by J. W. Ocker
One quote caught Douglas’s eye in particular. It was attributed to a woman whose daughter had been murdered by a serial killer. She spoke the words on the witness stand at the trial: “He’s a monster.” That simple. Without fang or claw or tentacle, the serial killer was a monster. That’s what the Ghastlies had been calling the guy themselves.
The book was the most horrific thing Douglas had ever read in his life, and he was enjoying every minute of it. He was acutely aware of how close he was sitting next to Audrey, and hanging out there with her and his best friend made it almost seem okay that a monster was on the prowl in Cowlmouth. That death could be unnatural. Almost.
“Look at this.” Audrey pointed with the hand adorned by the purple stone. “It says here that serial killers often choose their victims according to a pattern. The same gender, the same neighborhood, the same age, the same habits, the same physical description. That hasn’t been true so far with the Day Killer.”
“Maybe there’s something the two victims have in common,” Lowell suggested. “Where they lived or what store they shopped at, or something.”
“If the killer’s making a calendar, all he’s looking for is a smooth cheek,” said Douglas.
“So horrible,” Audrey replied with a shudder. Douglas colored slightly. “Sorry.”
“No, I meant what a horrible thing in general.”
“Yeah.”
“I know something they have in common,” said Lowell. Audrey and Douglas waited. “The Mortimer Family Funeral Home.”
“What?” asked Douglas.
“Just saying. Same morticians, same embalmer.”
“Same reverend presiding over their services, same gravediggers putting them in their holes … same police officer in charge of investigating their deaths.”
“Same kid sleeping above their corpses.”
The trio should have laughed at the joke, but the reality of how close the monster was to their lives silenced them. Eventually, a tinkling intruded on their dark thoughts. After a bit of rummaging, Audrey pulled a phone from her backpack and answered it.
“Okay. I’ll be right out.” She pulled the phone away from her ear. “My mom. Gotta go. Let me know how the book ends.” She stood up, grabbed her backpack, and was off around the shelf and down the stairs before either Douglas or Lowell could say goodbye.
Lowell took advantage of the extra space on the couch by stretching out his long form, laying his head back, and closing his eyes. Douglas nestled deeper into whatever room that left him, and flipped lazily through the remaining pages without really looking at them. He liked Audrey, but so far, all of their conversations were about serial killers. Can people build a friendship out of murder? It seemed an insane interest to share. Well, not an interest, maybe. More like a stake. Still …
An image on one of the pages caught his eye. It was a pen-and-ink illustration, heavy on the cross-hatching, of a dark figure. A white skull poked out of the hood of its bulky black robe. In one of its bony hands was a long, wooden staff topped by a curved blade. The figure dragged a limp body behind with its other hand. The caption read, “The Grim Reaper.” In his mind, Douglas could see a bone-pale countenance framed in a thick black hood staring up at him from the bottom of a rope ladder. Cowlmouth’s monster. The murderer. The serial killer. The Day Killer. He stared at the illustration for a good five minutes before slamming the book shut and smashing the robed skeleton between the pages.
Then he got up to call his mother for a ride home. As he stood, he realized that he had no clue where in the library Audrey had gotten the book from. He nudged Lowell, who was pretending to snore. “Do you have any idea where this book goes?”
“No. Does it matter?”
“I don’t want to wander the library with this in my hands, trying to figure out where it needs to be re-shelved.”
“You’re Douglas Mortimer. People expect you to have something like that in your hands. Just leave it here.”
Douglas didn’t like that idea. A lifetime of putting away funeral programs and Mortimer Family Funeral Home pamphlets had made him a little obsessive about things being in their proper place. “Maybe I’ll throw it on the Halloween table out front.” If the staff didn’t like it there, they could use their magic filing system to find the book’s appropriate place.
He walked around the corner of the shelf … and almost ran into the tall woman in the glasses. She had been walking from the direction of the snack counter, and in her hand was a steaming paper cup with the unmistakably bitter smell of coffee wafting from it.
Startled, she looked at Douglas, and then down at the book in his hand. He looked down at it, too, surprised to see himself holding it like a dinner tray, the grisly red letters displayed as boldly as if they were written in neon-lit tubes. He tucked it quickly under his arm and nodded to her. “I know,” he said. “Unwholesome.”
He took off for the Belfry exit before she could reply, heading down the stairs. He could tell Lowell was following him from the barely stifled guffaws hitting the backs of his ears.
By the time Douglas got to the Halloween table, though, he had already forgotten about the woman in the glasses. All he could think about was the image of a skeleton in a black robe staring up at him from below his bedroom window.
OCTOBER 7
FRIDAY
“What do you know about serial killers?”
Maybe it was a strange question for a boy to ask. Maybe not. It was certainly a strange question for a boy to ask a pair of dirt-covered men struggling to fit a gangly metal contraption around an open hole in the ground.
“This could do with a bit of oiling,” Moss said to Feaster, trying to make the metal bars of the casket-lowering device telescope to the appropriate lengths. As usual, Moss was in a brown coat and slacks. Three watch chains dangled from pockets in his vest, none of which, Douglas knew, ended in watches. That was where Moss kept the keys to the graveyard’s more expensive mausoleums. The ones filled with old, valuable statues and paintings. You can’t take it with you, but you can stuff your tomb full of it. Moss’s thick, black beard was flecked with dirt, and he’d stuffed his shapeless cap into his back pocket to let the cool air chill the sweat from his scalp.
Feaster, dressed in a green plaid coat and T-shirt bearing the faded image of a pair of moray eels, nodded his agreement as he struggled with the tubular framework. His long brown hair dangled free across his face.
Above, the sky was a somber gray that matched the gravestones surrounding them. It was the short mourning period of the day before the quickly falling October darkness blinked. Both men were trying to beat that blink so that everything would be ready for their scheduled graveside funeral first thing the next morning. Neither seemed to register Douglas’s question. They kept huffing and grunting and sliding the sheathed parts of the framework in and out like some kind of large, experimental trombone.
Douglas helped as much as he could by arranging and adjusting the green mats of fake grass that covered the loose dirt that had been excavated. It was considered unsightly to have raw dirt exposed during a funeral. Piles of dirt were too close to the truth.
Today was Friday, and Douglas’s mother had dropped him off at the graveyard right after school. He looked a bit ruffled as he adjusted the mats, his pants wrinkled at the backs of his knees and his red tie lolling out of his jacket like a thirsty tongue.
“Serial killers. They’re monsters, right?” Lowell had said it. Audrey had said it. He had said it. The library book had said it. That had left Douglas only one place to go.
Feaster finally pushed the long hair out of his eyes and looked at Douglas. “That should probably be a father-son talk, Spadeful.”
“We have talked.”
“What did your dad say?”
“He said ‘I don’t know’ a lot.”
Moss took a heavy seat on the mat-covered pile of soil and scratched some of the dirt from his beard. “Wise man, your father. I’ve always thought that.”
“It’s death,” Feaster agreed. “Being around so much death makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
“Minus the wealthy,” finished Moss.
“Minus the wealthy,” echoed Feaster.
“Well? The murderer’s a monster, right? You won’t be telling me anything I shouldn’t know. Everybody at school is talking about the Day Killer. He’s all over the news.”
“He is, he is,” agreed Moss.
“So?”
“Well, Spadeful,” answered Moss as he settled his key chains, “you see, this type of monster, he doesn’t really fall within our jurisdiction, you know.”
“Jurisdiction?”
“He’s not the kind of monster that we deal with. He’s different.”
“Why?”
“Well, first of all, because it’s a he, and not an it.”
“Could be a she,” said Feaster with a hiss of satisfaction as a piece of the metal piping locked perfectly in place. “It’s not unprecedented.”
“Either way,” explained Moss, “it’s kind of a long story for a short autumn day, especially one that’s about to drop The End here on us at any second.”
“And we’ve got to get this here casket-dropper to install before it gets dark, else this whole project gets a lot harder to do.” Feaster wasn’t looking at Douglas when he said this, but at Moss, who was still casually perched on the pile of dirt.
“Yeah, that’s right. Because of the gremlins.” agreed Moss, not taking the hint.
“Gremlins?” Moss and Feaster barely needed to bait their hooks for Douglas to chomp down on them these days.
“Little mischievous beasties that only come out at night. They take pleasure in interfering with whatever it is you’re trying to do. Make you have to work three times as hard to get something done or make it take twice as long. Fix a porch light? You’ll lose your tools. Walk the dog? The leash will break, and your pooch’ll run away. Grill a steak? It’ll burn to a coal. And, whatever you do, never put up Christmas lights at night. Gremlins can really gum everything up. That’s why most people work during the day and sleep during the night. Gremlins.”
As tempting as it was, Douglas wouldn’t be distracted by Moss’s stories nor deterred by Feaster’s impatience to get back to work. “Speaking of monsters, what can you tell me about the Grim Reaper? I mean, besides the obvious stuff.”
Ever since he had seen that image in the library book, he couldn’t get over how much it matched his impression of the Day Killer.
Feaster squinted at Douglas like he was out of focus. “Ha! Spadeful wants to know about the Grim Reaper.”
“Death, himself, huh?” Moss heaved himself off the mound of dirt with some difficulty. “Now there’s a serial killer for you. The worst of the lot. Also goes by Death Angel, Thanatos, Santa Muerte, the Black Mower …”
“I don’t think he was ever called the Black Mower. You made that one up.” Feaster chuckled under his breath. Douglas couldn’t see what was so funny about serial killers. No one seemed to be as destroyed by the idea as he was.
“Allow me some license for my poetry, gravedigger. Besides if he hasn’t been called that in all the millennia that he’s been scouring the earth, he should be. In fact, the next time I see him, I’ll dub him the ‘Black Mower’ myself.” Moss delicately extended his shovel like a king knighting a kneeling man with a sword.
“The next time you see him, you’ll have bigger concerns than nicknaming him.” Feaster pushed back his hair, which seemed to prefer falling down the front of his face rather than the back of his head.
Moss turned back to Douglas. “I don’t know if there’s much to tell you that you don’t already know. There’s nothing too interesting about him. He’s basically the postman, taking your box, so to speak, for delivery into the hereafter …”
“Here-under,” interrupted Feaster, stamping a heel into the grave dirt.
“He’s the narrator that gives the epilogue after the last chapter, the guy that rolls the final credits at the theater.”
“You could even say he’s your parents’ best employee, what with all the business he drums up for them,” added Feaster.
It was a joke, but the punch line horrified Douglas as he came to a disturbing realization: his parents were profiting off of the work of the Day Killer. Two funerals, two body preparations, two coffins, two plots, two burials, two headstones, flower arrangements, and publicity. That was a good bit of money. He tried to ignore the thought, but the shadow cast across his mind by the figure in the dark robe seemed to emphasize it all the more clearly.
“Why all these questions about serial killers and Grim Reapers?” Moss asked. “If I didn’t know you had a fascination with death, I’d be worried that you had a fascination with death.”
“Just curious. You guys talk a lot about monsters. You’ve never really talked about murderers.”
Moss rolled his head back and forth on his neck, brushing his chest with his beard. “Maybe you should wait until you get a bit longer in the tie before you start trying to make sense of all this.” When Douglas continued to stare stubbornly at him, Moss sighed. “Listen, you’re talking about a different kind of monster. Not like a zombie or a mutant insect or a werewolf.”
“So it’s not a made-up monster.”
“Whoa, whoa, Spadeful,” Moss protested the statement by waving both his hands in front of him. “Monsters ain’t ‘made-up.’ That’s your mom talking. It’s just that when it comes to serial killers, we call them monsters because it helps us come to terms with them. To set ourselves apart from them. As much as we can, anyway. We haven’t quite figured them out, honestly, and by ‘we,’ I mean all of us adults. We call them monsters because their acts are monstrous, as monstrous as a blob from the depths of the ocean swallowing a swimmer or a succubus sucking the soul out of a sleeper. But they have a kinship with us—a kinship we don’t like to admit, but a kinship nevertheless. They do monstrous things, but they’re as human as your father or Reverend Ahlgrim. If you take the cells of a serial killer and the cells of an innocent newborn baby and stick them all under a microscope, you’ll see no difference between them. Do you understand?”
Douglas kind of did to his surprise, but his mind kept returning to the vague dark form below his bedroom window. “I don’t like this monster,” said Douglas.
“That’s good, Spadeful,” said Moss. “Real good.”
“Looks like your ride’s here,” said Feaster, nodding his head in the direction of the iron gates. Christopher stood on the far side of the black vertical bars, looking like he didn’t want to come any nearer to them, their hole, or their coffin-lowering device. “Why won’t he come on in?” asked Feaster. “He afraid we’re going to ask for help?”
“Maybe he’s not allowed on sanctified ground,” said Moss.
“I don’t know. Chris is being weird lately,” admitted Douglas. “I guess I’d better go. You guys going to get this finished before night?” He looked up at the ashy sky doubtfully.
“Wouldn’t be the first time we tended graves at night. It’ll be romantic, just me and this old beard-hanger,” joked Feaster, kicking a dirt clod at Moss.
“Well, watch out for gremlins,” Douglas took off, leapfrogging tombstones to the gate.
At the gate, he didn’t see a car. “Did you bring the hearse?” he asked Christopher.
“Nope. Walked.” Christopher was in his work clothes, a black suit and a silver and gray-checkered tie, accented by a matching gold-plated tie clip and cuff links. His black hair was spiky with gel. They walked side by side down the walk, with Douglas taking two strides for every one of Christopher’s steps.
“Did you have a removal today?”
“No. Been manning the storefront, waiting for sad people with dead bodies on their hands to come in and make pricey decisions.”
“Why didn’t you come into the cemetery?”
“Man, just because I have to sleep over the dead and wheel them around in boxes doesn’t mean I want to traip
se all over them when I can avoid it.”
“You really don’t like the dead. What’d they ever do to you?”
“You’re a funny kid. It’s all right for you. You grew up with dead people. They’re like family to you. I’m in this because my pops thinks it’s a good idea.”
“That’s why you took the apprenticeship?”
“Yeah. You can’t get more stable than the death business. Always clients.” Christopher looked around at the darkening shadows. “Especially with this Day Killer running around.”
The row of dogwood trees was coming up, and Douglas made a point not to look too deeply past their trunks.
“I mean, nothing against your folks and all, but this death stuff … it’s not me. I kind of knew that already, but I thought I could handle it. Work’s not something everybody gets to enjoy. Now, though, with this Day Killer creep … I don’t know if I can handle that kind of death.”
Finally. Somebody who seemed as genuinely troubled by these murders as Douglas was. He should have talked to Christopher weeks ago. “I know. Suddenly death doesn’t seem to be much of a life.” Christopher nodded, stretching his upper lip with his top teeth until the sparse hairs of his moustache were parallel to the sidewalk. “What are you going to do?” Douglas asked.
“I don’t know. Quit, maybe. That way, I can read about all this online like a civilized person who doesn’t have to worry about death until they’re old instead of having a murdered body two floors below the place where you’re supposed to have sweet dreams.”
The answer made Douglas’s heart drop like it had only been thinly webbed into his chest. Chris might be feeling the same as him about the serial killer, but he also had an escape route if it got too bad. Douglas couldn’t quit. Death wasn’t his job; it was his family, his life.
