The Sepulcher

Here I am, at my desk. The neon glare of the screen flickers ghost-like on my face, illuminating the lonely, lunar surface with dark craters for eyes. My hidden bun partially shows, like an eclipse. I am propped up on one fist, half-aware, kept alert only by the horror that is on my screen. It's a creepy time of morning to be reading police case files. Outside the foggy window, behind the slitted blinds, is the kind of indeterminate, primeval grey that could be the pre-dawn, dusk or twilight of any day in any month in any century. It reinforces the message playing on my fatigued brain– It could have been you. It could just as easily happen to anyone, at any time.

There is a randomness about the crimes on display in front of me. They flash across the monitor like shadows on the periphery of my sight. Fleeting, mad streaks of quotations from cross-examination and psychiatric interviews hint at unimaginable things. There is a predator in the room with me, reflected in the computer screen that is both my watcher and my shield. The crimes I annotate on the filing system defy any pattern of era, class, race or circumstance, and so pend investigation.

The sleek, modern screen is thick and glassy, like a lens for detective work. The coffee beside it is a familiar, bitter colleague, and the only reason I’ve managed to stay up through the night. I'm too new to the job to receive much in the way of direction. I just read the cases and summarise them for the Chief of Police. If it takes all night, well, then that's just how long it takes. Often, I'm in the office long after the others go home, and the peak-hour traffic in the city grid below my window recedes into the gentle, purring tide of the night. It's only taken two weeks for me to feel fortified inside Police Department Headquarters. Now, everything I know is under siege.

There are some bizarre sets of evidence. I definitely agree with my hard-boiled supervisor that the more you learn, the less you know, and the less you feel certain about. It's impossible to fathom how these recorded events took place– some cases are so wildly outside the ambit of normative behaviour as to make morality redundant. There just isn't a yardstick to measure by. Indescribable realities defy simple notions like right and wrong or sane and insane. Those dichotomies, I've come to realise, are just the playthings of police academy undergraduates. They represent the tip of a hulking, theoretical iceberg, which the larger ocean of reality drowns.

I think of the facts in front of me. A woman has killed her husband, butchered and eaten his body, attempted to serve his boiled head to his children, and retained his skin. How could this description, typed up neatly on a courtroom keyboard, be an account of a real event? Even summarizing it with my own fingers doesn’t make it believable. A young man shot thirty-two people around ancient ruins, gunning down bystanders and their fleeing children like a player in a Grand Theft Auto game, as though there were no consequences, or no people involved at all. What was the motive? A rapist and killer flirts with cross-examination, making himself out to be a monster one moment, and a rational actor the next. What is calculated, and what is madness? Five psychologists say different things. Peeling back the layers, is it even possible to get at the heart of truth?

I sip my coffee, lukewarm now, and knead my temples to no avail. It's just too much to comprehend. It reminds me of my studies in trauma, and particularly of the notion that deep trauma is without witness, for all who truly experience it are mute. As somebody who doesn't experience the desire to kill large numbers of total strangers apparently without motive, I can't fathom how or why these crimes took place. Perhaps these kinds of events traumatise society, so that there are no words to frame them, nor any theories of psychology, behaviour, philosophy or law that can capture them? These events are like other great traumas of human history, Holocausts on a smaller scale. They are impossible to reproduce, as well as to move on from. They preoccupy us, giving tangibility to the nameless aspects of fear.

I can't replicate in my own mind whatever motive was behind these actions, because I can't fathom the desire to kill randomly and in mass, seemingly without motive, but only for the pure joy of killing. Revenge murders I can understand. Those things, I've learned to deal with, and prepared for to some extent while I was studying. The kind of situation where battered wife kills abusive husband, where a begrudged woman takes revenge, or where an aggrieved person lashes out in anger– those situations I can wrap my head around. As psychology students, we all read about such cases. We were even taught to feel sympathy for the perpetrators, in some instances. These are the people who don't deserve the death penalty, because they are still humans who have transgressed, albeit gravely. They are not unrecognisable. They are not monsters.

Accordingly, such everyday, rational acts of madness have become familiar motifs in our justice system. They are within the comfort zone of hardened prosecutors, not representing any deadly frontier. Instead, they play on the edges of an experience we all share. We've all been angry at some point or another, and we've all wished the worst for someone, even if we are prevented from acting on our hate. Thus, those crimes, mere single killings with discernable motives, even when in cold blood, are punished less severely by our legal system. We see ourselves in them, and are rightfully horrified. Parables of human danger do not approach the indescribable anathema of psychopathy, or of serial killing.

It’s depressing in police headquarters, drab and desolate, like the crazy labyrinth of a prison. I stare down my screen again, and sigh. The reports aren’t finished, but they never really are. That’s enough for one day, I tell myself, and more than enough for the night.

I shrug into my coat. Wool and navy style, I bought it partly as a reward for getting this job, and partly to fit in. Everyone in law and order seems to own a pea coat. I lock the office on my way out, shut down all the machines, feel the lights shudder as the neon fades. My heels click on the hard linoleum as I stride down a corridor built for stalking. I pass the lockers and the windows into interview rooms with cheap, horizontal blinds– the kind that clatter. As I pass the final window, I see a note fixed to a door. It is addressed to me.

Christine Kimura– activate security door after you leave. PIN is 1337. Good work staying late tonight. Remind me in the morning, there’ll be a box of doughnuts in the fridge with your name on it.

-Ned

I shrug, remove the note, key in the code, and step out into the gusty night. It is still submarine blue outside, not quite the coal black of deep night when deep sleep and deep memory wake demons to walk on these streets and lurk behind the windows of the houses. The halogen from the street lights has preserved the twilight, and the late spring air is still slightly warm when it blows off the concrete, like fresh leftovers. I inhale, smelling the sweetness of just-closed blossoms and acrid tar. I feel confident in my coat, with my pistol in my left pocket, so I decide to take the scenic route home. My mind could use some airing out, so that I don’t have to sleep with nightmares again.

Stepping off the sidewalk, I cross the underpass and emerge on a fringe of woodland. The track through here will lead me directly to my house, which is secluded in autumnal foliage all year round. I look up, always seeking the moon as it flits winking between the treetops. The further I go, the more the trees still need to catch up with the season. In the centre of the wood, they are a strange combination of floral and bare. Some hold out ikebana sprays of pear or plum blossom, to match the diamond sprays of stars. Others scrape the sky with twisted talons, raking the clouds ragged.

Suddenly, the path peters out. I stand speechless. It’s never done this before. Then, I reassess my surroundings. Serrated branches curl their claws around the keyhole moon. Bone dry leaves rattle as they dance with whippoorwills, lending fleshless, disjointed bodies to mad pirouettes, coming apart and folding back together with skeletal seamlessness. The restless graveyards of summers spent obscure the ground, so that I could be anywhere, at any time. It is my worst dream come true again. I stand in sepulchral silence, container of my fears.

I stumble through the woods, aimless until I find it– springtime preserved in a clearing like a snow globe in reverse. The citronella candles burn waxy, yellow halos, dispelling the encroaching night. Like a spirit fence, a row of them keeps darkness at bay. Or, rather, it keeps mere dimness from discovering where true darkness is sequestered. Here is a tent. Red and purple by another hour, by evening it gleams in shades of black, where the evening smells of honeysuckle and burning wicks. Moths dance smoky in the dusk, flirting with electric fireflies strung up like decorations. Here also the path emerges again, becoming crushed cherry blossom petals. By the path, there is a sign–



I lift up the flap, which tinkles with beads, and enter the tent. Inside is a shadow. It speaks, using its enigma to polish the crystal ball until there are stars inside the tent, too. They spangle the canvas that has become a canopy or a net for dreams.

‘You came down the pink corridor,’ says the mystic, a venerable woman of amber adornments and unknowable age. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘I want to be here,’ I say, not knowing where the words come from.

‘Fine. You shouldn’t be in these parts, but just this once.’

I sit in the one chair provided, a wicker variety with cushions of satin. ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask. ‘This is the middle of nowhere.’

‘On the contrary,’ says the mystic. ‘It is the middle of somewhere. It’s the where you are.’

I blink. Okay… ‘I have a question,’ I announce.

The mystic’s tongue is rasping like a devil’s, dry as the leaves that skitter diabolical outside her tent. It utters a demand. ‘Speak.’

I swallow, but the woman’s rasping eggs me on. ‘There’s this case,’ I find myself saying, not knowing again how the words got there and who articulates them for me. ‘A police file. I’m working on it, and the more I work, the less I seem to be able to get away from it. So, my question is, why do terrible things happen?’ As soon as the words leave my mouth, I feel simple, and curse whatever it is that has made me say them.

‘Because people do them,’ the mystic replies. ‘That’s not really your question. Try again.’

I scowl, disgruntled, but do as I’m told. Since signing up to work as an intern with the Chief of Police, I seem to have developed a knack for following orders.

‘This case I’ve been covering, it’s about a woman, young, in her mid-twenties. She had a husband and three young children, until, one day, they found all four dead in her apartment. The walls were covered in blood and signs– unspeakable things. Nobody knew what they meant. They defied understanding, as did the whole crime. It was so sudden, so apparently without motive. They found the woman crouching in the midst of it all, still alive, as though possessed. The psychiatrists can’t get her to talk. They try so hard, but she seems incapable of speech. It’s a horrible thing to research as a first case, there are more and more doctors’ notes every day, and I just have to ask… Why? Why me? Why did this happen now. Why did it happen at all?

I try to picture the most disturbing thing about the scene, to put my finger on why I find it so haunting, as though the case has a personal vendetta against me. It’s not so difficult, when I try. It could have been you. I hear those words echoing in my head again. It could just as easily happen to anyone, at any time… because we don’t understand why it happened to begin with.

The mystic speaks again. She seems to have paused to wait for my thoughts. I don’t know whether to think of it as polite or unsettling. ‘I can’t do everything for you,’ she says. ‘You already know the answer to this yourself.’ Her tone is somber, her words a pronouncement. I fume at being thwarted, denied a second question, but there’s no use protesting.

‘At least tell my fortune,’ I beg.

‘Very well.’ She nods her head. ‘Your future is that one day, you’ll understand what this is all about. You’ll see the pink corridor for what it really is. Also, you will see the sepulcher. What is the sepulcher?’ she adds, cryptically. ‘Or, who?’

‘The sepulcher?’ I asked, feeling a chill up my spine at the mention of such a funeral thing. ‘The pink corridor? What’s that supposed to mean?’

The woman only shakes her head, and for a second, some object drops down the shaft of memory, ringing as it goes, and her age shows. Flustered, I pick up my bag and wrap my coat around my chest. Swaddled like this, I march out of the tent and into the forest. I tread once more on the crushed, fragrant pink again as I leave, but when I turn around, there is no guiding light shining through the trees. No light emanates from the tent, or from anywhere. I’m on my own.

The next day, I stumble into the office. A slight wobble in my three inch boots and untrained gait betrays my lack of sleep. Once again, I have given over my night to something I can’t control, something that is beginning to consume my days as well.

‘Whoa, watch it.’ Ned catches me before I fall headlong into the coffee machine. ‘You look like less than a million bucks. Perhaps you need to take it easy, kiddo? Just relax and let the ideas come.’ My supervisor smiles and offers me a paper cup of fresh brew. I add a packet of cream and reach for a plastic spoon to stir opposites together. I slump into a plastic chair that could be the brainchild of the same designer.

‘Can’t get worn out at this stage of the game,’ I hear Ned commenting, but he’s not talking to me this time. ‘We’ve almost got her figured out.’ Of course, when he says her he is referring to the Widow. That’s what we’ve dubbed her for the time being. She has a name, but in my sleepless state I can’t remember it. I’ve called her Widow for so long that it’s lost to me. That means things are getting bad.

I persevere through the day and into the night, as usual. Around my cubicle, lights go out and the humming of computers dies down. People shuffle and yawn, saying their systematic goodbyes. This is their ritual. I collect one farewell from each of them as payment for covering the late shift. Then, without announcement, Ned slides by my desk. As I look up, he peers over the wall of my compartmentalised office area. A key dangles from his fingers.

‘Take this, kiddo. You did a perfect lock-up last night. You’re too good at keeping secrets! Tonight, I’m trusting you with something extra. Go down the pink corridor, and check this door before you leave. I’m counting on you, and in the morning, you can have anything you like from the bakery. On me.’

He grins toothily under his moustache, and I smile weakly back. Ned goes.

Later that night, I review the Widow’s case file. I see the pictures. A lone arm, severed gruesomely, belonging to a child, perhaps. The husband’s head. The younger daughter’s scarlet splattered dress and shoes. There are no photographs of the Widow herself, only a stream of pictures that chill me and render me mentally mute and deaf in ways I can’t describe. I can’t look at them, but I can’t tear my gaze away. Eventually, I peel my eyes off the computer screen, but the images stay with me. I carry them in my head as I do my rounds locking up. Last of all the areas, I come to the pink corridor.

I’ve never seen it before. It seems unreal that it could be there, when I thought I knew police headquarters inside out. Nevertheless, the door is there. Room 4311, like Ned told me. Come to think of it, I don’t actually remember him telling me, but he must have, because I have the knowledge of being told. Room 4311. There’s something about the number that creeps me out, but I force the key into the lock anyway, and make the handle turn.

I gasp when I see what’s on the other side. It can’t be! Not in the police station! We’re the good guys, I tell myself, and so we couldn’t have anything as inhumane as this, not even in our basement, where few officers and even fewer administrative staff ever go. The corridor is pink enough, and it’s the only sinister shade of pink I’ve ever seen. Partially grey, like brain matter, the pink tiles extend further than I can see until I turn on all the lights. As soon as I do, I wish I hadn’t.

This isn’t a corridor of ordinary holding cells. Even the weekend remand cells aren’t this bad. Those are just rooms with bars replacing one of the walls, and low benches instead of proper beds. These rooms are high security. The doors are iron, and I can’t help but knock on one with the back of my knuckles– solid. There’s only the smallest viewing panel in each one, and this cut away shows the doors to be about four inches thick. A blank clipboard is pinned underneath each cramped window. Inside, the rooms are all padded. It’s like a nightmare come to life. It can’t be true.

I force my eyes to floor as I walk the length of the corridor. It must take about ten minutes. I get the sense that this is the kind of place where time doesn’t matter. This is a corridor where time comes to die and be interred, where people are forgotten.

At the very end of the corridor, I find the door I have to lock. Or, was it unlock? I don’t remember. I turn the key, and leave the door in the opposite state to the one I found it in. I’m not game to test the handle. I don’t want to know what’s on the other side. Once I’m done, I sprint to the other end of the corridor, to the entrance where I came in. I don’t want whatever is behind that door to come out and catch me. I don’t even care that my heels pounding the tiles give me away entirely.

When I am outside the pink corridor, I lock the entryway and test it twice. Wiping my fringe from my clammy forehead, I sink to the floor. It’s only from that angle that I notice the new object placed in the break room. It has a note on it, and I can tell even from afar that the note is a tag, addressing the object to me.

The object itself is a sprig of cherry blossoms with a soda bottle for a vase.

On my walk home from the office, I go through the woods again. I don’t want to encounter the gypsy woman, I tell myself, but secretly, my feet resist me. They carry me towards that fated place whether I like it or not. Here, again, are the purple and red stripes, made too dark by the set sun to be candy stripes. There’s nothing sweet about this setting. The clearing dresses itself up with fair lights and candles in bright lanterns, but the carnival, if there ever was one, has gone home. The tent crouches under soft-smelling cherry trees, but its fair surroundings are nothing but a trap.

Nevertheless, I go in. The mystic greets me wordlessly, packing up a spread of cards with a single swipe of her many-ringed hand. ‘I knew you would be back,’ she tells me, and her smile reveals a hint of gold. It’s the kind of smile that says, ‘I know everything.’

I try to ply her with the same question from last night. ‘Why have you set up your tent in the middle of nowhere?’ I want to add, Because it seems like you’ve positioned yourself just perfectly to catch me, but the only guts I have seem to be squirming all around. I can’t pull them together, and so my confidence sags with my spine.

I get the same reply as before, almost exactly. ‘This isn’t the middle of nowhere,’ says the mystic, unfazed. ‘It’s where you are, right in the thick of everything.’

That only makes my suspicions throb harder, until finally they are all I hear, the blood beating an insane tattoo across my temples. I stand up, splaying my hands across the shawl-covered table to steady myself as the pain in my head swells.

‘What are you really doing here?’ I demand. ‘Are you real, or am I dreaming? What do you want from me?’ I reach for my pocket with shaking hands, and feel the cool metal of my gun against my feverishly hot and sweaty palms.

The woman, revealed now to be very old, either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. She’s grinning widely, her hair a wild tangle framing the fervor in her face. ‘Oh, what is the sepulcher?’ she asks, ‘Or who? What is the container for things buried here and grieved everywhere. Who is the mourner and the mourning object balled into one?’

‘I don’t know,’ I grit my teeth, ‘and I don’t care.’ My fingers close around the handle.

‘Oh, but you do.’

‘That’s it!’ I whip the weapon out of my pocket and turn it on the old woman. I don’t know what’s come over me. How could I do such a thing? But then again, how could she? What I’m doing seems so easy, so natural in response. ‘Give me a reason not to shoot you. You’re a demon, a figment of my imagination!’

‘That’s what the Widow said,’ the woman intones, with a sparkle in her eye.

‘What?’ I lick my lips and lower my weapon. ‘What?’

‘That’s what the Widow said,’ the mystic repeats. ‘She is the one you asked about, isn’t she? Well, right before she died, that’s what she told them. She said, “You’re all figments of my imagination.” You know that, Christine. I don’t have to tell you.’ The mystic smiles, but I feel my temperature drop. For a moment, I forget my theory that nothing here is real.

‘How do you know my name?’

The woman in my dream is disobeying me. ‘What is the sepulcher?’ she half-sings. ‘Or who? Who is the sepulcher, if not you?’ Beyond that, she doesn’t answer. Instead, she appears to be whispering to someone beyond the curtain. ‘Ned,’ she says. ‘You asked to see her.’

And, just like that, a man emerges. I recognise him, only he’s dressed differently, in billowing striped pants and an open shirt unlike anything I’ve ever seen him wear. My supervisor’s feet are stuffed into like curly shoes like elves’ slippers.

‘Boss!’ I exclaim, but Ned doesn’t talk to me. He seems to be in allegiance with this woman. Both are figments of my imagination, and both are ignoring me.

Ned whispers something back to the woman. Conspiratorially, she nods.

‘Boss? No…’ I close my eyes and try to calm my shaking limbs. ‘You’re not my boss. You’re not real. This is just a nightmare, and I want to wake up. I want to wake up!’ I can feel myself screaming, but I don’t hear the words outside my head. ‘I want to wake up!’

My hand clenches around the trigger, and the gun points up. There is laughter from the two of them, as if they can tell what’s happening. They don’t fear death.

‘I want to wake up!’

There’s the recoil, right in my sore shoulder. Why is it sore?

‘I want. To. Wake. Up!’

‘Honey?’

I open my eyes. At first, the room around me spins. ‘Honey? You okay? Get Ned, and get the Chief of Police. She’s awake.’

‘Huh?’ This voice is mine. I see a middle-aged woman swim into view in front of me. Not a caricature anymore, she is dressed in green scrubs, a single pendant of amber shining at her throat. She is matronly, her age unknowable. She’s the one who’s calling me pet names. I can’t believe anyone could be so kind, after what I’ve done.

‘It’s my job to look after you,’ she says, as if in answer. Her ability to read people almost makes her psychic. ‘I don’t cast aspersions on what you’ve done. I know illness too well to award blame. You don’t need childish name-calling, anyway. “Widow?” Psh! You’ve suffered enough, I can see it. I wouldn’t trade anything to be you. Poor dear.’

I find myself babbling, unable to stem the flow of words. ‘Trauma cannot be replicated,’ I say, dredging up the mantra from deep within a comatose dream. ‘Trauma can’t be replicated. No, that’s not true. It can be replicated, but it takes just the right conditions and people… What’s a sepulcher?’

‘Excuse me?’ The woman who is my nurse looks bemused.

‘What’s a sepulcher?’ I repeat.

She shakes her head, and decides to answer. ‘Well, it’s a kind of tomb, like you see in the big lawn cemeteries. Rich folks bury their dead in there. It’s a tiny… what you call it… a mausoleum. A house for the dead.’

‘Oh.’ I see now. I look up at my nurse, implore her with my eyes. I feel something wet on the front of my gown. Vomit, perhaps. I suddenly feel very weak. ‘What happened to me? Where have I been? Have I been dead?’

Her eyes dart away. Only for a split second, but I catch them. ‘No, dear, but… Just no.’ I can tell she’s trying to save me from the truth.

‘It’s okay,’ I whisper. ‘I know what I did. I’m the sepulcher. It’s me. Just like you told me, I was going to figure it out. I’m the container for my deepest, darkest fears. I had to break into me.’ A thought occurs, and I resolve to ask one last question before I give up. ‘Have you been talking to me?’ I wonder aloud. ‘In my sleep?’

Silently, my nurse nods, and I remember everything. Down the corridors, I hear them calling, ‘She’s awake! She’s awake! Call Ned! He used to be her boss, you know. He said he wanted to be contacted personally! Call Ned Anderson, right this second! Call Ned Anderson, Assistant to the Chief of City Police!’