I hereby reserve all copyrights not expressly granted to Timebomb for any works of fiction posted at Timebomb under my name - Fred
Members may copy for their own personal use.
Any other copying or distribution is expressly prohibited
Author's note: This story can loosely be categorized as horror, so read at your own risk. Inspired by mostly true events (seriously). My fiction probably goes a long way towards explaining what's wrong with me.
Sarah and Phil Richardson were sitting in the den of their suburban home watching television – a new reality series featuring B-list celebrities stranded in middle America without credit cards or personal assistants – when the call came. Phil checked the caller ID before picking up the phone, given the proclivity of telemarketers to call just when the really good shows were on. It was his father.
“Hello?” he said, getting up from the couch and taking the cordless receiver out into the garage.
“Hey,” replied his dad, “do you remember my brother Gerald?”
Uncle Gerald, Phil thought, how long has it been since I thought about him? Fifteen years? Twenty?
“Sure I do,” Phil said, “What’s up?”
“He died last night, from a stroke. The doctors thought he was going to pull through, but then he started hemorrhaging.”
“Oh my God,” Phil said, “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah it was,” his father agreed, “but at least it was pretty peaceful. He was in pretty bad health for the last few years, so it wasn’t completely unexpected.”
“Have the arrangements been made yet?” Phil asked.
“No, Martha hasn’t decided where she wants to bury him. They didn’t have burial plots, so now she has to find a couple.” Martha was Gerald’s wife, a humorless woman who spent the majority of her time taking care of Gerald and going to church functions.
“Okay, just let me know when you find out the details.”
“Can you be one of the pallbearers if they need you?”
“Sure, no problem.”
Phil hung up the phone and went back into the house to tell Sarah.
In 1979, when Phil was twelve – that magical time halfway between boyhood and manhood – he spent most of the summer in Alabama with his Uncle Gerald and Aunt Martha. Phil’s father, a civil servant, had to spend almost three months in special training in Oklahoma, and was required to live in a hotel room for the duration of the stay. Since Phil’s mother had died of cancer when Phil was seven, he and his sister Karen were shunted to Gerald’s because he was closest.
It was a fun summer for Phil, full of running and jumping and playing with the children from other homes, a far cry from the city life Phil was used to. At Uncle Gerald’s there were cows to milk, pigs to slop, vegetables to pick and help Aunt Martha can, fish to catch in the creek, and chickens to feed.
There were also plenty of varmints to kill. Woodchucks, coyotes, and possums were threats to the farm and Phil enjoyed the time spent with his uncle in the fields, waiting patiently for one of the creatures to make an appearance before picking it off with a rifle. They had weekly competitions to see who could get a kill from the longest distance, a competition that Gerald won every time.
He’d laugh and poke gentle fun at Phil’s shooting abilities as they walked through the high grass to the spot where the dead animal lay. If the kill was a coyote or a woodchuck they’d bury the carcass to keep even more scavengers from showing up to eat it, but in the event it was a possum it was dressed out for dinner. Gerald would take out the shiny pocketknife he always carried – I took this off a Nazi I shot in the war, he told Phil once – and carefully skin and gut the possum, taking care not to damage the meat underneath.
“It’s tougher than leather”, Gerald always said with a grin over his bowl of possum stew, “but it’s free, and free’s a fine thing.”
It was during this fun-filled summer that the single incident Phil remembered most about his uncle took place. A raccoon got into the henhouse while everyone was at prayer services one Wednesday evening and killed several chickens. When the family got home at dusk, the chickens were making an awful racket flapping and clucking wildly around their pen. Feathers littered the ground around the henhouse, and as everyone got out of the car the raccoon slunk out of the henhouse, low to the ground. It went under the fence around the chicken yard and loped through into the garden, moving with a peculiar rolling grace.
“Phil, go get my shotgun!” Gerald cried.
Phil did as he was told, returning with the shotgun as quickly as he could. Gerald took the gun and jogged into the garden, his ample belly jiggling from side to side under his overalls as he ran. Phil followed his uncle through the rows of vegetables, listening to him pant and wheeze. Martha and Karen went into the house.
Gerald stopped suddenly and seated the stock of the shotgun to his shoulder. Phil stopped just behind his uncle and peered around, catching just a glimpse of the scurrying raccoon about a hundred feet away just before the shotgun boomed. The raccoon pitched ass over head and lay in a heap in the dirt.
“Way to go, Uncle Gerald!” Phil shouted, running to get the raccoon’s body. Together, Gerald and Phil walked back to the house. Gerald laid the shotgun on the front porch steps and reached into his pocket for his pocketknife.
“Can I have the skin, Uncle Gerald?” Phil asked, excited, “Can we make me a coonskin cap, like Davy Crockett wore? Please?”
Gerald laughed.
“You’re kidding, right?” he asked, “A boy your age, wanting a coonskin cap? It’s time you grew up some, Phil. I’m giving this coonskin to little Bobby Jackson. He’s six, and about the right age for it.”
“Please, Uncle Gerald? I’m not too old, honest! A coonskin cap from a coon you killed would be awesome!”
“I said no, boy, and I meant no. Now get inside and take your bath.”
As Phil slumped his shoulders and slowly climbed the steps, Gerald folded the pocketknife open and slid the blade into the raccoon’s still-warm skin. Though he never talked about it with anyone, Phil never forgot the incident with the raccoon skin, and being told to grow up by his uncle.
Phil’s father called again that night, after the reality show ended – Kato Kaelin won, barely edging out Barry Williams in the final round – but before Phil and Sarah had gone upstairs for bed. He had an unusual question for Phil.
“Do you have an old suit?” he asked, “From when you were fat? Gerald didn’t have one and Martha doesn’t want to bury him in his overalls. I thought I’d check with you because the money’s going to be tight, what with the costs of the funeral, and I don’t know if she can afford much of a suit.”
Over the years as he grew up, Phil had also grown out, ending up weighing just under four hundred pounds by the time he was in his early thirties. A couple of years earlier he’d had gotten his act together and lost almost two hundred of those pounds by being more active and eating less junk food. Now he was fairly fit and very healthy, albeit with some loose skin. He pondered his father’s question.
“I don’t know,” he said after a moment, “I can’t remember. Let me go look and call you back.”
Phil went upstairs to his bedroom closet. A quick search revealed a single suit from his fat days, the double-breasted suit and white oxford shirt he’d been married in. As he was dialing his father’s number, he remembered the one time he’d really wanted something from Gerald, and how he’d been treated.
“Hey Dad?” he said when his father answered the phone, “I guess I threw them all away. All I could find was a white shirt. Would that help?”
“Yeah, anything would help. Thanks for looking. Can I stop by your office and pick it up tomorrow?”
They set a time and hung up.
The funeral was held two days later, on Saturday. It was a beautiful November day, sunny and cold. Phil was a pallbearer for his uncle’s casket, and was standing in a line with the other pallbearers behind the flag-draped casket. The other mourners were gathered facing the casket and pallbearers, and an Army honor guard stood at attention about a hundred feet behind the mourners. At the head of the casket, the minister read from his Bible.
“When I was a child I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child,” he said, looking up from his Bible at the mourners gathered before him. “When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
The minister closed his Bible and said a short prayer. When he finished, a member of the Army honor guard standing behind the mourners bent and pressed the ‘play’ button on a small boom box. As a recording of Taps played, four other members of the honor guard raised their rifles to fire the volley for Gerald. Each time they fired, Phil saw the mourners across the casket from him jump, and there was a brief but horrifying instant when he thought he was going to start laughing.
At the end of Taps, the final two members of the honor guard came forward and removed the flag from the casket. After folding it carefully, one of the young men presented it to Martha, offering words of consolation that only she could hear. He then stood, saluted the casket, and marched away. The minister dismissed the mourners.
Phil spent time talking to his relatives and friends of the family. The Richardson clan was large, and there were many people Phil hadn’t seen in years. Several people exclaimed over how good he was looking because of all the weight he lost, and several of his overweight relatives asked him for his secrets for keeping off so much. As he was telling his Aunt Cindy about the joys of lifting weights, he felt a brief tug at his elbow. He turned to find his Aunt Martha looking at him with red-rimmed eyes.
“Aunt Martha I’m so sorry,” he said, bending to hug her, “He’s in a better place now, where no one ever gets sick or dies.”
“Thank you, Phil,” she said, “Gerald always spoke well of you.”
Phil blinked, pausing for a second with surprise. After the summer with the raccoon incident, he hadn’t seen Gerald much, begging out of family reunions and visits when he could. When he couldn’t, and had to go, he stayed away from his uncle as much as possible.
Martha leaned in closer.
“He would’ve been pleased if he knew it was your shirt he was wearing,” she whispered.
“I only wish I’d still had the whole suit,” Phil replied. I wonder what Uncle Gerald would’ve thought if he knew I did still have the suit, he thought gleefully.
“Oh, that’s alright, that’s alright. We found one down at the Veteran’s Mission. A blue one. It had a couple of holes in it but that didn’t matter; he was laying on them and no one knew.”
Phil felt a small pang of guilt at the thought of his aunt having to beg for a suit at the charity place. Wait a second, his mind argued, this isn’t about her, it’s about Uncle Gerald. The guilt faded.
Time marched on, as time does. Thanksgiving and Christmas came went and a new year rolled in with nary a whisper. Winter turned into spring, and spring turned into summer. The days were long and the weather was hot, perfect for swimming. Phil and Sarah spent many evenings lounging in their pool, enjoying the sunsets and the cool water. Life was good.
Almost.
Phil found himself growing more and more annoyed with his body. He ate right, he worked out regularly, and it had paid off in spades. He was in the best shape of his life and he felt better than he thought was humanly possible. Everything was perfect until he caught glimpses of himself in the mirror from time to time, and found that he still looked pudgy because of the extra skin that hung off his body.
No matter what he did, Phil couldn’t get his loose skin to tighten up. He tried rubbing cocoa butter on his belly; it smelled good but did nothing more than make the skin softer. He spent hours cracking vitamin E capsules open to squeeze them onto his chest to no avail. Egg whites, herbal wraps, honey, and several different over-the-counter “skin tighteners” found their way onto Phil’s body. Each one produced the exact same results: the only thing tighter was Phil’s bank account.
In September, Phil broke down and visited a cosmetic surgeon for a consultation. The doctor spent several minutes poking and prodding, lifting and squeezing, then made a proclamation that was music to Phil’s ears.
“I can fix your skin,” the doctor said, “and tighten you right up. Since you’re in such good shape we can even make it a day surgery; you’ll be in and out of the hospital in a matter of hours.”
Phil considered this – he’d never had surgery before and was a little nervous at the notion of being under anesthesia for something that was ultimately a vanity issue and not a life-or-death thing – for several days, discussed it with Sarah, and talked it to death with his co-workers at the office before finally deciding to have the surgery. Because the surgeon kept such a busy schedule he wasn’t available to operate on Phil for almost two months, which was fine with Phil. It would give him plenty of time to prepare mentally.
Phil clicked the remote control and watched the picture on the TV switch from Suzanne Somers selling a diet book to a documentary about gastric bypass surgery. He groaned softly and clicked the remote again.
He’d been in bed earlier, trying to sleep but unable to. Pre-op jitters, he told Sarah sheepishly when she finally asked him to get up so she could get some sleep. After putting on his slippers, he’d made his way down to the den, where he now sat on the couch morosely trying to find something worth watching.
On the television, a loud man with a fake British accent extolled the virtues of orange oil for cleaning really tough stains. Phil sighed and turned off the television. He stood, stretching, and was just about to try sleeping in the guest bedroom when he heard the garage door rumble up.
What the hell? he thought as he walked through the kitchen to the door leading to the garage. He walked into the garage and saw the raised door, but no one was present. Moving quickly because of the chilly November air, he went to the garage door opener control unit and pressed the button. The garage door lowered slowly, and Phil watched it to see if anything was out of the ordinary. It wasn’t.
As he stepped back into the warmth of his kitchen, a soft thump came from the front of the house. It was a sound Phil knew all too well: the front door had swung open and hit the wall in the foyer. After a second’s consideration Phil went back into the garage, picked up an aluminum baseball bat leaning in the corner near the door, and returned to the kitchen.
Holding the bat high as though expecting a pitch, Phil crept out of the kitchen and down the front hall to the foyer. The door leading to the porch stood wide open. Before closing it, Phil checked the living room next to the foyer to make sure no one was in there. No one was, and Phil closed the door. He looked nervously up the staircase.
Sarah! he thought and raced up the stairs clutching the bat in one hand. She was sleeping peacefully in the bed, undisturbed because she wore earplugs to filter out night sounds. Phil checked the closet and under the bed to make sure no one was in the room with Sarah, then walked across the landing to check the other two bedrooms.
“Philly boy,” said a voice from the staircase. Phil stopped suddenly, his heart pounding. He could make out a dim shape there, two or three steps down.
“Who’s there?” he asked, his voice breaking. He turned toward the staircase and drew the aluminum bat back to use as a weapon.
“I’m here for my suit.” The voice was thick and gravelly, as though the speaker had a mouthful of sand. The shape shuffled up a step.
“Who are you? I have a bat!” he said a little more loudly as he took a step backwards. His back hit the wall and he stopped.
The shape stepped up once again.
“I’m here for my suit,” it repeated.
Phil edged along the wall, searching for a light switch with one shaking hand. When he found it he flipped it up, bathing the landing in bright white light. Suddenly, he found himself wishing he’d left the light off.
What was left of his uncle stood at the top of the stairs, facing him. Gerald’s skin was mottled and black with the advanced stages of decomposition, and portions of his visible flesh were covered with blotches of dark green mold. Maggots churned busily in one eye socket; the other eye glinted with eerie life.
“I’m here for my suit,” Gerald said, and took a step toward Phil. Where his foot had been there was a dark, wet mark on the carpet.
Crying out, Phil swung the bat as hard as he could, connecting solidly with a loud crunch. The side of Gerald’s face split open and caved in, giving him a crazy skewed expression, and a cloudy maggot-laced fluid poured from the opening. Gerald laughed wetly.
“I’m here for my suit,” he said again.
“Oh God, oh God, let me get it!” Phil babbled, trying to get away from the walking corpse, “It’s in the closet, I swear to God it is, just let me get it!”
Phil dropped the bat, sobbing. As Gerald stepped closer, he pulled something from the jacket of his mission suit.
“I don’t want that suit,” he said.
Gerald opened his rusted pocketknife and reached for Phil.
Members may copy for their own personal use.
Any other copying or distribution is expressly prohibited
Author's note: This story can loosely be categorized as horror, so read at your own risk. Inspired by mostly true events (seriously). My fiction probably goes a long way towards explaining what's wrong with me.
* * *
The Suit
Sarah and Phil Richardson were sitting in the den of their suburban home watching television – a new reality series featuring B-list celebrities stranded in middle America without credit cards or personal assistants – when the call came. Phil checked the caller ID before picking up the phone, given the proclivity of telemarketers to call just when the really good shows were on. It was his father.
“Hello?” he said, getting up from the couch and taking the cordless receiver out into the garage.
“Hey,” replied his dad, “do you remember my brother Gerald?”
Uncle Gerald, Phil thought, how long has it been since I thought about him? Fifteen years? Twenty?
“Sure I do,” Phil said, “What’s up?”
“He died last night, from a stroke. The doctors thought he was going to pull through, but then he started hemorrhaging.”
“Oh my God,” Phil said, “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah it was,” his father agreed, “but at least it was pretty peaceful. He was in pretty bad health for the last few years, so it wasn’t completely unexpected.”
“Have the arrangements been made yet?” Phil asked.
“No, Martha hasn’t decided where she wants to bury him. They didn’t have burial plots, so now she has to find a couple.” Martha was Gerald’s wife, a humorless woman who spent the majority of her time taking care of Gerald and going to church functions.
“Okay, just let me know when you find out the details.”
“Can you be one of the pallbearers if they need you?”
“Sure, no problem.”
Phil hung up the phone and went back into the house to tell Sarah.
* * *
In 1979, when Phil was twelve – that magical time halfway between boyhood and manhood – he spent most of the summer in Alabama with his Uncle Gerald and Aunt Martha. Phil’s father, a civil servant, had to spend almost three months in special training in Oklahoma, and was required to live in a hotel room for the duration of the stay. Since Phil’s mother had died of cancer when Phil was seven, he and his sister Karen were shunted to Gerald’s because he was closest.
It was a fun summer for Phil, full of running and jumping and playing with the children from other homes, a far cry from the city life Phil was used to. At Uncle Gerald’s there were cows to milk, pigs to slop, vegetables to pick and help Aunt Martha can, fish to catch in the creek, and chickens to feed.
There were also plenty of varmints to kill. Woodchucks, coyotes, and possums were threats to the farm and Phil enjoyed the time spent with his uncle in the fields, waiting patiently for one of the creatures to make an appearance before picking it off with a rifle. They had weekly competitions to see who could get a kill from the longest distance, a competition that Gerald won every time.
He’d laugh and poke gentle fun at Phil’s shooting abilities as they walked through the high grass to the spot where the dead animal lay. If the kill was a coyote or a woodchuck they’d bury the carcass to keep even more scavengers from showing up to eat it, but in the event it was a possum it was dressed out for dinner. Gerald would take out the shiny pocketknife he always carried – I took this off a Nazi I shot in the war, he told Phil once – and carefully skin and gut the possum, taking care not to damage the meat underneath.
“It’s tougher than leather”, Gerald always said with a grin over his bowl of possum stew, “but it’s free, and free’s a fine thing.”
It was during this fun-filled summer that the single incident Phil remembered most about his uncle took place. A raccoon got into the henhouse while everyone was at prayer services one Wednesday evening and killed several chickens. When the family got home at dusk, the chickens were making an awful racket flapping and clucking wildly around their pen. Feathers littered the ground around the henhouse, and as everyone got out of the car the raccoon slunk out of the henhouse, low to the ground. It went under the fence around the chicken yard and loped through into the garden, moving with a peculiar rolling grace.
“Phil, go get my shotgun!” Gerald cried.
Phil did as he was told, returning with the shotgun as quickly as he could. Gerald took the gun and jogged into the garden, his ample belly jiggling from side to side under his overalls as he ran. Phil followed his uncle through the rows of vegetables, listening to him pant and wheeze. Martha and Karen went into the house.
Gerald stopped suddenly and seated the stock of the shotgun to his shoulder. Phil stopped just behind his uncle and peered around, catching just a glimpse of the scurrying raccoon about a hundred feet away just before the shotgun boomed. The raccoon pitched ass over head and lay in a heap in the dirt.
“Way to go, Uncle Gerald!” Phil shouted, running to get the raccoon’s body. Together, Gerald and Phil walked back to the house. Gerald laid the shotgun on the front porch steps and reached into his pocket for his pocketknife.
“Can I have the skin, Uncle Gerald?” Phil asked, excited, “Can we make me a coonskin cap, like Davy Crockett wore? Please?”
Gerald laughed.
“You’re kidding, right?” he asked, “A boy your age, wanting a coonskin cap? It’s time you grew up some, Phil. I’m giving this coonskin to little Bobby Jackson. He’s six, and about the right age for it.”
“Please, Uncle Gerald? I’m not too old, honest! A coonskin cap from a coon you killed would be awesome!”
“I said no, boy, and I meant no. Now get inside and take your bath.”
As Phil slumped his shoulders and slowly climbed the steps, Gerald folded the pocketknife open and slid the blade into the raccoon’s still-warm skin. Though he never talked about it with anyone, Phil never forgot the incident with the raccoon skin, and being told to grow up by his uncle.
* * *
Phil’s father called again that night, after the reality show ended – Kato Kaelin won, barely edging out Barry Williams in the final round – but before Phil and Sarah had gone upstairs for bed. He had an unusual question for Phil.
“Do you have an old suit?” he asked, “From when you were fat? Gerald didn’t have one and Martha doesn’t want to bury him in his overalls. I thought I’d check with you because the money’s going to be tight, what with the costs of the funeral, and I don’t know if she can afford much of a suit.”
Over the years as he grew up, Phil had also grown out, ending up weighing just under four hundred pounds by the time he was in his early thirties. A couple of years earlier he’d had gotten his act together and lost almost two hundred of those pounds by being more active and eating less junk food. Now he was fairly fit and very healthy, albeit with some loose skin. He pondered his father’s question.
“I don’t know,” he said after a moment, “I can’t remember. Let me go look and call you back.”
Phil went upstairs to his bedroom closet. A quick search revealed a single suit from his fat days, the double-breasted suit and white oxford shirt he’d been married in. As he was dialing his father’s number, he remembered the one time he’d really wanted something from Gerald, and how he’d been treated.
“Hey Dad?” he said when his father answered the phone, “I guess I threw them all away. All I could find was a white shirt. Would that help?”
“Yeah, anything would help. Thanks for looking. Can I stop by your office and pick it up tomorrow?”
They set a time and hung up.
* * *
The funeral was held two days later, on Saturday. It was a beautiful November day, sunny and cold. Phil was a pallbearer for his uncle’s casket, and was standing in a line with the other pallbearers behind the flag-draped casket. The other mourners were gathered facing the casket and pallbearers, and an Army honor guard stood at attention about a hundred feet behind the mourners. At the head of the casket, the minister read from his Bible.
“When I was a child I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child,” he said, looking up from his Bible at the mourners gathered before him. “When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
The minister closed his Bible and said a short prayer. When he finished, a member of the Army honor guard standing behind the mourners bent and pressed the ‘play’ button on a small boom box. As a recording of Taps played, four other members of the honor guard raised their rifles to fire the volley for Gerald. Each time they fired, Phil saw the mourners across the casket from him jump, and there was a brief but horrifying instant when he thought he was going to start laughing.
At the end of Taps, the final two members of the honor guard came forward and removed the flag from the casket. After folding it carefully, one of the young men presented it to Martha, offering words of consolation that only she could hear. He then stood, saluted the casket, and marched away. The minister dismissed the mourners.
Phil spent time talking to his relatives and friends of the family. The Richardson clan was large, and there were many people Phil hadn’t seen in years. Several people exclaimed over how good he was looking because of all the weight he lost, and several of his overweight relatives asked him for his secrets for keeping off so much. As he was telling his Aunt Cindy about the joys of lifting weights, he felt a brief tug at his elbow. He turned to find his Aunt Martha looking at him with red-rimmed eyes.
“Aunt Martha I’m so sorry,” he said, bending to hug her, “He’s in a better place now, where no one ever gets sick or dies.”
“Thank you, Phil,” she said, “Gerald always spoke well of you.”
Phil blinked, pausing for a second with surprise. After the summer with the raccoon incident, he hadn’t seen Gerald much, begging out of family reunions and visits when he could. When he couldn’t, and had to go, he stayed away from his uncle as much as possible.
Martha leaned in closer.
“He would’ve been pleased if he knew it was your shirt he was wearing,” she whispered.
“I only wish I’d still had the whole suit,” Phil replied. I wonder what Uncle Gerald would’ve thought if he knew I did still have the suit, he thought gleefully.
“Oh, that’s alright, that’s alright. We found one down at the Veteran’s Mission. A blue one. It had a couple of holes in it but that didn’t matter; he was laying on them and no one knew.”
Phil felt a small pang of guilt at the thought of his aunt having to beg for a suit at the charity place. Wait a second, his mind argued, this isn’t about her, it’s about Uncle Gerald. The guilt faded.
* * *
Time marched on, as time does. Thanksgiving and Christmas came went and a new year rolled in with nary a whisper. Winter turned into spring, and spring turned into summer. The days were long and the weather was hot, perfect for swimming. Phil and Sarah spent many evenings lounging in their pool, enjoying the sunsets and the cool water. Life was good.
Almost.
Phil found himself growing more and more annoyed with his body. He ate right, he worked out regularly, and it had paid off in spades. He was in the best shape of his life and he felt better than he thought was humanly possible. Everything was perfect until he caught glimpses of himself in the mirror from time to time, and found that he still looked pudgy because of the extra skin that hung off his body.
No matter what he did, Phil couldn’t get his loose skin to tighten up. He tried rubbing cocoa butter on his belly; it smelled good but did nothing more than make the skin softer. He spent hours cracking vitamin E capsules open to squeeze them onto his chest to no avail. Egg whites, herbal wraps, honey, and several different over-the-counter “skin tighteners” found their way onto Phil’s body. Each one produced the exact same results: the only thing tighter was Phil’s bank account.
In September, Phil broke down and visited a cosmetic surgeon for a consultation. The doctor spent several minutes poking and prodding, lifting and squeezing, then made a proclamation that was music to Phil’s ears.
“I can fix your skin,” the doctor said, “and tighten you right up. Since you’re in such good shape we can even make it a day surgery; you’ll be in and out of the hospital in a matter of hours.”
Phil considered this – he’d never had surgery before and was a little nervous at the notion of being under anesthesia for something that was ultimately a vanity issue and not a life-or-death thing – for several days, discussed it with Sarah, and talked it to death with his co-workers at the office before finally deciding to have the surgery. Because the surgeon kept such a busy schedule he wasn’t available to operate on Phil for almost two months, which was fine with Phil. It would give him plenty of time to prepare mentally.
* * *
Phil clicked the remote control and watched the picture on the TV switch from Suzanne Somers selling a diet book to a documentary about gastric bypass surgery. He groaned softly and clicked the remote again.
He’d been in bed earlier, trying to sleep but unable to. Pre-op jitters, he told Sarah sheepishly when she finally asked him to get up so she could get some sleep. After putting on his slippers, he’d made his way down to the den, where he now sat on the couch morosely trying to find something worth watching.
On the television, a loud man with a fake British accent extolled the virtues of orange oil for cleaning really tough stains. Phil sighed and turned off the television. He stood, stretching, and was just about to try sleeping in the guest bedroom when he heard the garage door rumble up.
What the hell? he thought as he walked through the kitchen to the door leading to the garage. He walked into the garage and saw the raised door, but no one was present. Moving quickly because of the chilly November air, he went to the garage door opener control unit and pressed the button. The garage door lowered slowly, and Phil watched it to see if anything was out of the ordinary. It wasn’t.
As he stepped back into the warmth of his kitchen, a soft thump came from the front of the house. It was a sound Phil knew all too well: the front door had swung open and hit the wall in the foyer. After a second’s consideration Phil went back into the garage, picked up an aluminum baseball bat leaning in the corner near the door, and returned to the kitchen.
Holding the bat high as though expecting a pitch, Phil crept out of the kitchen and down the front hall to the foyer. The door leading to the porch stood wide open. Before closing it, Phil checked the living room next to the foyer to make sure no one was in there. No one was, and Phil closed the door. He looked nervously up the staircase.
Sarah! he thought and raced up the stairs clutching the bat in one hand. She was sleeping peacefully in the bed, undisturbed because she wore earplugs to filter out night sounds. Phil checked the closet and under the bed to make sure no one was in the room with Sarah, then walked across the landing to check the other two bedrooms.
“Philly boy,” said a voice from the staircase. Phil stopped suddenly, his heart pounding. He could make out a dim shape there, two or three steps down.
“Who’s there?” he asked, his voice breaking. He turned toward the staircase and drew the aluminum bat back to use as a weapon.
“I’m here for my suit.” The voice was thick and gravelly, as though the speaker had a mouthful of sand. The shape shuffled up a step.
“Who are you? I have a bat!” he said a little more loudly as he took a step backwards. His back hit the wall and he stopped.
The shape stepped up once again.
“I’m here for my suit,” it repeated.
Phil edged along the wall, searching for a light switch with one shaking hand. When he found it he flipped it up, bathing the landing in bright white light. Suddenly, he found himself wishing he’d left the light off.
What was left of his uncle stood at the top of the stairs, facing him. Gerald’s skin was mottled and black with the advanced stages of decomposition, and portions of his visible flesh were covered with blotches of dark green mold. Maggots churned busily in one eye socket; the other eye glinted with eerie life.
“I’m here for my suit,” Gerald said, and took a step toward Phil. Where his foot had been there was a dark, wet mark on the carpet.
Crying out, Phil swung the bat as hard as he could, connecting solidly with a loud crunch. The side of Gerald’s face split open and caved in, giving him a crazy skewed expression, and a cloudy maggot-laced fluid poured from the opening. Gerald laughed wetly.
“I’m here for my suit,” he said again.
“Oh God, oh God, let me get it!” Phil babbled, trying to get away from the walking corpse, “It’s in the closet, I swear to God it is, just let me get it!”
Phil dropped the bat, sobbing. As Gerald stepped closer, he pulled something from the jacket of his mission suit.
“I don’t want that suit,” he said.
Gerald opened his rusted pocketknife and reached for Phil.
**