The Bone Yard and Other Stories Read online

  “Nicola?” he said.

  “I can’t. You have to leave us alone, Jason.”

  She hung up.

  A man had entered the room. Frost did not know him. He was a handsome, living man wearing nothing but a blue towel. The man said something. Nicola nodded. Nicola kissed him, running her hands through his wet hair. He responded by hitching up her dress around her waist and lifted her off the carpet - her legs fastened around his hips as he carried her towards the hallway ... and the stairs leading up to the master bedroom. The blue towel was left behind.

  Oh, Nicola, why? Why him?

  You should never have revived me.

  It was starting to rain.

  How appropriate, he thought.

  *

  Standing on a bridge over a section of the M25, he considered suicide. Suicide among the dead was one solution to eternal existence - but jumping off the bridge was no guarantee of success. If it failed he would be a horrific mess still existing in a devastated body. A passing truck would probably just smash his bones and leave him in a filleted body. Suicide was stupid, he knew. After all, he was not depressed. That was another emotion he was also incapable of feeling. The serotonin levels in his brain mattered nothing to his state of mind. Destroying himself would solve nothing. So he returned to his car, vowing not to take the coward’s way out. A sensible answer had to be available.

  He went in search of emotions. Emotions were the key to winning back his family from the usurper wearing the blue towel. The top expert in the field of post-life thought-processes was the inventor of biofluid, Professor Stuart V Badenhoff. For the next seven days, Badenhoff was holding lectures at Cambridge.

  *

  “I believe sentience and emotion can’t exist in separation. You can’t be human with only a functioning brain. You need the outside world to provide pleasurable and non-pleasurable input ...”

  Frost sat at the back of the lecture hall, wearing sunglasses. It was two weeks since he’d lost his friends. The BLP were getting stronger, openly destroying the dead and wrecking revival clinics. Hard-line dead and their supporters were fighting back by killing the living and making them join their ranks or die at the hands of their ex-allies. Frost was pretending to be alive, so he could move around in daylight. Professor Badenhoff was the leading figure in the new science of necro-psychology, a man the BLP and several religious leaders considered the Antichrist. He was maybe the one man in the world who could help Frost rediscover his emotions. The lecture covered the properties of biofluid in some depth, boring to the layman, like Frost. At the end of the lecture, the professor invited questions from the audience. A few tentative students asked challenging questions, then Frost stood up:

  “Sir, is it possible to recreate emotions by stimulation of the cerebral cortex by artificial means?”

  “A good question! I would say yes and no. Yes, it is possible. No, it isn’t possible yet. If you had listened properly to my lecture you would know the biofluid I invented is incompatible with the endocrine system of a living person. That is why the living can’t be granted immortality by a simple injection of biofluid, but I do foresee a time when the living and the dead will be indistinguishable. Soon the dead will just look like normal people. The problem of eye-adaptation to light is one I am currently working on in leaps and bounds. In fact, I have a theory the dead person’s brain will eventually adjust to the absence of these emotion triggers by finding new pathways to produce them as time goes by, in much the same way a child’s cognitive skills improve with age. Is that all?”

  “No. How long will it take for this step?”

  “Ten, twenty years. The time will be nothing for the dead, who after all feel nothing.”

  You don’t know what you’re talking about, Frost thought.

  Two days later Professor Badenhoff was destroyed by a BLP bomb left in his Mercedes. Nothing was left of him to be resurrected.

  Frost did not shed a tear.

  *

  And so he wandered far and wide, searching for the answers that would make him live again. Badenhoff was not the only expert. He had been the pioneer, sure, but his followers were in every university and research laboratory, working for an answer to the emotion problem. Billions of dollars, pounds, marks and yen were there for the taking, if only the strike of genius sparked. Frost spoke to experts, becoming more and more informed as he did so. What he learnt was not good.

  Unfortunately, Badenhoff’s ten to twenty years estimate for a breakthrough looked optimistic. Nobody really understood biofluid, with its weird quantum-mechanical properties. It was like electricity to a Neanderthal, a great mystery that didn’t really belong in that time. Fifty years was more likely than twenty. By the time biofluid II was on the market, Caitlin would be grown up and Nicola remarried.

  He would have lost the very reasons for living.

  *

  The article was in the Fortean Times. After he’d read it, he read it again. Then he checked the publication date to make sure it was not an April Fool’s joke. It was not. There was one woman exploring the edge of science, a Californian scientist who claimed to have created positive results on 56 test subjects out of 200. She said she could make the dead laugh for real. The ordinary scientific community considered Dr Sarah Sifuentes a New Age crank, but through heavy use of the Internet Frost discovered intriguing anecdotal evidence supporting her claims: video-recordings of dead people smiling and laughing and reporting emotions. A call to the Fortean Times verified the reference sources as genuine. They came from the Sifuentes Institute in Southern California.

  He phoned Sifuentes.

  “I’ll certainly try to help you, Mr Frost,” she said. “I need volunteers all the time. But you’ll have to signs some papers.”

  “Papers?”

  “I have to warn you the treatment works in just over 25% of the case studies done so far, with varying results. You see, if it fails you’ll have a serious chance of non-recovery.”

  “You mean permanent death?”

  “I’m afraid so,” she said.

  “What’s the odds?”

  “Well, 84 subjects died on the operating table. 16 lost all memory functions and are in comas.”

  He could not feel fear. Even if he could have done, he doubted it would have altered his response. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Have the papers ready.”

  *

  “What’ll we’ll be doing is passing electricity through your skull into your brain and the biofluid. This has the effect of disturbing the natural properties of the fluid, creating micro-eddies and pockets of liquid with radical neurological effects. These areas seem to do something to the brain structure.”

  Frost nodded. He hoped he understood. He trusted Sarah Sifuentes because she clearly loved her work. They were in the operating room, which looked more like a study. Medical textbooks lined the shelves. He climbed up on the leather couch, resting his head on the soft cushions. “Doctor, can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “You mean is it for the money and fame?” She switched on a computer beside the couch, attaching wires to his forehead. “The answer’s no.”

  “Then why?”

  “My husband died of cancer,” she said. The memory made her pause. “Tommy-Lee was one of the first people to be given Badenhoff’s biofluid. It worked, but he wasn’t the same man after. There was no vitality left in him. One day, I found a note on the kitchen table. It was a suicide note.”

  “What did it say?”

  “‘I was reborn without a soul. I can’t steal yours.’ LAPD found him in a ravine. He’d killed himself with his gun. He used all of the bullets because it was so hard to destroy enough of his brain to stop existing. He didn’t want to come back a zombie.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Stay still, please,” she said. “This will take an hour.”

  *

  “How do you feel?”

  “I ...
don’t know.”

  Sarah Sifuentes led him outside. His head buzzed, motes of coloured light dancing before his eyes as the brightness disturbed his vision. The laboratory faced an arcing stretch of a white beach surrounded by thrashing ocean. It was a hot day, the sky pure white. The ocean roared. Blond surfers rode the waves a hundred metres from the shore.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Hot.”

  “That isn’t an emotion. How do you feel?”

  He knew the scene was beautiful. He knew it, but he could not feel it. “It isn’t working.”

  “There are some tests I’d like to perform,” she said, quietly.

  *

  “Well?” he asked, much later.

  “The results are negative. I can’t explain it. The biofluid has changed, but your emotions haven’t returned. In other patients this led to rapid development of emotions. I’m at a loss to explain it. It’s as if you’re blocking the treatment subconsciously. I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks for trying,” he said.

  He wished he could mean his words of gratitude.

  *

  Back in Britain, the motorway was empty of moving traffic. Glass crunched under Frost’s tyres as he drove slowly and cautiously along the hard-shoulder, giving the wrecked cars a wide berth. The lanes were crammed with burnt-out cars, some still smoking. It looked as if a gigantic accident had happened extending for several miles, but if that was true why had the motorway not been shut down?

  He drove straight home.

  *

  He half-expected Blue Towel to open the door. But Nicola opened it. Her hair was unbrushed, and her mascara had formed deep shadows under her red-rimmed eyes.

  “You,” she said, a quiet accusation thrown tiredly in his direction.

  “Nicola?”

  She turned away. He asked her what was wrong but she either did not hear or did not want to respond. He followed her into the lounge, where she’d curled up on the sofa with a box of Kleenex on her lap. She pulled a tissue from the box and blew her nose. In the detached reality Frost was locked in, he noted a running nose was a side-effect of heavy crying. The shifting seas of consciousness broiled with disquiet.

  “Is it Blue Towel? Has he left you?”

  “Who?”

  He remembered she did not know he had been observing her. She did now.

  “If you mean Richard it has nothing to do with him. God, Jason, where have you been? Where were you yesterday?”

  “California,” he said. “Why?”

  “Don’t you know? There’s been a riot.”

  There was more to it, he saw. A riot in itself was not enough to upset his wife this severely.

  There was something she was not saying.

  “Tell me.”

  “It was the BLP and your pals the zombies. The troubled started in the middle of London and spread ...”

  Caitlin’s school. On the road to the town.

  “Caitlin? Is she okay?”

  “She’d DEAD, Jason. My baby’s dead, okay? A car hit her. A zombie was driving, trying to escape the BLP. My baby was killed instantly.” Her eyes hardened. “Are you happy now? Are you? Are you?” She launched herself at him, punching his chest, kicking his legs. He stood there, taking it. She punched and slapped him until sweat rolled down her face, and she kept at it for another five minutes. Panting, she went to the drinks cabinet and poured herself an overfilled tumbler of martini. She gulped it down, liquid splashing her chin and clothes. “And before you ask, Jason, I’m having her cremated tomorrow! She’s not becoming a zombie!”

  Let me feel something, he thought. My only daughter is dead. My wife is on the point of breakdown. Why can’t I feel the pain?

  The pain should have ripped him apart, but there was nothing, just a gaping void in his heart sucking the life out of the living.

  He wanted Caitlin alive. With emotions.

  “Wait, Nicola. There’s a doctor -”

  “Get out. I don’t want to hear. Get out.”

  “But -”

  “Get out.”

  He left.

  He phoned the hospital. “My daughter was brought in yesterday. Her name? Her name’s Caitlin Frost. Yes, I’m her father. You need proof?” He read out his National Insurance number. He didn’t mention he was dead. “Yes, I know she’s dead. I want to see her. Where is she being kept? Thank you. Goodbye.”

  His thinking was this: Dr Sifuentes could offer hope - a slight chance his Caitlin could become human again. But he would have to be fast - before she was taken out of the mortuary.

  First, he visited the hospital for the dead. The doctor who had treated him the last time provided a litre packet of biofluid in the naive belief it was for him.

  One litre would be sufficient for a child.

  *

  Caitlin had been stored in ice, as was the standard procedure, even when the body was going to be destroyed. She looked so small and vulnerable on the cold metal drawer. She’d died of internal bleeding; her lungs had filled with blood. He touched her wispy hair, which was stiff and frozen to her scalp. It was matted with blood. The doctors had not bothered to put her clothes back on. They were in a plastic bag, crisped by brown bloodstains.

  “I’d like to be alone with her,” he told the attendant.

  The man nodded and excused himself.

  Looking around the mortuary, he saw no one else. Frost took a syringe from his coat pocket and the biofluid from inside. He’d seen the resurrection process performed countless times, and he set out on the task quickly, injecting the biofluid in sites on her neck and spinal column, the needle sinking in the greyish skin time after time.

  That done, he wrapped her in his coat and carried her to the emergency exit.

  He reached the parking spaces before she started to stir. He set her down on the grass next to his car to allow the sunlight to heat the biofluid. Slowly, the signs of life returned. Her skin goose-fleshed and her muscles twitched as the biofluid saturated her cells.

  She opened her eyes. Her dead eyes.

  “Dad?” No emotion. Not yet, but there was a chance of it, with Dr Sifuentes’s treatment. “Dad?”

  He hugged her. Squeezed.

  “I’m here,” he said. “Forever.”

  Biofluid clicked into place, forming new brain patterns. A revelation.

  He felt something.

  Dear God - he felt something.

  Love.

  Monsters

  “Have you met Professor Frankenstein?”

  “No, no. He works here?”

  “But of course! He’s the head of research. It’s a tightly held secret, naturally. What with the war and everything …”

  “The war …”

  “Come, come, follow me …”

  *

  EXPERIMENTATION ROOM 52

  There was a smell in the air like ozone at the beach. I breathed it in with relish until I realised what was causing the smell.

  There were hundreds of Jews and Negroes in light-green tanks, floating in a preservative that seemed to glow. They were all wired up from head to toes with electrodes and optical cables. Blue-white flashes of electricity violently jerked the bodies. Computers recorded the information gathered with a quiet hum.

  Some of the experiments involved pieces of humans somehow kept alive against the odds. I could see a man sliced precisely in half writhing in the current like a dying fish. Another was no more than a brain connected to a spinal column. There was every variation in between.

  Curious, I approached the nearest tank and tapped the Plexiglas. It had to be at least twenty centimetres thick. I leapt backwards when a mottled face slammed against the Plexiglas and the eyes, such sad brown eyes, pleaded for mercy. He was a man stripped of flesh, his muscles exposed. The mouth opened and a gasp of trapped oxygen blurted out and bubbled on the surface.

  I knew what the man was saying. Help. Help me. He was no older than I was. But he was a Jew. I knew they were all subhuman, worse than animals, but –<
br />
  “Dr Kessler, we don’t have time to stand around gawking. Professor Frankenstein is waiting.”

  I blinked and focused on Dr Bauer. He had been my tutor at medical college in New Berlin. He was a plump blond man with the physical appearance of a man in his early thirties, though he was closer to eighty. He’d recently acquired the body of a brave SS commandant who had been killed on the Eastern Front, his brain ripped to shreds by a Russian headseeker.

  Stalin was using inhumane methods to kill our soldiers’ minds, then keeping their bodies for his own army. In 1945 the Americans had nuked Berlin and Bonn, forcing us underground. They’d expected us to give up, but then we’d stolen the atomic secrets and nuked New York and Moscow. Before more cities were wiped out on a tit-for-tat escalation, the Axis and Allied powers agreed to a ban of atomic weapons. Stalemate, of a sort.

  For fifty years the conventional war had raged on at sixteen fronts in the disputed territories. The Allies controlled the Americas, Australia, South Africa, Russia … We controlled Europe, the Middle East, China and North Africa. Now it looked like we would lose North Africa …

  We had to fight back. That was where the institute came in. And Bauer. He was a genetics genius. He probably knew more about the subject than Frankenstein. I’d known Bauer as witty and caring man, always with time for his students, unlike many of the doctors. His star student, I’d enjoyed dinners with his family. I’d always known he did top-secret research for the Reich … Until that moment, I had not known what his research entailed.

  It looked like torture, simple torture. Somehow, I had imagined he used mindless corpses for his experiments. How naïve! I was twenty-four-years-old and I knew nothing. By calling me Dr Kessler and not Christian, Bauer was showing his annoyance with my childish behaviour.