Box Set: Scary Stories- Vols. 3 & 4 (Chamber Of Horror Book 8)

by Billy Wells

  “Hello,” Mort said. “I'd like to speak with someone about donating a body.”

  “Just a second, let me transfer you to Mr. Sharlaton.”

  Mort listened to the phone ringing, and on the third ring, he heard, “Mr. Sharlaton here. May I help you?”

  “Uhh,” Mort said, and suddenly realized he couldn’t find the words to put a sentence together.

  “Is someone on the line?” Sharlaton asked impatiently.

  “Yes. I don't know how to begin exactly,” Mort stammered nervously.

  “May I ask with whom I am speaking?”

  “Well,” Mort hesitated. “Actually I would like to remain anonymous.”

  “I'm sorry, sir, but I already know you’re calling from the Mort Spade listing. Your name is already visible on caller ID. Are you Mort?”

  “Well, yes, but what I want to ask must remain strictly confidential.”

  “I understand, Mort. Many of our calls begin this way. Death of a loved one is always a ticklish matter to discuss. What do you want to know?”

  “Let's say I know someone who is very sick and will probably kick... I mean pass away soon. The person’s spouse, who is responsible for paying for the funeral, has no money, but does have complete control of what happens to the body once the spouse dies. Could I...I mean my friend, donate the body to your organization without the deceased signed permission?”

  “Yes. It happens all the time. All you... I mean your friend, has to do is have the loved one sign a waiver stating your friend will be solely responsible for the disposition of his or her body in the event of death. I can even fax you a copy of the form they need to sign if you like.”

  Mort’s face beamed with excitement. "Let's say I place an ad like you did on Craigslist to solicit people, who will agree to use your service, and I supply you with their names. Do you have, what d'you call it ...an affiliate agreement arrangement? You know… would you pay a finders fee for every person I can get to donate their body?”

  “Actually, yes,” Sharlaton replied cheerfully. “We already have several affiliates who receive finders fees for body donations.”

  “Really. And how much do you pay for each corpse…I mean dearly departed?”

  “Two thousand dollars is our standard fee for a deceased who expired in less than twelve hours, and one thousand for one between twelve and twenty-four hours.”

  Mort could barely form his next sentence; the grin on his face was so wide. “I guess this is a crazy question, but I'll ask it anyway. Let's say the deceased is embalmed and goes through the memorial service process, but rather than a burial or cremation, they elect to donate their body to your organization after the ceremony.”

  “Cadavers already embalmed are less desirable for our primary research, but we do have other uses for such bodies with universities and medical training establishments. But, we only pay five hundred dollars for those cadavers.”

  “If I find a donor, are you the person I should speak with to receive my payment?”

  “Yes. Since I spoke with you initially, I will be your contact for all future dealings with our company.”

  * * *

  The next Wednesday, Mort excavated a grave for a newly departed and closed it after the funeral. The man had died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two. He wondered if the cadaver being young would increase his payment for the donation.

  That night, at three in the morning, Mort drove the backhoe to the fresh grave. There was little chance anyone would hear the machine digging since it was deep in the new section of the cemetery far from the main road. Still, the work was nerve-racking since the roar of the engine was loud enough to drown out the sound of a tank if it approached during the excavation.

  Knowing he would be exhuming the body in only a few hours, Mort dispensed with placing the top on the concrete vault. He simply covered the hole with dirt as fast as he could without anyone seeing. He wasn’t used to digging up bodies only burying them, and he’d never excavated a grave at night. Even with the headlight of the backhoe blazing, the shadows of the machine’s arm rising and lowering cast eerie shadows on the gravesite that unnerved him more and more, as the exhumation progressed.

  Then, the bucket finally reached the coffin on one of its downward spirals and split the mahogany top. Mort didn’t hear the loud crack of the impact and the wood splintering for the roar of the engine but he felt the vibration. He cringed at the thought of the bucket crashing through the top and squashing the body as flat as a pancake. He quickly turned off the engine to inspect the damage.

  He jumped into the hole, and straddling the edges of the concrete vault, began removing the excess dirt so he could lift the lid of the coffin and drag out the body. He wasn’t looking forward to handling the corpse, but the mechanical coffin lowering device only went down, not up. Consequently, the body would have to be physically removed from the coffin just like Boris had done in the movie.

  Mort winced when he saw the huge crack and the long gash in the mahogany top and the scrapes along the sides where his shovel had raked across it. Finally, he lifted the lid and exposed the body of the corpse within. He chuckled when he remembered Joseph Stiff was his real name.

  Stiff had a spray of dirt that had seeped through the jagged crack on his face and on his black suit and red tie. An ugly bloodworm that had also fallen inside had crawled into the corpse’s right nostril and was trying to make a home there. Mort plucked it off and flicked it away like a big booger. The next obstacle was getting the body out of the coffin and into his truck without messing it up too badly.

  Mort was beginning to wonder whether he had misjudged how hard it would be to make five hundred dollars grave robbing. He loved earning two weeks pay for a single night’s work, but it was ball-busting labor for one man. He wished Fuzzy, his fellow gravedigger friend, could help, but he was afraid to ask him for fear he would blow the whistle.

  Mort walked back to his truck in the parking lot and backed it up to the edge of the grave. Next, he took some blankets from behind his seat, opened the tailgate, and spread two of them in the truck bed and on the ground just above the corpse’s head. He straddled the corner of the vault, and reaching down and placing his hands under Stiff’s arms, he dragged him on to the blanket. Catching his breath, he lifted him like a giant sack of potatoes into the truck bed, covered him with another blanket, and closed the tailgate.

  Huffing and puffing, he collapsed on the ground next to his truck and thought about the joy of getting back to his place to crack open a cold Rolling Rock.

  After a rest, Mort returned to the backhoe, pushed in the pile of dirt he had removed, and smoothed it over so it looked about the same as the grave had when he started.

  After returning the backhoe to its assigned parking space in the cemetery lot, he went back to his truck and drove to Edmunds Medical Research. By the time he arrived, the sun was beginning to rise.

  When he pulled into the large parking lot, and he saw a loading dock and assumed it must be the place where people disposed of the bodies and got paid. The interior was dark, and no one was moving about inside at this early hour. He waited.

  At seven-fifty, a car pulled into the lot and parked. A young man got out, and after unlocking the door next to the receiving window, he went inside and turned on the light.

  At eight o'clock, Mort saw the door to the loading dock go up. He drove alongside of the receiving window so he’d be first in line. The man inside was talking on the phone.

  Mort waited for the young man to hang up and talk to him, and finally, he noticed Mort and said, “Good morning. May I help you?”

  “I‘m making a delivery. This is my first time, and I’m not entirely familiar with the process. Do I give the purchase order to you?”

  A slot opened in the window and a receiving box opened. “Place the P.O. inside, sir. Let me take a look.”

  Mort complied. The man smiled when he looked at the purchase order and said, trying not to laugh, "This is a loading dock f
or supplies… things like equipment, paper goods, drugs. We don't accept cadavers here.”

  “I'm sorry. Like I said this is my first delivery. Where is the proper place to deliver a cadaver?”

  “Usually, our drivers pick up the body of the deceased at their residence, the hospital, or the morgue and take it to the arranged drop off point. I don’t remember anyone making a personal delivery from a truck. Do you have the name of a contact I can call?”

  “Yes,” Mort said nervously. “Mr. Sharlaton. Call him. He's the one I spoke to about the arrangements.”

  The clerk picked up a phone and called the name he’d been given. Mort saw the man's lips moving but didn't hear what he said.

  Finally, the voice returned over the loudspeaker, “Pull to the side over there next to the trash cans. Someone will be here shortly.”

  Mort hoped his failure to follow the correct procedure would not threaten his relationship with the facility before it had even begun. He saw a black van approaching from around the corner of the building. It pulled alongside his truck. Two surly men who looked like Stallone and Schwarzenegger in their prime, strong enough to rip his arms off, got out of the van and approached him.

  The first one with a large spider tattoo on his left cheek bellowed, “Where's the stiff?”

  “He's in the truck bed,” Mort replied, mesmerized by the man’s bulging biceps.

  “I’m Sydney. Do you have a purchase order?” he barked.

  Mort handed him the form and asked, “How do I get my money?”

  “Would you prefer $450 cash now or a check in two weeks?”

  “I'll take the cash now,” Mort said with no hesitation. “This is my first delivery. Did I fill out the form correctly?”

  Sydney glanced at it and said, “Looks good to me.”

  “Will I receive a 1099 for the money I receive?”

  “A what?”

  “You know, a tax form reporting the money you paid me during the year.”

  “Do you want one?” Sydney said skeptically.

  “Well, not really. But I'll do whatever you and Mr. Sharlaton want.”

  “Do you plan to bring in more stiffs or is this the only one?”

  “I hope there’ll be more, but I don't know for sure.”

  Sydney handed Mort a business card through the window. “If you come again, call the number on this card an hour before you plan to deliver, and either me or my brother, Sherwood, will meet you at the back of the parking lot to pick up the stiff.”

  Mort couldn't believe what he was hearing. He hoped he wouldn't go to jail. This sounded too good to be true.

  Sydney and Sherwood, who had tattoos over most of their visible skin, pulled back the blanket covering Andrew Stiff and scrutinized him. They seemed pleased. Afterward, they transferred the body into the back of their black van.

  Mort wondered if they would pay him or stiff him. Sherwood came to the driver’s side window and gave him an envelope containing $450 cash. After he watched the van drive away and disappear over the crest of a hill, Mort drove to his apartment and knocked down a six-pack of Rolling Rock. He felt like he was riding on top of the world.

  Over the next year, Mort delivered twenty-five cadavers to the Edmunds facility and received $450 for each one. Each week, he religiously placed an ad on Craigslist and in the local newspaper, soliciting people, who wanted to donate their body to science.

  Mort was working much harder than he ever had and his effort was paying off. His bank account was growing steadily. Life was good as long as no one tried to exhume one of the corpses he’d dug up and sold to science. Occasionally, Mort received email agreements for body donations, but most of the corpses still came from cadavers he dug up the night after he buried them.

  * * *

  Finally, one night after struggling with a particularly obese body, Mort did not feel well. In spite of the chills and fever he’d been experiencing for several days, he drove to the Edmunds’ parking lot to deliver the rotund cadaver to Sydney and Sherwood as he usually did. After this delivery, Mort had already decided he would take a well-earned two-week vacation and rest up before he killed himself working too hard to get rich.

  When Sydney and Sherwood arrived in their black van after receiving Mort’s call, they pulled alongside his truck and found him slumped over the steering wheel. They piled out of the van, and after opening the truck door, Sherwood felt for a pulse. He couldn't detect one.

  The brothers removed Mort’s lifeless body from the truck, laid him out on the pavement, and took turns pounding on his chest for five minutes without a response. They had grown to like the gangly old codger and were genuinely sad he had apparently had a heart attack and died. After a few more moments of heartfelt bereavement, they loaded Mort’s body into the van with the cadaver he’d brought for them and delivered both bodies to the Edmunds facility. They received twenty-five hundred dollars for their trouble. It went a long way toward relieving their momentary pangs of remorse.

  Later that morning, the facility shipped the embalmed cadaver Mort had brought with him in the truck to a university for dissection by medical students. Since Mort had not been embalmed, Sydney and Sherwood delivered him to the National Highway Safety Administration. The brothers heard they used cadavers as test dummies to study the frame-by-frame carnage of a body involved in a head-on collision.

  As soon as Mort’s body arrived at the test site, two men in black sweat suits removed him from the van and strapped him into a Kia compact. In this particular experiment, the small car was scheduled to have a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer loaded with concrete stanchions used in the construction of highway bridges.

  The brothers hadn’t had breakfast, and feeling hungry, they stopped just down the road at Krispie Kreme for some donuts and coffee.

  Sitting outside at a table munching on the sugary delights, the brothers had an unobstructed view of the test site. As they listened to the roar of the bellowing mufflers and smelled the acrid fumes of the diesel exhaust, they were comforted they had left strict instructions in their wallets, their vehicles, and their living wills their bodies would not be donated to medical science under any circumstances.

  “Poor old Mort, I'm going to miss him,” Sidney said mournfully. “He was the best good old boy we ever did business with.”

  Sherwood grinned, "And he was stupid enough to give us a 10% commission on every stiff."

  "That, too.” Sydney sighed and sipped the steaming hot coffee. “I'd put a flower on his grave if he had one, but after the eighteen-wheeler pulverizes his body, they’ll haul what’s left to the land fill.”

  “Well, would you rather have NASA test its landing systems with his corpse? He'd be burned to a crisp upon impact after a teeth-rattling trip into outer space.”

  “Yeah, but not all the landings are bad. NASA isn’t that incompetent. I'm sure he'd have a 50-50 chance to come down in one piece.”

  “Sydney, it's a no win situation. If he wasn’t incinerated the first time, they’d probably keep shooting his corpse into space until he was.”

  “I don't think so. The corpse would be all dried out by that time. They wouldn't send it up more than once.”

  “No matter what you say, Mort is lucky. The National Highway Safety Administration is the best way to go. Boom! You're obliterated in one quick ball busting collision. Better that than be bloating and wasting away in the sun for months to better inform law-enforcement about decomposition.”

  “You're right, Sherwood. That would be the last way I'd want to go.”

  “I understand some university science departments let the military use cadavers donated to them to test landmine resistant footwear.”

  “If the people who donate their bodies to science only knew what the universities, the military, and the government agencies actually do with them, we'd have to find another job.”

  Sydney chuckled to himself and then said, "I saw an article in Reader's Digest that said in the old days when a corpse wasn't emb
almed, sometimes they put a bell outside the grave with a pull-chain leading inside the coffin. If the dead guy was just temporarily out of it and woke up after being buried alive, he could ring the bell for help.”

  “Fuck. Can you imagine if Mort wasn't really dead and he woke up strapped into the seat with the tractor-trailer loaded with concrete barreling down on him?”

  A loud beeping sound from inside the Kia compact awakened Mort from his temporary, catatonic stupor. He'd had this malady several times before in this life. It was always annoying to wake up in a strange place with a bunch of strangers gawking at you. But, it was funny to see their faces when you opened your eyes and got up after they thought you were dead.

  This time he decided to really give these clowns a scare. He screamed "Boo!" and tried to jump up abruptly to scare the living shit out of whoever was around him. But to his dismay and utter shock, he found himself strapped in a seat, unable to move his limbs. He opened his bleary eyes and tried to focus.

  The last thing Mort saw before he was squashed like a grape run over by a steamroller was the dazzling chrome ornament of a big-busted woman with a fifteen-inch waist affixed to the hood of a cherry red tractor-trailer.

  JUMPER

  Josh Kramer saw the young man peering into the dark water under the bridge. It was almost midnight. Way past time for a casual stroll. The man had a troubled, lost soul kind of look, and he was so committed to the murky depths thirty feet below, he hadn't noticed Josh walking toward him on the bridge.

  Josh was a cop, and he came here several times a night to check if there were people on the bridge contemplating suicide. He walked this beat five nights a week.

  “The water's pretty cold in October,” Josh shouted.

  The man recoiled backwards from the railing and turned toward the police officer. “What?”

  “I said the water's pretty cold this time of year if you're thinking about jumping.”

  “Why don't you mind your own business?”

  “Right now, you are my business. I’m a cop, and suicide is a crime. More importantly, I don't want you taking a dive on my beat so please step away from the railing.”