by Anne Rice
“Yo!” he called out. “Anybody alive around here?”
He tapped his foot impatiently. When they’d offered him the job, the Croghans had explained to him that he would not have the place to himself. Were he not so strapped for cash, the news might have caused him to tell the Brothers Croghan to Take This Job and Shove It, thank you very much, Johnny Paycheck. It was humiliating enough to be a janitor. But the notice in the Reporter had contained a slight omission. The God of Comics on the Rise had decreed. Not janitor. Assistant janitor.
Meehoff heard a wet grumble of a cough. Human, he decided. Alive, but just barely.
A moment later, a sour little troll of a man shuffled into view, emerging from a room up the corridor. Wonderful, thought Meehoff. Imagine Walter Brennan crossed with a Munchkin.
The troll wore a ring of keys like a six-shooter. He had flyaway white hair that made Albert Einstein’s look as if he’d been coiffed by Vidal Sassoon. The troll trudged down the corridor, carrying a mop. He stopped inches from Meehoff’s face and looked him over from stem to stern.
“Meehoff?” grunted the troll.
“Soitainly,” Meehoff answered, giving it his finest Curly Howard inflection.
“Mmmmpf,” grunted the troll. He uncorked his mouth of a stubby, wet cigar. Unlit. “I’m Kramer. Did the necro-feelie brothers give you the nickel tour, or what?”
“Every penny of it.”
“Then you know where the embalming room is.” Kramer unceremoniously popped the cigar back into place and thrust the mop into Meehoff’s grip. “It needs this.”
Meehoff’s face squinched into a grimace. “What’s the problem?” he asked. “Are there, like, guts and stuff all over the floor?”
“Real funny,” Kramer grunted. He spun around on his chubby little feet and waddled away. The keys attached to his belt jangled like a cowbell. Before he disappeared through the door from which he’d emerged, he turned back to Meehoff. “Rule Number One,” he barked, jabbing his cigar emphatically. “Don’t fuck with the stiffs.”
“Don’t fuck with the stiffs,” Meehoff whispered to himself once the little man was out of sight. “There go my plans for the evening.”
With a sigh, he dragged the mop behind him along an intersecting corridor to the embalming room. There he found a bucket-on-wheels contraption with a lever-action ringer mounted on the side. The bucket was filled with lukewarm, soapy water. Damned considerate of old Yoda back there, Meehoff thought.
He submerged the mop into the water, then paused, leaning on the handle. No call to get too quick a start on the new vocation, he decided. Take a few minutes to scope the place out.
There wasn’t much to see. A couple of stainless steel slabs with drainage gutters—very nice. Racks of waxes and cremes and makeup—fun stuff there, no question. Nasty-looking tools that no doubt originally had been invented for use by Torquemada—a party guy if ever there was one. And best of all …
… the corpses. In progress.
They lay on gurneys that lined the wall. Some were dressed in Sunday finery. Others were considerably less dignified. Looks like room service for cannibals, Meehoff said to himself.
Then he broke into a goofy grin. At last, he thought happily. An audience….
The mop handle became a microphone. “Hey, thanks for coming out tonight. You folks ready for a good time? Thank you, thank you. Hey? How did the necrophiliac’s wife catch on to what he was doing? Give up? He came home with formaldehyde on his breath!”
He cheered, “Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh! No, no, please hold your applause. Here’s an oldie but moldy for you. Two skeletons meet in a bar. One turns to the other and says, ‘Who was that zombie I saw you with last night?’ And the other one says—all together now—THAT WAS NO ZOMBIE! THAT WAS MY GHOUL-FRIEND!’ Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh! Thank you, thank you very much.”
Silence.
I gotta hand it to you, Jack, Meehoff told himself. You’re really knockin’ ‘em dead.
So it went for the rest of the night. And the night after that. And the night after that. And by Wednesday, Meehoff had decided that this job bored the ass off of him.
It was time to start having a little fun.
On Wednesday night he came to work early, purposely arriving ahead of Kramer, who always showed up at the mortuary precisely at 10:45, rain or shine. Kramer had made a point of emphasizing his own punctuality the night before, when Meehoff had shown up a lousy seven minutes late. Was it his fault the motherfuggin’ battery in his twelve-year-old Pinto had decided to conk out? That it had taken him fifteen minutes to scare up a neighbor who owned a pair of jumper cables?
Kramer didn’t want to hear about it. “Rule Number Two.” Another jab of the slimy cigar. “Don’t be late for work.” End of discussion.
Meehoff was there plenty early on Wednesday night. Early enough to rig a little surprise for Kramer and have it in place by the time the troll-man appeared.
Which he did, right on time. Meehoff was standing nonchalantly outside the door to Kramer’s “office,” a tiny, cramped closet that the janitor had converted to his private use. Kramer had managed to squeeze a lawn chair, a floor lamp, a small refrigerator and a portable black-and-white television into a space not much larger than a horse’s stall. Meehoff imagined that Kramer spent many hours in there chugging bottles of Mickey’s Big Mouth and whacking off to the nudie centerfolds he had taped over every square inch of the closet’s walls. One brief look inside was enough to confirm Meehoff’s opinion that Kramer wasn’t exactly the classiest guy since Cary Grant to come down the pike.
Kramer saw him lounging outside the door. “You wanna see me about somethin’?” the janitor grumbled.
Meehoff smiled innocently. “I’m not here collecting for the Red Cross.”
“Real funny,” grunted Kramer as he pushed open the door … and immediately wet his dungarees.
Because there in the doorway, Meehoff had propped up Mr. Spinoza. Whose age at time of his passing from emphysema was 76 years, and whose body was tall and gaunt and emaciated. Whose flesh was a pasty, blue-tinged white, since he’d not yet been made up to go on display the day after tomorrow before his grieving relatives and friends. Who had been embalmed only that afternoon. Who was board-stiff and grim-countenanced and as naked as the day he’d come into the world. Who was very. Very. Dead.
Kramer stood there in shock, hopping from foot to foot. He blubbered, a low, terrified moaning that sounded to Meehoff like a bad impersonation of Jackie Gleason: “Hubbeda-hubbeda-hubbeda …”
Meehoff fell to the floor, convulsed with laughter. Kramer swung around to glare at him, opening his mouth to cry out in rage. Until he became aware of the damp stain spreading at his crotch, let out a tiny, self-conscious “Eek,” and ran away in the direction from whence he’d come, covering his privates with his hands.
It took several minutes for Meehoff to compose himself enough to come to his feet. He was wiping tears from his eyes as he stepped over to Mr. Spinoza. Laying a friendly hand on the corpse’s shoulder he said, “You did great, old buddy. Would that every joke of mine worked so well.”
As he carried Mr. Spinoza back to the embalming room, Meehoff told himself that he was undoubtedly going to catch no small ration of holy hell once Kramer had changed into dry clothes. But, he said to himself, it was worth it. Boy, was it worth it.
He was surprised, then, that Kramer left him alone the entire night. Not that Meehoff minded; he had no masochistic desire to get chewed out. He knew that Kramer had returned; he had heard the sound of the television through the closed door of Kramer’s “office” around three that morning, after he’d worked up the nerve to check out whether or not the old man had come back.
When Meehoff’s shift ended at 7:30 A.M., he left for home. Not once during the shift had Kramer sought him out. Probably too embarrassed to face him, Meehoff decided, even if it was to read him the riot act.
But when the next night began the same way—Kramer ignoring him, not bothering at
all to check up on what he was doing—Meehoff became annoyed. Like any performer, he knew that the worst reaction he could get from an audience was indifference. Laughs were best, of course. But jeers, groans, hisses, catcalls … any of those were preferable to being disregarded. Love me, hate me, just don’t ignore me. In a perverse way, he was beginning to feel cheated that Kramer didn’t ream him. Kramer’s initial reaction to the Mr. Spinoza joke had been priceless. But until the janitor completed the circle by exploding at Meehoff, the joke hadn’t received its full payoff.
So, Meehoff told himself, let’s push the envelope a little bit more, shall we?
His half-hour meal break came at 2:30 A.M. Meehoff left Croghan Brothers and drove home. On his way back to work, he stopped off at a 7-Eleven store three blocks east of the mortuary, on Melrose. Meehoff told himself it was an omen, as not only did the convenience store stay open twenty-four hours, but they had exactly what he was looking for.
Back at the mortuary, Meehoff worked feverishly to finish his regular chores before commencing his special project. Finally he was able to get started on it, shortly before 5:00 A.M. It took him an hour and a half to get everything ready.
At 6:45 he was standing outside Kramer’s “office.” He took a deep breath. Then he was pounding on the door and shouting excitedly. “Mr. Kramer, Mr. Kramer! You gotta come down to the embalming room right away!” He ran off quickly, before Kramer could answer the door.
Five minutes later, Kramer anxiously pushed open the door to the embalming room. And was sonically slapped in the face: Kris-Kross doing “Jump” at very high volume, erupting from the ghetto blaster that Meehoff had brought from home and set up on one of the stainless steel slabs in the middle of the room. Hanging across the back wall was a multicolored banner: “CONGRATULATIONS!” Coiled streamers cascaded from the ceiling. Each of the half-dozen corpses in the room had been propped up on their gurneys, and each wore a party hat tilted at a jaunty angle. Each had a noisemaker wedged between cold lips and a bottle of embalming fluid gripped between stiff fingers.
And there was Meehoff, wearing a party hat of his own. In one hand he held a Budweiser long-neck, in the other a plastic horn. He tooted the horn and called out joyously, “Join the party, Mr. Kramer! We’re celebrating! My five-day anniversary with the firm!”
Kramer stood in the doorway, eyes wide, ready to burst an artery. His jaw was clamped shut, and his face turned ever-deepening shades of scarlet. His head was a bright red balloon, the skin stretching and straining as it expanded, filling with explosive air. Until it was just about ready to pop.
Then he spun around on his pudgy feet, scooted out of the doorway, and was gone.
Meehoff frowned at the empty doorway. He reached over and switched off the ghetto blaster. He stepped to the nearest occupied gurney: the body of an obese, elderly black man whose slack skin had turned from chocolate-brown to a dull, dark shade of gray. Meehoff looked to the corpse sullenly. “I guess some people just have no sense of humor,” he said. He poked the dead man in the belly, and the noisemaker in the corpse’s mouth gave a thin, weary bleat.
Meehoff had the room back to its proper condition by the time he was to clock out. Kramer did not return. Shrugging, Meehoff left the mortuary and went home.
He spent the weekend anticipating a call from one or the other of the Brothers Croghan. Kramer surely could not allow his behavior to go unreported. A part of Meehoff felt like kicking himself for being such a smartass and getting fired from a job that he genuinely needed. But another part was relieved. He decided that the subconscious motivation for his practical jokes had been a desire to get out. After all, mopping floors in a mortuary all night long was a mighty dull occupation.
But the call never came, and on Sunday night Meehoff drove back to the mortuary, telling himself: What the hell, a job’s a job.
He parked in the lot behind the mortuary and walked to the rear door. As he was reaching for his key, he happened to look up. Taped to the door was an envelope with his name printed on it. Inside the envelope Meehoff found a typed memo from Croghan the Younger. It seemed that Mr. Kramer had taken ill suddenly over the weekend and had been admitted to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. There were no details concerning the nature of Kramer’s illness, but the memo did say that until further notice Jack Meehoff was to be head janitor of the Croghan Brothers Mortuary.
How ’bout that, he thought. Only one week on the job, already I got a promotion.
Included with the memo were instructions for a specific assignment he was to complete that night in addition to his other duties. The Croghans wanted him to take inventory of the number and types of coffins they had in a storage room in the mortuary’s subbasement. Kramer was to have done it himself, the memo implied, but the old man wasn’t going to be available for a while. The job was now Meehoff’s.
This, Meehoff told himself, was seriously uncool. All work and no play made Jack a dull boy, and he’d been feeling in enough of a rut as it was. It was Kramer’s revenge, he decided. Double his workload. Meehoff hoped the old boy would choke on his lime Jell-O.
But since he was a firm believer in the principle that tackling your most unpleasant task first makes everything else a downhill coast, Meehoff made up his mind to get the inventory job out of the way. He let himself into the mortuary and made a quick stop by the embalming room. Pity. A full house, but no time for a floor show tonight.
He waved an apologetic greeting. “Sorry, folks,” he told them regretfully. “Tonight’s show has been pre-empted, and Elvis has left the building.”
Meehoff departed the embalming room and headed for the sub-basement. As he descended, he told himself that he might as well have been heading into the Bowels of Hell, as far down as it seemed to go. The least the Croghans could have done was given him a key to the freight elevator that they used to bring the coffins up. But nooo-ooooooo.
In the storage room Meehoff found a clipboard and inventory sheets lying atop the coffin nearest the door leading to the main corridor of the subbasement. Sighing heavily, he went to work.
By the time he was twenty minutes into his task, terminal ennui had set in. What an absurd fucking job, Meehoff thought darkly. Coffins, Go-carts for dead people. Did anybody really give two squats about makes and models of coffins, f’Christ’s sake? The proud owner got a couple of days’ public use out of the goddamn thing, then boom. Out of sight, out of mind. A pine box would have been just as practical and a sight less pricey.
He was logging numbers into their appropriate columns on the inventory sheet, when he halted in mid-scribble. Like a tap on the forehead by the Fickle Finger of the God of Comics on the Rise, it came. An idea, full-blown, burst upon Meehoff’s warped imagination. The coup de grace. The finishing stroke. The perfect welcoming reception for Mr. Kramer for when he returned to work.
Meehoff frowned, feeling a momentary pang of guilt. He hoped that the old troll hadn’t gone into the hospital for treatment of a heart condition. Oh please oh please oh pleeeeeeeeeeease make it not be true. Because this idea was simply too good to pass up.
Meehoff rested the clipboard on top of a coffin. He leaned against the shiny, oblong box, thinking. He shut his eyes and let the sweet fantasy play out in his mind.
Talk the Croghan Brothers into furnishing him with a key to the freight elevator. Arrive an hour earlier than the triumphantly returning Kramer. Bring up the darkest, most foreboding coffin he could find. Rest it in the hallway directly outside the door to Kramer’s “office.” Don his finest suit and buy some theatrical makeup to create the appropriate visage: a nice, ghastly, mottled blue-and-gray, that’s the ticket. Then settle into the coffin, close the lid, and patiently await the approach of footfalls and the cowbell-jangle of keys. Wait for the footsteps to come to a halt. Listen for the old man’s curses and questions. And then … slowly … raise the lid. And sit up. And smile. How’s it goin’, Mr. Kramer? Hope you’re feelin’ in the pink again …
Yes. Oh yes. It would be a classic
redefining of the term “Jack-in-the-Box.”
Meehoff tried to resume his inventory, but it was a hopeless endeavor. With all of those coffins lying around, he felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store. Which one to choose? he wondered. Which one?
He found it lying against the back wall. A coffin elegant enough for Dracula himself. Gleaming, blacker than a new hearse, adorned with silver rails and trim. Morbidly gothic, the most gorgeous thing Meehoff had ever beheld. It was perfect.
To hell with the rest of the inventory. It would be foolish of him to borrow one of these babies without having tried it on for size.
The lid opened in two pieces, top half and bottom. The inside of the box was lined with billowy, white silk. Just waiting to caress its deceased occupant like a bed of dreams. Meehoff slipped out of his shoes—mustn’t track in a mess now, must we?—and climbed into the coffin. He lay down, resting his head on a satin pillow. His bed at home should be so comfortable, he told himself. Not much of a view, though. Only a glimpse of the bare concrete of the ceiling and the end of a flickering fluorescent bulb. Still it was a better view than its eventual permanent occupant would have.
Meehoff sat up to close the bottom-half lid, then reached for the top half, pulling it with him as he lay back down. The lid shut with a final-sounding chunk, and he found himself surrounded by darkness.
As he snuggled himself into the plush lining, Meehoff pictured the look on Kramer’s face as he pulled off this grandest of jokes. Oh yes, the old boy would do far more than wee-wee in his Fruit of the Looms this time, yes indeedy-do.
But, Meehoff wondered, would he be able to hear Kramer’s approach? It would be a shame if the box were so well-constructed that it was soundproof or nearly so. He decided to make a test.
Holding his breath, he strained his ears, listening for the hum and flow of the building’s ventilation system. There it was. He could hear the muffled sound of the air conditioner and the faint rumble of wind blowing through the ductwork. He could hear it just fine … and he could hear something else as well.
