Short Stories

These are just a few of my most recent short stories. Most of them nearly thirty years ago were typed out, the soft copies of which no longer exist. These, of course, are not all of the short stories I have written in the last few years, but the ones I feel are most interesting.

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A SYMPATHY ARRANGEMENT

    The Daley-Palmer Funeral Home and Crematory had stood at the end of the dead-end street of Woodlawn longer than anyone in town could remember. Railed off along the front walk by a white fence made of chain stanchions, the railing trailed down the front drive where several hearses languished dustily in the summer heat. The original grand structure had burned down in the early 20th century, and its brick replacement stood in sharp contrast to the quaint wooden houses which lined the rest of Woodlawn Street, itself an entrance into the familiar (yet disconcerting) grounds of the Eternal Rest Cemetery and Mausoleum. If you were unlucky enough to live in that part of town, it was said, backyard digging often turned up long-buried gravestones from the original cemetery which had been moved from its original location the century before. It was something the locals rarely discussed but occasionally whispered about as they milled about in the gravel parking lot of the cemetery after funerals, shuffling their feet in the humidity and flies.

    Despite the gossip, the Daley and Palmer families ran a tidy business, and every spring tulips would appear on the front lawn to encircle the oval wooden sign which read “Daley-Palmer Funeral Home and Crematory – Estd. 1875” in a nostalgic font, the details of which appeared on a not a few business cards and church fans in the lobbies and bulletin boards of local businesses beneath a line art drawing of the structure. Stained orange glass swag lamps ran along the length of the front, white-scalloped colonnade, casting colorful shadows along the shady walk. The front of the building, which came to a dramatic triangular point spanning two floors, was entirely glass, bathing the inside of the lobby with a bright glow during the day. It was under this triangular structure that I stood one morning in a suit and tie, ringing the front bell.

    A stout woman in a floral dress soon appeared at the door, her eyes smiling at me warmly through aluminum cat’s-eyeglasses. “You must be Mr. Burnett,” she said as she reached out and shook my hand. “I’m Ova Albaugh, Mr. Daley’s secretary. He has been expecting you.” Her matronly figure leaned against the entrance. “Please, call me Tom,” I said, glancing at the tasteful lily brooch she had pinned near her ruffled lapel.

    I removed my hat and stepped inside a sculpted-carpeted, wood-paneled lobby, the air suddenly filled with the faint scent of flowers and a vaguely-familiar disinfectant. Her tan metal and Formica desk sat diagonally off to the right against a back brick wall, surrounded by ferns and mid-century Spanish-influenced swag lamps. On the desk was an avocado rotary phone, an orange plastic geranium in a Melmac vase, and a leather-bound date book filled with a flowery hand. A damask sofa sat against the brick wall beside the desk, near several armchairs clustered around carved tables upon which sat tissue boxes and poorly-hidden air freshener cones. Only the Florence Hotel over on Market Street perhaps held a cleaner, eerily-still lobby.

    “Have you been out of school long?” she said over the faint strains of piped-in Muzak. “Just a few months,” I said, jumping slightly as the door closed loudly behind us. “I really appreciate Mr. Daley giving me this opportunity, especially with me being so wet behind the ears.”

    She smiled warmly. “It’s a pleasure to have you with us. Things have been a little quiet around here now that Winfred is gone. I’m sure Mr. Daley will appreciate having someone else around, and it will do him a world of good. This has been a family business for so long. It’s nice to meet someone new.” I glanced over at a fly which had momentarily landed on a silk flower petal of a stuffy arrangement propped in one corner of the room. I glanced away, then down at my feet. “It’s a pleasure to be here.”

              

    “Why don’t you have a seat?” she said, motioning to the couch beside her desk. “Mr. Daley will be with you in a moment.” I wandered over to the sofa and sat down, my frame slightly crunching against the heavy plastic slipcover which encased the cushions. FOR NEARLY A CENTURY, DALEY-PALMER HAS PROVIDED EXCEPTIONAL CARE FOR BOTH THE DEARLY DEPARTED AND THE LOVED ONES WHO REMAIN read a brochure stuffed into the couch. SCHEDULE A CONSULTATION WITH US TODAY TO SEE IF WE CAN PROVIDE YOU AND YOUR FAMILY WITH THE CARE AND COMPASSION MONTGOMERY COUNTY HAS COME TO EXPECT SINCE 1875. Beneath this were printed the stern portraits of Misters Meredith Daley and W. L. Palmer, captioned in the familiar—if not overly sentimental—Park Avenue font. The sleepy Muzak in the room was suddenly interrupted by the sound of the phone ringing. I glanced up to catch the intense gaze of Mrs. Albaugh. Ring. Ring. Ring.

    “Aren’t you going to answer the phone?” I asked, a little amused.

    “Oh, of course,” she said, picking up suddenly and cradling the green receiver to her ear. She was wearing floral clip-on earrings studded with rhinestones. “Daley-Palmer Funeral Home and Crematory,” a voice rang out with an oddly-cheery tone.

    I glanced across the lobby through the front window looking out onto the lawn. Beyond the carved back of an avocado green Chesterfield, a vulture landed momentarily on the white metal fence which framed the front walkway. That’s odd, I thought to myself.

    “Hello?” Mrs. Albaugh’s voice suddenly brought me back into the room. “Is anyone there?” Sighing, she hung up the phone. “I do wish they would stop calling,” she said as she shook her head slightly. “This is the second time today—oh! Mr. Daley!” Her face lit up.

    Standing silently in front of me was the tall, rail-thin figure of Meredith Daley. He had been old my entire life—and that’s all anyone could remember, if the stories around town were to be believed. His crumpled black suit seemed to droop off him, and his starched white shirt appeared held only to his body by the thin bolo tie around his neck. He had been a member of St. Mark’s United Church of Christ over on College Avenue since its inception, although people could rarely remember him attending, save on Christmas and Easter morning when his unnerving figure would slump quietly in the back pew, almost as an afterthought. His tiny brick house on the perimeter of the cemetery could often be seen lit-up late into the night, through the cobwebs of the thin horizontal awning windows that concealed his shadowy figure. He had never married, had no children, and had been conspicuously missing from every photo the Clark Memorial High School 1918 graduating class had taken. Now he stood in front of me, half-stooped over, smelling of formaldehyde.

    “Mr. Daley, it’s such a pleasure to be working with you,” I said, standing up to shake his ice-cold hand.

    “It’s been over two years since my partner Winfred died. He left some mighty big shoes to fill.”

    “I’ll certainly try my best.”

    He gestured towards two grandly carved doors. “Why don’t we take a look around?” He held the door open as we both disappeared into the familiar main corridor of the funeral home. “Ova has really given this old place a feminine touch,” he said, nodding towards the opulent vestibule in front of us. Light mauve carpeting and floral wallpaper ran the length of the hall, lined by golden sconces with twisted candles and framed watercolor scenes. Pastel floral arrangements sat in front of gilded mirrors on lace-draped tables between claw-foot armchairs.

    “The main reception hall is here,” he said, pointing towards a magnificent chamber beyond a broadly arched doorway that had fascinated me since I was a small child. The peach Austrian valances that lined a picture window were accented with rococo fainting couches and crystal chandeliers. Above the doorway a golden engraved sign read Olive Palmer Memorial Hall. “The last large reception we had in here was for Winfred,” he said sadly, motioning towards an oval portrait of Mr. Palmer that hung on display next to that of his mother Olive. “Half of the town turned out. I haven’t seen the hall this packed since my father died in 1947.”

    He paused for a moment, deep in thought. “In any case, he added, “the chapel is this way.” He led me across the hall into a large mint green sanctuary lined with carved church pews and Italian tole candelabras. It had looked exactly the same my entire life, museum-like in its damask and silk perfection, permanently-scented of carnations. Here vertical slit-like stained glass windows lined the left wall, sending a cascade of late morning sunlight into the hushed chamber. Elegant white wicker baskets sat on either side of an empty bier, each adorned with a well-loved peace lily that Mrs. Albaugh watered once a week as she had for years.

    “I suppose I better show you where you’ll be working,” Mr. Daley said suddenly in the stillness. Putting his arm around me we wandered to the end of the hallway where we turned down a wooden staircase descending to the lower floor of the building. Down here the scent of floral arrangements gave way to a chemical odor that seemed to cling to the stale air around us. Brown and cream flecked tiling lined the corridor stretching ahead of us as fluorescent bulbs hummed overhead, pecked at by nagging flies. Darkened cinder block passageways stretched out on either side of the hall, seeming to disappear in a confusing maze of hospital green and brown.

    “Ova doesn’t come down to these parts much,” he said with a wry grin. Deep in the building I heard the distant clank of the radiator and the disconcerting whir of the cremation retort. When I was younger the plumes rising from the smokestacks always filled me with a feeling of dread that gnawed at me whenever I passed the building. We walked past a brick-arched room where cardboard boxes were lifted onto a belt that stood ominously in front of an oven. At the push of a button, the box was ushered into a blazing fire before disappearing behind a metal door. Workers stood dutifully nearby to spread the incinerating bones with a rake before shutting the oven door again and waiting for the process to finish.

    I stared intently as an oven door suddenly opened to reveal a glowing skeleton, contorted in the heat and spewing fumes into the body of the kiln. With the flick of a rake, the skull became detached from the rest of the body and its jaw fell open to reveal a ghastly set of teeth. I watched the eye sockets glow red in the coals before it was stirred up by a silent, bleary-eyed worker and hidden once again behind the oven door.

    “Do the bodies always stare at you like that?” I asked almost as an afterthought. “Never look into their eyes,” he said in a distant tone as his eyes gazed off in the direction of the oven. “They’ll find you in your nightmares.”

    I took a deep breath. Over the mustiness of the aging basement, I could make out the faint scent of burning human flesh, sickly sweet as it clung to my nostrils and filled me with a certain dread. Nearby eyeballs exploded in their sockets, over the hum of the ovens and the disconcerting crackling and sizzling of burning skin. Occasionally the heat would contort the muscles of the corpses as they burned, causing them to sit up violently in the neon orange glow. I wondered how many bodies over the centuries had been accidentally cremated before death took place, leaving one’s last few seconds of consciousness in terror as the oven door slammed behind them in the suffocating heat.   

    As we turned to leave, I listened to the sound of the oven door until it grew faint, and I could hear it no more; soon the warmth of the crematory evaporated into an eerie chill.    My eyes turned towards the tiled floor as I tried to put the lingering vision of death out of my mind. Soon we stopped in front of a carved wooden door with an engraved sign that read Mortuary above a dusty window.

    “I suppose this is my new home,” I said quietly as I turned towards Mr. Daley. But he was gone. Suddenly I heard the patter of footsteps echoing down the chilly corridor and the sound of a door slamming. I was suddenly alone in the passageway, listening to the hum of the lights and sounds of unidentified machinery somewhere in the basement. “Mr. Daley?” I called out into the stillness. A chill went up my spine as the overhead lights flickered off and darkness swallowed up the hallway. In the dim light coming from under the door I could barely make out the tarnished mortuary sign. I rattled the brass doorknob; much to my relief (but with unease) it opened with a creak.

    "Mr. Daley?"

    Feeling through the bluish-grey light I pushed the carved walnut door open. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by an odor of chemicals and decaying flesh. I coughed. My eyes adjusted to the dimness, revealing a dingy black-and-white penny-tiled floor. The walls, half-tiled a sickly pale green and half-plastered was broken up by several high, thin horizontal windows which did little to illuminate the murkiness. I reached for a wall switch. Suddenly the industrial light above me flickered on. To my right, white metal cabinets clung to a brown-stained backsplash in various states of disarray; chemical bottles with peeling labels were haphazardly stacked inside. Beneath this bank of cupboards, cheap pine cabinetry held up a counter stacked with several boxes of paperwork and rusting embalming powder tins. Certainly this can't be where he works, I thought to myself. Next to the window stood a white ceramic utility sink, under which several large bottles sat abandoned, spilling out under an octagonal mint green examination table.

    I cautiously walked over to the window to look out; from my view in the basement the lawn of the cemetery stretched out as far as I could see. The mausoleum rose up in the distance, surrounded by a bricked walkway lined with rose bushes. A funeral tent waved slightly in the breeze, shielding a freshly-dug grave gaping ominously in sunlight. Suddenly a spider appeared out of the corner of my eye, dropping slowly towards the windowsill on a thin strand of gossamer. I shuddered, shrinking back into the room. The door slammed behind me.

    “Mr. Daley?” I called out again, rushing over to the exit and turning the knob cautiously. I craned my head out into the dark hallway. Deep inside the building ovens hummed. Suddenly an icy chill engulfed me as an ethereal mist began to take shape in front of me. Out of the haze curling around me two thin legs formed, followed by a long torso and the mournful, empty gaze of two empty eye sockets staring at me from a withered skull. It was the face of Winfred Palmer, the same face that had stared at me from the portrait in the upstairs hall, except the fat had rotted away to reveal thin, greyish skin like leather stretched over hollow cheeks.

    “MEREDITH! YOU MUST REPENT!” a voice suddenly cried out with a raspy growl. It seemed to spew forth with a frightening anger from the apparition in front of me.

    I shrank back against the wall in horror, at the same time terrified yet eerily comforted by his familiar presence. “Mr. Palmer, it’s me! Tom Burnett! You’ve known me since I was a little boy!”

    His face softened as he turned his cheek down towards me, what remained of his desiccated brow furrowing slightly. “This is a place of evil! Atonement must be made!” His long sinewy arm stretched out towards me as he pointed a bony finger at me. “Meredith will never rest until he has paid for what he has done!”

    The figure began to twist back and forth as its otherworldly gaze stared at me from beyond the grave. Reaching out towards me with longing hands, it suddenly began to dissipate and fade off into the darkness. The hallway began to grow warmer as the figure disappeared, calling as it trailed off into the distance, “He must repent!” Then the mist vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving me alone in the dim passageway.

    For a moment, I sat slumped against the wall, unsure of what I had just seen. Should I run back upstairs? Should I leave? I sat for a moment in the darkness which seemed to throb inside my skull in the shades of black and grey of the unlit hallway. Suddenly in the darkness I saw the glowing outline of a human form; shaking my head, I tried to put it out of my mind as the distant sound of footsteps grew closer.

    Through the blackness, down the hallway, a thin silhouette shuffled towards me in the silence. From the dim light streaming through the mortuary window, I suddenly made out the doleful figure of Mr. Daley, striking a match in the blackness as the scent of sulfur filled the air.

    “You shouldn’t be down here in the dark!” he said as a lantern he held slightly above his waist began to glow. Then he turned the doorknob and lead me back into the mortuary.

    Under the buttery glow of the overhead light, he set the lantern down and reached for his white lab coat on a nearby hook. Suddenly, in the middle of the room, an invisible figure sprang up under the white sheet stretched over the examination table. As if in slow motion, the now-hollow drape fell to the floor. With a rattle the legs of the table squeaked against the tile floor of the room; startling Mr. Daley whose eyes grew wide with terror.

    Bottles of chemicals suddenly dropped one by one from their perch inside the cabinets, smashing in the stillness and filling the room with an acrid stench. I watched in horror as invisible footprints seemed to glide through pools of amber liquid, shattering shards of glass with each step. Trembling, Mr. Daley’s eyes darted from their horrified gaze on the floor to where I now stood across the room, cowering behind the table.

    Suddenly the faucet of the utility sink was turned by an invisible hand; hot water splashed in the hollow basin. As the steam filled the room, the window fogged over, blocking out what little sunlight remained. REPENT, an invisible command read, appearing slowly, painstakingly, letter-by-letter on the misty pane, scratched as if by a child’s unseen hand. Suddenly the drawers on the cabinets began to open one-by-one along the length of the wall until the drawer next to Mr. Daley wriggled free from its encasement and smashed onto the floor with a loud crash.

    “MEREDITH, REPENT!” A loud booming voice called out, shattering the chaos in the room with a commanding growl.

    “Mr. Daley, what did you do?” I yelled, my eyes darting towards the terrified figure now cowering behind the cabinets.

    His eyes grew wide as he turned towards me. “It was me! I was the one who burnt the building down!”

    “But why?” I yelled over the loud rattle of the cabinet doors which began shaking violently on their hinges.

    “It was a mistake!” he cried out. “I was just an apprentice working for my father! We couldn’t keep up with the influx from the Spanish flu epidemic. It decimated the town. Boxes upon boxes of corpses. So, one evening when my father left for the night, I piled as many as I could into the crematorium and set them on fire. The heat from the bodies caught the roof on fire and burnt the building down! For sixty years they’ve haunted me because they weren’t laid to rest!”

    Suddenly the industrial lamp began to sway and flicker overhead.

    “They’re here! They’re all still here!”

    “Who’s here?” I yelled, watching as rusted tins of embalming powder toppled over.

    “The bodies! I bury them but they keep coming back!”

    Suddenly something flew through the long, thin basement window, sending shards of glass flying into the room. I looked down at the floor to where the object now lay abandoned. To my horror it was a human skull, glowing and flickering as if lit by an internal ember. Flames skimmed through each puddle of liquid on the floor, catching the next one alight as it curled upwards towards the ceiling. “MEREDITH!” a menacing voice bellowed from the center of the blaze.    From out of the skull a mist began to emerge, slowly taking on a human form. Legs and arms curled out of the smoke, followed by the opaque torso of a long-dead corpse. Suddenly a familiar face appeared, sunken and desiccated with gaping eye sockets. As it began to speak the terrifying gaze of Winfred Palmer took shape in the smoke. “YOU MUST ATONE FOR WHAT YOU DID!” it yelled, as his jaw fell slack and to the floor.

    “Winfred!” Mr. Daley shrieked. “It can’t be!”

    The flames slowly engulfed the center of the room, spilling out towards the cabinets which ran up towards the water-stained tiled ceiling. As the blaze grew, ethereal human-like shadows rose up from the center, calling out and moaning as if rising up from the depths of hell. Bony, transparent arms reached out from the fire, grasping at Mr. Daley’s trembling figure as growing flames reflected in his wide eyes.

    “Mr. Daley, we’ve got to get out of here!” I cried as I reached for his hand and pulled him towards the door. The inferno lapped at our feet like a vivid wave of scarlet. Bounding down the hallway the lights popped and exploded behind us as we ran, casting eerie flame-like shadows against the cinder block walls. As we rounded the corner the staircase loomed in front of us into the distance; I turned to look back at the passageway behind us. Winfred’s wistful, mournful gaze stared back at us from the flames, his empty eye sockets calling us from beyond the grave. “Repent!” a voice called from the shriveled skull, ringing in our ears as we reached the steps leading up to the first floor. As we reached the lobby we called out for Mrs. Albaugh, frozen in fear as flames rose up from the depths of the basement. “Mrs. Albaugh, run!” I said as we ran out a back door. Behind us disembodied voices called out from the bowels of the funeral home, tangling with the breeze and the distant peel of church bells. Suddenly our faces were warmed by the late morning sun.

    Ahead of us lay Mr. Daley’s orange brick house along the back of the property, half-sinking into a hillside covered with coltsfoot and wild violets. In a shady patch that was more dirt than grass, columbine sprouted at the edge of the foundation, trailing off towards a sidewalk that had slowly been reclaimed by ryegrass over the decades. In the windowsills past panes long-faded to a milky-white in the sun, colorful bottles sat among magazines curled and bleached by the passage of time. Wriggling among the dust and the faded tomes, maggots laid scattered among the trash like squirming grains of rice.

    On the left of the property, a wrought-iron porch railing stood on either side of the door, shaded by a white metal awning painted with burgundy stripes. I stopped to rest in the lee of the building, catching my breath beside a flower pot filled with long-dead blooms. Behind me the front door stood slightly ajar, held open by a patent-leather shoe attached to a rotting foot. I gasped. A putrid, sickly-sweet odor began to fill my nostrils as I peered through the scalloped oval window, past the buzz of flies that nipped at the inside screen. I slowly reached for the handle, pulling open the lid of the house-sized coffin that had entombed the unburied bodies of the Eternal Rest Cemetery. Upon opening the door, the house seemed to exhale the gasses long-trapped inside the brick tomb, filling the late morning with the putrid scent of decay.

    There among the dusty pedestrian furniture of a bachelor lay dozens of corpses, peeling and turning purple in the heat. “I bury the bodies but they keep coming back!” His words now buzzed in my head as my wide eyes took in the carnage that lay in front of me. Once thin bodies dressed in suits and delicate tulle dresses now lay bloated and rotting on the floor. Eyeballs, popping out from their sockets seemed to stare vacantly towards the ceiling, tongues dark and protruding from mouths gaping and twisted in sinister grins. Skulls were visible through tufts of matted hair, gnawed at endlessly by bugs, which had begun to nest in the decaying tresses. Limbs of dozens of corpses lay contorted in the heat, curled upwards as they began to deteriorate in the cloyingly sweet air which seemed to cling to the back of my throat. Suddenly a familiar face stared at me through the tangle of bodies. There, slumping against a corner in the same suit I had seen years earlier in a polished coffin, were the mummified remains of Winfred Palmer.

    Terrified, I ran out of the house, slamming the rusted white screen door behind me.       

    “You’ve got to atone for what you’ve done—”

    Mr. Daley’s eyes grew wide with terror. “Tom, I—” he stammered, holding his arms up as if to fend off an invisible enemy.

    I walked slowly towards the freshly-dug grave in front of us, my eyes fixed on the afternoon sun as it reflected off a nearby shovel. “It’s the only way, Mr. Daley,” I said as I pushed him into the awaiting abyss. “Tom! No!” he yelled, his arms grasping at me in vain. I began to shovel dirt into the chasm, watching as it speckled his face with black.   

* * *

    Sometimes at night I lay awake in my bed remembering the frantic screams of Mr. Daley, and the terrifying cries that only stopped when the dirt slowly filled his mouth and covered his head, until at last all that remained of him was dirt and crystals of sand, glistening in the sunlight.

THE END