This is a work of fiction.

All of the characters, organizations, and events in this novel are

either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A CORPSE’S NIGHTMARE. Copyright © 2011 by Phillip DePoy. All rights reserved. Printed
in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DePoy, Phillip.
A corpse’s nightmare : a Fever Devilin novel / Phillip Depoy. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978- 0-312- 69946- 8
1. Devilin, Fever (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Attempted murder—
Fiction. 3. Coma—Patients—Fiction I. Title.
PS3554.E624C67 2011
813'.54—dc23
2011026226

First Edition: November 2011

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 1.

The dead can dream; I’ll tell you how I know.

Things had been quiet in Blue Mountain for so long that we
had all come to mistake inertia for contentment. An entire autumn
afternoon, for example, could be spent cataloging the images in
cumulus clouds. They rushed over the mountain on their way to
other, more important places, each with great mythic import. On
October 9th I noted three minotaurs moving in the clouds. I
made a list of their various postures. Doubtless a propensity for
classical literature and a bottle of French pastis combined to color
these perceptions. My time at the university had given me a love
of mythology. My friend Dr. Winton Andrews had given me the
pastis. Indolence had done the rest. I might have remained in that
happy state of suspended animation for the rest of my life. I’ve
heard or read that some people have that sort of luck. Alas, lazy
autumn turned to bitter winter. On the 3rd of December, just be-
fore midnight, a total stranger came into my home and shot me as
I slept in my bed. I died before the emergency medical team could
find their way to my house.

But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come? To begin at

the beginning, childhood is of absolutely no consequence if it’s
1
 2 | PHILLIP DePOY

handled properly. All normal childhoods are exactly the same as

Tolstoy’s happy families: just alike. Unfortunately, my early years
were handled as strangely as anyone could possibly imagine.
For reasons I can only guess, my mother always instructed me
that it was impolite to tell the truth. In any circumstance, she
thought she should make up something better. It was never a harm-
ful lie. In fact, it was generally a lie that was meant to improve a
situation.
She would say, “What a splendid looking dress!” no matter what
the thing looked like. Or: “These are the most delicious Brussels
sprouts I’ve ever eaten.” (Clearly the oxymoron of placing the
words delicious and Brussels sprouts in the same sentence needs little
comment.)
The worst lies were about me. “My son? He’s a fine, normal,
average boy. We didn’t really name him Fever, it just sort of hap-
pened.”
I knew I was neither normal nor average. My IQ tested at 186;
I liked the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the music of French
Middle Ages at age eight; I had my first sexual encounter with a
girl when we were both nine—it was wonderful.
I also may have had an angelic experience when I was eleven.
So while mother’s application of the word fi ne might have
applied—I won’t judge that—the words normal and average seemed
out of the question.
To be specific, the IQ test was given three times to verify its re-
sults, the nine-year-old girl’s name was Alisa; the angel had no
actual form. My IQ has been a source of trouble for me ever since
I was tested. I never knew what became of Alisa, her family moved
away to New Orleans. The angel, on the other hand, visited me
again—possibly.
I first met the angel in something of an unusual way. I had read
that Einstein posited curved space by imagining he was riding
the Universe on a beam of light. I wanted to try the same experi-
 A CORPSE’S NIGHTMARE | 3

ment. It seemed a most obvious occupation for a Sunday morning

while my father was at church.
I remember quite clearly that I sat in a chair by the window in
my room, staring out at the morning sun. I was dressed in my
usual blue jeans and flannel shirt. The room was bare then, save
for a bed, a desk, and a Currier and Ives picture of a sleigh being
pulled over a bridge by two horses. Just as I was beginning to feel
light-headed from shallow breathing and concentration, the im-
ages of ordinary reality faded and there it was: the angel.
I saw a face that was not a face and it said, very softly, “Do you
recognize me?”
“No,” I think I said. “Should I?”
“No should. Just is.” I might have imagined that an angel would
proffer that sort of language.
I tried to focus on the face, but it kept changing. “I don’t under-
stand,” I said.
“We only have a moment together.” It hovered like a mist out-
side the window. “Look through the things in the box behind the
clock on the mantel.”
“What things?”
It shimmered. “They’re in the box behind the clock.”
I dared not take my eyes away. “What am I looking for?”
Then the angel vanished.
Without hesitation, I flew down the blond wooden staircase that
led from the upstairs bedrooms. In those days all the rooms down-
stairs were, in fact, one big room. Bronzed oak beams framed the
entire place. The galley kitchen was small then, still to the right as
you came in the front door. There was a stone hearth wood-
burning fireplace to the left by the large picture window. The
quilts on the walls always seemed like church windows to me.
I went straight to the clock on the mantel. Behind it I found a
blue tin box. I didn’t even think to question why I’d never noticed
it before. It had a forest hunting scene embossed on its lid.
 4 | PHILLIP DePOY

In that box, I found the ingredients of several lifetimes.

The tin was old, nineteenth century, and had, I believed, once
held candies. I opened it as if it were some sort of present. It
contained mostly papers and letters, some photos—poems and
documents—things that would prove quite puzzling for, really, the
rest of my life.
The most baffling object in the box was a photograph. Just as I
picked it up to examine it more closely, my mother appeared be-
hind me.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
I jumped because she startled me. Whatever she lacked in veri-
similitude, she more than made up for in stealth. She always had.
I spun around. She was wearing her print dress with the giant
blue roses on it, and a black cardigan with a collar. Her feet were
bare. Her hair was tightly coiled copper around her head. She
was smoking a cigarette.
“I didn’t hear you.” I tried to hide the box, but it was no use.
She stood over me. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ”
“I’m looking through the things in this box,” I answered
calmly, “as would seem to be obvious.”
She stared down at me. “Don’t you get smart with me, buster.”
“I’m not getting smart with you, Mother,” I sighed. “I already
am smart. And please don’t call me buster.”
“How about if I call you Smart Mouth?”
“Call me whatever you want to. I can tell a puzzle when I see
one.”
“A puzzle?” she asked.
I held up the photo. It was an ancient sepia image of a young
woman in a bar, smiling for the camera. On the back of the
photo it simply said, “Lisa, 1923.”
My mother looked away. “What is that?”
“Oh, I have a feeling you know what this is.” I moved toward
her. “It says ‘1923’ on the back, but that’s a picture of you if I ever
 A CORPSE’S NIGHTMARE | 5

saw one. You weren’t born in 1923. Your mother wasn’t even born
in 1923.”
“That’s not me,” she said weakly, using the same inflections she
always employed when she was making things up.
“I don’t see how it could be.”
“What do you want?” she sniffed.
“An explanation would be good,” I answered.
She let out a sigh that I would remember for the rest of my days.
In it I could hear all her heartbroken, impossibly gargantuan
disappointment—in me, in my father, in an entire world that had
not given her the things she richly deserved: normalcy, comfort-
able economics, and an escape from Blue Mountain. But all she
said was, “I’ll get the letter.”
She went up to her room, and came back out a few moments
later carrying the letter as if it might explode. She handed it to me
and turned her back. I thought she was being overly dramatic, as
she was always wont to do.
It was a plain envelope. It was sealed. On the front were the
words For Fever in keen script. Just touching the envelope somehow
made my fingers feel strange.
I opened. I unfolded the paper inside. I read.

Dear Fever,
If your mother has given you this letter, you must already suspect
something. You’re looking at some of the photographic evidence.
Maybe you’ve had an angelic visitation. Don’t be alarmed.
Everybody has those. If you decide to pursue this matter, you’re in
for quite a ride. If you find out who the woman is in that
photograph, your life will change. Doesn’t matter. Everything you
think you know in this life? None of it is real.

It wasn’t signed.
I looked up at my mother. “Who wrote this?”
 6 | PHILLIP DePOY

She still had her back to me, but I thought she might be crying.
“Did my father write this letter,” I demanded, “or my grand-
father?”
“You don’t know the person who wrote this letter,” she mum-
bled, “yet.”
I set the letter in the box with the other foreign objects. “Are
you crying?”
She nodded.
I took a step closer to her. “Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Then why are you crying?”
Her voice got stronger. “Don’t do it, Fever. Don’t chase after
answers to these things. Forget all about it. Just stay around Blue
Mountain and maybe work with me and your dad in the show
when the time comes for you to earn a living. You leave here and
go out in the big world: you’re just asking for trouble and heart-
ache. You look for answers to this particular riddle, and you’ll
find out things about people—about the whole human condition,
in fact—that you don’t really want to know. You don’t really want
to know just how awful everything can be.”
I blew out a little breath. “That’s just the sort of thing you say
that eggs me on.”
She turned. “What?”
“Maybe you don’t realize it,” I explained, “but when you say
something like that, it makes me want to do the opposite.”
She stuck her neck to the side. “What are you telling me?”
“When you say ‘no,’ Mother,” I explained exasperatedly, “it only
makes me want to find out what ‘yes’ is like. You drive me crazy!”
“Don’t pay any attention to this mess, I’m telling you!” Her voice
grew shrill. “Why can’t you just stay an ordinary human being?”
“God! You have to realize that when you refer to me as an ordi-
nary human being, you are engaging in what’s called ‘wishful think-
ing.’ I’m about as ordinary as wings on a turtle!”
 A CORPSE’S NIGHTMARE | 7

“And?” She narrowed her eyelids. “You never heard of a turtle-

dove?”
“God, God, God!” I looked away. “If you aren’t the most
exasperating person I’ll ever meet, I don’t want to go on living.”
“I see.” She wagged her head. “And you call me overly dra-
matic.”
“Where do you think I get it?”
“Brother!” She tossed her hand. “You can’t blame everything
on me. Some things you’re just born with.”
“Do you see why you make me crazy?” I rolled my head trying
to untie some of the knots in my neck. “Do you see what you’re
saying? Whether I learned it from you or I inherited it genetically,
it still comes from you!”
“You blame me for everything,” she said again, feigning weak-
ness. “Well, fi ne, then! Go on! Chase the ghosts for all I care. Be
a freak!”
And at that—and I recall this feeling quite clearly, even as an
adult—my entire body and mind relaxed. With a miraculously
bizarre sense of what I was soon to learn could be called déjà vu,
I answered her challenge.
“Well,” I announced, “it’s good to know my true nature so early
in life.”
At that she gave up, ascended the stairs a bit like Gloria Swanson
in Sunset Boulevard, went to her room and put on the Frank Sinatra
record of “Angel Eyes.” It was a deliberate dig at me. She thought
I ought to be more religious, more normal, more outgoing—all
qualities that she seemed to think Sinatra embodied and I hated.
Sinatra was a good American; I was a bad boy.
I knew, even then, the heartbreaking aspect of my mother’s de-
sires and accusations, lies and foibles, disappointments and fears.
They all stemmed from an attempt on her part, in the younger
days, to escape Blue Mountain. She and my father had both been
born in our little hamlet, but had once wandered away—in
 8 | PHILLIP DePOY

1961—all the way to Atlanta. They always told me that they had
taken a journey toward spirituality and a dynamic sense of pur-
pose, something that everyone had then. Kennedy was in the
White House, Civil Rights were on the move, young people were
speaking their minds—the world was changing for the better and
forever. By the spring of 1963, everything in America was moving
in the perfect direction. The country was fi lled with beautiful
young people. Their ideology was beautiful. Even the president
and his wife were beautiful. Everything seemed to be headed into
the light at the center of the greatest century in human history.
That’s how it felt.
Everything was opening up. Even the interior of the White
House was revealed. Previous first ladies had been shy about the
decor of their four-to-eight-year home, but Jackie Kennedy took
everyone on a tour of the place— on live television! She showed
everyone the young White House, where their president and his
smart, beautiful wife lived.
In that year, 1963, my parents were crusaders. They helped to
arrange a folk-singing extravaganza on the steps of the Atlanta
Capitol building. They were already gearing up for Kennedy’s re-
election. They were Young Democrats. They had convinced no less
than Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez to perform.
Every song was the hammer of freedom. Every word was the
bell of justice. Every glance they shared was a song about love
between brothers and my sisters, all over this-a land. The feeling
in the air that spring was that all human beings could, with very
little effort, change the world for better, forever, and very soon.
They felt it was the most exhilarating sense of power and change
ever known to humankind.
Then, autumn came.
The president—the young beautiful president, the president
that would live forever, the president that gave everyone a feeling
of freedom and forward-moving idealism—was assassinated on
 A CORPSE’S NIGHTMARE | 9

national television. The gun exploded, blood erupted; they saw

the skull and brains fly everywhere. President Kennedy lay dead
in a Lincoln Continental.
Also that year: Robert Frost died. Jean Cocteau died. Edith
Piaf died. Pope John XXIII died. A hurricane in Eastern Paki-
stan killed twenty-two thousand people. The entire world had a
shocked sense of loss. Suddenly all the events of life seemed greatly
random and inexplicably cruel.
It was no coincidence, my parents believed, that the popular
American drug culture got a significant boost after the Kennedy
assassination. If the icon of hopes and dreams could be shot
through the head right in front of you, it was understandable that
you might want to search for alternate realities, other possibilities;
any means of turning away from the things that you saw.
My parents’ choice—their act of turning away—was to go
back to the strange carnival life they had known only two years
earlier with their odd traveling show. They went back to Blue
Mountain and resumed their deeply unusual lives. My father was
a world-class magician and my mother was his hypnotically beau-
tiful assistant. Together they were mesmerizing onstage, largely
because they seemed too ethereal—as if they weren’t entirely of
this earth. They picked right up where they had left off, almost as
if their dream of a better world had never happened. The Ten
Show, as it was called, turned out to be their calling. Once they
came home, they never looked back.
These events explain how I came to be born in Blue Mountain,
not a more metropolitan clime, the product of strange parents and
lost hope.
Whenever they told me these stories—and most of them came
from my mother in her cups—I always had the impulse to tell
them that they had not been paying attention. I thought they
should have realized that no one could alter reality. They couldn’t,
as they’d dreamed, ever eliminate war, hatred, racism, sexism,
 10 | PHILLIP DePOY

governments, systems of economics, foundations of education,

and all strife—not just by loving. I tried to explain it to them, at age
eleven. I gave them the salient facts: (a) color television had become
the single most popular form of entertainment in the world. After
10,000 years of human folklore, oral traditions, stories passed
from person to person with great reverence, suddenly came televi-
sion. Human interaction was quickly being removed from the
process. (b) It’s not possible for the human mind to hang on to a
beautiful vision indefinitely. That vision changes in a very short
time. Everything changes. It’s a key function of the human psyche:
visions are meant to fade. (c) No one can alter reality. All you can
alter is your own perceptions—and not even that very well.
Which brings us back to the angel. It was very clear to me
when I saw the angel that God was in everything. For months af-
ter that experience I could see His Light emanate from trees and
rocks and hills and plains and water and air and most of all from
the glorious, loving, all-embracing countenance of every human
being around me. We were all very obviously one in God, I thought:
safe, blessed, and free. It was the most beautiful vision of life that
anyone ever had.
But it passed.
A CORPSE'S NIGHTMARE

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