by Unknown
An icy fall breeze cuts into the young man, yet he refuses to shiver. He blinks the cold away, determined to take the day one step at a time—the same way he handles every day. One step at a time. Hedges and cast iron fences line the properties in this neighborhood, but the gate to 1804 is open. He walks to the front door, which is large and made of heavy wood painted white. He hammers the golden knocker with a quick, heavy slap.
“Hello, ma’am, I’m Mr. Smith. I’m from the Funeral Home,” he tells the older woman who answers the door. She wears a black dress, the darkness a stark contrast to her weathered skin. She has been crying. Of course. They usually cry.
“Oh, yes, they said you’d be here,” she replies, her voice distant, as if she doesn’t even really understand what she’s saying. The young man suspects that just might be the case. She carefully opens the door the rest of the way, allowing her visitor to come inside. “Do you need anything?”
“No ma’am,” he replies. “I’m here to help you. Please know that you have my most sincere sympathy for your loss.”
She only nods.
Twenty minutes later, the woman and her family have left for the funeral.
The young man sits in the large kitchen on a high stool at the marble island in the center of the room. He sits with the telephone.
His job is to answer any calls the family or even the deceased—it’s amazing how many calls people make to the dead without realizing the person is gone from this world—might receive during the funeral, and his presence is meant to deter thieves who might have seen the obituary in the newspaper and decided this would be a good time for a break-in.
It’s a more common occurrence than you would expect.
So the Funeral Home hires people to housesit, and one of the responsibilities of the job is to answer the phone and the door, accepting flowers, condolences, and generally letting the world know someone is watching the place.
But the phone is not ringing.
The young man thinks, Maybe this isn’t going to be one of the bad ones. His job is not fun. Often someone will call for the Deceased, and he has the unpleasant responsibility to tell them that their friend or associate is dead. Sometimes angry callers are thrilled to discover the Deceased is gone and they feel the need to tell someone. Those often get nasty. Sometimes distraught relatives who couldn’t make the funeral need someone to talk to, and the young man becomes a grief counselor. Every now and then he’ll get a hang-up, which could be any of the above, or possibly a crook checking to see if anyone’s home.
And all too often, the dead call, and he has to handle them. That’s the most important part of his job.
Someone rings the doorbell at the front door, and the young man makes his way to the three story foyer with the marble floor, crystal chandelier, vases on pedestals, and dozens of recently delivered flower arrangements. The house is very beautiful and very cold.
He answers the door and accepts more flowers from a teenager whose flesh is bursting with pimples. As the delivery boy walks back to his van, the housesitter scours the neighborhood to make sure there isn’t anyone watching the house who shouldn’t be. He sees no one.
After he closes the front door and bolts it, the young man carefully proceeds up the curved staircase. It’s time to do what he really came here to do. His real job.
The carpet on the stairs is plush. The chandelier is even more beautiful as he gets closer to it.
He continues to the third floor where there is a long hallway. It’s nice here. Paintings line the walls. European art. Probably old. Probably original.
At the end of the hallway is an oak door that looks nothing like the other doors in the house.
The young man picks the lock and steps inside.
A chill rips into his spine. Something is wrong here. That’s his first reaction. The chill is from a gut instinct, and maybe also because the room is very, very cold, as if the A/C has been running non-stop for days. The floors are polished wood, there is a wide mahogany desk across from the door, and the walls are lined with bookshelves covered in leather-bound books.
There are no windows.
This isn’t right, the young man thinks. He’s done this many times, dealt with the worst of the worst, and he’s never felt this way before.
He wants to flee the house, leaving the family to deal with their own dirty laundry, but he can’t. He has a job to do.
He’s sweating.
Even with the coldness of the air, he can feel the perspiration forming on his brow.
There’s an enormous chair behind the desk, and the young man goes to sit, just as he always does. This is where he’ll wait for any calls. The desk is neatly organized, with stacks of papers sorted into bins, a calendar, and a phone with a built-in answering machine and multiple lines.
Just as the young man sits in the chair, he realizes this was a mistake. Coming here is going to cost him his life. The owner of this leather chair was almost certainly the most evil person the young man has ever encountered. He’s dealt with people who committed terrible acts before, done terrible deeds, but nothing like this.
Invisible arms shove him back into the chair when he tries to stand, and the coldness that started in his spine spreads to his arms and legs, chilling his blood. His brain begins to throb. He feels a dagger shoving its way through his skull and into his brain ever so slowly. The pain is simple and precise and extraordinary.
He wants to run from the office, to run all the way home, but he realizes he had his chance and let it slip away.
A horrible screaming pierces his mind, making him throw his head back, open his mouth wide and scream, too.
The phone begins to ring.
Not any of the family’s lines, but the private line to the office. This is the call he’s been waiting for.
His arms are paralyzed, but he must answer the phone. If he doesn’t, he’ll probably die, and the family who lives here will never be safe. No one will ever be safe in this place.
With a burst of strength from deep within, he breaks free and grabs the phone. The invisible hands fight for control of it. His gloves and sleeves shred instantly, like the seams have been yanked in a million directions. He can see the blueness on his pale flesh where fingers are wrapping around his bony arm, trying to stop him from answering the call. The gold watch on his wrist is ripped away—sent flying across the room.
He screams, focuses all of his energy and talent and knowledge, and he breaks free yet again. He gets the phone to his ear and pushes the RECORD ANNOUNCEMENT button on the base at the same time.
There is a roar like a thundering train in a tunnel as images rocket past the young man’s eyes and sear into the soft tissues of his brain, where the cold ice pick sensation only grows worse.
He sees: a woman in 1930s attire being tied to a bed and raped, a woman he knows is the mother of the Deceased; children being rounded up in a grey and ugly WWII concentration camp, those children as they are lead into a room where they are told their parents are waiting, those children as they suffocate when the poison gas collapses their lungs; a little girl in Argentina in the 1950s sitting on the lap of the Deceased, smiling and laughing and playing with a yellow flower, the little girl laying bloody and dead and raped in an alley; a group of hippies hanging by their necks in a barn in Iowa in the 1960s; a security guard and three bank tellers dead in a vault with bullets between their eyes in Chicago in the 1970s; the Deceased and his young bride in Hollywood in the 1980s on their wedding night, when he ties her to a bed and reenacts what he did to his mother fifty years earlier, the young bride’s “accidental” slip and fall in the shower later on; the Deceased’s rise as respectable businessman and high price consultant in Silicon Valley in the 1990s; finally the Deceased’s discovery of a woman named Marge, a woman who he loved and who knew his dozens of terrible secrets and didn’t care, the woman who answered the door, the woman who the Deceased now wants to finish off, the reason he’s calling today.
The young man tries to
open his mouth, feels the fingers of a dead man push between his lips, grabbing his tongue. The fingers are cold and dead and slimy, and they pinch and they pull.
The young man gags, expelling the putrid fingers from his mouth, and he screams into the phone as those cold hands wrap around his throat and begin to squeeze: “Blessed be the people who dwell within this residence and may they be free of your furious spirit when they stand in darkness, when they sleep within these walls that I bless in the name of Jesus, the Holy Son, and may they be free of your residual presence for as long as they live, and you shall be banished to the tape in this Earthly machine as your mortal frame is interned to the ground forever and ever in the name of our Lord!”
The hands drop from his burning throat, the icy dagger withdraws from his brain, and the room begins to warm, ever so slightly.
Much later, the young man is sitting in his home. He sits on the stool in the room that is almost empty except for the lamp on the floor, and he holds the new answering machine on his lap.
He is so very pale, and so very sweaty, and so tired beyond human knowledge, but he’s finished his job yet again. There will be burns all over his body from the hands and fingers of the Deceased, but he doesn’t bother to look. It goes with the territory.
The woman named Marge and all others who live in that house are going to be safe from the dead.
At least until Marge dies. He has a bad feeling about her.
The young man sits and he presses the PLAY ANNOUNCEMENT button.
The room’s walls hear a thick German voice say: “You’ve reached the private line of Mister VonMueller, please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
The young man hears a screaming shriek: “I’LL KILL YOU, HURENSOHN, YOU LITTLE MUTHAFUCKER, YOU LITTLE STÜCK SCHEIßE, VERDAMMTE SCHEIßE, IF YOU DON’T LEAVE THIS PLACE NOW AND I MEAN RIGHT NOW …”
The recording goes on like that for almost seven minutes—the young man had no idea it had taken him that long to say the words he needed to say after he answered the phone, but he also knows that time works funny when he’s doing his job—and eventually the words of the Deceased turn into all German profanities and then they become the language only the dead understands and then finally there is the young man’s chant and nothing else.
He scoots off the stool in the middle of the empty room, walks to the closet door, and opens it. He turns on the light and steps inside.
The closet extends for as far as his eyes will allow him to see—hundreds of yards, maybe thousands, maybe more—and he walks until he reaches the place where the millions of answering machines lining both sides of the closet from floor to ceiling are barely stacked waist high.
He adds this one to the collection.
He knows he isn’t the only person in the world who has this job. He occasionally sees other people here, entering and exiting from any of the hundreds of doors that line the hallway, but he never talks to them. Doing so is forbidden, a violation of the most sacred laws of the universe, and that’s one of the reasons why the young man is lonely as hell. He wishes he knew his true purpose. He wishes he wasn’t so alone all the time.
Yet maybe there’s another call to answer in life. He suspects there’s more for him to do with his days than listen to the voices of the dead. The dead are dead, after all. They shouldn’t have any bearing on our lives.
They shouldn’t have so much control over his life.
Someday the young man hopes to move on, too. To be free of this terrible job and this wounded flesh.
Someday very soon.
Smooth Operator
DOMINICK CANCILLA
Rich Chizmar, and his Cemetery Dance Publications, has been nurturing the career of Dominick Cancilla. However, if we had been able to get this volume into print when originally scheduled, we could have laid claim to yet another new writer. The story which follows is a clear indication of the talent we recognized all those years ago.
For the eighth fruitless day in a row, Clarissa sat on a bench in the open-air mall and waited for Charles, her one true love. Through dark lenses she stared across the promenade toward the Surfside Café, a popular eatery with both indoor and patio seating. It was a casual but romantic place, the kind of place where a man, holding a woman’s hand in his own across the table, could speak the words which would make her every wish come true. Charles wanted to meet Clarissa there for just that purpose—she knew it without him even having to tell her. His every thought, his every word, his every motion was an open book to her, such was the depth of their love.
Clarissa wore the yellow flower-print sun dress he had bought for her, just as she had each day prior, and plain white gloves. Very elegant. Although the summer sun was still high in the sky, she found a scarf necessary to warm her head and he had been kind enough, thoughtful enough, to provide her with one.
She wondered where he was.
Every few minutes Clarissa glanced up and down the promenade, looking for his handsome face, his familiar smile. It was not like Charles to be late.
The hours passed slowly. Ten o’clock.
Eleven. Eleven thirty.
With nervous fingers Clarissa twisted her beautiful new silver and diamond ring through the thin fabric of her ill-fitting gloves. It was not an engagement ring—at least not yet—but more of a pre-engagement gift, a symbol of their undying love, and Clarissa was more than satisfied with that for the time being. Keeping the diamond in slow orbit about her finger brought Clarissa great comfort, even though the skin beneath the ring was slowly being rubbed raw.
Noon.
One o’clock.
Clarissa was not sure that Charles would be meeting her for lunch, just as she had not been sure if a champagne brunch had been his intention. By half past one she felt confident that it was a romantic dinner that he had in mind.
Two o’clock. Three.
Children played in the water of the fountain between Clarissa and the restaurant, and she caught herself wondering how her own children would one day look. She searched for her and Charles’ features in their smiling faces.
Three thirty.
By four she began to worry.
It was silly to begin fretting about such an odd hour, of course. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner and all that. Why would he show up at such an inconvenient time? No reason. Still, Clarissa didn’t move from her seat—just in case.
Five.
The sun hung low, staring into Clarissa’s eyes. Deep in her heart she knew that he was not going to show up, and she knew where to lay the blame.
Oh, on the first day she had been surprised that he stood her up. She had run home crying when the restaurant closed its doors at eleven, cursing him beneath her breath, paying no attention when cars screeched at her fleeing form. But when she’d gotten home the reason for his disdain had been all too clear, staring out at her from the bathroom mirror. Red, puffy, tear-swollen eyes. Nose running. And hair.
Hanging down her forehead to touch her eyebrows, hanging down her back in a stream of red to brush across her hips. Hair.
It had repulsed him.
Not bothering to get the scissors, Clarissa had used a razor blade—left so long ago by a fickle lover—to saw off every strand that reached below her shoulders. It had been difficult work, arduous, painful as the threads tugged at her scalp. But the result was more than satisfying. Clarissa had left the ends uneven, giving her a wild, devil-may-care look that she knew would excite Charles.
The next morning she’d returned to her place at the mall puffed up with confidence and anticipation. And once again he had passed her by. It had been a Sunday, and she could picture him in her mind’s eye laughing at her, chastising her for thinking that what she had done would be enough to please him.
Clarissa knew that he was with another woman. Rutting, fucking, screwing, all the time taunting Clarissa, letting her know that it could have been her instead. Clarissa couldn’t see the other woman, who she was. Probably a prostitu
te, a stranger, a co-worker. Maybe his wife.
That night, Clarissa worked on her eyebrows, thinning them, and plucked the unsightly hair from her nose with a pair of tweezers. It wasn’t enough.
The soft hairs above her lip and on the rim of her ears drove him away the next day, forcing her to endure a thousand stings as she plucked them gone. She removed the last of her eyebrows for good measure.
Clarissa had not spent long on the bench the day after that. She had been distracting herself from the monotony of waiting by flipping through his wallet, and that was when she realized what was really keeping Charles from coming to meet her as he had intended.
The wallet was much as it had been when Charles left it on the seat of the bus for her to find—pictures (minus the one of his wife which Clarissa had “lost”), a driver’s license, someone’s address scribbled on the back of a receipt, a lottery ticket. The only real difference was that most of the cash was gone. And, of course, the credit cards had stopped working after the second day, but that wasn’t a difference you could see. With a flush of embarrassment, Clarissa remembered the clerk in the shoe store telling her that the card had been refused. Charles hadn’t bought her anything else after that, and she was forced to come to meet him each day with silk stockings that led the eye down to a grungy old pair of sandals.
But of all the wallet’s contents, it had been the pictures that gave Clarissa the clue she needed to unravel the mystery. One of the photos was a picture of a baby lying in a crib, newborn, hands in tiny fists. The other was a snap of Charles holding the child, looking down at it with an expression of infinite love. That was what had tipped Clarissa off. Soft, round, smooth—Charles loved the baby. Loved it. Loved it.
