Norm gave me a look more serious than his glassy dark eyes usually entailed, then simply said, “No.”
I took it to mean something even more ponderous, but as it was part of my job, I really did want to know.
“Oh… was it something really bad? A murder-suicide? A death pact? I didn’t see anything on the news…”
“It’s not for any of that shit,” Norm exhorted. “It’s for one person. Just one, extremely large, single person.”
Later on, during the embalming and processing of the body—it had been a 350-lb. man who’d died of a massive heart attack—I marveled at the human form, how much it could take, how far you could push it past any reasonable point and still have it be viable. Well, for a while, anyway.
All my insights on this, when explained to Norm, were dismissed with grunts and requests for more instruments or aid. I’d had no idea how sensitive the subject was for him, and didn’t recognize it fully until Maggie’s massive form was being dealt with. Norm had a little bit of a beer belly, due to his Duyvil’s Sting habit and the usual wear of middle age, but other than that he was pretty average. His decent health also underscored the obviousness that his mother’s condition had been imposed due to effort, not genetics.
And people say I must hate myself to do what I do.
Anyway, the whole week after Mrs. Hope passed, Norm was beside himself. Not just drunk but angry, not just brusque but vehement. He stayed upstairs most all day, except to check in once or twice that I was properly tending to the only other body we had that week, an elderly man who’d been so frail I could easily move him through the mortuary all on my own.
Mrs. Hope’s gnawed, clawed, horrifying remains had been returned to Norm after the county medical examiner had confirmed the cause of death involved no foul play. As the county nor Hope Cemetery had any possible way of wedging her 600-minus-a-few-dog-chomped pounds into a morgue freezer, her body stayed beneath a sheet on a table in the coldest storeroom in the cellar. Technically, bodies are supposed to be stored at 45 degrees.
We couldn’t exactly do that, not to a whole room.
By the fourth day, the smell was so pungent, so pervasive, and so putrefying, I had to yell Norm downstairs.
He staggered down from his boozy perch on the second floor and followed me to the basement, mumbling about how he always had to handle the worst of everything, and how it was always fucking something in life.
He couldn’t even uncover the mountainous-looking sheet in the semi-cold room. He fell against the wall and sat there for a long time.
I work with dead people all day. I had no idea what to say.
After a long silence, Norm muttered, “Dog din eat’er fingers, didde?”
I delicately looked under one side of the sheet. Mrs. Hope’s enormous hand lay there like a bloated starfish, three different and lovely diamond rings embedded in the flesh of her fingers.
“No, the dog didn’t eat her fingers,” I assured him. Norm nodded decisively and burped authoritatively to accentuate his point.
“Wantcha ta cut’em off.”
We said the next two sentences at the same time.
“Her jewelry?” was my reply.
“Her fingers,” was his.
“I… shouldn’t I try to use some grease or something first, to…”
“You’d need more lube than a San Francisco bathhouse durin’ Pride Week,” he slurred. “No. Cuttem off.”
I should have thought about it harder, but I didn’t. The whole situation was so macabre, even by my own ridiculously different standards, that I just did what my boss told me. We had a pair of bolt cutters out back in the gardening shed, where we kept all the stuff that our twice-weekly laborers used to keep the shrubberies and trees in order, and before I knew it, I was back in the basement, clutching them in a daze.
Norm hadn’t moved. He still didn’t, even when the first crack of bone resonated from the teeth of the pincers. He just looked away with a thousand-yard stare as I wrestled away with the dismemberment.
I got both ring fingers off, only slightly shredding and twisting the gold on one of the rings, before I couldn’t ignore my circumstances any more, and ran to the washup sink in the next room to puke.
Norm still didn’t move.
I composed myself and walked back into the luke-cold room. The rings glittered there on the table, their sparkle undeterred by their sickening circumstances. Maybe that was why people liked diamonds so much, because they always kept shining like that, no matter what. Maybe that was why some people were pressed into diamonds when they died. I tried to hand the sparkly stash to Norm, but he just turned his head and shut his eyes.
“Yers.”
“Norm, I can’t…”
“Yers. Take’em. I don’t wanna look at ‘em.” He put his head between his knees and started breathing as if he were falling asleep.
This was as close to an opportunity to provide closure as I could.
“Norm. NORM.”
“Rgh.”
“Norm, we’ve gotta embalm her. It’s been almost five days, we’ve gotta do something.”
He shook his drooping head, forcefully. “I can’t fuckin’ do it.”
“Then I’ll do it. But we have to…”
“Nobody’s puttin’ her in a coffin. No lookin’ at that. No.” Norm coughed and rolled himself semi-upright, his head lolling against the wall.
“What then? Resumation?” I referred to the process of melting down a corpse using chemicals. It’s a fairly new process, and an effective one.
“No. No’uns melting her. Not seein’ that. No.”
“Well, then, do you want her cremated? No one will see the body, and you won’t have to watch it melt. We’ll just put her behind the doors and that’ll be that. I’ll even do the rearrangement raking,” I referred to the process of how the body needs to be repositioned after about 45 minutes of cooking, to ensure the flames consume everything. “Come on, man. You’ve done this a lot of times. You can do it one more.”
“Yer doin’ it,” he spat succinctly.
“Alright,” I said. “No problem.” I’d helped Norm do this before. I was capable. Today, I’d be an apprentice no longer. The sadhu would become the guru. I could handle this whole damn place if Norm intended to check out like this.
But there was a problem. Six hundred pounds of it.
There was no fucking way that Maggie Hope’s body, at least in its current configuration, was getting cremated in our oven.
Now Woodlawn, my ghoulish gallery, my dream cemetery… they have the industrial-strength stuff. They have an oven that can handle up to 1,200 pounds of human to be rendered into ash. They’re capable of doing double-cremations, husbands with wives or parents with kids, that sort of thing. The caretaker had told me that one time, they’d done an obese couple… 1,130 pounds total. It had taken four and a half hours.
And that was with the best of the best equipment.
Our oven maxed out at around 400 pounds of person.
I was going to have to get creative.
“Dismantler,” Norm huffed from the floor. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to me with a proper title—”dismantle” was, after all, the technical funereal term for what was about to happen—or if he just meant “dismantle HER.”
Dammit, clearly it was now going to be both.
The small tree-trimmer chainsaw’s roar in the tiled cold room was more than Norm could bear, even with the ear protection we were both wearing. Or at least, that was the element that drove him to flee the room where his mother was being chainsawed—well, dismantled—to fit into slabs for the oven.
I’m not a tremendously large or strong girl. I’d only wielded the chainsaw once before, and that was to help with a bit of gardening on one day after a storm when we had to clear some felled trees before a funeral, and the laborers had all been hired out to other parts of town.
Suffice to say, this was not a skillful surgery.
The fat itself was so thick that
wielding the chainsaw against it felt like a giant knife slicing into butter. The soft muscle tissue was like carving the most morbid of turkeys, and the bones… god, the bones… I tried to segment her as neatly as possible, but by the end was arm-deep in effluvia, gore, skin, blood, sweat, and bone chips. My safety goggles were smudged red with blood, my clothes (despite a rubber cape) were saturated, and for the first and only time in my career, I hated death. I hated a life that would compel itself to end up like this—Maggie, not me—but damn, did I hate death.
And I needed Norm to know that.
*
The cop-shaped blob that ambles in is not only the physical opposite of McLaughlin’s tall, well-built form, he soon proves himself the mental opposite as well. He saunters up to the interrogation table, thumbs hooked in his belt loops as if he could ever haul his pants properly up around his wobbly waist, and glares at me with beady eyes.
He wastes no time, and actually seems impatient. To his lazy ass, this probably seems like an open-and-shut case.
Well, I can’t lie, especially not to myself. The facts really do make it appear this case is locked against me. The big cop seems even more aware of this than me, as he upends a bag of evidence onto the interrogation table.
“Miss Blaise, you sure you don’t want a lawyer?”
I glare at him levelly. “No. I’m innocent.”
“Well, that’s nice that you’re so sure of that. But we’re not, darlin’.”
My stomach turns. I say the only thing that makes sense. “Well then, if I’m guilty, I guess I deserve to be punished.”
The cop-blob nods, his head’s slow movement making a few extra necks bulge out. “Seems you’re into that sort of thing, doesn’t it.” He leans in, his belly balanced on the table. “Likin’ punishment.”
I roll my eyes over to McLaughlin, but his icy blues are fixed on the pile of my artifacts on the table. It’s not a terribly innocent-looking array. The cop-blob—whose smudgy nameplate reads “Morgan”—picks up a leather riding crop that had, until this afternoon, been safely nestled in a chest under my bed.
“Ain’t too many ponies to ride ‘round here, cowgirl,” he says. His weird upstate accent—a combination of laziness and wannabe-city brusqueness—hints at a Southern drawl, minus any of the charm.
A moment passes as the two survey the stash. My riding crop. A few very high-end black leather whips, including a menacing cat ‘o nine tails. Some CDs. Some handcuffs. More than one really nice black leather facemask.
McLaughlin, as ever, remains impassive and a little intrigued. Morgan seems titillated, but I’m not sure if it’s at his possible mental resolution of the crime, or something else.
“We been hearin’ a lotta ‘sex-cult’ type talk lately. Satan stuff. Real weird business. You wouldn’t know anythin’ about that, would ya?”
I almost have to suppress a laugh, but fortunately my throat is still so scorched, it comes out as a cough.
“I’m an atheist.”
“Uh huh.” Morgan picks up a Danse de Sade CD, one of my favorites. It’s covered in imagery from old pornographic movie marquees, with the title Sex, Satan, Baroque N’ Roll splashed across the front. He flicks his eyes between me and the record cover.
“Now, you may think I’m mean, but I ain’t dumb. This band gets their name straight from the guy who invented beatin’ people up during sex.”
I consider explaining that the Marquis de Sade didn’t invent sexual vehemence, he just perfected the art to a point that they named it after him. None of this information will help my case, though, so I keep my singed mouth shut.
Morgan starts listing song titles. “‘Death Rock Pornstar’? ‘Welcome The Souleaters’? ‘Black Witch Blues’? Some interestin’ influences you got there.” He looks over at McLaughlin, who only stares back as if he’s waiting for a point or punchline to emerge.
Morgan focuses on me as if he’s softened me up. “You obsessed with death, Miss Blaise?”
“I respect it enough to understand it completely, as part of my professional life,” I say levelly. I avoid adding, “You know, the way you’re obsessed with being an asshole.”
My nerves are getting more frayed than my smoked-out hair. I want to laugh, but I keep my patter placid, and nod at the CD. “This should PROVE I’m not obsessed with death,” I maintain. “There’s no funeral metal or doom-dirges or anything. I listen to rock ‘n roll, like all human beings who are truly alive should.”
“Uh huh,” Morgan continues. He picks up a framed photo of me standing next to a massive man wearing a black leather vest, gauntlets, facemask, and executioner’s hood. There’s a very realistic-looking guillotine behind us. We’re both throwing up our fingers in Satanic horn gestures. Morgan needs only to raise a lazy eyebrow.
“Hey, you’re friends with The Monster?” McLaughlin suddenly enthuses. He keeps himself in check and nods up to Morgan. “That’s Danse de Sade’s bass player.”
“Yeah, we’re both in the same animal rescue network,” I smile. “I’m sorry, what do any of my personal effects have to do with this case?”
Morgan puts down the photo and leans in, spreading his arms around the array. “I think you were into likin’ it a little rough. Both’a you and Norm, there. Maybe he wanted it rougher’n usual on accounta his mom passin’. He liked seein’ how violent you got, cuttin’ her up like that. Maybe y’all took it a little too far. Or maybe you WANTED to take it too far, on accounta the will and all.”
Now it’s my turn to be genuinely baffled. “What do you mean, the will?”
Morgan leans back and hooks his thumbs back into his abused belt loops.
“Girl, if you’re puttin’ me on, maybe you shoulda moved down to the city and been an actress instead o’ dealing with all these dead things.”
I gently shake my head in befuddlement. The burned tissue around my neck crackles faintly.
Morgan explains his discovery to McLaughlin, not to me, as if the victory means more to his peer than his victim.
“She’s the sole beneficiary of Norm Hope’s entire estate. Every last ash.”
*
They say that the death process involves Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance. The worst part is the bargaining… there’s no way it can ever work out.
Norm was not in a mood to bargain. He was still firmly entrenched in anger.
After yelling at him for any kind of help and receiving no reply, I’d hauled most of Maggie’s various elements into the cremation oven, a staunch old black thing, basically a modified incinerator, in a small room off toward the back of the house. Generally, the body would be loaded feet first, with the flame positioned over their chest. You can be burned in a coffin, or a container of cardboard, Pacific Pine, Shaker Pine, or in some states, just a cloth bag.
Norm made no specifications. I went with cardboard, making a morbid “take-out container” joke to myself.
During my vicious ministrations I’d discovered that Pancho, he of the actual appetite for destruction, had been left by the medical examiner right alongside Maggie’s bedeviled body.
I chucked that ex-yappy little bastard right in the oven there with her. Norm staggered in a moment later.
“Push the button,” I said. “You need closure for this. I’ve done everything else. Check the settings I made, and push the damn start button, Norm.”
His eyes wheedled around the settings and, finding them acceptable, slapped the button to fire up the furnace. He then attempted to stagger out of the room.
“Oh no you don’t,” I said. “You’re seeing this through. The hard part’s over.”
“You said you’d do the raking,” Norm drawled.
“I will,” I said. “But that’s at least half an hour from now, and right now I need the most serious shower of my life. You sit here and see this though. I’ll be back in a few.”
He couldn’t fire me. He already had enough fire to deal with. I walked out.
I smoked a joint near
ly as fat as one of Maggie’s dismantled digits, dumped the eternally-cheerful diamond rings on the bathroom counter, tossed my blood-drenched clothes in a trashbag in the hamper, and let the water cleanse me back to normal as fiercely as the fire was cleansing Maggie back to dust.
A normal human body is 10% combustible solids. God only knows how that extrapolated regarding Maggie. But I smelled the smoke before I saw it, and that much smoke could only mean the combustion was incomplete.
The worst part is, that’s not the worst.
As I ran from my little cabin over to the main house, the mortuary chimney of which was pealing with inky black smoke, I realized I was higher than I thought from the fat-as-a-finger joint. What happened was what happens to all high people when they smell something grilling.
Worst. Munchies. Ever.
*
“So you’re openly admitting to drug use earlier this evening, before the incident?” Morgan glares at me.
“Yes. Come on, you’re going to test for it anyway, I’m not going to lie.” I smiled passively. “And you probably already know this, but I don’t have any priors. Not that you need a background check to burn bodies, but I don’t have anything you can hold against me. But yeah, I was incapacitated, to an extent. Can you blame me?”
McLaughlin pipes up. “The only thing we’re interested in placing blame for is Norm Hope’s death. What happened when you got back into the mortuary?”
I looked deep into his scorching stare. “I hate self-sabotage. Self-sabotage is the suicide of your dreams. And that’s no kind of death for me.”
I exhaled hard. My lungs wheezed, as if a small puff of smoke would still emanate from them.
“I tried. I really tried my best.”
Never Fear - The Tarot: Do You Really Want To Know? Page 31