Grimm Memorials

by R. Patrick Gates

  Jennifer glanced at him and wondered if he was joking; couldn't he see the curl of smoke coming from the solid milk chocolate chimney? She smiled awkwardly at his comments and led him on through the woods.

  "I hope that dog doesn't get loose," Greg said. Mephisto had heard them coming through the woods and was barking ferociously at them. Lunging against his leash, he frantically tried to break free and attack them.

  Jennifer laughed. Greg had such a strange sense of humor. There was no dog at Grandma's.

  They came out of the woods on the right side of the house, several yards down from Mephisto. Oblivious to the dog, who was in a frenzy at their being so close, Jennifer led Greg around the side of the house to the back door.

  "Your grandmother lives here?" Greg asked incredulously, looking at the size of the place and the cemetery in the backyard.

  "Yes. It's beautiful, isn't it?" Jennifer said, sounding to Greg like a member of the Addams family for liking such a weird place.

  Jennifer led Greg into the kitchen and offered him a seat at the kitchen table. "Have some candy," she said pointing at the wall.

  Greg Roberts sat down and looked at her like she was crazy; there was nothing but wall where she was pointing. He looked around with distaste at the rest of the dingy room with its ancient black stove and filthy sink. To Greg, this place looked like somebody's dead grandmother should be living there. It was creepy.

  "So where's this great fish?" Greg asked uneasily, wanting to see the damn thing and get the hell out of there. The place gave him the willies for certain.

  Jennifer went to a tall freezer in the far corner of the room and took out a foil package about two feet long. She placed it on the table in front of Greg.

  Greg gaped at the size of the package. It was true! He couldn't believe the size of it. Anxiously, he began to open the foil wrapping. As he peeled it away, he thought the fish had a funny shape, and color for trout. He ripped more foil off.

  Trout didn't have fingers, or a hand and wrist.

  He tore away the rest of the foil. A whole severed arm, from shoulder to fingertips lay on the foil in front of him. He let out a yell and jumped up, backing right into Eleanor. She swung a heavy, cast-iron frying pan at him, striking the back of his head and knocking him senseless to the ground.

  CHAPTER 35

  Pussy-cat ate the dumplings, the dumplings ...

  "Shhh! What's that?" Jackie asked. The room was filling with a loud electronic humming, that stopped suddenly with an airy, blowing sound. Moments later, he heard the witch's footsteps on the stairs. "She's coming back!"

  All of them scrambled at once to the back of the cage, as far as possible from the door as they could get. Without realizing it, they collectively held their breath when the old woman entered the room.

  Eleanor lumbered into the crematorium, her left leg dragging, the pain making her vision thick, and went to the casket lift, which she had just sent down from the chapel with Greg Roberts inside. She unlatched the lift door and slid it up. Using the casket gurney, she lifted Greg out of the elevator and wheeled him to the cage.

  She got the key from the wall, opened the cage door, and wheeled the gurney and its human cargo inside. She pulled a lever and the table holding Greg Roberts collapsed. He fell heavily to the floor and rolled off the table in front of the others.

  Eleanor gave them a cursory glance, just enough to provoke a cold sweat, wheeled the gurney out of the cage, locked the door again, and placed the gurney next to the embalming table. From the instrument tray she removed a large brown bottle of ether and a white cloth. She opened the bottle and, keeping her face turned away, splashed some ether on the cloth. The cloth went over Jackie's mother's face. Eleanor held it there for less than a minute before tossing the cloth back on the cart and limping to the crematorium door, and back upstairs.

  "Mom!" Jackie called as loud as he dared to his mother when the witch was gone. She didn't respond. He started to call her again, but no sound came out of his mouth as he choked up with emotion and nearly burst into tears. He stood against the bars, his hands clenching them tightly, and stared sorrowfully at his sleeping mother.

  The sweet sound of metal chopping through meat reached Eleanor's ears as she climbed to the entrance hall. The pain bearing down on her drove her to the leather couch, where she lay popping bomb pills and praying for the pain to decrease. After a few moments, she felt the nitroglycerin taking effect on her heart rate, slowing it, but it couldn't touch the pain. "I need something stronger," she whispered to the couch cushion. And she knew where she had to go to get it.

  Halfway up the stairs to the second floor Eleanor was sure she would never make it. The next thing she knew, she was standing outside Edmund's study, her hand on the doorknob. There was a loud crackling noise in her head, and she didn't know how she'd got there. She had no memory beyond stopping on the stairs and wrapping her arms around herself as Pain River swept her through a nasty set of rapids.

  She pushed through the door and hobbled inside to the large oak desk in front of the fireplace. In the third drawer on the right, Edmund kept a cachet of army surplus field medic supplies. At one time the drawer had been filled with plasticwrapped syringes, each filled with a pain killing dose of morphine. Edmund had picked them up on the blackmarket, trading two young boys to a CIA agent, who planned on giving them as a present to an Arabian prince for inside information on a terrorist group. Edmund had accepted five hundred of the morphine packets for each child. In the bottom of the drawer, only two remained.

  Eleanor looked at the two syringes and remembered Edmund's last attack. Doctor Phelps had given him morphine then for the pain. It was the morphine that had been Edmund's undoing. The morphine not only dulled the pain, it had dulled his mind. But like Edmund, Eleanor was at the point where she had no choice: take it or die.

  She pulled a packet out, clutched it in her aching hands. She couldn't tear it open. Her hands were too feeble to separate the plastic at the dotted line. After all her effort, she was going to die, all because of a vacuum-sealed plastic bag. She lay her head on the desk top and sobbed. The pain was so bad she almost wished she could die.

  You 71 wish it soon enough, Edmund promised from nowhere and everywhere.

  No! Eleanor answered. Summoning the last of the strength that was left her, she shoved the packet in her mouth. With her teeth, and her will, she tore the plastic open and released the drug-filled syringe. She popped the cap, pushed the needle into her forearm and pressed the plunger. The syringe fell to the floor as Eleanor slumped over, head on the desk, waiting for the morphine to tame Pain River.

  And waited. Some more. Still the river went on and on. Eleanor had been waiting for the initial rush to hit her and carry her away, the way it always had the many times before that she and Edmund had used the army surplus morphine packets for pleasure, but this time, the drug came on slower.

  Gradually, Eleanor began to notice a feeling of apartness from Pain River. Instead of submerged in the waters of Pain, she stood on the riverbank, getting soaked from its spray but not swimming in it; not drowning in it. The crackling noise in her head subsided to a steaming hiss.

  Sleep came then, pulling her under, leaving the Machine to limp along on its own. She slept for a short while. When she woke, the swollen waters of Pain had retreated to the size of a stream. For the first time in days, she actually felt hungry.

  Snatching up the last morphine packet, she stuffed it into her dress pocket and stood. Her limp left leg felt stronger. Moving slowly, enjoying the simple act of walking without being a pack animal to killing pain, Eleanor went to the open study door and took a deep breath. There was a wonderful smell coming from the kitchen.

  "I cut the meat and added it to the stew, Gram," Jennifer said. She stood on a chair at the stove, stirring the contents of a large black pot that sat on the front burner. "It's almost done"

  "Good girl," her grandmother replied, smiling as she came into the kitchen. "When it's ready, we'll fe
ed our guests" She patted Jennifer on the head as she went by her. She took a bottle of Cuervo Special Gold from a shelf by the stove and took a long, hard pull from it before heading for the table, where she scooped up several of the fingers lying there and began to gnaw on them in between swigs of tequila.

  There's thirteen of us, Mark thought. He had noticed their number when the old woman brought the last kid in. Unlucky 13. He counted them over again, for something to do, and wondered why the old woman was collecting just boys.

  The boy the old woman had just left began choking. He was still out, lying on his back just inside the door. He was having trouble breathing. Suddenly he vomited. It gushed up out of his mouth, running down his chin, and sank back into his mouth. The boys nearest him made disgusting noises and moved away. Mark jumped up and dragged the boy to the side of the cage and turned him over so that his head was next to the bars and he was puking outside the cage.

  This kid is in bad shape, Mark thought as he took his hands from the boy's head and saw the blood. The boy had a deep four-inch gash in the back of his head. With a sick feeling, Mark realized he could see bone: the boy's exposed skull. Mark bent over him and put his ear to the boy's back. He was barely breathing and his heart was hammering like a drumroll.

  He's going to die, Mark realized, if he doesn't get help. Tugging at his cotton, tab-collared shirt, Mark ripped a sleeve off, rolled it up, and applied it to the boy's head. He wished he could do more for the boy, but he didn't know what else to do other than what he had already done.

  "She's coming back," one of the boys whispered loudly. Mark listened, and could hear footsteps on the stairs, only this time it sounded like more than one person was coming. Mark left the makeshift bandage pressed to the boy's wound and, on his knees, scrambled back to the others huddling together in the rear.

  The second the door opened, Mark felt the cold, numbing tendrils of the old woman's mind probing into his, and felt an overwhelming desire for food. A second later, a delicious hot smell hit him as the old woman and a young girl carried trays stacked with bowls, two loaves of bread, two large pitchers of milk, and a big black pot of steaming stew.

  In the rear corner of the cage Davy Torrez's ego was coming up for air, climbing up from the depths of shock-induced oblivion to reality. A number of things triggered it: the pres ence of the witch in the room; the sound of the boy's voices; and especially the smell of something hot and meaty. His starving body responded and his stomach growled. His mouth watered with faint memories of Sunday dinners. He began to breathe deeply. He floated upwards, out of total unawareness, into the normal levels of sleep. The memory of Sunday dinners grew stronger and became a dream.

  He saw himself sitting at the kitchen table. His mom was pouring milk into Flintstones jelly glasses. Davy's father came to the table and placed a fat, perfectly cooked turkey on the table. Davy's mouth watered as his father rubbed the knife and fork together before carving the bird.

  As metal sliced through meat, Davy looked at the turkey again, seeing it for what it really was-a headless child's torso cooked to a golden brown, hands and feet cut off, arms and legs trussed, with stuffing popping out of its neck and rectum.

  Davy tried to scream, but his father grabbed him by the neck and shoveled steaming gobs of human meat into his mouth.

  "Jennifer!" Jackie cried loudly. He felt the witch poking his mind with the same burning hunger for food that Mark and the others felt, but it wasn't enough to contain his joy at seeing his sister alive. She smiled at him and concentrated on carrying the tray to the cage. Jackie yelled again and the witch gave him a look that froze his vocal cords. She followed Jennifer into the room and put her tray down on the embalming table.

  Jackie backed away from the front of the cage, but never took his eyes off his sister. She wouldn't look at him, keeping her eyes down on the tray in front of her. The witch retrieved the key from the wall and unlocked the cage.

  Never looking up, Jennifer placed the tray she was carrying, inside. The witch followed with the other tray and placed it on the floor next to Jen's. The witch gave them all a glance. Jackie, along with the others, heard the command, Eat, in his head as though it was a thought of his own, then she had his sister by the arm and was leading her out, locking the cage, and taking Jennifer upstairs with her.

  The boys rushed the food, scrambling over one another in an attempt to grab anything to eat. For most of them, it had been more than two days since they'd eaten last. Even without Eleanor's influence they would have eaten almost anything served them; now they couldn't get it fast enough. With all of them greedily pushing and shoving, no one was getting much of anything, and they were in danger of spilling and losing everything.

  Mark saw this and, though he was so hungry it would have been easy to knock the smaller boys aside and take what he wanted, he made the boys take turns with him dishing out the food and the boys lining up. "Take it easy. Stop pushing, you're going to make me spill it," Mark complained grufffly.

  Besides the fact that he was starving, too, Mark was glad there was food. The boys had been hovering on the edge of full-blown hysteria ever since the old lady's revival and this was getting their minds off her for a while. Even Jackie, who sat crying his eyes out in the corner over his sister not noticing him and helping the witch, finally came around and helped Mark by pouring a glass of milk for each boy as Mark filled their bowls with stew.

  When all the boys had some, Mark dished out bowls for Jackie and himself. Jackie declined his, saying he wasn't hungry. The truth was he couldn't bring himself to eat anything the witch had touched no matter how hungry he was. Mark shrugged at his refusal and poured Jackie's portion into his bowl.

  "Want some milk?" Jackie asked Mark.

  "No," he replied. "I'm allergic to it."

  As Jackie watched and his stomach gurgled noisily, Mark and the boys devoured all the food.

  Acting from reflex, Mark took his bowl to Davy Torrez and the new boy with the head wound, and spooned stew into their unconscious mouths.

  Davy Torrez's smothered dream screams triggered his rise toward consciousness again and he left the level of sleep. He became aware of his body and the hard floor beneath him. The smell of hot food was all around him. He could taste it, making his stomach gurgle against his will. He could hear spoons scraping on dishes and the slurping of small mouths drinking. He could hear murmuring voices and the sounds of eager chewing.

  With a great deal of effort, Davy began to move his lips.

  Jason Grakopolous and Jeffrey West were fighting over the last bit of stew left in the pot. Mark intervened, splitting it up between the two of them, then finished his own bowl. Jason took his stew to the far corner, near the unconscious dark-skinned boy, and shoveled it into his mouth, keeping a wary eye on the others.

  Suddenly he jumped, and looked at the boy lying near him. "He just said something," he explained to the others.

  Jackie and Mark both got up and went over to the boy. Jason moved away from them, hugging his bowl to his chest, and continued eating. Jackie leaned over the boy and put his ear to the boy's mouth.

  "What's he saying? Does he want some more to eat?" Mark asked, kneeling next to Jackie.

  Jackie listened carefully, his head nodding a little, then looked up at all of them. "He says don't drink the milk. The witch put something in it to put us to sleep." He and the others looked at the empty glasses and two empty pitchers. One of the twins began to cry. Jackie bent over again, holding his breath as he listened to the faint words coming from the boy's mouth.

  "What!" Jackie gasped. He listened some more, then started to get up, but fell over, landing hard on his rump and sat there dazed, as if he'd just had the wind knocked out of him.

  "What'd he say?" Mark asked anxiously.

  "Don't eat the stew," Jackie mumbled. The boys looked at their bowls.

  "Why? Is it drugged, too?" Mark asked, sniffing at one of the boy's empty bowls.

  "No ... ," Jackie said hesitantly. "He sa
ys ... He says ... it's made out of ... a ... a ... kid. A kid ... who ... was in here before us "" Jackie's voice went up an octave. "He said ... the ... the ... witch ... cut the kid up and made stew out of him! " He began to cry, sobbing out the words. "That's what she wants with us. I told you. She wants to eat us up!"

  Realizing what Jackie had just said, Jason Grakopolous gagged and threw his bowl to the floor. The thick brown liquid splattered and several large pieces of meat rolled out of the bowl. One of them was the tip of a finger, the fingernail still intact.

  Eleanor leaned on Jennifer as they went up the stairs to the second floor. Though the pain was far away, she was exhausted. Everything was ready. All she needed now was some sleep before the night's work would bring her immortality. Clinging to Jennifer for support, she steered the girl to the bedroom and brought her to the bed.

  "Are you all right, Gram?" Jennifer asked, looking at her grandmother's tired face.

  "Yes, dear," Eleanor answered. "I just need a nap. Come lie down with me for a while." As Jennifer sat on the bed, Eleanor took her face in her hands and kissed her forehead. With the kiss, she slipped into Jennifer's mind. Later, she in structed, you'll know when, I want you to take your mother home and call the doctor No matter what else happens, you must be sure that she gets to the doctor's. Eleanor gave the command a little kick, burying it deep in Jennifer's mind, and laid the girl beside her on the bed.

  "Sleep now," she said softly, her arm around Jennifer's shoulder. "Sleep," she crooned, and felt herself drifting off into a sleep alive with dreams of memories.

  `Another heart attack," Dr. Phelps says to her. They are standing outside Edmund's bedroom. "I might have to put him in the hospital, but I don't think he should be moved right now Tomorrow, after he's rested and is a little stronger; we'll see how he's doing." Dr. Phelps reaches in his black bag and produces a small brown pill bottle.

  "This is a more powerful nitroglycerin. He's to take one whenever he has pain in his chest or arms. I've given him morphine, which should help the pain for a while. If he doesn't get overexcited or do anything strenuous, and takes his medicine, he should be fine. But knowing your brother, you'll have to watch him like a hawk.