Chapter 1: Cold Storage

Midnight. The drawer was knocking from the inside.

Four thuds against steel. A pause. Four more. The bolt on the drawer’s edge had been painted over enough times that it no longer sat flush, and every knock shifted it a little wider, until the catch let go and the drawer ran out of the wall on its rails.

The man inside came with it. He hit the floor shoulder first, then cheek, and stayed there, breathing into the terrazzo.

Cold arrived before anything else did. The gown he had on was striped blue and white and about as thick as a bedsheet, and the drawer had been kept at a temperature meant for people who were already finished. It took him thirty seconds to find the strength to lift his head, and when he opened his eyes he opened one.

Terrazzo, cracked into long gray veins, gone the color of old teeth. Tile walls that had started white and ended up yellow, rust bleeding out of every fitting, black in the corners where damp had been collecting for years. The air tasted like basement and mold. Nothing in the room moved but him.

Two feet away, a card lay face down on the floor.

He crawled for it, got his fingers around the edge, and turned it over. Then he stayed down on the tile a while, thumb working along the laminate, over the lettering pressed into it, before he got an elbow under himself far enough to hold it up toward the small green light at the far end of the room.

A state ID. The photograph showed a young man with short black hair and an expression like he was trying to kill whoever was holding the camera. KESSLER, ASH. Date of birth: L999.

He read it against the plastic band on his right wrist. Same name on both, same date under it. He slid the card into the pocket of his gown and decided he was Ash Kessler, since nothing else in the room was offering an opinion.

What came before, he couldn’t reach. He lay on the floor and went looking for it, and what he found was the inside of his own skull, spinning, and a wash of nausea that made him stop looking. No room. No year. No face. He stayed down there with that until it passed.

He touched his face to check whether he’d landed on it, and his fingers found gauze.

Tape above the eyebrow, tape below the cheekbone, a pad sitting over his left eye. He pressed on the pad. It gave. Behind it was the bony rim of the socket, and inside the socket there was nothing his fingertip could catch on.

He pressed again, flatter this time — along the top, along the bottom, down into the deepest part of it.

Nothing.

His hand stayed where it was for a while. Ten seconds, maybe more, while the cold worked its way through the gown into his back and the open drawer gaped above him.

Then he took the hand away and went down his body.

Ribs, one at a time, in order. Gut. Hips. Spine, as far as he could reach. Legs, knees, both ankles, ten toes. He rolled onto his side and checked the back of his head with the flat of his hand, then his neck, then his shoulders. Nothing else hurt, and by feel nothing else had been opened up.

He still had his kidneys.

So he hadn’t fallen. He hadn’t been left somewhere to freeze by accident. As far as he could work it, somebody had put him in that drawer, and somebody had taken his eye out before they did, and the rest of it had a word attached to it. He turned the thought over once and set it down. The cold was doing more damage to him right now than any conclusion was going to.

He needed to stand up.

He got a hand on the edge of the table in the middle of the room and pulled.

The table moved.

He looked at it properly for the first time. A gurney — four wheels, nothing bolted, nothing fixed. While he’d been hauling himself up on it, the thing beneath the sheet had shifted and settled, and the sheet had slipped off one long arm.

He let go and stepped back.

Whoever was under it had been big. Big enough that the belly lifted the sheet into a ridge higher than the side rails. Big enough that the arm hanging off the edge ended in a hand the size of a dinner plate. The skin below the sheet’s hem had gone gray-yellow and shone a little, like bread dough nobody had punched down.

Ash swallowed. His heel touched the drawer behind him, and the rails creaked — rusted metal, loose in its fittings.

He turned fast. A full wall of drawers, some shut, some ajar, two or three standing open onto empty dark. Nothing in them, nobody behind him.

The room had one door — iron, directly across from the gurney — and past it was black. The temperature in here would put him on the floor again inside twenty minutes, and he didn’t have twenty minutes. He breathed into his hands until he could feel his fingers, rubbed them together, then crossed to the door and put his eye to the gap. No sound. No movement. He watched the dark a while longer, then pushed the door open and went through.

The corridor ran dark both ways with one small green light burning at the far end of it.

He got ten steps along the wall before something behind him shifted — metal again, the same loose note the drawer rails had made. He stopped, put his back flat to the tile, and listened. Nothing came. He counted to twenty anyway, then kept moving.

The green light was an exit sign over a fire map, glassed in and printed in four colors, the corners warped with damp.

COLDWATER COUNTY HOSPITAL — FLOOR PLAN.

Ash found the red dot marked YOU ARE HERE. It put him in the basement. Three ways out of it, according to the drawing. He went and checked two of them himself: a vehicle ramp, chained and padlocked from the outside, and a body-delivery ramp at the back of the building, locked the same way, with a smear of something dark on the concrete that he stepped around without looking at closely.

That left the elevator at the end of the corridor, its call plate lit.

Then the ceiling above him took a step.

The sound came down through the concrete — one foot, then the other, slow and heavy — and the light fixture over his head shivered on its mount. Somebody was up there, and whoever it was weighed enough that the floor carried them. A building like this moved sound around; Ash’s own footsteps didn’t do that.

He hit the call button.

The car was already parked on his level, so the doors ground apart right away and the overhead light flickered twice before it settled. The cabin smelled of disinfectant and old machinery. Narrow, but deep — long enough to take a gurney with a patient on it — and there were four buttons, each one worn down to bare metal along the edge.

B1: morgue. 1: billing and registration. 2: exam rooms and surgery. 3: patient wards.

Whoever was up there was on one. Two sat a single floor under them, close enough that any staircase would beat him to it. Three gave him the building to work with, and a building this old had drainpipes bolted down the outside of it.

He pressed three.

The car climbed. The air warmed a degree or two somewhere between one and two. Then the bell rang, and the red panel lit: 3.

The doors opened onto a corridor.

Ward doors ran down both sides of it, most of them shut. The ceiling fixtures were old enough that dust and dead moths had settled inside the covers, so the light came out dim and uneven, flickering wherever the tubes had started to go. Something was in the air — blood, faint and old, sitting under a smell of hay that had soured in the damp. Fermented hay, in a hospital. He slowed down for it.

The storeroom nearest the elevator had a door that hadn’t been locked. He eased it open and went in.

No windows. He learned that by turning in a full circle twice. Cardboard boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling and more of them ran along the wall, the top row taller than his head. Dust lay thick on the upper boxes, so this wasn’t a room anyone came into. The hay smell was stronger in here, and so was whatever sat underneath it.

He lifted the lid on the box nearest his feet. Glass bottles in racks, sealed, new labels. Rubbing alcohol, by the case.

The next box along had been scored open and left that way, and he registered it only from the corner of his eye as he turned — a tear in the cardboard, and inside the tear, eyes.

He stopped.

He made himself stand still and look at it properly. The box carried a red diamond and one word, FRAGILE. Inside was a cheap anatomy skeleton, the kind bought by the case — ribs strung on wire, fingers molded in a single piece. Somebody had stacked it badly, or the box had taken a hit from the side, because one skull had worked its way out through the tear and sat in the gap facing the room. Paler than real bone. The empty sockets looked at him, and he looked back, and neither of them had anything to say about it.

Above all of it, up on the topmost box past the reach of the shelves, somebody had stood a goat’s skull.

The horns had been polished until they threw back the corridor light — two long curves, ridged like rope. It wasn’t real; he could see the seams at the back where a reproduction fits its pieces together. The sockets had been fitted with glass eyes. Brown. Wet-looking. And painted with rectangular pupils, the way a goat’s eyes are, so that whichever way he moved, they were pointed at the doorway he was standing in.

He knew where a thing like that went. A study, in a house with money in it. It did not go in the storeroom of a county hospital that had stopped replacing its light bulbs.

The eyes stayed on the doorway. Ash backed out of the storeroom and went to find another door.