Kiss & Die - Lee Weeks [7]
‘Shush,’ she patted the baby’s back, ‘in a minute my love, Mummy will feed you in a minute.’
Ruby put the doll back and as her hand lingered in the cupboard it traced the outline of something lying there. It was small, no bigger than a mobile phone, it was dry and hard. Ruby touched its face and started to cry. ‘Daddy wasn’t nice to Mummy at all.’
Chapter 6
Kin Tak, the mortuary technician, looked at the clock on the wall: it was almost 5 a.m. ‘Quick, quick,’ he said out loud. ‘No wasting time now. Finish the job. Finish it.’
Kin Tak had a form of Tourette’s syndrome that had been allowed to grow in the dark environment of the mortuary. He tried to curb it. He tried to suppress it but he was on his own for most of the day and night and he talked to himself incessantly. He talked to the people in the drawers. He talked to the dead that roamed his icy rooms, looking for their heaven.
He had worked through the night to make the girl ready. He washed her young body. He worked methodically, meticulously, marvelled at her beauty as he passed a cloth over her young skin. He talked to her as he washed her hair to remove the blood. Now he dried it with a towel, it crinkled into black glossy waves. Kin Tak held it in his hand, ‘Lovely, lovely.’ It was as soft as cotton wool, as springy as air. He marvelled at her slender arms, her slim thighs. She had no imperfections. Her skin was smooth and flawless as the day she slid from her mother’s uterus, fighting for breath in the outside world.
Now he hummed to himself as he pierced the young girl’s eye with the syringe and extracted fluid from the back of the eye. He was practising. Now that the pathologist had done his work it was Kin Tak’s turn. The fluid, vitreous humour, was a vital source of information for determining time of death. But they knew when she had died. She had died a few moments before they had run away and a few moments after they had cut off her hands and slit her throat. Now Kin Tak was allowed to practise his forensic skills before he did what he liked doing best.
Kin Tak was a diener, a mortuary technician. His job was to assist the pathologist in a post mortem examination, take tissue samples, weigh organs, take samples for the lab and record the findings of the post mortem. But Kin Tak was more than that – he was a student of the art of beautifying the dead and he was a student of pathology. He was a devoted mortuary technician who lived and slept amongst the dead. His skin seldom felt the sun, wind or rain on it. It had become cheese-like in its appearance. He practised his stitching whenever he could. Choppings gave him plenty of practice. But this was not a chopping tonight; these were wounds he had not seen before. He picked up the severed right hand. It was not a clean cut. It was a broad, layered wound, some of the flesh was missing. He would have to improvise by stretching what skin he could to stitch neatly. But not yet, he wasn’t ready yet. He moved down her body. Her small hips, not yet spread by childbirth. He combed her pubic hair.
The bell rang. Kin Tak felt the excitement turn his stomach but he was agitated. He hadn’t finished with the young woman’s body. It would have to stay where it was.
‘Fuck. Fuck.’ He snorted a giggle out of his nose and clamped his hand over his mouth to suppress it. ‘Sex. Sex.’
He knew she would come tonight. She wouldn’t mind the young woman’s body being on view. She would be pleased. She was still learning and he had such a lot more to teach her. She would pay him the way she always did. She would give him her body. She would take off her clothes and lie on the autopsy table; he would gently part her naked thighs