The Mortuary

"The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window." John Shummer started in a hushed husky voice. He was leaning forward on a log. His stomach pulling on the tight flannel around his protruding gut. His beard thick and wiry looked like copper in the light of the fire. His eyes glistened in the dancing light of the campfire. Henry, Jessica, and Timothy Shummer huddled together on the other side of the fire. One large, quilted blanket wrapped around their tiny shoulders combined them into one mass of vibrating child.

On the left Henry, the oldest, grinned with the cocky shit eating grin of every eleven-year-old boy to ever walk the earth. He was tall for his age and lanky. His limbs looked too long for his frame and made any attempt at grace impossible.

Jessica right in the middle, both in age and in position, held the straight-faced determination of all tom boys showing just how tough they can be. She was a foot shorter than Henry and just as thin. Her boney chest caved out making her look like a bird.

Little Timmy the last and youngest. He wasn’t as thin and lanky as his siblings but the way his torso gapped out of his spiderman tee shirt indicated that soon he would take on the long lanky appearance of his siblings. He peered through glasses that made his eyes combine fright and wonder into a strange mix of glassy watery amazement.

“Your aunt Kathrine and I had just moved in the cabin that very day. We had a matt on the floor and that candle in the window. A mountain of blankets kept out the creeping autumn cold. We bought the place for a steal. The relator wouldn’t even come out to show us the property.” John grinned from ear to ear. His eyes swept over each child. “Do you children know why the relator was such a yellow belly?” He took in each face studying their reactions.

Henry spoke up first. “Because the cabin is supposed to be haunted right?” Henry grinned again but leaned in closer to his siblings. “But he is a scaredy cat right uncle John? There are no real ghosts, just stories to scare babies.” He laughed and glanced over at Timmy. “Like you Timmy, scared of the dark just like a baby.” Timmy’s lip curled, and his face scrunched. He sucked in a breath getting ready to defend himself as a big boy.

John cut him off “Now. That’s not true there are plenty of reasons to be scared of the dark. Out in the dark, in the night anything can happen.” A wolf howled in the darkness as if in exclamation. Timmy yelped in surprise. Jessica threw her hands over her face. The tough look of determination jumped off her face and was replaced by fear. Eyes wide and arms scrunched she looked regressed back to five years old. Pressing tightly into her big brother. Henry was electric eyes darted this way and that. His skin crawled and his arms constricted pulling his siblings as close as he could.

“Now then,” John chuckled. “Your aunt and I had come to renovate the cabin into our perfect home. She was just a month into pregnancy with our boy Tom. He would have been your cousin.” Jessica spoke up, her face carefully composed into that tough girl shell. “We have a cousin?” John squirmed in his seat. His face fell hard and cold. “No, you would have had a cousin, but the baby and your aunt had an unfortunate accident.” Timmy looked up over his falling glasses and questioned. “Is that why we have never met you before?”

John thought for a second weighing each child's reaction. “I suppose that would be one of the reasons I have stayed away, but enough questions. Who wants to hear the rest of the story.” All three children enthusiastically chanted that they very much wanted to hear the rest of the story.

“Alright. We moved in that night and everything seemed to move inside the house. The boards squeaked and the windows rattled. We could hear little creatures stirring in the wood's outside and the wind whistled underneath the door and through every nook and cranny it could find.

We picked this place because it was in a perfect location. Surrounded by forest and just a few miles from town. In fact, we are about less than a mile from where the cabin still sits. We heard the stories about it being haunted. We say the tabloid articles about the old owner of the cabin.” Timmy raised his hand as if he was in school afraid of interrupting the teacher. John nodded and Timmy asked, “What is a tab owied?” “Tabloid” Henry corrected with a sneer and emphasizing heavily on the ‘L’. John ignored Henry’s condensing correction and spoke to Timmy. “A tabloid is like a paper that sells made up stories instead of stories that have proof to back them up.” “Like a man married an alien.” Henry chimed in grinning again.

“Yes, like that. A story that grabs people’s attention regardless of how true the story is or not. Now back to the story and no more interruptions. The tabloids did get one thing right. The cabin used to be an old mortuary.” John saw Timmy raise his hand again and waved him off. “A mortuary is where dead people get fixed. They dress them up all nice and pump them full of fluids to keep them fixed. They wash’em up and paint them up and stick them in a box for people to gawk at until they stick them into the ground to forget about’em. That was what the old owner of the place did. He fixed up the dead so the towns people could gawk at them one last time.

The basement was still fixed up to do just that when we moved in. There were old clogged drains in the floor to get rid of the blood and fluids he would suck out of the bodies. Metal tables secured to the floor where he worked. Big metal cabinets in the walls where he would store them. Everything was just as he left it when we moved in. We hear the town talk. The whispers that the old man liked his job a little too much. That he would run out of dead people to work on so he caught a few living folk to practice his craft. The kids in tow used to say you could hear the muffled cries of people with their mouths wired shut in the nearby woods at night. Well, we knew all the stories but paid no mind. Small towns talk like fish swim.

Nothing happened that night or for even the next week that we started rooting around the place. Fixing the roof and tearing out the old kitchen, but in the middle of the second week I was out of town getting supplies. Your aunt was in the kitchen knocking down the last few cabinets when she swears, she heard the loudest ear-splitting scream. She dropped the mallet she was using and whipped around. She said the sound seemed to come right up from the basement. Now your aunt was not the type of person to run tail between her legs. So, she grabbed the mallet and trudged down the creaky wooden steps and stepped into the old mortuary room. She looked under the tables and pulled out all the drawers. Everything was spick and span.

She told me the story about it later that night while we lay in bed. Blushing at how silly it all seemed later, but she really expected to see a woman down there. Blood replaced with formaldehyde, jaw wired shut, and thick sticky make up dripping down her dead face. I had rolled to her and laughed. I knew she was scared but the image was just so preposterous I could not hold back. I could see the hurt on her face and immediately felt like the biggest asshole in the world.

She forgave me and the days passed. We forgot all about the incident and made a lot of progress with the house. The kitchen was nearly complete and we had started work on the bathroom. I was disconnecting the pipes to take out the bathtub when I heard a bubbling sound coming from the skin. I figured the line had backed up and the water drain was backing up into the sink. I glanced into the skin when I finished disconnecting the line and saw a great big black ball sticking up out of the sink. It took me a second to realize it was hair. A big black thick wet wad of hair sticking up right out of the sink. The sight was nauseating but it never occurred to me that I could have gotten some gloves.

I grabbed a hold of it as close to the drain as I could manage and pulled. It moved an inch out of the drain and a pungent and repulsive vinegar like odor crashed into me like a wave. I lost my grip of the ball and covered my nose with both hands getting a sticky substance on face from the ball of hair. My face contorted and my stomach rolled. I glanced back at the hair and noticed blood seeping through the sides of hair that had pulled loose from the drain. I lost the control I had on my lunch and shot it as close as I could at the toilet. It splashed all over the seat and painted the lid. Dripped onto the floor around it. The vinegar small combined with the smell of my previously digesting lunch and I spent the next twenty minutes expelling everything my body had every taken into it. I swear I could taste the orange birthday cake my grandmother made for my fifth birthday. It all came flooding up in wave after wave of explosive expulsion.

* * *

Terry Shummer unlocked the door and walked into his three-bedroom colonial just on the edge of the forest where three small children were huddled in complete shock and awe. It was dark and cold in the house. Which wasn’t cause for alarm because his kids should have been in bed for at least an hour for the time it was. He closed the door quietly and stripped out of his work boots and placed his jacket on the bench next to the door. He was a tall and lanky man just like his children. He had large hands and a thin protruding chest. Thin facial hair speckled his cheeks. He flicked on the lights and made his way into the kitchen to grab a sandwich before he checked on the children. He flicked on the kitchen light and grabbed for the fridge door, that was placed on the left right inside the opening to the kitchen.

He had it half open before his fatigued eyes focused on the piece of paper stuck to the door by one of the many magnets that occupied the space. He closed the door and grabbed the paper. He read the word three times. His brain refused to understand what the words meant in that order. He could understand the separate words. Dear, Daddy in Jessicas neat scrawl made perfect sense. His daughter had left him a nice note to read after he got home, but the rest of the note was impossible. It just... It couldn’t... The words... Uncle, Woods, Cabin. The refused to register in his mind as a coherent sentence. The letter dropped out of his hands and suddenly his legs were in motion before his brain even caught up. He was out of the door and running towards his truck before another thought entered his brain. * * *

John Shummer was in the middle of another ghastly story of his adventures in the cabin when Timmy felt something tapping against his ankle that had pulled loose of the blanket. He bent over and scrapped up the piece of paper. Pulling it up through the blanket and glancing over the headline. The words weren’t hard to decern even at his young age, but the picture underneath the title made a sick cold fear crawl up his spine. He glanced up at John and his body started shaking uncontrollably. He clenched the paper in his fist and shoved it into Jessica’s lap. She looked down and glanced at the paper, ready to protest until she saw the sheer terror on her brother's face. She glanced down at the paper and smoothed out the crinkled edges. She read the title and her eyes passed over the picture and froze. A rising horror gripped her chest and before her scream could pass over her lips a crash suddenly ripped through the trees.

* * *

Terry shummer burst through the trees a shot gun in his hands and yelled at the top of his lungs “THAT’S NOT YOUR UNCLE”. His heart stopped as he came across an empty clearing fire still smoldering and a discarded blanket on the ground. His heart dropped. His stomach gripped tight. Panic rising was rising in his throat. He turned west and was about to start running when he saw a piece of paper on the ground next to the blanket. The edges were crumpled and sticky with sweat. He pulled it apart and read the headline Crazy local Mortician accused of killing locals escapes from prison. The picture under the headline showed a thick rugged man in a flannel shirt and a long coarse beard that strangely looked like copper wire on his face. In a smaller text underneath the picture, Local man John Summer was found dead inside an old mortician's cabin with his wife Kathrine Shummer. Their blood had been drained and their mouths were found wired shut. The suspect at this time is local mortician Larry Klinder who fled custody last week.

Terry sprinted west towards the old cabin. The branches ripped into his face slicing the delicate flesh of his cheeks. He couldn’t feel them. All he could feel is the pumping in his legs and the crushing weight in his chest. A light parted in the trees up ahead and he pushed harder against the protest in his calves. He got into the clearing and sprinted up to the door panting. He ripped it open the old wood protesting in a low groan as it popped open. He could hear screaming from the basement and his hand tightened around the gun still in his hand. He rushed for the door and could hear Jessica pleading “Don’t, please, please don’t.” The terror in her voice shot red hot beats of anger into his throbbing head. He creaked open the door to the basement and started down the stairs with the gun loaded and his finger on the trigger. He peered around the ceiling to the basement and between the railing boards and saw his two youngest kids in the corner. Zip ties around their hands and feet. Backs pressed up against each other. His oldest was on one of the metal tables with his hands bound to the edges with the same zip ties. The man who pretended to be his brother was turned around facing a big clunking machine with tubes coming out of it and the awful putrid stick of formaldehyde. He trained the gun on the man as he slowly descended the steps.

The two youngest children started to scream around the white cloth that had been placed in their mouths as they saw their father coming down the stairs. They whipped from side to side trying to get out of the bonds. The man turned around from the machine small knife in hand and smiled as he saw Terry pointing a gun at him. His grin took up his whole face and he opened his mouth. “Well, well if it isn’t th...” the words cut off. The bang of the gun rang in the small, closed space. A pool of blood exploded in Larry’s abdomen. He grunted and hunched forward gripping his stomach. The knife clanged on the floor and he gurgled out a grunted cry of surprise and pain. The kids screamed as he slipped to the floor a puddle of blood growing under him.