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You sit in the hospital cafeteria and sip a coffee. You haven’t slept in days, the dark circles under your eyes steadily spreading. If you don’t sleep soon they might engulf your whole face. You know you reek too, you haven’t showered and you’ve almost finished the pack of cigarettes you found in the pocket of Corey’s leather jacket, even tho you’d never smoked before Monday. None of that matters to you though. There’s something much more important on your mind.
You check your phone. She’s late. You bounce your leg anxiously and scan the room for her. Finally you see her striding towards you.
“Oh my god,” she says when she sees you, voice full of concern. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
You let out a dry little laugh. “I barely recognize myself.”
“I heard what happened to Corey Cunningham. You guys were dating? I’m really sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks. That’s actually why I wanted to meet you. I know you can find out what’s happening with his body.”
The woman sitting across from you is Emily, a friend you’d made in nursing school. When you met she was already a nurse, but studying to be a pathologist, and had been the TA for your anatomy class. You had asked her a lot of questions over coffee during that semester, trying to be a good student, and a bond had formed between you in the process. You don’t hang out much, but she’s one of the only people in Haddonfield you trust. Now she works for the county morgue, where you know they took Corey’s body after the events on Halloween.
“His body?” She asks, surprised.
“Yeah. His parents are dead and he wasn’t in contact with any other family members. I know I don’t have any legal standing, we weren’t dating very long before he died, but I should be his next of kin and I want to decide what happens to his body.”
“If you have no legal standing to claim his body and they can’t get in contact with someone who does, the county will probably just cremate him on the cheap and scatter his ashes in the Illinois River.”
“No!” You exclaim, sounding more forceful than you meant to. “He wouldn’t have wanted to be cremated, I know he wouldn’t.” You say more calmly.
It’s not true. You have no idea what Corey would have wanted. But you know what you want, and you need his body to be fully intact. You pray they didn’t autopsy him.
“Well, I can do some digging for you, but if he’s scheduled for cremation already there’s probably nothing we can do.”
“Thank you, Emily.”
“Are you gonna be okay? You can call me if you need anything. I know you’ve been through a lot and this whole thing is terrible. I’m here if you need me.” She does look genuinely sad and concerned about you. It breaks through the shell you’ve been wearing the past few days, and you feel a single tear run down your face. “I gotta go, I only had a couple minutes free, but I’ll let you know as soon as I can,” she says as she stands up from the table.
You watch her walk away. Then you pound back what’s left of your coffee and go home.
Home isn’t really home right now. You’re staying with Lindsey. You can’t bear to be in your grandmother’s house with that big dark stain where Corey bled. You know exactly why the Allens abandoned their house after Jeremy died, haunted by the trauma they endured, and constantly reminded by that unholy discoloration on the foyer floor.
In the parking lot you pull his cigarettes out of the pocket of his jacket. You’ve scarcely taken it off since you put it on to go meet him on Halloween. Wearing his jacket feels like he’s still with you, just a little bit, and smoking his cigarettes does too. But to your dismay, there’s only two left in the box, and you can’t smoke the last one, it’s his lucky. You put them back in your pocket for now.
When you get to Lindsey’s house, you write her a note. You don’t think you’ll still be here when she gets home, but you feel bad leaving without saying goodbye. You’ve already said all your other goodbyes, meeting your grandma earlier in the day. Lindsey’s the only one left. You appreciate her letting you stay, and giving you full access to everything in her house. You stick the note to her fridge with a magnet. Then you go gather some sticks from outside. You tie them together with string, breaking them to the right length and crossing them over each other so they look vaguely like a person.
Your phone rings. Emily.
“That was fast,” You say instead of Hello.
“He’s scheduled for cremation tomorrow. If you want to see him, you can come to the morgue right now, but you gotta be quick, I’m only alone down here for a little while. As far as preventing the county from going through with the cremation, there’s paperwork you can fill out, but I don’t know if you’ll be able to file it in time to stop them.”
“Okay, I’m coming. I’ll see you in a couple minutes.” You hang up, jump in your car, and speed towards the morgue.
When you get there, the receptionist tries to make you sign in as a visitor. You’re tempted to give a fake name but she asks for your ID. You really didn’t want there to be a record of you being here. You pat your pockets stupidly and tell her you think you left your wallet in the car. You walk back outside and call Emily.
She tells you to come to the back and she’ll let you in the service entrance. It makes her nervous to do so but she can understand, the way this town talks, not wanting your name on the morgue sign in sheet. You drive your car to the back of the building and park with your back end facing the door. Emily ushers you in, down some long hallways, and finally to the room with all the drawers for bodies. It looks exactly how it does on tv, you think.
She leads you to a specific drawer.
“Are you sure you’re ready to see him?” She asks, eyebrows knit together in concern.
“I was there when he died, I can handle seeing him dead.”
“A fresh body is different from one that’s been in storage for several days. He won’t quite look like… himself.”
“I’m ready. Show me.”
Emily purses her lips like she doesn’t believe you, but she unlatches the door and pulls the drawer out.
She was right, you weren’t ready. Your vision tunnels and you’re losing your balance. You think you feel yourself wailing, but you don’t hear any sound. Emily runs around the drawer to catch you as your knees give out. She locks you in her arms and you sob into her chest.
“Shhh. I’m so sorry,” she says soothingly. “I can push the drawer back in while you face away”
“No. I have to see him.” You pull away from her and wipe your tears. Then you brace yourself and turn back to his body.
Corey, this thing that used to be Corey, lays flat on his back, eyes wide open, looking straight up. His curly hair is splayed out limply around his head. His beautiful pink lips are ashen and deflated. The holes where he was stabbed and shot are clean and bloodless, but they gape wide open with ragged edges and you can see inside his body. As a nurse and as a survivor of so much violence, the wounds wouldn’t bother you if they were fresh and flowing with hot, red blood. But seeing them like this turns your stomach.
Despite your nausea, you lean down and look at him more closely. Thankfully he hasn’t been autopsied or embalmed. You take his face between your hands and his head lolls wrongly on his broken neck. You plant a gentle kiss on the tip of his nose.
“Help me get him out of here,” you say.
“What!?”
“If I can’t file the paperwork to have his body released to me in time, I’m just going to take him. I have blankets in my car we can wrap him in.”
Emily sighs your name. “That’s not a good idea. What are you going to do with him?”
“I’m gonna bring him back,” you say, finally looking up from his face.
“You what?” She replies, eyes wide.
“I’m gonna bring him back! I’ve been doing research on how. I think I have it figured out. Listening to Willy the Kid spew all his bullshit about how Corey and Michael were the tools of some evil cult… it got me thinking. I know they weren’t, I know there’s no cult, but what if the kind of magic he was talking about is real. Lindsey’s gotten into witchcraft since she survived. Everyone knows she reads tarot, but that’s not all she does. I’ve been staying with her. She has all these books I’ve been reading.”
“You’re not making sense,” Emily says. “You’re grieving, you lost your parents, and your boyfriend, and now you’ve lost another boyfriend, and you helped kill a man. You’ve been through so much, I understand this coping mechanism but -”
“You’re not listening to me!” you hiss, cutting her off. “I killed a frog. I trapped it in Lindsey’s garden and I stabbed a knife straight through it. Then I combined some of the spells and techniques I’d been reading about. And the frog came back. It hopped away like nothing happened.”
Emily says your name quietly. “Please, listen to yourself,” she begs. “You’re not okay.”
“You don’t have to believe me! You don’t have to help me! Just stay out of my fucking way!” You wrap your arms around Corey’s shoulders, cradling his ragdoll head, and try to pull him out of the drawer.
“Stop! Stop stop stop,” Emily cries, pulling your arms from around him. She restrains you for a moment, then she sighs and releases you. “I’ll help you take him. Let’s go get the blankets from your car.”
The two of you sprint down the hallways. She props the door open while you get a big bundle of blankets out of your backseat. Then you run back to the room where Corey still lays in his half open drawer. You drape the blankets over an autopsy table and roll it to him. Emily shows you how she was taught to move bodies by herself, gently sliding him onto the table. Then you tuck and fold the blankets around his body, almost like swaddling a baby.
Emily pushes the autopsy table back down the hallways and out the back door. You practice the technique she showed you to move his body from the autopsy table to your backseat by yourself. It’s more difficult than she made it look, but hopefully you’ll only have to do it a couple times.
“I can’t thank you enough,” you say, closing your car door.
“No, you can’t,” she says, and laughs a little. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna tell my boss.”
“I’m sorry I put you in that position,” you say. “I’m confident you’ll think of something believable.” You reach out and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Good luck with your reanimation.” She says it like she means it but her face looks more like she’s telling you not to touch a hot stove.
You smile despite her concern. Then you get in your car and drive away.
You only go a couple miles before pulling into a gas station. You take your person-shaped bundle of sticks out of the glove box. When you put your hand on Emily’s shoulder, you’d plucked one of her long, golden hairs off her shirt. You tie it onto the bundle of sticks, and then you unspool most of a roll of medical tape, wrapping it around the poppet you made and chanting.
“I bind you, Emily. From telling anyone that I took Corey’s body. From telling anyone what I said about bringing him back. I bind you from trying to contact me, or Lindsey, or Grandma.” You repeat it over and over, focusing hard, imagining her trying to tell someone what happened, but red ropes coming from nowhere and wrapping her up so she can’t. You feel sort of bad doing it, but it’s what needs to be done to protect you and Corey in your new lives.
Then you go into the store and buy as many bags of ice as you can carry at once. You pile them in the backseat on top of Corey’s body. You move the car to a pump and fill up. With a full tank of gas, you leave the station and just drive.
You don’t know where you’re going. You and Corey hadn’t gotten the chance to talk about where you’d go to start your new life together. But it doesn’t matter that much. Right now you just need to get distance between you and Haddonfield. Once he’s back you can iron out all the other details.
You keep the heat turned down kind of low even when your knuckles get stiff and painful inside your gloves. You have to prolong the life of the ice as much as you can. When you come to a crossroads in an empty little midwestern nowhere, you toss the poppet you made of Emily out the window. Goodbye, friend. Thank you for everything.
When you notice yourself starting to drift off to sleep, and in turn, off the road, you take an exit that advertises a super 8, and get a room. It pains you deeply but you leave Corey in the car while you take a shower and sleep for a little over an hour. You really needed the rest, and you had to wait until there would be fewer witnesses.
When you wake it’s early morning, the sky mostly inky blue but already purple-gray on the edges. You go out to the car and gather up all the ice. The bags leak a little, but the cold outside has persevered most of it. You dump a little less than half of it into the bathtub. Then you go back outside to get him. The distance between your car and the door to your room is as short as it could be, but still longer than you had to carry him at the morgue. He’s not that much bigger than you, but he feels enormous in your exhausted arms as you fight to get him across the threshold.
As soon as the door is closed you collapse, dropping Corey on top of you. You break down crying.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry we didn’t leave sooner. I should’ve listened to you, I should’ve left work to come to you. You were right, I didn’t have enough bandages to keep you together. I’m sorry I didn’t. But I do now. We’re out of Haddonfield and everything’s going to be okay.” You ramble to the bundle of blankets pinning you to the floor. Stroking where you think his cheeks are underneath.
You pull yourself out from under him, unwrap him from the bundle of blankets and, mustering every ounce of strength you have left, you get him off the floor and into the bathtub. You pour the rest of the ice over him. You want to get started, right now, but after you’d brought the frog back you’d been so hungry and tired from the amount of effort it took. You know you won’t be successful with Corey if you’re not better rested, and he deserves you at your best. So you go back into the bedroom and sleep again.
This time when you wake, it’s been far longer than an hour. You don’t know what time it is, you’ve had your phone turned off since you went into the morgue, and you don’t want to turn it on until your ritual is complete. It’s dark outside again, fully dark, but brightly illuminated by the full moon. You didn’t time it to the moon on purpose, but it feels like an incredible omen that it’s full tonight of all nights. You walk across the street to a brightly glowing Denny’s and order a massive spread to go. Pancakes, grits, eggs, bacon and sausage, French fries, burgers, slices of pie, coffee and soda and tea.
You nibble on some of it, eating an okay sized meal, but you leave most of it alone. Corey will probably be hungry when he gets back and you want to be sure you’ll have something he’ll want to eat.
It’s finally time. You sit on your knees beside the bathtub, everything you need around you. You light the last cigarette besides the lucky one and take a deep drag. You know Corey, who had been through so much shit, took great stock in turning one cigarette filter down in every new pack, and waiting to smoke it until all the others were gone. He didn’t believe it really did anything lucky, but opening the pack and seeing it there soothed him somehow. You’re saving it for when he gets back.
First, you open a little jar of a potion you made out of things from Lindsey’s kitchen. It’s olive oil based, but it has a texture like butter from being in the cold car. You scoop some up in your fingers and smear it into his wounds. The way they look still makes you feel sick, but you power through the waves of disgust to pack them full of the potion.
The frog story you told Emily wasn’t the whole truth. You’d killed three frogs. The first one you couldn’t bring back. It twitched like it was considering it, but ultimately decided not to. The second one you brought back easily, but you didn’t do anything about the stab wound you inflicted on it, and as it hopped away, its guts fell out and it died again. The third frog you’d given this potion and sutured its wounds closed. It came back to life more easily than the other two and survived the night. You’d seen it the next morning, wounds already almost fully healed, seemingly exactly the same as before you’d trapped it.
You tell yourself Corey will be just like the third frog as you open a fresh suture needle and sew his wounds closed. After his neck and his shoulder are taken care of, you check his left hand, knowing his stitches had been torn out and he’d started showing signs of infection. It’s the worst looking wound by far and you have to fight your reflexes hard to even touch it. But you do what needs to be done. You give him a shot of antibiotics from a bottle you stole from work. You want it to start circulating the second his heart starts beating again.
Now is the moment of truth. You close your eyes and put your hands on him. You recite the spell you wrote, cobbled together from fragments from Lindsey’s books. You imagine Corey’s spirit, existing somewhere in the dark. While your mouth moves, repeating the words over and over again, you imagine your consciousness going to find him.
In your head, you walk through a black void. The echo of your footsteps is the only sensory input. Where are you, Corey? Then you see him. Standing in front of you, back turned. You move to stand next to him and take his hand. He looks at you with his big brown eyes and smiles.
“Come with me,” you say and take a step forward. Corey stands still. You step backwards to stand next to him again. “Corey, come with me.”
You fight to stay calm as you try repeatedly to get him to come with you. He smiles at you sweetly but refuses to follow you, standing there with his hand limply in yours until you walk so far ahead of him he slips out of your grasp.
“Come with me! Come with me, Corey, please!” You beg him, tugging on his arm. Tears stream down your real life face from under your closed eyelids, your physical mouth still chanting your spell. “Everything will be okay, you just have to come with me!” He doesn’t budge.
You open your eyes. There he is in the tub, surrounded by more water than ice as it melts slowly in the heat of the hotel room. Still just as dead. You shove your fist in your mouth and scream around it. Then you center yourself the best you can. Taking deep, shuddering breaths. You sit on the edge of the tub instead of on the ground beside it, and put your hands on his face instead of his chest. You don’t know if this matters. The frogs were so small you could just cup them in your hands. You close your eyes and start chanting again.
Just as before, you see Corey from behind. But this time he turns around to face you before you’re next to him. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey!” You launch yourself into his arms. He catches you in a hug and laughs. “Come with me!” You say excitedly. You feel him stirring in your real hands. “Everything will be okay if you just come with me.”
Suddenly his cheeks feel warm. You open your eyes, but don’t stop chanting until his eyes flutter closed, then open again.
“Corey?” You say.
He tries to say your name but all that comes out is a gurgling sound. You don’t know if it’s from the stab wound in his neck or the fact that his vocal cords have been sitting dry and unused for almost a week now.
“Don’t speak! It’s okay.” You lean down and put your ear to his chest. You hear his heart beating extremely faintly. He shivers in the ice water. “Are you cold?” You ask. He groans.
You help him stand in the tub. His head rolls to one side, his neck healing, but still kind of broken. You dry him off and wrap him up in blankets. You should’ve brought something for him to wear, but it didn’t occur to you that he would be naked when you got him from the morgue. You keep one towel dry, and roll it up to use like a neck brace, sitting Corey upright in the bed and tucking the towel around him to keep his head upright while his body goes through the accelerated healing process brought on by the magic.
You hover over him, watching nervously. You’re scared that the spell will wear off somehow, that you should have practiced on something bigger than a frog first. Or dead longer. You feel as fragile as he looks, extremely spent from the power required by the spell. But his color slowly improves, going from gray to pink with the sky outside as the sun rises.
You ask if he’s hungry and present him with the feast you got at Denny’s. He eats it ravenously, sampling everything. He seems much better after that. Better enough to try talking again.
“What happened?” He asks, his voice a barely intelligible rasp.
“You died on Halloween. I watched the light leave your eyes. But I wasn’t going to start our new life without you,” you say. “I brought you back.”
“How?” He croaks.
“I know it sounds crazy, but I learned a spell. I don’t really understand how it works. But I found you and led you back to your body.”
“You still want me? I killed so many people.”
“No, Corey, Michael killed those people,” you say in a soothing tone. You smooth his hair. He starts to protest but you talk over him. “Michael killed those people. But my grandma and I killed Michael..”
Corey’s eyes widen. “Are you sure he’s really dead?”
“We put him in the shredder at the shop. He’s gone forever.” You smile and squeeze Corey’s hand. “With him gone, grandma let me go. We’re free now.”
You reach into your pocket and pull out the battered box of Marlboro Reds, flipping it open to show him the inside. “I smoked most of the cigarettes you left behind. But I saved you your lucky one. I knew it had to be the first one for when you came back.”
Corey reaches out and takes it from the box. You flick the lighter and hold it out to him. He leans forward and lights the cigarette. Watching him smoke it you can’t help but smile. Everything has been so hard for so long, but the cherry at the end of that cigarette looks like the light at the end of the tunnel.
Corey sleeps. You know he probably needs the rest to heal, to be all the way back. But it scares you. What if he doesn’t wake up? You drift off beside him but jerk awake to check on him over and over again.
The only place you can get him clothes nearby is a Tractor Supply Co but that’s good enough. You leave him in the hotel bed and race around the store. When you unlock the door to the room you’re so certain he’ll be dead again in there. But he isn’t. He’s still as you left him, watching the ancient TV set.
As Corey dresses in the clothes you bought him, and you clean up the room he gets a sensation like someone is watching him, but it’s different from the way that usually feels. It’s almost like the person watching him is inside him. Using his eyes to monitor where he is. He looks in the mirror. That’s him, looking back, but something about him isn’t right. He chalks it up to being reanimated. But he can’t help but wonder. If you could bring him back… How can it be true that Michael is gone forever?
Corey feels a strong, almost instinctive urge to cover his face.