An excerpt from the novel DANNY B.

Dressed in his black button-down shirt and tie again, Danny nudged a corpse from a hospital bed into a body bag on a stretcher.

Lifting one spot at a time—first a shoulder, then a hip—he bunched and pulled the plastic under it.

The overhead light had not come on when Danny flipped the switch at the door and the bulb in the bedside lamp appeared to be burnt out too.

So the room was dark.

The corpse maintained a serene expression, like an old-timey actor with his face caked in stage powder.

And Danny did find it a wee bit challenging to concentrate completely on his task at hand due to the continuous screams coming through the walls—parallel screams—neither in unison nor call and response, just arhythmic and unattributable scorching anguish.

He muttered to himself in a sing-songy pattern as he worked the corpse into the body bag: “None of my business. Not my department. None of my business. Not my department.”

One cluster of screams sounded particularly agonized, and Danny struggled with some wrong folds

along the body bag’s zipper, pinching plastic from the zipper’s grip.

It must’ve been echoes reflecting down the hall; the screams surrounding him.

He flipped the light switch on and off a couple times quick, but nothing.

And then the screams stopped.

From every direction they stopped.

And Danny stopped too.

He stood assiduously still, as still as if the most minute contraction of his jaw or calf could set the screams peeling off again.

He did, on occasion, feel no choice but to respect that this process that he so regularly attended to—the unhitching of spirit—might sometimes require such finesse in every detail of a scene, that it could evoke from him a subtlety beyond that which he could ever expect to comprehend, let alone achieve with any intentionality.

So he’d trouble nothing.

He pivoted slowly, slowly and stared at the wall and listened.

The striped shadow of the parking lot lights through the blinds landed at a clashing angle on the vent.

He crossed the room in a few long, loping steps and stood dopey staring at the other wall, listening into the silence.

The alarm clock shrieked like a robot rooster-siren and Danny jumped and screamed.

He banged at the alarm clock’s plastic top and sides and back, then bent and pulled the cord from the wall.

Standing up straight, he turned back to the corpse, groaning flat and atonal, “Neat and clean. Get you out of here. Neat and clean.”

Of all the church lessons that he retained from his adolescence as an altar boy, the one that he respected most taught him that he should never attempt to summon any spirit that he presumed he could call by name for risk that he could just as likely summon other less helpful spirits too, or even troubling ones.

“Yes?” a voice squawked over the intercom, startling him.

He fumbled with the intercom until he found the button to answer. “Excuse me.”

“May I help you with something?”

“Nope. I mean, no ma’am.”

“Well, my call button keeps going off.”

Danny worked quick to zip up the body.