The Mortician’s for Dinner

The mortician’s for dinner?

How could I refuse? After all, I was new to the neighborhood, and eager to make new friends.

And what an interesting line of work, that of a mortician. But would undertaking even come up? How well does a morgue mix with a meal?

Talk about work you wouldn’t bring home with you.

The mortician’s front walkway led up to a mortician’s front door that was … just about as nondescript as you can get. No creepy, gargoyle-styled door knocker … no mossy gravestones. The domicile struck me as institutional, in the suburbia sense of the word.

A sense of panic struck all through my being …

What if I was in for a drab, boring evening?

Shudder the thought.

There was a note on the door.

“Come in. Door is open.”

Some reception.

The door was in fact open, and through it I entered the mortician’s lair.

I looked and listened for a sign of my host.

Then a draft caught the door as I was closing it behind me, and the ingress slammed shut with a―

Bang!

“JUST MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE,” beckoned a voice from another room.

I followed the voice into the dwelling.

“I’M JUST FINISHING UP … IN THE KITCHEN.”

Everything was quite tidy, and the decor was quite nice. Prints of classic artworks on the walls, bright flowers in vases here and there … the mortician obviously did not bring his work home with him.

A bit of a relief, for my apprehension—but also a taste of disappointment, as I was keyed-up for more macabre fare.

I laughed at myself. What did I expect to see … a dead body?

The dining room table was set for two.

“Can I give you a hand?” I called after the mortician.

“That’s alright,” he replied from the other side of a closed door. “I’ve got things under …” he grunted, “... control.”

Something popped.

“You sure?” I said. “It sounds like you’re really working in there.”

I tried to open the door, but found it locked.

“I’m sure,” he said, “just give me a … minute. Or two.”

An odd buzzing and grinding sound came from the room on the other side of the door—the mortician’s kitchen.

An electric knife, perhaps? I’d always used an electric knife to slice roast beef … and I salivated at the prospect of some.

My hungry stomach rumbled.

“Not a problem,” I answered him. “You’re the host.”

I’ll just look around while I wait.

After a few minutes spent appreciating the artwork on display in the dining room, I worked my way into the adjoining hallway, which was itself adorned with a bevy of discerning works.

And there, while standing in that hallway, appreciating … my eyes seized upon on a door that was open, just a sliver. It was another door to the mortician’s kitchen.

I was attracted to it like a Peeping Tom to a bedroom window.

The sliver opening was wide enough to afford a full view of the white-tiled kitchen, and the mortician’s back to me as he worked, hunched over a table.

The kitchen looked to be appropriately appointed, with the typical array of appliances and utensils, pots and pans, and …

My hand flew up over my mouth, to muffle … A GASP.

I saw legs! A pair of them upon the table, protruding from where the mortician was hunched.

Legs with feet and toes at the end. Painted toenails. And a yellow toe-tag.

“Oh my God!” my thoughts screamed. “IS he working from home?”

He turned from the table with two fistfuls of what looked like … meat … and dropped it into a pot on the stove.

She stared at me, the bare body on the table … beautiful, and deathly pale.

Her torso had likely seen better days, now sporting a carved-up look we’ll call ‘slaughterhouse chic’.

And those spunky blonde locks … a hot mess, like after a long, hard night. But still more than sexy, if say … she were alive.

Likewise from the waist down, she was fully intact.

Apparently, my host was a boob man?

The mortician wiped his bloody hands on his already bloodied white overcoat, and went back to the body.

And what he did to her next showed the boobs were just foreplay.

I jerked myself back away from the door.

“How are you doing out there?” the mortician said. From the way he spoke up, he didn’t know I was right there. “Sorry … I got started cooking late.”

“No problem,” I replied, as I scurried back to the dining room. “Really, none at all.”

I was so out of there.

Obviously, even for a mortician, his treatment of that dead body was way out of line.

And by culinary standards, his sourcing of my meal was even further out of line.

I went for the exit.

But then, just as my hand was reaching for the door, the sanity of elsewhere just steps away … I got curious.

Afraid as I was … as SHOCKED as I was … I came to wonder, strangely … just what in the Hell was going on in this mortician’s house.

Well, just what in the Hell else was going on in this mortician’s house.

So I pulled my hand back from the door, and started for the staircase nearby.

“Feel free to look around—my home is yours,” my host called out again, “but DO NOT go upstairs … please. It’s really a mess up there, you see.”

“I see,” I called back, as I crept up the stairs.

They were creakier than I would have preferred, but egged on by curiosity, I kept creeping anyway.

“I’ll stay downstairs.”

Curiosity made me lie, too.

The lighting was dim in the second floor hallway, probably because all the doors were closed.

And it was starting to get dark outside anyway.

What was hiding inside all those closed-up rooms in the mortician’s house?

The mortician, whom I suspected with good cause, planned to feed me a grisly gourmet of (however lovely) corpse for dinner …

Curiosity wanted to know.

The rooms down at the end of the dim corridor seemed promising.

The deeper the probe the better, I reasoned.

The first room I ventured into at the end of the hall was … very dark, the drawn draperies doing an admirable job at keeping whatever was left of the day’s light out.

So I flipped on the light and … other than a few untidy details, such as a pair of socks on the floor and the rumpled pajamas on the bed, it seemed kempt enough … for that matter, it was rather an idyllic boudoir.

Exactly the kind of place a corpse-cookin’ mortician would sleep.

Was I wasting my time?

I said goodbye to that room, and stuck my head into the compartment across the hall.

The smell wasn’t good … and I couldn’t see a thing.

Until I hit the light.

Jackpot!

My feet felt spiked to the floor, and a shiver tingled down my spine.

I couldn’t breathe.

It was just another bedroom, nothing especially notable about it … other than the naked bodies lying on the bed.

Young ladies both, their flesh a frosty shade of dead, their sleep deep and eternal (from what I could tell).

WHAT possibly could be the reasonable explanation for two dead girls in the bedroom?

One’s lonesome, and three’s a crowd?

Merely a mortician bringing his work home with him?

I was beginning to conclude the man was deeply disturbed.

Leaving the ladies to their beauty rest, I closed them in their cryptroom and moved on down the hall.

The next room was … stunningly … an exercise room. Stunning because my host did not look like much of an exerciser. But there were a lot of clothes hanging off the exercise equipment, the same way most people use their exercise equipment.

“JUST A FEW MORE MINUTES!” the mortician hollered from the kitchen. “I’M VERY SORRY FOR THE DELAY … BUT YOU’RE REALLY GOING TO ENJOY THIS.”

“NOT AT ALL,” I hollered back, hoping I sounded like I was downstairs in the dining room, where I was supposed to be. “I’M NOT IN ANY HURRY.”

He must have been satisfied—it was the end of the exchange.

I considered ending my tour.

The sooner, the wiser.

There was, however, another door to try … and curiosity bade me … to open it.

So I did.

This chamber as well was indiscernible and black as a well.

At this point, there was no turning back, so … trembling and trepidation be damned, I hit the light.

And it became clear that the only thing I had to fear, within this, the last of the mortician’s bedrooms … was fear itself.

Also clear was it, the stack of dead bodies on the bed was pretty scary too.

Were they stacked?

Or were they posed?

Unclothed as they were unliving, it appeared the woman was the meat, between two men, being bread; the form of a depraved, death sandwich.

“ALMOST TIME FOR DINNER!” the mortician called from his kitchen butchery. “I HOPE YOU’RE HUNGRY!”

The feeling in the pit of my stomach was not that of hunger.

And although I held myself as polite a dinner guest as anyone … no way was I well-mannered enough to chew my way through a meal of corpse flesh.

Pretty girl or not.

“FANTASTIC!” I called back. “I COULD EAT A … A HORSE!”

“SORRY, WE DON’T HAVE ANY HORSE … BUT I KNOW A VETERINARIAN UPSTATE …”

The thought of horse cadaver kebabs was not especially appetizing, and I instantly regretted bringing it up.

I left the threesome to themselves and moved toward the stairs.

Dinnertime? Maybe for somebody … but I was headed for the door.

And if I could slip out without having to face my host, all the better.

Recalling the creakiness of the stairs, I paused, then stepped gingerly onto the top step.

Then I stepped just as gingerly, down atop the next.

Carefully, carefully … so as not to alert the mortician that I had been upstairs prowling …

And, I was FALLING … hard … and fast.

The floor at the bottom of the stair came at me as a blur.

When I came to, I was face on the floor, sprawled in a heap. The floor was hardwood, and did I ever know it.

Seemed everything was bruised, but nothing was broken, and I groaned out loud as I brought myself back to my feet … then admonished myself for not better suppressing the noise.

Rubbing my head, I looked back up the stairs.

It seemed impossibly clumsy that I could have simply fallen. Had I lost my balance? Tripped over my own two feet? But what else could have been the cause? A push?

From who? A naked corpse?

At least the door, my exit from the macabre mortician’s horrible home was now well in sight.

And I was ready to make a break for it.

I padded over to the door, home free … until the sound stopped me.

Footsteps. Overhead. Not just one pair of feet, either. Who was milling about upstairs?

Goosebumps tingled up my spine and over the scalp of my head.

My body feared what my mind was afraid to contemplate.

(The mind is always the last to know.)

DONG!

There were twelve of them, specifically, as the grandfather clock in the room struck midnight, at quite a bone-jarring volume.

Midnight? How could that be? Had I been knocked-out at the bottom of the stairs for hours?

Consulting my wristwatch, I learned the grandfather clock’s dong was wrong—it had actually been several hours.

How had so much time elapsed without the mortician having come upon me?

Not that it mattered to me … I was out of there.

Then I thought of the mysterious footsteps upstairs, and again … curiosity took hold.

Damn curiosity!

I made my way to the dining room, as discreetly as I could.

If a meal had been eaten without me, there was no evidence of it. Everything looked completely undisturbed, table still set for two.

I continued on to the hallway, where through the open sliver of doorway, I had earlier caught my host, bloody handed.

The kitchen … was not undisturbed.

It looked like a blood-bomb had gone off in there.

Floor to ceiling was blood, with cooking utensils and pans strewn all about.

Pots on the stove boiled over watery red sauce that washed down onto the floor.

The mortician had made this mess … and then walked away from the sick meal he was preparing?

Something didn’t add up.

Well, it hadn’t added up before … and now it really didn’t add up.

The corpse was still on the table where I’d last seen it, now mostly stripped to the bone.

The mortician could evidently handle his dead flesh.

His dead flesh?

I did a double-take.

Her toenails were no longer painted. For that matter, the body’s feet had gotten large … and fugly.

Her pretty (for a dead girl) blonde hair was … well, her hair was dark … and a short, man’s cut.

Where was that mortician?

I felt a suffocating lump in my throat.

THERE was the mortician.

THERE! On the table!

I had to go … I turned to flee …

And the lights went out.

Unbelievable!

I still had to go.

Cautiously, I felt my way along the wall, until I was back in the dining room.

Then I heard the footsteps again.

I froze.

The footsteps were upstairs.

And on the stairs.

And … Oh God! Behind me?

I squinted into the darkness, fretting, knowing I probably didn’t want to see, and didn’t have time to fret.

I had to move.

So I did move, despite the footsteps I heard all around me, and the terrible things I sensed … that I feared … accompanied those awful steps.

As subtly as I could, I crept toward the exit, my breath still as the breath of the dead.

Ironically.

I touched something.

Something touched ME.

Something grabbed at me!

Instinctively, I ducked and jerked and drove through the blackness, fighting in the direction of the door.

Coldness pawing my entire way, I thrashed through the valley of the shadow of death.

I was almost thankful I couldn’t see it.

Slamming broadside into the door, terror blunted the pain as I clutched for the doorknob.

My assailants were upon me, all around, I knew it.

And I sensed their growing frenzy as I threw open the door, and bounded out it.

Ahhh! Fresh, cool air … on an inky, starless night …

Then they grabbed me! Midstep!

There was no time even to struggle; in an instant, I’d been yanked back inside.

My spirits turned on a dime … as freedom bled from my veins, and the inevitability of The End set in.

They had me.

They had me!

And then … I felt a hit … and I was flying through the air!

The open air!

Was it … could it be?

They had kicked MY ASS out the door!

I heard the door slam shut as I hit the ground.

And I didn’t turn back—I just started running.

My body ran all the way home.

My soul is still running.

Never again, would I follow that cursed path to that dreadful door.

But do sit down and make yourself comfortable, if you like … bon appétit!

The mortician’s for dinner.

The End

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-Harlowe Pilgrim

Copyright 2015 Cock and Bull Publishing, LLC

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