Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk [Palahniuk, C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: [2010.01.06]
Publisher: [Côte d’Azur]
Published: 2004-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

∨ Haunted ∧

Chapter 12

It’s Sister Vigilante who finds the body. She’s coming down the lobby stairs, from the first-balcony foyer, from turning on the lights in the projection booth, when she stumbles over Miss America’s pink exercise wheel gripped between two dead-white hands.

There, in the video camera’s little viewing screen, the Duke of Vandals’s stretched out at the foot of the lobby stairs, his fringed buckskin shirttails hanging out, his blond hair fanned out, facedown on the blue carpet. The pink plastic wheel is between his hands. One side of his face is stomped flat, the hair pasted down in every direction with blood.

The royalties to our story split one less way.

Sister Vigilante, she had the video camera. Getting around in the dark, Mr. Whittier had used a flashlight, but now the old batteries were as dead as him and Lady Baglady. Now Sister Vigilante used the camera spotlight, with its rechargeable batteries, to find her way up and down the stairs before dawn, and after dark.

“Subarachnoid hemorrhage,” Sister Vigilante says, her words recorded as she pans the camera over the body. “With partial avulsion of the left cerebellar hemisphere.” Saying, It’s the most common sequela of massive head trauma. She zooms in for a close-up of the compound skull fracture, the bleeding inside the outer layers of the brain.

“As you press the skull in one spot,” she says, “the contents swell around that location and burst the skull in a rough circle.”

The camera roving over the sharp edges and dried red on the skull, Sister Vigilante’s voice says, “The outbending is extensive…”

The camera comes up to show the rest of us, staggering into the lobby, yawning and squinting into the spotlight.

Mrs. Clark looks down at the sprawled buckskin body of the Duke, his cud of nicotine gum—plus all his teeth—knocked halfway across the lobby floor. And her inflated lips squeak out a little scream.

Miss America says, “The bastard.” She steps over to the body and kneels to pry the stiff, dead fingers off the black rubber grips of the exercise wheel. “He was trying to lose more weight than the rest of us,” she says. “The evil shit was doing aerobics to look …worse.”

As Miss America wrestles and kicks at the stiff fingers, Mrs. Clark says, “Rigor mortis.”

As Miss America pulls the body to one side, twisting the wheel to free it from the hands, as she pulls, the body turns faceup. The Duke of Vandals, his face is dark as a sunburn, but purple except for the tip of his nose. The tips of his chin and nose and the flat of his forehead are all blue-white.

“Livor mortis,” Mrs. Clark says. The blood settles to the lowest points of the body. Except where the face pressed into the carpet: at those points the weight of the body kept the capillaries collapsed, so no blood could pool inside.

From behind the video camera, Sister Vigilante says, “You sure seem to know a lot about dead bodies…”

And Mrs. Clark says, “Just

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