The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(65)
Unsure of what to do now, Ilka felt a bit useless. Artie was working, and the nun was taking care of her duties; she felt she should be the motivating force, the engine in her father’s business, but the others had the fuel to make everything run. They knew the routines; they had the experience—they should be the ones trying to get the business back on track so it could be sold. So Artie could take over the house and start his own business.
Determined now, she walked over and knocked on the preparation room door. She had to knock again a few times before he unlocked it.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” She walked inside and looked around for a white coat. “It would be good for me to know how this is done, and I promise I won’t get in the way—”
She looked down at the steel table. The exhaust fan hood loomed over Mike’s body, which was covered by a white sheet from the waist down. It was so very different from seeing the bodies they had picked up. There was something clinically dead about this, yet it seemed almost intimate, vulnerable.
“Are you okay?” Artie joined her. She stood motionless, her eyes stuck on the exposed upper body like thin skin to a frozen iron pipe.
She knew bodies were pumped full of formaldehyde during the embalming; Artie had explained that. But she hadn’t imagined a person could seem so lifeless.
He’d made an incision on each side of the throat. On one side the embalming fluid entered through a tube, while on the other side the body fluids drained out. A pump whirred, and at short intervals it emitted air. It sounded like sighing.
In her head, she heard Erik’s calm voice, and she tried to imagine him explaining how to photograph the body in bright light: Use a filter and change the aperture. But she was still unable to move. She struggled to find a suitable expression, one that would look professional.
Artie was back at the table, but occasionally he glanced over his shoulder, as if making sure she was still standing.
“During the embalming, you remove the eyes,” he explained, after she’d gotten a grip on herself and put on the white coat he’d handed her. She fumbled to put on the mask. “Eyes are too fragile to handle the process.”
He turned and pointed at some small plastic boxes on the shelf beside the door. “We have fake eyes over there, but I don’t put them in until I’m done. And it’s only for cosmetic effect, the facial expression. The eye cavities have to be filled, because I close the eyes.”
His deep voice was calm, something like her mother’s in schoolteacher mode when she forgot that Ilka wasn’t one of her students, not to mention an adult.
She nodded and watched. The skin over Mike’s stomach was bumpy—the fluid had gathered in pockets—and Artie concentrated on smoothing the skin by stroking it carefully with the flat of his hand.
The odor in the room stung her sinuses when Ilka breathed through her nose. She opened her mouth and sucked in air through the mask, which hopefully filtered the poisonous particles. But the rough paper didn’t stop the sensation of breathing in fumes from a putrefying body. She pressed her tongue up on the roof of her mouth to hold back her nausea.
Though slightly dizzy, Ilka stood beside Artie while he finished up. She was determined to file away every single detail of his work so she would understand the process.
He turned off the pump and pulled out the thin tube. “You thinking about coming along to the crematorium to watch Mrs. Norton burn up?” He took the tube over to the sink, but he didn’t shut off the exhaust fan. “Everything has to be rinsed and washed; otherwise, it’s too dangerous to be in here.”
“I’d like to go along to the crematorium, yes.” He mumbled something behind his mask. “If you don’t mind?”
She had the feeling her presence made him uncomfortable, prevented him from getting into his work as he normally did. He nodded and said she was welcome to come along; they could leave as soon as Mike had been laid in the coffin and wheeled into the cold room.
“It’s too hot in here for him; he needs to be cool. I got a coffin ready out in the garage. You want to give me a hand with it?”
Ilka nodded and asked if she should keep the white coat and mask on.
“The mask doesn’t matter; it’s only for not breathing in too much poison. But keep the white coat on so you don’t get your clothes dirty.”
He went outside and opened the garage door. He’d already covered the bottom of the coffin with a white sheet. There was no embroidery or decoration, just a common white sheet and a small flat pillow up at the head. He tossed her a thin blanket in a plastic sack and asked her to unwrap it. Then he rolled the casket carriage over to the door. “You want to help me with the step here?”
She leaned over and grabbed a small handle on the front of the carriage. The coffin looked like the coffins common in Denmark, not like the ones she had seen since she’d arrived. Apparently, this was the discount model.
He parked the coffin in the hallway. “Normally I’d wheel the body out and lift it over, but since there’s two of us, we can carry him out.”
She nodded and tried to conceal her discomfort. Though it wasn’t the first time she’d lifted a corpse, she wasn’t really used to it. Though Mike Gilbert now looked more like a wax dummy than a real person. But she followed him, and when Artie told her to grab under his knees and lift while he lifted his upper body, she did so without batting an eye. A moment later the body was in the coffin, and she covered it with the blanket and swept the wrinkles out until it looked as smooth as a tablecloth.