Grimm Memorials

by R. Patrick Gates

  Vitelli went outside. The Rambler was gone. In its place was a small white Toyota. He started over to look at it when he got a call on his radio to go to the Pioneer Valley Regional Elementary School to check out a report of missing chil dren. As he got in his car, he gave the Toyota one last look and shrugged his shoulders. He didn't know how the old lady had gotten past him, but she had. He drove away, never noticing that the same black sack that had been on the Rambler's front seat was on the front seat of the Toyota.

  Inside the store, Eleanor carried her armful of groceries to the counter and piled them there. She added a jar of Skippy peanut butter and several loaves of bread and stood, head bent, breathing deeply while the clerk rang it up.

  "That'll be twenty-two dollars even," the clerk said picking at a pimple on his chin and glancing with ill-concealed disgust at the woman's obesity.

  Eleanor rummaged in her bag, then held out her empty hand. The clerk took the twenty-dollar bill and two ones he saw there and put them in the cash register. Later that evening, when the manager came in to tally the register receipts, he would accuse the clerk of stealing twenty-two dollars and fire him.

  Smiling to herself, Eleanor carried her groceries out of the store and placed them on the floor of the hearse below the sack on the front seat. The pain in her chest was returning. She knew she was doing too much, but it couldn't be helped. She took a bottle of tequila out of the glove compartment and took a swig. She sat back, trying to relax, and waited for the pain to subside, but it didn't. Though it didn't get any worse, it also didn't get any better; it just kept on at a steady, consistent hurt. After several minutes, when she realized the pain was not going to go away, she started the hearse and pulled out of the store lot.

  She parked the hearse behind the house, close to the kitchen door and out of sight of the road. After a few moments of rest during which she finished the half-pint of tequila and dropped another pill (bomb pills is what Edmund had called the nitroglycerin tablets), she clutched at her bags of groceries and carried them in the kitchen door. The black sack remained unmoving on the seat.

  Eleanor came out and retrieved the sack, dragging it inside with great pain and difficulty and left it by the refrigerator. From outside, the sound of loud barking startled her. She went to the back door and looked out. Mephisto, Edmund's massive St. Bernard/Pit Bull mixed mongrel was lunging wildly against his rope tied to the gnarled oak by the cemetery fence.

  "Alright, alright," she called through the screen. "Old Mother Hubbard's coming to fetch her poor dog a bone" Mephisto lay down and whined, licking his chops in anticipation, as if he understood what she had just said. She shuffled to the refrigerator, pulled out a foil-wrapped package, and carried it outside.

  Mephisto stood in anticipation as Eleanor approached. He worked his tongue over his teeth noisily, drool dripping from his jaws as he watched Eleanor peel off the foil. When she tossed his meal to him, he caught it in midair. He turned, holding the small, severed forearm tightly in his mouth, and trotted back to the shade of the oak tree where there still remained a pile of gnawed finger bones from an earlier meal. The small hand, sticking out of Mephisto's massive mouth, jiggled as he walked away and appeared to be waving.

  Smiling, Eleanor waved back.

  CHAPTER 15

  What are little girls made of made of?

  The new captives were still unconscious from the ether when Eleanor wheeled the upstairs portable gurney out to the kitchen. It was a narrow metal table on wheels that collapsed flat on the ground, and lifted to an upright position with the aid of hydraulics. A body could be strapped to the gurney and be stood straight up by one person to be moved with ease through doorways. It, and another just like it that was kept in the crematorium, had been bought by Edmund to replace the ancient hoist their father had used to lift dead bodies into caskets, or onto the embalming table, or to lift caskets into the chapel elevator, or onto the conveyor belt that fed them into the crematorium's blast furnace.

  She released the lever that collapsed the gurney to the floor, and slid the black sack onto it. It was relatively easy, with the help of the hydraulic legs on the gurney, to pick up the bodies so they could be pushed into the chapel. There the sack could be rolled into the elevator, and lowered with a minimum of effort.

  When the sack was in the elevator, she closed the door and pressed the button sending it down to the crematorium. She followed by way of the stairs, resting at the bottom be fore she wheeled the second gurney out of its storage cabinet and pushed it over to the elevator. She removed the boy from the sack first, rolling him out, sliding him onto the table, and strapping him up. She pushed the gurney over to the cage where she unceremoniously collapsed it and dumped the body inside with the drugged twins and unconscious Davy Torrez.

  Behind her, the girl in the elevator moaned, a sign that the ether was wearing off. Eleanor returned the gurney to the elevator, strapped the girl in, and lifted her body to the embalming table. Since the girl was waking up, Eleanor took the precaution of muzzling her with heavy gray duct tape over her mouth; she didn't need the girl's screams (and oh how she would scream!) distracting her during the ritual. When she was finished with the tape, she secured the child's arms, legs and head with the leather restraining straps that Edmund had rigged to the table just for the special rituals.

  As she tied the girl down, the dream-memory she'd had in the tower flashed in her mind. This was the very same table the dead woman had lain upon; the very same table upon which she and Edmund had watched Father perform his secret perversions; and the very same table where Edmund would later teach Eleanor the life-extending rituals which had drawn him to occult worship while away at school.

  From a nearby shelf, Eleanor retrieved a pair of scissors and began cutting the girl's clothes from her body. When the girl was naked, goosebumps rising on her cold skin, Eleanor ran her hands lightly over the pale, succulent flesh, and her mouth began to water.

  Eleanor removed her own clothes quickly then laid out the necessary instruments for the ritual on the metal instrument tray attached to the side of the table. From the storage compartment next to the elevator, she removed the electric embalming aspirator, which she wheeled to the table's side. After lighting the hundreds of candles placed strategically around the room, she opened the large book on the wooden podium set in the middle of the pentangle. She was ready to begin. As she read an incantation from the book and prepared to make the first incision, she thought of how much parts of the Rituals of Sacrifice were like the embalming procedures she had first watched her father teaching Edmund a long time ago.

  She was eleven at the time. Unlike their mother, Eleanor and Edmund's father was oblivious to their powers and untouchable by them. He was a hardheaded New England undertaker of little intelligence. Neither Edmund nor Eleanor had been able to penetrate that hardheadedness; neither to project their thoughts, nor to hear his.

  When their mother died, Father hired a series of nannies to care for them, but none stayed more than a week. After the eighth one left, crying hysterically about the children being possessed, Edgar Grimm decided he would care for the children himself.

  When Edmund realized he couldn't control his father he took a different tact, convincing his father that he was a dutiful son who wanted to be just like his dad. His father responded by letting Edmund watch him as he performed the mortician's craft.

  Eleanor was cleaning the front waking parlor one afternoon when Edmund and Father disappeared into the crematorium to embalm a body that had just come in. Eleanor was never allowed in the crematorium during embalmings, only to clean up after, and she resented being left out. That day she decided to slip into the chapel elevator and lower herself to the crematorium to watch through the same hinge crack where she and Edmund had watched father abusing corpses.

  On the table was a naked old man, completely bald, his skin tinged a pale white-blue and mottled with age spots and dark, purplish blood clots just under the surface of his flesh. His head was
turned to one side and his right arm was raised as though he was pointing at something of interest on the ceiling. One of his legs was rigidly bent, also.

  The first thing Father showed Edmund was how to mas sage the body, loosening the effects of rigor mortis in the muscles and joints so that the body could be positioned with legs straight, arms crossed over the chest, and head raised, turned slightly to the right. Father worked a long time at this with obvious enjoyment.

  Next, he set the features of the old man's face. Two thin metal picks with tiny-toothed clamps on the ends were stuck into the corpse's eyeballs and the lids drawn over them and held together by the clamps. He then pierced each side of the dead man's upper and lower jaw with needle injectors to which were attached a very fine threadlike wire that was almost invisible. When the wire ends of top and bottom were twisted together the corpse's mouth was drawn closed and held shut. Father then pushed the wire ends between the teeth and sewed the cadaver's lips together with an invisible stitch of catgut.

  With the facial features set, Father explained that the arterial embalming-replacing the blood supply with embalming fluid-could begin. Using a scalpel, Father sliced through the flabby dead skin at the man's neck, armpits, and groin until he had exposed the major veins and arteries of the man's body. Drainage forceps were injected into the veins and laid out to the gutter at the edge of the table so that the blood would run off when the displacement began. Father then hooked up the injection needles and hoses of the electric aspirator to the exposed veins and began pumping a mixture of formaldehyde and water into the veins. Immediately, a thick, sludgy flow of dark blood began to run from the drainage forceps and into the gutter where it collected in the large glass jar at the bottom of the table.

  Again Father massaged the body, this time, he said, to be sure all clots were washed out of the cadaver, and another stronger solution of embalming fluid was pumped into the body. Eleanor remembered marvelling at how the embalming fluid, which was treated with a red dye, brought a healthy pink tinge back to the dead flesh. After the three vein areas were sutured closed, Father demonstrated the process of cavity embalming.

  Using a large-bore injection needle, which Father called a trocar hooked up to the electric aspirator's vacuum pump, he inserted it into a small cut he had made just below the cadaver's navel. When he turned on the electric aspirator, a foul mixture of blood and waste was drawn from the dead man's intestines and bowels. When this part of the corpse was sucked dry, Father hooked the trocar and hose up to the formaldehyde pump and filled the cavity with an extra-strong solution of formalin, in order to (as Father put it) cook the man's entrails and insure the destruction of microorganisms that might present a health threat.

  Eleanor had found the whole process fascinating, as had Edmund. She would return to the elevator many times over the years to watch her father perform embalmings, and other, more perverted acts on dead people he had been hired to prepare for burial. And later, after Father's death, she would share the mortician's duties with Edmund as the business thrived and they handled nearly every burial in the AmherstDeerfield region. But the thing Eleanor enjoyed most was the ritual of sacrifice that Edmund taught her, which was built around the embalming procedure and rites of ancient occult worship that he had discovered while away at school.

  With cadavers they were hired to prepare for wakes and burials and which supplied their daily diet, they used the same ritualistic procedures, but instead of formaldehyde they used boiling water circulated through the body so that the meat would still be edible and the body would be completely drained of blood, which they refrigerated for later ingestion but sometimes drank straight from the body. The rest of the corpse was stripped of edible meat and flesh from the neck down. When the body was clothed and made up, no one knew that little remained under the clothing of the person that once was. Edmund even did research into ancient Egyptian embalming practices and adopted their method of severing the brainsteam at the back of the head and inserting a hooked wire up through the nose and into the brain (a most delectable delicacy and important ritual offering), snagging it and drawing it out whole through the nasal passage.

  The only difference between that procedure and the ritual she now performed on the girl (Edmund would have called her an innocent, because she was untouched by puberty and therefore seen as clean spiritually) was that this girl would be skinned alive first, as Eleanor was now doing, and most of her meat would be left on her for the altar, according to the ancient rites.

  As she worked, Eleanor whistled softly to herself, oblivious to the girl's tape-muffled screams. Betty Boone's eyes bulged from her head, and her faint screams sounded like a faraway horse whinnying in pain.

  CHAPTER 16

  See-saw, Margery Daw ...

  No one wanted to talk about the disappearance of Betty Boone and Timmy Walsh, and that bothered Jackie. Something had happened that day, something bad, but like a forgotten sentence on the tip of his tongue, Jackie couldn't remember what. He thought that by talking about it, and asking questions, he could jog his memory and it would come to him. For some reason, it seemed very important that he remember. A week and a half had passed since they'd turned up missing at afternoon recess and all anyone would say-from the teachers on down to the kids in first grade-when he brought it up was the official line: that they had been taken away by their fathers and would return as soon as the police caught up with them.

  He had tried to talk to his mother about it, but she had become more and more withdrawn, staying in bed all day and coming down to the kitchen only occasionally to make supper, which recently consisted of peanut butter sandwiches. There was little else to eat in the house since she wouldn't go out shopping; sometimes they went for days without a hot meal. Steve had gone out and picked up a few things frozen pizzas, SpaghettiOs-a few times when he had gotten sick of peanut butter, but in the past few days he had skipped supper altogether. Two nights in a row Jackie and Jennifer had made suppers of Cheerios and milk for themselves.

  Steve was no comfort to Jackie, either. In the past he'd always had time for Jackie. He'd always had an interest in what he had to say and in what he was doing. They had grown close before they'd moved, but now Steve kept putting him off with the excuse that he had to finish his poems for the competition deadline less than a month away. He'd begun secluding himself in his study, and now that he didn't even come out for supper, Jackie and Jennifer saw him only in the mornings, leaving as they came downstairs for breakfast.

  Though Jackie often brought the matter of Timmy and Betty up with Jen, she tired quickly of his questions to the point where she had begun avoiding him, as she was doing now, sitting with Margaret Eames on the bus home after school. Jackie sat behind them with a freckle-faced boy from second grade whom he had managed to make friends with recently. The boy was a quiet loner in desperate need of a friend, who accepted Jackie's overtures with shy enthusiasm.

  "You better not sit with my brother, Billy," Jen said, leaning over the seat, to Jackie's friend. "People will think you're wacko ."

  "Shut up, Jen," Jackie shot back.

  "Seen any trolls lately?" Margaret asked with a cruel grin on her face.

  Jackie's mouth dropped open and he looked at Jen with such an expression of betrayal that she blushed and had to look away. Jackie had made his sister promise-shed crossed her heart and hoped to die! not to tell anyone about that incident, especially the part about wetting his pants.

  "Don't worry. I didn't tell her everything," Jen said tauntingly. She felt bad about betraying her oath to Jackie, but not knowing what to do to rectify the situation, she did the opposite and worsened it.

  Margaret sat up, her curiosity piqued. "What?" she asked greedily.

  Jennifer glanced sidelong at Jackie, her face hot with guilt, but she forced a smile. "Oh, nothing."

  "What? What?" Margaret implored, grabbing Jen by the arm.

  "She said, nothing!" Jackie said forcefully.

  Margaret gave him a dirty look betwe
en the seats. "I think you're weird," she said, shaking her head at him in that snotty little-girl manner as though to say he was more than weird, perhaps the weirdest person to have ever lived. "I think you like to make up stories to get attention," she said accusingly.

  "What about you? You said there was a witch in the woods," Jennifer said, seeing her opportunity to make up to Jackie. Margaret looked at her with surprise at her turnaround.

  "Yeah," Jackie said, delighted with his sister's coming to his aid. "What about the witch in the woods?" Jackie asked, with nyah-nyah emphasis to the words. "Huh, Dumb 01' Margaret?"

  "Don't call me that," Margaret pouted. Jackie had been calling her that since having seen the name in the Sunday comic strip, "Dennis the Menace"

  "I never said there was, Jerry Hall did," Margaret said defensively.

  "Oh sure," Jen said with exaggeration, "Blame a kid who isn't here to defend himself."

  "Yeah," Jackie concurred enthusiastically.

  "He disappeared!" Margaret answered.

  Jackie stopped smiling at the mention of that fact.

  Margaret, sensing his mood swing, jumped on the opportunity. Giving Jackie a slit-eyed stare and speaking in a low, creepy voice she said, "Right after he told me about the witch, he disappeared. I'll bet the witch got him!"

  Jackie paled at the thought of it, but Jennifer laughed. "See. That proves you believe there's a witch," she said victoriously.

  "Yeah," Jackie echoed, less enthusiastically than before.