There Was Someone Inside Him

The corpse arrived without a face.

Not damaged. Removed.

Someone had cut around the hairline, behind the ears, beneath the jaw, and peeled the skin away in a single piece. The work was careful enough that Dr. Harlan initially assumed the killer had medical training. The deeper incisions changed his mind. Whoever had done this understood anatomy, but they hadn’t learned it from a textbook. They had learned by opening people.

The body belonged to a white male, approximately forty-five, discovered in a drainage ditch outside Rockford just before dawn. No wallet. No dental records. No fingerprints because the pads of every finger had been surgically excised. There were no defensive wounds and almost no blood at the recovery site. Whoever killed him had prepared him somewhere else and dumped what remained. The only unusual finding before autopsy was a vertical scar running from the base of his throat to his pubic bone. It was old, pale, and perfectly straight.

Harlan ran a finger beside it. “Previous surgery?”

I was photographing the body. “For what?”

He didn’t answer. There was no obvious procedure that required an incision like that anymore. Not unless the man had been opened decades ago. Even then, the scar looked wrong. Too neat. Too deliberate.

Harlan made the Y-incision. The blade crossed the old scar near the sternum, and the corpse twitched.

Not a movie twitch. No dramatic convulsion. Just the right hand closing once, softly, as though squeezing someone else’s fingers.

We both saw it.

“Residual nerve activity,” Harlan said.

“He’s been dead fourteen hours.”

“Bodies do strange things.”

That sentence became less comforting over the next three minutes.

When Harlan opened the chest, the organs were not where they should have been. The lungs were compressed against the back of the rib cage, thin and flattened. The heart was pushed high and left, nearly beneath the clavicle. The stomach and liver had been forced downward into the abdominal cavity. Something occupied the center of the torso from sternum to pelvis.

At first we thought it was a tumor.

Then it moved.

Harlan stepped backward. I stopped breathing. Beneath a translucent membrane stretched through the body cavity was the unmistakable outline of a human hand.

Not a malformed appendage. A hand. Five fingers, knuckles, nails. It pressed slowly against the membrane from inside the corpse, flattening the tissue until we could see the whorls of its fingertips.

Harlan whispered, “Get upstairs.”

I didn’t.

Neither did he.

He cut the membrane.

A smell rolled out that wasn’t decomposition. It was warm and mineral, like blood trapped in a sealed room. The hand withdrew. Something inside the body took a breath.

We opened him further.

There was a person inside.

That sentence still feels impossible to write.

He was folded lengthwise within the dead man’s torso, but not in any position the human skeleton could tolerate. His knees were drawn beside his shoulders. His spine curved around the pelvis. His arms had been threaded upward alongside the ribs. He had no hair and very little body fat. His skin was almost transparent. Veins ran beneath it in dark ropes. A cord of tissue connected his abdomen to the corpse’s aorta.

He was alive.

His eyes opened.

They were brown.

The same brown as the dead man’s.

He looked at Harlan first, then at me, and began to cry.

Not scream. Cry.

“Please,” he said.

His voice was barely air.

Harlan stared at him. “Jesus Christ.”

The man inside the body shook his head.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t let him wake up.”

Behind us, the dead body inhaled.

The sound came through an exposed chest with no possibility of speech, a horrible wet intake through the severed throat. The corpse’s fingers curled around the edge of the steel table.

The man inside began fighting to get out.

He tore at the membrane with his fingernails, slipping in blood, sobbing so hard he could barely speak. “Cut me out. Cut me out. Cut me out.”

Harlan grabbed the scalpel.

“What the hell is this?”

The man looked directly at him.

“The part he keeps.”

The corpse sat up.

Its face was gone, but the muscles beneath were intact. Red tissue flexed around the exposed teeth. The eyes opened in their sockets.

And they were empty.

Not blind. Empty.

The brown irises were gone.

The eyes inside the smaller man had stolen them.

The corpse lunged.

Harlan went down first. It caught him by the jaw and the back of the skull and slammed his face against the autopsy table. Teeth scattered across stainless steel. I remember the sound more than the blood. A thick, blunt crack, followed by Harlan making a noise like he was trying to breathe through soup.

The smaller man crawled halfway out of the body, dragging the vascular cord behind him. “Help me.”

The corpse grabbed his ankle.

He screamed.

I picked up the bone saw.

I wish I could say I thought about it.

I didn’t.

I switched it on and put it through the corpse’s forearm.

The blade chewed bone and sprayed us both. The hand dropped away still gripping the smaller man’s ankle. He kicked it free and pulled himself onto the floor.

The dead thing did not scream.

It turned toward me.

Faceless.

Watching.

Then it smiled with muscles that should never have been visible.

The smaller man screamed, “The neck.”

I drove the saw beneath the jaw and cut.

The body collapsed.

The room went quiet except for the saw winding down.

Harlan was still alive. Barely. His nose was flattened, half his teeth gone, one eye swelling closed. The smaller man crawled beside him.

I shouted at him to stay back.

He didn’t.

He placed his palm against Harlan’s chest.

Harlan stopped moving.

The smaller man closed his eyes.

For several seconds nothing happened.

Then the scar appeared.

A thin red line formed beneath Harlan’s throat and slowly traveled downward under his clothing.

I grabbed the man by the shoulder.

“What did you do?”

He opened his eyes.

“I’m sorry.”

The scar continued down Harlan’s abdomen.

“What did you do?”

“He needed somewhere to go.”

Something moved beneath Harlan’s skin.

His stomach rose.

Then fell.

Then rose again, but not with his breathing. Something was turning over inside him.

I backed away.

The smaller man looked exhausted. Human. Terrified. He had blood in his mouth and a deep tear along his abdomen where the cord had ripped free. He should have been dying.

Instead, his skin was changing.

Slowly darkening.

Hair began pushing through his scalp.

The shape of his face altered by degrees. His jaw widened. His nose thickened. His shoulders settled into a familiar posture.

I knew the face.

It was hanging in an evidence bag in the next room.

The dead man’s face.

He saw that I understood.

“We don’t know what we look like,” he said. “Not at first.”

I stared at Harlan. The movement beneath his abdomen had stopped.

“What are you?”

The man shook his head.

“That’s the wrong question.”

He stood. His legs trembled but held.

“What was he?”

He looked down at the decapitated corpse.

“A house.”

“For you?”

“For whatever was left.”

The fluorescent lights hummed above us. Somewhere beyond the morgue doors, a phone rang.

I looked at Harlan again.

His chest rose once.

Then something knocked from inside.

The man walked toward the exit.

I blocked him.

“You’re not leaving.”

He looked almost offended.

“You opened me.”

I raised the bone saw.

He looked at the blade, then at me.

“Do you remember being born?”

“What?”

“Do you?”

I said nothing.

“Do you remember learning to walk? Your first word? Your first face?”

I felt cold.

He stepped closer.

“We all think we started on the outside.”

I gripped the saw harder.

“What does that mean?”

He glanced at Harlan.

“It means sometimes the house dies before the tenant.”

Then he left.

I should have stopped him.

Instead I stood there listening to something inside Harlan scratching against his ribs.

The police came. Federal people came after that. Men whose badges disappeared into their pockets before I could read them. The morgue cameras had stopped recording thirteen minutes before the autopsy began. Harlan was taken somewhere I was never told. The original corpse disappeared. Every photograph I took was confiscated.

They told me to sign papers.

I refused.

They told me what had happened was a biological exposure incident.

I asked them where Harlan was.

They told me there was no Dr. Harlan employed at the facility.

I resigned that afternoon.

For six months, nothing happened.

Then last Tuesday I saw him.

Harlan.

He was standing in the produce section of a grocery store twenty miles from my house.

His face had healed completely.

He was thinner. His hair was darker.

He saw me.

I froze.

He smiled.

Then he lifted one finger to his lips.

His wife was beside him.

She looked happy.

They had a little boy with them.

Maybe four years old.

The boy was staring at me.

There was a scar running down the center of his throat.

His mother noticed me looking and pulled his collar closed.

I left my cart in the aisle and drove home.

That night, I dug out every photograph of myself I could find. Childhood pictures. School portraits. Family vacations. My wedding. I looked at them until three in the morning.

There is something wrong with them.

I don’t know how I never noticed.

I have the same scar in every photograph.

Sometimes faint. Sometimes almost invisible.

But it’s there.

A thin line beginning beneath my throat.

Running downward.

I checked the mirror.

Nothing.

I checked again under brighter light.

Still nothing.

Then I pressed my fingers against my sternum.

There is a seam under the skin.

I can follow it all the way down.

And now I understand why the man in the morgue looked at me the way he did.

He wasn’t asking for help.

He recognized me.

Last night, while I was lying in bed, something inside my chest moved.

Not much.

Just enough to wake me.

I put my hand over the spot.

Something underneath placed its hand against mine.

Five fingers.

Palm to palm.

For a moment neither of us moved.

Then it tapped once.

And I tapped back.