On the Day I Died Page 4

  Upstairs, right on top of all this dead-body stuff, was where the undertaker and his family lived. At first I wondered what it was like to go to bed every night knowing there was a corpse laying right downstairs. But then I’d seen stiffs before, and they didn’t move. Dead and gone, right? Besides, I figured this was normal for them, just like sleeping in the park was normal for me. People get used to their own lives, you know?

  I’ll tell you one thing about funeral homes, though. They were easy pickings. All I had to do was wait until the middle of the night, when I was sure the undertaker and his family were fast asleep, then open a window and creep right in. The windows in those places were never locked, which seemed downright stupid to me. But, then, who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth? Those undertakers’ trusting natures just made my job that much easier.

  Once inside, I’d ease open the big double door that led into the parlor. Then I’d slip along through the shadows—those thick carpets conveniently muffling the sound of my footsteps—until I came to the casket.

  Opening a casket’s lid was like opening a box on Christmas morning—you never knew what you’d find inside. A pocket watch? A gold wedding band? A set of pearl cuff links? Eagerly, I’d slide my nimble fingers under the rim of the lid until I found the release tab. The lid would open with a sigh, the stiff would come into view. Always polite, I’d introduce myself.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” I’d say as I slipped off her ring. “The name’s Johnnie.”

  Or other times,

  “Thank you kindly, sir,” as I unsnapped a tie pin.

  Or once in a while,

  “Sorry, kid,” as I pocketed a baseball card or a Shirley Temple doll.

  Business was booming! As long as people kept dying, I was in clover.

  Then one night I slipped into the Swickard Funeral Home over on Ashland and Grand. It was smaller than the other joints I’d robbed—just one tiny parlor that stunk of cooked cabbage and mothballs. Wooden chairs—the flimsy, folding kind—had already been set up for the next day’s funeral, and even in the dark I could see that the carpet was thin-to-none in spots.

  Johnnie, I told myself, as sure as eggs is eggs, you won’t be walking out of here with no diamond necklace. Still, even a poor corpse might have a bauble or two. Creeping easy, I moved toward the front of the parlor where the cheap pine coffin lay.

  And then I stopped. It was a humid June night, and the block of ice that had been placed under the bier to keep the body cool had created a fog bank of pale vapor that swirled, ghostlike, in the parlor’s dim light. I tell you, it gave me a creepy feeling, as if I was stumbling onto the set of one of them Wolf Man movies. I paused, got a grip.

  Reaching the casket, I placed my hands on the lid and took a deep breath. Then, quiet, all cautious-like, I raised it, inch by inch, the thrill starting to build inside me as the contents of the coffin came into view.

  “Come on,” I muttered, my voice sounding like it did when I was shooting dice, “make it a wedding band, a silver cross, a pair of gold earrings.”

  Hopes high, I leaned in through that weird fog and—leaped back, knocking over one of them folding chairs. The clatter echoed in the empty room.

  For a couple of seconds I was glued to the spot, bent over, my heart rat-tat-tatting in my chest like a Tommy gun.

  It couldn’t be!

  But it was!

  The face—them waxy, bloodless features—belonged to none other than …

  Miss Bolam!

  I swallowed hard, my throat feeling all thick and woolly. I’m not afraid, I told myself. It was just creepy, seeing someone dead that I’d seen alive only a few weeks earlier.

  I straightened and forced myself to look in. There she lay, her cobweb-white hair done up in her everyday bun, her skin wrinkled as a mummy’s. Her eyes were closed, sure, but in my mind I could see them lifeless black marbles beneath the lids.

  A glint of something pulled my eyes away from her face. Pinned to the collar of her death dress, Miss Bolam’s brooch glittered in the mist.

  My lips, which had been pressed together so tightly they ached, suddenly relaxed into a smile. Poetic justice. That’s what it was, all right. Poetic justice. Miss Bolam’s precious brooch was about to buy me pecan pie over at Alma’s Diner for the next year!

  I reached for it.

  And then, by some crazy trick of light, one of Miss Bolam’s yellow, melted-looking hands seemed to move. Except it wasn’t a trick of light, because … the hand moved again. Twitched. Lifted off her chest. Then it slid down, inch by inch, its long nails making a scratching sound as they dragged across the casket’s satin lining until it finally came to rest at her side.

  I pulled away. Squeezed my eyes shut. Opened them again.

  Come on, Johnnie. Get a grip. It’s just some kind of dead-person reflex, the body settling or something. You’re spooked and letting your mind play tricks. What with the fog, and finding your old teacher like this, you’re imagining things.

  I made myself reach down again, my fingers feeling thick as sausages, and unpinned the brooch. The metal felt cold in my hand. As cold as that block of ice sitting under the bier.

  Time to skedaddle, I told myself. Yeah, hightail it out of here now. Letting the coffin lid fall shut with a dull thump, I turned and made my way through the rows of cheap chairs. I was already at the double doors, already turning the knob, when I remembered. Her hand. Tomorrow morning when the undertaker opened the coffin, he’d see that Miss Bolam’s hand wasn’t crossed over her chest anymore. He’d take a closer look, discover that the brooch was gone and squawk to the cops. Sure as beans on toast, by tomorrow night there’d be nothing in the papers and on the radio but news about the funeral home robbery. And my perfectly good business? So long and good night! Everything spoiled because of dusty Miss Bolam.

  I shook my head. That dame had been in the driver’s seat while she was alive. I wasn’t about to let her run things when she was dead, too.

  I made myself turn around, forced one foot in front of the other. Drops of sweat the size of dimes clung to my forehead, and my breath came in whistly gasps, like a Model T that’s split an air hose. Hands shaking, I opened the coffin’s lid for a second time.

  “Miss Bolam?” I whispered crazily.

  She lay there, cold and stiff. Unmoving.

  I took a step backward. I didn’t want to get anywhere near her.

  Do it, Johnnie. Just do it, and get outta here.

  I stretched out my arm. Wispy fingers of fog reached into the casket along with me. My belly clenched as I grasped her dead hand.

  It grasped back.

  I screamed. Scrambling backward, I tried to pull away, but the hand held on like a vise, the dead fingers digging into my flesh. In its coffin, Miss Bolam’s body was dragged onto its side. Its mouth fell open, gaping. One eyelid, like a broken window blind, rolled halfway up. With a final frantic tug, I flung the hand off. It fell back against the side of the coffin with a sickening thunk.

  I screamed again, sucking in lungfuls of that yellowish coffin fog. I whirled, and in my fear fell head-over-hobnails into the front row of folding chairs. I went down, the chairs toppling onto me. I kicked them away. Struggling to my feet, I glanced back at the casket.

  Everything was the way it had been before!

  The body lay on its back, mouth and both eyes closed, hands crossed over its chest. The only thing different was the brooch. It no longer gleamed from Miss Bolam’s collar. It was mine now, stuffed into my shirt pocket, cold against my chest.

  I couldn’t have dreamed this all up, could I? I had screamed, for cripes sake. I had tripped. I had seen that hand move.

  But if it wasn’t my mind playing tricks, why hadn’t the undertaker burst in? Surely he’d heard all the racket.

  My brain felt fuzzy and confused.

  I looked back at Miss Bolam’s corpse.

  “Dead and gone,” I said aloud.

  At that, the fog thickened and swirled, and the parlor’s c
urtains billowed as if there was a breeze blowing somewhere, which there wasn’t because the windows were closed tight. Behind me, the parlor doors squeaked shut.

  I lunged for the doorknobs, turned, pushed. The doors wouldn’t budge. It was as if someone—or something—was holding them from the other side, refusing to let me out.

  In my pocket, that brooch suddenly started throbbing … no … beating, beating like a human heart. And where it had once been icy, it now burned through my shirt. I could feel the red stone in its center glowing.

  Then a voice spoke from behind me—Miss Bolam’s voice—sounding like dry leaves on a sidewalk and spouting words I didn’t understand. “Amun cahi ra lamac harrahya.”

  I turned slowly.

  Miss Bolam was sitting up in her casket. Her head slowly swiveled until she was facing me. She looked deep into my eyes with her flat, dead ones. Then her lips parted like an open wound, and out crawled a single black spider.

  My knees buckled. With a shriek, I pounded, kicked, flung myself against the doors. I cast a frantic glance over my shoulder.

  Miss Bolam was out of her casket now. She staggered toward me, her leather shoes squeaking. “Amun cahi ra lamac harrahya.”

  I whimpered and shook the doorknobs.

  She kept coming, step after squeaking step. Trapped like a rat, I could only watch, my back pressed against the doors, as she moved closer and closer, until finally she stood close enough for me to feel the chill rising off her dead flesh. Her dried-apple face pressed against mine.

  “Ai oro ramr hvtar.”

  I heard a new voice. A man’s voice. The undertaker’s voice!

  “You’re a fine lady, Miss Bolam,” the undertaker was saying, “to pay for all the boy’s funeral expenses. A former student of yours, did you say?”

  “Yes.” It was Miss Bolam’s voice again, but this time she didn’t sound like dead leaves. This time she was using her old classroom voice. “It’s such a shame. Johnnie had such promise.”

  “I’m alive!” I tried to yell. But my lips wouldn’t move. Nothing would move. I could only lie there, stiff as stone.

  The dusty-thick stink of lilac talcum powder filled my nose; then Miss Bolam’s face came into view. She was fully alive now and grinning with triumph. Leaning over to pin the brooch onto the collar of my dress shirt—the light in its center starting to fade—she whispered in my ear, “We all learn our lesson, Mr. Novotny, one way or the other.”

  The coffin lid closed with a creak.

  Mike watched as Johnnie, no longer angry, yanked the brooch off his collar. “It don’t look like much now, does it?” he said. His voice sounded both hurt and bewildered.

  Mike looked at the brooch. Tarnished gold. A dull red stone. He shook his head. Above them, the wind sighed through the trees.

  Finally Gina said, “Did you try to haunt her? Miss Bolam, I mean. Did you get your revenge?”

  “I thought about it,” said Johnnie, tucking the brooch into his trouser pocket. “And I woulda done it too, but then … well … I sort of figured I had it coming, what with the spiders and all.”

  “Poetic justice,” Mike whispered to himself.

  Johnnie heard him. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “Poetic justice.”

  “That’s crap,” said a new voice. The boy with the camera hopped down from a weather-stained statue of an angel. “If you want to think you got what you deserved—somehow earned your fate—then go ahead. But there’s no way I’m buying that poetic justice baloney. I didn’t deserve my fate. I didn’t have it coming. It just happened. Death’s like that, you know? Capricious.” He paused, then laughed, a deep, rich laugh. “How’s that for an SAT vocab word, huh? Capricious.” He pointed. “Hey … um … what’s your name?”

  “Mike.”

  “Hey, Mike, you want to hear a capricious story?”

  Do I have a choice? thought Mike.

  THE CHICAGO STATE ASYLUM for the Insane—or what was left of it, anyway—was just six blocks from my house. The place had been abandoned so long even my dad couldn’t remember a time when it was open, and he’d lived in the neighborhood his entire life—almost fifty years! Left to decay, it was creepy as crap. Its gables and towers jutted into the stormy sky like evil fists, and its dark windows made me think of a skeleton’s eye sockets. You know, bleak and empty, but still full of secrets. Its paint peeled. Slates from its roof littered the overgrown ground. And you could hear rusting KEEP OUT signs banging whenever the wind howled.

  Oh, yeah, Dracula would have loved this place.

  So would Edgar Allan Poe.

  And me. Most definitely me. Already, I could imagine a series of my black-and-white photographs of the place hanging on the art room wall; already hear Mr. Adair, the honors art teacher, saying something like “Forlorn and intriguing, exuding a sense of transience, the ruins of the asylum are a reminder of mortality, proof that nothing is forever.”

  A+ work for sure. I’d probably even score a primo spot in the senior exhibition. And why not? A project like this would be epic!

  The idea had come to me the night my buddy, Aidan, and I were hanging out in his basement stuffing our faces with leftover Chinese and flipping through the cable channels. Aidan tucked a forkful of lo mein noodles into his mouth, then came to a total stop.

  “Cool,” he said, noodles dangling, “Specter Searchers!” He dropped the remote and reached for the soy sauce.

  We watched as a couple of so-called paranormal experts—a big-gutted guy with a face full of piercings, and a girl who could definitely have used a couple of doughnuts—stumbled around a dark basement.

  “Oooh, did you see that?” gasped the girl, whirling and shining her flashlight into a corner littered with crushed beer cans and cigarette butts.

  “It was a ghost,” declared Gut Guy, as if his saying so made it true.

  The girl rubbed her bony arms. “It’s cold,” she whimpered.

  “A cold spot,” said Gut Guy. Then, for those viewers who still might not have connected the dots, he added, “A cold spot is an indicator of paranormal activity.”

  I couldn’t stand it. “This is all a crock,” I erupted. “There aren’t any ghosts down there.”

  “They just found one, didn’t they?” Aidan said, pointing at the screen with a cold egg roll.

  “They said they found one. But where’s the proof—the irrefutable, scientific proof?”

  Aidan stared at me blankly. Let’s face it. He wasn’t exactly a brainiac. Still, he had other things going for him. Like his laid-back personality. Like the fact that he could put up with what some of the other kids at school called my superiority complex.

  What? I’m supposed to apologize for being smart?

  “Who needs proof?” Aidan finally said with a shrug. “Ghosts just are.”

  And that was when it struck me—I’d do a little urban exploration of my own! But instead of stumbling around in dark corridors and moldy basements looking for ghosts, I’d set out to prove that there was no such thing. That ghosts were merely the result of superstitious minds and tiny intellects. Urban legends created by people willing and eager to believe the unbelievable. And I knew just where I’d go—the Chicago State Asylum for the Insane.

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Aidan after I told him my idea. “That place rates like a two hundred on the haunt-o-meter!”

  I knew the stories, of course. Everyone in my neighborhood knew them. Stories of flickering lights; of crazed, disembodied laughter and shrieking; of the occasional trespasser seeing moving shadows and floating orbs.

  “It’s all crap, Aidan,” I said. “Come with me and I’ll prove it to you.”

  “No way am I going poking around in there. And you shouldn’t either. Annabelle might get you.”

  “Annabelle?”

  “You mean to tell me you haven’t heard about Annabelle?” He leaned forward, pushing aside a half-empty carton of mu shu pork. “A few years ago some guys were in there, drinking beer and goofing around,
when they hear this giggling sound coming from the third floor. So they go upstairs and they see this little girl sitting next to the barred window in this old-fashioned-type wheelchair. Her hands and legs are all bound up with leather straps, you know? And when she turns to face them they realize … she doesn’t have any eyes! ‘My name is Annabelle,’ the little girl says, all whispery. ‘Want to play a game? I know some fun games.’ And she smiles this crazy warped smile. But no way are those guys sticking around to play Ring Around the Rosy with a dead kid. They race for the door. ‘Don’t leave me!’ the little girl cries after them. ‘Don’t leave me!’ Later, those guys swore they felt Annabelle holding them back with, like, some kind of supernatural power or something.” He paused. “I’m telling you, Scott, those dudes were lucky to escape.”

  “Those dudes were dipsticks,” I said.

  “Whatever,” said Aidan. He burped. Changed over to the sci-fi channel.

  Aidan’s bogus story didn’t stop me, of course. I was already on fire with the idea’s possibilities, already basking in the glory I knew I’d earn.

  I raised the viewfinder of my Canon EOS 30D, framed and snapped. As I did, a spiral of dust and dead leaves whirled up the ruined circular driveway toward me. Black clouds darkened the already gloomy building. Lightning forked and thunder rumbled. Time to go inside.

  Ignoring a NO TRESPASSING sign that had been up so long its post was almost completely rotted through, I shouldered my camera bag and squeezed under the buckling chain-link fence. I raced up the driveway, taking the asylum’s crumbling stone stairs two at a time. But before diving for cover inside, I paused for a closer look at the arch above the front door. Carved into the lichen-spotted granite were the words ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  I recognized the quote. It was the inscription at the entrance to Hell from Dante’s Divine Comedy. I had to grin. Who would have thought I’d actually use something I learned in AP English?