Fourth year. Still maintaining my record of completed NaNos without completed novels. It is said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So, without further ado…
This year I went horror comedy. This proved to be a more accurate description than I’d have liked.
Habeas Corpse
By C. A. Bridges
chapter one: the surprise witness
“Dying is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing to do with it.”
–Somerset Maugham
Grave-robbing ain’t nearly as much fun as they make it out to be.
Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!” Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!”
Also not quite as creepy-cool, at least not when there’s a small crowd around with half of ‘em in law enforcement. Just takes the coolness factor right out of it.
Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!” Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!”
“How deep did you guys bury him, anyway? Do we need to get the backhoe out here?”
“Same as everyone else, deputy. Six feet under, just like the TV show. Don’t worry, Earl and Jimmy are almost there,” said the voice in the reassuring tones of someone who wasn’t standing in a five-and-a-half-foot hole.
Earl – which is me — was almost dead himself if my aching back was any judge. The spotlights shining down at us brilliantly lit up everything in front of me, which at the moment was a pile of dirt and Jimmy’s butt crack. I don’t know about Jimmy but the reason I was working so fast was because whatever was left in that coffin had to be a damn sight prettier than Jimmy’s south end. There was a car battery and some jumper cables I had thought were there to run the lights but they seemed to be doing just fine without.
Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!” Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!”
Somewhere above me I could hear people pacing about. Police Deputy Step Moody was crouching at the edge, probably waiting for something to burst out so he could shoot it. The weasely guy whose name I can never remember that works at the graveyard was keeping an eye out to make sure we didn’t leave a divot. Judge Califer was leaning on the gravestone looking appropriately grim for someone standing around an open grave at ten minutes to midnight on a cold and foggy night.
And Aunt Peggy was clutching her purse and walking around the gravesite in a wide circle. Dunno why she was so worked up, this was all her idea and it ain’t like she’s never seen a dead body before, although I grant you she usually sees ‘em in more clinical surroundings.
Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!” Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!”
There was this man named Carl Brunswick, see, and he came up all stiff and suicided in the woods about a week ago. Terrible blow to his wife and son, namely because of the lost insurance payoff. Something less of a blow to his circle of friends and relatives, assuming there were enough to form a circle, and something more like karmic justice to everyone else.
Every town, no matter how small, has to have certain personages in it if it expects to be taken seriously and allowed to eat at the Big Cities table, and the citizens of Jackson Springs proudly did their part. There’s the sweet church ladies that gossip and twitter like birds on a fence. There’s the town drunk, a job I considered as a likely career goal in my younger days. I let that dream go when I realized I didn’t have the stamina for it, preferring instead to remain a talented amateur. There’s the tough-but-fair police chief, the shady lady at the bar, the kindly old preacher man, and the stuck-up, priggish bank manager what has everyone’s finances in his tight, thin-knuckled fists. That last one would be the late Mr. Carl Brunswick.
It seemed like an open and shut case, something the TV detectives would have solved before the first car commercial. Brunswick was found lying dead in the woods with a gun in his hand and a bullet in his head. There was no note, but his car was properly parked at the side of the road with the wheels turned at a 45 degree angle to the ditch the way the driving test said to do, and his topcoat was folded neatly in the front seat.
This is Florida. The fact he even owned a topcoat tells you a great deal about the man right there.
The cops took a lot of pictures, gave the body a look-see, pronounced him ready to eat, and passed him over to Ernie Joe the mortician to turn into a table display for everyone to ooh and aah over before sending him off to be plant him out here in 35 feet of hard dirt.
Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!” Chuk. Chuff. “Whouf!”
Then Aunt Peggy – Dr. Margaret Peach, M.E. — came back from her Caribbean vacation and all hell broke loose.
Aunt Peggy was what you call your applied research medical examiner, one that spent a lot more time working with dead bodies than was really required or particularly pleasing to think about. She’d gone to college for twice as long as anybody in Jackson Springs and was always taking notes and asking people questions about how long their dead relatives twitched before croaking. Then she’d take off for another week to study with a biologist in Peru or a witch doctor in Haiti, which no one really understood because there ain’t a whole lot to know about fixing a body once it’s dead and if she had plans to work up to sewing on live folks she’d never mentioned anything about it.
Two hundred years ago she’d have been burned as a witch if they could have found enough people to stand up to her. I wouldn’t count on it. When she’s got her mind set on something you can bend rebar over her stare.
I could hear Deputy Step legging it over to talk to her, but it didn’t sound like she was stopping for him. Good, he needed the exercise. I’d even give him a turn behind the shovel if he asked nice.
“Dr. Peach, is this really necessary?” he said, panting a bit. “I mean, we took pictures, we didn’t just dump him.”
I heard Aunt Peggy mumbling something but it didn’t sound like an answer to Step’s question. Step seemed to agree. “Dr. Peach, please stop and tell me why we’re defiling this here body. It wouldn’t have been right for you to examine it anyway, you know. Is that a candle?”
In front of me Jimmy stuck his shovel into the dirt and leaned on it. “More than likely she wants to see him for the same reason everyone at the reception did. To make sure he’s dead.”
I kept shoveling. “You keep a civil tongue in your head, Jim. Don’t speak ill of the dead when you’re standing on him, it ain’t polite.”
“Oh, sorry Earl, I forgot. I didn’t mean nothin’ by—“
“No sweat. Just dig, let’s get this over with.”
From the sound of it, Step was losing ground. If he wasn’t careful Aunt Peggy’d lap him. “C’mon, Miz Peach, this is a bad idea. I feel just as sorry as you do that this happened and it’s a damn shame Mrs. Brunswick won’t get a settlement. But it ain’t like she’s hurtin’, and there ain’t no good reason to keep bringing up such a horrible memory, is there?” He stopped and collapsed against the headstone. I could see his beefy arms hugging the top of it. “What’s this gonna get us, anyway?”
Aunt Peggy stopped at the foot of our hole. “Answers,” she said.
Chunk!
My shovel hit something harder than dirt and woodier-sounding than a root. It only took a few more minutes of digging and scraping to expose the coffin and then me and Jimmy nearly strained ourselves pushing it up onto the edge of the grave. If you can ever arrange your affairs so that you never in your life have to heave a big damn casket above your head in the dark, all the time wondering if a hand or something was gonna flop out and smack you in the face and make you scream like a 9-year-old girl, I suggest you do so.
When we scrambled out of the hole Step was wringing his hands, the graveyard guy was standing back like he was disassociating himself with our group in case any paparazzi caught us, and Aunt Peggy was muttering things over the coffin and rummaging in her purse.
“I gotta admit, the coffin held up nice,” I said.
Jimmy rubbed at a scratch in the finish. “It sure did. This mahogany?”
“Cherry wood,” the graveyard guy said proudly. “Holds a deep, lustrous shine longer. And look at the brass fittings! That’s quality, that is. Mr. Brunswick would be proud to rot away in a casket like this.”
“Can’t even smell a thing,” I said, although I wasn’t planning any deep breaths in the immediate future. Any second now I’d have to help carry this puppy to Aunt Peggy’s meat wagon and I wasn’t sure how airtight the $2,999 Cherry Forever Deluze Special was. At least the handles were—
With one final, unidentifiable exclamation that sounded like she was clearing a small squid out of her throat, Aunt Peggy threw the lid of the coffin open. There, before our shocked and somewhat nauseated eyes, was Carl Brunswick, or most of him. His eyes were sunk in a bit and his skin was hanging on his body, and his slack-jawed mouth had that undeniable “I’m dead” look about it. Also there was a hole in his left temple that Ernie Joe had tried valiantly to cover with makeup and whatever spackle morticians use.
“Geez,” Step said, gagging slightly. “Can’t you wait til you get him back? I didn’t need to see that.” I whole-heartedly agreed. This was a rough enough ordeal for me anyway. If Peggy hadn’t been family I’d be home watching Gilligan and being only half as nauseated. If she started cutting on anything, family or not I’d start running and not stop until I hit the snowline.
Then I wished she had started cutting on him. Instead she snapped on some rubber gloves, pulled out some small vials from her purse, and poured a couple different powders into the dead guy’s mouth, and before we knew what was happening she grabbed the jumper cables and clamped ‘em onto his tux.
There was a flash and a muffled noise like a small explosion inside a meat loaf and a smell like burning bacon, and the dead guy jerked like a Pentecostal on Sunday. Peggy hit him again. Zap! I began to seriously consider the immediate therapeutic value of vomiting. For once, Jimmy was way ahead of me.
“Dr. Peach, maybe you oughtta just come away from the body real slow, like,” Step said carefully, reaching out for her shoulder. I came up behind her and snatched the cables away before she thought about using them on Step. Jimmy came up behind me, wiping his mouth, and between the two of us we got her on her feet and away from the sizzling stiff.
“Dr. Peach—“
“God, that smell’s gonna make me barf again—“
“Aunt Peggy, maybe you should—“
“Lady, you can’t do that to our—“
“Urrhhhh.”
In every monster movie there’s a moment where you, the audience, wonder how the fifteen-foot morons up on the screen could be so mind-numbingly stupid. Don’t they know better? Don’t they hear the damn music? Can’t they see that as soon as they turn their backs the evil shambling whatsit is gonna Texas chainsaw them all to death? Let me tell you, when you’re actually in that position, when everyone around you with a pulse is in your line of sight and you can hear another voice behind you, you feel every bit as stupid as the audience thinks you are. Also, you piss yourself.
Aunt Peggy looked triumphant, a little wild-eyed, and proud. I would have paid cash money and two coupons not to turn around and see what she was looking at, but there’s this manly thing and I was surrounded, however loosely defined, by guys. I turned around.
There was Carl Brunswick, standing tall and straight. And dead. And looking at us. And dead. And standing between us and the car. Did I mention he was freaking dead?
Aunt Peggy pushed between us to take Carl by a dusty arm and lead him away. “We need to talk,” she said.
The rest of us stayed perfectly still. “Ain’t he supposed to be with Jesus or something?” Jimmy asked.
“You know my brother, Jimmy,” I said. “Always has to be doing something different.”