After Darkness Falls - 10 Tales of Terror - Volume one

by Matt Drabble

  “Where’s my office?” Duane demanded. “I think it’s time to see just what a mess you’ve been making here,” he scoffed, angry at Hardman for making him jump like a schoolgirl.

  An hour or so later he sat back in the chair as it creaked beneath his weight. The office was small and dark without any window. The light overhead buzzed and flickered and his head was already beginning to thump.

  He was studying business economics, or at least he was supposed to be. He was already cutting most of classes and most of his assignments were already being bought. He had enough of a brain, however, to see that although the funeral home had a small overhead, their profit margins were just too damn small. He flicked through the monthly accounts again, the small numbers were starting to jump around on the page as his mind was unused to even an hour or so of thinking time.

  “HARDMAN?” He yelled and the old man appeared around the office door in an instant as though he had been hovering outside the whole time.

  “Sir?”

  “What sort of mark up are you charging here?” Duane asked flapping the sheet of paper at the old man.

  “Mark up sir?”

  “Yes profit, you know where you buy an item for a low price and then sell it for a higher one,” he said impatiently, rubbing his temples.

  “Well we’re not really that sort of business here sir,” Hardman replied with a strained expression. “The sorts of folks that come to us do so because they can’t afford anywhere else. We only really charge what they can afford.”

  “How the hell do you expect to make any money this way?” Duane asked incredulously.

  “We’re here to provide a service sir, not to make money; I thought that your father understood that?”

  Duane understood now that his father had set him up to fail. It was a hopeless task to turn this crap hole of a company round. There were barely any clients and those that did come were apparently paying with magic beans. He squeezed the bridge of his nose and fought the onrushing headache. His father had made it clear that this was to be his audition for entry into the family firm; if he failed then he would be cut off and cast aside.

  “What’s with that coin you keep playing with?” Duane asked as Hardman kept running the small silver coin over his knuckles.

  “Just a small keepsake, it brings me luck,” Hardman smiled infuriatingly.

  “It doesn’t seem to be working,” Duane said as he pointed at the balance sheet. “What are these amounts here?” he asked pointing at multiple zeros.

  “Those are our stock and trade,” Hardman replied enigmatically.

  “Huh?”

  “Caskets sir.”

  “And they cost that much?” Duane whistled. “Two thousand, three, this one’s six.”

  “People don’t like to skimp on a final resting place for their loved ones.”

  “I just bet they don’t,” Duane said slowly as an idea started to bubble beneath the surface of his dubious mind. “I bet they don’t.”

  ----------

  It was six weeks later and Duane allowed himself a moment to relax and reflect with a smug grin and a stiff shot of whisky. He prided himself on having a strong stomach, but even he needed the alcohol to take the edge off.

  The day had been long and he was glad for the night that was closing in. The weather outside was filthy and the rain was battering hard against the windows, but his mood was in stark contrast to the howling gale outside.

  Over the last few weeks the “Huntsacker Funeral Home” had gone from one of his father’s biggest losers to a growing success. His father hadn’t wanted to know the finer details and for that Duane was grateful, it wasn’t something that he was keen to explain.

  The idea was criminally simple; you sell the client the most expensive casket they can afford, and then you pull a switch and bury the dead in a cheap pine box. They always sold the same high-priced casket reducing the price to the client as necessary, as they were never really buying it. The crimson coffin had cost over eleven grand to buy, but in eleven services they had already recouped well over five times that amount. The most they had got for the coffin was nine thousand and the lowest was three, but it was all profit and word of their generosity was already increasing business.

  If the service called for a cremation then the casket rolled back through the curtains supposedly for the furnace and you made the switch without even needed to waste a pine box. If they were burying the client out back in the cemetery then you had a slightly trickier job. Luckily the family would never wait around until the casket was all the way buried, they were led away from the grave whimpering and wailing. Duane only had to wait until they were out of sight before carefully lifting the casket back out of the polythene laid hole. For this reason they were pushing the cremation option hard. During the last six weeks they had performed eleven ceremonies all with the same one luxurious and deluxe casket.

  Hardman was of course the only problem. The old man had been horrified at his initial suggestion, but Duane had cared little. He had coaxed and bullied the weary old fart until he had reluctantly agreed to go along. Duane wasn’t stupid and he knew that Hardman would lose his nerve pretty soon, but at least the doors of the home were still open and they were still caring for the community, at least on the surface. Duane had even allowed Hardman to carry out three services entirely for free. The old guy seemed to have a circle of friends that were going to be too poor to bury themselves. In exchange for going along with Duane’s sleight of hand economics, Duane agreed to carry out as many free burials as Hardman needed. It was a short term offer as far as Duane was concerned, but he needed to buy some time while he figured out what to do with him.

  Meanwhile the books were firmly in the black and that was all Duane cared about. In his father’s eyes he was doing the impossible and that would keep him in the will and the money rolling in. Duane already had ideas for branching out their services further afield. Whilst the hardworking community was able to stump a few thousand here and there, there were richer fish to be caught. The whole area was caught in poverty and crime ridden and there were a lot of young men dying on the wrong side of the tracks; a lot of young gangbangers with thick rolls of cash in their pockets ready to be milked. If a truck driver could find five grand for the casket, some hood could find three or four times that amount. Duane already had his eyes on a fifty grand coffin that he could resell over and over again.

  He was picturing those fat cash rolls when he spied Hardman out of the corner of his eye lurking as usual. “What is it Hardman?” Duane demanded irritably as if he didn’t already know the answer. The old bastard had spent the last week constantly flitting around like a nervous butterfly, wringing his hands like an old woman and always with that damned coin in his hand.

  “I’m really not sure about tomorrow,” Hardman started.

  It was a conversation that they’d had every day for the last week. Tomorrow’s service was for some old woman, one that Hardman had apparently taken some kind of special interest in.

  Mrs. Olivia Lincoln was an elderly widow that had belatedly joined her husband. Her family was distant and cold during the dickering over the service and Duane had been sure that Hardman could have gotten them to spend more than they had agreed to. Duane had listened at the door as Hardman conducted business, seemingly with little enthusiasm. For some reason Olivia Lincoln had gotten to Hardman more than any of the others. Duane had later found the old man in the mortuary below the home preparing the woman for her upcoming debut.

  Duane did everything that he could to stay away from the mortuary and those that slept below. Just how Hardman managed to get a single night’s sleep in his apartment above the home was a mystery to him. The mortuary had to be kept cold, but the air sank a chill into his bones far deeper than the temperature should have. He always made sure that he was out when Hardman was working below the stairs. The sound of the suction pump as it drew the fluids from the bodies reverberated throughout the home and turned his stomach at the mere
thought.

  Hardman had started whining about Duane’s plan to operate business as usual from the get go. It was a burial ceremony which was always a pain in the ass. They had developed a working relationship where Hardman performed the service and Duane operated the digger. Hardman was a naturally warm and attentive recitalist and he was able to keep the service moving and the people along with it. Duane wasn’t completely useless and he found that he actually had a pretty decent work ethic when properly motivated. The digger was surprisingly easy to operate and he knew that he had to be careful with the merchandise so as not to damage the casket. Despite packing the coffin with as much protection for the lifting process it was already showing too many signs of wear and tear to last much longer. Hardman was supposed to push the cremation option as the casket had to do little else but lay there and slide along some rollers at the end. For some reason Hardman had been unable or unwilling to push the cremation on the woman’s family and they were stuck with a burial.

  “How many times are we going to go through this?” Duane said throwing his hands up in the air in frustration.

  “I just think...., that is to say...” Hardman said falteringly as his fingers fidgeted with his coin.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake Hardman, do you want this place to close down? Is that what you want? Because another day of us losing money and that’s exactly what my father will do,” Duane lied.

  “It isn’t right sir, it’s unseemly,” Hardman said stiffly. “I’m afraid that I can’t be a part of this any longer, this has to stop.”

  “Don’t you go getting any rash ideas Hardman,” Duane warned. “You’re in this as much as I am, right up to the neck in fact.”

  Duane stared hard at the old man as the wind battered the funeral home and the soft sound of water ran down the guttering and into the overflowing drain outside. The office was dimly lit and the light buzzed and flickered as always. Their gazes were locked and the air crackled between them.

  “I’m sorry sir, but I can’t rest whilst knowing what I’ve been a part of here. The dead deserve rest and respect and I have to come clean. First to your father and then to the authorities,” Hardman spoke firmly with only the slightest of wavers.

  “Think about the good that we are doing here with the money that we’re making,” Duane pleaded. “Those freebie funerals, we couldn’t afford to do those without making money.”

  “I’m not a stupid man Mr. Jones,” Hardman said primly. “I’m well aware that the cost of those was a drop in the ocean compared to what you must have been making.”

  “What if we do more goodwill for the needy? What if we split the profit between the business and our, shall we say, charitable services?”

  “I’m sorry sir,” Hardman said shaking his head. “But it’s just not right and it has to stop.”

  “What if I cut you in for a slice of the profits?” Duane offered as the old man turned to leave pulling on his coat. He immediately regretted the offer and cursed himself for the notion that Hardman would care about himself.

  Hardman turned and withered him with a stare that was both pitiful and contemptuous at the same time. It was the same sort of look that his father often bestowed upon him and Duane was on his feet before he realised it. He snatched the whisky bottle from the table and swung it hard at Hardman and his father’s imagined face.

  The glass shattered against the old man’s thin skull and Duane’s stomach rolled as Hardman’s head caved in on one side under the blow. Hardman sunk to the floor like a heavy sack dropped from a great height. There was no balletic motion, just the collapsing of an elderly corpse.

  Duane stood there clasping the remnants of the bottle as the shards bit deeply into his hand. Soon his own blood was dripping slowly onto the office floor as Hardman’s eyes rolled back in his eyes and lay forever open.

  He tried to think through the fog of fear and panic that threatened to overwhelm him. He looked across at the telephone sitting expectantly on the desk and his hand even reached out for it, but then he saw his father’s face. The man was a doer and a winner, a man of iron will and granite nerve. Duane knew that his father would shower him with nothing but disdain for his lack of control and scorn for his failure to deal with the mess he’d created.

  Surely the biggest problem with getting away with murder would always be either seen committing the crime or seen disposing of the body. Here there were no witnesses and didn’t he have the perfect disposal opportunity at his fingertips?

  Absently he stood back from the spreading pool of Hardman’s blood and thought harder. He couldn’t ever remember Hardman speaking of family or even friends. The man lived in a small apartment above the home and was here first thing every morning and stayed until late every day seven days a week. In the six weeks since he had started here no-one had ever phoned for Hardman and no-one had ever called into the home for him. He lived upstairs and seemingly never left the premises. Duane started to wonder if perhaps tomorrow’s service could be a buy one get one free funeral. If Hardman had been so concerned for Mrs. Olivia Lincoln, well then he could sleep next to her for eternity.

  Duane sat back exhausted, but the strain was more mental than physical. The service had amazingly gone off without a hitch.

  He had pulled in a minister to perform the service from a neighboring parish with the aid of a large contribution to his church. Mrs. Olivia Lincoln had been laid to rest as several young relatives had struggled under the surprising weight of her casket. What they obviously didn’t know was that Hardman was safely tucked underneath her.

  The viewing had been the day before when Hardman was sitting alone in the dark in the mortuary below. So there had been no reason to open the casket again on the day of the funeral. Duane had snuck a small smile at the straining faces of the young pallbearers as they struggled to carry the extra body without showing it. Fortunately Mrs. Lincoln’s family had proven to be every bit as cold and distant as Duane had hoped. They turned up to the funeral presumably for appearances sake before all shuffling off the moment that the casket hit the dirt. It was with some reluctance that Duane shifted the digger and dumped scoops full of dirt onto the coffin. He hadn’t been planning on replacing the show casket just yet, but this seemed like the perfect time to do so. Besides even he didn’t want to push his luck too far and move Hardman’s body again. Let the two old farts rot in the ground together, he’d simply have to replace the show coffin and start reselling it again tomorrow, it was a small price to pay for getting away with murder.

  His head was fuzzy and he looked down to see that the bottle was half empty. He was surprised to find that guilt wasn’t gnawing away at his guts. There was only the satisfaction of a man who’d overcome a great obstacle. He’d faced a great test of character and he’d succeeded flawlessly.

  He took another long gulp from the bottle and toasted his victory. The dark night had drawn in around him and the sound of rumbling thunder came over the hills to announce the approaching storm.

  He still had a mountain of paperwork to get through as he was now a one man band. He had given thought that he would need to hire extra help, but he couldn’t come up with a foolproof way to find the right candidate, one who wouldn’t balk at his creative accounting.

  The thunder rumbled again, only this time it was closer. A flash of lightning exploded overhead and the dimly lit office flickered as the electricity buckled momentarily.

  Duane checked his watch; it was close to midnight and he decided to call it a night. Maybe he could bring in sales staff to work the home and he could take care of the practical side of the business. Maybe he could stop offering burials altogether and concentrate on the cremations.

  He was pondering such things when he heard a noise from above. He initially dismissed it as just Hardman shuffling around until he remembered that Hardman was dead and buried out the back underneath Mrs. Lincoln. He strained his ears to listen for the noise but there was nothing. The funeral home was still and dead, for want of a better word, he
smiled to himself. This might be the place, but it wasn’t the time to start getting jumpy and it wasn’t in his nature for flights of fanciful imagination. This was an old building and they had a habit of settling their bones when the nights were cold. The overhead lights flickered worryingly again and Duane figured that it was time to get going.

  He had one foot out of the office door when he heard the thump again from upstairs in Hardman’s apartment. This time it was unmistakable and the implication was unavoidable, someone was up there.

  He drew his courage up and refused to be scared as he stood in a dimply lit funeral home in the middle of the night with his murder victim buried out back and a storm raging overhead. He looked around the office for some kind of weapon, but there was nothing of any use. Soft and slow footsteps crept across the ceiling and his heart almost stopped.

  Just kids, that’s all, he thought to himself, or maybe just a couple of winos sneaking in out of the rain. His logic was sound enough, but there was something in his mind that was trying to get around the corners and out of the shadows. He stamped down hard on the nervous thoughts of a child. There were no bogeymen here, there were no shuffling monsters creeping from open graves, just bums looking to get out of the rain.

  He headed up the stairs to Hardman’s apartment one at a time. The wooden stairs creaked under his weight and the noise from above stopped. Duane stood on the stairs, one foot up and foot down, waiting for something. Eventually reason took over and he headed back down. If there were bums up there or maybe junkies, then stumbling into them made little sense. Fuck it, he thought as he strode purposefully back into the office. He snatched up the phone to call the police when his hand got stuck halfway. Three days ago he had murdered Hardman in this very office. As clean as he had scrubbed the floor, surely there were still traces there. Hardman seemed to have no family or friends and no-one had asked about him, but did he really want to bring the police in? Did he want a couple of cops poking around and maybe asking a few questions? Like just who did live in the apartment above and where was he now?