‘Like Alice!’ he cried to himself in surprise. ‘Taller, taller. Curiouser and curiouser!’ He flexed his hands straight out and up.
He had never gotten over his initial incredulity when in the room with the dead. He was both delighted and bewildered to discover that here he was master of peoples, here he might do what he wished with men, and they must, by necessity, be polite and co-operative with him. They could not run away. And now, as on other days, he felt himself released and resilient, growing, growing like Alice. ‘Oh, so tall, oh, so tall, so very tall. . . until my head. . . bumps. . . the ceiling.’
He walked about among the sheeted people. He felt the same he did when coming from a picture show late at night, very strong, very alert, very certain of himself. He felt that everyone was watching him as he left a picture show, and that he was very handsome and very correct and brave and all the things that the picture hero was, his voice oh, so resonant, persuasive, and he had the right lilt to his left eyebrow and the right tap with his cane — and sometimes this movie-induced hypnosis lasted all the way home and persisted into sleep. Those were the only two times in his living he felt miraculous and fine, at the picture show, or here — in his own little theatre of the cold.
He walked along the sleeping rows, noting each name on its white card.
‘Mrs. Walters. Mr. Smith. Miss Brown. Mr. Andrews. Ah, good afternoon, one and all!’
‘How are you today, Mrs. Shellmund?’ he wanted to know, lifting a sheet as if looking for a child under a bed. ‘You’re looking splendid, dear lady.’
Mrs. Shellmund had never spoken to him in her life; she’d always gone by like a large white statue with roller skates hidden under her skirts, which gave her an elegant gliding, imperturbable rush.
‘My dear Mrs. Shellmund,’ he said, pulling up a chair and regarding her through a magnifying-glass. ‘Do you realize, my lady, that you have a sebaceous condition of the pores? You were quite waxen in life. Pore trouble. Oil and grease and pimples. A rich, rich diet, Mrs. Shellmund, there was your trouble. Too many frosties and spongie cakes and cream candies. You always prided yourself on your brain, Mrs. Shellmund, and thought I was like a dime under your toe, or a penny, really. But you kept that wonderful priceless brain of yours afloat in parfaits and fizzes and limeades and sodas and were so very superior to me that now, Mrs. Shellmund, here is what shall happen. . .’
He did a neat operation on her. Cutting the scalp in a circle, he lifted it off, then lifted out the brain. Then he prepared a cake-confectioner’s little sugar-bellows and squirted her empty head full of little whipped cream and crystal ribbons, stars and frollops, in pink, white and green, and on top he printed in a fine pink scroll SWEET DREAMS and put the skull back on and sewed it in place and hid the marks with wax and powder. ‘So there,’ he said, finished.
He walked on to the next table.
‘Good afternoon, Mr. Wren. Good afternoon. And how is the master of the racial hatreds today, Mr. Wren? Pure, white, laundered Mr. Wren. Clean as snow, white as linen, Mr. Wren you are. The man who hated Jews and negroes. Minorities, Mr. Wren, minorities.’ He pulled back the sheet. Mr. Wren stared up with glassy cold eyes. ‘Mr. Wren, look upon a member of a minority. Myself. The minority of inferiors, those who speak not above a whisper, those afraid of talking aloud, those frightened little nonentities, mice. Do you know what I am going to do with you, Mr. Wren? First, let us draw your blood from you, intolerant friend.’ The blood was drawn off ‘Now — the injection of, you might say, embalming fluid.’
Mr. Wren, snow-white, linen-pure, lay with the fluid going in him.
Mr. Benedict laughed.
Mr. Wren turned black; black as dirt, black as night.
The embalming fluid was — ink.
‘And hello to you, Edmund Worth!’
What a handsome body Worth had. Powerful, with muscles pinned from huge bone to huge bone, and a chest like a boulder. Women had grown speechless when he walked by, men had stared with envy and hoped they might borrow that body some night and ride home in it to the wife and give her a nice surprise. But Worth’s body had always been his own, and he had applied it to those tasks and pleasures which made him a conversational topic among all people who enjoyed sin.
‘And now, here you are,’ said Mr. Benedict, looking down at the fine body with pleasure. For a moment he was lost in memory of his own body in his own past.
He had once tried strangling himself with one of those apparatuses you nail in a doorway and chuck under your jawbone and pull yourself up on, hoping to add an inch to his ridiculously short frame.
To counteract his deadly pale skin he had lain in the sun, but he boiled and his skin fell off in pink leaflets, leaving only more pink, moist, sensitive skin. And what could he do about the eyes from which his mind peered, those close-set, glassy little eyes and the tiny wounded mouth? You can repaint houses, burn trash, move from the slum, shoot your mother, buy new clothes, get a car, make money, change all those outer environmentals for something new. But what’s the brain to do when caught like cheese in the throat of a mouse?
His own environment thus betrayed him; his own skin, body, colour, voice gave him no chance to extend out into that vast bright world where people tickled ladies’ chins and kissed their mouths and shook hands with friends and traded aromatic cigars.
Thinking in this fashion, Mr. Benedict stood over the magnificent body of Edmund Worth.
He severed Worth’s head, put it in a coffin on a small satin pillow, facing up, then he placed one hundred and ninety pounds of bricks in the coffin and arranged some pillows inside a black coat and a white shirt and tie to look like the upper body, and covered the whole with a blanket of blue velvet, up to the chin. It was a fine illusion.
The body itself he placed in a refrigerating vault.
‘When I die, I shall leave specific orders, Mr. Worth, that my head be severed and buried, joined to your body. By that time I shall have acquired an assistant willing to perform such a rascally act, for money. If one cannot have a body worthy of love in life, one can at least gain such a body in death. Thank you.’
He slammed the lid on Edmund Worth.
Since it was a growing and popular habit in the town for people to be buried with the coffin lids closed over them during the service, this gave Mr. Benedict great opportunities to vent his repressions on his hapless guests. Some he locked in their boxes upside down, some face down, or making obscene gestures. He had the most utterly wondrous fun with a group of old maiden ladies who were mashed in a car on their way to an afternoon tea. They were famous gossips, always with heads together over some choice bit.
What the onlookers at the triple funeral did not know (all three casket lids were shut) was that, as in life, all three were crowded into one casket, heads together in eternal, cold, petrified gossip. The other two caskets were filled with pebbles and shells and ravels of gingham. It was a nice service. Everybody cried. ‘Those three inseparables, at last separated,’ everybody sobbed.
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Benedict, having to hide his face in his grief.
Not lacking for a sense of justice, Mr. Benedict buried one rich man stark naked. A poor man he buried wound in gold cloth, with five-dollar gold pieces for buttons and twenty-dollar coins on each eyelid. A lawyer he did not bury at all, but burnt him in the incinerator — his coffin contained nothing but a polecat, trapped in the woods one Sunday.
An old maid, at her service one afternoon, was the victim of a terrible device. Under the silken comforter, parts of an old man had been buried with her. There she lay, insulted by cold organs, being made cold love to by hidden hands, hidden and planted other things. The shock showed on her face, somewhat.
So Mr. Benedict moved from body to body in his mortuary that afternoon, talking to all the sheeted figures, telling them his every secret. The final body for the day was the body of one Merriwell Blythe, an ancient man afflicted with spells and comas. Mr. Blythe had been brought in for dead several times, but each time had revived in time to prevent premature burial.
Mr. Benedict pulled back the sheet from Mr. Blythe’s face.
Mr. Merriwell Blythe fluttered his eyes.
‘Ah!’ and Mr. Benedict let fall the sheet.
‘You!’ screamed the voice under the sheet.
Mr. Benedict fell against the slab, suddenly shaken and sick.
‘Get me up from here!’ cried the voice of Mr. Merriwell Blythe.
‘You’re alive!’ said Mr. Benedict, jerking aside the sheet.
‘Oh, the thing’s I’ve heard, the things I’ve listened to the last hour!’ wailed the old man on the slab, rolling his eyes about in his head in white orbits. ‘Lying here, not able to move, and hearing you talk the things you talk! Oh, you dark, dark
