Dead Boy
and the Other Picture of Dorian Grey
The cold woke Dead Boy. And Dead Boy didn’t feel the cold.
“Hi,” said Drew. “You’re Dead Boy, right?”
Dead Boy blinked back to consciousness to look at the girl who’d woken him from a dream about hungry worms. She was maybe twenty, with short ash-blonde hair and Irish-green eyes. She wore a grubby tank-top and faded jeans with holes in the knees. And she was transparent.
“You’re… a ghost?”
Drew put her hands on her hips. “Well, duh! Look, they told me you were the go-to guy for stuff like this. Are you sure you’re Dead Boy?”
“I didn’t know I could see ghosts.”
“Maybe this was a big mistake. I don’t think I’ve got much time. I can feel myself fading.”
Dead Boy brushed off the pile of newspapers he’d been sleeping under and scrambled to his feet. “No, it’s okay. Don’t go! I was just… well, y’know, a bit phased. I mean, ghosts!”
“You’re undead,” objected Drew. “Well, somewhere between alive and dead, anyway.”
“That’s just weird science,” shrugged Dead Boy. “I don’t even know if I believe in ghosts.”
Drew snorted. “Neither did I,” she admitted, “until I became one.”
Dead Boy tried to remember what to do when talking to a girl. He could hardly go and buy her dinner. “What can I do for you?” he wondered. “For that matter, who said I was the go-to guy? And go-to for what?”
Drew pointed over the windswept cemetery, past the rows of weed-choked grave-makers, to the dark ancient sepulchres over on the hill. “Some people over there. There was an old guy in a tartan dressing gown and carpet slippers. He said.”
“Said what?”
“Said you could help me find out who murdered me.”
Drew’s body didn’t look as good as her ghost. Mainly that was because her body was nailed down onto the floorboards of an old townhouse down in the Village, the bohemian rat’s nest of rotting houses that was the oldest part of Gothametropolis York. Cutting her throat had been a mercy, because after that somebody had taken the time to unwind quite a lot of her internal organs and scatter them around the floor.
“I really liked that top,” Drew complained, looking down at her sad butchered body. “That blood will never come out, y’know.”
“So did you see anything?” Dead Boy asked her, looking around the room for clues. The verdegrised sign on the front door proclaimed this the Gothametropolis York Museum of Local History, est. 1826, but all that was left was row upon row of empty shelves and dusty broken cabinets.
“Nope,” Drew sighed. “I’d hardly got off the bus. I was just looking round, wondering where the YWCA might be, when somebody pulled something over my head.”
“This, maybe?” Dead Boy wondered, pointing down to a piece of hessian sacking. “This is pretty old.” He looked at the stencilled printing on the side of the bag. “Carrington Stable Company?”
“Don’t ask me. I came to GMY yesterday to make my fortune. I don’t know the local businesses.”
“Carrington’s not in Gothametropolis. It’s the financial district of Paradopolis, across the river. At least it is now.”
“I know about Paradopolis. All my friends said move to there, it’s the modern 24 hour mega-city and all that stuff. But I thought Gothametropolis would be more romantic. It’s so much older, and the architecture’s got this brooding civic things going, y’know?” Drew looked down at herself. “On reflection, coming here might have been a mistake.”
Dead Boy examined the floor around the corpse. Where the blood hasn’t washed it away there were chalk markings, a complicated circular design with lettering in some runic language. “This looks like something occult, a ritual maybe?”
“Please don’t tell me I got chopped up in some cheesy magical summoning,” pleased Drew. “That’s so 1970s.”
“Are you sure about this?”
Drew nodded and pointed again at the Gothametropolis Central Post Office. “That’s the place. Some of my blood is in there. I can sense it.”
Dead Boy looked up at the huge, darkened building. Despite the sickle moon it had a sinister aspect, aided by the gargoyle-masked statues clinging to the windowsills and gutters. “Okay, just let me do some fiddling with the locks. Unless you want to just walk through the wall and look for yourself.”
“N-uh. I’m not going in there alone,” replied the ghost. “It’s spooky.”
“Fine. I’ll just… hey, the door’s open!”
The two undead crept cautiously into the darkened interior. Pale moonlight shone through high thin windows to splash over the faded marble magnificence of the post office. There was a dark patch in front of the parcel counter, where the blood from the new corpse had pooled.
“What?” Dead Boy exclaimed. “Another murdered girl?”
“I prefer to be described as a woman, actually,” snapped Melanie irritably. She walked through the counter and placed her hands on her hips challengingly. “Who the hell are you two?”
Dead Boy did a quick match of the new ghost and the remains of the body’s face and made a positive ID. “She’s victim number one,” he explained, gesturing a thumb over at Drew. “And I’m… a sort of consulting undead. What happened to you?”
“I dunno,” complained Melanie. “I was coming back too late on my own, I guess, from my night class. At the GMYU? Local history? And then somebody grabbed me from behind and dragged me into an alley.”
“Local history?” Dead Boy noted. “Have you ever heard of the Carrington Stable Company?”
“We haven’t got to the rise of Paradopolis yet,” Melanie confessed. “We’re still back in Gothametropolis’ glory days, when it was the major seaport and the big island across the river there was a mosquito-swamp.” She thought a bit more and seemed to brighten up a little. “I guess I don’t have to revise for the quiz next week now.”
Dead Boy examined the scene again. “I’m guessing they used the same knife on both of you. It had traces of Drew’s blood on it that she could track to here. Do you think either of you could sense where the knife is now, if they haven’t cleaned it?”
“So you’re kind of a walking zombie that does work for the government?” Melanie summarised as they walked down Baxter Street towards City Hall.
“I guess. I dunno. Do we have to talk about this right now?” Dead Boy answered. He was starting to feel a sense of urgency, and the four girl ghosts trailing behind him were spending more and more time bickering.
He’d picked up Lucy in the basement of an abandoned bakery in Hogan, and Janice’s body was hidden on the mudflats beneath Sheldon Bay Bridge. Now all the girls seemed drawn towards City Hall.
Dead Boy paused and looked in front of the two dozen steps up to the columned entrance of the much-rebuilt administrative heart of Gothametropolis. Five sleek limousine hearses were parked in the no-waiting zone, in the middle of the night. As he watched, six sombre men in mourning dress bore a coffin at shoulder height from the main entrance down towards the last of the vehicles. Another man in a frock coat and black top hat followed on.
“Stop!” shouted the dark-skinned transparent girl who trailed after them. “Stop them! They’re stealing my body!”
Dead Boy bounded over the road, vaulted the lead hearse, and confronted the undertakers. “Excuse me. I think you might be tampering with some evidence.”
The morticians looked up at him, and Dead Boy saw the parchment flesh on their corpse faces.
“Crap,” swore Dead Boy as they laid the coffin down and lurched at him. The doors of the hearses opened and five more undead undertakers glided forwards.
Dead Boy did a quick calculation of the odds. They weren’t good.
The senior mortician hung back as his eleven colleagues kept the intruder occupied. He twisted his fingers into a complicated position and intoned an ancient sibilant spell to freeze a zombie in his tracks.
Dead Boy stopped moving.
“Do something,” demanded Drew.
Dead Boy didn’t speak.
The senior mortician came up to Dead Boy. Beneath the flesh-coloured makeup powder he too had the sallow paleness of a cadaver. He smelled of formaldehyde. “Well well,” he whispered. “It’s been some time since anybody seriously tried to stop us.”
“Quite a while?” Drew echoed. “What do you mean?” but the morticians gave no sign of being able to see her or the other murdered spirits.
“You’re probably wondering why you are about to die,” the undertaker said to Dead Boy. “I mean truly die, shredded to gobbets no bigger than a penny. Maybe you’ll still be conscious for eternity even after that, but you’ll certainly not be back to bother us.”
“This isn’t good,” worried Drew. “I thought you knew how to deal with this kind of stuff?”
“Have you read Oscar Wilde?” the mortician wondered. “The Picture of Dorian Grey? Grey keeps a portrait of himself hidden away. No matter what wickedness he does, what excesses he goes to, he remains young and beautiful. His picture bears the sins and scars in his stead, becoming old and corrupted and pustulent.”
“I think I might have seen the movie of this,” considered Lucy.
“Imagine then, a century and a half ago, the founder of a city making a similar arrangement,” the undertaker suggested. “Two thriving metropoli competing across the water. One old and established, the other new and thrusting. And the new city’s founder, Mayor Wilbur Parody, arranging to keep his creation ever spotless and bright.”
“Who… are… you?” Dead Boy snarled.
“We are unimportant. Agents of the Westminster Necropolis Company, which was employed lo those many years ago to renew the rituals in due season. As we have done tonight.”
“You creepy bastards!” shouted Drew, pointlessly.
“Parody is gone, but his commission remains; and our company is punctilious in its responsibilities and contractual obligations.”
“That is so gross,” Melanie hissed.
“And now, unless you have any more questions, we shall destroy you and conclude our business for another decade,” the senior undertaker told Dead Boy.
“Just… one…” Dead Boy snarled. “Can you zombie undertakers still function if your spine is snapped?” And he reached forward, grabbed the senior mortician by the cheeks, and spun his head backwards until there was a nasty crack.
The mortician toppled to the floor. His head rolled off and he crumbled to dust.
“Guess you can’t,” noted Dead Boy. He pushed back and topped the two morticians who were coming at him from behind, flipped over and snapped another backbone with a sudden kick.
The undead seemed somewhat taken aback. “What?” Dead Boy demanded as he jumped forward to fight them, “I wasn’t made by magic. None of that spell stuff works on me. But it did get your boss to explain the plot. And now it’s dusting time!”
“Almost dawn,” Drew said, looking out past Funfair Island to the pink smear on the eastern horizon.
“’Fraid so,” Dead Boy agreed.
“Well, thanks for talking with me while I waited,” Drew told him. “And for, y’know, killing those things that murdered me as well.”
“I think I’ll have to warn a few people to be on the lookout again in ten years,” Dead Boy pondered. “Although I wonder who those people in the All Saints Cemetery were that pointed you to me in the first place?”
“Paradopolis was kind of like an undead, sucking the life-blood out of GMY, wasn’t it?” said Drew . “It’s grown beautiful while Gothametropolis has turned ugly. It’d be nice to think this old city had some guardians watching over hit.”
“Yeah.”
Drew suddenly shuddered and looked up as the first rays of sun broke over the waters. “Dawn,” she gasped. "I think it's time!"
“Drew?”
The ghost girl’s eyes widened. “Oh!” she breathed, staring at something Dead Boy couldn’t see, her face bright in the morning’s glow. Then she melted like the mist on the river.
Dead Boy watched the sunrise but the heat of the sun didn’t warm his skin. He couldn’t breathe in the morning’s sea-tang or feel the wind.
After a while he walked away back towards the Cemetery.
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Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2003 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2003 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
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