Disposing of a corpse is remarkably difficult. It can reveal itself in surprising ways. Here in Bermuda we have the cautionary tale of Edward Skeeters and his wife Anna, a childless couple who lived by the sea. Anna went missing one Sunday afternoon, and after a time her neighbors and friends noticed a peculiar phenomenon out at Long Bay channel. The waters were remarkably calm no matter the weather, and when this persisted a search party rowed out to see what they could see.
Reaching the calm, these two men were deeply impressed with the sinister character of the spot. "It was more conspicuous," they said, "than any other calm we had ever seen before. The calm would rise and spread out and then go away with the wind and tide. And then, the calm would rise again."
Corpses decay. They give off fat and oil. Oil calms troubled waters, as Pliny pointed out. There wasn't much left of Anna by this point.
Up came the skeleton; it was not a complete skeleton; it seemed to have broken in two. The legs were there - they were out straight - but the feet were gone and the arms and the skull; there was no clothing; the flesh was soft ... it was slimy ... there was a great stench.
Edward Skeeters hanged July 1879.
A corpse goes through several stages before it becomes a skeleton. It starts as a relatively fresh piece of meat. This when it goes through rigor, muscles stiffening and then relaxing, a process that was very popular in early detective novels as it gave fiction's greatest detectives a presumed time of death.
Then comes bloat, about 3 to 5 days after death. The gut begins to liquefy and gases extend the abdomen and limbs. Foul-smelling liquid is forced out of the mouth and nose due to pressure in the intestine. For those acquainted with vampire literature this should all sound familiar. The flushed and livid appearance, the gore at the lips - classic signs of vampirism. The corpse can be volatile in this condition, which is why William the Conqueror exploded at his funeral. It is also why funeral homes took to lead-lining their coffins, before embalming became popular.
Even then there can be complications. "A well-designed mausoleum will have the crypts inclined very slightly to the rear," according to a Vice article, "to a drainage pipe so that the fluids that come out will be drained away discreetly. And it will be designed in such a way so that fresh air exchange is constantly coming through the crypts themselves facilitating dehydration out of a discreet vent in the back of the building."
Active decay comes next. The remains blacken and putrefy. It gives off liquids and chemicals. The stench reduces. This is when those famous maggots become helpful, tracking the rate of decay.
After Active comes Advanced, when there isn't much left to look at. After Advanced comes skeletonization.
There are facilities devoted to the study of decay. The US has several body farms, but the practice has not been widely adopted elsewhere. The UK, for instance, does not have a body farm, though there has been a TV series with that name.
What does this mean for your game?
To begin with, it enables creative set dressing for a scene. Trail, Bookhounds, and especially Night's Black Agents generate corpses on a regular basis, but rarely are they interesting. Suppose, for instance, your Bookhounds find a corpse in the course of their investigation.
Arthur's swollen body lies in his bed, limbs akimbo as if in his last moments he reached for the heavens in protest. Foul liquid smears across his face, gore expelled from his lips and nose. His stare is horrible to look upon, and your eyes dart here and there so as not to see it - but you can't help looking. [Stability loss is usually 3, in this case adjusted to 4 if Arthur pops. By this point he's three days dead.]
Arthur's blackened skin seems oily and somehow loose, an ill-fitting suit. Foul liquid sloughs off the bed and across the floorboards, a fatty pool of decay that you do your best not to step in. Flies buzz about, Beelzebub's children on grisly errands, many of them battering themselves on the closed window. You cannot believe it took the neighbors this long to notice the smell. [Arthur's been dead at least 6 days by this point. Stability loss definitely 4 now, though it might drop to 3 once skeletonization sets in.]
It also should alert the Keeper/Director to a rule of thumb that often gets ignored: corpses are very difficult to deal with. The longer it's left alone the more difficult it is to handle, as it becomes soft, oily and liquid. There's a reason why crime scene clean-up is now a thing people do for money. When the body's fresh and relatively intact it can be moved around without too much mess, but the longer you wait the nastier it becomes.
So for, say, vampires, corpses become a real problem. You generate corpses on a regular basis. Unusual corpses, ones that will make a forensic pathologist sit up and pay attention. Which is fine if you're on a battlefield or in a place where random killings are a regular event, but if you're in, say, London, you need to come up with a way of dealing with the problem. Otherwise slayers will take notice and pay you a visit. How the vampires in your game deal with that problem can become a scene, or several scenes, all on their own. Is that removals van part of a Level One Node? That crematorium? Construction company? What happens when someone finds your corpse store?
For that matter, what about zombies? Those poor unfortunate deadfellas condemned to wander - how come their decay process is so wacky? Those dead bodies seem to last for-freaking-ever, defying natural processes. Which, okay, they're basically magical creations at this point, so a certain amount of denying-natural-yadda-yadda is expected. Still, it seems unusual and arbitrary. Surely once they reach the skeleton stage, when muscles are a thing of the past, they're basically helpless? What about the ones in the bloat stage?
A so-so zombie series, Walking Dead.
A much, much better zombie series, Kingdom.
Finally, a story seed:
Waking Ned Devine (Night's Black Agents)
Tourists Shocked By Corpse In Garden A group of friends who rented a house in the Lake District got a nasty surprise when they found a corpse floating at the bottom of the garden.
"The body was found caught in the weeds at the riverside, at the bottom of the garden," said the police. Foul play is suspected ...
Corpse Farm Discovered in Pastoral Fenby Bridge Following on events that took place two weeks ago the police have discovered a body disposal site at a Lake District farm. Estimates suggest at least twenty bodies in various stages of decay were discovered ...
The agents are dispatched to Fenby Bridge ostensibly as MI5 liaison officers attached to the police investigation, but they have a particular reason to be there. They need to check whether the bodies found were vampire killings, and if so who was involved in the disposal operation. The locals are less than thrilled to be the focus of the investigation - it's ruining the tourist trade.
Options:
- The corpse farm is actually an offshoot of a larger operation. The owners of a cemetery in a larger town have been digging up corpses and selling their plots on to other buyers. Of course this creates a body disposal problem, which the cemetery owners have solved by offloading the bodies in a more rural, secluded location. The Fenby Bridge locals are genuinely upset, and have a right to be. However one of the corpses was less than dead, and less than thrilled to find itself carelessly tossed into the bushes. It spent the last however many years starved and trapped in a hole in the ground, only to find itself thrown out like garbage. This feral is the reason why the body ended up in the river; it was careless when it made its escape.
- The Fenby Bridge locals are protecting one of their own, a man turned into a vampire during the Second World War. Through Aberrant influence and some natural charm it's been able to keep things quiet for decades, but as the tourist trade picked up and more and more outsiders came to the Lake District the problem became worse. The vampire refuses to acknowledge the danger, which means its human protectors have to go to greater lengths to keep it safe.
- This is part of a larger Node operation gone wrong. Corpses from all over the country are sent to Fenby Bridge and places like it, scattered across the UK. The idea is to 'disappear' people, but the problem is the Conspiracy generates corpses faster than its crematoria can handle them. So the excess are delivered to places like Fenby Bridge until such time as they can be properly dealt with - except of course that never happens because the Conspiracy keeps generating more corpses and the old ones get forgotten about. The locals are genuinely terrified of what might happen next. At any moment someone in a far-off office may decide there are too many witnesses, and what kind of horror will be unleashed then?
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