The yellow wax tip of the grease pencil pressed against Julian Vance’s thumb.
The heat from his flesh softened the outer petroleum layer, releasing the familiar scent of paraffin, sulfur, and industrial beeswax. It was the smell of every inventory count, every price mark-down, and every midnight shift he had ever worked at Store #04. It was the scent of plain, working-class retail reality -- greasy, stubborn, and completely indifferent to municipal horror.
Against his left shoulder, the copper freon pipe was a column of solid, unyielding agony.
The negative-twenty-two-degree metal was drinking the heat out of his bloodstream through the wool sleeve of Arthur’s cardigan. Frost was spreading up Julian’s neck, stiffening his collar into a ring of iron needles.
His left arm was completely dead, the nerves frozen numb from the shoulder socket all the way down to his fingertips. His skin felt like cracked porcelain, ready to shatter under the slightest hammer blow.
In his right ear, the tinnitus throbbed at a thunderous, sickening pitch.
Forty-one ninety-six hertz.
The binaural frequency rattled against his jawbone like a dentist’s drill, tasting of scorched zinc, stale battery acid, and cold river water. The tone was trying to force his vocal cords to resonate with the morgue’s frequency, trying to make him confess that he was a corpse.
