The Psychopomp

CW: Hospice and discussions of hospice care and murder/euthanization

If you’ve worked with the dying for a long time, you learn that there’s a certain smell to it. Perhaps people would expect me to instinctively know the smell of death, but no. It was something I had to learn.

Once I learned, I could pick up the subtle curls of the scent wafting off the skin hours before anyone else. Except, perhaps, for animals. They say cats will curl up with nursing home residents who are the next to die. I wonder if they’re acting out of an effort to comfort, or if their predator instincts tell them there will be fresh meat soon.

Then again, they could be doing it for both reasons. I do.

The smells of death vary. There’s the smell of ammonia you get when someone’s kidneys fail first, the fruity, sweet scent of ketoacidosis as the glucose in the body stops being broken down and builds up, a sharp, stinging smell, like acetone, and a fainter, fouler smell of decomposition as small parts of the body die first and start to rot.

I’d smelled this from Mrs. Ozman some two hours prior and started to prepare.

The hospice care center I work at is small and poor. It’s the sort of place people don’t go if they have other options. If there was family to take them in, or money to allow a better location, they wouldn’t be under my care.

The place is full to capacity anyway. Most of shifts involve desperately trying to adjust pain medication and soothing those whose brains are aware that they’re dying, but not where or why.

You learn a lot about people like this, if you can find quiet moments with them. When I start to smell death wafting up from Mrs. Ozman’s skin, I find a quiet moment with her.

Most people are delirious by this time. It’s a combination of pain medication and, well, the aforementioned dying. But a subtle application of hypnosis works wonders to east the mind.

“Hello, Mrs. Ozman,” I say, tilting my head so I can catch her eyes. I smile with my lips pressed together. I don’t think anyone can see past my veneers, but I can’t bring myself to break the habit. “How are you feeling today?”

Her eyes flutter open, glazed with a silver sheen. The hypnosis settles in within seconds, easing off the dulling effects of the medication. “Kayla?” she mumbles.

“I’m your nurse,” I tell her. I make a show of fussing with her medication. “Who’s Kayla?”

“My daughter.” She smooths trembling fingers over her blanket. “She wouldn’t be here. I forgot.”

I pretend to check the monitor, sliding my hands along the machine. “She wouldn’t want to be with her dying mother?”

Mrs. Ozman smiles, papery lips splitting as they pull back from teeth. “I didn’t tell her.”

“We can still call her,” I say, though there’s little chance she’ll arrive before her mother departs.

“No, no. I didn’t tell her on purpose,” Mrs. Ozman says. “She just had a son. Only a couple months old, and her husband- well, I don’t think the deathbed is a good place to hold grudges, but she’s got more important things to do than fuss over an old woman.”

Humans will have the funniest priorities on their deathbed. “You don’t think she’d want to fuss over you?”

“Oh, I’m sure she’d want to, but she’s got other people who need her. I’ll be fine.” Mrs. Ozman smiles again. A smudge of blood from her split lip smears across her teeth.

I lick my lips as I sit back down. “If you’re sure, Mrs. Ozman. We can always call her if you need us to.”

“No, I have you lovely people looking after me. What else could I need?”

I nod. “Mrs. Ozman, why don’t you tell me about Kayla?”

Something you notice in this job: most of the people here are happy to talk. You get the occasional sourpuss who is steadily silent, and you get those who are too close to death to be coherent. But if they can, most of them will. I assume it’s because they know how little time left they have to tell them.

Mrs. Ozman talks about Kayla. About her terrible twos, where she refused to travel anywhere without her blanket and stuffed monkey and screamed bloody murder if they were taken away. About her cuddly elementary years, where they would spend weekends doing each others’ makeup. About her tumultuous teen years, where a parade of unsatisfactory boyfriend and maternal disapproval strained their relationship to the breaking point.

“She was always a good girl. And we made up once she got older. But…” Mrs. Ozman’s face partially crumples.

“Something you regret?” I ask.

“I always told her to go to college for something that would make money,” Mrs. Ozman says. “And she did. She met her husband there, and that didn’t…” She flicks her hand, irritated. “Well, that could have gone better. Maybe, if I could redo things, I would have told her to go for what she loved.”

“I’m sure there are all things we’d like to redo,” I say neutrally. “But at this time, there’s no point dwelling on regrets.”

“No,” Mrs. Ozman agrees. “I suppose not.” She glances at the nearby clock. “Oh, but it’s getting late, dearie. I shouldn’t keep you.”

“Yes, I should continue with my rounds,” I say. “Thank you for the talk, Mrs. Ozman.”

I head into the hall. The head nurse looks up from her station. “Your shift ended six minutes ago.”

“I’m on my way out,” I reassure her.

“As long as all your paperwork’s done,” she says, and returns to her computer. I nod. I need to leave before sunrise. But there’s one more task to complete.

There’s a changing room toward the entrance of the building. I slip out of my work scrubs and into an older set. Most people don’t think too much of a few specks of blood on a nurse’s scrubs, but I try to contain the mess to one set.

As I head back toward the ward, I push out with my powers. Hypnosis is the most useful in my arsenal, and it works best in small touches. I give a subtle nudge now. No one look here. Nothing interesting is happening.

Using that, I get back to Mrs. Ozman’s room uninterrupted. I slide the door shut.

“Hm?” she blinks, hazy. I catch her eye and push my hypnosis to full force. Her expression slackens. “K-Kayla?”

I smile. “Hi, mom.”

My own body hasn’t changed, but Mrs. Ozman reacts to the conjured image of her daughter. “How did you- I didn’t tell you-”

“I knew, mom. Of course I knew.” I go to her side and take her hand. Her skin is thin as tissue paper, liable to tear at any moment. “I wanted to see you.”

Mrs. Ozman shakes her head. “You shouldn’t be here.” But she hasn’t stopped smiling, lips splitting again to fleck tiny spots of blood on her mouth. I swallow. Her eyes glisten with tears.

“I needed to be here,” I say. “For you, mom.”

The smell of death is profound now. She has hours. Maybe less. “How’s Maggie?”

I lie. One of the good things about the soon-to-be dead: they’re rarely able to call you out on it. I spin some plausible tales for her, of a happy baby who gets into mischief, but no serious trouble. “I’m going to leave him, mom,” I say. “I promise. Me and Maggie, we’re going to move away. I’ll go back to school.”

“You were such a good artist. Do you remember, when you were little…” The words are more effort now. If my ears weren’t so sharp, I’d barely be able to make them out. “You painted for the school contest and were so disappointed when you didn’t win?”

“Yes, mom. I remember.”

“I still have it.” Her eyes drift shut. “It was so beautiful. I was so proud. Even when you didn’t win…”

Her voice fades into silence. I wait for a few moments. Then I lift her wrist to my mouth and bite.

The skin yields with little effort. Blood flows into my mouth.

The blood of the dying has a sour edge. Still, I drink in great swallows, measuring myself out. There’s an art to taking enough that I can be full, without taking so much that it’s obvious they’ve died from exsanguination.

I feel it when her heart stops, blood no longer trickling easily into my throat. I manage a few more pulls, then stitch the cooling flesh back together with a lick. The machines, which I silenced earlier, are turned back on, and their blare draws other nurses.

I need to be there until the end, nudging at people’s minds so they don’t notice anything too odd. Everyone overlooks the blood specks on my shirt, including the fresh ones. The attending doctor, coming to mark time of death, is glassy-eyed during the check, and doesn’t register the body is light on blood.

Once her body is carted off, I hurry home. Sunlight is nipping at my heels by the time I return to my blacked-out apartment.

There is one more task I have to do.

As the blood settles into my veins, I get flashes of things. They’re only fragments, but I see things. A little girl, fingerpainting on the wall, a teenager screaming as she’s grounded, an adult woman smiling at me as she puts boxes in a car and a man with folded arms looks on.

Handwriting is hard to mimic, but pulling on those trace memories helps. I could type it up, but sending as an email has the issue of a timestamp after the listed time of death. I spend a couple hours fighting the pull of sleep to write out a letter to Kayla.

I won’t say everything I put in there. There are some things that belong between the dead and their living. But I close the letter with this:

Do you remember the contest you entered when you were little? I still have the painting. I want you to have it.

It didn’t matter to me that you didn’t win. If you loved making it, that was a win to me.

I hope you never forget how it feels to make something. I hope you keep doing things that make you happy. I hope you show Maggie how to live a life that makes her happy, too, even when it’s a struggle.

Life’s too short to avoid what makes you happy.

I love you.

Mama.

I seal the letter and mark it with her address. Then I crawl into my bed and, blood warming my belly, I sleep.

There are few ways to be an ethical vampire. I don’t suspect I’ve found one that’s perfect, in that regard. But I suppose, in the end, it makes sense or one of the undead to act as the last point of communication between the living and the dead.

I dream of Mrs. Ozman and the others I’ve consumed. I have no way of knowing if there is an afterlife, and less confidence a creature like me can get there. But at least if they are inside me, some part of them will still live.

There will always be someone out there who loves Kayla now.