Dead Scared

by Ivan Blake

  “My activator is designed to eliminate the inconsistent capacity of chiropractors to handle the duration and magnitude of the load required to target the first and second vertebrae. And for posterity I say again, none of my colleagues has the courage to perform this most delicate of spinal manipulations, and were it not for my activator, I would not attempt a manipulation in this region either. Hence the importance of what I’m trying to do here.” Meath stopped speaking for a moment while he concentrated on a few final adjustments. “Now that’s done.”

  He inspected each fitting one more time, and then lifted out of the nest of wires what appeared to be a kitchen timer. He set the timer and laid it in Bent’s lap.

  “I shall now administer a high-velocity, short-lever thrust. The low-amplitude manipulation has the physiological effect of signalling neural discharge from paraspinal muscle tissues. I have set my activator to the next increment of duration and amplitude in order to measure the degree of muscle spindles activation which can be achieved with my device.”

  He stopped the tape recorder and waited as the timer ticked down. After several seconds, the cadaver’s head suddenly twisted to the left, then the neck cracked, and the whole body shuddered.

  “Well, the activator worked flawlessly, and the crack of the spine was loud enough to wake my goats. Now I shall remove the head to determine the extent of the realignment and the impact on the vertebral arteries. I shall transect the face from forehead to chin, and then peel the skin to the left and right before repositioning the corpse for an examination of the cervical section of the neck.”

  He stopped the tape recorder again and unfastened the metal strips and wires from the skull and shoulders of Mr. Bent. When the corpse was freed, Meath went to the workbench, selected a saw from the pegboard, and carried it back to the cadaver. He took a marker from his lab coat pocket, drew a black line at the base of the neck, positioned the saw on the line, and began to cut.

  If there’d been a single drop of blood, Chris would have fainted dead away. There wasn’t, and after several minutes, during which the goatman had to use a scalpel several times to cut away troublesome tendons, the head came off in the goatman’s hands. He bundled an old towel on the heavy wooden table, nestled the head in it face up, and turned the tape machine on again.

  “I have removed the head, and now I shall transect the face and expose the vertebral arteries.” Silence ensued as he first sliced the face, then turned the head and peeled the flesh from the neck up toward the scalp. He bent down to examine the exposed arteries.

  “Damn, damn, damn!”

  Meath stopped the machine and paced back and forth for a moment, waving his arms in the air. Finally collecting himself, he turned the machine on.

  “There is once again evidence of subarachnoid hemorrhage. The tear is small and may be due in part to the unusual thickness of Bent’s neck. I cannot claim success, however, until I have at least one clean manipulation and one set of parameters to employ as my baseline for further refinements of my device. I shall require yet another specimen.”

  He turned the tape recorder off. “You have wasted my time, Mr. Bent.” He paced about furiously. At last he sighed. “Ah well, you’ll make good goat meal, so tonight will not be a complete loss.”

  Goat meal? Meath turns dead bodies into goat meal? The idea was just too horrible. Then again, goats will eat anything. Near Chris’s feet was a broken sack of feed. He picked up a handful of the spilled feed and shoved it into his pocket. He’d have to check the stuff out.

  Meath bellowed. “Come out here and help me!”

  Chris heard a door open, then slam, and the old lady appeared. “So?” she asked.

  “Help me get him onto the table.”

  “That’s a no then.” She shook her head and said, “Two failures this week. When are you going to stop?” From the look on her face, Meath’s wife knew immediately she’d made a mistake. Even through the peephole, Chris could tell Meath was livid.

  “When I get it right,” he screamed. “And don’t you ever…ever…question my work! Never! Do I make myself clear? Now help me shift him!”

  Meath moved the head, the towel, and the cleaver from the butcher-block table to the floor, and reattached the canvas sling to the pulley system. He rotated the barber chair to face the table, and pulled on the rope. Once the headless corpse cleared the chair, his wife pushed it with the shovel until it dangled above the table. Meath then lowered it to the table where it draped over the sides like a walrus balanced on a bar stool.

  “I’m going,” the old lady grumbled and started for the barn door. “Are you grinding him or burning him?”

  “Grinding.”

  “Good, because when you burn them, the smell stays in the house for days. I’ve asked you a hundred times to move your burn barrel out of the yard.”

  “And I’ve told you a hundred times, I can’t risk animals carrying off any bones.”

  The old lady slammed the barn door as she left.

  “I swear, one day soon…” Meath said. He picked up the cleaver from the floor, lifted it high, and with one blow, hacked off Arthur Bent’s right leg.

  Chris gasped at the suddenness of the act.

  The goatman paused, looked toward the boarded-up window, and smiled.

  Chris took off running through the grass, down to the tracks, and home.

  He only stopped running when he emerged from the orchard at the side of the Willard house. There, he dropped onto the back steps to catch his breath. He dared not go into the house, not yet, not panting like a maniac. He’d wake everyone. Instead, sitting in the dark, trying to still his heart, he listened for sounds of pursuit. Nothing. Then...

  * * * *

  “Chris?”

  “Gillian? What are you doing out here.”

  “Waiting for you.” She approached from the corner of the house.

  “You scared me!” Chris got up, grabbed her by the hand, and hurried her to the old Adirondack chairs in the orchard. She went without protest.

  “I was scared too,” she said when they got to the chairs. “I was out for a walk after helping Mom all evening, when I heard someone running along the tracks. I didn’t know who.”

  Chris was trembling.

  “Are you all right? What happened?”

  “You won’t believe what I just saw.” He could hardly believe it himself. “I...I followed Meath home after I saw him carrying a body along the tracks. And then I saw him do some kind of experiment on the body, and then he cut it into pieces.”

  “What?”

  Chris started again, this time in greater detail, and when he finished, Gillian was speechless.

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “I...I believe you. It’s just so horrible!”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “And Meath couldn’t have been cutting up something else, like maybe a goat?”

  “No, I heard every word. He called him Arthur Bent.”

  “I know the name, from over at Perkin’s Pond. This is awful! You have to tell the police, you have to.”

  “I know, and I will, first thing in the morning. But tonight...I don’t know whether he saw me and I…I’m sort of scared. You know he can get in this house. He put chiropractor magazines in my room earlier this evening while I was out.”

  “No way. We would have seen him.”

  “What about the cellar door on the other side of the house? Could he get from the cellar up to the attic somehow?”

  “Well, there is a ladder from the cellar into the old summer kitchen.”

  “Where’s the summer kitchen?”

  “It’s in a part of the house we closed off years ago so we wouldn’t have to heat it.”

  “Is there any way to get from the summer kitchen up into the attic?”

  She thought for a moment and then said softly, “There might be.”

  “We have to bar the cellar door.”

  “I haven’t been in the cellar for years. It’s w
here the accident happened.”

  “To your grandfather?”

  “And to my dad.”

  “Then you can’t go down there, Gillian. Let me do it.”

  “No, I’ll take care of it.”

  “Gillian,” Chris asked, “why are you being so nice to me?”

  “Because we’re friends.”

  They got up from the damp chairs and stood for a moment in silence. Then Gillian leaned forward, kissed Chris on the cheek, and slipped away into the dark.

  * * * *

  “Because we’re friends,” she’d said. What she’d really wanted to say was, “Because you’re so incredibly beautiful, and because you’re lonely, and you’re hurting, and I know too well what that’s like.”

  Going down into the cellar after all this time was going to take every ounce of courage. She hadn’t set foot in the cellar since the accident.

  The ghastly scene remained as vivid today as if it had happened yesterday: the rumble like thunder of the falling barrels; the unearthly cries; Grandfather pinned against the cellar wall; Father sprawled on the cellar floor, broken, blood trickling from his mouth; kneeling at Father’s side, cradling his head in her arms, wiping blood from his chin; hearing his last words, “Look after your mother, my precious child.”

  What a pointless way to die, under empty barrels in a dirt cellar! And now her family had to grub for every penny just to survive; equally meaningless. Of course, Gillian would do as her father had asked; she’d adored him, and loved her mother every bit as much; but Gillian was going to do something meaningful with her own life—starting with her attempt to help Chris….

  Chapter Six

  Sunday, November 17

  “Christopher!” his mother called from the kitchen.

  “What?” It had taken hours to fall asleep after Mallory’s performance and the horrors he’d witnessed in Meath’s barn. He was still in a fog.

  “We’re having French Toast. Would you like some?”

  “Maybe. I’ll be down in a while.”

  The bacon smelled good, and he was starved after the paltry dinner he’d had at the Dahlmans. The price of a family breakfast, however, would be unending questions about his evening with Mallory. There’d been an upbeat note in his mother’s voice just then that he hadn’t heard for months. She must, on some level, have decided Mallory’s dinner invitation marked a turning point in the fortunes of the Chandler family in Bemishstock. Chris had also hoped that might be the case, but after the bizarre evening, he doubted it.

  He shuddered at the memory of Arthur Bent’s butchered corpse. And he felt sick at the thought that Meath had been up here in his own room. To drop off magazines? Really? To set Chris up more like. To frame him somehow for Meath’s own crimes. Maybe that was it. Meath must have realized the police would believe anything he told them about the Chandler boy so he’d decided to plant evidence on Chris he could use later somehow.

  Gillian was right; he had to tell the police before Meath had a chance to spread his lies. That said, why the hell would they ever take Chris seriously? So he’d go to them and say, ‘The goatman who has lived here for twenty years, and makes cheese, and works part-time at the funeral home, he’s stealing corpses, and experimenting on them, and then chopping them up for goat feed.’ And the cops would reply, ‘Oh, right, sure, we’ll investigate right away. And oh, by the way, do you have any proof?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, I’ve been sneaking around Meath’s place and looking in his window at night, and...and he also said we’re both Übermenschen...and oh, he’s been coming into my bedroom while I’m sleeping and giving me magazines... and he made me ride in the back of his truck with a goat.’ Oh yeah, they were sure to be convinced. Crap!

  * * * *

  When the call came in from old lady Holcomb about some kid terrorizing her during the night, Chief Gabe Boucher was ecstatic. It had to be the Chandler kid, he just knew it. And then, at the crime scene, they’d found hard evidence! Oh yes, this time he’d nail the bastard for sure.

  They’d finished up at the scene of the incident and were on their way to Willard Farm. The patrol car turned into the Lane. “Pull round back of the house, so the car’s handy if the kid tries to run,” Boucher said to his deputy.

  He’d been hoping for an opportunity to nail the Chandler kid ever since the little prick had written the letter about Father David. The letter had spooked the Chief’s friends, and they expected Gabe to sort things out. That’s what he did; he sorted things out for his friends.

  It wasn’t like Gabe and his friends had anything to hide, not really. He had his problem with painkillers under control at last. He’d almost paid off his debts, thanks to several generous albeit reluctant contributors in the Bemishstock business community. And so what if he belonged to a small circle of gentlemen who occasionally engaged in some very private and intimate personal activity? It meant nothing. They weren’t fags or anything. Hell, they were veterans and hunters and members of the fucking Legion. Some were married, and one was even a man of the cloth. They were simply respectable men who enjoyed each other’s intimate companionship from time to time, just looking for release from the pressures of their professional lives. Maybe, if most of the women in Bemishstock hadn’t been such stuck-up dogs, they wouldn’t have had to turn to each other; but not everyone would understand if their companionship became known. So, when the kid wrote his goddamned letter about Father David ‘and his circle,’ they’d all been freaked.

  It had taken some time before he’d been able to reassure his friends the letter was a hoax, nothing more than a vicious prank. Turned out the Chandler kid knew nothing at all about Father David’s private life. Chandler even denied he’d written the letter, but the stunt had cost the Chief and his friends some sleepless nights, and they wanted payback. Even if the Chandler boy hadn’t actually written the letter, then it sure as hell had been somebody close to him, so hammering the kid would have the same deterrent effect anyway.

  “Now listen,” the Chief said to Ricky Pike, “when we see the Chandler kid, we get him talking. He’s bound to make things easy for us if we let him rattle on. The kid always mouths off when he feels cornered, so he’s bound to let something slip. He’s too stupid to keep quiet, even for his own good. All right? Let’s go get the bastard.”

  * * * *

  Chris heard the hammering on the back door, muffled voices, some shouting, and then his father calling loudly, “Christopher, Christopher, come down here.”

  “In a minute.”

  “No, get down here now!”

  What the...? He looked out the window and saw a police car parked on the grass by their back door. Nobody drove around to the back of the house because of the lawn. So why had the police? They must be mad about something. “Oh crap! What now?”

  He jumped out of bed, pulled on last night’s clothes, then dropped down through the hatch onto the second floor landing and ran into the bathroom to rinse his hands and face. He squeezed past his brother and sister sitting at the top of the stairs and ran down to the kitchen.

  Two police officers stood just inside the back door: Chief Boucher and Deputy Ricky Pike. Chris knew them both; Boucher was a nasty son-of-a-bitch, and Ricky, as dumb as a post. Chris’s father was red-faced and his mother tearful.

  “Is this about Dr. Meath?” blurted Chris.

  “What? No,” Chief Boucher said, “What about Dr. Meath?”

  Then this wasn’t the time. “Nothing.”

  “Son,” his dad said, “there’s been a complaint made by Mrs. Holcomb, you know the lady who lives up the hill?”

  Christopher was confused. “Mrs. Holcomb? A complaint? Against me?”

  “No,” Chief Boucher said.

  “Not yet,” added Deputy Pike with the biggest, dumbest grin.

  Chris saw Chief Boucher glance disapprovingly at Pike like he wanted to shut him up, like he didn’t want his deputy giving anything away, not yet anyhow.

  “What’s happened?” Chris asked.


  “Someone was up to her house last night, killed one of her cats, and threw paint all over the door. Stuff like that,” the Chief said.

  “And took a dump in her garden,” added Ricky, giggling.

  “That’s terrible,” Chris’s mother said.

  Boucher nodded. “Yes it is.”

  “She’s had trouble before,” Chris said.

  “And how would you know that?” Boucher asked with a wry smile.

  “I had tea with her on Friday.”

  “So you know Mrs. Holcomb.”

  “Yes, she’s driven me home from school a couple of times.”

  “Jeez, I’d like to get my hands on that Buick of hers,” Ricky said.

  “And we’ve talked. She’s nice.”

  “Then why would you do such terrible things to her?” asked Boucher.

  “Me?”

  “Yes you.”

  “I...I would never—”

  “Explain to us then how your wallet got on her porch,” the Chief said with a malicious smile. Gotcha, Kid, it seemed to say!

  “My wallet?” Chris instinctively felt his back pockets. Not there.

  “Where were you last night?” Time to gaff this fish.

  “I went to dinner at the Dahlmans.”

  “What time did you get home?”

  “I don’t know...maybe nine, nine-thirty?”