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THE AUTOPSY

Michael Shea

Dr. Winters stepped out of the tiny Greyhound station and into the midnight street that smelled of pines. The

station’s window showed the only light, save for a luminous clockface several doors down and a little neon beer logo

two blocks farther on. He could hear a river. It ran deep in a gorge west of town, but the town was only a few streets

wide and a mile or so long, and the current’s blurred roar was distinct, like the noise of a ghost river running between

the banks of dark shop windows. When he had walked a short distance, Dr. Winters set his suitcase down, pocketed

his hands, and looked at the stars – thick as cobblestones in the black gulf.

“A mountain hamlet – a mining town,” he said. “Stars. No moon. We are in Bailey.”

He was talking to his cancer. It was in his stomach. Since learning of it, he had developed this habit of wry

communication with it. He meant to show courtesy to this uninvited guest, Death. It would not find him churlish, for

that would make its victory absolute. Except, of course, that its victory would be absolute, with or without his ironies.

He picked up his suitcase and walked on. The starlight made faint mirrors of the windows’ blackness and showed

him the man who passed: lizard-lean, white-haired (at fifty-seven), a man travelling on death’s business, carrying his

own death in him, and even bearing death’s wardrobe in his suitcase. For this was filled – aside from his medical kit

and some scant necessities – with mortuary bags. The sheriff had told him on the phone of the improvisations that

presently enveloped the corpses, and so the doctor had packed these, laying them in his case with bitter amusement,

checking the last one’s breadth against his chest before the mirror, as a woman will gauge a dress before donning it,

and telling his cancer:

“Oh, yes, that’s plenty room enough for both of us!”

The case was heavy, and he stopped frequently to rest and scan the sky. What a night’s work to do, probing

pungent, soulless filth, eyes earthward, beneath such a ceiling of stars! It had taken five days to dig the ten men out.

The autumnal equinox had passed, but the weather here had been uniformly hot. And warmer still, no doubt, so deep

in the earth.

He entered the courthouse by a side door. His heels knocked on the linoleum corridor. A door at the end of it, on

which was lettered NATE CRAVEN, COUNTY SHERIFF, opened well before he reached it, and his friend stepped out

to meet him.

“Dammit, Carl, you’re still so thin they could use you for a whip. Gimme that. You’re in too good a shape already.

You don’t need the exercise.”

The case hung weightless from the sheriff’s hand, imparting no tilt at all to his bull shoulders. Despite his implied

self-derogation, he was only moderately paunched for a man his age and size. He had a rough-hewn face, and the bulk

of brow, nose, and jaw made his greenish eyes look small until one engaged them and felt the snap and penetration of

their intelligence. In the office he half filled two cups from a coffee urn and topped off both with bourbon from a bottle

in his desk. When they had finished these, they had finished trading news of mutual friends. The sheriff mixed

another round and sipped from his, in a silence clearly prefatory to the work at hand.

“They talk about rough justice,” he said. “I’ve sure seen it now. One of those … patients of yours that you’ll be

working on? He was a killer. Christ, ‘killer’ doesn’t half say it. A killer’s the least of what he was. The blast killing

him , that was the justice part. Those other nine, they were the rough. And it just galls the hell out of me, Carl! If that

kiss-ass boss of yours has his way, the rough won’t even stop with their being dead! There won’t even be any

compensation for their survivors! Tell me – has he broke his back yet? I mean, touching his toes for Fordham

Mutual?”

“You refer, I take it, to the estimable Coroner Waddleton of Fordham County.” Dr. Winters paused to sip his drink.

With a delicate flaring of his nostrils he communicated all the disgust, contempt, and amusement he had felt in his four

years as pathologist in Waddleton’s office. The sheriff laughed.

“Clear pictures seldom emerge from anything the coroner says,” the doctor continued. “He took your name in

vain. Vigorously and repeatedly. These expressions formed his opening remarks. He then developed the theme of our

office’s responsibility to the letter of the law, and of the workmen’s compensation law in particular. Death benefits

accrue only to the dependants of decedents whose deaths arise out of the course of their employment, not merely in

the course of it. Victims of a maniacal assault, though they die on the job, are by no means necessarily compensable

under the law. We then contemplated the tragic injustice of an insurance company – any insurance company – having

to pay benefits to unentitled persons, solely through the laxity and incompetence of investigating officers. Your name

came up again, and Coroner Waddleton subjected it to further abuse. Fordham Mutual, campaign contributor or not,

is certainly a major insurance company and is therefore entitled to the same fair treatment that all such companies

deserve.”

Craven uttered a bark of wrathful mirth and spat expertly into his wastebasket. “Ah, the impartial public servant!

What’s seven widows and sixteen dependant children, next to Fordham Mutual?” He drained his cup and sighed. “I’ll

tell you what, Carl. We’ve been five days digging those men out and the last two days sifting half that mountain for

explosive traces, with those insurance investigators hanging on our elbows, and the most they could say was that

there was ‘strong presumptive evidence’ of a bomb. Well, I don’t budge for that because I don’t have to. Waddleton

can shove his ‘extraordinary circumstances.’ If you don’t find anything in those bodies, then that’s all the autopsy

there is to it, and they get buried right here where their families want ‘em.”

The doctor was smiling at his friend. He finished his cup and spoke with his previous wry detachment, as if the

sheriff had not interrupted his narrative.

“The honourable coroner then spoke with remarkable volubility on the subject of Autopsy Consent forms and the

malicious subversion of private citizens by vested officers of the law. He had, as it happened, a sheaf of such forms

on his desk, all signed, all with a rider clause typed in above the signatures. A cogent paragraph. It had, among its

other qualities, the property of turning the coroner’s face purple when he read it aloud. He read it aloud to me three

times. It appeared that the survivors’ consent was contingent on two conditions: that the autopsy be performed in

locum mortis , that is to say in Bailey, and that only if the coroner’s pathologist found concrete evidence of homicide

should the decedents be subject either to removal from Bailey or to further necropsy. It was well written. I remember

wondering who wrote it.”

The sheriff nodded musingly. He took Dr. Winters’s empty cup, set it by his own, filled both two-thirds with

bourbon, and added a splash of coffee to the doctor’s. The two friends exchanged a level stare, rather like poker

players in the clinch. The sheriff regarded his cup, sipped from it.

“ In locum mortis. What-all does that mean exactly?”

“In the place of death.”

“Oh. Freshen that up for you?”

“I’ve just started it, thank you.”

Both men laughed, paused, and laughed again, some might have said immoderately.

“He all but told me that I had to find something to compel a second autopsy,” the doctor said at length. “He would

have sold his soul – or taken out a second mortgage on it – for a mobile X-ray unit. He’s right, of course. If those

bodies have trapped any bomb fragments, that would be the surest and quickest way of finding them. It still amazes

me your Dr. Parsons could let his X-ray go unfixed for so long.”

“He sets bones, stitches wounds, writes prescriptions, and sends anything tricky down the mountain. Just barely

manages that. Drunks don’t get much done.”

“He’s gotten that bad?”

“He hangs on and no more. Waddleton was right there, not deputising him pathologist. I doubt he could find a

cannonball in a dead rat. I wouldn’t say it where it could hurt him, as long as he’s still managing, but everyone here

knows it. His patients sort of look after him half the time. But Waddleton would have sent you, no matter who was

here. Nothing but his best for party contributors like Fordham Mutual.”

The doctor looked at his hands and shrugged. “So. There’s a killer in the batch. Was there a bomb?”

Slowly the sheriff planted his elbows on the desk and pressed his hands against his temples, as if the question had

raised a turbulence of memories. For the first time the doctor – half hearkening throughout to the never-quite-muted

stirrings of the death within him – saw his friend’s exhaustion: the tremor of hand, the bruised look under the eyes.

“When I’ve told you what we have, I guess you’ll end up assuming what I do about it. But I think assuming is as

far as any of us will get with this one. It’s one of those nightmare specials, Carl. The ones no one ever does get to the

bottom of.

“All right, then. About two months ago, we had a man disappear – Ronald Hanley. Mine worker, rock-steady,

family man. He didn’t come home one night, and we never found a trace of him. OK, that happens sometimes. About

a week later, the lady that ran the laundromat, Sharon Starker, she disappeared, no trace. We got edgy then. I made an

announcement on the local radio about a possible weirdo at large, spelled out special precautions everybody should

take. We put both our squad cars on the night beat, and by day we set to work knocking on every door in town

collecting alibis for the two times of disappearance.

“No good. Maybe you’re fooled by this uniform and think I’m a law officer, protector of the people, and all that?

A natural mistake. A lot of people were fooled. In less than seven weeks, six people vanished, just like that. Me and

my deputies might as well have stayed in bed round the clock, for all the good we did.” The sheriff drained his cup.

“Anyway, at last we got lucky. Don’t get me wrong now. We didn’t go all hog-wild and actually prevent a crime

or anything. But we did find a body – except it wasn’t the body of any of the seven people that had disappeared.

We’d taken to combing the woods nearest town, with temporary deputies from the miners to help. Well, one of those

boys was out there with us last week. It was hot – like it’s been for a while now – and it was real quiet. He heard this

buzzing noise and looked around for it, and he saw a bee-swarm up in the crotch of a tree. Except he was smart

enough to know that that’s not usual around here – beehives. So it wasn’t bees. It was bluebottle flies, a goddamned

big cloud of them, all over a bundle that was wrapped in a tarp.”

The sheriff studied his knuckles. He had, in his eventful life, occasionally met men literate enough to understand

his last name and rash enough to be openly amused by it, and the knuckles – scarred knobs – were eloquent of his

reactions. He looked back into his old friend’s eyes.

“We got that thing down and unwrapped it. Billy Lee Davis, one of my deputies, he was in Vietnam, been near

some bad, bad things and held on. Billy Lee blew his lunch all over the ground when we unwrapped that thing. It was

a man. Some of a man. We knew he’d stood six-two because all the bones were there, and he’d probably weighed

between two fifteen and two twenty-five, but he folded up no bigger than a bag-size laundry package. Still had his

face, both shoulders, and the left arm, but all the rest was clean. It wasn’t animal work. It was knife work, all the edges

neat as butcher cuts. Except butchered meat, even when you drain it all you can, will bleed a good deal afterwards,

and there wasn’t one goddamned drop of blood on the tarp, nor in that meat. It was just as pale as fish meat.”

Deep in his body’s centre, the doctor’s cancer touched him. Not a ravening attack – it sank one fang of pain,

questioningly, into new untasted flesh, probing the scope for its appetite there. He disguised his tremor with a shake

of the head.

“A cache, then.”

The sheriff nodded. “Like you might keep a pot roast in the icebox for making lunches. I took some pictures of his

face, then we put him back and erased our traces. Two of the miners I’d deputised did a lot of hunting, were

woods-smart. So I left them on the first watch. We worked out positions and cover for them, and drove back.

“We got right on tracing him, sent out descriptions to every town within a hundred miles. He was no one I’d ever

seen in Bailey, nor anyone else either, it began to look like, after we’d combed the town all day with the photos. Then,

out of the blue, Billy Lee Davis smacks himself on the forehead and says, ‘Sheriff, I seen this man somewhere in town,

and not long ago!’

“He’d been shook all day since throwing up, and then all of a sudden he just snapped to. Was dead sure. Except

he couldn’t remember where or when. We went over and over it, and he tried and tried. It got to where I wanted to

grab him by the ankles and hang him upside down and shake him till it dropped out of him. But it was no damn use.

Just after dark we went back to that tree – we’d worked out a place to hide the cars and a route to it through the

woods. When we were close, we walkie-talkied the men we’d left for an all-clear to come up. No answer at all. And

when we got there, all that was left of our trap was the tree. No body, no tarp, no Special Assistant Deputies.

Nothing.”

This time Dr. Winters poured the coffee and bourbon. “Too much coffee,” the sheriff muttered, but drank anyway.

“Part of me wanted to chew nails and break necks. And part of me was scared shitless. When we got back, I got on

the radio station again and made an emergency broadcast and then had the man at the station rebroadcast it every

hour. Told everyone to do everything in groups of three, to stay together at night in threes at least, to go out little as

possible, keep armed and keep checking up on each other. It had such a damn-fool sound to it, but just pairing-up was

no protection if half of one of those pairs was the killer. I sent our corpse’s picture out statewide, I deputised more

men and put them out on the streets to beef up the night patrol.

“It was the next morning that things broke. The sheriff of Rakehell called – he’s over in the next county. He said

our corpse looked a lot like a man named Abel Dougherty, a mill-hand with Con Wood over there. I left Billy Lee in

charge and drove right out.

“This Dougherty had a cripple older sister he always checked back to by phone whenever he left town for long, a

habit no one knew about, probably embarrassed him. Sheriff Peck there only found out about it when the woman

called him, said her brother’d been four days gone for vacation and not rung her once. He’d hardly had her report for

an hour when he got the picture I sent out, and recognised it. And I hadn’t been in his office more than ten minutes

when Billy Lee called me there. He’d remembered.

“When he’d seen Dougherty was the Sunday night three days before we found him. Where he’d seen him was the

Trucker’s Tavern outside the north end of town. The man had made a stir by being jolly drunk and latching onto a

miner who was drinking there, man named Joe Allen, who’d started at the mine about two months back. Dougherty

kept telling him that he wasn’t Joe Allen, but Dougherty’s old buddy named Sykes that had worked with him at Con

Wood for a coon’s age, and what the hell kind of joke was this, come have a beer old buddy and tell me why you took

off so sudden and what the hell you been doing with yourself.

“Allen took it laughing. Dougherty’d clap him on the shoulder, Allen’d clap him right back and make every kind of

joke about it, say, ‘Give this man another beer, I’m standing in for a long-lost friend of his.’ Dougherty was so big and

loud and stubborn, Billy Lee was worried about a fight starting, and he wasn’t the only one worried. But this Joe Allen

was a natural good ol’ boy, handled it perfect. We’d checked him out weeks back along with everyone else, and he

was real popular with the other miners. Finally Dougherty swore he was going to take him on to another bar to help

celebrate the vacation Dougherty was starting out on. Joe Allen got up grinning, said goddamn it, he couldn’t

accommodate Dougherty by being this fellow Sykes, but he could sure as hell have a glass with any serious drinking

man that was treating. He went out with him, and gave everyone a wink as he left, to the general satisfaction of the

audience.”

Craven paused. Dr. Winters met his eyes and knew his thought, two images: the jolly wink that roused the room to

laughter, and the thing in the tarp aboil with bright blue flies.

“It was plain enough for me,” the sheriff said. “I told Billy Lee to search Allen’s room at the Skettles’

boarding-house and then go straight to the mine and take him. We could fine-polish things once we had him. Since I

was already in Rakehell, I saw to some of the loose ends before I started back. I went with Sheriff Peck down to Con

Wood, and we found a picture of Eddie Sykes in the personnel file. I’d seen Joe Allen often enough, and it was his

picture in that file.

“We found out Sykes had lived alone, was an on-again, off-again worker, private in his comings and goings, and

hadn’t been around for a while. But one of the sawyers there could be pretty sure of when Sykes left Rakehell because

he’d gone to Sykes’s cabin the morning after a big meteor shower they had out there about nine weeks back, since

some thought the shower might have reached the ground, and not far from Sykes’s side of the mountain. He wasn’t in

that morning, and the sawyer hadn’t seen him since.

“After all those weeks, it was sewed up just like that. Within another hour I was almost back in Bailey, had the

pedal to the metal, and was barely three miles out of town, when it all blew to shit. I heard it blow, I was that close to

collaring him. I tell you, Carl, I felt … like a bullet . I was going to rip through this Sykes, this goddamned cannibal

monster …

“We had to reconstruct what happened. Billy Lee got impatient and went after him alone, but luckily he radioed

Travis – my other deputy – first. Travis was on the mountain dragnetting around that tree for clues, but he happened

to be near his car when Billy Lee called him. He said he’d just been through Allen’s room and had got something

really odd. It was a sphere, half again as big as a basketball, heavy, made of something that wasn’t metal or glass but

was a little like both. He could half-see into it, and it looked to be full of some kind of circuitry and components. He

hadn’t found anything else unusual. He was going to take this thing along with him, and go after Allen now. He told

Travis to get up to the mine for backup. He’d be there first and should already have Allen by the time Travis arrived.

“Tierney, the shift boss up there, had an assistant that told us the rest. Billy Lee parked behind the offices where

the men in the yard wouldn’t see the car. He went upstairs to arrange the arrest with Tierney. They got half a dozen

men together. Just as they came out of the building, they saw Allen take off running from the squad car. He had the

sphere under his arm.

“The whole compound’s fenced in, and Tierney’d already phoned to have all the gates shut. Allen zigged and

zagged some, but caught on quick to the trap. The sphere slowed him, but he still had a good lead. He hesitated a

minute and then ran straight for the main shaft. A cage was just going down with a crew, and he risked every bone in

him jumping down after it, but he got safe on top. By the time they got to the switches, the cage was down to the

second level, and Allen and the crew had got out. Tierney got it back up. Billy Lee ordered the rest back to get

weapons and follow, and him and Tierney rode the cage right back down. And about two minutes later half the

goddamned mine blew up.”

The sheriff stopped as if cut off, his lips parted to say more, his eyes registering for perhaps the hundredth time his

amazement that there was no more, that the weeks of death and mystification ended here, with this split-second

recapitulation: more death, more answerless dark, sealing all.

“Nate.”

“What.”

“Wrap it up and go to bed. I don’t need your help. You’re dead on your feet.”

“I’m not on my feet. And I’m coming along.”

“Give me a picture of the victims’ position relative to the blast. I’m going to work, and you’re going to bed.”

The sheriff shook his head absently. “They’re mining in shrinkage stopes. The adits – levels – branch off lateral

from the vertical shaft. From one level they hollow out overhand up to the one above. Scoop out big chambers and let

most of the broken rock stay inside so they can stand on the heaps to cut the ceiling higher. They leave sections of

support wall between stopes, and those men were buried several stopes in from the shaft. The cave-in killed them .

The mountain just folded them up in their own hill of tailings. No kind of fragments reached them. I’m dead sure. The

only ones they found were of some standard charges that the main blast set off, and those didn’t even get close. The

big one blew out where the adit joined the shaft, right where, and right when, Billy Lee and Tierney got out of the cage.

And there is nothing left there, Carl. No sphere, no cage, no Tierney, no Billy Lee Davis. Just rock blown fine as

flour.”

Dr. Winters nodded and, after a moment, stood up.

“Come on, Nate. I’ve got to get started. I’ll be lucky to have even a few of them done before morning. Drop me off

and go to sleep, till then at least. You’ll still be there to witness most of the work.”

The sheriff rose, took up the doctor’s suitcase, and led him out of the office without a word, concession in his

silence.

The patrol car was behind the building. The doctor saw a crueller beauty in the stars than he had an hour before.

They got in, and Craven swung them out onto the empty street. The doctor opened the window and hearkened, but

the motor’s surge drowned out the river sound. Before the thrust of their headlights, ranks of old-fashioned parking

meters sprouted shadows tall across the sidewalks, shadows that shrank and were cut down by the lights’ passage.

The sheriff said:

“All those extra dead. For nothing! Not even to … feed him! If it was a bomb, and he made it, he’d know how

powerful it was. He wouldn’t try some stupid escape stunt with it. And how did he even know that globe was there?

We worked it out that Allen was just ending a shift, but he wasn’t even up out of the ground before Billy Lee’d parked

out of sight from the shaft.”

“Let it rest, Nate. I want to hear more, but after you’ve slept. I know you. All the photos will be there, and the

report complete, all the evidence neatly boxed and carefully described. When I’ve looked things over, I’ll know exactly

how to proceed by myself.”

Bailey had neither hospital nor morgue, and the bodies were in a defunct ice-plant on the edge of town. A

generator had been brought down from the mine, lighting improvised, and the refrigeration system reactivated. Dr.

Parson’s office, and the tiny examining room that served the sheriff’s station in place of a morgue, had furnished this

makeshift with all the equipment that Dr. Winters would need beyond what he carried with him. A quarter-mile outside

the main body of the town, they drew up to it. Tree-flanked, unneighboured by any other structure, it was a double

building; the smaller half – the office – was illuminated. The bodies would be in the big windowless refrigerator

segment. Craven pulled up beside a second squad car parked near the office door. A short rake-thin man wearing a

large white stetson got out of the car and came over. Craven rolled down his window.

“Trav. This here’s Dr. Winters.”

“’Lo, Nate. Dr. Winters. Everything’s shipshape inside. Felt more comfortable out here. Last of those

newshounds left two hours ago.”

“They sure do hang on. You take off now, Trav. Get some sleep and be back at sunup. What temperature we

getting?”

The pale stetson, far clearer in the starlight than the shadowface beneath it, wagged dubiously. “Thirty-six. She

won’t get lower – some kind of leak.”

“That should be cold enough,” the doctor said.

Travis drove off, and the sheriff unlocked the padlock on the office door. Waiting behind him, Dr. Winters heard

the river again – a cold balm, a whisper of freedom – and overlying this, the stutter and soft snarl of the generator

behind the building, a gnawing, remorseless sound that somehow fed the obscure anguish that the other soothed.

They went in.

The preparations had been thoughtful and complete. “You can wheel ‘em out of the fridge on this and do the

examining in here,” the sheriff said, indicating a table and a gurney. “You should find all the gear you need on this big

table here, and you can write up your reports on that desk. The phone’s not hooked up – there’s a pay phone at the

last gas station if you have to call me.”

The doctor nodded, checking over the material on the larger table: scalpels, post-mortem and cartilage knives,

intestine scissors, rib shears, forceps, probes, mallet and chisels, a blade saw and electric bone saw, scale, jars for

specimens, needles and suture, steriliser, gloves … Beside this array were a few boxes and envelopes with descriptive

sheets attached, containing the photographs and such evidentiary objects as had been found associated with the

bodies.

“Excellent,” he muttered.

“The overhead light’s fluorescent, full spectrum or whatever they call it. Better for colours. There’s a pint of

decent bourbon in that top desk drawer. Ready to look at ‘em?”

“Yes.”

The sheriff unbarred and slid back the big metal door to the refrigeration chamber. Icy tainted air boiled out of the

doorway. The light within was dimmer than that provided in the office – a yellow gloom wherein ten oblong heaps lay

on trestles.

The two stood silent for a time, their stillness a kind of unpremeditated homage paid to the eternal mystery at its

threshold. As if the cold room were in fact a shrine, the doctor found a peculiar awe in the row of veiled forms. The

awful unison of their dying, the titan’s grave that had been made form them, conferred on them a stern authority,

Death’s Chosen Ones. His stomach hurt, and he found he had his hand pressed to his abdomen. He glanced at

Craven and was relieved to see that his friend, staring wearily at the bodies, had missed the gesture.

“Nate. Help me uncover them.”

Starting at opposite ends of the row, they stripped the tarps off and piled them in a corner. Both were brusque

now, not pausing over the revelation of the swelled, pulpy faces – most three-lipped with the gaseous burgeoning of

their tongues – and the fat, livid hands sprouting from the filthy sleeves. But at one of the bodies Craven stopped.

The doctor saw him look, and his mouth twist. Then he flung the tarp on the heap and moved to the next trestle.

When they came out, Dr. Winters took out the bottle and glasses Craven had put in the desk, and they had a drink

together. The sheriff made as if he would speak, but shook his head and sighed.

“I will get some sleep, Carl. I’m getting crazy thoughts with this thing.” The doctor wanted to ask those thoughts.

Instead he laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Go home, Sheriff Craven. Take off the badge and lie down. The dead won’t run off on you. We’ll all still be here

in the morning.”

When the sound of the patrol car faded, the doctor stood listening to the generator’s growl and the silence of the

dead, resurgent now. Both the sound and the silence seemed to mock him. The afterecho of his last words made him

uneasy. He said to his cancer:

“What about us, dear colleague? We will still be here tomorrow? All of us?”

He smiled, but felt an odd discomfort, as if he had ventured a jest in company and roused a hostile silence. He

went to the refrigerator door, rolled it back, and viewed the corpses in their ordered rank, with their strange tribunal air.

“What, sirs?” he murmured. “Do you judge me? Just who is to examine whom tonight, if I may ask?”

He went back into the office, where his first step was to examine the photographs made by the sheriff in order to

see how the dead had lain at their uncovering. The earth had seized them with terrible suddenness. Some crouched,

some partly stood, others sprawled in crazy free-fall postures. Each successive photo showed more of the jumble as

the shovels continued their work between shots. The doctor studied them closely, noting the identifications inked on

the bodies as they came completely into view.

One man, Roger Willet, had died some yards from the main cluster. It appeared he had just straggled into the slope

from the adit at the moment of the explosion. He should thus have received, more directly than any of the others, the

shock waves of the blast. If bomb fragments were to be found in any of the corpses, Mr. Willet’s seemed likeliest to

contain them. Dr. Winters pulled on a pair of surgical gloves.

Willet lay at one end of the line of trestles. He wore a thermal shirt and overalls that were strikingly new beneath

the filth of burial. Their tough fabrics jarred with the fabric of his flesh – blue, swollen, seeming easily torn or burst,

like ripe fruit. In life Willet had grease-combed his hair. Now it was a sculpture of dust, spikes and whorls shaped by

the head’s last grindings against the mountain that clenched it.

Michael Shea - The Autopsy.pdf

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