On a lonely cold morning, Mr. William Smith went to check on the grave of his beloved mother- of whom he had buried in the strictest confidence of a funeral director, a certain Mr. Alias, that she would be buried in all the expense, pomp, and scientific certitude against decay that modern embalming and funeral techniques could supply. Mr. Smith, being as it were an ideal customer of such unimaginable gullibility that the funeral industry had never imagined a customer as committed, let alone able, to not only afford, but demand, and demand absolutely, the very most expensive and scientifically precise embalming techniques of his beloved mother, had thrown them into such unpracticed raptures that sure enough, the best, and most modern and proof-against-decay methods were sold, and sold but once and to great expense. And so one can imagine the consternation of the funeral home employees when Mr. Smith, being a quite different business man than his fanaticism for funeral technicalities had formerly led them to believe, arrived to check on his investment. Not can one quite imagine the shock, both practical and emotional, of Mr. Smith upon observing ants and other unmentionable vermin on his mother's coffin, of which he had been assured was even more air-tight than the supposedly already redundantly air-tight mausoleum that was itself, supposedly but not especially at the moment Mr. Smith arrived, itself triply redundantly re-enforced with security, of whom were in Mr. Smith's employment. One can scarcely imagine the sight when Mr. Smith discovered that Mrs. Smith was not being tormented by ants, or maggots or other creatures of the night that Mr. Smith had paid extra to prevent even being within telescopic sight of his dear mother, but gone. Gone as absolutely as was his security deposit had tried so unconventionally to prevent, and the stink of litigation was as heavy in the air despite the vermin as indeed it would have were even Mrs. Smith there to make it better. Since all the elaborate expense of Mrs. Smith's funeral, encaskenment – a peculiar term coined at the moment for her expensive internment – burial, and perpetual safe-keeping, nothing was spared to be left over to be buried with her. And so no jewels, heirlooms, etc... had been with her supposedly, and a great expense, remarkably preserved corpse to induce Sheriff Mansfield to assume a grave robbery was at hand. No-- Something much darker was at hand, and although he was at pains immediately to guess, it was Mr. Cullen, the funeral home director who had insured all the very safe-guards that had quite, and spectacularly, failed to secure Mrs. Smith from at least one criminal activity that had not, by God's own Providence, arisen in the contract with Mr. Smith, who provided the answer. It was a fiend, a necrophile who, despite, admittedly, by all parties present, many young and beautiful women had been buried heretofore, had yet slept in abeyance until the remarkably expensive techniques of which only Mr. Smith could afford, and that had been well-published in journals of which necriophiles would read, that had aroused his curiosity to exhume and enjoy Mrs. Smith against all costs to all parties involved – but most especially Mr. Smith. Sheriff Mansfield was doubtful. More likely Mrs. Smith had not been embalmed, had not even been buried, was his guess, but so fiery was Mr. Cullen's rhetoric that Mr. Smith, convinced beforehand of his mother's beauty, was persuaded beyond any other explanation. Sheriff Mansfield went back to his office disconsolate and a bit depraved. It was beyond the mentality of his Southern Baptist mentality to understand, much less imagine, a crime like neophilia, and it was n great surprise that he could find no statute by which to punish the necrophile. It was then that Mr. Cullen suggested that, if no explicit law existed, than nonetheless the necrophile had committed, by virtue of his contract with Mr. Smith, grand larceny – on account that the embalming apparatus itself had at least met the qualifications of $1,000. And so Sheriff Mansfield, with no other thought it mind, sought to catch the necrophile with fake obituaries. He hired a talented painter to paint an imaginary woman, irresistibly beautiful, and write a quite obscene obituary in the paper so as to lure him out. Then the he and his best deputies hid and waited. The response was unprecedented even without the horror of a precedent to rely on. Men and women arrived, in various stages of premeditation, from shovels to back-hoes, and the round-up proved quite as troublesome as the fall-out. No one was quite sure, from an innocent printer's mistake, exactly which grave it was, and thus many graves were in stages of being dug up as the mass of necrophiles descended on the graveyard. One necrophile, a Mr. Fell, admitted to the crime, as well as many others to boot. With half the graves in the city cemetery already half-exhumed, it was a small chore to check to see if he was lying. But Mr. Fell admitted to many more abuses, so much more that his admissions exceeded the jurisdiction of the county prosecutor, and involved Mr. Fell on a state-wide tour of graveyards, all the while enjoying himself in hotel rooms with room-service and unexpectedly normal pornographic movies, until he was found not guilty by insanity of exhuming some 20,000 corpses. During the course of his appeals, some 10,000 serial murders were set free. Mrs. Smith was never found. Mr. Smith has since died, but his burial site remains a mystery. Mr. Cullen, meanwhile, continues to run a very prosperous Anti-Necrophile Funeral service nation-wide. |