Death and Douglas

by J. W. Ocker

  He ducked around the many appendages of the vehicle and squatted down to hide on her far side, not knowing what to do next or where to go. He wondered where Lowell was. Wished he were here with him. No, wished Lowell was safe elsewhere. He should have run back to Death House instead of to the cemetery. That’s where the police would be after Lowell had called them. He should have banged on every door in the surrounding neighborhood. Or shouted in the streets until everyone realized it wasn’t a Halloween prank and came outside. He never should have told his friends he saw the monster in the first place. But now, alone except for thousands of corpses, he was going to be murdered. Douglas, the boy who got death, was facing it.

  Yet there, crouched in the snow, his only shelter the cold yellow metal of a grave-digging machine, his only company a cemetery full of the dead and a pursuer that wanted him to end up the same way, Douglas did finally think he understood death. Natural death, unnatural death, murder, heart attack, car accident, dead in your sleep, dead in the ground. None of that was important. Death, whatever its form, whenever it happened, wasn’t the point. Death was never the point.

  In that strange calm that only cemeteries have, Douglas realized how much he wanted to live. He wanted to walk right down Main Street to get a hot caramel sundae at Sweeney’s. Wanted to watch a movie at the theater with a big, warm tub of popcorn on his lap. Wanted to go to another Fall Carnival. To graduate to the next grade in school. He wanted to play video games. To listen to Moss’s and Feaster’s monster stories and Reverend Ahlgrim’s eulogies. He wanted to be called Mortimer the Cadaver Kid. Wanted his mom to tousle his hair and to go on more removals with his dad. He wanted another of Dr. Coffman’s lemon candies. And to see his great-grandfather’s collection of funeral art in the sitting room. He wanted to polish the coffins in the showroom. To watch Eddie make a dead body beautiful. He wanted to get to know Audrey better. And he wanted to do all of that with Lowell, his best friend in the whole world, at his side.

  But if he died tonight in the cold Halloween snow, at least he had known all those people and done all those things.

  And that didn’t feel like salvage. It felt like … somebody else’s funeral.

  There was a reason people went through the funeral ritual, why they followed the customs and picked out a casket or an urn, and held a service, and dug a hole or lit a fire. There was a reason why people grieved and cried and got together with loved ones. It wasn’t play-acting or pretending.

  It was living.

  It was everything a dead person couldn’t do. People are the most alive at funerals. “Not for the deceased.” That’s what his dad always said about the funeral business. It wasn’t really about the dead or how they died or why they died. It was about continuing to live until your own death, however that happened.

  Living was worth dying for. Even dying badly.

  And that was exactly what he had to do.

  Sitting there in the snow, cold metal against his back, the most horrible thought entered Douglas’s head: What if the killer can’t find me?

  He’d been sitting there too long. He must have lost the monster in his race across the cemetery. That meant he might be safe. But if he were, the monster would find a different victim. And there was only one other victim in that cemetery.

  Douglas had to make sure Lowell was safe.

  He jumped up from the snow and clambered up the various protrusions on Daisy’s flank until he found himself standing on the slippery metal of her roof. All around him, the cemetery was dark, although the dim light from the town gave vague forms to the headstones through the static of snow. The audience of graves waited expectantly. Douglas screamed the first thing that popped into his head.

  “Second son!”

  The two words sounded tiny, blown away by the wind, absorbed by the graves. He tried again, putting as much force into them as his freezing lungs could throw.

  “Second son!”

  Douglas strained his ears in the silence. He imagined he could hear the tiny flakes striking the stones. But no shadows moved. No snow parted. Not even an echo returned his cry. He would need a bonfire and a bullhorn to get anybody’s attention.

  Fortunately, he had Daisy. She gave off a lot of light. And made a lot of noise.

  He scrambled from her roof and dived into her cab and the driver’s seat. A plastic, severed hand dangled from the mirror. The windows were plastered with monster stickers. And surrounding him were enough knobs and buttons and levers to confuse an astronaut. He’d seen Moss and Feaster work Daisy a thousand times, and knew it was more an art than a science. But he did know how to turn the rickety, yellow beast on. He gave the keys dangling from the dashboard a twist. And, for the first time in the history of Daisy, she started on the first try, resurrecting into a glory of headlights and engine noise.

  “Yes!” he shouted, high-fiving the severed hand.

  A black hood popped up at the window. “Second son,” it said as a streak of knife blade invaded the cab, tickling the fabric against Douglas’s chest.

  Douglas threw himself back against the cracked vinyl of the driver’s seat. He looked down at his chest, expecting the worst, but saw only a tear in his thick robe. He looked at the hooded figure standing just outside Daisy’s cab. The monster had pulled his hand back from the half-open window. His black robe was specked with snow as if he were wrapped in an indifferent universe.

  “Second son,” the voice repeated, colder than the graves, colder than the snow.

  The monster lunged at him again, and Douglas squeezed himself back into the opposite corner, out of reach of the deadly blade. After a few failed swipes, the monster scrabbled at the handle. The door opened, and the monster lunged inward, just as Douglas kicked out his feet to parry the attack. His left foot struck the monster in the side of the head, for the second time that night pulling a grunt from the depths of the dark hood, and repelling the figure out of the cab. Douglas didn’t even notice that he’d connected, continuing to kick his feet in terror. His right foot hit one of the levers and Daisy responded, swinging around on her axis. Her backhoe hit the monster, throwing him backward.

  And then the monster disappeared.

  A horrible thud, stark and final like the first spadeful of dirt on the polished lid of a coffin, soon followed.

  Douglas froze for a long time as the snow seeped in through the open door, covering his robe in a layer of white that snuck into the openings to chill his skin. Finally, he jumped down from Daisy’s cab.

  He turned on his flashlight and saw the short trail first, like someone had brushed the snow from a four-foot section of dark grass. It ended at the mouth of the open grave. He moved closer. There, six feet down, at the bottom of the human-sized hole that bore the bite marks of Daisy’s backhoe, was a black mass of cloak. He stifled a scream, swallowing his own soul back into his body before one of the envious dead grabbed it.

  Something kept him rooted to the lip of the open grave. Something that had been ingrained in him for a short, but no less, a lifetime of experience with dead bodies. Douglas knew the stillness at the bottom of that shaft.

  The monster had landed on the concrete grave liner, the black smear on the snow-covered lip testifying to where his head had hit. A head that was now completely slipped of its black hood.

  The monster in that grave wasn’t the Grim Reaper. In the light of Daisy’s headlamps, he could see that the killer’s extremely pale head was bald except for a thin fringe of light blond hair around the temples. He had a moustache that was the same color, and a pair of round spectacles that were askew on his face.

  The man at the photo booth at the Cowlmouth Fall Carnival.

  The monster, the murderer, was an ordinary man. A coffee-drinker. And he was somewhere that he wasn’t a danger to anybody, exactly like Douglas’s father had hoped for. It was the only corpse Douglas had ever seen that didn’t look at peace.

  As the snow slowly buried the body in white, three shapes quickly detached from the mottled mist b
ehind him. Douglas smelled cloves, heard the jangle of keys on chains, and felt a skinny arm covered in a tattered sweater slip around his shoulders.

  “Have I ever told you, Spadeful,” one of the shapes said breathlessly through a rasp of beard, “that holes are the best things in the entire world?”

  NOVEMBER 14

  MONDAY

  Now this was a merry funeral. Douglas hung back in the empty foyer of Cowlmouth Center Church and watched the festivities in the auditorium through the crack where the two doors met. People were wearing brightly colored party hats instead of somber veils, burying their faces in glasses of punch instead of into handkerchiefs. In lieu of memorial funeral programs, people hefted small paper plates piled with cheeses and meats and olives and other foods that could be skewered by toothpicks. Napkins were stuffed into collars and worn down the front of shirts in place of ties. What would normally have been a muted, respectful buzz of conversation had moved up the ladder to a boisterous roar. The crowd was huge, bigger even than the one at Mr. Stauffer’s funeral had been. The attendees—the anti-mourners—weren’t sitting somberly in ordered rows, either. They were milling about excitedly, clumped in animated clusters among the pews.

  Douglas’s eyes roamed the sliver of crowd that he could see through the crack. He was looking for somebody specific, but all he could see was the almost solid mass of people wandering under the blind, bemused gaze of the blue-and-white stained glass window behind the pulpit. Every once in a while, the open coffin at the front of the auditorium was visible through breaks in the crowd.

  “Let me see.” Lowell lightly pushed Douglas away from the doors and stuck his face to the crevice. Had somebody pushed the door from the opposite side, Lowell would have earned a black eye that would’ve stuck around until Christmas. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved gray pullover. A faded red stripe slithered down the length of each sleeve, which stopped short a good inch before his bony wrists. “Man … everybody’s in there.”

  “Everybody?” asked Douglas.

  Before Lowell could answer, the outside doors behind them opened, and in swept a rush of cold November air accompanied by two men who walked gently into the foyer like they didn’t trust the carpet under their snow-encrusted boots. Moss and Feaster both wore beat-up jackets, Moss’s of brown tweed and Feasters of green suede. Moss’s shirt was buttoned all the way to his beard, and Feaster had a rudimentary part in his hair that looked more like a ragged scar than a neat division. In fact, the pair almost looked like imposters of Moss and Feaster, especially since neither one of them hoisted a shovel or leaned on a pickax. It was like they both had suffered amputations.

  It had been two weeks since the four of them stood together in the snow at that impromptu funeral service. Two weeks since Halloween. Two weeks since the dark burden of Cowlmouth had rolled right off its back and into an open grave.

  “I don’t remember the last time I saw you at a funeral service.” Douglas wasn’t sure about calling it that.

  “Eh,” dismissed Feaster with a wave of a hand that was remarkably clean except for the dark edges of his fingernails. “We get our time with the dead, you know that. But we figured this was a special occasion.”

  “So how are you two doing?” asked Moss, scratching uncomfortably at a beard that seemed to have been lavished with a scented cream strong enough to fight a violent battle with Feaster’s aroma of cloves.

  “Okay, I guess,” Douglas answered for both of them.

  “I bet you guys are,” replied Feaster. “I bet you’re more than okay. We got real heroes, here, Moss, you know.” Douglas felt warmth fill his face.

  “Bona fide monster slayers,” agreed Moss.

  “Fellow monster slayers,” corrected Feaster.

  “It was all Doug,” protested Lowell. “I never even really saw the creep. At least, while he was alive.”

  “He fell into a hole.” Douglas felt as if he had offered that explanation a thousand times in the past two weeks. Nobody seemed to listen to it.

  “Don’t matter how you did it. Matters that you did it,” said Moss, twisting his neck uncomfortably and reaching under his beard to unfasten one of his shirt buttons. “We’re just sorry we weren’t there to help you.” They had already apologized too many times to Douglas for taking a break from cemetery business to enjoy Halloween in town for a bit.

  “No good ever comes from us leaving that boneyard,” said Feaster. He tugged at the uneven ponytail that he’d gathered his long, brown hair into.

  “Still,” said Moss, “It’s good to know that when we’re gone, there’ll be somebody here who can take care of Cowlmouth’s monsters. We’re getting old, you know.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Feaster, “You always forget that you’ve got decades on me.”

  “A few years, sure.”

  “Decades,” Feaster insisted. “I’ll be throwing dirt on your box before I’ve even hit my prime.”

  “We’ll see. The fickle Fates cut strange expiration dates.”

  Feaster shrugged at the old argument and turned back to Douglas and Lowell. “You’re going to want know that we had to fix the lock on the Grassley mausoleum. Too many people poking around it after your story got out.”

  “But we left another one open for you elsewhere in the cemetery,” said Moss with a wink that made one side of his beard twitch. “We’ll leave it to you to find it. Make sure you keep it secret from us.”

  “Thanks,” said Douglas distractedly as his eyes were again drawn to the thin stripe of activity between the doors.

  “Why aren’t you going in there?” asked Moss.

  Douglas looked down at his dress shoes. He’d shined them that morning and could see his reflection looking up at himself. It was disconcerting and made him feel like he was falling. “I don’t know.”

  “Looks like a real party,” urged Feaster.

  “Where are your folks?” asked Moss.

  “Already in there. Came over early to help set everything up. Said we could come over whenever we felt like it.”

  “Feels good to be able to walk the streets of Cowlmouth by yourselves again, eh?” asked Feaster.

  “Yeah,” agreed Douglas. It really was.

  “Too bad this will probably be our last time for a while. We’re both grounded until Thanksgiving,” said Lowell.

  “What?” said Feaster, “Heroes such as yourselves?”

  “Our parents didn’t like us keeping things from them and putting ourselves in danger,” said Douglas. He’d almost gotten away with a sentence of extra funeral home duties, but then his parents remembered that he liked doing that kind of stuff. So, grounded it was. Until at least Thanksgiving.

  “Well,” said Moss, who had managed to undo another two buttons of his shirt and had twisted an arm halfway out of his jacket. “No reason for you to be spending your last moments of freedom with us antisocial types. I’m sure there are lots of people waiting for you guys in there.”

  “I guess,” replied Douglas feebly while gently dabbing at the three stripes of hair on his forehead.

  “You need a push?” asked Feaster.

  “Nope. We’re going in.” Lowell grabbed Douglas by the arm and pulled him through the doors like he was delivering an order at a restaurant. Douglas didn’t protest.

  The crowd barely parted as the two boys stepped into the noisy auditorium. Douglas had received so much attention lately that he had expected—and dreaded—everybody making a big commotion when he arrived. Thankfully, the crowd was too big and having too much fun to notice such a small detail as two more in their midst. The only eye staring at them was the giant pupilless one at the front of the church.

  The walls of the auditorium were covered in rainbows of brightly-colored streamers, and the ends of the pews were topped with large bows. Off to the side of the church, at a respectable distance away from the open coffin, was a large TV that cycled through images of Lavinia Laurent, Marvin Brinsfield, and George Rivets. Nearby, Douglas saw his parents t
alking to Dr. Coffman and Chief Pumphrey. It was a grouping that usually meant that the details of a death needed sorting, but this time, they were all smiling and eating and not acting like any one of them had ever seen a dead body in their entire lives. Douglas’s father saw him and gave him a quick wink. His father, the mortician, who had seen plenty of dead bodies, who had helped plenty of living people get through death so that they could go back to living.

  “Hail, Dorothies!” The voice came from his left, and was followed by Eddie Brunswick, who sauntered over to him with a glass of punch in his even-fingered hand and a plate of deviled eggs in his other. His brown shirt bore his average number of stains.

  “Dad really needs to invest in more smocks for you,” Douglas said.

  “Doesn’t matter. If it weren’t mortuary fluids, it’d be food stains.” The way the level of punch seesawed in the glass and the deviled eggs wobbled on the plate seemed to support the statement.

  “Whoa,” said Lowell. “Deviled eggs? Where at?”

  Eddie thrust his glass in the general direction of a wall at the far end of the church. “Full buffet.”

  “I’ve got high standards for full,” insisted Lowell. “I’ll catch up with you guys,” and like that Lowell was lost in the crowd.

  “How’s the funeral going?” asked Douglas.

  “I’ve been to better ones. Haven’t been to a better party, though.” He took a sip from his glass and smiled, his teeth red from the liquid. “It’s crazy, man. I guarantee you every conversation in this church is about murder, yet I haven’t seen so many smiles in my entire life.” He paused. “Hey, shouldn’t you get announced or something? You’re like the guest of honor at this thing. The most famous person in Cowlmouth.”

  “He fell into a hole.”

  “Ha,” said Eddie, but not in response to Douglas’s statement. He was waving his glass haphazardly in the direction of a back corner of the church. “There’s Chris. I thought that guy would never go near a funeral again.” Douglas hadn’t seen Christopher in more than a month, since the last—the actual last—murder. He was wearing black jeans and a burgundy sweater. The thin growth of hair on his upper lip had spread to his chin. Chris looked very different from how Douglas was used to seeing him, in the somber suits of the trade. He also looked a lot more relaxed. Nevertheless, he was about as far away from the coffin as he could physically be and still share an auditorium with it.