Free The Autumn Dead by Edward Gorman

and how he'd been knocked out and forgot all about a curious figure in black on a black Honda motorcycle and all about a suitcase that nobody seemed to possess but that somebody seemed to want very, very badly.
    I wasn't thinking of anything at all really, just floating on her perfume and the darkness and the music, and at first I was scarcely aware of how she began to slip from my arms to the floor.
    "Karen?" I said. "Karen?"
    People around us were looking and a few giggling, making the assumption she was drunk, but I didn't think so.
    She was dead weight in my arms. And that was exactly what I thought: dead weight.
    And then one of those quick bursts of panic, some sort of concussion, went off inside me and I heard myself shouting for lights up and for people to clear space and I knelt paramedic-style next to her feeling for pulse in neck and wrist, touching the tepid, sweaty skin of her body.
    I found no pulse.
    A priest and a fat man in a dinner jacket whom I recognized as our class president came running up and said, "What's wrong here?"
    "Ambulance," was all I could say, scarcely able to speak at all.
    The overhead lights were on now and the magic was gone; you could see how old the floor was, and how beaten up the bleachers, and how cracked the tall windows. It was not the Stairway to the Stars of countless proms, after all. It was just a gym in a school more than half a century old and now in ill repair because the diocese saw no future in the Highlands. Nobody ever had.
    She looked comic herself now, fake, the way the dancers had, fake gray tint in their hair, fake bellies, fake wrinkles and jowls and rheumy eyes, but what she was putting on was even more alarming because she was imitating death itself, like some phantom beauty from a Poe poem, but without the flutter of an eyelid or warm breath in her nostrils, not the faintest flicker in wrist or neck.
    "Ambulance!" I shouted again, and this time I heard how ragged and desperate my voice had become and saw in the eyes of those encircling me a modicum of pity and a modicum of fear—both of her death and of the potential rage in my voice.
    The priest, young as a rookie ballplayer, yet shorn of the grace that comes with age, knelt down beside me and said, "Maybe I'd best say some prayers with her. " He didn't say "Last rites." He didn't need to. He produced a black rosary and began saying a "Hail Mary" and an "Our Father" and then a woman somewhere sobbed and for the first time I realized that the music had stopped, and that in the gym now there was just the rush and roar of time itself and nothing more, nothing more at all.

Chapter 8
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    "Y ou were the man dancing with her?"
    " Yes ."
    " Can we talk a minute?"
    "Sure."
    Forty-five minutes had passed since the dance had ground to a nightmare halt, all motion seeming to be slowed down for a time, faces ripped open with tears and fear and the bafflement only death can inspire.
    A white box of an ambulance sat with its doors open near the west entrance. The three people from the coroner's office had finished with her now, and two attendants in white, both with potbellies and hippie beards and eyes that had gazed on death perhaps too many times, had put her inside a black body bag, which was in turn put on a gurney that was now being loaded inside the well-lit confines.
    Fanned around the ambulance were three hundred people from the dance. Many of the women had their husbands' coats draped over their shoulders. While the women were given to tears and occasional whispers, the men seemed doomed to an odd silence, gazing at the ambulance as if it explained some long-sought answer to a puzzle. There was a great deal of booze, punch from the bowl, Scotch in pint bottles, gin and vodka in flasks, beer in cans and big clear plastic cups. They'd been ready for a night when alcohol would set them free; now all alcohol could do was tranquilize them. Technically, there was a city ordinance against drinking out here, but none