I Too Was In Arcadia

• Miriam Smith, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2019

The streets crawl with occasional predatory police cars and house cats who have roamed too far from home. The two boys stick to the shadows as they approach the large Mortuary which looms over the road. Nick, the eldest by only a month, fiddles with the lock to the fire escape in the laneway.
In the centre of town, every house is decorated with witches and ghosts. Parents open doors to children dressed up in sheets and robes and they pass candy through doorframes into small clammy hands. But further out of town, the lights are dim and barely anyone searches into the night knocking on stranger’s doors.
The boys file through the opening into the dark and wintery hole which spirals down the fire escape staircase inside the morgue. The grey walls stretch into a black infinity above. Glancing down as they descend; the glistening spiral metal handrail reflects their torches’ light, inducing uneasy vertigo. The air gets colder and colder.
At the bottom of the stairwell, Lachlan holds up his hand and turns around.
“Okay guys, bottom level. I think this is it. The actual morgue.”
He reaches forward and turns the handle. Entering at the end of a short hallway, a large room opens up a few meters away.
Nick flicks the light switch. A dull silver light is cast over the grey floors and walls. Lachlan approaches one of the silver metal roll-out drawers.
“Okay. Let’s just find her and leave,” he says, reaching for the handle.
The metal drawer slides out cleanly. Empty. A slight flow of cool air brushes his face. The metal gleams under the silver light, which now buzzes in an attempt to warm up. Nick steps forward.
“I guess it’s my turn.”
He pulls slightly on the door, expecting it to slide out with ease. The slider resists. Lachlan’s eyes open wide and his arm drops to his side.
“It won’t open, Nick. It won’t open. There’s someone in it.”
Gripping the handle with white knuckles, he pulls it open. A body rolls out on the tray, feet first. It’s Eden Baker. He recognises her dark hair. And her lifeless blue eyes which have partially rolled into the back of her head. The tag around her toe has a number and her name. The thought of labelling what was once a living, breathing human seems wrong in so many ways.
Around her pale cold and scarred ankle is a small tattoo. Lachlan covers his mouth as he leans in to read the fine serif font.
“I too was in Arcadia,” he pauses. “Do you know what that means?”
“Let’s just pass on what we know, get the $500, and get the hell out of here.”
Lachlan nods his head and slides the shiny tray with Eden’s body back into the wall. The cold of the morgue makes him shiver, and as he closes the door behind him, he flicks off the light, plunging the morgue back into darkness.