Martyr

         For more than forty years, Thomas had taken charge of the city’s dead; signing for them, tagging them, necropsying them, and then putting them on ice until they were collected and disposed of by family or friends. In that time, he had seen bodies in nearly every imaginable stage of dismemberment and decay. Love crimes, hate crimes, accidents, murders, suicides, children killed by animals- or by parents who were less than animals, elderly people who had died alone and not been discovered until the stench of death had become an inconvenience to the neighbors: he had seen them all. The dead had ceased to have any effect on him. So he believed, and had believed, for at least half of those forty years.

         Thomas was sixty-one years old. He had taken a part time job as a file clerk in the city morgue when he was nineteen. As an adolescent, he had been rather morbidly inclined- devouring with gusto publications like Weird Tales, and delighting in the possibility that the world might truly contain such things as monsters, ghosts, aliens, and other fantastic creatures. Of course, a somewhat morbid streak is rather common amongst many teenagers, yet he had been even more so than most, and the job had not only paid well, it had seemed cool. His friends, his little circle of peers chosen mostly by similarity of taste and opinion, had agreed, and in some cases had been envious of him.

         He had been neither a proponent nor a protestor to the war. His name had not been selected in the draft (though if it had, he would not have dodged), and he had not become a hippie (though some of his friends were). He simply did not have an interest in politics. He had worked his way through medical school, graduated, and eventually became a deputy coroner and medical examiner. Since his first being hired, there had not been a time in his life that he had not been employed in some fashion at the morgue.

         Thomas was a long way from a teenager now, and he no longer used the word cool to describe anything besides temperature. His morbid tendencies had developed from idle fascination to a cultured interest. He knew that the only real monsters in the world were human beings, and that they were far more vicious than the creatures of fable and superstition. He no longer considered his job cool, though he still enjoyed it, and he was good at it.

         He had never married, and his friends often told him now that he was at times very cold and impersonal, detached even.
         That was a necessary part of his job, he told them. To work almost exclusively with the dead, one needed to be detached. And the job itself was also necessary. Forensic evidence- molecular clues that he had discovered- had actually helped to stop several killers from claiming further victims. He could not have done that were he emotionally invested in each death that he encountered. Besides, having seen emotions such as anger and despair in others, he did not believe he was missing much by subduing them within himself.

         At times though, he wondered. He wondered whether his stoic observations in his job had perhaps influenced his personal life negatively. More and more as the years had slipped by, he had become aware of his own feelings of isolation, and of loneliness. He was not unhappy certainly, though neither was he particularly joyful. His life lacked… excitement… it lacked enthusiasm.

         He remembered when he had first taken the job of file clerk. It had not brought him into contact with the actual corpses, yet still it had been an interesting (and something he had never admitted to any of his friends, a sometimes spooky) place to work. It had fueled his daydreams and his secret fears of unknown evils that stalked the night. Despite the unarguable tragedy of death, the world then had seemed more colorful- more magical.
         Now, the bodies brought to him were merely numbers.

         She was different.
         After the officer that had wheeled her in tore off the carbons of the documents that Thomas had signed in three places, collected his clipboard, and left the sterile room, Thomas began pulling down the zipper of the bag that concealed her, and abruptly stopped as her face was revealed.

         She had been eighteen years old, he guessed at a glance, possibly younger. Long blond hair, thick and full, lay in shiny tangles around her throat, and piercing blue eyes that had undoubtedly once reflected such radiance as to inspire poetry, were now as glazed and depthless as a pair of marbles. Still, even in death, she was without competition the most beautiful person that he had ever seen.

         Thomas laid his hands flat on the gurney and examined the features of her face more thoroughly. She had all of the markings of classical beauty: Long golden eyelashes, and neatly trimmed golden eyebrows; High cheekbones and a subdued nose, offset by rich full lips. Even the pallor of death had failed to rob her of her exquisiteness. On the contrary, her cold white skin, quite nearly the color of bone, actually made her features more attention gathering than had they been a warmer shade of pink. If Helen’s visage had been that for which to launch a thousand ships, then this girl would surely have launched a million. She was, in the most simple of words, perfect.

         Her death could be called nothing less than a tragic waste; and Thomas was surprised by the fierceness of a sudden pang within his heart at the loss of this woman from the world. He had not thought himself able to feel much beyond his customary indifference to the bodies that were brought to him- perhaps an occasional sigh, or a shake of the head, for one that had died especially young, or especially violently. Yet here he was, actually and earnestly mournful, for a girl that he did not even know. Nor were his feelings lustful or lewd: the concept of necrophilia repulsed him, and even had she been alive, Thomas did not expect that she would have inspired something so simple as sexual desire. If such a thing was possible, she seemed too beautiful for such thoughts- angelic before human. Looking upon her corpse was like seeing a forest burned down.

         Taking hold of the zipper, Thomas dragged it down several more inches, and then stopped again as the undeniable cause of death was revealed.
         He felt bile rising in his throat.

         Protruding up from between breasts that had probably once matched her face in perfection was a crude wooden stake. A stake. As though she were a vampire in some cheap Hollywood movie, some psycho had taken her life. Such beauty, such a marvel of nature, snuffed out in an instant by a lunatic- most likely by a scorned would-be lover, utterly unworthy, with nothing more than a sharpened stick. Surprised once more by his sudden emotional involvement, Thomas barely made it to the washroom before vomiting.

         Afterwards, he knelt there on the cold yellow tiles for a time, trembling slightly, his fingers tightly gripping the edge of the toilet, shocked at the horrors of the world, and shocked that he was still affected by them.

         At length he regained himself, stood and washed his hands, rinsed his face, and then returned to the larger room. Unable to cope with the tragedy of the young girl just yet, he resealed the bag that held her body, and he busied himself with other duties; it was a rare instance in which he was grateful for the unending paperwork that his job required.

         It was nearly an hour later when the door to the morgue opened and a man silently entered the room. Thomas looked up from his desk at the sound of the door clicking closed, and took the stranger in.

         Thomas was over six feet tall, yet this man was taller still. He guessed him to be 6’5”, possibly 6’6”. He was very lean, although not unhealthily so. He wore a dark and crisply pressed suit of fine silk, and even Thomas, who knew precisely nothing about fashion, thought he would recognize the name of the designer. In one hand, he carried a walking stick of polished wood that was a rich cherry brown in color- probably mahogany. It was adorned at top with a simple gold ball. His hair was pure white: not gray, but true white. It was the color of fresh fallen snow, and drew attention away from the lesser pallor of his skin. It was combed neatly back, close against his head, and as he glanced at the wall of refrigerated drawers, Thomas noticed it had been tied with a velvet ribbon into a ponytail that hung long and pin-straight down his back.

         His face gave no sign of his age. His features were hard and angular, and entirely unmarked by even the smallest wrinkle or blemish; yet he could have been anywhere from twenty to sixty. Rather, it was something else about him that gave him the appearance of youth- the manner in which he carried himself: firm and solid. Turning back from the wall, he stared at Thomas without speaking.

         Thomas met his eyes, and saw in them such dread, that he thought for a moment his heart would burst. They were gray in color, a composite of a thousand silver flecks, and no doubt ordinarily reflected any surrounding colors spectacularly. Granted, the cold and sterile rooms of the morgue contained no colors to reflect, but Thomas suspected that even had the man now been at a carnival, his eyes would have now absorbed and reflected nothing.

         The stranger’s eyes seemed somehow ancient: as though they had witnessed countless sorrows, and knew they would yet witness countless more. It was a sharp contrast to his seemingly young demeanor. They held only the barest light of hope, overshadowed by the knowledge of despair. His eyes knew that whom he sought would be found here amongst the dead, and yet still clung to a shred of desperation that only a final glimpse of proof would dispel.

         Wordlessly, Thomas stood and approached the gurney where the young girl who had come in earlier still lay. The stranger followed him.
         Unable to bear her death himself, he who had not even known her, Thomas had resealed the bag that contained her lifeless body. Now he opened it again.

         The stranger stared at her for several moments in silence, then bent forward and kissed her gently, first on the forehead, and then on the lips. He spared a glance at the stake that had released her from the heartlessness of this world, and then he rose up again, and his eyes were no longer cast down.

         Thomas looked at him, expecting to see tears; knowing he would see anguish and defeat, the complete hold of despair. Thomas had seen eyes filled with sorrow on more occasions than he could remember. He had seen crashed hopes and shattered loves- he had seen the effect of irretrievable loss.

         But this man’s eyes were different.
         Thomas had seen the eyes of hundreds upon hundreds of bodies. And now he was seeing one more. The stranger’s eyes now matched the girl’s: glossy, and flat. As though bearing witness to the tragedy of her death had somehow proven to be contagious. There was no other way to express it. His eyes were the eyes of the dead.

         Then, like a sudden flare, a spark of life returned to them. Yet it was a spark that held nothing of the joys of life: of laughter, hope, or happiness. Rather, it whispered darkly of anger and ferocity, and of a pain that would soon be shared. A refusal to die even in death; a lust for life fueled solely by the hope of hollow vengeance. It was the joy of intended violence, and the laughter of madness.

         The stranger turned and walked silently from the morgue, leaving Thomas to again seal the bag, hiding the beautiful corpse. He did so, and after a moment’s pause, began wheeling the gurney over to the operating table. He became aware that he was smiling.

         Thomas was old. He questioned some of the decisions he had made in life, and grappled with occasional regret, as everyone must. He had witnessed some of the many horrors of life, and he had lost faith in both man and God. He had all but abandoned emotion, and chosen against family. Still, he was alive. And the world was a magical place, in which the existence of angels and monsters was distinctly possible. The world was… cool.

         He returned to his work, knowing that soon, certainly before he would see that man again, he would be meeting the killers of the girl.
         They would not have much blood left in them, he expected.