“Check the dementia patients first—anyone who might be exhibiting visual hallucinations or delusions. Ones who reach a crisis in their condition, then present a few hours of lucidity right before death. The spots start appearing then, during that brief lucid state. I need you to watch them. And bring me the bodies.”

He pulled the caps off of glass vials and lined them up, rattling them against the tray, drowning out my protestations.

“Dan, I don’t get to decide where—”

“Hold your breath.”

I slapped a hand to my mouth. I tasted the powdery residue of the latex gloves I’d been wearing.

He squeezed a black spot against the rim of a vial, collecting the trickle of ink and ramming the cap in place before the plasma turned to smoke.

He exhaled. I didn’t.

He held the vial up between our faces. The dark liquid inside sucked light from the room. He swirled the glass tube. The ooze coated the glass, sliding back down it in writhing swirls.

“Whatever this is, it’s killing people, Greg. I can’t stop it if I can’t research it.”

“Dad didn’t leave you this place so you could play mad scientist.”

“Dad didn’t leave you this place at all,” he said, picking up an eye and rolling it in his palm.

“You’re supposed to be taking care of these people, for their loved ones. And you’re supposed to be taking care of the business.” I swept my hand toward a section of crumbling wall, groundwater seeping in through the cracks in the cinderblocks.

“Greg, this stuff’s contagious. I don’t know how, yet, but it is. Who gives a shit about upselling casket hardware when people are seeing things that aren’t there? People are hallucinating, tearing each other apart, dropping dead, and you don’t want to help?” He tossed the eye back onto the steel tray. It splashed and rolled, leaving a trail of humor.

“Well, talk to their doctors, put it in your reports.”

“No one is going to look twice if I don’t bring examples. I need data before I can make a claim like this.”

“Your data are people, Dan.”

“Dead people. And if you don’t bring me what bodies you do have, we’ll end up with more data than we’ll know what to do with.” His eyes narrowed like the tip of his scalpel, cut into me.

I sighed and stared at the ooze. “Where does it come from?”

“How should I know? That’s the point. Where do fleas come from, or rats? It’s just the fucking circle of life.” He picked up the corpse’s arm and shook the limp hand at me.

I stepped back, stumbling over my foot. “Well, someone else has to have seen it; it can’t just be here.”