I’m a mortician.
Scratch that, I WAS a mortician. I quit about a year ago after a very unfortunate encounter.
It happened September of last year. We are all reasonable here, I was a practitioner of mortuary science after all. That’s why I was so good at my job. I was able to set aside all of the superstitious nonsense about the dead returning to life or hauntings by spirits not at rest to give people a few final moments with the bodies of their loved ones.
Mortician, while not considered by most as a good career path, is an outstandingly stable and important job. The old saying is that there are two things in life that are certain: death and taxes. I knew that to be true and I discovered at a young age that I was dreadful at math so it was the business of death for me.
While it’s a stable career it can also become overwhelming. I was located in a small town in the northern United States because where else would be better? Because of low population density and low murder rate it’d be a relaxing gig with a low volume of work, right? Yeah, remember I’m not so wonderful at math. I’d failed to take into consideration that a significant portion of the population was 70 when I arrived and 5 years in people started dropping like flies. Whereas before it was maybe 2 bodies a week I was getting 7 or so on average.
The town I worked in wasn’t like most where there were funeral homes where you’d have a funeral director take care of your whole mess with a small crew. Our town had one mortician, me, who would pick up, embalm, beautify bodies and deliver them to home burials. I bugged my boss constantly about getting someone to help me and he kept telling me he’d consider it and obviously forgetting about it right after he’d hung up.
Imagine my surprise when a young man showed up at the mortuary late in the month. He was normal looking enough. Medium height, lanky build, mousy, nothing shocking or suspicious really. He introduced himself as Jeffery Herbert with a smile and told me that my boss, Mr. Collingwood, had sent him to help me out with the sudden rush of work. You can’t imagine how grateful I was to finally have another set of hands to help out. He produced a copy of his mortician’s license, I glanced at it to make sure it was in date, and we got started.
We immediately set to working on the day’s bodies. It was so much easier with Jeffery to help. He was extremely skilled too. While the majority of deaths we got were old people who passed in their sleep we would still get some really gnarly farm accidents since we were in the country. The unfortunate man of the day was someone who got a little too close to their hay bailer. The reconstruction was the most difficult part but Jeffery handled it like a pro and made the guy look as good as new. I was impressed.
Mortician is an on call position here. We don’t really tend to sit around in an office for eight hours a day and go home leaving work for the next morning. Death waits for no man so we work when death works. We finished prepping and delivering the hay bailer victim sometime around noon that day. Since Jeffery was new to the town I decided to invite him to spend some off time with me to grab some lunch in the town center. He agreed and we went to my favorite little general store/sandwich shop.
The store’s owner Charles was happy to see me. I had prepared his father’s body a few months prior and he was obsessed with thanking me every time I came in. He would go on and on about how alive his father had looked and I’d blush to be polite and thank him with false modesty and say I’m sure his dad is at peace etc. That day I was happy to have Jeffery with me because it gave me another avenue of conversation. I introduced him as our new secondary mortician and Charles welcomed him to town with his extra special secret sandwich (it’s an Italian cold cut in truth) and a bottle of cola. Jeffery laughed and thanked him and we went out front to a crumbling picnic table Charles had put there several years prior to enjoy our sandwiches in the cool mountain air.
We got to chatting and Jeffery told me that he had just moved to town a week or so ago after he had called Mr. Collingwood about a position. He told me that he had just been re-licensed after taking a 3-year break. His father had been a funeral director in a more traditional operation and had insisted his son take the same path to keep the home in the family. Jeffery was happy to do so and got licensed right out of school. He was enjoying his apprenticeship until he had to prepare a little girl who had been murdered by her father. It messed him up inside. He turned his back on the profession of mortician and decided to go to a four year college. He flunked out after a semester and started wandering from town to town taking odd jobs. Something hit him during his wandering that made him realize he wanted to get into the business again so he started calling around for openings and Mr. Collingwood was the first one he found.
I told him I was impressed. There aren’t many people who would jump on a job in a podunk town like this just to be a mortician. I was from a few towns over myself so I got to stay near my family but be just far away enough that I couldn’t be counted on for too much “family togetherness time”. He said he wanted somewhere out-of-the-way and quiet. He gave off the vibe of someone who was very private so I chose not to pry.
We continued to chat and started really getting along. We had a lot of the same interests and hobbies. I ended up giving him a tour of the town and grabbing dinner with him that same day. I wouldn’t say I was in love, but what can you do as a woman in her late 20s in a town full of hillbillies hitting their golden years? He was young, I was young and so on. We got a call just as magic was about to happen and when death is calling you come running with no regard to the mood. It was unfortunate but you always need to be professional in this line of work.
We picked up old Wilma Waters from her house at around 9 pm and drove the body back to the mortuary and got to work. It was an easy enough preparation. Wilma died a natural death. We were able to wrap the whole thing up in a pretty short time. Once we were finished the mood had been thoroughly quashed in the way that only an overweight 80 year-old dead person can quash a mood. We said our goodbyes, locked Wilma in one of the coolers and went our separate ways for the evening. I made sure to hand the spare key to the mortuary to Jeffery before I left so he could get in in the morning if he arrived before me.
The next morning Jeffery was dressing Wilma when I arrived. He was one of those early risers apparently. It was barely 8 and it seemed like he had been here a while. Either way I pulled out my corpse make-up and painted the death away. We delivered Wilma around 11 am to the Waters house with gratuitous thanks from the Waters family. We bowed out quickly and quietly to leave the family to their grief and headed out to lunch.
Once again one thing led to another and death didn’t call us out of our reverie that time. It had been quite a while for me and I was just ecstatic that it was happening at all. The only thing that I found off was his cologne. He had absolutely bathed in the stuff and it was overpowering. It didn’t smell bad, per-say, just familiar and strong. I couldn’t place it then but I thought maybe it was my grandfather’s cologne from when I was a little girl. Anyway I was pleased, he was pleased, and everything was peachy keen.
Jeffery had called my phone the next day and left me a message about a family emergency and he was going to need to take a few days off. I was slightly annoyed because I was fighting some sort of sickness and had no interest in handling corpses. I’d woken up nauseated with a headache like I’d never experienced. I told him it was fine and I’d see him when he got back and headed in. I was in the middle of starting the embalming process on a body I had just picked up when Mr. Collingwood suddenly came into the lab.
I told him I hadn’t expected him and asked him what he needed. Mr. Collingwood seldom ever came to the mortuary since he wasn’t so much a mortician as a businessman anymore. He’d fill in for me if I was unable to drag myself out of bed but he clearly had no love for the profession anymore. I figured it must have been important so I set my work aside. He looked really disturbed as we walked over to my desk. He looked like he was ready to be sick at any moment. Even though Mr. Collingwood had been out of the business of handling corpses for a long time he was still an old hand and I couldn’t imagine him getting ill simply from the smell and sights of a mortuary.
We sat down at my desk and he began to speak.
“I’m sorry to burst in like this but I just received some disturbing news. About a week and a half ago a patient from a state psychiatric unit a town over disappeared. The staff didn’t notice him missing until just this morning. He’s not particularly dangerous but the state is warning all morticians and mortuaries in the area because … “ Collingwood looked disturbed again and coughed before forcing out the words “. . . he is a necrophile.” He shifted uncomfortably, and so did I.
I was at a loss for words. I couldn’t imagine what sort of creep this guy was. The idea that there was someone out there who was doing unsavory things to corpses was making my nausea even worse. It’s not that I felt it sacrilegious but it was so unsanitary. It’s an easy way to make someone sick. I leaned over a little and steadied myself against the desk.
“Alright Mr. Collingwood,” I swallowed the bile in my throat and took a deep calming breath “Jeffery and I will be on the lookout for suspicious people.”
“Jeffery? Who’s Jeffery?” Mr. Collingwood asked suddenly and sharply.
“Jeffery Herbert. The mortician you hired to assist me. He had some family problems come up so he’s taking the next few days off. I’ll let him know when he gets back.”
“You are the only person currently employed in this mortuary. You said that there was a mortician that came here to help you?” He looked very pale and very scared suddenly. The usually distinguished-looking Mr. Collingwood suddenly looked old, desperate and sickly. “The man who escaped was James Harold, he was a talented mortician before they locked him up three years ago.“
My vision swam. Mr. Collingwood stumbled past me, between the body lying on the table and my chair, to grab at the phone hanging on the wall while I sat in shock and horror. My nausea finally got the best of me I started gagging and reached under the dissecting table for a bag to vomit in. As I leaned close to the slightly embalmed corpse I smelled something familiar. It smelled like the cologne Jeffery had absolutely bathed in yesterday.
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Credits to: StandardPractice
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