Dr. Billy Malone is new in town but it looks like he won’t be staying in the remote, little town of Desert View the way he imagined. Billy, you see, has a condition nobody would recognize, one which leads to his premature funeral.
What would you do if you were buried alive? This is the Billy’s story … once Dr. Malone, now Billy the corpse.
Part 3 – Conclusion
William woke up with a pressure in his bladder.
He swung his feet over, stood up and out of bed.
Naked, he walked out of his rented room, down the hallway which was eerily lit with oil lamps, descended the stairs and approached the parlor.
Penelope was sitting on the round sofa in the center of the Victorian-style room, dressed in her high-collar finest. She covered her mouth and giggled as he came full into view. He looked down and saw that he was becoming aroused just from being in the same room as she. He covered himself (with both hands, she admirably noticed), dashed through the kitchen and out the back door. He felt pleasure in his nudity and erection once he was outside. He strolled through the dew covered field to the outhouse. He knew he had nothing to be ashamed of and decided that, after he completed his constitution, he was going to walk back into the house with overwhelming confidence and take Penelope right there in the parlor. Yep, that’s just what he was going to do.
Inside the small wooden structure, he positioned himself and began to release. Something was wrong though. He felt that he was urinating on himself. He was about to stop when the (coffin? Why would you say that?) outhouse began to shake. It tilted violently until the tiny building was somehow pushed onto its back. Waste began to pour in from the hole between his knees. He turned about in the filth, and felt even more warmth on his thighs. He was still peeing.
He frantically pushed his face up against the half-moon window to see who was doing this to him. He saw the Undertaker outside. “Down you go, boy! Didn’t even use th’ spoon! Ah jes’ wanted you down!”
Wilson’s face never changed, but his voice became Chester Kinslow’s. “Told you to stop growin’, Billy! You’re to big for the basket!” Basket? Better than casket!
The old man laughed. “A tisket, a tasket, Billy’s feet ain’t in the casket!”
The Undertaker raised an ax over his head and began to swing.
Billy’s eyes couldn’t follow the arc of the blade, but heard the metal crush wood (a familiar sound, for reasons he couldn’t understand). He saw blood fly up and disappear in the blackness of Wilson’s coat. The young doctor pushed away from the door and looked down. The floor of the pine box had been raised six inches, cleanly slicing though his ankles. There was no blood. It seemed as if his legs had simply merged with the pine. He tried to wiggle his toes, and the planks of wood abidingly rippled.
Outside, Wilson was laughing wildly. The laugh quickly turned into a hacking cough, producing a monstrous ball of phlegm. Instead of spitting it out, the old ghoul bent over and let it slowly roll off his tongue. The mucus fell through space for an excruciatingly long time before striking the open and hysterically wild eye of Billy Malone.
◆ ◆ ◆
Billy’s body violently convulsed. The raindrop rolled off his eyelid and down his cheek. He breathed heavily through his nose, knowing that he had been dreaming and trying to prevent more hyperventilation. He nodded down in a habitual gesture to “see” the dampness in his crotch. He had urinated in his pants. He sulked a little, but decided that it was for the best.
He would’ve suffered through stomach cramps out of sheer pride if he’d been awake and needed to relieve himself.
He stared at the nothingness. He wondered when he would get the energy or the desire to start stripping the pine again.
His fingers were in agony. He decided to wait until he got hungry and therefore motivated, when his eye was stung closed.
He jerked, turned his head, and another drop of moisture rolled down his cheek.
Water? Rain! It’s getting through!
He reached up to feel the crack with more than a little trepidation. What he found was a layered excavation of the lid, close to a foot square, centering around a two-inch wide split in the wood.
He put his pinky against the fissure and pushed. It easily slid through into the soil above. Moisture ran down his finger, off his palm, and into his anticipating mouth. He savored the eight drops of life; the liquid on his parched tongue, the crunch of soil between his teeth. He silently thanked no one in particular and threw himself into scraping.
◆ ◆ ◆
When the split had opened a little wider, he inserted his right forefinger to the middle knuckle, grabbed the wood and pulled. Having so many layers stripped already, the pine crumbled with surprising ease. He eventually created a hole nearly a foot long, He began grabbing and tugging the board with both hands. Dirt rained into his face, mouth, and neck. He was grateful that the entire topsoil didn’t give way.
Up and in and up and in, he pried. The pine moaned and creaked as it finally gave in down at his feet. He brought the plank into the casket and laid it flush against his left side. He took a fistful of wood that had fallen onto his chest and put it in his mouth. He sucked at the moisture and slowly chewed the fiber as he turned his attention to another task.
He had an opening that ran from his face to his feet, approximately one foot wide. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there. He knew it was raining outside from the dampness of the dirt. He hoped that it was night. The last thing he needed was for the entire town to witness his resurrection. Odds were good that he’d be shot on sight. Truly not worth the trouble of “rising.” He decided that the first thing he’d have to do, if he actually made it, was to see Gus. Gus Hatskin was a reasonable man. He’d go to Gus and borrow some money and get the hell out of Desert View. But first, he had four or five feet of soil to dig through.
He quickly took fistfuls of ground and flung them to the bottom of the casket. He had to bite down hard on the wood in his mouth. The dirt agitated the exposed nerves of his fingertips. It got under the layers of skin and burned like an open flame. The worst was the bone that represented his left forefinger. Soil surrounded it like a new, maddeningly irritating skin.
The piece of pine in his mouth split. He spit it out, felt around for another one of similar size, and shoved it in before he gave in to the screams that so begged for release.
He patted the soil down with his feet, but quickly ran out of room. His head couldn’t move because the piece of plank above his face didn’t give with the rest of the board. He tried to pry the piece loose, but couldn’t manage the necessary leverage.
He was losing focus. Sweat flowed from every conceivable pore. If he didn’t breathe fresh air soon, he became resigned, he would lay down and die; a crazy man in his own private asylum.
Working up strength from whatever intestinal fortitude he could muster, he breathed in deeply and heaved his forehead against the only wooden obstacle remaining. The ease in which it released was almost irritating. Without the other five-and-ahalf feet of plank for anchorage, the nails popped out with seemingly no resistance.
Am I supposed to be grateful?
He reached directly above his head, and resumed digging.
◆ ◆ ◆
His fingers quickly became useless. He tenderly picked up the board that had been above his head. Squeezing it between his palms, he chopped at the dirt with the makeshift shovel. After a few digs, he used the board to scrape the dirt off his chest, piling in down at his feet.
The doctor had no way to gage the passage of time. Eventually, he had to stretch to bring the ground down. William stopped digging and blindly reached up for the roof of his enclosure. His fingers couldn’t find the top.
He painfully grabbed the edges of the casket and twisted his upper body so that the could squeeze through the gap in the planks. The dirt he had accumulated made it even more difficult to adjust his lower half as he lifted his upper torso. When his chest cleared the wood, he turned to sit. The top of his hair brushed the dirt cone of the ceiling he had made. The back of his shirt dampened from the moist soil. The air was lighter, cooler. But it still wasn’t entirely fresh, and there wasn’t an abundance of it. Then he considered how absurd he must have looked.
I’m sitting up in my own coffin. Wish I could’ve done this during the funeral. Would have saved a lot of aggravation.
The attempt at humor only succeeded in darkening his mood.
He began to wonder if he was even given a funeral. If anyone showed up. Few people knew him, and even fewer wanted him there. He wondered if Penelope Gardner had cried.
They must have sent word to my mother. My God, to lose both a husband and a son in a lifetime is more than she should have to endure. What if I miraculously show up after she’s come to terms with my death? The shock could kill her.
Billy went back to digging.
Wilson took everything from me! Tulpa was an idiot, but Wilson is the one who killed me! Well, I hope they can’t hang a dead man. When I get out here I’m going to kill you, you twisted bastard. You wanted to send ashes to ashes? I’m turning your dust to dust.
He vividly began to see himself rising from the ground like some vengeful spirit. Powerfully, he would stride across the graveyard and up to the Undertaker’s house. He would kick in the door, bound up the stairs and into the old man’s bedroom.
Wilson’s fat, ugly wife (if he had one) would scream in terror upon discovering the filthy thing Billy had become at the hands of her husband. She would run past Billy and out of the room to find help. Paying her no heed, Billy would then charge the panic-stricken Wilson and choke the life out of him. The doctor envisioned his victim’s face turning purple, his tongue swelling and dangling out of a pleading mouth, his eyes bulging out from their sockets.
The man of medicine smiled and continued digging upward.
He was primarily using the corner of the board; the tunnel coned to a peak. His energy waned, but the thought of killing Wilson bolstered his enthusiasm.
Eye for an eye. Isn’t that what Reverend Johnson preached last Sunday? It sure was. Your life for mine. It’s just, old man.
Maybe I’ll go for Tulpa when I’m done with you. I don’t know. All I know is that my life’s over, even if I do get out. But you’re next.
Abruptly, the dirt stopped falling. It continued to crumble and slide down the sides, but it stopped raining from the top. Billy pulled the board down and felt the tip. Grass. Or what passed for it in Desert View. Weeds, roots, it didn’t matter. He had reached the top.
He looked up. Although he didn’t see a break in the darkness, he felt the air. Just barely, but enough.
He scurried up to a squatting position while untold pounds of dirt fell from his lap. He reached up, and his tortured fingers dabbed a wisp of breeze as their tips touched the night.
Hysterical with glee, he leapt for salvation. He became stuck immediately.
His right hand and wrist broke through the ground, but his head and chest became pressed at the point of the funnel-shaped cavern. He could draw no breath. His legs were also wedged between the coffin planks of the lid, with shifting mounds of dirt preventing his bare feet from being any real help in pushing himself any further toward freedom. Struggling only forced the truth to become apparent. He was hopelessly seized by his earthy prison. The ground wished not to give him up.
No! I’m so close!
More tears began to well up, but he couldn’t sob; his chest didn’t have the room to heave.
NO!
Using the very last reserves of energy he had, he lifted his feet from the dirt and began kicking petulantly at the air. He hoped that he might at least fall back into the casket.
Another chance! I just need another chance! I’ll take my time! I won’t kill anyone! I wasn’t going to kill anyone! I’ll sleep with the lepers! JUST ONE MORE CHANCE!
His left foot struck something solid in the void. One of the remaining planks of the lid. He fought against the soil to get a knee up so that his foot could get hold. Succeeding, he pushed.
His arm jutted out of the ground nearly to his armpit. He pulled the dirt and grass away from his face. He greeted the night sky at long last.
The rain had stopped. The full moon shone bright over the desert, it’s beams reflecting brilliantly off the moist ground.
This time he wept with joy.
Forget Wilson, or Tulpa. I don’t want to kill anyone. I just want out of here. I want to live!
“And I want to have sex with Penelope Gardner!”
He laughed, relishing the open air. His pores pulled tight against the cool August night. He savored every sensation.
He started to pull the sod away from his neck and shoulders, the pain from his fingers locked away for the time being.
After uncovering his left shoulder, he maneuvered that arm out. Pushing with both hands, he dragged himself up from the grave. When his butt was clear of the ground, he laid down. He slowly pulled each leg from the earth. He breathed deeply, cried quietly, and stared into the heavens.
I think I’ll just lie here awhile.
No! You’ve got to get up! Look at the town! The place, the people that put you down there! You beat them! You came back! YOU DID IT!
Reluctantly, every move an act of intention, he got to his feet. He swayed in the breeze. In front of him, past the rest of the graveyard, was Desert View by moonlight. On instinct, he raised his destroyed hands high into the air. Clenching painful fists, he called out to the sky:
“I…DID…IT!”
He never knew what hit him.
◆ ◆ ◆
Lonny Crocket didn’t want to work in the graveyard. He hated it.
His brothers (who were always smarter than him, even the young’ens) used to frighten him with ghost stories to keep him up at night. Half his youth was spent under the bed. The rest of the time he slept with potato sacks over his head.
Whatever he couldn’t see couldn’t hurt him, his figured.
But he needed a job after his daddy died, and Lon found that he actually had a “God-given talent.” Undertaker Wilson promised lunch one afternoon if Lonny could dig for him. Not feeling too comfortable around an honest-to-gosh’n corpse, but very hungry, Lon dug like a man possessed. As it turned out, Lon was the fastest grave digger in the West. The talent ultimately rewarded Lonny Crocket with the very prestigious, if not extremely ironic, position of cemetery caretaker.
Lon wanted to refuse the job at first, but his need for room and board won out. Sensing his apprehension, Wilson took his new assistant aside and told him the most, and possibly only, profound thing Lonny had every heard in his life.
“Lonny,” the Undertaker said. “The dead stay dead. Ah don’t care what your brothers have told you to scare you, ah don’t care what you’ve heard in what little school you ‘tended. The dead stay dead.”
That was it. The divine commandment. And it worked. Until now.
◆ ◆ ◆
Lon became comfortable enough to walk the grounds at night. He still jumped at every coyote howl and owl hoot, but his heart rarely froze in his chest anymore. He still didn’t like his job, but he was getting used to it. At 43, he finally knew responsibility. He felt like he was growing up.
Then he heard a grave cry out.
The ground screamed, and Lon went running for his groundskeeper shed. He spent the night there, shaking in the corner, hiding under some old potato sacks he found. The single word cried from the grave echoed in his head until dawn.
The word was “no.”
But the dead stay dead.
(no)
The next night he walked the grounds carrying his trusty shovel; the tool of his trade, his weapon for combat. He paraded the general area of the cry and began to hear something else. It sounded an awful lot like digging. He tracked the sound to a fresh plot. He knew the doctor was buried there. There wasn’t any kind of marker yet (not that Lonny could have read it, or anything), but he remembered that this was where they put the doctor. Of course, it didn’t make any difference whose grave it was. The dead stay dead.
(no)
He sat beside the cemetery’s sole Jericho tree the whole night, even in the rain. He listened and watched. He just about soiled himself when a hand came up out of the ground. It was all he could do not to run across the cemetery to Undertaker Wilson’s house, race up the stairs and crawl under the old man’s bed. Instead, he watched as the sprouting hand grew into the full upper torso of a man. Lon got up just as the body laid down. He slowly, quietly crept up on the corpse that stretched out on the ground. Then the cadaver got up, faced the town, and raised its dead arms.
Omigo-od! It’s a demon! An’ it’s bringin’ more demons!
No! The dead stay dead!
“I…”
Lonny choked up on his shovel and reared back.
“DID…”
The blade sliced the air as he swung.
“IT!”
The flat of the shovel connected satisfactorily with the back of the dead doctor’s skull. Led by the head, the body flew into the air a few feet before landing flat on the ground.
Lon wound up again, but the corpse never made a twitch.
He waited just to be sure. Nothing. Lon shrugged and began digging.
The dead stay dead. But he looked mighty alive. If he wasn’t dead, and Lon pointed this mistake out to Undertaker Wilson, Lon might lose his job. But he’s dead now, that was for sure. So Lonny decided to just do the work he was paid for.
Whatever people didn’t see didn’t hurt him, he figured. Keeping secrets keeps you from getting hungry.
The only thing that bothered him was that he never had to actually touch a dead person before this. But he had to get it back in the ground somehow.
◆ ◆ ◆
Billy’s forehead was pressed uncomfortably into the wood when he came around this time. He groggily felt the pine in front of him. No marks, no scratches. A clean surface.
Someone put it back. Made it new. Or did he ever get out at all?
No! It’s not fair! I made it! I know I did!
The fact that he was entombed again did not strike him as surprising or even odd. Just very, very cruel.
You’ll just have to do it again.
He pictured himself losing more skin and nails as he dug out. He pictured eating more dirt and crying more tears. A very loud snap, like pine, erupted inside his head.
Sure. I’ll just have to do it again. Only this time, no deals. This time I will kill them all. Every damn one of them. After I do it again.
Just have to do it again.
He put his head back to laugh, or maybe succumb to hysterics, when the back of his skull rubbed a fissure in the wood.
Stunned, he let his neck go limp, and his head bobbed forward.
Thump. “Ouch.”
Gravity.
He then realized that, as he felt the wood for defects, his hands were pressed against the coffin under the weight of his own body.
Upside down? He chortled.
“You buried me upside down? The coffin’s the same, the dirt’s the same, I’m just upside down?” He was no longer concerned about hyperventilation or dehydration. He had no thoughts at all about what digging out again might mean for his hands. “You ignorant FUCKS! I’ll kill you all! I’ll get out again, and KILL YOU ALL!”
◆ ◆ ◆
He cursed, he spit, he vowed revenge. Strangely, there were even moments where he was able to find peace, but such times of clarity were brief and few.
He laughed maniacally, cried ferociously, and pleaded silently. He made his peace with God, then denounced Him, then offered contrition. He damned the town. He forgave the town. He became convinced the town never existed.
Several hours after standing triumphant over his own unmarked grave, there was only one thing Billy Malone found he could not do no matter how desperately he wanted.
Try as he might, he could not turn around.
About the author:
Jim Fredrick, author of the novel A Cross to Bare, is currently performing as a stand-up comic throughout South Florida. Sunday nights at 11PM (EST), he hosts the JKRZ show along with Richy Lala, Matt Z. and Kevin McLeman, discussing the trials and triumphs of comedy in South Florida. The call in number is 347-324-3937, if you would like to contribute to the show.
If you should run into Jim in the streets: He’ll trade you a story for a cigarette. It’s a fair trade, as both are proven to take time off your lifespan.
