by Ivan Blake
By the time he’d finished, Boucher was shouting at the top of his lungs. Chris and his dad turned and left.
* * * *
Boucher returned to his office and slammed the door. “That fuckin’ pair! So god-damned arrogant!”
Okay, so maybe Malcolm Duncan had told him he suspected Floyd’s father was beating his own son. And so maybe Boucher believed it too. After all, he knew firsthand what a bully Ed Balzer could be. They’d been in school together, and he’d had his own share of thrashings from that psycho. Only in the Army had Gabe developed the backbone to stand up to the town thug. When he’d returned from Vietnam, he was one huge knot of muscle and wound so tight on pain killers, that Ed Balzer quickly realized his former punching bag would probably beat him to a bloody pulp if he tried his old tricks.
That was many years and fifty pounds ago, and Ed Balzer was now head of an influential family in town. Boucher as the town’s police chief knew only too well which side of his bread the butter was on. Damned if he was going to jeopardize his pension by crossing Ed Balzer on behalf of an asshole like Chris Chandler.
Chapter Nine
Wednesday, November 20
In the failing light of a cold November evening, the funeral parlor looked even gloomier than usual. The old mansion had once been grand in a garish sort of way, with wide front steps, a huge porch spanning the entire front of the building and wrapping around both sides, and an oversized, purple front door in the center of its facade. It had enormous windows on two floors along with several gables in its mansard roof, and a tower high above the front door with a widow’s walk around it—a touch of architectural irony probably lost on most of the funeral parlor’s patrons. Now paint was peeling, several shutters dangled askew from rusted hinges or were missing altogether, and at least one window was boarded over with plywood. Apparently, in a dying town, even the business of death doesn’t pay that well.
The Balzer visitation drew a huge turnout, many kids from school Chris recognized, and many adults he did not. Cars crowded the funeral parlor’s short drive, lined Main Street for some distance in both directions, and filled the staff lot behind the main building where the garages and workrooms were located. Out in the drive and up on the porch, people stood chatting quietly in small groups. People who’d recently arrived were moving slowly up the stairs and through the front door, and judging by the number of people Chris could see pressed up against the windows, the crowd inside filled every room.
The Balzers were a prominent family in this backwater town, and every employee of Balzer Trucking had turned out, along with fellow business people, friends of the family, and even folks who couldn’t stand Ed Balzer, the drunken bully. Everyone always turned out for a Balzer social event. The Balzers always laid on a good spread and some sort of show...and a Balzer funeral would be no exception.
Chris joined the line of people making their way slowly up the front steps.
“Chris!” he heard someone call softly. “Chris!”
Gillian. She was leaning over the porch railing trying to catch his attention without drawing anyone else’s. “What are you doing here?”
She was standing near her mother, grandfather and friend, Madelyn. They were bundled against the cold and sipping from mugs that steamed in the night air. Gillian was wearing the parka she wore to school every day. Beneath it she was apparently wearing a dark dress and high heels. The sight of her legs gave Chris a momentary jolt.
People in the line ahead of Chris turned to stare. “The Chandler kid,” he heard people whisper.
Gillian passed her mug to her mother and edged through the crowd on the porch and stairs to join Chris down on the front walk.
“I thought you weren’t talking to me.”
She ignored the dig. “Do you really think you should be here?”
“I want to tell Mrs. Balzer how sorry I am, and that I had nothing to do with Floyd’s death.”
“That’s considerate, but I don’t think this is the time.”
“Everyone else from school is here.”
“Floyd’s dad is inside and he’s really drunk. He’s sitting in the corner near the coffin in the back parlor, not talking to anyone. He looks really weird, muttering to himself and wringing his hands. And, from time to time, he shakes his fists in the air like he’s having a fight with someone. I really think it would be best if you weren’t here.”
Too late.
“Chandler!” Chris heard someone shout. “You’re him! You’re the Chandler kid!” Ed Balzer stood in the front doorway. Someone must have tipped him off that Chris was outside. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Balzer pushed through the crowd to the top of the stairs and glared down at Chris as people in line cleared space between them.
“You’ve got some nerve coming here. Are your dad and his thugs here too?”
“I don’t want any trouble, Mr. Balzer. I just came to tell Mrs. Balzer how sorry I am for her loss and—”
“You little prick! Sorry for her loss? Like you had nothing to do with it?”
Chris was stunned, not by Balzer’s rage, but by the sight of Mallory Dahlman in the doorway behind Balzer. Mallory, dressed in black, was helping the grieving mother step unsteadily out onto the porch.
“Mallory,” Chris blurted out.
“That’s right, Mallory Dahlman, my son’s girlfriend! And they would still be together if you hadn’t started messing around, getting Mallory all confused, and Floyd would still be alive!”
“I...I...”
Chief Boucher also appeared on the porch. “Move along, Chandler. I think you’ve caused enough trouble already.”
“But I wanted to say—”
“There’s nothing the Balzer family needs to hear from you—except maybe your confession.”
“I had nothing to do with Floyd’s death.”
“You had everything to do with it, you little turd,” Ed Balzer bellowed. “You humiliated my boy.”
“No! You humiliated him, you fat drunk! You beat up your own son, for Christ’s sake!”
“Why you little—” Balzer started down the steps and would have tumbled to the concrete below if the Chief and several onlookers hadn’t caught him.
“Leave!” ordered Chief Boucher. “Get out of here!”
Chris walked away, then shouted over his shoulder, “I had nothing to do with Floyd’s death. His father did. You all know it. You know what his dad was doing to him.” No one was listening. They were trying to restrain the stumbling, blubbering father, trying to get Balzer back inside, back to his son’s broken body.
Chris walked down the drive and out onto Main Street. It would be a bitterly cold walk home because he sure as hell wasn’t going to get a ride from anyone in town tonight.
He stopped to look back at the funeral parlor one last time. Mallory was helping Mrs. Balzer inside. What the hell was she up to? Whose pain was she offering up tonight? Then Chris saw Gillian, her eyes filled with sadness and concern, before she turned and followed the crowd inside. Finally, Chris noticed the goatman standing at the corner of the house, a curious grin on his face.
“Sure, go ahead, Doc,” Chris said to himself, “pull Floyd out of the grave, break his neck, and grind him into feed for your goats. Why the hell should I care?” Then Chris walked away.
* * * *
Chris’s sleep was more troubled than usual. He thrashed about into the wee hours of the morning. One moment, the sight of Mallory arm-in-arm with Floyd’s mother had him muttering and cursing. What was she playing at? Was she just being kind? Mallory, kind? Not bloody likely.
Then the memory of the confrontation with Floyd’s father and the police chief’s accusations made his skin crawl. Surely no one actually believed he was responsible for humiliating Floyd to the point of suicide?
His pulse raced when he realized how close he’d come to a fistfight on the steps of the funeral parlor. He could see the headlines: Delinquent who drove boy to suicide taunts father at son’s funeral! Damn, he hated
Maine, and this town and this house, and dad’s job, and school, and, well, his whole crapfest of a life! Then he cursed himself for being such a wuss and for letting things get to him.
He rolled onto his back, stretched out, shoved his hands into his pyjamas and stared up at the roof boards, just a few feet above his head. Seven more months; all he had to do was keep it together for seven more months. So what if everybody in town hated him? It just meant he’d get a lot of quiet time. And what if he had a mad scientist and a grave robber for a neighbor? Some people might have thought that cool; maybe he’d even turn it into a story one day. And what if he had a freak for a girlfriend who believed in strange gods that made dead people walk and expected pain as an offering? Okay, she was a little creepy, but could she be any sexier? Those breasts, and that gorgeous butt; now that was pain! His hands grew a little more active inside his pyjamas, but in the cold and damp there wasn’t much pleasure to be had. Besides, he did have one friend, well had one anyway—Gillian Willard. For some reason, the recollection of Gillian in a dress at the funeral home made him smile.
He rolled onto his side. Maybe if he read for a while. He reached out and switched on the small lamp by the bed. He pulled the reading basket from beneath the bed, shuffled through his stash of pocket books and magazines for the book on Mortsafemen, and began flipping through its pages.
After the guild of Mortmen was banned in the late sixteenth century, the popular belief…they had packed away their axes and given up their cause...until they made a sudden and dramatic reappearance in the 1820s...
...In Edinburgh, Scotland, seat of an old and prestigious university, the theft of corpses in the early part of the century had become almost epidemic. There were neither the public executions nor the number of deaths among paupers to supply the huge anatomy classes at the university with all the cadavers its medical students required. The shortage had spawned a lucrative trade in bodies obtained by less than scrupulous means. Professors and students were willing to pay as much as ten pounds for a corpse, and there were many sellers willing to oblige. Officials turned a blind eye to the trade because of the importance of the university, the popularity of the anatomy dissections which had become a form of entertainment for students and the general public alike, and finally, because grave robbing seemed a victimless crime.
Then one morning, visitors to Greyfriars Kirkyard discovered body parts scattered over a wide area of the consecrated ground. It turned out the parts belonged to six students, all dismembered with an axe or perhaps several axes. Pinned to some of the grizzlier body parts were pieces of paper bearing the crest of the Mortsafemen’s guild, the black hooded figure with an axe standing atop a mausoleum against a field of gold.
Popular opinion had it the murders were the result of a war between “professional” body snatchers and medical students looking to earn a few shillings. Then, a few days after the body parts were discovered, a lengthy and bizarre tract appeared in one popular Edinburgh newspaper. The cost of the publication must have been considerable. Local authorities were never able to determine who had paid for it. The story went around that a wealthy and powerful highland family was behind the current incarnation of the ancient guild.
The tract, which bore the crest of the Mortmen, denounced in no uncertain terms the violation of graves, and lamented the suffering such desecration caused the soul of the deceased in the afterlife. It detailed the many horrific punishments Mortsafemen were charged by God to mete out to villains who violated the sanctity of the grave. In the days to follow, much debate ensued as to whether the tract confirmed the ongoing existence of the Mortmen’s guild or was the work of a copycat. Irrespective, the sponsors of the tract meant business. As if to underscore their determination to make grave robbers pay, the same morning the tract appeared, seven heads were discovered at daybreak spiked on the iron gate of the Old Calton Burial Ground. The names of the souls whose graves they had supposedly violated had been carved into their foreheads.
Needless to say, the number of grave robberies in Edinburgh—or at least those reported to authorities—fell away to nil almost overnight. The dismembered students and the heads of the grave robbers had put a quick and nasty end to the trade in stolen bodies. Their work done, the Mortsafemen returned to the shadows from whence they had arisen, because nothing was heard from them again, or at least not in the United Kingdom.
In a brief postscript, the author described the last documented appearance of the Mortmen. It happened in Canada in 1979.
Police in Montreal received anonymous reports a doctor in the city’s large Haitian community had been removing kidneys and livers from the bodies of several recently deceased patients and selling them on the organ transplant black market. Police were just about to arrest the doctor when his dismembered body was discovered at home by a cleaning lady. Nailed, and quite literally so, with a three-inch spike to the doctor’s limbless torso was a piece of paper bearing the insignia of the Mortmen’s guild.
…it would seem the ancient and holy order of Mortmen still waits and watches from the shadows for another violated soul to cry out in its otherworldly agony from beyond the grave, at which time the Order will re-emerge to take its ghastly retribution.
Retribution! Now that’s what the goatman required—a dose of retribution.
Chapter Ten
Thursday, November 21
Was it the chattering of his own teeth that woke him, or maybe the wind, or perhaps the rustling sound on the other side of the attic door? Whatever had disturbed him, Chris was now awake. He lay as still as death, listening. Only the familiar creaks and groans of the old house, nothing more.
He rolled onto his side and squinted toward the window. Still dark, and with the thick layer of ice across the pane, Chris couldn’t see a thing. Not yet six a.m. but he wasn’t going to get any more sleep. Too damned cold. And he wasn’t going to school either, not after the humiliating episode at the funeral home. He pulled his clothes under the blankets and tried to wrestle them on without exposing an inch of bare flesh to the icy air. Rolling out of bed, he pulled back the trapdoor and dropped down onto the landing. Not a sound from anyone. He crept downstairs, washed in the kitchen sink and dried with a tea towel, then drank a glass of juice, grabbed an apple from the fridge, and left the house.
The world outside was the color of beaten pewter. The grass and trees were rimed with frost, and the gun-barrel gray sky was streaked with watery light seeping over the horizon from a weak winter sun not quite risen. Sound in the crisp cold air was keen. Chris stood by the back steps listening to the waves lapping against the shore. Would it be the beach or the hills? Somewhere up in the hills a coyote called to its kind and a pheasant cried out in pain. The hills it would be.
He walked around the house and up the lane, moving from the gravel to the grassy margin so his footfall would not be heard. He glanced back at the dark house just in time to see a light blink on in Gillian’s bedroom, and a glimpse of her moving past the curtain.
Should he wait at the bus stop, and try to talk to her, or was she still mad at him? Did she still think him responsible for the cartoon which had driven Floyd round the bend? She had spoken to him at the funeral parlor the previous evening, if only to ask that he leave. If he waited for her, however, she might try to talk him out of cutting school, or maybe tell his parents he was. Okay, that wasn’t likely, but knowing what he was up to might get her into trouble. Just being his friend had already made the police suspicious of her. The idea he might get Gillian into any more trouble made him feel awful. When he got to the main road, he didn’t wait; he crossed over and started up the trail to the top of the mountain.
The track ran straight up the hill for about a hundred yards before it swung to the right and disappeared into the tangle of birch and black spruce. At the bend, Chris crouched down behind a blood-red sumac and waited. As the sun rose, the silver landscape faded to gray. Not ten yards below him, a doe and two fawns, oblivious to his presence, walked cautiously across
the trail and then back into the wood. A quail, meandering through the undergrowth, came right up to him, squawked in surprise, and shot into the air. A couple of cars passed on the main road below, early risers heading for work in town. And then he saw Gillian walking up Willard Lane.
At the main road, she looked around with concern and maybe even a little irritation. She was looking for him, Chris realized with a smile. He’d never really been able to look directly at Gillian before. Normally, they were coy with each other as they waited for the bus. Recently, they’d chatted but still hadn’t ever made eye contact. Why was that? What were they both afraid of? Now he looked right at her, and he liked what he saw.
She was tall for a girl. Nice. She was wearing a short, tight, dark blue jacket pinched at the waist, and jeans, not the usual duffel coat and dungarees. She had long legs. Her jeans were kind of tight through the leg and a bit flared at the ankle, and as she turned and looked about, Chris registered a new and electrifying thought: she had a nice figure. How had he never noticed before? Okay, so not in-your-face sexy like Mallory, but graceful. From beneath a pink knitted tuque, long blond hair fell to her shoulders. In the morning sunlight, it shimmered. And she’d combed it. It wasn’t flying off in all directions the way it usually did.
“You really are beautiful,” he said to himself, remembering what Felicity Holcomb had tried to tell him. And Gillian was nice. He had a sudden and powerful urge to leap from the sumac, run down the hill and, what? Beg her not to be angry? Explain last night? Put his arms around her? Maybe even kiss her? Get a grip! She was a friend, perhaps his only friend. The last thing he wanted to do was wreck the one good thing in his life at the moment.
Gillian pulled a book from her bag, turned away, and began to read. And she was smart, too smart to get mixed up with a loser like him. Or she should have been.
A coyote stepped onto the track below him, on the scent of the deer most likely. It too looked down the trail toward the road. Gillian must have sensed the two pairs of hungry eyes upon her. She turned and looked up the trail just as the school bus arrived. She momentarily disappeared from view as it rolled to a stop. The next Chris saw of Gillian, she was looking out the window in his direction. Then the bus pulled away and she was gone.
