Figgis 5: Body Snatching

Body Snatching

“So how do you know your body is in there?” Theresa asked.

“I seem to recall something in the contract saying they kept discarded effects for up to thirty days,”

“Effects?”

“I presume that meant bodies too, I’d check the paperwork but, y’know,” Bel spread her hands in a ‘what can you do?’ gesture, “can’t carry anything.”

Theresa stepped up to the studio’s large shop front window. It had been tastefully done out in that ubiquitous ‘fly by night’ dressing style. IE covered in giant posters promising to CHANGE YOUR LIFE! BECOME WHO YOU WERE MEANT TO BE! and, bizarrely, BUY TWO TRANSFORMATIONS... GET THIRD FREE. She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered through the narrow gaps between posters.

“I can’t see anything.”

Bel sighed. She stepped up beside Theresa and also peered through the window through cupped hands. “Me neither. Oh wait...duh... ghost abilities, right?” She slipped through the glass and disappeared into the gloom of the shop.

Theresa turned to Figgis, “I guess I deserved that.”

Figgis agreed. Why keep an incorporeal being and peer through windows yourself?

Bel returned with a grin. “They’ve got them in the back, all the bodies. Now all we have to do is go in there and get me out.”

Easier said than done. Bel told them there was another door around the back. She’d had  a quick scout and didn’t think it would be too hard to break into. All they had to do was get over the wall and then find some way of opening the back door. As far as she could tell, the window at the back was large enough to climb through if the could break it quietly enough.

Figgis rather hoped he wasn’t going to have to drag a corpse through a broken window. There were better things he’d rather spend his time doing. Like developing his new found skill of self-fellatio.

The row of shops backed onto a cobbled lane. Along the other side of it loomed a huge derelict mill. If you were planning on doing a spot of breaking and entering, you couldn’t wish for a better set of circumstances. Except for the wall.

“That’s a huge wall,” Theresa said.

They looked up at it. It was easily eight feet tall, with barbed wire along the top. The gate was solid wood and  flush to the wall.  Theresa could barely slide a finger in the gap between wood and concrete brick. “We can’t get through that. Well, you can, but we can’t.”

“It’s not locked. There’s only a catch on the other side,” Bel informed them.

“Yes, very easy to open, if you’re on that side of it.”

“I thought you could fly?”

Theresa opened her wings out to their full span. She flapped them experimentally. Then flapped them harder. then harder still. Finally she raised herself a couple of inches off the ground. Red-face with exertion, she dropped back down to the ground. “I’m not sure flying’s going to be an option.”

“What about gliding?”

“Gliding?”

“Yup,” Bel pointed to an industrial sized bin a few feet away. “Drag that here, jump up and glide down.”

Theresa looked doubtful, but in the absence of any better ideas, that’s what she did. It took five minutes to drag the bin into position, and another five for her to clamber up until she stood, unsteadily, on the huge pile of refuse. “Geronimo?” She leapt into the air and flapped furiously, looking more like a moth in a cobweb than a sleek predator of the night. She disappeared into the garden and then was a muffled “Oof.”

There was a click and the gate swung open. Theresa stood there, patches of dirt on her knees and both palms grazed. “You didn’t tell me the garden was full of stuff.”

“You didn’t ask,” Bel answered.

With the first obstacle defeated, they regarded the second.

“Door or window?” Theresa asked. “I’ve got to tell you, I don’t really want to break the window.”

Bel and Theresa discussed various methods of burglary. Both had theories on what was the best method (lock picking with a hair grip, sliding a credit card down the poor and popping the lock, brute force with something heavy...) but neither had any experience and Theresa’s knees were rather painful, she wasn’t sure she could kick a door in with her tiny size five feet. Bel pointed out that size five was hardly tiny, hers - when she had real real feet - were that size and she didn’t think they were particularly small. Theresa replied that when you’re barely five feet tall, she guessed anything over a size three shoe must feel like wearing clown shoes. Bel’s reciprocal comment managed to insult Theresa’s own lanky height, suggested that her IQ was reflected by her hair colour, and further insinuated that she had canine parentage.

And whilst the two women were bitching at each other like siblings at bedtime, Figgis noticed the door wasn’t even shut properly.

So they were in.

It didn’t take long to find the bodies. They were stacked, neatly labelled, in a back room. Each body was contained within a plastic coffin, hooked up to a couple of drips and catheterised. Bel’s body was fortunately the uppermost in a stack of three. Inside the plastic coffin she was dressed in a hospital gown.

“I thought we were retrieving a corpse.”

“Seven day return policy,” Bel said, “have you never read your consumer rights?”

Figgis wasn’t sure body storage had ever formed part of any consumer agreement he’d ever accidentally read. Maybe it had been in the contract he’d flipped through, he certainly hadn’t read it. Wasn’t one of the biggest lies of the modern age ‘yes, I have read the terms and conditions’?

“Are we taking the cylinder? Or do I um unhook you?” Theresa asked.

“Whichever is easiest.”

They pondered the problem. Even Figgis could see they were not going to get the cylinder in his car. Nothing less than a hearse would have contained that thing. It was nearly seven feet long. Not that Bel took up all of it. She was, as Theresa had pointed out, very short.

Theresa popped the catches on the cylinder and dragged Bel’s body out. The catheter bag ripped and spilled urine all over her shoes. “Oh god, yuck.”

“It’s only pee,” Bel snapped. “Bloody hell, I don’t half look a sight!”

Theresa grabbed Bel’s body, holding her under the arms. She dragged her backwards across the floor.

“Mind my feet!” Bel shrieked.

“What am I supposed to do? Ask Figgis to help carry you?”

Obligingly, Figgis ducked under the body’s legs and stood, so the body’s legs were resting on his back. They went back out the way they’d come in a shuffling, sweary huddle. Every few moments the legs would slip off Figgis, or Theresa changed her grip. With much sweating and more than a little instruction from Bel, they finally got her body out into the cobbled alley.

“I’ll bring the car round,” Theresa said.

They put Bel’s body on the back seat, where she sat, like the world’s most lifelike ventriloquists dummy, her owner on the seat next to her. One solid and silent, the other transparent and ranting incessantly. Figgis wasn’t sure which he preferred.