whole series of Funeral Director: Ask Me Anythings.
That’s when the messages began.
She was grateful for the gloves. She couldn’t imagine touching him, feeling his warmth through his clothes. With a body, she would have started with sanitizing, with washing the hands and feet, scrubbing the nails, shampooing the hair. There was no reserve with the dead, no shyness as she worked, massaging the fluid through their limbs, arranging their faces in pleasant, everlasting repose. This was different.
“I start with the hands,” she stated, in order to fill the room with something other than their mingled breath.
Her fingers trembled over the frayed edge of his shirt cuff. It was just—it was just skin, and she had done this a million times before, to bodies of all shapes and sizes and colors and ages.
He didn’t make a sound, didn’t say a word, the mask a blank, empty slate.
Was she even sure this man was alive?
The smallest undulation of his throat caught her eye as he swallowed shallowly.
“The hands,” she said again, and grasped his fingers before she could second guess herself.
Cold seeped through her gloves, icy and insidious. Breathing in sharply through her nose, she looked down at the chalky hue of his palm, tinted yellow from where the blood had drained away.
“Can you even feel them?” she whispered, holding his dead, freezing fingers in hers.
“A little.”
She massaged just the tip of one finger, holding his hand in hers and running her thumb gently from nail to knuckle. He passed a low, long breath from his lips.
“How long does it take?” Each bone jutted against her fingers as they traveled across the back of his hand. “For the circulation to return?”
“A while, sometimes.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
His joints were stiff as she worked them up and down, first the distal knuckles, then the proximal phalanges and metacarpals, his wrist bones gently undulating under the pads of her fingers.
“Yes.”
She didn’t stop, and he didn’t ask her to. Eyes trained on his as he stared unblinking at the ceiling, never meeting her gaze, she moved from one hand to the other, before sliding up the underside of his shirt sleeve, soft blue cotton with three white buttons, manipulating the elbow in gentle angles, then using two hands to cup the upper arm and rotate the shoulder in the socket.
“What’s your name?”
The messages had started innocently, as they always did.
Your work is special.
The lives in the Fringe studio had continued fairly frequently for at least a month before the excitement had died off, and she had tried to milk the opportunity for all it was worth, answering messages on Instagram and responding to comments on YouTube as often as she could, trying to garner interest, hoping in her wildest dreams that maybe she could monetize her image if she couldn’t monetize her business.
But the requests from Fringe stopped coming, the company moving on to their newest fad (at-home manicure companies), and Christine had instead been faced with a dwindling follower list as small as her bank account.
A few users had continued to message her sporadically, mostly the same junk she always got—how do I become a funeral director? Can I intern with you? and the typical can you sit on my face? shit she got once in a blue moon.
This one was different.
The person had given no indication of gender, or lack thereof, and despite how often they chatted, here and there asking questions about funeral homes and what it was like to practice on the dead, they had never made the propositions Christine was anticipating— nothing sexual, nothing desperate or romantic. Just—thanks for answering my question. And—Hope to see you online again?
She had never asked for his name. The handle had been SumQuod_Eris in the beginning, although later he would use many different ones across platforms, a new username every day, by the end.
When the Fringe stint had ended, SumQuod_Eris had asked if she was planning to continue her AMAs, and she had said no. Offhandedly, she had told him that she had only done them because the business was struggling, and that they hadn’t helped enough to continue them.
Fringe had contacted her again the next day.
In the silence after her question, Christine eased each of his legs up, moving the knee in a short circular motion, the sole of his shoe pressing deep into her palm. The hands, the wrists—it had been awkward, but she could do it without any sense of intrusion on his person. This—this was—
Desperate to look somewhere else, anywhere else but his long legs, her eyes flitted from her hands to her work table, considering the industrial-size bottle of lotion. After massaging rigor mortis from the limbs, thin, satiny lanolin lotion is applied liberally to the skin to prevent dehydration during the embalming process. She didn’t know how the cream might affect skin that was still living.
“Erik,” he said.
Her fingers splayed over his thigh, hesitating before kneading her knuckles into the tense muscles. Treat me like one of them, he had begged.
“My name.”
She didn’t answer, too focused on what she was doing, where she was touching, the trembling of his fingers against his pantlegs.
“I’m going to skip the lotion,” she said, quickly setting his leg down. “I know you wanted—you wanted to—to have me treat you like—” Christine swallowed. “I don’t know if it’s safe.”
He nodded very slowly, and she turned away, sifting through her sterilized tools, always meticulously organized, for the scalpel handle. By unspoken agreement, there had been no mention of the face. It would come last.
The flat, heavy handle had never seemed sinister to her before, although its raison d’etre was ultimately to hold a blade that would incise tissue. She had a variety of scalpel blades, in all shapes and curves and sizes, sitting innocently in their dispensing boxes, stacked neatly one atop the other. They slipped easily onto the scalpel handle, clicked into place for surety of precise cutting. All of her tools—her trocars, her aspirators, her needles, were laid out in evenly-spaced arrays. Everything in this room always was. There was never a question of why any of it, from the air ducts to the chemicals to the bodies, was here. Her eyes slid to Erik.
What was this man doing here? Did he truly have any idea what she did to bodies on a daily basis? Cut into their arteries, drained their blood, sewed their eyelids shut? Hadn’t he watched her videos, didn’t he know? Was he here for that? Did he want her to attach an 11 blade now and turn it on him? Go for his throat?
Christine shuddered, the handle like lead in her palm. She had chosen this, chosen to live amongst the dead instead of the living, chosen to drain her life savings right along with her father’s bank account into the swirling sink of her despair, too young to have taken over a business in a town that remembered her with blond pigtails instead of black braids, too in debt to start the life in the city she had so desperately wanted before her father had died, too mired in the grief of his sudden loss to make any steps towards her own future. She had chosen to be here, day after day, hauling corpses out of the back of a hearse and loading them onto her table, painting their lips red, folding their hands over their chests, talking to them, learning their stories from their scars and their dimples and their wrinkles. It was easier for her, easier than anything else, easier than making small talk, or faking a smile, or misunderstanding a well-meant comment.
But he didn’t need to be here. Not when he had fifty thousand dollars to toss around like a pile of leaves.
She faced him, looking again at the man on her table, the man who was not dead. What could possibly drive a person to do what he was doing now? If it wasn’t a kink? If it wasn’t a bet? She had chosen this—why had he?
A flash of his face appeared behind her eyelids.
I want to know what it’s like.
Christine tensed. She needed a smoke.
“Erik,” she said, repeating his name.
For the first time since he had come, his eyes met hers, sharp and yellow and direct, more real than any skin she had yet touched, keen and glimmering and deeply alive.
Christine fell back against her sink, her sink where she washed blood from her gloves every day without blinking, her sink that swirled away fluids and chemicals and paints and plaster. The scalpel handle clattered to the floor.
“I—I can’t—” Hands trembling against the edge of the sink, she licked her lips, dry and chapped. “I—”
Her sneakers skidded against the pristine white floors, meticulously sanitized daily from innards and waste and guts and stink, and her breath seized painfully in her chest, the full, impossible vitality of the man before her now incredibly apparent, this whole insane situation fully borne out. There was a living person on her embalming table.
“You can’t possibly want—”
He averted his eyes, the holes of the mask casting them into shadow. “We had an agreement.”
“I—it’s not—”
She swallowed, dipping to pick up the handle, holding it in her palm while she crouched on the floor.
What was she doing?
The air system whirred and whooshed around them, the deafening quiet of her basement embalming room a heavy and deep weight.
In the silence, he whispered.
“Please.”
Breath trembling from her lips, she stared up at him.
“Why?”
He didn’t answer.
“Erik?” she ventured, unsure.
“What is next?” he said. “What is the next step, after the lotion?”
When she made no movement, he sighed.
“Another ten thousand, deposited tomorrow.”
Standing, Christine positioned the tool in her fingers, approaching his shoulder.
“It’s not as easy as you think,” she said, hushed, knowing the anatomical landmark she sought, and yet paralyzed to unveil it. Could she really do this? Even for sixty thousand dollars?
She stared at his neck, at his shoulder, at his chin.
Could she really let her father’s business die when she had a chance to save it?
“What do you need?” he asked, his Adam’s apple quivering in his throat.
“I need—” She closed her eyes, steeling herself. “I need you to—”
Just do it, Christine. This is what he wanted.
Without another word, she grasped the placket of his shirt and tore open the first three buttons, threads hanging loose against the bared skin of his neck. Breathing fast, trembling, she pressed the flat tip of the empty scalpel handle into the hollow above his collar bone.
“The carotid.” His pulse was thrumming violently beneath her fingers. “I would open the skin here—” She pushed in just a little bit, just enough to remind them both that she was in control, sixty thousand or not. “—and formaldehyde would flood your veins.”
Flushed, she dropped the handle onto his chest, the thin, erratic rise and fall of it spurring her on.
“Then—” she thrust up the edge of his shirt, exposing the grey skin of his abdomen. “Then—here—”
He sucked in sharply as her thumbs pressed deep into his navel.
“Then a trocar, into the lungs, the stomach, the small intestines, the bladder. Do you know what a trocar is? Do you know how long it is? How quickly it could kill you?”
“Where?” His voice was hoarse. “Where is the stomach?”
“Here,” she touched him, even though he knew where the stomach was, tracing a line from one curve of his ribs to the other, smooth and cool, his muscles contracting, “and here,” dragging the tip of her acrylic in twisting undulations across his belly as he shuddered beneath her, “to here,” finally pausing low just above his waistband.
He gasped, and she backed away, her own breath uneven, unsure what she had wanted to prove, what had forced her hand so violently when she knew—when she didn’t have to ask, because she had already seen—
The scalpel handle had fallen to the floor again, and she bent to retrieve it, replacing it in the shallow instrument bowl and squaring her shoulders.
“I’m sorry.”
There had never been an apology spoken in this room, not really, not unless it was Christine apologizing to an old woman for talking her ear off, or for giving her red lipstick because her daughter had requested it when Christine had only ever seen the woman in peach. Christine had never lost her cool with a body—that was impossible; that was a breach of her ethical responsibility, that was unthinkable. These bodies, these people, were perfect to her—there could be no grudge, no anger, no regret, no feeling, really. Just quiet, perfect, eternity.
But there was never perfection with the living.
Erik cleared his throat. “What—what is next?”
Sighing, she looked at him. He knew, and so did she. It was the entire reason he had come.
“The face,” she said. “Your face.”
Everything in him changed in an instant. His legs, long, languorous, stiffened; his hands, now pinked and warm, clutched the edges of the table. A vein in his neck throbbed. She had already touched it, already felt it. She wanted to—it was crazy, it was inappropriate, unprofessional—to just, just press her nails into it, to watch it spring up against the pressure, to flatten her whole hand against his neck, hear him fight for air, feel the vibration against her lips as he moaned—
“I am ready.”
Jesus. Christine fisted the fabric of her shirt, struggling to focus her eyes on his mask, to block out the rest of his body, the collar she had ripped open, the buttons hanging by threads.
It had all been for this. All of it—the messages, the bribery, the barrage of burner accounts following hers, one after the other, piling into her DMs faster than she could block them—
Please let me come. I am not dangerous.
I already told you, it’s illegal for anyone without a license to enter the embalming room.
Blocked.
Just once.
Blocked.
Please.
Leave me alone.
Blocked.
Let me come.
I’m going to report you.
Blocked.
I can pay your debts.
And then, when she had asked him why, when she had asked why a fifty thousand dollar check had been mailed to the funeral home, payable to Christine Daae, what kind of insane kink he had and why he couldn’t act it out anywhere else, he had messaged her again.
Unprepared, unsuspecting, she had swiped up on the notification.
The screen flared to life.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Christine’s fingers clenched involuntarily around the phone, her eyes squeezing shut as she thrust the screen away from her. “Jesus hell.” She sucked in a huge breath, her heart pounding so hard in her chest it made her throat close. “Fuck.” Sweat had beaded under her arms and behind her neck.
What had she even seen? Even now, even knowing what it was, even having been trained on car wrecks and cancerous masses and bullet holes and fires, she still could hardly parse it. It had flashed behind her eyelids, again and again, the image fading more and more each time she tried to recall it. What the fuck had she seen? Was it a face?
Gingerly opening one eye, Christine had clicked on her phone again, using her other hand to cover the screen.
Holding her breath, she slowly slid her hand to the top, uncovering the face from the bottom up, first the pale, grey neck, the skin leathery and dry, a corpse not properly cared for. Then the chin, the mangled, deformed edge of bone that sat at an abnormal angle, the cleft much too deep, shadows caving in from the glare of the light. The mouth gave way to a cavern of cartilage, the nose rotted or ravaged away, sitting between eyes set so deep in the skull, the skin stretched taut and sickly into the sockets to form the thinnest blue-veined eyelids. The yellow of the iris though, was shocking. She had wondered then if the cosmetologist had applied colored contacts at the request of the family.
She knew now that there had been no cosmetologist. She knew now that it had not been a corpse.
“How—” she rasped. “How do you want me to—”
“Exactly as you would. With any other face.”
She didn’t know why she was hesitating. She had seen so many dead faces in her life. She had seen this dead face.
But—he wasn’t dead.
“Erik.” Swallowing, she approached him again, bracing her arms on either side of the table, looking directly down at him.
“I know we don’t know each other very well. I don’t—we don’t know each other at all. But this isn’t—you don’t have to do this. Your face—it’s just another face. Whether it was congenital damage, or something else—”
Erik lifted his head slightly, hooking his thumbs under a thin wire behind his ears and offering the edges of the mask to her.
“Take it off, then.”
She stared at him.
“If you’re not afraid.”
Their eyes were locked, his unflinching, unforgiving.
He chuckled, low and bitter. “You’ve already seen, and you can’t even look.”
Determined to prove him wrong, Christine took hold of the mask. It’s just another dead face. This is your job. She lifted it up, taking care not to look away, not to let him see her flinch.
“You see,” she breathed. “Just a face.”
It watched her. He watched her. Just a face, Christine. Objectively, she had seen worse. Much worse. She had been a mortician for three years, and she had already seen some of the most catastrophic devastation. Skin melted clean off from housefires. Tumors rotting away the bone and muscle.
But none of them had been alive, none of them had the animation of breath and soul. None of them watched her.
Turning quickly to her worktable, Christine uncovered the bowl and tray she had prepared in advance of this meeting, based on the picture he had sent her.
“Will it hurt?” she asked, unwrapping the block of plastalina in the bowl. “Will the skin hurt if I apply product to it?”
“No.”
Warming up the clay between her palms, she re-focused on his face, clinical now. Detached.
When assessing the picture in her DMs, she had concentrated mostly on the nose, sketching out how she would fill that hole, shaping several hollow noses out of plaster of Paris and leaving them to dry on the tray until he arrived. But there was so much more to even out first, the bones that jutted, the caved indents, before she could even begin to apply wax or makeup.
“This may leave a stain behind on your skin,” she said, stretching out the plastalina to fit against his cheek and create the smooth, firm line of the zygomatic arch.
“I don’t expect anyone will ever see it,” he said, and she paused, looking at him, holding her breath until she saw just the edges of his lips curl up.
Smiling slightly in return, she pressed the plastalina mold into his skin, curving it with her fingers and working at it with the scraper until he had two prominent cheek bones, stark in their beige coloring against the yellow and gray hues of his face. Then, she drew a line with a wax pencil from the middle of his bottom eyelid to the edges of his lips, gently brushing his mouth with her fingertips and pretending she did not hear him breathe in or see him close his eyes.
The inner corners of the eyes had to match up with the wings of the nose in order to create some kind of symmetry, but since he had no nose, she was using the lips and eyelids as her landmarks.
She gestured to her tray of noses, preparation that had seemed smart and practical at the time and now felt very presumptuous.
“Would you like to choose a nose?”
The words felt absurd, even to her.
“You choose,” he said, hardly looking at her offerings. “You have far more experience with noses than I do.”
Swallowing an unexpected snort, she dared to match his tone.
“Maybe, a Roman nose?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
Christine bit her lip, an unexpectedly light feeling building in her chest.
“No, I promise I am not.”
Now that it was all revealed, now that all the cards were laid out, she was in her element, blinking eyes or not. She knew how to fix dead things.
Selecting a plaster nose from the tray, she filed it to shape, sculpting the bridge as she assessed his features.
“I hope this won’t obstruct your breathing.” She applied the nose to his open nasal cavity, stabilizing it with plastalina at the sides and between his eyebrows.
“It probably will, a little bit.”
“How do you breathe normally?” Christine turned to prep the mortuary wax.
“Poorly.”
“Your voice is beautiful, though,” she said, somewhat absentmindedly, scooping the mortuary wax out of the tub with her fingers. “Even without the nose.”
He paused, long enough for her to look up at him, the wax molding into her fingertips.
“Thank you.”
She stood, staring at him, at the jarring dissonance of the clay and plaster attempting to create a recognizable face, and the underlying ruin that was his own.
“Erik,” she said softly, “do you want to apply it? The wax?”
Helping him to sit, she pressed the ball of warmed wax into his palm, and guided his hands across his face as he laid the wax down atop her plastalina, smoothing out the edges and ridges of his skin. With each pass of wax her fingers sunk more deeply into the spaces between his, his skin now warm where it had been cold, fluid and alive where it had been stiff and dry. She saw him watching her, his eyes following every movement of her face, every blink of her eyelids.
“That’s right,” she said. “Just like that.”
She leaned forward to dip the wax behind the curve of his jaw, and he turned his head just slightly, his breath against her ear, blowing softly at one of her black curls.
“Look at me,” he whispered.
Her eyelids fluttered closed for an instant, feeling him breathe against her, and then she pulled back and met him face to face, her nose just brushing the tip of his plaster one.
“You’re looking at me.”
“You asked me to.”
He gazed at her steadily, his eyes yellow and glowing. “No one looks at me.”
“It’s just a face,” she said, glancing ever so slightly down at his lips. “Everyone has one.”
She felt his fingers trembling against her neck, the skin rough and cool and calloused, sliding beneath her ear and into the blonde roots of her hair.
Their breath mingled together, Erik cradling the back of her head against his palm.
“You’re beautiful.” He ran his fingers through her hair. “Christine.”
The sound of her name jolted her back to reality, and she drew back sharply, dropping the remainder of her wax as she did.
“I’m sorry—” she fumbled with her shirt, pulling it down and flattening it against her hips, dusting off the front and looking anywhere but him. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Here.” Erik held out the wax, and she took it from him, blushing and turning away. His fingers had left deep imprints in her pot of wax, irrefutable evidence that he was real, that he had been here tonight, that his face and his body were truly those of a living man, the first man who would ever leave her embalming room alive. A man who had no other body but his own. No other face but his own.
She heard him breathe out slowly, the seconds ticking past her, until he gradually lay back down against the table, joint by joint.
“What is next?” His voice had lost its depth.
“Makeup.” She busied herself mixing colors against the inside of her wrist, stopping suddenly and staring with the tip of the brush against her skin, wondering when she had shed her gloves. “Makeup,” she said again, shaking her head and then picking up product with her stipple sponge, “and then we’re done.”
“Right,” Erik said as she neared, hovering the sponge over his waxen cheeks. He had returned to staring at the ceiling, arms at his sides. “Then we’re done.”
Swallowing hard, Christine layered the thick, oily makeup over the wax, long lines in some places and short dabs in others, adding pinks and reds and beiges, blending down towards his neck. The hardest part was the periorbital rim—that’s all it was, just a piece of anatomy, just a rounding of bone and fascia and skin—because of those eyes, because they were watching her, because spreading the makeup gently under the eyebrow meant his eyelashes fluttered over her knuckles.
Finally, after painting the palest red onto his mouth, two simple swipes across and up, she set down her brush, stepped back, and inspected. The way she would inspect any of her bodies. Each adjustment was slight, but necessary. Crossing the hands over the chest, arranging the feet. Smoothing the creases in the pantlegs and buttoning up the shirt. Combing the hair (it was clearly a wig, but she did not comment). Setting the lips together, nudging his chin up until his bottom lip met the top. Last, his eyes, gently setting her fingertips against his eyelids until they closed, her hands falling away from his face like a veil. “There,” she whispered. He was still, holding all of his limbs precisely as she had placed them, breath only barely parting his lips.
He was a perfect corpse. Beautiful in repose, high, defined cheekbones with preternatural coloring, exactly beige where a person should only be beige, flawlessly rouged to a sun-kissed flush, silent in the peace of death.
If only they could remain so.
“You are finished,” Christine said, clearing her throat. She turned away to clear her supplies and stack them back on the shelves. Behind her, she heard him shifting off the table.
His well-painted face appeared behind her in the glass of the cabinets. He stood a head taller than her, staring at his reflection, his fingertips coming to his cheeks in disbelief.
“I—I am—” He gaped. “This is my face?”
Christine didn’t answer, swallowing against a sudden lump in her throat as she watched him. He pressed gently on the wax, only making the vaguest prints, skirting over the nose and pivoting to see it in profile.
“I—I could have been—”
“Erik—” She moved towards him.
“Nevermind.”
He turned abruptly away from the mirrored glass, gathering his coat and pulling the hood over his head, holding his mask lightly in his fingers, his thumbs running over the hollow plaster cheeks.
After a moment, he pinched the mask between his fingers and dropped his hands to his sides. Inclining his head towards her over his shoulder he said, “Thank you for everything. I’ll send the extra money tomorrow.”
Helplessly she watched him leave, heard the heavy door of the embalming room swing closed before she could speak, before she could form a syllable, before she even knew what she wanted to say.
Don’t pay me, she thought, as she locked up and turned off the lights, heading back up the stairs, drained and empty. How could she accept money for this? When he had first contacted her, the money had been the only thing that mattered. He was a crazy person, and she was a struggling business owner on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. Even when it had become clear that the decaying face he had sent to her DMs was his own, she hadn’t comprehended what he was really asking, what this meeting would really be.
Shrugging on her warmest cardigan, Christine stared out the window at the howling rain, curling her fingers into the sill.
She had taken care of the dead all her life. It was in her blood. It was in her name. But she had never really—had she ever taken care of something living? Someone alive?
I—I could have been—
Christine bolted out of her office and down the steps, slamming open the door and charging out into the rain.
“Erik?” she shouted into the misty darkness. “Erik!”
Under a street lamp she saw him, standing with his mask in hand, face tilted up into the light and into the driving rain, makeup sliding off the wax in oily clumps.
“Erik?”
He didn’t look at her, even when her shadow joined his on the pavement.
She took his mask, easing it into her pocket, and slid his hood over the back of his head. Her hands slick with water, her cardigan and shirt soaked through, she cradled his chin in her hands.
“Wait,” she said.
In the dim light of her office, she sat him in her chair, towels thrown in the dryer just long enough to be warmed through, smelling of fresh linen and spring. Then she kneeled before him, his eyes trained on hers, and began to remove, layer by layer, the makeup, the wax, the plaster.