The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

  “So you want to see my posse?”

  In a large pen by the barn were six coyotes. Two were standing on their doghouses; the other four were jumping up against the wire mesh of the gate. All were yipping and yelping, not at Bobby but at Korak.

  The big man entered the pen, closing the gate behind him. Then he flopped down on the cement. “They wrestled,” Bobby told Woody later. “They leapt on him and he threw them off. These were big animals, sixty, seventy pounds. I thought they’d eat him, but he laughed and they were laughing, sort of. Like they were making friendly yelps. But they weren’t gentle. Korak got his face scratched and his ear was bitten bad enough to bleed.”

  After five minutes of moderate violence, Korak got to his feet. “You want to try it?” He laughed his booming laugh.

  “Not today, thanks. I’m not dressed for it.”

  Korak opened the gate, and a grayish brown coyote galloped toward Bobby, leapt up, planted its forepaws on his chest, and snatched his necktie in its jaws. The fur on the coyote’s neck was snow white. Bobby hoped he wouldn’t have to shoot it.

  “That’s Svetlana; she’s the most civilized. She wants to take you for a walk. Just give her a cuff on the ear and she’ll get down. Don’t be too gentle or she’ll think you’re a wuss.”

  Bobby clubbed Svetlana’s head with his open hand. She seemed to like it, but at least she jumped down. Bobby’s hundred-dollar silk tie was a rag. The coyote jumped at Korak, and he cuffed her away. She lay down at his feet.

  “So where did you get your posse? eBay?”

  Korak rubbed his hand across his scalp. “It’s taken about five years. I’ve been doing a coyote study with some guys from the Bureau of Natural Resources. First we trapped a dozen coyotes and radio-collared the females. They come into heat once a year in January or February. Gestation’s nine weeks. So we tried to pinpoint when they bedded down. The pups are pretty helpless. Their eyes don’t open for two weeks, and they’re nursed for three. If you’re going to bond with them, it’s got to be during that time. We were lucky. We found a litter near Woodstock—ten pups—but it took some work to get them. The mother had holed up under a barn. We took the six feistiest. Then I sat with them, hand-fed them, howled with them, sniffed them, wrestled with them—we became a pack. My only mistake was to let them into the house. Just because we’re pals didn’t mean they were tame. They tore the shit out of the place—ripped down curtains, peed and shat on the floor, tore up furniture, all in the space of fifteen minutes. I thought my wife would kill me. So now we play outdoors and they play rough. I’ve got stitches in my shoulder, leg, left arm, but I bite right back. Nothing beats a mouthful of coyote fur. I’m not gentle; they’re not gentle. They respect me. I’m boss dog.”

  As Korak spoke, he put Svetlana back in the pen, and then he and Bobby walked to the farmhouse and entered the kitchen. He said his wife taught water resources in UConn’s Department of Natural Resources and the Environment.

  “She’s off slogging through the swamps today,” said Korak. “She’ll come back this afternoon covered with mud and ticks. I’ll have to hose her off outdoors.”

  “Sounds like a happy family.”

  Bobby accepted a cup of strong coffee and proceeded to tell Korak about Brewster’s coyote problem. They sat at a round butcher-block table. The sun streamed through the floral-patterned calico curtains over the sink.

  “My old man used to tell me stories about shape-shifting wolves in Serbia,” said Korak, “but he didn’t believe them, and I don’t, either. Somebody’s been fucking with your coyotes. A few times one of mine’s gotten loose. They rush around through the woods for a while, but they come back. Yours seem better trained. I guess you could do it if you took the time.”

  “Do you know people who raise them?”

  “Not really; I mean we don’t have a club. A guy over in Krumville, New York, raises them and he’s mentioned someone else north of Albany. But it takes a lot of work. Your coyotes sound pretty vicious. It makes me mad someone would do that to them.”

  Bobby decided he wouldn’t want Korak mad at him. “Could they be trained to be vicious?”

  “You can probably make any creature vicious, even rabbits, though it’d be hard to have them vicious and under your control at the same time. But I’ve read studies of dogs on drugs and you can go to YouTube and see videos of dogs on LSD—some asshole trying to give Fido a good time. The dogs respond like humans, except worse. The downers make them sleepy; the uppers make them jumpy. If these coyotes are on drugs it’s probably amphetamines. Coyotes are pretty timid, but eastern coyotes are the most aggressive, and you can pick the feisty ones out of the litter. I expect you could breed them to make them more aggressive. Then amphetamines would jack it up. Meth and coke also. Anyone doing that has got to be a pretty heartless fuck.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  “What’re your choices? You got shape-shifters or naturally aggressive coyotes or you got tamed coyotes that have been trained. Only the third makes sense.”

  • • •

  Hamilton Brantley’s crematorium was in Hope Valley off Skunk Hill Road bordering the Arcadia Management Area, fourteen thousand acres of forest. It was a large, one-story cinder-block and concrete building with a loading dock on the left side. Only a big chimney, surrounded by a mesh box, suggested the building’s purpose. The windows were glass bricks. No peeking, thought Woody. A sign over the front door said WASHINGTON COUNTY CREMATORIUM. Above it was a bullet camera. Before Woody could see if the door was unlocked, it opened and Brantley gave him a friendly wave.

  “Seymour called and gave me the heads-up,” said Brantley. “Welcome to my humble establishment.” He laughed and shook Woody’s hand. “Would you like a tour? I’m afraid there’s no viewing room like some crematoria, but that’s next on my list of improvements. Was there something in particular I can help you with?”

  Brantley led him into a small office with a large window looking into the crematory. On the wall was a flat-panel LCD monitor, quartered to show the views from four outdoor security cameras. Directly across from the window was the furnace, about the size of a Ford van with a stainless-steel front. A lift table with an open corrugated cardboard casket stood near it. Leaning into the casket was a balding middle-aged man doing something to a cadaver in a plastic body bag. Everything about him seemed gray: hair, T-shirt, pants, and skin. Woody imagined he had been dyed by the ashes of the dead, but he disliked frivolous thoughts and he pushed it aside.

  “That’s Larry,” said Brantley. “I’d be lost without him. He runs the whole thing practically single-handed.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I can’t say for sure—perhaps snipping out a pacemaker or removing rings or other jewelry. Pacemakers explode in the furnace and make a mess of things. So we have to be careful. But we’ve found customers with cell phones, iPods, car keys, all sorts of stuff. It all goes back to the family or we throw it out. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who wanted a pacemaker returned.”

  “Customers?”

  Brantley leaned back in his desk chair with his fingers knitted across his stomach. “Our little joke. Certainly, we treat our customers with utmost respect, but, as you yourself must know, every profession develops its own brand of humor that might not be in the best taste. For instance, Larry calls this the Burn Palace.”

  “So I heard,” said Woody. “You know the term slabman?”

  Brantley’s smile hardened a little. “An old-fashioned term, much like calling a policeman a pig. Mostly they worked in morgues. Nowadays they might be called terminal cosmeticians. But surely there’s a larger purpose to your visit.”

  Woody stood by the window, half looking at Brantley but also watching Larry. “I wondered if you knew Benjamin Clouston, who was murdered the other day. He was a pathologist’s assistant at the hospital.”

  Brantley looked thoughtful and then shook his head. “I can’t say I did, though I read about his murder of course. Absolute
ly horrible. We have little to do with the hospital except for pickups.”

  “Your customers?”

  “Exactly. Do you have any idea who killed him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I suppose it’s connected to these other events. Who could have imagined Brewster would be victimized by Satanists? People are terrified. I know several who have left town.”

  “More business for you, I guess.” Woody had meant no sarcasm, but he realized too late that his comment sounded sarcastic.

  Brantley’s smile disappeared. “We much prefer people living than dead. That’s one subject we don’t joke about. May I offer you a tour?”

  Leading Woody into the crematory, Brantley described filters, heat recovery ventilation, hot-hearth and multichamber air-controlled designs. Woody’s attention was more focused on the room itself, which was starkly functional, warm, and dusty. Is this dust, he thought, or ash? And if it’s ash, is it bits of Brantley’s “customers”? He noticed that the man searching through the body bag wasn’t wearing gloves.

  “The chamber, or retort, will accommodate a five-hundred-pound cadaver.” Brantley gave a little laugh. “Anything bigger will have to go in piecemeal. Temps range between sixteen and eighteen hundred degrees; that’s twelve hundred more than a pizza oven. Our customers take quite a bit longer than a pizza, however. It takes an hour to burn someone who’s a hundred and fifty pounds. What are you, one-eighty? I’d give you an hour and a quarter. Not bad for turning you into six pounds of ash and bone fragments.” Again there was the little laugh. “But come and meet Larry. If this is the Burn Palace, he must be the prince.”

  Larry turned at the mention of his name. There was no smile, no expression of any kind. Just blankness. His gray face was pocked with old acne scars. On his right forearm was a tattoo of a bat, or maybe an eagle. He offered his hand to Woody.

  Woody looked at the hand and thought how it had just been poking around in the corpse. He understood that Larry was offering him an unpleasant challenge. Glancing up, he saw that even Larry’s eyes were gray. All this took no more than a second. Woody shook the hand.

  “Why does it say ‘head’ at the top of the cardboard lid?” Woody hoped to insert a display of nonchalance between the handshake and what came next. He had an almost overpowering desire to wash his hands. “Does it matter how they go in?”

  “Of course it does. The chest area takes the longest to burn, so we’ve a special flame right above the heart. That’s almost romantic, don’t you think? Larry’ll be sliding this old fellow into the retort in a few minutes, and perhaps you’d care to watch. October’s the start of flu season, so we get an uptick in elderly customers. I’ve always thought they should say October’s the cruelest month, but then I’m partial to April.”

  Brantley handed Woody a stainless-steel pan two feet by about one foot. “Larry sweeps the ashes and bone fragments into this and then sorts through it for any metal he might have missed and for larger fragments that need extra breaking down before going into the cremulator.” He patted a cylindrical drum mounted on a metal cube with a drawer at the bottom. “This is basically no more than an oversized Cuisinart. The blades reduce the bits and pieces to ash in thirty seconds. We call them cremains. They can go into an urn, be put into jewelry—pendants, charm bracelets, key chains—shot into space, or scattered at sea. Whatever you prefer, though of course we’d like to sell you a nice urn. But let me show you the cooler.”

  Woody wished Brantley wasn’t so enthusiastic. On the other hand, he wondered about the cause of it. Maybe it was pride in his establishment; maybe it was tension. And if it was the latter, what was he tense about? “Does Larry ever wear gloves?”

  “Gloves? I’ve never thought of it.” Brantley gave a shout: “Larry, the detective wants to know if you ever wear gloves.”

  Larry was just closing the cardboard container. He looked at Woody and shrugged. Digger Brantley chuckled. “I guess he likes the hands-on approach.”

  “So what did Carl Krause do here?”

  “Janitorial work, mostly. Though he was a great help if anything broke down. I feel awful about his wife. And those poor children!”

  “Why’d he try to break into your place last night?”

  “My place? You mean the funeral home? He never did any such thing.”

  “The back door was broken. Seymour told me Carl broke it.”

  Brantley burst out laughing. “Seymour said you’d asked about Carl and that broken window. You’ve a wicked sense of humor, Detective.”

  The walk-in cooler was roughly twenty by twelve feet, with four-tier racks on either side and a ventilation system with three large noisy fans on the farther wall. The single light hung over the door. The metal floor was dusty; the green racks were pitted with rust. A case of Budweiser was tucked under the rack on the right. A dozen cardboard caskets rested on the racks. Waiting customers, Woody thought. He could see his breath.

  “Not very pretty, I’m afraid,” said Brantley, raising his voice over the noise of the fans, “but thoroughly functional, and nobody sees it but us. We provide services for about twenty funeral homes, and that means at least ten customers a day. More in flu season. It’s the same temperature as your regular meat locker or beer cooler. We can keep our customers here for a month or so, I expect. The bottoms of the cardboard caskets are fluid-resistant, but occasionally we have leakage. Most go into the furnace in a day or two.”

  Woody stood just inside the door; Brantley stood behind him. Woody found it impossible to avoid grim thoughts. He had taken care of his parents’ funerals, and both had been cremated. He imagined them in such cardboard coffins in such a cooler, waiting for such a fire. Leakage, he repeated to himself.

  Woody heard a noise behind him and turned. Brantley was shutting the door to the cooler. Kicking his foot into the opening, Woody blocked the door from clicking shut.

  Brantley pulled open the door and laughed. “Just my little joke,” he said.

  NINETEEN

  HER NAME WAS MOLLY GEIER, but she preferred to be called Vultura. She wasn’t exactly a Satanist, but a Generational Demonolator, meaning demonology ran in the family. Demonolators were Theistic Satanists in the same way Presbyterians or Evangelists were Protestants. She spoke in a sandpaper whisper, and even her gums were black. She scared the living shit out of acting chief Fred Bonaldo.

  Vultura knew this, and it warmed her heart.

  Bonaldo sat at his desk, flanked by Detectives Brendan Gazzola and Sarah Muller. They didn’t like Vultura much, either.

  Vultura was thirty and had been a Demonolator all her life. Although Satan stood at the center of her religion, as a Demonolator her prayers were directed to Leviathan, prince of pain, and Belial, angel of hostility. As a child, her family had practiced Demonolic holy day rites with altars for particular demons and the home decorated with charms. These days, she belonged to a coven in New Haven. She aspired to astral projection, was proficient in magic word squares, and she told Fred Bonaldo she could turn him into a toad.

  Bonaldo doubted this, or pretty much, but he didn’t plan to test it. Vultura’s very presence threw his belief system into jeopardy. Bonaldo was what might be called a generational Republican. He saw people in terms of party affiliations, with subtle gradations of liberal and conservative like the ticks on a thermometer, and he believed that everyone in South County could be measured by his simple method. What shook this faith was the realization that Vultura was off his chart. For crying out loud, she probably didn’t even vote. And if she had a party affiliation, Bonaldo didn’t want to know about it.

  Vultura’s black dress was slit up the thigh, and as she sat before Bonaldo and his detectives, she crossed one long leg over the other and it twitched, so Detective Sarah Muller thought, like the tail of an albino rat. Her eyes were so black that Detective Gazzola guessed she must be on drugs. Vultura described the nature of Leviathan, quoting from the Book of Job, and the three police officers leaned forward to hear.

&n
bsp; “His sneezes flash forth light,

  And his eyes are like

  The eyelids of the morning.

  Out of his mouth leap burning torches;

  Sparks of fire shoot forth.

  Out of his nostrils boil smoke

  As from a boiling pot.

  His breath kindles coals,

  A flame gushes forth from his mouth.

  In his neck lodges strength,

  And dismay leaps before him.”

  • • •

  Gazzola was unimpressed. He had little imagination, and Vultura didn’t fit into his worldview, which, in any case, was small. She was all smoke and mirrors, as far as he was concerned. “How’d a girl from New Haven end up at a kinky party on the island?” he asked.

  Vultura’s smile was barely a ripple. She described black-magic chatrooms, message boards, vampire websites, Satanist blogs, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Skype. Online indexes listed thousands of covens and related groups around the world and led Vultura to Demonolators in a dozen countries. They journaled, swapped profiles and pictures, studied calendars of Left-Hand Path events, where they met and cavorted. Inevitably, crossovers occurred into the cybergoth and rivethead subcultures, which she dismissed as imposture. But if any Sabbat, Esbat, Dark Gathering, or heavy metal concert were advertised within a three-hundred-mile radius of New Haven, Vultura knew about it.

  “Some I go to, some I don’t. It depends on the level of Bad.”

  By Bad, Bonaldo realized, she meant Good. It astonished him that satanic covens had websites, that videos of their diabolical rites were available on YouTube and that athames, flying brooms, cloaks, spells, spell supplies, voodoo dolls, and suchlike were available from online witch-supply stores. Fred Bonaldo had recently begun to use e-mail and found it nothing short of miraculous. He realized he had barely scratched the surface.