Krafft's Notes on Anomalies

"May his soul ascend to the kingdom of the Lord." Father Adrian said. In Kraft's understanding, this sentence is similar to "mourning". It is suitable for blurting out when you don't know what to say during mourning occasions. It is not very useful or useful. Too much nonsense.

He held the double-wing ring pendant in front of his neck, tried to put in his belly to appear more formal, and added in a professional manner, "I have seen many long-term sufferings of illness, and being free from them is not a bad thing for him. Even if Regardless of your age, you have done well enough, better than most people I know, so there is no need to blame yourself."

These words did not arouse any reaction. Yvonne said softly, "Hmm", squeezed past the priest, and walked past them towards the depths of the alley.

The priest followed a few steps with the apple in hand, but he didn't expect what he could do. He stopped angrily and watched her leave without looking back. Craft heard him murmuring, "Father..."

Objectively speaking, it is indeed a good thing, for the deceased, and perhaps even better for his daughter.

After pinching the holy symbol with his fingers for a long time, a certain priest realized that there was something else he could do to make his conscience feel better.

"Where is he buried? I can help with the prayers."

Logically speaking, there must be a clergyman who reads a eulogy during the burial, as a guide to guide the soul to ascend to the kingdom of the Father. In Yvonne's situation, finding another priest in the church was clearly out of the question.

"not yet."

"It just so happens that I no longer serve in the church, and the rules about collecting remuneration have no control over me." It's rare for a priest to be expelled from the church, which is a good thing. It cannot be ruled out that he just made it up casually, but it seems to be credible.

Yvonne seemed to be moved. There were not many non-religious people in this port, so they all had some spiritual sustenance. The hope for loved ones to live in another world is an important part of the church's influence, often even higher than the vision of living people.

After all, no matter how mature she is, she is still a child, and the possibility of letting her father ascend to heaven after death is something she longs for, no matter how young she is.

Her pale lips pursed, and it took a few seconds for the teeth marks to turn red. She was still a little hesitant. As early as her father's lifetime, those who frequently came to her home with doctors or people who claimed to be able to summon souls came and went for nothing more than a secret that she still didn't understand.

But now, when people die and things disappear, and their secrets are taken away along with their souls, what can they plot? There was also another question that made it difficult for her to decide.

"not yet."

It’s not that no one has prayed for her yet, what she said is to go one step further.

"Heavenly Father." Adrian threw the bag to Kraft and ran after him.

…

They pushed open the door and walked into the windowless room. There was a hard bed without a quilt leaning against the wall, and an upright figure was placed on the bed board.

A smell similar to mold permeated the closed environment, and became more pungent as it got closer. It reminded Kraft of his experience in the salt tide area, but it was more unacceptable. Not only physical but also psychological rejection.

"Heavenly Father." The priest had been repeating this sentence since just now, and he did not dare to come forward after entering the room.

"Now someone needs to find a coffin. Father, you should know such a person." After adapting to overcome the physical difficulties, the psychological barrier was not too heavy for Kraft. He found a way out for the dilemma-ridden priest. reason and walked to the bed alone.

After opening the door for them, Yvonne watched from the side, and Kraft looked at her imploringly, without any obvious intention of rejection.

She might be thinking of a more decent ending, at least not throwing it outside directly, but judging from the three days of shelving, she probably has no solution and no money to solve the problem, so she can only close the windows to slow down the decay.

Fortunately, the weather has not been too hot recently, and no active gas-producing bacteria were seen nearby to bloat the body, and the body remained roughly in a normal shape.

That smell... was still hard to accept. He couldn't think of how Yvonne had survived these three days. This feeling was even worse than the first time he opened the iron cabinet full of formaldehyde smell, the smell of death lingering.

The body was emaciated, the chronic disease taking its toll on it painfully, its muscles atrophied and thinned by lack of movement, and covered with rough yellow skin. The full-size clothes couldn't be supported by her thin frame, so they hung loosely on her body, and the neckline was open to her sternum.

What was disproportionate to the whole were his thicker fingers, which looked like swollen medicine pestles at the ends on his skinny palms, with the bulges pushing up the nails. This is a growth caused by lack of oxygen at the end of the limb.

[Coughing, wheezing]

The priest described the situation he saw when he visited Yvonne's father. He should have some kind of chronic respiratory disease. The oxygen supply has been insufficient for a long time, resulting in long-term hypoxia in the extremities, which resulted in the formation of clubbing fingers.

The pressing sense of suffocation forced him to breathe with all his strength, pulling on the chest "like a bellows" and expanding the chest to suck in more air. The ribs opened outwards into a barrel shape, and the negative pressure caused the unsupported skin between the bones to dent. The intercostal and supraclavicular fossaes are dug into grooves.

The two movements in reverse shape the patient's upper body under the clothes into a clear-cut skeleton, like the legendary walking corpse with a layer of dry skin covering the skeleton.

The open purple lips showed that he was still trying to breathe before he died, although the oxygen reaching the effective alveolar spaces was completely insufficient for body consumption and could not even maintain the minimum physiological needs.

A painful death. The deceased could not even express his pain during his lifetime. That fall may have damaged the language area of ​​the brain, depriving him of his ability to express himself.

"Heavenly Father." Kraft unconsciously imitated the priest's speech. Any meaningful words were pale and feeble before this encounter, leaving only a sigh for the cruel destiny controller in human imagination. He would rather he didn't understand anything.

The priest soon returned with people and a coffin, and they worked together to lift the deceased from the bed into the coffin. The figure with a smelly liquid left on the bed board was unusable from his point of view.

Blocking the cover from closing, Kraft waved to Yvonne, "Do you want to see him for the last time?"

"Thank you." She thanked the stranger standing in the room, holding the edge of the coffin and looking at the haggard face. Only then did some age-appropriate sadness and confusion appear on her face, reminding others that she was just a little girl of thirteen or fourteen years old.

This gives the waiters more patience and leaves enough time to complete the farewell in silence.

In a quiet environment, with nothing to do, Kraft's mind began to wander, and he thought about age inappropriately.

If Yvonne is only thirteen or fourteen years old, then her father's age is estimated to be only around thirty. In today's age where the average age is not optimistic, he is still a young man in the labor force, and he is at the peak of his physical condition.

There was no tobacco, and Yvonne, who was in the same room, did not seem to have been infected with a serious respiratory infectious disease. Logically speaking, it should not have developed to such an extent at his age, unless there were other external factors.

What could it be?

The priest was already preparing the eulogy, Yvonne left the coffin, and nails were being hammered into the cover. While no one was paying attention, Kraft briefly opened his mental senses and scanned the chest of the corpse in the coffin.

Countless round and irregular nodules occupied the entire lung field, distributed like dots, and merged into large lesions in dense areas.