Death and Douglas

by J. W. Ocker

  “Okay, Douglas. These two are ours.” Mr. Mortimer handed Douglas two bags full of the personal effects. Naked come we into this world, and covered in jewelry, phones, and keys shall we return, as Eddie liked to joke. “Hold these while this gentleman and I load Mr. Carnegie and Mrs. Dallas into the van.” The attendant scowled and scratched at the naked dome of his head, but didn’t say a word as he helped Douglas’s father with the bodies.

  With Mr. Mortimer at its shoulders and the big man at its feet, they heaved one of the cadavers off its gurney on the count of three, and laid it as gently as they could onto the empty gurney from the van. They rolled it the short distance to the back of the vehicle and loaded it, afterward repeating the process with the second one. After a few signatures were exchanged and Mr. Mortimer picked up a receipt for the transaction, he and Douglas got back into the van for the long trip home. It was only nine in the morning.

  “Well, what’d you think?” Mr. Mortimer asked after they had left the grounds of the hospital.

  “It was kind of boring.”

  “Yup. That about sums up this kind of removal. Just your basic transaction. Lots of paperwork. Lots of people detached from what it is they’re transacting. Now, if this had been a home removal, it would have been a totally different experience. When we have to pick up somebody from their own house and from their own family, well, it can be the most heartbreaking part of the whole funeral process.”

  After about ten minutes of driving in silence, Mr. Mortimer spoke again. “We ready to talk about last Saturday?”

  “Those women who came by?”

  “Yes. The Guardian Angels. Of all the silly … Well, I shouldn’t say that. They’re well-meaning. Just nosy. But sorry I haven’t been able to talk to you about it yet. Been so busy. I’m always pretty busy, huh?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Did you eavesdrop long enough to get what they were saying?”

  “They didn’t think that it was … wholesome … for me to grow up in a funeral home.”

  “Yes, they didn’t seem to. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Before the murders, I would have thought they were crazy. Now? I think I understand why Chris left.”

  Mr. Mortimer sighed. “The mortician’s life is tough, whether you’re a grown-up or a kid, but especially if you’re a kid. You know so many things about death that most kids don’t have to know for many, many years, if ever. I mean, there are dead bodies a few inches behind you right now, for goodness’ sake. Most kids don’t come within miles of it growing up. Maybe they have to go to the funeral of a grandparent, but seeing a family member in the box of honor at a funeral is completely different from picking up a strange body from a hospital.

  “On top of that, after you’ve learned that death is as much a part of life as living, you’re given a lesson even you shouldn’t have to learn for a long, long time… That it’s a bit more complicated than merely being a part of life. That it’s not all loss and comfort and moving on. That sometimes, it’s terrifying, disgusting, discomforting.”

  “Why do we do it? The funeral home business, I mean.”

  “Well, partly because that’s all we’ve known. My father raised me this way, like his father raised him. Like I’m raising you. But also because we get real satisfaction from helping people.” Mr. Mortimer paused, running a finger over the top of the steering wheel. “Honestly, though, it’s mostly because we can.”

  “We can?”

  “Not everybody can deal with the dead on a regular basis. Chris couldn’t, and he’s not a rare case. It’s not even a fault that he can’t deal with death. It just is. He can’t. I can. Sky is blue, grass is green, and the sun is extremely bright.” Mr. Mortimer lowered his visor.

  Douglas drew invisible letters on the window, concentrating on not looking at his father. “What if I can’t?”

  “That is a definite possibility. Heck, my brother couldn’t. First chance he got, he jumped into a different business. He’d rather get his clothes all dirty landscaping a yard than wearing a tie and rolling a coffin around.”

  “When will I know?”

  “I don’t know. Not yet, I don’t think.” His father hit a button and adjusted the side view mirror. “But I’ll tell you this … You’re pretty amazing with it, considering how old you are. When I was your age, I only attended a funeral or visited the graveyard when my parents made me. The family business was the furthest thing from what I wanted to do on any given day. But you … Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if you took this whole thing over and made the Mortimer Family Funeral Home the biggest success it’s ever been.”

  “Is that why you’re letting me come on this removal?”

  “Sort of. You’ll need the experience eventually, but between you, me, and our two trustworthy passengers back there, I need the help right now, what with Chris gone.”

  Douglas sat back in the seat and thought for a second. “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t have to if I don’t want to, right?”

  “Don’t have to what?”

  “Take over the funeral business.”

  “No, of course not. But this is a conversation I should be having with an eighteen-year-old Douglas. Maybe even a twenty-five-year-old Douglas. Right now, we should be talking about your schoolwork, your friends, your favorite YouTube shows. You have a girlfriend yet?”

  Douglas ignored the question. “I don’t know enough about death to take over the funeral home.”

  “Sure you do. You don’t need to know much. I didn’t when I started, and I don’t even know that much now. Besides, it’s the living you need to become an expert at. I mean, sure, we serve both the living and the dead. But, between the two, the living are the more important. They’re the ones who pay the bills.” Douglas’s father grinned and elbowed Douglas across the center console.

  Douglas smiled. “So the Guardian Angels, they’re wrong?”

  “Douglas, I’ve never met two more wrong people in my life. Nice people, don’t misunderstand me, just unqualified brain donors when it comes to understanding the Mortimers.”

  “So it’s okay if … if I’m curious about the Day Killer?”

  “To a point, yes.”

  “What point?”

  “I don’t know. How about I let you know when you get there?”

  Douglas pushed on, encouraged by what his father was saying. “You saw the latest victim’s face, right?”

  Mr. Mortimer paused for a second, a strange hesitation from a man whom not an hour before walked his son into a bay filled with dead bodies. “I did,” he finally answered.

  “You saw the letter. The F? There was an F on the corpse’s face?”

  “Mr. Rivet?” As a general rule, Douglas’s father didn’t like referring to the deceased like they were objects. He always called them by their names. “There was.”

  “And an M on Mrs. Laurent and an S on Marvin?”

  “Yes, I saw them all. Why do you ask?

  “Seems important to hear it from you instead of the news or rumors at school.”

  “The whole thing is real. Too real. Or just real, I guess, no ‘too’ about it.” His father’s tone slipped into the subdued, and it seemed he was watching the road in front of them in a completely different way. Douglas decided not to disturb him, instead leaning his head against the window and letting the vibrations travel through his skull to tickle the skin of his nose. His father was the one who broke the silence.

  “You want to know a secret?” It was the only question in the history of the human race that has never received a “no.” Douglas nodded. “I wasn’t always okay with death.”

  “Really?”

  “When I was in my twenties, I had to help my father deal with a pair of young parents who had lost their daughter. Had to help him with the removal, a home one. I’ll never forget her name … Candice. The worst part was that she choked to death. On a radish. A stupid little radish. I almost gave it all up.”

>   “But you didn’t.”

  “No. I gave up radishes for a time, though. The thing is, no matter how hard it was for me, it was a thousand times harder for her parents, for her grandparents, her aunts, her uncles, her cousins, the friends of her family. I finally realized I was being selfish. These people needed help, and we were the ones that could help them.”

  “So I’m being selfish?”

  “No, no. Man, I’m really bad at this. We’re going to have to have another child so I can get a do over. You see, I was in my twenties. You’re just a kid. Besides, you have to face this doubt at some point. Better now than later, but you can do it both now and later, too. Might be better that way.” Mr. Mortimer took his eyes briefly off the road and looked at Douglas. “You know what, though? You can take it. Like I said, you’re pretty amazing at this.” He cocked his head back toward their cargo, somehow making the two bodies symbolic of the whole fate of humankind in doing so.

  Douglas didn’t feel amazing, but he did feel better.

  For more than a month, the town of Cowlmouth had been spooky for all the wrong reasons. Today, as Douglas looked down Main Street, it was spooky for all the right ones.

  Along the street, every lamppost flew a faded black banner with white puffy ghosts floating above the words HAPPY HALLOWEEN in shivering yellow letters. Cowlmouth had hung those banners every year that Douglas could remember. Shop windows glistened with gels of orange pumpkins and black cats or were painted with pointy-hatted witches and decapitated skulls with smiles friendlier than any pair of lips could achieve.

  Douglas stood outside the window of Sweeney’s Ice Cream Shoppe. It would be closing for winter in a few weeks, but today it was ready for Halloween. Inside the front display window wafted helium balloon ghosts covered in white sheets with black construction paper eyes. A small chalkboard on an easel advertised pumpkin-flavored “Eye Scream” in letters drawn out of green pumpkin vines.

  After he and his father had returned home from the removal, Douglas helped transfer the bodies to the morgue and then excused himself after he found a message from Lowell telling him to meet at Sweeney’s. Douglas was ten minutes early, but he had enough time to take in the Halloween surroundings because none of the other Ghastlies seemed to be there yet.

  In fact, it looked like they were the only ones in town who weren’t around. Since it was a Saturday—a day that the Day Killer had already crossed off of his morbid calendar—a respectable number of people walked the decorated street. Inside Sweeney’s, a long line snaked to the ice cream counter despite the cool temperatures outside. Actually, Douglas realized, he wouldn’t mind a hot caramel sundae.

  He had just started checking his pockets for money when, on the edge of his vision, he registered a strange hopping motion. Turning his head, he noticed a small white sphere, no bigger than a dandelion puff, jumping in long arcs against the sidewalk until it hit the side of the building and settled into a crevice. Douglas brushed at the hair on his forehead and walked over to pick it up. It was a human eyeball. Or, at least a small rubber ball painted to look like one. Red veins spider-webbed across the surface and a black pupil stared blindly up at him from the palm of his hand. The iris was a monstrous yellow shot through with green streaks. So maybe not exactly human. He looked around to see if he could figure out its source and saw another hopping motion. Another eyeball. He chased it down and picked it up. This one had a red iris. Neither seemed to come from anywhere.

  As he stood there with an eyeball in each hand, his own eyeballs rotating in confusion as he tried to figure out what was happening, he felt light impacts on his shoulders and head. More eyeballs were bouncing off him like gentle hailstones. Before he could look up, a deluge of rubber white eyeballs with yellow, green, and red irises cascaded down, rebounding off him and bouncing on the sidewalk and road like the eggs of a confused flock of birds.

  As quickly as the eyeball storm started, it stopped and, with the exception of a few overly energetic orbs that caught a lucky slope and careened down the street, eventually settled. Douglas could see people all down the street had stopped to stare at him. He looked up, both to avoid their gazes and to see where the eyeballs had come from. Against the sun, he saw a spindly, familiar silhouette accompanied by a second, shorter one peering over the edge of the roof.

  “There’s a ladder around back,” said the spindly figure.

  Douglas found the iron rungs bolted to the back of the one-story building. After a brief hesitation made up of one part feeling ridiculous for climbing onto the roof of an ice cream shop and one part terrifying flashback to the last time he had climbed a ladder, he ascended to the roof where he found Lowell and Audrey waiting. They weren’t even trying to control their laughter. Lowell was holding an empty plastic bucket with a garish label that read MONSTER EYES.

  “Why?” was all Douglas said.

  “The eyeballs were my idea,” piped in Lowell between guffaws. “Found ’em in the Halloween section of the dollar store down the street. As for the roof, I wish I could take credit for that one. That’s all Audrey.”

  Douglas turned to her expectantly. She answered, “It has nothing to do with dropping eyeballs on you.”

  “Yeah, it has to do with the monster,” said Lowell excitedly. “Tell him, Audrey.”

  “Well, I overheard something my dad was telling my mom …”

  “Down a staircase?” asked Douglas.

  “No, and not through a vent, either. We were all just watching TV, and I guess they thought I wasn’t paying attention to them. He said that because of the Day Killer, they’ve started new procedures at his ambulance service for what to do on crime scenes. That got me to thinking about the crime scenes themselves, that we should check them out if we can.”

  “See, told you having the daughter of an ambulance driver would come in handy. If only she were better at video games.”

  Douglas waited a few seconds for Audrey to continue until he realized that she was at the end of her explanation. “So how does the roof of an ice cream shop fit into this story?”

  “Oh. This”—Audrey raised her arms and half turned—“is one of the crime scenes.”

  “Sweeney’s?”

  “No,” said Lowell. “Sweeney’s roof.”

  “What?”

  “This is where they found Mrs. Laurent.”

  “Are you sure?” Douglas looked around. The roof was flat and had a one-foot-high wall surrounding it. Slits were cut into its base to let rainwater escape. In the middle of the roof was a large, square ventilation system, and a few pipe-like protrusions the purpose of which Douglas couldn’t even hazard a guess at, sprung up here and there.

  “Yeah,” answered Audrey. “After what my dad said, I went online and found a whole website about the Day Killer that listed all the crime scenes. I was able to cross-check them with articles from the local news.”

  “Get this, though,” said Lowell. He’d slid his phone out of his pocket and was taking pictures of the rooftop like it would disappear at any moment. “The site was from a guy in Montana. Montana! The Day Killer is making Cowlmouth famous.”

  “Infamous,” said Audrey. “Some places are even calling him the Cowlmouth Killer. Points for alliteration.”

  “But, man, oh man, is there more,” said Lowell. “There’s a bloodstain.” He pointed at a dark splotch on the inside wall at the front of the roof.

  “We think it’s a bloodstain, at least,” said Audrey.

  Douglas crouched down to look closely at it. The dark splotch was brownish and shaped a little bit like New Hampshire. It did look like dried blood. Douglas had seen enough of it on Eddie’s aprons. “So this is where Mr. Laurent would have been.”

  “Yeah, I mean, think about it. The killer was up here. Right where we’re standing,” said Lowell.

  “Killing someone,” Audrey finished soberly.

  “Or placing her here after killing her somewhere else,” observed Douglas.

  “No less grisly,” said Audrey.


  “Still … on the roof? That makes no sense.” said Douglas.

  “He’s a monster. He has his own ideas of sense,” replied Lowell, who had found an interesting angle on the stain and was celebrating by taking a dozen pictures of it. “But it actually does make sense. He’s not trying to hide the bodies. He’s carving messages into their faces. Messages are meant to be read, remember? He set Mrs. Laurent here on the roof and lowered her arm down so that anybody walking past the shop would see it. Can you imagine that? On your way over for a banana split and you see a dead hand dangling up there like a fishing line.” Lowell mimed holding one of his hands limply in the air with the other.

  “Where were the other victims found, hanging from the water tower? Lying in the arms of the founder’s statue at Town Hall?”

  “Marvin was found in a vacant lot beside Hiram’s,” explained Audrey. “It’s one of the most popular restaurants in town. Mr. Rivets was found on the side of the highway … propped up in the driver’s seat of his delivery truck.”

  “Who knows how many people drove past him thinking he was taking a break,” added Lowell.

  “We’d need a car to get to the other two spots, but this one was close, especially to your place, Douglas. Which is probably one of the reasons that your funeral home got tapped to take the first victim instead of one of the other funeral homes in town. And I guess you got the rest because you got the first.”

  “Lucky us,” said Douglas. He walked over to the edge of the roof and gazed down Main Street. “I wonder how far across town you could get just by using the roofs?”

  “I don’t know, but now that we’re up here, I kind of want to figure out a way to get to the other murder scenes,” mused Lowell. “Maybe we can convince Chris or Eddie to take us?”

  “Chris quit. Eddie might, I don’t know.”

  “Chris quit? I always thought that guy hated dead people. We should at least do more than fill Doug in on everything that he’s missed by not hanging out with us enough.” He threw Douglas a mock-stern look. “We should look around a little. See if there are any more bloodstains.”