two l acerations of the myocardium; a one-point-five-centimeter laceration in the right ventricle and a one-point-eight-centimeter laceration penetrating the left ventricle.”
Jacquel removed each lung. The left lung had been stabbed and was half collapsed. He weighed them, and the heart, and he photographed the wounds. From each lung he sliced a small piece of tissue, which he placed into a jar.
“Formaldehyde,” whispered Mr. Ibis, helpfully.
Jacquel continued to talk to the microphone, describing what he was doing, what he saw, as he removed the girl’s liver, the stomach, spleen, pancreas, both kidneys, the uterus and the ovaries.
He weighed each organ, reported them as normal and uninjured. From each organ he took a small slice and put it into a jar of formaldehyde.
From the heart, the liver, and from one of the kidneys, he cut an additional slice. These pieces he chewed, slowly, making them last, and ate while he worked.
Somehow it seemed to Shadow a good thing for him to do: respectful, not obscene.
“So you want to stay here with us for a spell?” said Jacquel, masticating the slice of the girl’s heart.
“If you’ll have me,” said Shadow.
“Certainly we’ll have you,” said Mr. Ibis. “No reasons why not and plenty of reasons why. You’ll be under our protection as long as you’re here.”
“I hope you don’t mind sleeping under the same roof as the dead,” said Jacquel.
Shadow thought of the touch of Laura’s lips, bitter and cold. “No,” he said. “Not as long as they stay dead, anyhow.”
Jacquel turned and looked at him with dark brown eyes as quizzical and cold as a desert dog’s. “They stay dead here,” was all he said.
“Seems to me,” said Shadow. “Seems to me that the dead come back pretty easy.”
“Not at all,” said Ibis. “Even zombies, they make them out of the living, you know. A little powder, a little chanting, a little push, and you have a zombie. They live, but they believe they are dead. But to truly bring the dead back to life, in their bodies. That takes power.” He hesitates, then, “In the old land, in the old days, it was easier then.”
“You could bind the ka of a man to his body for five thousand years,” said Jacquel. “Binding or loosing. But that was a long time ago.” He took all the organs that he had removed and replaced them, respectfully, in the body cavity. He replaced the intestines and the breastbone and pulled the skin edges near each other. Then he took a thick needle and thread and, with deft, quick strokes, he sewed it up, like a man stitching a baseball: the cadaver transformed from meat into girl once again.
“I need a beer,” said Jacquel. He pulled off his rubber gloves and dropped them into the bin. He dropped his dark brown overalls into a hamper. Then he took the cardboard tray of jars filled with little red and brown and purple slices of the organs. “Coming?”
They walked up the back stairs to the kitchen. It was brown and white, a sober and respectable room that looked to Shadow as if it had last been decorated in 1920. There was a huge Kelvinator rattling to itself by one wall. Jacquel opened the Kelvinator’s door, put the plastic jars with their slivers of spleen, of kidney, of liver, of heart, inside. He took out three brown bottles. Ibis opened a glass-fronted cupboard, removed three tall glasses. Then he gestured for Shadow to sit down at the kitchen table.
Ibis poured the beer and passed a glass to Shadow, a glass to Jacquel. It was a fine beer, bitter and dark.
“Good beer,” said Shadow.
“We brew it ourselves,” said Ibis. “In the old days the women did the brewing. They were better brewers than we are. But now it is only the three of us here. Me, him, and her.” He gestured toward the small brown cat, fast asleep in a cat-basket in the corner of the room. “There were more of us, in the beginning. But Set left us to explore, what, two hundred years ago? Must be, by now. We got a postcard from him from San Francisco in 1905, 1906. Then nothing. While poor Horus…” He trailed off, in a sigh, and shook his head.
“I still see him, on occasion,” said Jacquel. “On my way to a pickup.” He sipped his beer.
“I’ll work for my keep,” said Shadow. “While I’m here. You tell me what you need doing, and I’ll do it.”
“We’ll find work for you,” agreed Jacquel.
The