by Billy Wells
She called Frank and asked him to drive to the gravesite. She thought about telling him she was pregnant, but decided it should wait.
He considered her request as insane, like everything else about the fictitious gravesite, but knew he would always humor her. He loved Pat dearly and did what he could to make her happy.
In a few minutes, he pulled his car into the parking space next to hers. When he joined her at the grave, he was immediately puzzled by the name on the headstone.
“Did you give the boy a name and have someone engrave it on the headstone after all these years?” Frank questioned.
“Of course not. I have no idea who did this or why. They even put lilies on the grave. I wondered if you knew anything about it.”
“I don’t know anything. I guess the only answer is that someone who doesn’t have any money has buried his kid in our cemetery plot.”
“How could anyone think they could do this without repercussions?”
“I’ll notify the police and let them take care of it.”
“No! I don’t want to get the police involved,” Pat stated emphatically. “Let’s start with the cemetery administrator. Let him look into the situation before we involve the authorities.”
The next morning, Frank called George Landers and informed him of the bizarre mishap.
After waiting on hold for a few minutes, Landers said, “I assure you, Mr. Stevens, that no one has been buried in the Queen of Angels section for over a month.”
“Maybe not officially, but certainly illegally. It probably happened in the middle of the night,” Frank responded gruffly. “The grave has been violated, and a name we don’t recognize has been engraved on our headstone. What are you going to do about it?”
After pausing for a few moments, Landers responded irritably, “We will exhume the casket and examine the contents if you give us written permission.”
“When can you do it?”
“Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”
“We’ll be there.
The next morning, Frank and Pat watched the bobcat remove the dirt. Three workmen shoveled until the casket was uncovered and raised it to ground level. They placed a canvas enclosure around the casket and removed the top for viewing.
Frank and Pat stood agape. It was not a freshly interred body their eyes fell upon, but one that had been decomposing for a considerable period of time. A bluish-gray layer of putrefying flesh stretched across the skeletal frame, allowing some degree of human recognition.
Pat stifled a scream when she saw the hair lip that disfigured the small face. The right arm of the corpse was twisted at a familiar odd angle. She remembered how her son’s backbone extended higher than the neck. There was no doubt this was Tommy, not someone else’s child.
Frank caught Pat in his arms as she started to fall.
“This is not a new burial,” Landers stated meekly, wondering if he should remain silent. After a moment, he added, “Forgive me for asking, but are you sure this is not your child after all.”
“I’m positive it is not my child since we buried an empty casket without a body.”
Landers looked at the distraught man incredulously and waited for an explanation.
“My wife had a child who died at birth during a previous marriage. We purchased the gravesite, and even the casket, as a kind of belated memorial to his memory.”
“Who is Thomas Eastwood, the name on the headstone?” Landers asked.
“We have no idea who he is.”
After Pat regained consciousness, Frank escorted her to the car and asked Landers to wait there until he returned from taking his wife to their house, only a few blocks away.
When Frank and Pat arrived home, Pat confessed that she hadn’t told him the truth about why she wanted the gravesite. She told him that when she was a young girl she had a deformed child who wandered off into the swamp and was never found. She named him Thomas Eastwood. She left out the part that she had murdered her own son.
Frank responded, “And you think that someone has gone to the trouble of placing your real son’s body in our empty casket and putting his name on our gravestone?”
Pat started to sob uncontrollably. Frank consoled her as best he could and promised everything would be all right. Pat rested her head on the sofa, and Frank left the house to return to the cemetery, where Landers and his crew were waiting for a decision.
When he arrived, he found the casket lying askew across the open grave. Landers’s dead body was stuffed into the small casket. His head was smashed in on one side. The workmen had disappeared.
Frank saw a young boy’s footprints in the damp earth that led off in the direction of their house.
Frank picked up the shovel that was lying by the grave and hurried into the woods toward his house. The sun was going down, and the rain clouds were ominous.
The front door was standing open as he rushed inside, shovel at the ready. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator.
It was dark as thunder rumbled in the distance. He snapped on the living room lamps.
He saw a trail of muddy footprints on the carpet heading up the stairs.
“Pat?” Frank called out.
Silence.
Frank heard the sound of something shuffling across the floor upstairs and immediately took the stairs, two at a time, to the second level.
He rushed into the master bedroom and saw Pat cowering in the far corner. What was left of the decomposed body was shuffling toward her with its skeletal hands outstretched.
Frank plunged the shovel into its neck, sending the head flying across the floor. The headless body continued toward Pat, who was screaming at the top of her lungs.
Frank plunged the shovel through its back, which pushed the putrefied intestines out through its stomach. The corpse’s body doubled over and collapsed to the floor. Frank saw the dead eyes in the wormy head still glaring at Pat with animal fury. Frank continued to plunge the blade of the shovel into its writhing body until it stopped moving.
He rushed to Pat’s side and embraced her.
When things had settled down for the night, Pat told him she was pregnant. He kissed her tenderly, and the horror of the day was replaced by the promise of the future.
The authorities closed the case without resolution. No one believed Frank and Pat’s story about the corpse reanimating itself. The identity of the corpse remained a mystery, and there were no leads on who killed the cemetery administrator, George Landers.
Eight months later, the happy day arrived. When Pat’s water broke, Frank drove her to the local hospital without complications. The delivery was textbook. Pat had experienced much less than normal labor pains, and even the duration of the birth was uncommonly short.
When the head and then the shoulders came out of the birth canal, the pediatrician removed the boy, wrapped him in linen, and laid the baby on Pat’s stomach. Frank beamed with the wide grin of a proud father as he pulled back the little sheet from the baby’s face to take a look.
Pat saw Frank’s smile evaporate in an instant. His face contorted in horror. She lifted the baby from her stomach and turned it toward her. Frank rushed to her side as the doctors and nurses stood aghast at the sight of the infant’s deformed head.
Pat’s piercing scream was like fingernails across a blackboard.
The baby looked a lot like Tommy.
* * *
The Maw
Star quarterback, Beef Burroughs, of the Broadway Tigers pulled his fire engine red Mustang into his favorite make-out spot overlooking an expansive black lake. The full moon looked like a golden saucer in the sky with a halo around it.
It was a perfect night, so he powered the windows down and turned off the engine. Turning to his date, Marcy Turner, he smiled broadly and surveyed her body with an obnoxious air of self-confidence. She had only been at school for a week, but she had what Beef liked, a JLo ass and gigantic jugs.
He moved toward her and planted a wet kiss on her warm lips
. His hand wrapped around her neck as he pulled her closer and started nibbling at her left earlobe. He was surprised she was so easy, but decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Suddenly, a branch snapped in the dark woods on her side of the car. He felt her neck muscles tense, and she pulled her head away to stare into the eerie underbrush that was alive with the rustle of leaves in the wind.
“This place is spooky,” she said as an owl hooted in the black woods. “I don’t like it here.”
“Oh, baby, don’t be like that. There’s nothing to fear. Everyone knows I don’t take any bull shit from anyone. Nobody in their right mind would try anything with you when you’re with me.”
He thrust his massive hairy arm into her lap, “Feel this muscle.”
“Oooh, that is big,” she cooed, feeling the rock hard outline of his Hulk Hogan-like bicep.
He started unbuttoning her blouse and kissing her passionately on the neck. Pausing for a breath, he continued, “If some clown was hiding in the bushes out there, and he dared to show himself, do you think I’d give it a second thought?”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Of course not. I’m six foot five and 275 pounds of pure muscle. I can bench press 400 pounds, if I put my mind to it. I’d tear the pervert limb from limb.”
“Wow! I guess a girl would be safe with you.”
His hand crept behind her back, and he unsnapped her bra strap with the panache of someone who’d performed the task countless times and he continued, “Nobody in this county would have the nerve to mess with me. They know what happened to the punks who tried before.”
“Did you hurt them?”
“Hurt them? I wasted them. As far as I know, all three are still in wheelchairs today.”
“Golly gee. I guess a girl is really safe with you,” she said, purring like a kitten.
His hand found its way under her bra, and just as he started fondling her breasts, another loud snap from the thicket on her side of the car caused her to straighten up and button her blouse. Her eyes flitted back and forth across the expanse of the foreboding woods.
“Do you think someone’s watching us? I want to be alone with you.”
“Baby, what did I tell you? Why can’t you relax? Let me take care of the bogeymen.”
“Do you believe in them?”
“What?”
“Bogeymen,” she said as her eyes continued to search the underbrush, and the wind whispered through the trees.
“Of course not. It’s just a fairy tale.”
“What about vampires and werewolves?”
“Same thing. They’re just folklore.”
When he started unbuttoning her blouse again, she moved back in her seat and peered into the black woods.
“Hey, what did you think I brought you out here for. You’re a very lucky girl. You get to do what other girls at Broadway High would die for. You can say you had the honor of making out with the star football player in the conference.”
She looked at him with disgust like the piece of shit everyone in the county knew he was, but her face was shrouded in shadow. Restraining intense loathing for him, she asked, “Do you think something from another planet has ever landed on earth?”
“Of course not. What is this, twenty questions? Let’s get it on. I want to show you a thing or two before the night is over.” When he lifted her hand and placed it on his crotch, it felt as if it had been submerged in ice cubes. Pulling away, he winced when he cut his fingers on what felt like razor sharp scales on the tips of her fingers.
He reached for his car keys to start the engine, but they were gone. When he began to search his pockets, she lifted the keys in front of his face. He looked at her incredulously, not understanding what was happening.
She moved toward him, and the light of the moon revealed her menacing eyes and insidious smile. In a voice, more like a croak, she rasped, “Don’t you get it, you despicable birdbrain? You didn’t pick me. I picked you because everyone says you’re the most worthless excuse for a human being there is at Broadway High. I’m leaving town in the morning, and I’m desperate for a tasty piece of worthless ass tonight.”
Beef’s face grew red with anger, and he tried to slap her face off, but after a blinding scissor motion with her arms, he found he had only stumps for hands.
“My hands!” he screamed as the blood sprayed his prized football jacket with the giant letter sewn on the front.
“Enough of this foreplay, I’m hungry.” Marcy croaked triumphantly.
Her beautiful face morphed into something green and alien as her whole body started to change. Her voluptuous lips parted, and her mouth began to enlarge like a giant reptile about to swallow its prey.
In seconds, the gaping maw of her mouth kept expanding bigger and bigger until it finally planted itself around the shaved head of the football star and started sucking it inside her.
After a while, the screaming stopped, and a few minutes later, Beef was gone. All that remained in the Mustang was the bloated, egg-shaped green thing with a toothy, satisfied grin.
* * *
Shadow On The Stairs
My name is Conrad Twist. I am a total loser. Webster and his descendants could have used my picture in their dictionary to show the world what a loser really looks like. I have accomplished nothing I set out to do when I graduated from Yale.
I have been a nursemaid to my sister, Emily, as a condition of the will since my father, who I nicknamed “Hitler,” and my slut of a mother were wasted in a head-on collision. Emily has been confined to a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy since she was eight years old. My aunt Sue and her worthless husband, Tom, are also living here in the lap of luxury afforded us by our father’s vast money-laundering empire.
I have to give my father credit for recognizing that I have no ambition to follow in his footsteps. Why bother when I could never match the lifestyle I already have by doing nothing? Nonetheless, I hate my father for his good judgment concerning my character in putting me under Emily’s thumb.
It’s been a living hell waiting on Emily hand and foot for the past ten years. The only salvation is I am to inherit everything when Emily croaks. Unfortunately, Emily has been writing large checks to the “Save the Polar Bears” foundation, which has been severely depleting the funds that would eventually be mine.
The doctors have said repeatedly that Emily would probably not live more than a few more years, but what if they’re wrong? I remember an old Hitchcock show where the hot babe marries a filthy rich geezer who was also supposed to die in a short time. Each year on the anniversary of their marriage, the geezer rolled a pearl across this long table to his wife, and after many years, she had a necklace of pearls. Since the old geezer wouldn’t die, the young wife and her lover, who had been waiting in the wings all those years, decided to eliminate the old reprobate. And so I have come to the same inevitable conclusion as the gold digger in Hitchcock’s episode: I must kill my sister, Emily. Tonight is the night I’ve been waiting for so long.
She has treated the three of us like dirt from the start, and I don’t think she cares if there is anything left for us once she’s gone. Sue and her worthless husband probably assume they will continue the same lifestyle when Emily is worm bait, but I assure you, this will not be the case.
I can’t wait for the magic hour. It will be the most fun I’ve had in ages to see the surprise on her twisted face when the wheelchair goes crashing down the long spiral staircase. I can almost hear her bones crunching on the beautiful mahogany treads now. Hopefully, there will be some blood. I can’t wait to replace that horrid green carpet.
I spent the day doing crosswords and Sudoku until the time came. Tom and Sue were at the dinner table, and it was time for me to bring Emily down in the elevator, which had been added when Emily was confined to the wheelchair.
She was waiting in her room with her usual overbearing manner and her ugly blue robe. Her hair was askew, and a bit of drool glistened at the corner o
f her mouth. Without ceremony, I guided her wheelchair toward the elevator, which was conveniently located at the top of the spiral staircase.
A faint scent of body odor hung in the air as we approached the elevator—and the stairs. And just like clockwork, she started talking about the polar bears and their horrible plight. The icecaps were melting, and they were having trouble swimming to their food supply. This was like chalk on a blackboard to my fragile senses. I could bear it no longer. I pretended to trip and with all my might thrust out my arms, and the wheelchair went plummeting down the stairs. About halfway down, Emily’s head conveniently careened off one of the treads, and blood splattered upon the wall and left a trail all the way to the foyer floor.
I lay there prostrate on the floor writhing in mock distress and pounding my fist into the rich mahogany floor. I was sobbing with enormous conviction as Tom and Sue appeared in a run.
“My slippers slipped out from under me when I reached the elevator and she went over!” I screamed.
Tom and Sue were standing below, visibly shaken by the sight of Emily’s bloody corpse. Her vacant eyes stared up at me at the top of the stairs. Her front teeth were crushed in, which made her look even more hideous than usual.
“What have I done?” I said leaning against the banister. I masterfully hid a smile that I couldn’t quite control in my sleeve and continued to snivel violently.
Tom ran to the phone and called 911. Sue slumped to the floor and continued to weep with conviction until the police arrived.
After what I thought was an academy-award-winning performance, all concerned considered it a terrible, unfortunate accident. The police were undoubtedly fooled by my performance, but even though silent throughout the investigation, Tom and Sue didn’t seem as convinced I had slipped.
Emily’s body was hauled away like a side of beef on a stretcher. The term “meat wagon” crossed my mind as I saw the ambulance pull away.
