The Cold Room

Cathy lived alone. The house was much too big for her, and much too empty, but it suited her purposes. There was a cold room in the basement, which she considered to be of the utmost necessity. Her father had left the house to her when he died. She was his only child, his only family, for that matter. Cathy’s mother had died before Cathy had known her, or before she could form memories, anyway. Cathy was twenty-one years old when her father passed. She was twenty-three now. Her father had loved her more than anything in the world.

Cathy was a desairologist. That meant she cut the hair and nails of dead people. Cathy considered what she did to be art. Most people wrinkled their noses at it. Cathy didn’t have many friends, but she didn’t think it was because of the desairology. The human body is the most beautiful canvas, the most beautiful thing one could shape, she thought.

On the same night her father died she found herself trimming his hair and nails, daubing his face with pale makeup. The night was dark, and she was the last person left in the mortuary. Some of her coworkers had offered to stay with her, but she had politely declined. She knew they didn’t really want to stay; they were just trying to be nice. Most people would not have liked to be the last person left in a mortuary, alone with all the sleeping dead, but Cathy didn’t mind. She had done such a good job of touching up her father that she almost didn’t recognize him. She stood up to examine her work. The old man lay, hands clasped over his stomach, swaddled in a velvet cot. Death had grasped him in its cold claws. He had been a stern man in life, but in death he looked serene. Cathy had loved him more than anything in the world. She had not cried about him yet, and still she did not feel like doing so. Death fascinated her. She closed the casket, hasped it with only the slightest air of finality, and turned to leave. She was collecting her coat from the coat rack when the idea came to her, planted its spore, grew and grew. A wonderful idea. 

By the time she had left the mortuary, nearly half an hour later, the casket was closed and locked. And the casket was empty. The old man lay shuddering stupidly in the bumpy trunk of her SUV. She had smuggled him out into the cool dark night.

This was how the cold room in Cathy’s basement came to be filled with beautiful corpses.

* * *

Cathy didn’t see anything wrong with what she was doing. She helped people leave their old lives behind, saved them from death, from obscurity. They came to be specimens in her museum, her own private monument to perfection. Such was the nature of her profession, as she saw it. And after the final visitations, nobody would see the body again, anyway. It would be sealed away for all time, or cremated, charred to unrecognizable bits. It would be a waste to destroy her good work, sinful, even. Like stealing a fresh manuscript from Hemingway’s hands and shoving it promptly into a paper shredder. The bodies being cremated were harder to steal; you needed convincing ash. But nobody knew if you buried an empty casket. And Cathy was always careful. Very, very careful.

The bodies lined the cold room floor, staring up at the grey ceiling. At first she had tried standing them up, propping them against the wall, against one another. But she found that they looked too much like people, not enough like canvases. There was a bright white light in the room that could be turned on or off by pulling on a long, thin, dangling bit of string. The light reflected off the ghostly, well-oiled faces of the corpses with their perfect hair and nails. Sometimes Cathy stood there and simply admired them, until she got too cold. They looked like perfect paintings in the light. She only wished there was someone she could show them too. All of their eyes were propped permanently open, staring. Except for her father. For some reason, unbeknownst even to her, she had shut his eyes. When she admired the corpses she tried not to look at him. Sometimes, though, when she kneeled on the hard cement of the cold room, tinkering away at a pale sculpture, her eyes lingered on his serene, glacial form.

She had known he was aging, but she had never thought it could really happen. That he could really up and leave her. That he could really cease to exist. But he hadn’t ceased to exist. He instead lay, perennially serene, a silver statue on the floor of his old cold room in his old basement. 

After Cathy’s father’s death a fog had come across her vision, a heavy grey mist coating everything she saw. When she tried to think back on happy memories with her father the fog was there, too. Soon the fog had invaded all her memories, like some supernal creature come to torment her, stealing color from the world. The fog only dispersed, Cathy found, when exposed to the seething bright light of the cold room.

A peculiar thing about the fog was its ability to cloud the difference between the living and the dead. Perhaps, Cathy thought, it was her exposure to both that had changed her. But she had never had any trouble before her father passed. At work, she could often not distinguish between her living, breathing coworkers, and the bodies she touched up, trimming their nails and hair, daubing them with a final coat of light makeup. In her dreams, frigid bodies took the place of living characters. They walked and talked as though they were alive. At first it was only when Cathy awoke that she noticed anything off about the dreams. Later on it was partway through the day, thinking about the dream as she worked, cutting away at dead hair and dead nails, beautifying dead faces. Soon she didn’t notice anything wrong with the dreams at all. Soon everyone looked dead to her. Or everyone dead looked living. They both looked the same, anyway. 

* * *

One afternoon, when Cathy was twenty-four, she was working on a particularly beautiful body. The body was that of a sixteen-year-old boy. The boy had died in a car accident, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at him. He had had no family. Like Cathy, he was an orphan. Her undead coworkers passed her as she worked, saying things like “How sad!” and “What a crying shame. . .” 

Cathy took no notice. It wasn’t particularly sad to her. The boy was dead, that was all. It happened all the time. It could happen to anyone. All she knew was that he was beautiful, and that she didn’t want her work to go to waste. 

Day turned to night and Cathy was still working. She checked carefully to make sure all her coworkers had left the building. She counted their leaving bodies. None of them offered to stay with her.

When the building was empty, Cathy got to work. He was going to be cremated tomorrow. Cathy was to supervise the cremation, sign the paperwork, as she usually did. Thankfully, she had some ash saved up for just an occasion. Each time someone was cremated, she had snuck a little bit of their ash into a small cloth pouch she carried inside her purse. A burnt human being produced a lot of ash, more than any one family could possibly need. And it all looked the same. So Cathy had been saving for just an occasion. She needed this body.

The boy’s body was surprisingly light. He was all skin and bones. Cathy dragged him walking backwards, her hands underneath his armpits, his limp legs sliding mindlessly after him. It wasn’t unusual for the body to sustain a little bit of damage during this stage, Cathy had found. But it was worth it. And it was never anything she couldn’t touch up.

There was a gasp behind her. Cathy stopped walking, stopped dragging. She did not look behind her. 

“Cathy?” She knew by the voice it was Sarah. Sarah was an embalmer. Sarah would have treated the boy’s body earlier that day. Sarah, of course, seemed to Cathy indistinguishable from any one of the bodies in her cold basement. “Cathy, what are you doing?”

Cathy turned. She opened her mouth, but was unsure of how to explain herself, and so shut it again.

“Cathy?” Sarah said, inching closer. “What are you doing with that body?”

Somehow, she was not sure of the reason why, Cathy felt herself immensely compelled to tell Sarah about her artwork, about her collection. Sarah was an embalmer, and so perhaps she could appreciate the artistry that went into perfect preservation. Perhaps she might appreciate the beautiful, frost-tinged corpses that lay in the cold embrace of death in Cathy’s basement. She also happened to be the closest thing Cathy had to a friend. Cathy knew that it would have been safer to plead her innocence, drag the body back inside. At worst Sarah might think her odd, but that wouldn’t surprise anyone. Everyone thought Cathy was odd. But then she would lose the body. He would be cremated, charred beyond recognition. She needed the body. She needed to save him.

“Come with me,” Cathy heard herself say, “I want to show you something.”

Reluctantly, Sarah followed. Her complicity lasted for only a few steps. When she realized they were walking towards the parking lot, and not back into the mortuary, she stopped, spoke. Her voice was part authoritative, part mystified, and tinged with the slightest bit of fear. She didn’t know much about Cathy. She was cordial to her, she greeted her in the mornings when she walked past. Cathy rarely looked up at her. In fact, she didn’t think Cathy heard her most of the time, she was so engrossed in her work.

“Cathy,” said Sarah, cautiously. “Surely you don’t mean to take the body home, do you?”

Cathy turned to face her, smiled. “I work better when I’m at home. I’ll bring him back tomorrow.” It was best to let her in on the truth in fragments, Cathy thought. If she did it all at once it might put her off. Cathy didn’t want to lose out on Sarah, almost as much as she didn’t want to lose out on the body. Sarah was her best option of finding someone to appreciate her work. “Help me put him in the trunk.”

Sarah did as she was told. Something in Cathy’s eyes had alerted her. She didn’t think Cathy could be dangerous, but she was certainly odd. She thought it best to stick with her, keep tabs on her. She got into the passenger seat.

“Are you sure you should be doing this, Cathy? What if it gets damaged on the drive?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Cathy said. “It won’t be anything we can’t patch up.”

They didn’t talk much more on the drive. Sarah felt like asking what it was she was being shown, but she couldn’t find the moment to say it. At some point the tiny inkling of fear in her had grown, expanded to a pulsating sense of general unease, of restlessness. She sat in the passenger seat, being bumped up and down, up and down by the sway of wheels on tarmac, watching her hands nervously, turning them over and over in her lap. Her hands had grown damp, she noticed.

When they arrived at Cathy’s house, it took them five minutes to shift the boy’s body from the trunk. Cathy did most of the work, unfolding him, straightening him out, lifting him and dragging him over the cold ground and in through the front door. Sarah watched, a few paces behind, feeling very uncomfortable. The night was dark, as though a heavy black pall had been thrown across the sky. She kept looking up and down the street, hoping no one was watching them. No one was, but she kept looking. When Cathy asked her to, she held the front door open for the body. Then, again at Cathy’s request, she held open the basement door.

“What’s in the basement?” she asked. 

“My workshop,” said Cathy, not looking at her. 

She followed Cathy and her shuddering body down into the basement. They went down the steps so quickly it looked as though they were dancing.

The basement was dimly lit. It was a wide space with grey cement floors and droplets of murky water leaking from the ceiling, one after the other, pounding the cement like a gong. Sarah stood in the middle of the basement, unsure of what to do with herself, watching Cathy and the body waltz together through a tightly shut door and into a dark, dark room. 

“Come on in!” came Cathy’s voice from behind the tight seal of the door. 

Sarah contemplated turning around and making a break for the stairs. Her heart pounded behind her eyes. Her throat and chest felt locked together, seized up. Carefully, slowly, she pushed open the door.

The room was pitch black and smelled strongly of formaldehyde.

“Turn on the lights.” Cathy’s voice. She handed Sarah a long, thin, dangling string. Heart pounding spastically, Sarah pulled.

For a moment she was blinded. She blinked the light from her eyes, and then took in the scene. She fought back a scream. 

The floor was coated with corpses. Only the spot where she and Cathy stood, inches apart, was free from the freshet of cold death. 

In the center of the room an old man lay dead, eyes closed. All the other bodies, perhaps a dozen in total, were arranged around him, staring up at the ceiling, their eyes screaming. The bodies were so well made up that they looked like movie props. But the smell betrayed them.

Sarah looked mutely up at Cathy, her throat frozen. 

Cathy was smiling. “What do you think?”

Sarah tried to back out of the room, almost tripping over the freshly laid corpse of the

sixteen-year-old boy. She let out a soft moan, almost of pain. 

“Cathy,” she said. “Cathy. .”

Sarah felt dizzy. She tried desperately not to faint. 

Cathy watched in puzzled amazement as her friend the embalmer rushed lightning-quick up the basement stairs, her body shuddering all the way. 

“Sarah!” she called. “Sarah?” 

There was no reply. Cathy heard the front door swing open. She heard the anxious footsteps as Sarah ran down the dark street, her silhouette barely penetrating the pitiful egg yolk glow of the street lamps. Cathy switched off the light, disappointed. She went upstairs and shut the front door. The fog today seemed heavier than usual. Cathy felt almost drunk. She decided she would work on the body some more before she went to sleep. He really was a beautiful specimen. You had to be careful, she thought, cutting a dead person’s hair. They didn’t grow any new stuff back. 

* * *

The police arrived later that evening. When they slapped their cold manacles on Cathy’s wrists, she could only think how peculiar it was to be arrested by dead people. As though they were taking revenge for her kidnapping of their brethren. As she was driven away, she had to try her best not to laugh. And then, noticing something, suppressed laughter turned to suppressed tears, turned to unsuppressed tears. She couldn't see a thing anymore, through the fog.