Rob Chilson
BLACK AS BLOOD
© 1998 by Rob Chilson
First published in TOMORROW SF, 1998
Formatted for #bookz by Ted
Bernie McKay coughed hollowly. Other coughs echoed, here and there, in the hollow room.
"Ah-men," the Reverend Hallowell intoned, and a relieved rustle went through the mourners. Bernie raised his head. Taking a breath and steeling himself, he looked toward the gleaming, solid copper coffin – no, "casket" – on the trestle. Beside him, Angie pretended to dab at her eyes, sniffed perfunctorily.
The first row filed out for the Viewing of the Remains; Uncle Albert's brothers and sisters.
Bernie felt his stomach tighten with tension, and hoped he wouldn't start having cramps or something. He wished he'd applied double deodorant. He wished it weren't so hot in here.
Murmuring, shuffling, the mourners filed forward. "Sir?" The discreet usher. "If you will, sir." The second row now; nephews and nieces, including Angie.
Bernie stood, taking a breath, and led Angie slowly out between the damned uncomfortable pews and up the aisle. Slowly, slowly, to give those behind them time. The casket grew before him, a gleaming copper trap with a satiny bed in its maw, a terribly strange bed. On this bed, incongruously dressed in a black suit, white shirtfront, wink of diamond from his tie, lay a dead man.
Uncle Albert, a fringe of gray hair around a polished dome across which a few errant strands straggled; Uncle Albert, shriveled and dried and shrunken in death as in life; Uncle Albert, his scrawny hands folded hypocritically on a shiny new briefcase; Uncle Albert, his mouth drawn down in a censorious scowl, only the cold, dead eyes now closed. An unrepentant Scrooge, dead at last in the midst of his Scrooging.
Near the head of the casket was a stand with an open Bible. On the Bible was a silver letter opener in the shape of a dagger, pointing to a line hilighted in gold: I am the Resurrection and the Life. I hope to hell not, Bernie thought.
He paused before the casket, calculating the minimum time he need wait without exhibiting unseemly haste. And then his stomach lurched.
Uncle Albert's eyelids flickered.
Oh, no.
Uncle Albert's eyes blinked. They opened, cold and dead. They focused on him, Bernie. Cold and deadly.
Angie squeaked, clutching Bernie's arm. He stood frozen in shocked horror. They all stared.
Expression came to the dead features, the stiff mouth opened, contorted in anger. The whole corpse convulsed as if electrified. Uncle Albert croaked, gasped; his left arm jerked up stiffly. The corpse came up on the right elbow, each motion easier than the previous.
Uncle Albert gave him the finger, glaring. "Up yours, Bernie!" he rasped hoarsely.
Bernie recoiled, flushing with fear and anger. Angie stared at him, horrified, embarrassed. Reverend Hallowell wrung his hands and bleated in dismay. The other mourners gaped in shock. Recovering, Bernie stabbed his finger at the corpse. "Shut up and lie down, you swindling old fart!"
But Uncle Albert had never been easy to shut up. "Don't you call me a swindler, you lying thief!"
A deliciously shocked murmur was already starting behind the chief mourners. Bernie started to sweat in earnest.
The corpse made as if to climb out of the coffin, bringing its left leg up stiffly. It probably couldn't walk – though with Uncle Albert you never knew – but Bernie, alarmed, leaped forward and shoved the cold, jerkily moving thing back, his hands on its slablike chest. Its left arm flailed aimlessly about his head, the other hand gripped the edge of the casket.
"I know all about you – I know the truth –" Uncle Albert was muttering in his hoarse rasp, struggling like a wind-up toy entangled in the carpet. "You little shit –"
Revolted, sweating and desperate with fear of what the corpse might say, Bernie cried, "Help, police! Cessation! I demand cessation!" He struggled to hold the grisly thing in its coffin, drowning out its words with his cries.
The bored cop at the back of the room had brightened at the beginning of the fracas. He filed forward along the wall of the room, eager but pretending to be deadpan official. Bernie turned a sweating, desperate look on him.
"Cessation! This man is legally dead. Please!"
"You got a death certificate?" the cop said, as if this happened every day. He had the blank expression of a man chewing gum, but wasn't.
"Yeah – Mr. Culter, quick, show him the death certificate – you have it, don't you?"
"Officer – arrest this man –"
"Oh, shut up! Officer, please, this is very embarrassing."
"We gotta do things by the book, sir," said the cop.
Mr. Culter, the mortician, did not alter his sad expression. With mournful dignity he pulled the death certificate out of his inside coat pocket and extended it.
Uncle Bill jostled forward, peering at his dead brother with the pleasantly horrified expression of a man relieved that a dull ceremony has been enlivened. There was a certain recognition in the relatives' expressions: just what you'd expect of Albert. Never could shut him up.
"I'll get you – I'll haunt you – little bastard –"
Still struggling with the thing, Bernie cried, "You heard that! A threat, a threat, harassment! I'll have you exorcised – Reverend Hallowell, you heard that –"
Reverend Hallowell shook his head, spread his hands: not without a warrant.
The cop pushed the certificate aside. "Yeah, right, so Albert Smithers is dead. You there, in the coffin. You Albert Smithers?"
"Officer – arrest him – he's Bernie McKay – the thief –"
"You Albert Smithers?"
The corpse's expression changed, its glittering dry eyes shifted. Alarmed, Bernie cried, "Hell yes it's Albert Smithers! Who the hell else could it be? Ask us! We're just the next of kin, you know!"
"Gotta go by the book. You could all be in it together."
Bernie shoved the cold thing back viciously again. "So go ahead, tell him you're not Uncle Albert, tell him you're Dracula, you're Frankenstein, you're the Ghost of Christmas Past!"
The cop leaned forward. "Albert Smithers!"
The corpse's head turned sharply toward him – then froze. Too late. Its withered features revealed its dismay; its reflexes had deprived it of the chance to muddy the waters.
"Right, it's him." The cop pulled his pistol slowly.
"I'll do it!" snapped Bernie, furious, impatient.
Holding it back with his left, he reached across and snatched up the blunt dagger that pointed to the Resurrection and the Life. He brought the weapon back.
"Be careful with that thing, sir," the cop grumbled, ducking away and holstering his pistol. "We ain't all dead, you know."
"For the third time, die!" Bernie said, and slammed the blunt point into Uncle Albert's gleaming white shirt front.
The corpse jolted. There was no blood. Then it was as if the toy's spring had run down. Its joints loosened and it began to relax, subsiding into the coffin. Not waiting, Bernie shoved it back. It was like shoving a door with an automatic closer. Feverishly he started prying at the fingers on the edge of the coffin, before instant rigor froze them in place.
"You – haven't – seen – the last – of me –" it said, its hoarse rasp also unwinding.
Frantically Bernie tore the gray pinkie loose and reached for the lid of the coffin. He had to push down the left hand, its middle finger still stiffly extended, to lower the lid. Viciously he snapped the latch shut. He blew out his breath, straightened his coat, patted his face with his handkerchief. No sound came from within.
The cop was fading, looking back with an expression of concealed amusement. He'd have tales to tell – this didn't happen at every funeral – and the upper crust, yet. Bernie's relatives looked at him with embarrassment and dismay; some shuffled their feet; some coughed. The other mourners were more pleased; they murmured together in subdued delight.
That social climber, Mrs. Whatshername, was equally pleased, despite her disdainful exclamation: "Shocking! Absolutely shocking! I thought them a refined, genteel family –"
Someone else was saying, "Old reprobate, you know, black sheep."
"Nothing like this ever happened in our family before," came another murmur.
Reverend Hallowell, trying to bring order out of chaos, was saying, "Mr. McKay – Mr. McKay –"
"For the third time?" a woman said quietly.
Hearing that, Bernie turned, met Angie's gaze. It was questioning, dismayed. Mutely shocked.
"When people die, I wish they would just plain die and be done with it," he grumbled, taking her arm and tugging, to start the procession moving.
No one seemed to have any desire to re-open the coffin.
"There he is," said Deputy Rod Parker, pointing and frowning officiously. White Bird Hadley, spiff in his blue uniform – and the officer who had witnessed events in the funeral parlor – was just entering the Bus Stop Cafe on the east side of the town square. How do these skinny guys do it, Parker wondered. He himself was short and squat, like a troll.
Hadley sat down in the booth with Parker and his boss. He looked like he had something interesting to tell, all right.
Evelyn Anderson, perennial sheriff of St. Claude County, Missouri, raised his eyebrows in expection. "What did the corpse say?"
"Called McKay a thief. McKay's his partner – was his partner. Think it means anything?"
Evelyn Anderson laughed. Parker laughed too, not so loud. "Hell, Smithers hisself was the biggest cheat and liar in the county," Evelyn said. "No, I don't reckon it means anything. What a dead man says ain't evidence anyway."
"Maybe McKay was cheating him in the business, taking loot outta the till," said Parker. From what he'd heard –
"That's for the accountants to find out," said the sheriff to Hadley, good-humoredly. "And prefer charges or file suit, as they've a mind to."
White Bird grinned back. "Guess who the accountants are? Smithers and Waley."
Parker chimed in with their laugh.
"Less trouble for us," said Evelyn. "You ceased the corpse?"
"McKay didn't give me time. He stabbed it with Culter's sterling silver letter opener. Smithers still has it, in the coffin." He grinned. "I heard Culter calling him a damned old thief." Sobering, he looked from Anderson to Parker, who tried to look alert. "Anything going on?"
"I'm lookin' at Brad Schiereck for that cornfield deal," said the sheriff. Parker nodded, ignored. "Somebody drove up and down old man Hatterson's east cornfield, row by row, and knocked about half his crop down."
White Bird nodded. "Figured it for one of the Lesslies or Watsons," he said. There were about a dozen of these cousins, some pretty wild.
"Could be, but I'm gonna want to talk to young Schiereck one day soon," Anderson said deliberately.
"Better be soon," said Parker. "That old nigger Hatterson's a mean jay."
White Bird gave him a look. "Yeah, well, I gotta be goin'. Don't look good for one third of the city cops to be standin' around jawin' with one fifth of the county law."
What'd I say? Parker thought, aggrieved.
Bernie McKay tore off the black jacket and tie with relief. Thank God it's over, he thought. Jesus, what a thing to have happen. Be just like the old bastard to haunt me. Angie slipped her dress off her shoulders and let it fall. He watched approvingly in the mirror. She'd kept her figure well, and her face was practically unlined.
"You're not going back to the office this afternoon," she said. "It wouldn't look right."
...
allforjesus2001