Just Kill Me (19 page)

Eating people is a particular favorite thing of hers.

And when I tell her about Cyn having a headless ancestor, she gets all excited and asks her mom if she's part headless too.

Nothing on the tour scares her until we get to the Couch tomb.

When we're walking up toward it, across the field, she starts out skipping along, laughing about how she's skipping over dead bodies, but then she stops midskip.

“You okay?” I ask.

She suddenly looks terrified, her face frozen like she's just watched someone die right in front of her and realized that it wasn't as funny as she thought.

Slowly she raises her shaking arm and points toward the tomb.

“There's a . . . a . . .”

Up against the stone wall of the mausoleum is a solid, unmistakably human silhouette, small enough that it could only be the shadow of someone standing right in front of it.

It's there for a second, and then it's gone.

Well, shit.

It freaks me out a bit, but poor Ava is frightened out of her mind. She screams and starts crying and won't take another step toward the tomb.

I try to play it cool and just calm her down.

“You mean the shadow?” I ask. “Is that what you saw?”

She nods. Behind her, her mother takes pictures, oblivious.

“Oh, that's nothing,” I say. “We see that a lot.”

“Was that a ghost?” she asks.

“Nope. Just the shadow of a rat. A big, ugly rat with fangs,” I say. “When the light from the street hits a big enough rat just right, its shadow looks like a person.”

Ava stares forward, and the color gradually comes back into her face. She stops crying. A minute later she's asking if the rat eats people, then says, “I wish I was a rat, so I could eat people's heads!”

“Oh, you wouldn't want to eat a head,” I say. “They're full of boogers.”

“Ew!”

“A hundred years ago, ‘booger' was another name for ‘ghost.' ”

That gets her laughing, running around, waving her arms and shouting “Wooo! I'm a booger!” She's forgotten that she
was scared, and I feel like I've handled the situation extremely well, though I have to explain the whole history of the word (and it's connection to “boogeyman”) to Ava's mom.

The shadow appears again for a second, and everyone on the tour sees it and goes nuts.

After that I don't even have to hop the fence or talk about the tomb much—everyone is looking for the shadow, or trying to find out if we've rigged up a projector to make it look like there's a shadow there.

I tell Ava that she and I are sharing a secret that it's just a rat, but everyone else is fired up and thinks they've seen a ghost. I don't know if it's really some of the reeks and fumes of Mr. Sturgeon's brain or if I was right about it being a rat or what.

And I decide not to dwell on it. All that matters is that after the tour, the tips are the best I've ever gotten, and in the morning Cyn texts me to say that we have three new five-star reviews online.

“It doesn't matter how much money you make or how much power you have or how much control you feel, when you die, you're likely to end up naked and pooping. That's just the way it is. And that's . . . very egalitarian, and very equalizing, and I really like it.”

—CAITLIN DOUGHTY, ASK A MORTICIAN

I
n my research I find an interview with a “professional subject-gatherer” (a very polite term for “one who steals bodies to sell to medical schools”) in an 1878 issue of the
Tribune
. When asked if he enjoyed the work, he said, “Well, it wasn't very pleasant at first, of course, but anyone gets used to it.”

That's the way it is with creating psychic imprints. You get used to it. Fast. “Ghosting” old chronic patients starts to feel like a simple chore, like sweeping the spiders off the bus before the tour, or filling it up with gas after the weekend.

If they ever make a movie about Mysterious Chicago, they could probably show a whole montage of me and Cyn taking care of volunteers throughout July. With “Poor Unfortunate Souls” playing in the background, probably.

Sometimes we use the gorilla mask, and sometimes not.

We always offer to do things the way the volunteers want them done. One woman asks us to learn the hymn “Nearer
My God to Thee” so we can sing it right before she shuffles off her mortal coil at the Holmes body dump. I'm not a great singer, and singing her off isn't as good for our purposes as scaring her, but it's a reasonable request, so we give it our best. And it might be my imagination, but the next night, when the tour stops at the dump, I think I hear the melody of the hymn, riding on the wind.

And I'm almost sure that I see the woman's shadow.

It could always be something else. There's always another possible explanation. But it's undeniable the dump seems infinitely spookier once we've done some charity work there.

Our “subjects” are always so grateful to us that it really feels like we're just doing a good deed, like shoveling their sidewalk or cleaning their bedpans or something. These aren't suicidal people who could have benefited from help from a mental health professional; they're terminal cases whose lives are effectively over already. We have guidelines regarding this sort of thing. They have to be chronically sick, above the age of average life expectancy, and totally and enthusiastically consenting. The one time a person seems a bit nervous about it, we cancel the whole thing and bring her back home. We don't take any “clients” who have second thoughts.

She dies two days later anyway.

And we're back at work on day three.

Cyn seems like she's determined to make ghosts real just so Rick can show them to people. He notices the uptick in ghost
sightings on the tours, and his tours get even better. As far as he knows, the ghosts people are seeing really
could
be people who died there years ago. For my part, when I'm running the tour, I tell the historical stories, and when people think they see a ghost, I just let them go on thinking it's a ghost from the story I was telling. It's not being dishonest, exactly. I'm just leaving certain parts out. And hell,
I
don't know what they're really seeing, either. I'm never
totally
sure that the brain punch thing really works.

Our five-star reviews multiply quickly.

And so does our average number of customers per night.

One day at the end of July I come outside to find that we've had one of the biggest single-day drops in temperature ever recorded in Cook County. It's like summer has slipped out for a smoke, and autumn has crept in early while its back was turned. The air is crisp, the sky is gray, and it feels like heaven to me. I put on my long jacket and feel like I'm taking myself out of storage and coming back to life. A good six weeks earlier than I normally get to. It's unnatural, maybe, but I don't give a damn.

I leave Forest Park way early for the tour that night, take the Blue Line clear to Wicker Park, and spend way more than I should on the witchiest pair of boots John Fluevog makes. They're out of my price range and not really practical for standing up on moving buses, but the heels make me feel so tall and powerful that I have to have them.

On Clark Street, Terrence the caricature guy has a leather jacket on. Tourists from Florida act like they're in
Frozen
, huddling together as if temperatures in the sixties are something they've never felt.

Cyn grins at my outfit and says, “You look so goth, you'd tag walls with a fountain pen.”

I smile.

“You ever think about dyeing your hair black again?” I ask.

“Not really. The old people at the home might not like it. But I do miss it.”

“It made your skin look better. It was so bright next to the black hair. If you ever saw it, you would even say it glowed.”

She nods, and we just make general small talk about skin care, boots, and the weather, like strangers who are chatting for the first time.

We don't once mention what we'd done the night before in the Alley of Death and Mutilation.

Not even later, when someone takes a picture there that looks almost like a full-body apparition of an old man crouching by the stage door. The kind of ghost you'd normally only see in a movie.

The cool weather holds into August. It's almost like a miracle. Like something has thrown off the natural order of things.

If the leaves were changing color, and gallon jugs of the good apple cider had started showing up, perched on top of
haystacks outside of the grocery store and next to the pumpkins and gourds at the weekend farmers' market, it would feel just like autumn. It feels close enough as it is.

Zoey still hasn't sent a picture, but I send enough cute selfies for both of us, now that I can dress the way I like to. It's still a bit too warm for the jacket in the middle of the day, when the temperature hits its high, but it's cool enough in the mornings and the evenings.

Some people try to pretend the change in the weather isn't happening. I still see girls in short shorts and bikini tops walking around outside, even though they've got to be freezing. When we drive up Lake Shore Drive, there are still people swimming beside us along the edge of Lake Michigan.

But other people surrender, and just admit that October has come home early this year. We never put up Halloween decorations at the house—that'd be in pretty poor taste at a funeral home—so I've always relied on my neighbors. A house near mine always puts out theirs early—they usually have a bunch of little plastic skeletons that dangle from their tree and dance in the wind—and this year they start even earlier. It's not even September, and they have the skeletons out.

I love this.

I go tromping around wearing boots like Gaston.

While Cyn and I perfect our technique as charitable ghosters, Rick and I refine our two-step act on the tours we run together.
One prank that goes over particularly well is pulling up next to people at traffic lights and asking if they want to come to the body dump with us. One time we pull up at a stoplight next to a guy who's riding around with a girl and just say, “You wanna see a dead body?”

He waves and says, “I got dead bodies in the trunk, man!”

“Well, pop it, Al Capone!” says Rick. “Let's see!”

And the dude pops his trunk. I jump off the bus and start rooting around inside. Obviously there aren't any bodies in it, just a bunch of baseball equipment, but when the traffic light ahead of us changes, I slam it shut, jump back on the bus before we start moving, and pretend it was full of corpses.

“You knew to sever the arteries and everything!” I say. “You've done this before!”

“Sure have!” the guy says. “And she's next!”

He points at his girlfriend, who smiles and laughs as they drive away.

I'd say that it's kind of a fucked up joke to make, but it isn't that different from Rick's and Cyn's sense of humor as a couple, really. Cyn jokes about killing Rick pretty regularly, and now and then he'll give it right back to her.