The freezer was at least ten feet wide and thirty feet deep. Susan remembered all too clearly the first day she had seen it. The diener loved to show it to the students, one at a time, and he particularly liked female students for some unknown but undoubtedly perverse reason. He had charge of the cadavers stored here for dissection. After embalming, they were hung up with tongs hooked into the external ear canals. The tongs were connected to roller bearings on tracks in the ceiling, to facilitate movement. The bodies were stiff, naked, misshapen; most were the color of pale marble. The females were mixed with the males, the Catholics with the Jews, the whites with the blacks in the equality of death. The faces were frozen into a wide variety of distorted grimaces. Most of the eyes were closed but here and there was an open one, blankly staring into infinity. The first time Susan had seen these four rows of frozen cadavers hanging up like unwanted clothes in a closet of ice, she had felt sick. She had vowed never to return. And until that night she had avoided the “fridge,” as it was affectionately called by the diener. But now it was different.
The anatomy hall had been dark. The inside of the freezer was lit by a single hundred-watt bulb from the rear of the compartment, casting horrid shadows on the ceiling and floor. Susan tried not to look directly at the grotesque bodies. She shivered from the cold and frantically tried to think. There were only a few moments. Her pulse was racing. She knew that D’Ambrosio would be coming into the freezer within minutes. She had to have a plan but she didn’t have much time.
Smiling, D’Ambrosio stepped back and kicked the locked door of the anatomy hall, but it held firm. He kicked out a pane of frosted glass, pulled out a few of the splintered pieces, and reached in, opening the door. He looked around the room, not comprehending what it was.
As a precaution against his prey bolting, he closed the door and moved a nearby table in front of it. The room was large, some sixty feet by one hundred feet, with five rows of seven shrouded tables each. D’Ambrosio went up to the nearest table and whipped off the plastic drape.
D’Ambrosio gasped, not even feeling the pain from his broken rib. He was staring at a cadaver. The head was dissected free of skin, the teeth and the eyes were bared. The hair had been undermined and folded back like a pelt The front of the chest was gone, as was the front of the abdomen. The organs, which had been removed, were piled back into the opened body haphazardly.
D’Ambrosio walked back to the door and thought about turning on the lights. Then he decided against it because of the large windows and the fear of alerting the security police. Not that he didn’t feel confident about handling a couple of inexperienced guards, but he wanted to get Susan without any interference.
Systematically D’Ambrosio removed all the shrouds from all the cadavers in the room. He tried not to look at the dissected bodies. He just wanted to make sure that Susan was not among them.
D’Ambrosio looked around the room. On the right side of the hall several skeletons hung on chains, turning slowly in the air stirred by the opening and closing of the door. Behind the skeletons was a huge cabinet containing numerous specimen jars. At the end of the room were three desks and two doors. One of the doors looked like a freezer door, the other a closet. The closet was empty. Then D’Ambrosio noted the stainless steel pin hanging from the latch on the freezer door. The light smile returned, and he transferred the gun to his left hand. He opened the freezer door and again fell back in horror. The hanging bodies appeared like an army of ghouls.
D’Ambrosio was shaken by the appearance of the bodies and his eyes darted from one to another. Reluctantly he stepped over the threshold of the freezer, feeling the sudden chill.
“I know you’re in here, cunt. Why not come out so we can have another talk?” D’Ambrosio’s voice trailed off. The close quarters in the freezer and the appearance of the stiffs made Mm nervous, more nervous than he ever remembered being.