It was pretty foul, for sure, just not in the way that they were imagining.
It was hard to get a line on what their cute sergeant McLaughlin was imagining, though. He’d personally seen me hauled out of the still-smoldering embers of the mortuary, screaming bloody murder and thrashing like I was at a particularly good punk show. He’d been part of the team that discovered the pile of bloody clothes in my hamper; the mangled, glinting stash of diamond jewelry on the bathroom counter; the gore-infused chainsaw out back that I’d probably never have been able to get completely clean anyway.
He was aware of all of that, but he kept looking at me through those sweet blue eyes like Heaven itself was his corrective lenses.
It was kind of disturbing to me, and I’m really not the type that gets easily riled.
The worst part, though, was that even if he believed I was innocent, I was going to have to explain myself anyway.
*
I don’t like explaining myself, or any of my choices, and that’s fine. They haven’t been bad choices. I mean, all things considered.
I’ve lived my whole life in Duyvil Kill, New York, a little town upstate on the Hudson. It sounds like a creepy place, but it’s not. We have cruelty-free coffee and jazz combos at the local bistro just like you. Sure, “Duyvil” comes from the Dutch word for “Devil”, but “Kill” comes from the Dutch word that translates to mean “a body of water.”
The Hudson River, which is the southernmost fjord in the world and quite rapid at the juncture where my town was founded, gave Duyvil Kill its name… not thanks to the supernatural, but in fact to the supremely natural.
Until its main house/mortuary burned to the ground this evening, I’d been an employee at the Hope Cemetery, a small but dedicated operation on expansive grounds overlooking the Hudson. I dress and style myself in a manner that I suppose could be called “adult goth”—stylish but not ostentatious black clothes, discreet piercings, a few well-done tattoos. I’m a little different from the rest of the townsfolk, to be sure, but I make no effort to be markedly so. I’ve just been fascinated with death since I was old enough to understand the concept, and I’ve spent the rest of my life getting really, really good at dealing with it.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to work that into my story though… it didn’t bode well for keeping murder charges away from me.
Maybe I could plead negligence? Get manslaughter?
One look of the scant, charred, hacked-up remains of Mrs. Hope would likely end that effort. To say nothing of what I’d done to her son, Norm.
Poor Norm. He’d been the one hit hardest by all this. Life had always dumped on him, but this was ridiculous. It hadn’t been his fault that he or his mother had met such an excruciating end.
Alright, it kind of HAD been.
And I didn’t want to explain ANY of that.
*
Sgt. McLaughlin taps his pen on his notepad but doesn’t take his creepy eyes off me. OK fine, he’s not really creepy. He’s actually pretty damn cute. I’m just creeped out by this whole situation. I stink like smoke, even in the freshly-pressed prison jumpsuit they gave me when all of my half-incinerated clothes needed to be entered into evidence. My exposed skin is covered in balm that’s not making my freshly-crisped flesh feel any more comfortable, my hair is singed, and my hands were black with soot and bone-char before the booking officer even got the ink near them.
My mugshot must make me look like Edward Scissorhands if he’d been hit by an IED.
The elephant in the room is the stench. This too does not seem to offend cute Sgt. McLaughlin’s sensibilities. Though the cops allowed me to wash up in one of the better bathrooms at their station, I’m all too aware of the aroma. In the tiny interrogation room, it feels like a confession all its own.
I want more smoke in my lungs; other smoke, better tasting smoke. I double down on my incendiary adventures of the evening.
“Can I have a cigarette?” I ask McLaughlin. I speak softly, as the evening’s screaming has imbued me with raspiness.
He replies less softly, but sweetly.
“You’re too pretty to smoke.”
He keeps staring.
Maybe I blush as I break his gaze and demurely attempt to tuck a strand of my horribly-burned hair behind one raw, blackened ear. I can’t tell. My face feels hot anyway, even hours now after the flames were extinguished. It’s like the heat stuck itself to me.
Is this what hell is like?
No. Of course it gets worse. I need to stay aware of how much worse this can get.
“So...” I ask cautiously. “Where’s the bad cop, then? Don’t you need two to play this game for interrogations?”
McLaughlin shrugs, a little twitch of his broad, uniformed shoulders. His creepy/not-creepy blue eyes smile.
“I think you might make him cry.”
I laugh—a single, barking rasp. “So what do you think I’ll do to you?”
“Let’s find out,” he says, almost charmingly. Then, seriousness intervenes.
“How about you start by telling me what happened.”
The way he says it insinuates that my acknowledging of his innate sweetness, his odd adorability, will somehow transpose itself into paying for my crimes, if only I can get him on my side.
I don’t want him on my side. I want to be punished for what I did. Not too punished. But there’s no way I can get away with this.
But it’s true… he doesn’t even know what really happened, outside the last official report. And what he saw earlier tonight… it wasn’t the whole story. Not by a long shot.
There’s so much that I should—and shouldn’t—say. The worst part is, I have no idea which is which. I should ask for a lawyer. But that’d look more suspicious than the fact that I still have snippets of Norm’s skin under my fingernails.
McLaughlin, sensing my inner conflict, offers me an entry point.
“Let’s start at the beginning. How did you know Mrs. Hope?”
Nowhere near the beginning I’d thought to start at. He’s trying to give me enough rope to hang myself, for certain. My stomach lurches. It must have been visible on my red, raw face.
“Are you going to be sick?” McLaughlin asks, with a genuinely kind-sounding air of worry.
I catch myself. I breathe—it tastes good to do so, even the stale, recycled interrogation room air. My brachioles suck up every bit of available oxygen like half-drowned refugees reaching the shore.
“No. I’m ok. Mrs. Hope is the mother of Norm, my former employer. I just learned of her existence last week.”
Although there’s a tape recorder going too, McLaughlin jots down notes with thorough fervor, his blue eyes gleaming as he finally makes the progress he’s been waiting for. I’m impressed that those bright eyes only dim a fraction when they hone in to scrutinize me as I inform him of HOW Mrs. Hope and I had become acquainted.
“I was compelled to chop her corpse into tiny pieces. That might make anyone feel a little sick.”
*
For the purpose of numbers and plotting things that most people don’t want to consider, the Environmental Protection Agency values a human life at nine million dollars. The Food and Drug Administration’s assessment is a little less, putting a $7.5 million price tag on your existence. The Department of Transportation is a full third less than the E.P.A., calling your whole damn spin around this mortal coil worth 6 million dollars.
To box it all up at the end, neatly, might only cost a few hundred bucks. Your dead body itself, in some areas, might not even be considered as a former human at all.
That’s just how it goes, right? In some states you’re a body, in some states, you’re medical waste.
I don’t think that the knowledge of all this makes me inherently sick, or weird, or gloomy. The human interest in the funerary process is thousands of years old… look at some of the best exhibits in the art museum. Mummies! Sarcophagi! Funeral trinkets and statues and coins and beads and jewelry, all made just to be in
terred in a tomb! You walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, easily the finest museum in New York City, and right there, right on the first floor, there’s this entire wing displaying a whole culture’s dedication to death.
When I applied to be the apprentice at Hope Cemetery, I’d mentioned this mindset of mine. I’d even started spouting off stats that I’d learned at my favorite cemetery in the city—Woodlawn, up in the Bronx. I liked it there so much that sometimes on summery days, I’d take the train down and spend hours strolling amidst the stunning stonework and masterful monuments.
I’d told Norm all about how I loved the assiduously-carved angels, the mosaic-domed mausoleums, the mini-Parthenons, the elegantly-etched gravestones. The anchors, torches, skulls, columns, books of life, shrouds, clasped hands, hourglasses, ankhs, roses, Masonic symbols, and weeping willows set in stone, all telling secret stories about those they guarded.
I explained that I knew the stats—in 1900, there’d only been twenty crematories in the United States. Now, there were 1,300. By 2025, 52% of Americans would desire to be cremated after death.
I extolled how I loved that those cremains could be pressed into records, or diamonds, or shotgun shells in tribute. How it was so beautiful that a former corporeal form could be blown into glass, or made into ecological bags that grew trees when planted, or even loaded into fireworks.
I even got cultural, though god knows it wouldn’t have mattered in Duyvil Kill. I mentioned about how Aghori sadhus in India were known to wear human bones and worship in haunted houses, and how they’d even go as far as to wear human cremains on their faces, since one of their core tenets involved showing how all opposites—like life and death—ultimately could be illusory.
I left out the part about how some of those sadhus lived in charnel grounds. I didn’t want to seem too overeager. I’m an atheist, anyway, and an apathetic one at that. I don’t care what god you believe in, I see the same damn results at the end.
It had worked perfectly. Norm clearly didn’t share my passion for the deeper details of death. This was a job to him. Like it or not, my aptitude and enthusiasm for the after-death process had been the reason he hired me.
When he’d given me the job, which came with the attendant perk of my own small cabin nestled in the tree line behind the main house/mortuary, Norm hadn’t mentioned his mother. He’d drunkenly implied many times that he’d been roped into the “family business”, that he didn’t really have a passion for funerary rituals despite his job-accrued knowledge thereof, and that he was glad someone like me was there to really be intrigued and useful for these sorts of things.
Norm had taught me all about the technical side of death. I’d learned everything about the professional mortuary process, embalming, cremation, burial, and all of the attendant emotional elements that had to be dealt with around these matters from him. Unlike me, Norm was a bit gloomy by disposition, but it seemed to be due more to his lack of a life than the lacks of lives with whom he dealt professionally.
He constantly self-medicated with Duyvil’s Sting pilsner, of which he’d scored a lifetime supply after burying one of the chief brewer’s elderly aunts, free of charge. It wasn’t like anyone would complain, after all, if he skulled a couple of brews as we went about the mortuary’s daily duties. He was always competent, lucid enough, and sometimes even chatty.
But he had never mentioned his mom, Maggie. It wasn’t until things went really wrong that I even knew she existed.
The only evidence there’d been someone living in the barn made me simply consider that it was critters of some sort or another. A bitchy, oddly overweight Chihuahua, Pancho, and a few stray cats lurked around the boarded-up barn, which Norm told me was condemned. He told me to keep away from it, for safety. That was fine with me. It seemed to be portly Pancho’s personal domain, and though I love dogs, I can’t abide those oversized rats. Even someone obsessed with the eerie can only take so much weirdness.
Pancho was generally tended to by Norm, but really, Norm could barely tend to himself. Living in the mortuary’s main building, his life was inescapable in his work and his home, and more often than, not the efforts at maintaining the former made the latter get neglected. We had a maid who kept the mortuary’s main rooms tidy and appropriately somber-looking, but the bulk of her work seemed to be cleaning Norm’s sty of a second-floor apartment. She’d haul down trashbags full of bottles at an alarming rate, and I’m not sure if it was professionalism or shame that precluded Norm from ever inviting me up there.
Anyway, the man did good work for his customers, he was a thorough and thoughtful teacher to me, and he’d tried to do right by his mom.
The worst part there, though, was his idea of what was best.
It wasn’t until a few days after her death that I finally got the whole story on Maggie. Why she’d been living in the barn. Why I hadn’t known about it. Norm was glassy-eyed and clutching his umpteenth Duyvil’s Sting local pilsner like it was the elixir of life. For him, it mostly was, even before his mother had met her untimely… well, perhaps VERY timely… end.
We’d been cleaning out the barn—his mother Maggie’s impromptu home for the past three years—when I’d asked about the ski trophies. There were so many of them. Medals too, and photographs. Plaques written in German and French and Italian, accolades from newspapers in more languages still.
“It was her life, the mountain.” Norm said wistfully, holding a slim old ski pole like he could use it to bestow a knighthood on someone.
Maggie had bought the property because she could not conquer death, and thus became it… or at least, forced her son to. She’d suffered a terrible injury one day last century during a critical Olympic trial, and had self-relegated to obscurity in the barn, surrounded by her ski trophies and soap operas and snacks. Norm said it had been her love of the mountain that had been her undoing.
Like death, when she realized couldn’t conquer it, Maggie Hope became the mountain. Give or take a few pounds, her regular human skeleton was surrounded by well over a quarter ton of excess fat and flesh.
Give or take.
We’ll get to that.
*
The first time the cops had dropped donuts and arrived at the call, it appeared an almost monotonously macabre scenario. Maggie was dead, all six hundred-odd pounds of her, face down on the floor in the barn—the only building on the property with no stairs to climb, and the only door big enough to wheel her through. It was as though she’d planned to die there, if only to be extricated with as much ease as possible. What a terrible tomb.
Though I never saw her in (what passed for) action, there was no way the former ski champion Maggie was completing more physical effort than lifting more food into her face. Maggie Hope could barely climb her way upright onto her own two feet.
That night, Norm had been at the bar drinking, so I’d signed off on the property search. That meant I’d been there when they cracked open the barn doors, when the nigh-Biblical plague of flies cascaded out.
Maggie’s life-alert bracelet had been triggered after she hadn’t responded to an automated check-in. It appeared that sometime during the previous evening, she had made a somnambulant stroll, tripped on something, and never recovered. A half-eaten ice cream bar had melted across much of the area around her head, like a gunshot wound appears in movie murders.
It wasn’t until they flipped the corpse—a feat which took three full-sized, gasping men—that they discovered Pancho embedded in Maggie’s midsection. He’d been squashed in between two prodigious fat rolls when the sleepwalking Maggie had fallen and been knocked out permanently, but worse, he hadn’t died immediately.
In fact, that fat little dog-rat had done a pretty fair job of eating his way through a sizeable portion of Maggie’s buttery-yellow belly fat, and straight into her intestines. The barky, bulky little bastard had almost chewed himself free of his portly prison, but in the end, his own immobility (and ghastly final meal) had smothered him.
The
sight, sound, smell of this discovery produced some of the more unique sounds I’d ever heard any man, let alone the brave and skilled officers of Duyvil Kill, exhort.
The worst part is, it wasn’t nearly the worst.
*
“Wow,” McLaughlin says, his blue eyes leaping wider, like someone had turned up gas flames on an internal stove of his. “I’d heard it was bad but… damn.”
“It’s more sad than bad, I think,” I said. “I mean, she was in bad health, she filled herself with bad things, she died badly, but she wasn’t a bad person.”
“That somehow also works for the good,” McLaughlin astutely notes. “People can do good things, have good intents, and still not ultimately end up being very good humans. Maybe…maybe that’s what happened with Norm?”
“Maybe. But your metaphor would imply that Norm also died well,” I intoned. “That… didn’t happen.”
McLaughlin nods seriously. “So tell me about it.” He scrutinizes me a bit, almost as if the request is a dare. A dare my entire innocence rests on.
“Well, my right to remain silent isn’t going to help me any, given what you’ve seen tonight,” I said. “I might as well try to convince you I didn’t murder my boss and torch the entire mortuary, right?” I attempt a smile. My burned lips send slivers of pain into my face as they stretch and quickly retract.
“So Maggie Hope was dead... badly dead… so dead, the response team is going to be telling stories about it for years from now. But you didn’t kill her, and neither did Norm, and we confirmed that over a week ago,” McLaughlin recounts. He pauses, looking genuinely confused.
“So that… doesn’t explain the chainsaw, though.”
*
The first time I saw a doublewide coffin, I legitimately thought it was romantic.
We keep a small showroom as part of our all-inclusive end-of-life service dealings (as Norm used to joke, “One-stop shopping for those who are dropping.”) We had a few of the usual models—cheap, fancy, one sadly child-sized one. But one day, the doublewide came in, and my first question was if it was for one of those old couples who have loved and lived with each other so long that they end up knocking off together, what Vonnegut had called a “duprass.”
Never Fear - The Tarot: Do You Really Want To Know? Page 30