I was a Teenage Grave Robber (1179 hits)
Category: Quotes & StoriesRating: 1.74 on 22 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Thinning Temples (View user info) at 2004-05-19 12:21:32 EDT
I was a Teenage Grave Robber
My name is Bob Henley, I'm a part time student at the University of Wisconsin. I work three days a week at the university (I'm completing the third of a five year undergraduate degree in literature) and the rest of the week at Hanson's Funeral Parlour.
On the days that I'm at university, I get up at around seven in the morning and take the eight o'clock train up to campus. Classes usually finish by three o'clock, I grab a bite to eat and relax a little, before heading to the campus library, where I spend the rest of the evening studying, writing papers, or preparing tutorials. I'm there until either they close (at eleven o'clock) or until I'm so tired I'm no longer able to read properly.
That's Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays I work at the funeral parlour.
The job title on my contract of employment is "Cosmetician's Assistant". The 'cosmetician', or 'cosmetic's artist' as he prefers to call it, is a little old man named Slim.
It's Slim's job to prepare corpses for those customers who choose an open casket funeral - those ceremonies during which the upper portion of the casket remains open, giving members of the funeral party the opportunity to see the deceased one final time.
Without going into too much detail, after people die, their bodies almost immediately start to decay. After only a few days the skin turns the colour of old wax, they start to leak (no further explanation required) and the faces start to kind of cave in - noses slip to the side, lips sag into the mouths, awful, nightmarish stuff that nobody wants to see, least of all the grieving families.
This is where Slim comes in.
A long time ago, Slim used to work in an ordinary beauty parlour, advising woman with too much money and too much time which cosmetics helped them look young again. He switched over to corpses before I was even born ("they don't talk as much shit") and he's been at Hansons ever since.
Slim must be close to eighty years old now and he struggles to even get out of his car. Since quite a lot of the work involved in preparing a corpse for an open casket funeral involves hauling the body into clothes, or positioning it correctly in the coffin, Slim asked for an assistant, and I answered the advert.
I should put in a minor disclaimer here. I never wanted to man-handle corpses for a living. I got the job through my cousin. Before Hanson's I cleaned sheets at King's Laundromat, but work at the laundromat meant long hours, back-breaking work and low wages, not to mention the chance of having both of your hands ripped off by the sheet mangler.
The truth is that I liked working at the funeral parlour. Once you got past the corpse thing, it really wasn't so different from any other job. Slim didn't like to talk very much, preferring silence while we worked. We'd tune into a station on the radio playing classical music, and work through the morning together in comfortable silence. Although I had to start work fairly early (first appointments are at eight o'clock and a single preparation usually took us about an hour), our days finished, at the latest, by about six o'clock in the evening. That gave me more time to study in the evenings, and once in a while I could catch a movie. It paid better than the laundromat, too. Hanson's was about mid-range in the funeral business, and they did a good trade. They could afford to pay their employees a fair wage.
Anyway, that's how and why I ended up working in a funeral parlour.
I met Dr Schmidt late one night in the library.
Part of my job entailed discreetly standing at the rear of the chapel during a service, in case something went catastrophically wrong, like some kid or an overwrought window hanging onto the edge of the casket and tipping the deceased out onto the floor. It used to happen, from time to time.
You might think that observing a funeral was interesting, in a ghoulish kind of way, but after the first few, you realise that one very much resembles another. Besides, incongruous as this may sound, I don't have a morbid bone in my body.
Dr Schmidt recognised me from his father in law's funeral. Later on he explained that he hadn't been especially close to the deceased; in fact he'd spent most of the ceremony daydreaming. I happened to be attending the funeral and noticed me. He said he'd been curious about what my job must have been like.
(A lot of people react this way. I mention my work at the funeral parlour and they behave as if I'm an astronaut or something. It's gotten to the point where I just tell people I work at the laundromat.)
Several days later he spotted me on campus, and that's presumably when he conceived of the idea.
Dr Schmidt happens to be one of the university's most prestigious staff members. He's received all kinds of fellowships and awards, his work in anatomy has been published in journals the world over. He's a big cheese, if you follow that line or work.
Of course, I didn't. I wasn't enrolled in any of his classes, and I wasn't studying medicine, and since outside of my degree I tend to steer clear of university life as much as possible, I basically didn't know him from Adam.
Our meeting occurred one night, when I was studying, as usual, at the library.
I was bent over a chapter of Dante (Purgatorio). It was late, approaching closing time, and the library was almost deserted.
I'd been at the library since that afternoon and the words on the page were practically swimming in front of my eyes. The doctor was returning a book (later on I learned that the hours were kept were extremely irregular - he had no wife or family, and since his classes all took place in the afternoon, as far as I could tell by the time I met him he was practically nocturnal), and he recognised me from the funeral.
"Excuse me," he said, "But aren't you the young gentleman who works at that funeral parlour?"
I am occasionally asked this question. Once, in a supermarket, I even had a woman burst into tears.
I replied that I worked at Hanson's funeral parlour, and turned to face the stranger. In his dark suit, the doctor loomed from the shadows of the deserted, creaking library.
I was tired of books, tired of studying, and hungry for conversation. When after a few minutes the librarian, on her final rounds, turfed us out, the doctor courteously offered to buy me a cup of coffee at the late night place they have in town, and I accepted.
I suggested we go to a twenty-four hour coffee shop they have on campus called the "Dean's Beans", which though horrible (fluorescent lighting, Formica tables, zombie-like staff) at least had the virtue of being just a few minutes walk from the library.
But Dr Schmidt insisted on driving us in his gleaming black Bentley into town. I was shortly to discover why.
There is no easy way to explain his reason for approaching me, so I'll put it as bluntly as I can: Dr Schmidt was interested in acquiring a steady supply of fresh corpses, on the quiet.
To this day I have no idea what he wanted them for. Did he spend his nights in some fiendish basement laboratory, attempting to infuse life into those bodies? Probably not. Dr Schmidt made his name in the study of anatomy, and more likely his uses were more prosaic. I like to think they were. Studies unlikely to have been approved by the governing board, research too controversial for the university's donors, something like that.
At any rate, I never asked Doctor Schmidt what he did with all of those dead folk. I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.
My own reason for getting involved was of course for the money. I wish I could tell you that I did it for the cause of science, for the betterment of the human race, but frankly I did it for the cash. I've been an atheist all my life and as far as I'm concerned, after you die what happens to your body is of no consequence at all. I'm a card-carrying organ donor myself.
Moreover, if your mortal remains happen to provide a poor college student with the means to get through university without having to worry about the cost of fees and text books, so much the better.
Maybe Doctor Schmidt divined this pragmatic philosophy, maybe he approached the subject carefully, or maybe he just took a hell of a chance, but by the end of the evening, we'd worked out a rough arrangement, and I found myself in the grave-robbing business.
The way it worked was as follows.
Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, the funerals that I attended typically lasted for about an hour; typically a sermon or reading, speeches, concluding with the disposal of the body, referred to as the "Farewell". Disposal took the form of either burial or cremation, usually cremation. In the event of the former, the service proceeded as usual, the casket transported by hearse to the cemetery, committed to the earth, end of story. However, in the event of cremation, at the end of the service the casket returned via conveyer belt to the preparation room, where it was stripped of flowers and ornaments, closed and sealed, then transported by the same conveyer belt back to the chapel, and finally, in view of the relatives, into the cremation chamber. The relatives were given a brief glimpse of the flames closing over the casket, before a door slid discreetly into place, hiding the final scene, which of course is of the cremation.
There are a couple of variations, but what I've described is the most popular service.
Since obviously no make-up is required after the service, Slim usually finished early and left for the day, leaving me to attend the service and prepare the casket for cremation. The latter task I performed alone.
It simply removed the corpse from the casket, which, empty, would then pass in front of the assembly before disappearing into the flames.
Since my daily work consisted of handling cadavers, manhandling the deceased into the back seat of my Volkswagen wasn't the horrifying ordeal it would be to others.
For those of you who are interested, rigor mortis only sets in briefly, commencing usually about four hours after death, and subsiding twelve hours later. After that the body's flexible again, the only problem, of course, being the aptly phrased dead weight.
Usually I'd go home after the service, study until around midnight, then return to Hanson's, let myself in (I had my own set of keys) and transfer the corpse from the back room to my car, parked round the back outside the tradesman's entrance.
By this time it was usually about one o'clock in the morning. I'd drive over to Doctor Schmidt's, park in his garage, and together we'd unload the corpse. I'd be home in bed by two o'clock at the latest.
Getting up next morning may have been a little tougher than usual, but then again, I wasn't losing sleep over where next month's rent money was coming from.
Over the course of that winter I made thirteen midnight trips to Doctor Schmidt's house. With the extra money I could afford to cut the number of shifts at the funeral home down to twice a week - Friday's and Saturdays, while the extra day spent in the library took the pressure off my course work.
There was only one close shave. It was Friday midnight and I had a Mrs Grieves under the armpits, her stockinged heels dragging across the tiled floor on my way to the service entrance out back, when a light in one of the adjacent offices flicked on.
It could only have been Mr Hanson. God only knows what he was up to at that time of night, but if he'd caught me it would have looked suspicious as hell. I suppose I could have tried to make up some story - house keys or a text book left behind after work, but I doubt I'd have been able to offer a plausible explanation for stuffing poor Mrs Grieves into my Volkswagen.
Luckily, the person in the room next door saw no reason to investigate the contents of the preparation room. That's understandable, when you consider that it was past midnight, quiet as a grave, and most of the lights were off. Under circumstances like these, most folks are uneasy hanging around dead people.
Mentioning the incident to Doctor Schmidt was a big mistake.
Hauling corpses in the dead of night brings an intimacy to a relationship, and I'd come to realise that, behind his formidable exterior, the doctor was gradually coming apart at the seams.
His level of personal hygiene had begun to noticeably deteriorate from one visit to the next. His hair, previously combed neatly over his bald spot, grew wild and unruly. He used to impress me by coming to the garage door in the dead of night dressed in a starched shirt and tie. Now he peered suspiciously from the doorway wearing stained pyjamas and once clad only in a pair of sagging Y-fronts.
Was I sure nobody saw me at Hanson's? Positive that the corpse wouldn't be missed? Had I been seen on the way over? He asked me these questions a dozen times every visit. Of course, I could understand why. A lowly undergrad like me was one thing, but if the honourable Doctor Hector Schmidt, prize of Wisconsin University, were to be implicated in such a ghoulish crime, his fall from grace would be swift and spectacular. The prospect tortured him.
But I was shaken by the incident and who else could I confide in but my partner in crime? I also had an exam first thing in the morning, and had passed the night bent over my notes to Homer's Iliad, drinking cup after cup of coffee and chain-smoking Pall Malls.
After I told him, the doctor had to sit down on the floor with his head between his legs. Although he didn't smoke I offered one to him anyway, and to my surprise he accepted. I had to light it for him. I rummaged around in his house and returned with two dirty glasses and a bottle of Jameson's whiskey, which we drank sitting on the cement floor of the garage, a Mr Grosvenor propped up between us.
I suppose that whatever the doctor got up to in the dead of night with his cadavers may also have had something to do with his unravelling.
That night we both agreed to finish our business by the end of winter. Doctor Schmidt needed only a few more specimens, he said. I didn't mind - I knew I could pick up another shift at Hanson's, and I'd saved most of the money that I'd made stealing corpses.
I was making one of my very last deliveries when the police stopped me.
I'd made a point of avoiding the main roads and highways on my way over to Doctor Schmidt's. The route I chose ran through mostly suburban neighbourhoods, a considerably longer journey but a much safer one.
But there had been a spate of alcohol related accidents lately - first year university students too drunk to even walk getting into their parent's cars - and this must have prompted the police to set up road blocks designed to catch those student's attempting to evade the check points set up on the major routes.
Even then I might have gotten away with it, if only I'd stuck to my initial modus operandi, which was to hide the corpse in back seat under a blanket (the boot of my Volkswagen Beetle is far too small to accommodate an adult male or female). But I'd gotten careless, and since I'd discovered it was easier getting a body in and out of the front seat, instead of laying them in the back, that's what I'd taken to doing.
It was almost one o'clock in the morning, a cold night and raining hard. On a clear night I might have had time to turn the car around, but in that downpour before I knew what was happening I was being signalled onto the hard shoulder.
I watched the policeman advancing out of the black, wet night in my rear view mirror.
The corpse was in a roughly seated position. I just had time to push it upright, where it immediately sagged forward against the safety belt, head lolling against its chest.
There was a sharp rapping on my window. I rolled it down and felt the cold, damp night rush into the car.
It was a policewoman, and behind the grouchy expression she looked surprisingly young. My heart skipped a beat.
"May I see your driver's licence, sir," she said, shining the torch around the interior of the car.
Rain pummelled the tin roof of the little Beetle.
I fumbled in the glove compartment, found my licence and handed it to her. She switched her torch from the card to my face, blinding me.
"You been drinking this evening, sir?"
I blinked in the glare of the torch. "Not at all, officer," I said, wearing my most alert, respectful expression. "I've been studying late at the library. I'm on my way home."
There was a moment's silence. Rain was dipping from the roof into the car.
"Going in the wrong direction, aren't you?" she said.
Stupid of me. My home address was printed on the licence.
"I'm just dropping my friend off first," I said, and immediately regretted it. But it was too late - the torch light turned on the corpse in the passenger seat.
"Your friend looks like he's had a few too many, is that right?"
My heart was beating so hard I could hear it in my ears. I laughed weakly.
"He's pretty far gone, that's for sure."
The torch beam stayed on the body.
"Sir, can you ask your friend to wind down his window."
The policewoman began walking around to the passenger side of the car.
In the darkness and the driving rain she might not have noticed me lean over and wind down the passenger window.
"Sir, are you alright?" she said, addressing the corpse through the passenger window.
By now I couldn't tell if the pounding in my ears was the rain smashing down on the roof of the little car or my heart hammering blood through my body.
"Sir?" she said, and leaning through the window, she trained the full force of the torchlight onto the corpse's face.
The weight of her body leaning on the car must have shifted the body - at that moment, with her face not ten inches from the cadavers, the head rolled back and the police officer found herself face to face with the cadaver.
It had been an especially busy time at university. I'd had to meet two essay deadlines and had spent most of the week at my computer, often working straight through the night. There had been no time to deliver this particular corpse to Doctor Schmidt's, and so I'd delayed the trip, reasoning that what the Doctor didn't know wouldn't hurt him, that the corpse was well hidden in the funeral parlour (there are vaults for storing the cadavers) and that the deceased probably wasn't going to complain about the delay either. Almost three weeks had passed since this particular gentleman was supposed to have been put to rest, and he looked a terrible mess. His eyes had sunk back into the skull, his nose had lost its position on the face and slipped badly to the right side, and his mouth flapped wide open, exposing a tongue turned completely black. He didn't smell too hot, either.
She didn't make a sound. Her head jerked violently backwards, her body went completely limp and she slipped back out of the car window.
When I'd stopped trembling enough to get my fingers around the door's interior handle, I leaned over and opened the passenger door. The interior light snapped on, casting a faint light across the police officer.
The police officer lay in a heap beside the car. I work with dead people twice a week and straightaway I saw that she was dead. I don't think I can put into words the expression on her face. It visits me at night sometimes, when it's late.
My memories of the rest of that night come in fits and starts, like a decayed, damaged film reel.
I must have slammed the car door shut and driven on. I don't remember seeing any other police officers, but then, I don't remember much of that drive at all.
My first clear memory is that of sitting in my car, hands clamped on the steering wheel, in my driveway.
I let myself in and sat down at the kitchen table. I smoked a couple of cigarettes. Then I telephoned the doctor and told him what had happened.
He went completely berserk, I think, but again, I don't remember the conversation well. I remember telling him that I was coming over. I hung up, walked back outside and got into my car.
The drive to the doctor's house takes about fifteen minutes. When I arrived I found the doctor in the garage. He'd hung himself from the beam with a clothes line.
I stumbled into his house and fetched another bottle of whiskey. This time there was no need for glasses. I got back into my car, beside the corpse, and drove over to Hanson's with the bottle jammed in-between my thighs. Nobody stopped me. I replaced the corpse in the vault and made sure I locked the door behind me and by the time I got back into my car I had finished the whiskey. Then I drove home.
I fell ill. The next few days passed in feverous, nightmarish haze. Alone in the house I lay in bed, unattended, delirious and parched with thirst. I had terrible dreams, waking once to find the Doctor sat on my bedroom floor in his dark suit, holding a glass towards me, another time my room full of corpses, jostling stiffly against my bed. One night I woke up standing beside my car in the driveway, with no recollection of how I'd gotten there.
I emerged from the fever on Monday, and though still weak I could get out of bed and move around the house.
I called in sick at Hanson's and skipped classes at university. I took long walks, telephoned my parents but hung up when my mother answered.
On Tuesday afternoon I checked in at work and handed in my notice. It had started to get to me, I told Mr Hanson. That afternoon Slim phoned up and over a beer in town he persuaded me to stay at the funeral parlour.
Over the next few days I kept a close eye on the weekly schedule, and when I found what I'd been waiting for, I made a few calls and swapped shifts with one of the other employees so that I could work on that Thursday.
The gardener found Dr Schmidt first thing on Sunday morning. He'd left a brief note, which was thoughtful of him - the police didn't pursue their investigations any further.
He had a brother in Ohio who flew in to arrange the funeral. Every day I anxiously read the newspapers, but nothing of the thirteen corpses I'd delivered to him was reported. To this day I have no idea what he did with them.
To this day, the police officer's death remains one of Wisconsin's great unsolved crimes, and one of its most mysterious. Her name was June Bennet.
The last time I saw the doctor was under Slim's delicate, skilful hands. Slim combed his hair over the bald spot, which I thought was nice. Then, as usual, he left for the day.
Doctor Schmidt's brother had chosen a closed casket service. I had plenty of time to haul the corpse that had gotten us into so much trouble out of the vault, and, after transferring the doctor into the largest model casket we had in stock, I lay both bodies beside each other in the casket.
For such an illustrious figure, there were surprisingly few attendees at the service. A handful of relatives, one or two students. One man, positioned near the exit, I thought might be a reporter.
I took my usual place at the rear of the chapel.
Towards the end of the service I found myself sitting in one of the long, empty pews at the back of the room. I watched the casket bearing the two men pass without incident into the flames.
The mourners began to file past me on their way out of the chapel, but I stayed.
Some time later, Mr Hanson walked into the room and asked if I was alright.
User Reviews
Submitted by FilthyAssistant (user info) at 2004-07-02 17:25:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
It says a great deal about the quality of your writing that someone as lazy as me followed it all the way to the end without being put off by the huge chunk of text.
Top notch.
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2004-06-11 12:36:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Held me from beginning to end. Excellent writing style, excellent story!
Submitted by thinning_temples (user info) at 2004-06-11 12:06:05 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
JewdoMaster, Scotsman, Caldur, tshia, moneyshot, Ruthy, digsy, thank you all for the reviews. I'd just about consigned this one to the grave, and it did bother me that it had vanished so quickly and so easily. Lovely to close this week with your comments.
Btw, for those who haven't read it already, there's another of my stories, named Desperation, here: http://www.ubersite.com/m/32149
Finally, Ruthy - having just come from my ouija board, I've asked the good doctor to tell us what he did with those corpses. He promised to visit you and I in a dream, sometime soon.
Matt
Submitted by digsy (user info) at 2004-06-11 06:05:56 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Great stuff pal
Submitted by Ruthy (user info) at 2004-06-11 05:57:23 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Please write another one from the Doc's point of view so we can find out what happened to the corpses. It was fantastic, didn't notice the lack of paragraphs at all.
Submitted by moneyshot (user info) at 2004-06-11 05:19:28 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Great story. Freaky as hell.
Submitted by tshia (user info) at 2004-06-11 05:04:18 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
awesome
Submitted by Caldur (user info) at 2004-06-11 04:40:24 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Scotsman (user info) at 2004-06-11 04:20:14 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fantastic!!!!
I was hooked from the title onwards!! So left wanting more but that is the sign of a good story!!
Submitted by JewdoMaster (user info) at 2004-06-11 03:50:59 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Awesome! This is your second +2 of the day from me! Congrats man!
Submitted by Kiddo at 2004-05-24 03:12:09 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Great story! I loved it!
Submitted by engine13 (user info) at 2004-05-19 19:29:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by bargled (user info) at 2004-05-19 17:15:37 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
another +2 because the title reminds me of "I was a teenage hand model" by QOTSA.
Submitted by bargled (user info) at 2004-05-19 17:14:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
that was awesome.
fiction or non?
Submitted by Donitsu2002 (user info) at 2004-05-19 16:31:28 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Pretty good... Darned freaky if it's true
Submitted by Fixer (user info) at 2004-05-19 16:04:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I would recommend blinking intentionally if you're getting headaches from reading.
Submitted by Yes (user info) at 2004-05-19 13:04:18 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Good... a few typos but I really liked the story. well done.
Submitted by weatherguy48 (user info) at 2004-05-19 12:56:58 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Wow...that is good..very suspenseful...is it true?
Submitted by cwl989 (user info) at 2004-05-19 12:41:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
I'll have to agree with lojope. Break it up and re-post.
Submitted by zarathustra (user info) at 2004-05-19 12:37:20 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
i didn't even notice the lack of paragraphs. my only positive rating, so far.
Submitted by apollo88 (user info) at 2004-05-19 12:33:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
If you hadn't written Desperation I wouldn't have read this.
Needs paragraphs.
Reminds me of a Stephen King story as well.
Submitted by lojope (user info) at 2004-05-19 12:30:24 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
I can't read that. Lack of paragraphs gives me a headache. It's too hard to read. Quick re-post it with paragraphs before the vultures decend!