HOW TO MAKE ENDS MEET

Note: This story contains references to necrophilia, abuse of a corpse, murder of a child.

HOW TO MAKE ENDS MEET

By Janet Lorimer

    Tonight is Halloween. Under the porch light I stand, holding a bowl of candy. Small ghouls and goblins run by, laughing and shouting. I watch for the little straggler who has fallen behind the older children. His cries of “Wait for me!”  go unheeded.

I am ready, my open hand outstretched so he can see the treat that rests upon it. He climbs the steps, coming to me just as I once came to this house.  

#

    It was also in October when, so many years ago, I climbed these steps. I was a tired and dispirited woman in her early forties here to answer a help-wanted ad. If this interview failed, I would be quite literally homeless.

As I climbed the steps to the front stoop, I glanced up at a faded sign over the door: Lang & Son, Photography.  

The door opened and I was ushered into a small entry hall. Facing me were stairs to a second floor, but my prospective employer opened a door on the left and invited me into the parlor.     

As we moved, she talked. “Never go upstairs. You’ll have no need to. Edward lives downstairs. He’s bedridden, and he has some dementia. Luckily, he sleeps a lot.”

    When I had phoned about the ad, she’d introduced herself as Savina. “I’ll take you to meet my great-uncle,” she said.

    We were about to leave the parlor when she pulled me to the front window.

    “There is one thing,” she said, her tone and her grip surprisingly fierce. “You must never forget to do this. Every day before dark, you must pull these drapes tightly shut and lock the door. Turn out the lights in this room and spend the rest of the evening at the back of the house.”

I felt a stab of alarm. “Why?” 

She pointed across the street at an old cemetery, acres of parched earth sprouting yellow weeds, grey headstones and brown wooden crosses. “Do you believe in ghosts?” she whispered. “Edward does, and he is terrified.” 

#

    Edward Lang, an only child, was born as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. His mother died when he was sixteen. His father had inherited the house and the photography business from his father. The second floor of the house was given over to a studio, a dark room, and a waiting area for sitters. The family lived downstairs.  

Edward began learning the family business as a child. When he was twenty-eight, his father suffered a stroke. Edward needed help, which he eventually found in a local charity home.  Renata, just fourteen, and her younger sister were orphaned Italian immigrants.   Edward hired Renata on the spot. She was an extremely beautiful girl, bright, clever, energetic. And so grateful for her new position she would have scrubbed the floors with a toothbrush if asked.

#

    “Edward called her Rennie, and the nickname stuck,” Savina said. We had finished a tour of the ground floor. Now we sat at the kitchen table drinking tea. “He was painfully shy around girls but at the same time enchanted by her.”

    I was only half-listening. During our tour of the house, we had passed a door here in the kitchen that Savina had said nothing about. So now I asked, “Is that the pantry?”

    She made a face. “No. It goes to the cellar, but there’s nothing much down there except stuff nobody wants anymore. And rats and spiders.” She shuddered.

    Earlier I had been introduced to Edward. He was gaunt, pale, a thin growth of white hair on the top of his head and white stubble on his chin. His lips were parched, so I automatically dampened them using a cloth soaking in a basin on the nightstand.  

Savina nodded approvingly. “The climate here is so dry.” Then she added, “He may call you Rennie. It’s the dementia.”

“My father had Alzheimer’s,” I told her. “After he passed, I had to care for my mother until she died. I have the experience, just not the license or degree.”

“Oh, the job is yours,” she said. “That is, if you want it.”

This job was my last hope. What choice did I have?

#

After his father died, Edward ran the business as he had been taught, but times and photography were changing. Rennie realized that Lang & Son, Photography would also have to change if they hoped to make ends meet.   

One day there was a knock on the front door. On the stoop stood a young couple. They looked to be in their early twenties, and very poor.  

The young husband was holding a large wicker basket, the contents covered with a ragged but spotless white cloth. They gestured to the sign over the door. Rennie ushered them into the parlor and went to fetch Edward.

The couple spoke only Italian, so Rennie translated. “They want us to take a photograph. They can’t afford much. It’s not what we usually charge, but I told them it was acceptable. We need the money, Edward.”

Edward sighed. “Oh, all right. How do they want to be posed? As if they are at a picnic?”

Turning to the couple, Rennie spoke. They looked at each other, then the man carefully pulled back the cloth. Inside was a baby, very pale and very still, eyes closed.

Edward smiled. “Ah, a child. That should be no problem. It’s asleep. We don’t want to deal with a fussy thing, do we?”  

Rennie and the couple just stared at him. Edward looked from face to face. “What?”  

Rennie spoke. “He’s dead, Edward. The baby is dead.”

Edward’s eyes widened. “What?”

“The child is dead,” Rennie repeated. “They want a picture of him. Something to remember their son by.”

“What an awful idea,” Edward gasped.

Renata did not hide her anger. “It’s a tragedy. They could not afford the medicine that might have saved their boy. This is their first child, and now he is gone. You will take their photograph, Edward.”

Edward stared at Rennie in astonishment.   

“Other photographers have been doing it for years. You will do it as well. You will take a photograph of this couple and their child.”

Edward nodded, stunned into silence by her vehemence.

Post-mortem photography was popular at a time when for many families that one photograph was all they had to remind them of their deceased loved one.  

Once he got over his initial revulsion, Edward discovered a gruesome kind of fascination for these sitters. In some cases, he and Renata had to go to the home of the family to photograph the corpse in its casket. In other instances, the whole family, along with the deceased, were photographed, a macabre family portrait. Most popular were poses of the mother holding the dead child in her arms with the living siblings standing next to her chair.

There were sundry tools to aid the photographer: stands with clamps to hold the seated corpse’s head still and upright; rods, fixed firmly to the stand, placed inside of garments to hold a standing corpse erect and in place. Once in a while the shoes of the deceased were temporarily nailed to the floor.

Since the eyes of the dead were usually closed, open eyes were drawn on the lids.

The photos had to be taken fairly soon after death. Edward and Rennie often found their subject almost drowning in fresh flowers to hide the odor of ensuing putrefaction.  

Little by little the business grew. Renata was in charge of everything now. Edward didn’t mind; he was head over heels in love with her.

#

    “Then Renata got sick,” Savina said. “She would have been in her early fifties and Edward in his late sixties. She didn’t tell him until it was too late, and she actually made all her own final arrangements. My mother, Rennie’s niece, came at once after Edward telephoned her. Rennie was buried in the cemetery across the street. No funeral, just a graveside observance with my mother and me, a priest, and Edward.”

    “How did Edward take her death?” I asked.

    Savina shuddered. “I thought at the time that he was on the brink of madness. He seemed almost impatient to get her into the ground.”

#

    The years melted one into another. Edward remained a recluse until the mailman saw the mail in his box piling up. The authorities located Savina who came to the house and found her great-uncle ill and alone. She took his care onto herself. Until she needed relief. And put a help-wanted ad in the paper.

#

    The days passed quickly as I cared for Edward.

    As I suspected, Savina showed up without warning about ten days later. She smiled and nodded, clearly pleased with my work, and I was sure she wouldn’t be back unless I phoned her.  

After she left, I breathed a sigh of relief. My parents had left me a rented house with cheap furnishings and nothing worth selling. Despite what Savina had said, I believed that Edward Lang’s cellar and perhaps the second floor might make up for it.

    The next afternoon, after I had locked and darkened the parlor, I opened the cellar door. A flight of wooden steps led down into shadows. I flicked the wall switch, and a single weak bulb came on over the stairs, but I also had a flashlight with me.  

    The cellar ran the length and width of the house. My light illuminated boxes and trunks piled one on another, and shelves on every wall. I saw the desiccated carcasses of a couple of rats. They had not decomposed in the dry climate, just become naturally mummified.

    There were more boxes and trunks than I could easily count. Some were labeled: Grandmother Lang’s china, Edward’s mother’s wedding gown, Edward’s books. I was sure the sales of antique china, the vintage clothing and other treasures I had yet to discover would provide me with an additional income.

    I scanned the shelves finding sacks and bottles of what I thought might be chemicals, maybe for the photography business: thiosulfate, natron, potassium ferricyanide, and more. Most likely useless to me.

    In a dusty corner at the back of the cellar stood an old metal chest. Inside lay album upon album of Lang & Son photographs dating from Edward’s grandfather’s day until close to the time Rennie passed away. As I carefully turned the pages of an album filled with prints of the dead, I felt certain that these vintage photos might also bring more money.  

    The next afternoon, after lunch, I decided to investigate the second floor. When I reached the landing, I paused. Three doors faced me. The first room appeared to be a waiting room for sitters.

    The second room had been made into a dark room. Old-fashioned photography equipment might bring good money.

    The last room was locked. I crept downstairs to begin a systematic search, finding a key ring in a shirt pocket in Edward’s closet.  

Back upstairs the second key I tried fit, and I slowly opened the door. The air that seeped out of that room had a musty and disagreeable odor.

I felt inside the doorway for a light switch, flicking it on. A small table lamp came to life. I glanced around, frowning in confusion. If this had been the studio, it was no more.

Dominating the room was what appeared to be a large bed shrouded with a dustsheet. Near it, other furniture, but I was focused on the bed. Puzzled, I carefully removed the covering. When it came away, I cried out, unable to contain my shock at the thing that lay there.    

It was a human corpse, one long dead, but not decomposed. Quite mummified, now just a husk, leathery and dark brown, the mouth opened in a contortion of terror. Or was it anger?

Rennie! It had to be. Somehow, he had robbed her grave, probably the night she was buried, and mad with grief, unable to be separated from her, he’d brought her cadaver home.

But not her spirit. That was what terrified him about the dark: Rennie, hunting for her body.

Had the dry climate mummified her or had Edward taken matters into his own hands, using chemicals to achieve the desired end? I remembered his books in the cellar, books on embalming and mummification. 

The bedding, grimy and stained, was pulled up only to the waist, revealing the upper torso clad in what had once been a filmy nightgown, now just discolored rags covering withered breasts. I could not bear to pull the bed clothes lower.

I glanced at the opposite side of the bed. No stains there, but on the pillow a damning certainty: a few short dark hairs in the hollow made by the repeated use of a man’s head.

Suddenly a call from the floor below: “You! You!”

My breath caught and held. Edward. I glanced at my watch. It was long past the time when the parlor should have been darkened.

I ran down the stairs, into the parlor and to the window. Near the entrance to the cemetery, shadows massed. A blackness that roiled and churned, moving faster, growing stronger with each passing second.

I watched the seething coil of darkness surge across the road. But as terrified as I was, I could not make myself move until the final moment when it reached the window, threatening to obscure what was left of the light.

I found my voice then, crying out, “No!” as I lunged for the door. I was too late. The black coil slid under the door and around the edges of it and through the keyhole until it was in the house. It was icy, angry and cruel. It screamed as it flew up to the second floor. I stood at the foot of the stairs, too terrified to climb, unable to look away.   

I knew what it was hunting. A louder pain-edged cry told me it had found what it sought. 

It reappeared, roaring past me, flying down the hall to Edward’s room. I heard him shriek in unison with the terrible thing, and then there was silence. It had exacted its revenge.

The house was suddenly silent, the entity gone. I sat on the bottom stair alone with my thoughts, trying to find a way to turn this nightmare to my advantage.

At dawn I found the strength to stand and walk to Edward’s room. I gazed down at him dispassionately. Oddly, he looked quite peaceful.     

I phoned Savina. “You must come at once. You should prepare yourself for the worst.”

When she reached the house, I opened the door but stopped her from going into the parlor. “There is something upstairs you must see first,” I told her.

When she saw the open door, she stopped. “Oh—.” 

I pushed her ahead of me through the doorway and toward the bed. “Look.”

For a moment she was silent and then she cried out, staggering back against me. “What is that?” She could not raise her voice above a whisper. “Is it—?”

 “I believe so. But it doesn’t matter. We have more important things to work out.”

“Edward—.”

“Is dead. We will tend to him later. First, we have to decide what we are going to do about this.”

“We have to call the police.”  

“That would be the worst thing possible. If you call the police, the media will be all over the story. Think of the awful publicity.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I have a plan to get you through this. No one will be hurt, no one will be wiser. But there is something I want in return. Give me the house and everything in it. You can’t sell it the way it is. I can live here and keep your secret. Do this and you will never hear from me again.” 

She agreed, albeit bitterly.

Savina reported her great-uncle’s death, and then she called a mortuary. They picked up Edward’s body and helped her arrange to have Edward buried next to Rennie’s grave.

The night before the burial service, the mortuary brought the casket with Edward in it to the house for the wake Savina had requested. Once the casket was opened in the parlor and the attendant had driven away, she and I wrapped Rennie’s corpse in a clean sheet and carried it downstairs, maneuvering the remains into the coffin and closing the lid. Rennie and Edward, side by side as in life, so in death. Although…perhaps not happily.

#

    In the weeks that followed, I had more time to comb leisurely through the contents of the cellar. The antique collectibles continue to bring a good price.

    So do the vintage photos, especially of the dead, although I have sold most of them. That made me realize that I have to think about the future. Photography continues to change. People take pictures with phones. Computers do marvelous things to enhance prints. 

    I’ve read Edward’s books on embalming and mummification, and I have discovered more about his supply of natron, used to help dry out and preserve a body. This has presented a solution to the problem that once vexed Edward and Rennie: how to make ends meet.

    Recently I read that although post-mortem photographs are enormously popular, collectors need to beware. Some of what is available to buy is actually faked: live people posing as dead ones. It’s true that the vintage appearance of my prints is photo-shopped, but the child I’ll pose and photograph is really very dead.  

The End