From under the sink he removed a pair of scissors and sat down in the bathtub. No water. Just space. Space to work. Space for one quick motion.

He set the twin blades on the two sides of his baby toe.

Andi, he thought. This is for you.

He squeezed gently, the edges starting to pinch his skin. A little harder now…a little harder now…a little—

“Then I was struck with a vision,” he told Richard in the idling Dart. “As if something much more powerful than myself was leading the way.”

“What’d you do?” Richard asked, amazed at his own ability to ask a question.

“You ever been to the morgue, Richard?”

13

“I didn’t have much of a plan, Richard. I rightly assumed the front doors would be locked. But there’s a dark alley there along the side of the building. Trash cans, too. I shudder to think of what they’ve put in there. But I suppose I’m no cleaner than a trash can in the alley of a morgue. And there was a door in the bricks back there. An open one.”

The hinges cried for oil as the door swung inward. Charles faced a small set of concrete stairs leading up to the first floor.

“Up there it was all offices. Frosted glass and nameplates. As if I had broken into a detective agency. I was very worried somebody might be working late so I tiptoed the length of the hall, to the other side of the building. I was lucky, I suppose. There wasn’t a sound in the place. Not even the sound of a ceiling fan. A phone. A computer humming, at rest. You know…I don’t think they have a security guard at the Goblin City Morgue. Isn’t that odd? Of all the places to leave unattended. The zoo has a guard. The cemetery has a guard. Even Wayne Sherman’s cousin watches The Hedges for him at night. But the morgue? Nobody. No eyes and ears. No mouth, either, to call out to me, to ask me what I was doing, to put a stop to it before it began.

“The door to where they keep the bodies is at the far north end of the first-floor hallway. I found it easily. And can you imagine? Me walking through the morgue with a pair of scissors in my hand close to midnight? I hardly recognized myself. Stepping through that door I began searching my history, our history, Richard, for a sign. A point in time that might suggest, yes, one day I’d be illegally inside the Goblin City Morgue, with a mind to steal something other than money. But I didn’t find any sign. No chain of events so far as I could see. Know what? I think love is a very powerful thing, Richard. I really do.”

The door had a sign upon it, a man with a mask over his mouth, rubber gloves over his hands. Charles entered and found himself at the top of a dark stairwell.