Grimm Memorials

by R. Patrick Gates

  Too soon he heard the sizzle of Timmy Walsh's private parts in the burning bowl and smelled the wretched stench of human flesh melting. When the oven door opened, he felt a blast of heat from it and heard the screech of the metal door as the witch slid Timmy's destroyed body into the oven and closed the door. He watched as the witch walked around the circle, sprinkling Timmy's ashes and bits of charred bone over the other boys' burnt remains.

  As she finished, the witch approached the cage, her bare feet slapping against the stone floor. Jackie raised himself cautiously from his crouch.

  The witch retrieved the door key from the nail on the side of the podium where she'd also hung the pocket watch. She slipped it into the lock, and turned it. Jackie readied himself to lunge against the door as soon as she stepped inside. She pushed the door open and paused a moment before entering. "Girl, bring the gurney over here," the witch growled at Jennifer.

  "Yes, Gram," Jennifer said pleasantly, and obediently pushed the gurney into the cage. The witch followed right behind her.

  Jackie slumped. Jennifer was blocking the way. He watched as the two of them picked up Jeff Best and slid him onto the collapsed gurney. Together they lifted the gurney to the upright position, and Jennifer pushed it out of the cage, the witch by her side helping her. Again, Jennifer was in the way.

  There was just the dark-skinned boy in the corner left. After warning them about the milk and the stew, the boy had lapsed into a mumbling stupor that had quickly regressed into total unconsciousness again. When the witch came for him would be Jackie's last chance to catch her off guard with the door. Theoretically, he knew if he missed this chance he'd have one more, when the witch came for him. But he was afraid that with her attention focused solely on him, he'd be unable to pull it off. And once she got her hands on him he wouldn't be able to do anything except go insane with fright.

  Whatever happened, he couldn't let the witch get her hands on him. He'd rather run and jump into the oven and burn alive than have that happen. The next time she came in the cage would have to be the moment of truth.

  Ken Vitelli walked around the long black hearse parked next to Steve Nailer's Saab and shined his light in the windows of both cars. He tried the hearse's doors and found them locked. The Saab was open but there was nothing inside that could be considered a clue.

  He left the cars and walked a ways to the back of the house, shining his light on the headstones in the cemetery and on the surrounding trees. The place looked so thoroughly deserted except for the hearse and Nailer's car that Vitelli doubted he'd find anyone inside. He glanced at his watch, noting that it was after eleven, and started back to the front of the house.

  Jackie waited and watched. Blood spurted from Jeff's body as the witch cut into him, and ran down the table's gutters to where it trickled into the collection jar. The jar was three-quarters full now with the blood of eleven children. The rest of their blood was splattered on the floor and on the witch. More sprayed on her now as she worked the knife through Jeff's body. It squirted in her face and up her arms onto her shoulders and chest. It mingled with her sweat and ran in rivulets over her skin. She licked it from the corners of her mouth and from her ashy fingers.

  Jackie watched, seeing the horror, but not seeing it; concentrating instead on counting the candles (125, 126) and keeping his mind free of everything else until the moment was right. A couple of times the witch paused from her debauchery and stared at him quizzically, but each time he weathered her gaze and kept on counting.

  She eventually went back to her grisly task, removing Jeff's heart and wolfing down half of it. She finished her portion and smacked her lips as if she'd just eaten the tastiest treat on Earth. Clots of blood and tissue slid down her chin as she took the rest of the heart to Jackie's mother.

  Again he heard the disgusting slavering and chewing. Again, he had to witness the witch removing her victim's private parts and throwing them into the smoking, sizzling bowl, fat bubbling over onto the floor, before she fed the body into the oven. For the last time, Jackie hoped, he watched the witch ring his mother with the burnt remains of a dead child.

  It was time.

  Jackie took a deep breath. His arms and legs trembled. The old witch brought the keys to the door and unlocked it. Jackie crossed his fingers. Jennifer pushed the gurney up to the cage door. No, Jen, Jackie thought, fearful his sister would get in the way again.

  The witch pushed the door open, and stood half in the doorway, motioning for Jennifer to push the gurney in. Jackie knew he couldn't let her; she'd get in the way and ruin everything.

  "Jennifer!" he screamed as loud as he could. She came to an abrupt halt, jerking her head toward him as if it were an effort to move it of her own free will. The witch, too, turned on him, but by then it was too late.

  As soon as he screamed, Jackie lunged forward, diving at the door bars, his arms outstretched. He hit the door hard with both hands, jamming his wrists, and spraining the left one badly. The door swept closed on the witch.

  She tried to get her arms up and duck out of the way, but couldn't. Two iron bars caught her full on the right side of her face and head, sending her crashing into the iron door jamb. She let out a grunt and a pained moan, then collapsed, sliding to the floor in a crumpled, blood-caked heap in the doorway of the cage.

  Jennifer Nailer took a sudden deep breath, coughed and staggered dizzily away from the cage door. Her eyelids fluttered, and her glazed, bloodshot eyes cleared. She felt as though she had been submerged in water and forced to hold her breath until it burned in her lungs, ready to explode. Now she surfaced to the real world. She gulped in air, coughed on the smoke and the foul odor in the room and tried to steady herself. She looked down. In the doorway of the cage lay an old, blood-drenched naked woman.

  Where's Grammy? was her first thought, followed closely by: Where the hell am I?

  "Jennifer!" a familiar voice cried.

  She looked up and saw her brother lying on the cage floor, holding his wrist as if in pain. "Jackie," Jennifer asked in a confused voice. "Where's Grammy? Where's the gingerbread house?"

  "Jen," he cried, getting to his knees. "Are you okay?"

  "I think so," she said tentatively, unsure if she really was. She felt so strange; like she had just woken from a beautiful dream of flowers to find herself standing in a pile of garbage. Just a moment ago, she was positive her grandmother had been by her side, healthy and sane again after all these years. Jennifer had been helping Grammy bake in the kitchen of the gingerbread house.

  How she suddenly got in this hot, smokey, and horriblesmelling dungeon, she didn't know. The gingerbread house was gone, Grammy was gone; in her place was this grotesque, bloody, apparently dead, white-haired old woman on the floor. It made her nauseous just to think about it.

  Jackie got to his feet, still holding his wrist, and walked to the doorway. He never took his eyes off the old woman on the floor. "We've got to get out of here, Jen," he said in a half whisper.

  "But where's Grammy? How did I get here?" Jen asked again, panic showing in her voice.

  Jackie started to answer her, then stopped and stared at the old woman again. He stepped cautiously closer to her crumpled body lying in the doorway. He jumped over her quickly, landing and dancing away from where she lay as if it were a pit infested with spiders. He ran to Jennifer and burst into tears as he wrapped his arms around her. "Jen! I'm so glad you're all right," he blubbered. "I was so scared. . " he carried on.

  "What happened to Grammy?" Jennifer pleaded suddenly with him, grabbing his shirtfront with both hands.

  "She's not here," Jackie sobbed and tried to calm down. "She was never here. It was the witch," he explained through intermittent tears and hitches of breath. He looked in the direction of the old woman on the floor when he said witch. "She had you in a spell."

  "A witch?" Jennifer said, doubting if she had heard him correctly. "A spell?" Jackie nodded. Jennifer started laughing.

  "Don't laugh!" Jackie hissed. "You t
hought Grammy was living in a gingerbread house in the woods"

  Jennifer stopped laughing. It was true. The nausea in her stomach did loop to loops with the realization of it. She had visited Grammy in a gingerbread house! She had believed that Grammy had built the house just for her and Jackie!

  Jennifer staggered from the impact of the impossibility of those things. Grammy was in a nursing home in Boston, crazy with Alzheimer's disease. And had she really thought that a house could be built of gingerbread? The memory of Grammy throwing a Halloween party for a bunch of Jackie's friends and of her and Gram baking something blurred in her mind, becoming vague with disbelief.

  Had she really done those things?

  Somewhere beneath those benign memories, dark ones lurked, pushing their heads up to the light of her conscious mind just long enough for her to catch a fleeting glimpse of them. Images of monster bears and blood-soaked children and the faint sound of screaming showed their faces and then were submerged again by her mind's defenses. Moving in a daze, Jen slowly put her arms around her brother.

  He looked up at her, eyes streaming with tears. "Jen, it was awful. The witch killed everybody, cut them up, and ate their hearts. She burned them in the oven and you helped her!"

  Jennifer glanced at the furnace with its huge, smoking hot door against the wall, then at the unconscious boy lying in the back corner of the cage. Where had all the boys gone? Had she really done what Jackie said? The memories flitted before her mind's eye, showing her the horrible truth. She had helped this bloody old woman lift the bodies of the boys in the cage and then had stood by as if watching a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey while she mutilated them.

  Another memory rose and Jennifer whirled around, afraid of what she might see; those fears were confirmed. Her mother was lying naked, tied to a reclining chair, her chest and stomach painted with bloody symbols, blood and gobs of raw tissue hanging out of her mouth and running down her chin.

  "We gotta get out of here," Jackie said urgently, grabbing her hand. He gave a fearful look back at the witch. "We gotta get out of here before she wakes up "" He started for the door, pulling her by the hand, but she wrenched her hand free of his and ran back to her mother's side.

  "Mom, wake up!" Jennifer whined through tears. She shook her mother's arm and patted her face lightly, but the only movement her mother made was to open her mouth. Jennifer thought her mother was trying to talk, but quickly realized she was doing something else. Her teeth were blood-stained and dirty with trapped shreds of raw meat. Gobs of the stuff filled her cheek pockets and she pulled it between her teeth now and began chewing.

  Jennifer thought she was going to be sick. The foul odor of her mother's breath almost made her faint and she had to move away from her.

  "The witch did something to her," Jackie said in a nervous whisper behind her. "But we gotta get outta here and get help before the witch wakes up "" He grabbed her hand again.

  That was when Jennifer saw her stepfather near the wall by the window. She let out a short, high-pitched gasp, then lost her breath completely as though she'd been punched hard in the stomach. She hunched over, stomach hitching as she tried to inhale and couldn't.

  Steve's eyes were wide open, staring intently at the floor. His lips were pulled back into a rictus snarl. His skin had turned blue-green with large dark purple bruises on his neck, face, and back. As she looked at him, unable to breathe, unable to take her eyes off him, Jennifer noticed something else, too. There were tiny dots on his face and naked back and arms; and the dots were moving. The cracks in the floor around his face and body had all erupted with tiny anthills as a legion of red ants lay claim to the body. They swarmed over him, and built a city around him.

  She saw one crawl across his open eyeball and felt the room spin and her legs go limp.

  "Oh God!" she finally croaked out-it sounded more like a burp than words-and took a huge breath. "Oh God," she repeated a little louder, tears streaming down her face. "Oh God!" she screamed again, backing away, shaking her head.

  "Come on!" Jackie bawled at her. He was crying and frantic to get out of there. He yanked on Jennifer's arm with all his might. Like a rag doll, Jennifer let herself be led out of the crematorium.

  Deputy Vitelli breathed through his nose, no longer able to stand the awful stench of whatever was coming out of the Grimm Memorials' chimney. He approached the front door cautiously, trying to be as quiet as possible. He peeked in the small round windows in the top of the massive double front doors, but they were too grimy for him to see anything. Holding his flashlight with his left hand, he tried the door with his right. It was locked. He moved along the porch and noticed the first window was open. Keeping his back against the wall, he slipped to the window, crouched and looked inside.

  The heavy drapes blocked his view. Carefully, he lifted the nearest side open and peered inside. There was a large piece of furniture near the window, but he could see little else beyond. He flashed his light inside and felt his throat become a little more dry as he looked at the moldy, velvetlined coffin. The room was full of them. They smelled like rot.

  That's perfect for this place, Vitelli thought with a silent, nervous chuckle. He wondered, if he knocked at the door, would Lurch answer it? Suddenly that didn't seem so funny. For a moment he considered calling in some backup, but then chided himself for being a coward. If this was going to be a big breakthrough in the investigation, he wanted it all for himself so he could prove to the sheriff and the other jokers at the station that they were wrong about him.

  Ducking his head and holding both sides of the drapes open, Deputy Vitelli stepped over the sill and into the room. The smell inside was worse than what it had been from the window. It was heavy and cloying, almost liquid in his nostrils. He blew the smell out and covered his mouth with his hand. There was more than just the smell of mildewing fabric and rotting wood here. There was a smell that Vitelli had experienced only once before: the time they'd pulled that mutilated kid from the river. It was the smell of rotting human flesh.

  Vitelli crossed to the door, a cold sweat capping his brow. He grabbed the doorknob and pulled it open. A moment later he flashed his light out into the entrance hall, noting the marble podium and the doors marked Crematorium and Chapel. He slipped through the door and crept to the marble podium. There was a door to his left, but the stench of wasted flesh came strongest from the door marked Chapel.

  He started toward it when he heard a sound that froze him. It was a loud crack. A moment later there was another one. They were coming from behind the chapel door. He noticed it was open just a bit.

  Vitelli freed his .38 from his holster and clicked off his flashlight. He returned the latter to his belt, and held the former upright in the ready-to-fire position as he crept to the chapel door. Holding his pistol with both hands, Vitelli nudged the door open with his knee. The sickening smell of death rolled over him and he gagged. He pulled out his handkerchief with his left hand and held it over his nose and mouth.

  The room was dimly lit by waning moonlight. He immediately saw two tall windows with no curtains on them, but could see little else. There was another sound as he stood in the doorway. It was the sound of wet lapping, and a snuffling sound. Vitelli stepped into the room, wincing at the stink the handkerchief was doing little to relieve, and looked around. The sound was coming from the other end of the room, to his left. Something huge hung from the ceiling at that end that looked like a weirdly placed cross beam.

  A loud crack from the darkness ahead made Vitelli jump. There was something moving at the foot of a long, high table beneath the cross beam. Two eyes glowed at him for a mo ment as he moved sideways through the room. He stopped. He stood, not moving a muscle, and stared in shock at the horror before him.

  A dog the size of a lion was crouching over something hideous. The dog lowered its massive head and took what appeared to be a human rib cage in its mouth, cracked several ribs open, and began lapping out the marrow.

  Vitelli wanted
to puke. His eyes, grown accustomed to the dark, showed him the rest of the dog's meal, or what was left of it. Both legs were gone except for two stumps of bone hanging off the hips, and only one arm remained attached to the shoulders, which still had chunks of rotting flesh clinging to them. One side of the arm had been ripped clean of meat down to the bone. The hand had been chewed off and lay a few feet away, palm up, fingers curled slightly, as if waiting for a handshake. The ribs the dog was working on were still attached to a backbone at the end of which was the gnawed remains of a human head. The face was turned, as if looking back at Vitelli. The eyes were gone, hollow black holes shown through the leathery skin of the upper part of the face. The bottom part, everything below the nose except the upper teeth, was gone, also torn away. Vitelli recognized the jawbone, with its bottom set of teeth, lying above the head. The rest of the head was wasted flesh, the ears gone, skull showing through over the eyes and at the crown. Vitelli couldn't tell who it was by looking at the face, but the blond hair was the same color as Roger Eames's, as were a pair of glasses lying nearby.

  The dog, too involved in cracking open the ribs, hadn't seen him yet. Sweating every move, he slowly backed up. As he did, he looked up at the weird cross beam and almost screamed. The flyblown corpse of a child was nailed to the beam, which Vitelli realized was an upside-down cross. The blackened, wasted face stretched in an eternal shriek and long blonde hair still hung from the shriveled scalp.

  Sickened, he pulled his eyes away. His foot hit the doorsill and he backed over it, through the door to the entrance hall again. With images of himself on the nightly news telling how he single-handedly captured the ring of childnappers, he fought the urge to call for reinforcements.

  Vitelli backed to the stairway and looked up, seeing nothing but shadowy hallways leading away in two directions from the second-floor landing. Behind him was a door with a short corridor leading to another room. He slipped quietly down the corridor and into the kitchen.