At twenty to two on an October morning, two men ring Fotini Bakola's doorbell in Larissa with her daughter's school timetable in their hands. One of them is the son of the family whose fuel stations line the old national road, and he needs something from the mortuary where she works: a phone that belongs to a young driver killed on a bridge near Farsala, which the police will collect at eight. The dead man's phone has not yet been switched off, and his finger can still open it if she can warm it enough. The Necromancy simulacrum writes a close, cold-room crime thriller, exact about procedure and the Thessalian plain at harvest, about what the dead say when they are made to speak, and to whom.
by Necromancy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
They came for Fotini Bakola at twenty to two on a Thursday morning in October, and they rang the bell like neighbours.
She knew the bell. It had a crack in its plastic housing and gave a double note, the second lower than the first, and in nine years nobody had ever pressed it after midnight except the hospital, which telephoned first. She lay in the dark and counted. It went again. She got up, pulled on the cardigan from the back of the chair, looked in on Marina, who slept with one arm over her face as she had since she was a baby, and went to the entryphone in the hall.
"Kyria Bakola," said a man's voice, pleasant, a little tired. "We need you at work."
"Who is this?"
"Open the door and I'll tell you. Or don't, and I'll stand here and ring until your daughter wakes up. It's all the same to me. I've got nowhere to be until morning."
She stood with her hand on the button. The hall smelled of the floor cleaner she had used that evening, pine, and under it of the cotton gins that ran all night out on the Trikala road at this time of year, a dry smell like hot linen. She thought about the police. She thought about how long they took to come to this end of town, and about the voice saying your daughter, and she pressed the button.
There were two of them on the landing. The one who had spoken was in his thirties, clean-shaven, in a good navy windcheater, with the open, rested face of a man who had never had to wait for anything in a queue. She knew it from billboards before she knew it from anywhere else. MAVRIDIS FUELS. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS ON THE OLD ROAD. On the billboards it was his father's face, and this was the father's face thirty years earlier, before it had thickened.
"Lefteris Mavridis," he said, as though she might need telling. "This is Stamatis. Get dressed. We're going up to Mezourlo."
Stamatis was older and heavier and said nothing. He had a folded sheet of paper in his hand, and while she was still deciding what to say he unfolded it and held it up for her to see. It was Marina's timetable from the Fourth Gymnasium. Mathematics on Monday first period. Gymnastics on Thursday afternoon, in the sports hall by the Alcazar park. Someone had circled Thursday in blue biro.
"Five minutes," Lefteris said. "Leave a light on for her. Children don't like waking in the dark."
The mortuary of the university hospital was at the back of the hill, below the boiler house, where the hearses could come and go by the service road without passing the main doors. The guard at the barrier was a man called Thodoris whom Fotini had known for six years, who had once given her a lift home in the snow. He looked into the back of the car, saw Stamatis, and lifted the barrier without leaving his booth.
"The Galanis boy," Lefteris said, as they went down the ramp. "Christos Galanis. Tuesday night, on the Enipeas bridge. You've got him."
She had him. She had helped Dr Zarkadas open him on Wednesday morning: a man of twenty-six, chest crushed against a steering column, the long tear in the aorta that killed most of the drivers who came to her from the old national road. Death within minutes. Blood alcohol nil. The report would say so.
"His effects," Lefteris said. "There's a phone."
There was. She had bagged it herself, with the wallet, the keys, a Saint Christopher on a chain and a box of Farsala halva in a carrier bag that had been on the passenger seat, still sealed. The property bag was in the locked cupboard in the office, and the traffic police were coming for the phone at eight, because a lorry driver had come forward on Wednesday afternoon to say that there had been a second car on the bridge, a dark one, that had not stopped.
She did not ask how Lefteris knew there was a phone. She unlocked the side door with her own key, and the smell came out to meet them, cold and chemical, the formalin and the drains and under them the other thing, which nobody who worked there ever named, and which was not as bad as people imagined. Stamatis put the back of his hand to his nose. Lefteris did not.
She switched on the lights in the office and they woke along the ceiling one tube at a time. The property cupboard was steel, grey, with a key she wore on the same ring as the door. She took out bag 2231 and laid it on the desk. Clear plastic, heat-sealed, with a strip of tape across the seal that had been signed in black marker by the day technician, Rena, and dated, and timed: Wed 14:05.
"Open it," Lefteris said.
"When I open it, it stays open," Fotini said. "Everyone will know it was opened."
"Everyone will know it was opened by you," Lefteris said, "on the night shift, which is when things are opened. Open it."
She cut the seal with the scissors from the desk. The phone was a cheap Android with a spider of cracks across one corner of the glass and the fingerprint reader set into the power button on its side, the kind they sold by the hundred in the shop opposite the bus station. She pressed the button. The screen lit with a photograph of a cotton field at dusk, white to the horizon, and the time, and a battery in the corner, red. Seven per cent.
Lefteris put out his hand for it. She did not give it to him.
"It's the finger, isn't it," she said. "You want his finger."
"I knew you'd be good at this."
"It hasn't been switched off," Fotini said. She heard herself say it in the voice she used for students on placement. "If it had been switched off, it would want the code, and nobody alive has that. Since it hasn't, it might take his print. Might. He's been in the cold for more than a day. A dead finger doesn't conduct. The reader wants a living one."
"Then make it a living one," Lefteris said.
The cold room held twelve drawers in two rows. Christos Galanis was in the lower row, number nine, under a sheet. She rolled him out on his tray, and the cold came off him in a slow fall she felt on her shins, and she folded the sheet down to his waist.
They had done good work on Wednesday. The long incision from the shoulders to the sternum and down was closed with a neat baseball stitch; Zarkadas did his own closing, which not all of them did. The bruising of the seatbelt ran across his chest like a sash. His face had been cleaned and his hair combed back from it. He had very dark eyebrows that met over his nose, and a small scar through one of them, white, old, a child's fall from a wall.
Lefteris looked at him for a long time and did not say anything. Stamatis stayed by the door.
"Did you know him?" Fotini said.
"He drove for us."
That was all. She took the right hand. The fingers had come out of their stiffness overnight, as they did, and the hand lay open in hers, heavy and cold, cold all through, the cold of a thing that has been kept rather than a thing that has been left. She ran water into the steel basin at the end of the dissection table until it came hot, and tested it with her wrist, as she had once tested Marina's bottles, and lowered his hand into it up to the knuckles.
"How long?"
"As long as it takes," Fotini said.
She held his hand in the water. She rubbed the index finger between her own thumb and finger, slowly, from the base to the tip, as you would rub a child's hand coming in from the snow. The steam rose between them. The pads of his fingers had begun, in the cold, to whiten and pucker; under the warm water they smoothed and pinked a little, not into life but into an imitation of it that would perhaps be good enough for a machine. She thought, as she did it, about Rena's signature on the seal, and about the eight o'clock shift, and about the circled Thursday. She thought about none of them for long. Her hands were busy, and they had always been able to take her away from her head.
When the finger was as warm as she could make it she lifted it out and dried it carefully on a paper towel, because a wet finger would fail as surely as a cold one, and she held out her other hand for the phone without looking up. Lefteris put it in her palm.
Seven per cent. Six.
She laid the pad of Christos Galanis's right index finger on the power button and pressed it, gently, with her own thumb on his nail.
The screen shook. Fingerprint not recognised.
"Again," Lefteris said.
"If I try too many times it will ask for the code anyway." She put the finger back in the water and held it there, counting under her breath, the way she counted compressions, and dried it, and tried again, with the finger flatter on the reader and a fraction higher.
The cotton field slid upward and away. Behind it was a grid of icons on a black ground, and the phone made a small sound, a soft click, as if a door had been unlatched somewhere in it.
Lefteris took it from her. She kept hold of the hand.
She did not mean to read. She had always been careful about letters; at twelve she had once found her mother's from Germany in a shoebox and had put the lid back on it without opening one, and been proud of it for years. But she was standing at Lefteris's shoulder because he needed the finger again within reach whenever the screen dimmed, and so she saw it as he scrolled: Viber, purple, the thing that everybody's mother and every tradesman in Thessaly used. He went past threads with names. Mama. Sakis Garage. Lefteris M. He opened that one and scrolled up through it quickly, his own messages, and his lips moved: Thursday, the yard, half past four, bring the long tanker, not the short one. He breathed out through his nose. Then he went back to the list and kept going, past Pizza Roma and Vasso with a heart after it, and then he stopped.
Kostas M.
It was not a long thread. The last message was on Monday, at 22:17.
Thursday. The yard at Farsala. Tell them he drives it himself. He always does.
And under it, from Christos, on Tuesday at 21:50, about an hour before the bridge:
I can't do this to him.
And nothing after that.
The screen went dim. Lefteris did not tell her to touch it again. He stood holding the phone, and the screen faded to its lowest light and then went dark, and in its black glass she could see the strip lights and the edge of his face. He did not move. Stamatis, by the door, said his name once and he did not answer.
When he spoke, it was in an ordinary voice, as if he were telling her the time.
"He's had that number for twenty years," he said. "He never changes anything. He's had the same barber since he was a conscript."
Fotini said nothing. In her hand the dead man's hand had begun, very slowly, to cool again from the outside in. She had felt this before, many times, and it had never been anything to her. Now she found she could feel it as a direction, as a thing that was going somewhere without her.
"Wake it up," Lefteris said.
She looked at him.
"Wake it up. I'm going to take some things out of it. Mine. Not his." He held the phone out to her. "His stay. Let them read his. I want them to read every word of his. Wake it up and hold it there."
She understood him. She stood beside the open drawer with Christos Galanis's hand in hers and understood exactly what he wanted the dead man to say in the morning to the traffic police and whoever came after them: that he had carried messages for an old man who was selling his son, and that the son had never written to him at all. It was not even a lie. It was only half the truth.
The battery icon said four per cent.
"Kyria Bakola," Lefteris said, still pleasantly. Stamatis had come away from the door.
She took the phone. She held it in her left hand and Christos's hand in her right, and she looked down at his face, at the eyebrows that met and the white scar through one of them, and she thought that he had sat in his car on Tuesday night on the Enipeas bridge, with a box of halva on the seat beside him for someone, and had written I can't do this to him, and that this was the last thing he had said to anyone, and that it was his.
She put her thumb on the power button and held it down.
The screen lit, and a menu came up over the cotton field. Power off. Restart. Emergency mode. Nobody had told the phone that the man whose finger it knew was dead, and so it asked her, politely, as it would have asked him.
She touched Power off.
Lefteris moved, but it was already gone. The screen went black, and then for a second showed the maker's name in white, and then nothing.
Stamatis had her by the upper arm. She did not remember him crossing the room. His grip was not cruel; it was the grip of a man who has held a great many arms and knows exactly how much is needed. She did not let go of Christos's hand, and so for a moment the three of them were joined in a line, Stamatis to her to the dead man, and the drawer behind them breathing out its cold.
"Switch it on," Lefteris said.
She pressed the button. The maker's name came, and then the cotton field, and across it, in white: Enter PIN to unlock.
"Use the finger."
"It won't take the finger now," Fotini said. "Not after a restart. It wants what was in his head." She pressed the dead finger to the reader anyway, so that he could see. PIN required. "That's gone. Nobody has it. It's not in the phone, it's not in him. It's nowhere."
Lefteris looked at her for a long while. She could not read his face; she had seen too many faces in the last hour of their lives, and his was not doing anything she knew. Stamatis's thumb moved slightly on the inside of her arm, waiting to be told.
"They'll open it," Lefteris said at last. "In Athens. They have machines."
"Perhaps," she said. "Then they'll read all of it."
He held out his hand. She put the phone in it. He turned it over, looked at the cracked corner, at the cotton field and the white words across it, and she thought he would put it in his pocket, or on the floor and his heel on it. He did neither. He put it down on the steel edge of the tray beside Christos Galanis's hip, very carefully, the way you put down something that belongs to somebody else.
"Leave her," he said to Stamatis.
Stamatis let go.
Lefteris took the folded timetable from Stamatis's other hand and looked at it, at the circle round Thursday, and then laid it on the dissection table beside the basin, where the water had stopped steaming, and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand.
"Gymnastics," he said. "I did gymnastics." He went to the door. "I'm going to Farsala. I have a delivery."
She heard them go up the ramp, and the car start, and the barrier, and then the long empty hum of the hospital at night, the boilers, a lift somewhere.
She dried the hand. She dried each finger separately with a fresh paper towel, the way she would have dried Marina's, and laid the hand back on the tray at his side, palm down, and drew the sheet up over the stitches and the seatbelt bruise to his chin, and then over his face. She pushed the tray, and it ran back into the dark on its rollers and stopped against the end of the drawer with a sound she had heard ten thousand times. She closed the door on it and turned the handle down.
In the office she took a new property bag from the box, and put the phone into it, with the wallet and the keys and the Saint Christopher and the box of halva, and sealed it on the heat sealer, and wrote across the tape in black marker, Opened 02:15 Thu, F. Bakola, and the bag number, and nothing else. Then she sat down at the desk and opened the night log and uncapped her pen. Outside the one high window the sky over the plain had not yet begun to go grey. In four hours Marina's alarm would go, in the flat where the hall light had been left on for her.
She wrote the date. She wrote the time. Then she sat with the pen over the page and listened to the hospital breathing, and did not write anything else for a long time.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Nōnās Octōbrēs (3 October 2026), ā Necromantīā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.
Necromancy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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