EC Comics: Ray Bradbury Three-Pack 3/3 (The Handler)

Mr. Benedict walked down the steps and out the gate, without once looking at his little mortuary building. He saved that pleasure for later. It was very important that things took the right precedence. It wouldn't pay to think with joy of the bodies awaiting his talents in the mortuary building. No, it was better to follow his usual day after day routine. He owuld let the conflict begin.

Mr. Benedict knew just where to get himself enraged. he spoke with Mr. Rodgers, the druggist. And he saved and put away all the slurs and intonations and insults.

MR. RODGERS: "There you are, you cold one!"

MR. BENEDICT: "Cold one. Ha, ha!"

Mr. Rodgers always had some terrible thing to say about a man in the funeral profession and outside the drug story, Mr. Benedict met up with Mr. Stuyvesant, the contractor.

MR. STUYVESANT: "Oh, hello, Benedict. How's business? I'll bet you're going at it tooth and nail! Did you get it? I said tooth and..."

MR. BENEDICT: "Yes, yes! And how's your business, Mr. Stuyvesant?"

And on it went, person after person.

MAN #1: "Say, how do your hands get so cold, Benedict, old man? That's a cold shake you got there. You just get done embalming a frigid woman? Heh, that's not bad, you heard what I said?"

MR. BENEDICT: "Good, good. Well, good day!"

Mr. Benedict was the lake into which all refuse was thrown. People began with pebbles and when Mr. Benedict did not ripple, they heaved a stone, a brick, a boulder.

MR. FLINGER: "There you are, meat chopper! How are all your corned-beefs and pickled brains?"

That was Mr. Flinger, the delicatessen man. There were more, many more. Things worked to a crescendo. Finally, Mr. Benedict turned wildly and ran back through town. He was all ready now.

MAN #2: "Some body waitin' on you? Hey! Get it? I said some body."

The awful part of the day was over. The good part was now to begin. He ran eagerly up the steps of his mortuary. The room waited like a fall of snow. There were white hummocks and pale delineations of thins recumbent under sheets in the dimness. Mr. Benedict flung open the door. He was the puppet-master come home.

He stood for a long minute in the very center of his theater. In his head applause, perhaps, thundered. Then he carefully removed his coat, got into a fresh white smock and rubbed his hands together as he looked at his very good friends.

MR. BENEDICT: "Heh, heh, heh."

He walked along the sleeping rows of sheeted people. It had been a fine week; there were any number of family relics lying there. He noted each name on its white card.

MR. BENEDICT: "Mrs. Walters. Mr. Smith. Miss Brown. Mr. Andrews. Ah, good afternoon, one and all!"

Mr. Benedict lifted a sheet as if looking for a child under a bed.

MR. BENEDICT: "How are you today, Mrs. Shellmund? You're looking splendid, dear lady!"

Mr. Benedict pulled up a chair and regarded Mrs. Shellmund through a magnifying glass.

MR. BENEDICT: "My dear Mrs. Shellmund. Do you realize, my lady, that you have a sebaceous condition of the doors? Oil and grease pimples. A rich, rich diet was your trouble. Too many frosties and sponge cakes and cream candies. You always prided yourself on your brain, Mrs. Shellmund. But you kept that wonderful priceless brain of yours afloat in parfaits and fizzes and limeades and sodas and were so very superior to me that now, Mrs. Shellmund, here is what shall happen."

Mr. Benedict did a neat operation on her. Cutting the scape in a circle, he lifted it off, then lifted out the brain. Then he prepared a cake confectioner's little sugar-bellows and squirted her empty head full of whipped cream and crystal ribbons, stars and fro-lips, in pink, white and green, and on top, he printed a fine pink scroll.

Then he put the skull back on and sewed it in place and hid the marks with wax and powder and walked onto the next table.

MR. BENEDICT: "Good afternoon, Mr. Wren. And how is the master of racial hatreds today? Pure, white laundered Mr. Wren. Clean as snow, white as linen. The man who hated jews and black folk. Do you know what I'm going to do to you, Mr. Wren? First, let us draw your blood from you, intolerant friend!"

The blood was drawn off.

MR. BENEDICT: "Now the injection of, you might say, embalming fluid."

Mr. Wren, snow-white, linen pure, lay with the fluid going in him. Mr. Benedict laughed. Mr. Wren turned black. Black as dirt, black as night. The embalming fluid was ink.

Mr. Benedict moved on...

MR. BENEDICT: "And hello to you, Edmund Worth. What a handsome body you had. Powerful with muscles pinned from huge bone to huge bone and a chest like a boulder. Women grew speechless when you walked by, men stared with envy. And now, here you are!"

Mr. Benedict severed Worth's head, put it in a coffin on a small pillow, facing up, then he placed one hundred ninety pounds of bricks in the coffin and arranged them to look like a body. It was a fine illusion.

Since it was a growing and popular habit in the town for people to be buried with the coffin lids closed over them during the service, this gave Mr. Benedict great opportunities to vent his repressions on his hapless guests. He had the most utterly wondrous fun with a group of old maiden ladies who were mashed in an auto on their way to an afternoon tea. They were famous gossip, always with heads together over some choice bit. As in life, all three were crowded into one casket, heads together in eternal cold petrified gossip. The two other caskets were filled with pebbles and shells and ravels of gingham. It was a nice service. Everybody cried.

WOMAN: "Those three inseparables, at last separated!"

MR. BENEDICT: "Heh, heh!"

Not lacking for a sense of justice, Mr. Benedict buried one rich man stark naked. A poor man he buried wound in gold cloth with five dollar gold pieces for buttons and twenty dollar gold coins on each eyelid. A lawyer he did not bury at all, but burned him in the incinerator. His coffin contained nothing, but a polecat, trapped in the woods one Sunday.

An old maid was the victim of a terrible device. Under the silken comforter, parts of an old man had been buried with her. There she lay being made cold love to by hidden hands and things. The shock showed on her face somewhat. So Mr. Benedict moved from body to body in his mortuary. The final body of the day was the body of one Merriwell Blythe, an ancient man afflicted with spells and comas. Mr. Blythe had been brought in for dead several times, but each time he had revived in time to prevent premature burial. Mr. Benedict pulled back the sheet.

MR. BENEDICT: "...*gulp*..."

Mr. Benedict fell against the slab, suddenly shaken and sick.

MR. BENEDICT: "You're alive!"

MR. BLYTHE: "You! Get me up from here! Oh, the things I've heard, the things I've listened to the last hour. Lying here, not being able to move and hearing you talk the things you talk!"

The old man on the slab wailed, rolling his eyes about in his head in white orbits.

MR. BLYTHE: "Oh, you dark dark thing, you awful thing, you fiend, you monster, get me up from here! I'll tell the mayor and the council and everyone, oh, you dark dark thing! You defiler and sadist, you perverted scoundrel, you terrible man!"

MR. BENEDICT: "No."

The old man shrieked, frothing...

MR. BLYTHE: "To think this has gone on in our town, all these years and we never knew the things you did to people! Oh, you monstrous monster! The things you said! The things you do!"

MR. BENEDICT: "Sorry..."

Mr. Benedict reached for a hypodermic. Mr. Benedict stabbed Mr. Blythe in the arm with needle. The old man cried widly to all the sheet figures.

MR. BLYTHE: "You! Help you! You out there, under the stones! Help me! Listen!"

The old man fell back. He knew he was dying.

MR. BLYTHE: "All, listen! He's done this to me and you and you, all of you! He's done too much, too long! Don't take it! Don't, don't let him do anymore to anyone!"

Mr. Benedict stood there.

MR. BENEDICT: "They can't do anything to me and neither can you."

MR. BLYTHE: "Out of your graves! Help me! Tonight or tomorrow or soon! But come and fix him, this horrible man!"

The old man raved on and on, getting weaker. The room was suddenly very dark. It was night. It was getting late. Finally, smiling, the old man whispered.

MR. BLYTHE: "They've taken a lot from you, horrible man. Tonight, they'll do...something."

...and then, the old man died.

People say there was an explosion that night in the graveyard. Or rather a series of explosions, a smell of strange things, a movement, a violence, a raving. Stone toppled and things swore oaths. And there was a chasing and a screaming and many shadows moving inside and outside the mortuary building in swift jerks and shambling. Windows broke. Doors were torn from hinges, leaves from trees. Iron gates clattered. And in the end, there was Mr. Benedict running about, vanishing and a tortured scream that could only be Mr. Benedict himself. After that...nothing. Quiet.

The townspeople entered the mortuary the next morning. They searched the mortuary building and then went out into the graveyard. And they found nothing, but blood, a vast quantity of blood, sprinkled and thrown and spread everywhere you could possibly look as if the heavens had bled profusely in the night.

MAN #3: "Where could he be?"

MAN #4: "How should we know?"

Walking through the graveyard, they stood in deep tree shadows where stones, row on row, were old and time-erased and leaning. No birds sang. They stopped by one tombstone.

MAN #5: "Here, now! Look at this!"

Freshly scratched, as if by feebly, frantic, nasty fingers in the grayish, moss-flecked stone was the name: Mr. Benedict.

MAN #4: "Good lord!"

MAN #5: "Look over here! This one, too. And this one and THIS one!"

A villager pointed to the other gravestones. Upon each and every stone, scratched by fingernail scratchings, the same message appeared: Mr. Benedict.

MAN #5: "But that's impossible!"

The townspeople were stunned.

MAN #6: "He...he couldn't be buried under all these gravestones!"

They stood there for one long moment. Instinctively, they all looked at one another nervously in the silence and the tree darkness. They all waited for an answer. With fumbling senseless lips, one of them replied, simply...

MAN #7: "Couldn't he?"