It's October, 1997, and Arlo Merrin spends his time driving an ambulance through the back streets of South Jersey with his co-workers, Corinne and Buddy. When he's not at work, he's holed up at a corner bar, smoking too many cigarettes and drinking too much Guinness. Then people close to Arlo start meeting violent, nightmarish ends. At the same time, Arlo witnesses the impossible: a woman standing across the street from a murder scene, a woman who too closely resembles his wife, Julie, who died from cancer six months earlier. When the police play a 911 call recorded at the scene of the murder and Arlo hears Julie's voice, his life spirals as he becomes convinced that the woman he loved has returned from the dead. And she wants him to join her in her grave. In order to protect Corinne, the one woman who offers him an escape from his grief, he needs to make a gut-wrenching decision that could destroy him.
It's October, 1997, and Arlo Merrin spends his time driving an ambulance through the back streets of South Jersey with his co-workers, Corinne and Buddy. When he's not at work, he's holed up at a corner bar, smoking too many cigarettes and drinking too much Guinness. Then people close to Arlo start meeting violent, nightmarish ends. At the same time, Arlo witnesses the impossible: a woman standing across the street from a murder scene, a woman who too closely resembles his wife, Julie, who died from cancer six months earlier. When the police play a 911 call recorded at the scene of the murder and Arlo hears Julie's voice, his life spirals as he becomes convinced that the woman he loved has returned from the dead. And she wants him to join her in her grave. In order to protect Corinne, the one woman who offers him an escape from his grief, he needs to make a gut-wrenching decision that could destroy him.
Six months after her funeral, on the same cloudless mid-October night when Rullo’s Pizza burned down, Arlo Merrin spotted his dead wife. She stood on a dark sidewalk across the street and watched him work.
Earlier, when Arlo arrived at the EMS station for the start of his shift, Corinne Kelleher sat in one of the recliners in front of the TV with a dog-eared copy of last month’s edition of EMS Magazine in her lap. The third on their regular Friday night shift was Buddy, who sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, pounding away on an old manual typewriter, wearing a pair of cheap headphones held together with medical tape, listening to a cassette on his Walkman.
Arlo grabbed the clipboard with the equipment checklist from the hook on the wall and headed into the bay. He closed the door behind him, pressed the button on the wall to open the bay door, and shivered at the sudden October chill that filled the large garage where the ambulance was parked. He lit a cigarette and went to work documenting the readings on the oxygen tank gauges and inventorying everything from various trauma dressings to latex gloves, and checking expiration dates on sealed items like the OB kit, and verifying the remaining fuel level in the rig — of which there was less than half a tank, and Arlo swore at the previous crew for not filling it up.
When he finished, he flicked his cigarette onto the driveway, closed the bay door, and joined the rest of his crew inside.
The TV was tuned to VH1. The Gin Blossoms sang about not knowing they were lost on Allison Road.
Corinne leaned her elbows on the kitchen counter. Buddy’s headphones lay next to the typewriter. Both turned to Arlo.
“What are we doing for dinner?” asked Buddy.
“I don’t know, but I’m famished,” said Arlo. “Let’s decide quick.” He almost added before they got a call, but caught himself in time. He understood it was superstition, but he also understood it was real.
“I’m in the mood for Chinese,” said Buddy. “You guys want Chinese?”
“We would need to pick it up,” said Arlo. “It’s all the way in Thorofare.”
“So what do you want? Rullo’s? Aren’t you getting burned out on cheesesteaks?”
Corinne grunted a laugh and nodded at Arlo. “If you cut Arlo, does he not bleed cheese and grease?”
“I mean, fine,” said Buddy. “I don’t care. Order me a cheeseburger, though. And mozzarella sticks. And maybe a bag of barbecue Herr’s.”
Arlo grabbed Buddy’s protruding gut and shook it. “You’ll never become a big boy eating little kid food.”
Buddy brushed away Arlo’s hands.
“Hey kiddo, ask them if they can stop at Heritage’s and grab me a pack of Marlboro Lights,” Arlo said while Corinne was on the phone with Rullo’s.
Corinne rolled her eyes as she listened to the girl on the other end. Then she looked at Arlo. Her voice was matter-of-fact, but her eyes burrowed into his. “She heard you, she said yes, they can, and she said to say hi, Arlo, and thank you for helping her with her windshield wipers.”
Arlo shot Corinne an exaggerated grin and she reciprocated with a cockeyed smile and a middle finger.
Corinne reclined in one of the living room chairs and stared vacantly at the music video for “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer while Arlo rifled through the latest issue of Weird N.J. magazine. He found himself annoyed by how none of the stories took place anywhere near where he lived in Jersey, but still managed to lose himself in a story about haunted graveyards around the Garden State. Buddy slipped on his headphones and resumed banging away at the keys of his old blue Olivetti-Underwood typewriter. A pile of more than fifty double-spaced pages stood nearby on the counter.
After a while, Arlo threw down the magazine, wandered over to Buddy, and picked up a few pages from Buddy’s writing.
“So, I get that the main character is the great-grandson of Eliot Ness,” Arlo said, reading. “And that he’s an ace pilot in the Air Force, but I don’t get why the crew of the Enterprise would convert the F-15s so they could fly in space to fight Martian Nazis. Why wouldn’t they have their own fighter spaceships like in Star Wars?”
Buddy yanked the pages from Arlo’s hand and set them back on top of the stack. He pulled the headphones off and rested them on his neck. “You’re a heathen and you don’t deserve the joy of my art.”
“I don’t think terrorists deserve your art.”
“When’s the food going to get here?”
Arlo looked at the clock on the wall over the dispatch radio that shared a shelf with the TV. Forty minutes had ticked by since Corinne called in the order. Rullo’s usually took no more than twenty minutes to deliver to them. “They’re running late.”
“Yeah. Probably got hung up getting your cigarettes.”
The dispatch radio squelched.
Corinne hit the button to open the bay door and the three of them climbed into the rig, Arlo in the driver’s seat, Corinne next to him, and Buddy in the back.
The rig was a Ford E350 Econoline van converted into a box ambulance. Arlo shifted it into gear and pulled out of the garage and onto the tarmac then picked up the radio and keyed the mic by fingering the push-to-talk button.
“County, this is 3-1-8 responding, over.”
Swimming in the radio’s static rose a woman’s voice. “Roger that, 3-1-8. Over.”
“Where the hell are we going?” said Arlo. “She said somewhere on Hessian, right?”
“1321 Hessian Avenue,” said Corinne and pulled the post-it note from her shirt pocket to double-check her memory against the scribbled address. She reached into an open compartment between the front seats and pulled out a spiral-bound book of laminated maps of West Deptford township, opened it on her lap, stuck a penlight in her mouth so she could see in the rig’s dark cab, and flipped through the pages.
“Go right,” she said.
Arlo flipped on the cherry tops and pulled into traffic, stopped at the traffic light in front of the station house until the cars at the intersection noticed their flashing red overhead strobes and stopped, then he rolled the rig through the intersection.
“Oh shit,” said Corinne, still looking at the book.
“Oh shit what?” said Arlo.
“Oh shit that,” said Buddy. He squatted down between them and pointed straight ahead. Above the trees rose a pillar of black smoke, its edges alive in the dancing lights of as-yet unseen firetrucks. Then the fire trucks and their flashing red and white strobes came into view.
Arlo pulled the rig to a stop behind the firetrucks and threw it in park and set the emergency brake.
Smoke spilled through broken windows from the inside of Rullo’s. Part of the roof over the kitchen had collapsed, and flames angrily spat through the black smoke that poured from the hole. A chubby firefighter missing his turnout coat connected a five-inch line from the engine to the steamer port on the hydrant across the street, while two more firefighters trained a pair of inch-and-three-quarter lines on the fire through the smashed front windows someone had taken an axe to before they arrived.
Arlo reached into the pocket of his uniform shirt and pulled out the nearly empty pack of cigarettes and shook one out. He lit it with a match, shook out the flame, and threw the dead match out the window. He took a drag and exhaled a cloud of blue-gray smoke. “Goddamnit.”
Corinne huffed loud enough for them all to hear. “Where the hell are we going to get dinner from?”
Buddy smiled wide. “Chinese looks pretty good now, huh?”
Once it was apparent no one would require the service of the EMTs and the all-clear was given, Arlo backed the ambulance onto Hessian Avenue and headed back toward the station.
“The Chinese place is the other way,” said Buddy.
“You can get to it this way, too.”
“Going down Grove to get to Delaware Avenue is like ten minutes faster than going down Red Bank.”
“He’s right,” said Corinne.
“Whose side are you on?” said Arlo.
“Whoever feeds me first.”
As they turned into the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant, the radio sounded off.
The dispatcher’s familiar voice again rose from the static. “Station 3-1-8, unidentified medical emergency at 1809 Mapleleaf Avenue. Repeat, Station 3-1-8, unidentified medical emergency at 1809 Mapleleaf Avenue.”
Corinne’s eyebrows crested in exaggerated emotional pain and she slumped over in her seat, tapping her head against the passenger-side window. “But I’m so hungry.”
Arlo made a U-turn in the small parking lot, every pothole bouncing them in their seats, and headed to the address. “We’ll stop at Wawa after this.”
“Wawa is a promise to no one,” said Corinne.
Arlo turned on the siren as they approached the intersection and turned onto Red Bank.
“My cousin lives on Mapleleaf,” he said.
“Which one?” said Corinne.
“Chloe.”
“I haven’t seen her since high school. No, that’s not right. I saw her at — ” she stopped herself. Arlo glanced at her from the corner of his eye and didn’t press her to finish the thought.
He turned onto Mapleleaf Avenue.
“What’s Chloe’s house number?” asked Corinne.
“I don’t know,” he said as he slowed the rig and scanned addresses barely visible on the houses in the yellow street lamps and porch lights. His stomach dropped as they approached his cousin’s house.
Chloe’s house, 1809, the address to which county dispatch had sent them, waited at the end of the street. The house crouched in darkness, its windows black.
Across the street from her house stood a vacant lot, and surrounding the house on each side were thick woods. The house next-door was impossible to see through the trees, even in autumn with the trees nearly bare.
“Fuck me,” said Arlo. The sinking feeling in his stomach turned to nausea and panic. He pursed his lips, took a deep breath through his nose.
Keep it together, he thought. Gotta keep it together. This is your fucking job, man.
They pulled into the driveway and the rig swayed from side to side as it rolled over cement that was cracked and lifted unevenly from hidden roots.
The ambulance’s lights broke the still black of the night and painted the surrounding woods with fleeing red ghosts.
Arlo pulled on a pair of latex gloves and grabbed the trauma bag from a compartment behind the ambulance’s passenger door while Corinne grabbed the airway bag. Buddy approached the house first, the desiccated leaves covering the walkway crunching under his boots.
The front door was ajar.
“Hello,” Buddy said to the dark, pushing open the door. From his breast pocket, he pulled a penlight and shone it around inside before venturing a tentative step across the threshold.
The foyer was the size of a phone booth. It opened into a narrow living room. Along the back wall of the living room was a staircase that led to the second floor.
Arlo and Corinne followed Buddy into the house. Buddy’s flashlight focused its attention on the body hanging from a black vacuum cleaner power cord. The cord wrapped several times around the banister at the top of the staircase, and the end was tied in a makeshift noose. The other end of the cord was still attached to the vacuum cleaner, which stood stiff and upright on the top stair.
The hanging woman stared at the dead screen of the TV behind the three EMTs, her glassy pale blue eyes wide with surprise. Her bottom jaw rested against her swollen neck and her tongue appeared to be trying to escape from her mouth. Even in the dim light of the tiny flashlight the blue hue in her face and lips was apparent. Her curled toes dangled barely out of reach of the carpeted floor below.
With a gloved hand, Corinne grabbed the woman’s wrist and felt for a pulse. She pressed the back of her other hand against the woman’s stomach.
“No pulse,” said Corinne. “But she’s not cold.”
“Grab her,” said Arlo as he pulled a pair of trauma shears from his belt and reached up to slice through the vacuum’s power cord.
Buddy grabbed the woman around her hips and Corinne helped him lower her onto her back on the dirty carpet. Buddy scanned the room, spotted the light switch by the foyer, flicked it on.
The weak amber light from a lamp on an end table lit the room enough for them to see. A nearby coffee table was covered with dirty plates, beer bottles, an overflowing ashtray.
With the trauma sheers Arlo sliced Chloe’s sweatshirt, dark blue with NYC printed in large white letters, from neck to waist, then measured two fingers from the bottom of Chloe’s bare sternum and started chest compressions. Corinne leaned next to the woman’s head.
“Jesus,” said Corinne.
“Yeah,” said Arlo.
Buddy fetched the BVM from the airway bag and handed it to Corinne. She pressed the mask over Chloe’s mouth and squeezed the attached blue bag. The bag forced air into the woman’s lungs and her chest rose as they inflated.
“Shit,” said Buddy. “I’m going to call for the po-po and grab the stretcher.”
Chloe stared at the ceiling with disinterest, seemingly ignoring the lock of blonde hair in her left eye. Her lips were nearly the same shade of blue as her eyes, which were now severely bloodshot.
“Her arms look funny,” said Corinne.
Arlo glanced from his hands, working to a silent beat he kept in his head, to Chloe’s arm on the far side from where he squatted on his knees. Her arm did look funny, like her elbow was too high, but he couldn’t determine if it was a trick from how the oversized sweatshirt fit her. In that moment, he didn’t care and only grunted in acknowledgment.
He tried to again focus on his rhythm but something pulled at his attention, not her oddly bent arm, but to the floor next to where they knelt.
The carpet that years ago had been white was now a patchwork of tan streaks. Among the stains and dirt were muddy prints made by dainty bare feet. They led from the front door and up the stairs, then down the stairs to where Chloe had hung. They faded away toward the blackness of the kitchen. Mounted on the wall just inside the kitchen was a phone, the cord stretched to the receiver that lay on the linoleum floor.
Chloe’s feet were clean. One of her slippers leaned against the TV stand, upside down. Its partner squatted at an odd angle a few feet away by the entrance to the kitchen.
Where had the muddy footprints come from?
The bottom of a half-empty beer bottle stuck out of the wall above the TV, a perfect circle in the dirty white drywall. Against the far wall there was a long, thin table where Chloe kept half a dozen framed pictures. The picture frames lay scattered on the floor in front of the table.
“What the hell happened here?” asked Arlo, nodding to the beer bottle stuck in the wall, then to the pictures on the floor.
Corinne looked around. “What the fuck?”
Buddy wheeled in the stretcher, banging it against the front door frame as he did, and collapsed it next to Chloe’s body.
“On three,” said Arlo.
He counted to three and he and Corinne stopped CPR and, with Buddy’s help, lifted her gently from the floor onto the neat white sheet of the stretcher. Corinne secured the straps over her chest and waist while Buddy took care of the one at her feet. When the final buckle clicked shut and the straps pulled tight, they lifted the stretcher and Corinne guided it through the doorway while Arlo pushed.
The stretcher’s legs folded closed as they slid it into the back of the rig and it latched into place.
Corinne stepped up into the back of the rig while Buddy stood by waiting to shut the doors behind them. Arlo gripped the grab bar next to the door and was about to follow her when he glanced across the street. On the edge of the reach of a distant streetlamp, silhouetted in the lonely cool darkness, haloed in the yellow sodium light, stood perfectly still a woman in a white knee-length dress. Her dark hair fell around her shoulders. She stood alone, watching from the sidewalk.
Ice filled his chest.
Although he could make out no other features, he swore there was a glow in the woman’s eyes. It wasn’t a reflection from the rig’s headlights or the red strobes from the light bar. The light in her eyes came from within, from another place.
Arlo was certain the woman would step off the sidewalk toward him and his heart would seize and he would drop to the ground, and then her cold hands would grip his face and curse him —
Julie.
That woman across the street, the woman now watching him, was Julie, his wife, come back from the grave to punish him for continuing to amble through life while she was left to rot in a century-old moss-covered family mausoleum shaded by an aging white oak.
“For Christ’s sake, come on,” said Buddy.
Arlo glanced at Buddy, then back to the woman. He expected her to have vanished but there she stood, as still as death.
An owl screeched. It sounded like a woman screaming.
A neighbor, he reasoned. Came out to watch the flashing lights with hopes of seeing blood, or better yet, a corpse.
He fought the impulse to grab Buddy and force him to look at her, if for no other reason than to prove he wasn’t insane, that the woman wasn’t a hallucination. Instead, Arlo cast a final glace at the woman — and his head swam in icy waters with how she resembled Julie — then he stepped up into the back of the ambulance and Buddy slammed close the doors behind him.
Arlo resumed chest compressions while Corinne worked the airbag. The rig rocked back and forth and the equipment in the ambulance’s compartments slid and banged around as Buddy backed into the street and took off for Underwood Memorial Hospital.
Buddy radioed ahead so the emergency room staff were prepared to take Chloe. Upon rolling her into the emergency room, a group of nurses and ER techs and a doctor were waiting. A male nurse directed them into an exam room where they parked the stretcher next to a bed. They transferred Chloe to the ER bed and one of the nurses took over chest compressions and the room swarmed with scrubs.
Arlo wiped the sweat from his eyes and stepped into the hallway and watched. A nurse injected epinephrine directly into her chest. They cut away the rest of her shirt.
Corinne wrapped an arm around Arlo and leaned her head against his shoulder.
After twenty minutes the doctor on duty ended resuscitation efforts.
“I’m sorry,” said Buddy.
Corinne squeezed Arlo.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Arlo.
As they walked past the front desk, one of the nurses waved them down.
“The doctor who worked that patient you guys brought in has a question for you,” she said.
The three of them returned to the hallway outside the exam room. The doctor peeled off a pair of latex gloves and tossed them into a trash can and limped into the hallway. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked from Buddy to Arlo and back again. He was stout and had a slight south-Asian accent. “You found her hanging, is that correct?”
“Yeah,” said Buddy.
“Did something happen when you cut her down? Any physical trauma?”
The three of them looked to one another, eyes wide, all of them shaking their heads.
“No,” said Arlo. “We got her down to the ground just fine and then started CPR.”
“Why?” asked Corinne.
With his right hand he tapped his left bicep and said, “She has displaced fractures to both humeri. Are you sure you didn’t do or see anything that could have caused both of her arms to snap?”
💀 ROBIN’S REVIEW: THE AUTOPSY FOR FOREVER GIRL
🪦 THE BODY
Forever Girl
Author: Brian McQuilkin
Publisher: Cemetery Hill Press
Publication Date: October 2, 2026
Pages: 214
ASIN: B0HD9MCCM3
Condition of the body: Questionable, emotionally compromised, and somebody really needs to stop answering the phone.
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
💀 Final warning: If someone you buried starts contacting you, perhaps do not immediately investigate. We have horror novels specifically to teach us these things.
🔪 FIRST INCISION
Arlo is not exactly thriving.
He is getting through his days mostly by working, drinking, smoking, and pretending that eventually grief might get bored and move out on its own.
Then something happens that makes his already messy existence considerably worse.
People around him start dying.
That would be concerning enough, but Arlo also begins encountering something that should be completely impossible. Something connected to the person he has been mourning for months. Something that apparently did not get the memo about death being a fairly permanent arrangement.
And suddenly Arlo has much bigger problems than deciding whether he should finally get his life together.
🩸 THE AUTOPSY
This book had me suspicious of absolutely everybody.
Including the dead.
Especially the dead.
The story has that wonderfully grimy late 90s feeling where people smoke everywhere, communication is significantly less convenient, and nobody can immediately Google, "Why is my deceased loved one being creepy as hell?"
Honestly, horror had it easier before smartphones.
The setting worked ridiculously well for me because there is something about ordinary neighborhoods, local bars, ambulance stations, and familiar streets that makes supernatural horror hit harder. Nothing feels particularly dangerous until suddenly it very much is.
Arlo is also exactly the kind of protagonist I enjoy in this type of story. He is flawed, exhausted, self-destructive, occasionally frustrating, and walking around with enough emotional baggage to qualify for an additional checked-bag fee.
In other words, perfect horror material.
The supernatural elements creep in rather than immediately kicking down the door, which gives the story time to build that uncomfortable little voice in your head saying, "Okay, something is seriously wrong here."
And then it keeps getting worse.
Naturally.
🫀 STILL HAD A PULSE
The emotional side surprised me.
There is plenty of creepy business happening, but underneath everything is a story about what happens when someone cannot quite figure out how to live after losing the person who defined so much of their life.
That gave the horror some weight.
It is difficult to simply dismiss what Arlo experiences because his grief makes almost every possibility feel plausible. Is something genuinely happening? Is his mind betraying him? Is he seeing what he desperately wants to see? Or has the universe decided he has not suffered enough yet?
Rude, universe.
Very rude.
The ambulance crew dynamic was another highlight. Their conversations felt casual and lived-in, and those normal interactions made the darker moments hit harder. The story lets you get comfortable around these people before reminding you that comfort is a temporary condition in horror.
🦴 WHAT BROKE
I did have moments when I wanted a few more answers.
There are pieces of the supernatural puzzle that remain deliberately slippery, and my brain does not always enjoy being handed three puzzle pieces while someone quietly removes the box.
I NEED TO KNOW THINGS.
At the same time, I suspect some of that uncertainty is exactly the point.
Not everything gets neatly explained, tied up, labeled, and handed back to you with a little instruction manual.
Annoying?
A little.
Effective?
Also yes.
☠️ CAUSE OF DEATH
Complications from unresolved grief, extremely poor supernatural boundaries, and one dead woman who apparently missed the part where death means leaving people alone.
If you like your ghost stories with damaged people, messy relationships, small-town atmosphere, and enough uncertainty to make you question what the hell you just witnessed, this one belongs on your list.
Reviewed by Robin for Robin’s Review