Firetale by Dante Graves Page A

Suddenly, the feelings that had been coming on
gradually, hit him like a wave, flooding into his consciousness.
The heat in his chest turned into a fire, as if a torch was burning
in the very heart of him. For a moment, Lazarus thought he heard a
devilish laugh. He put his hand to his chest and heard a melodious
clink.
    “ Oh, you finally woke up, Mr.
Bernardius,” a voice said. Lazarus turned his head to the right and
saw a strange metal table on thin legs, on which lay something
formless, covered with a white sheet.
    “ I’m here, Mr. Bernardius,” the
voice said. Bernardius turned his head to the left and saw the man
who was talking to him. He was tall, had blond hair, and was
dressed in a black coat over a white suit. Curly hair fell over the
stranger’s quaint face, a face that could be described as
beautiful, except for its sharp features, which were slightly
longer than they should have been. Bernardius, who had not yet
recovered himself, strained his eyes to have a better look at the
stranger. The face of the man curved a bit to the left, like a half
moon, and one eye was twice as big as the other. His mouth, splayed
from ear to ear, was full of small triangular teeth. Lazarus shook
his head and the face of a man again became normal.
    “ Where am I?” asked
Lazarus.
    “ You are in a waiting mortuary,”
said the stranger. The man was holding an apple, which he cut into
pieces with a small knife and ate. The fruit seemed weird to
Lazarus, but, because of his shock and poor health, he considered
this a hallucination and did not look closely.
    “ Waiting mortuary?” Lazarus
looked around and saw tables on which lay bodies covered with
sheets. For a moment he felt sick. His memories returned. “I was
attacked. I was stabbed in the chest.” With his memories came
renewed energy. He sat up abruptly on the table, pushing away the
sheet, under which he was uncovered. The bell rang
again.
    “ What is it?” he asked the
stranger. The man silently pointed to a knife on a string tied to
Lazarus’s hand. It was strapped around the bell on a stand next to
the table on which Bernardius lay. Lazarus looked at his chest.
There was a just small scar right above his heart, a trace of the
wound.
    “ I’m alive! I am alive by the
grace of the Lord,” Lazarus said. He was so excited by this fact
that for a moment he forgot his manners, which normally were very
important to him. “Pardon my look, sir.” Mr. Bernardius sat up and
dangled his legs from the bed, covering his private parts with the
sheet. “However, this might be habitual to you, because you work
here.” Only when the words slipped out did Lazarus realize his
stupidity. The strange gentleman was too well dressed for a man
whose job was to watch and see if someone in the morgue rose from
the dead.
    “ No, Mr. Bernardius, I don’t
think that God has something to do with the fact that you continue
to breathe, and no, I don’t work here,” the stranger replied. A
perpetual smirk seemed to be attached to the face of the stranger.
“To be honest, I never heard of anyone in the waiting mortuary
watching corpses. As far as I know, the bell has never rung in
places like this.” The stranger continued to eat his
apple.
    “ Then who are you?” The mocking
tone of the black-and-white-clad man bewildered Lazarus. What was
this strange man doing in this place? Was it possible that he was
one of those rich perverts who paid the guards in the morgue to let
them take a closer look at a dead body, still warm or already
touched by corruption? As if reading Bernardius’s thoughts, the man
raised his eyebrows emphatically, and Lazarus’s face flushed with
shame.
    “ Mr. Bernardius …”
    “ How do you know my name?”
Lazarus interrupted the stranger.
    “ I have my sources,” the blond
stranger said in a low voice. But noticing Bernardius’s frightened
look, he hastened to dispel the mystery. “The tag on your foot.
Your name is written on it.”
    Lazarus