Night had fallen. Anne, Johan and the Plantars parked Bessie and the fwagon in front of a tree. "It's a good place to spend the night," said Hop Pop. "Especially during the annual Blue Moon Shut-In."

"I think this will be our first one away from Wartwood," said Sprig.

"Explain this holiday to me again," said Anne.

"It's not a holiday, Anne," said Sprig. "It's the annual Blue Moon Shut-In."

"The Shut-In is dangerous, for tonight the moon turns blue," said Hop Pop. "And anyone who gazes upon it becomes a hideous beast!"

"And is this true or just a legend?" asked Johan. "'Cause sometimes it's hard to get a handle on what's real around here."

"No one knows, JoJo. And no one wants to find out! Ever!"

Johan pushed him away. "You're getting way too close into my personal space, old frog!" He patted his gunblade, just in case, though.

"Well, you know, we have a similar thing in my world called Halloween," said Anne. "We say 'Trick or treat,' and people give you free candy."

"Free candy!" cheered Polly. "What's the catch?"

"If they don't give it to you, you get to play a trick on them."

Polly beamed. "That is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."

"So, what exactly do you guys do during this Shut-In thing, anyway," asked Johan.

"It's actually kinda nice," said Sprig. "We sit by the fire-"

"And tell spooky stories," said Polly.

"And Bessie hides in her shell till morning."

"Cool! Let's get this holiday started," said Anne.

"IT'S NOT A HOLIDAY, ANNE!" all three Plantars shouted.

Hop Pop sighed. "Still, it's not quite the same. I wish we had enough time to carve the scare gourds."

"Well, where Anne and I come from," said Johan. "They used to make jack-o-lanterns out of turnips."

"That's because you humans were wasteful. Now, remember, the stories have to have actually happened and be scary enough to remind us not to go outside! Okay, kids, who wants to go first?"

Anne told the story of a killer app, Hop Pop told the story of being chased by Death itself, and Sprig told the story of a skin-taking killer. Polly didn't get the chance as she tried to tell stories that already happened to Anne, the Plantars, and Johan.

Now it was Johan's turn to tell a story. "Alright, JoJo," said Anne. "Give us a story that will make us wet our pants and make us never have to go to sleep for a lifetime!"

"Hey! I know a story," said Polly. "It's the story of five people trapped in a library with no way out-"

"That happened already to us," said Johan. He then cleared his throat and made an eerie, high-pitched voice. "This story is about one of life's most unexpected pleasures: death." Already Anne and the Plantars felt a tingle go down their spines. "Most of us take life for granted, but the same can be said for death. In fact, it can be said that death brings out the worst in us and that life is not fair. Like what happens to the man in this story, who finds out that life is as cheap as a lottery ticket while death is as expensive as a new house. I call this chunk of charnel chatter..."

The High Cost of Dying

Our story begins in Paris on a sweltering summer night in 1867. A cart rattles through deserted cobble-stoned streets...past darkened stories and shuttered houses...down winding alleys alive with scampering grey shadows..and finally up onto one of the countless bridges that span the river Seine. The shabbily dressed figure, pulling the noisy cart, gasps and strains as he labors up the incline of the bridge toward its center. His torn and shredded shirt is wet with perspiration, and his grimy face is streaked by the tears that fill his eyes and overflow their lids...

His name is Henri Courbet. He stops now, resting...wiping his wet eyes with the back of his huge hand. He turns and glances behind him...at the cart...at the body lying upon it, wrapped in burlap, lying still and silent and nevermore to move or laugh or talk or cry, as now Henri is crying...

For a while, Henri stares down at the muddy fog-blanketed river, shaking his head, hating himself for this...this horrible thing that he is doing...

"Sob...sob..."

But sometimes a man is forced to do things that are hateful and revolting to him. Sometimes, he cannot help himself. Henri stares down at the slow murky river and nods...

"Yes! Yes, I must! I must go on with this...finish what I started out to do! It...it is the only way. The only way..."

The river below the bridge flows on...like time...ceaselessly...unending...never coming back...going downstream into the past...lost forever. Henri gazes downstream into the fog...into the past. And he sees himself waking that morning to the children's hysterical cries...

"Papa! Papa! Wake up!"

"Huh? Wha...what is it, Marie...Pierre?"

"It is Mama! She will not get up..."

Henri sees it all so clearly...his hungry children...pale and wan and ragged...sobbing...

"She just lies there...so still...as if...sob...as if..."

"...as if she is dead!"

"Good Lord! Suzette! Suzette!"

And he remembers how he had leaped from his straw cot and rushed to his wife's side...to Suzette...beautiful, silent Suzette...

"Suzette! Speak to me! Wake up! Suzette...choke...Suzette..."

He remembers sending the boy, Pierre...

"Hurry, child! Run to M'sieur Le Ducart...the doctor. Bring him here! Hurry!"

"Yes, Papa!"

He remembers Doctor Le Ducart coming to the squalid cellar-apartment and putting down his little black bag and taking Suzette's limp white hand and shaking his head...

"Sorry, Courbet! She is dead, for sure. From malnutrition, it seems..."

"No...sob...no..."

Henri remembers Doctor Le Ducart looking at him...

"Couldn't you afford to buy food, Courbet?"

"We...we have no money! I...I had no work for some time... Suzette...she...she gave her share to the children!"

"Hmm! A pity! Well...better take care of the funeral right away, Courbet! Remember the new ordinance!"

"New...ordinance? Which one is that? There are so many these days!"

"The Commissioner of Health's latest decree. All bodies must be buried within twenty-four hours after death. You have until tomorrow morning. Good-day!"

And Henri remembers going to the undertaker parlor and inquiring...

"Well, let us see. There is the plot...and the coffin...and the cartage... The cheapest I can make it is fifty-five francs, M'sieu Courbet!"

"Fifty-five...gulp!"

"Anything wrong, Courbet?"

"I...I do not have fifty-five francs now, M'sieu Greviard. If I could owe it to you...?"

M'sieu Greviard, the undertaker, shook his head...

"No, no! M'sieu Courbet! I do not do business that way. No money! No funeral! What if you never paid me? What could I do? Go dig up the body!?"

"I would pay you! I swear it!"

"Sorry, M'sieu! Fifty-five francs is the price! And remember...the Commissioner of Health's decree. Twenty-four hours..."

"Yes! Yes! I will remember!"

The river below sweeps slowly by...as the past day's events sweep slowly by. Henri stares into the murky depths and sees his hopeless vain attempts to raise money...

"But you are my life-long friend, Louis! My wife is dead. I must bury her..."

"I am sorry, Henri. Times are bad. Jobs are scarce. I haven't enough to feed my own family...no less bury one of yours..."

...finally going back to the hovel that served as their home, and seeing the children's hungry faces and his wife's silent still body...

"We...we have eaten nothing all day, Papa!"

"We...we're...sob...hungry, Papa!"

"And I...I haven't the money to bury your poor dead Mama, no less...choke...no less feed you..."

...the sudden heavy knocking on the door...

"Who...who's there?"

"Open up...in the name of the Commissioner of Health..."

...the officer, looming in the doorway...his evil eyes flashing...his grim mouth sneering...

"You are Henri Courbet..."

"Yes! That's me..."

"The Commissioner of Health has received word word from your doctor that your wife passed this morning..."

"Yes...that is true..."

"It is my duty to inform you that in accordance with Ordinance 4956, if she is not properly buried by a licensed undertaker by tomorrow morning, her body will be removed from the premises and turned over to the Conservatory of Medicine..."

"The...the Conservatory of Medicine!"

"...for the edification and experimentation of medical students enrolled there. By order of the Commissioner of Health, City of Paris, July 13, 1867..."

"No! No! Oh, Lord..."

The officer leered at Henri...

"Do you know what that means, M'sieu Courbet? It means that if you can't afford to bury your wife, her body is turned over to medical students for dissection!"

"It isn't fair! Oh, God! There isn't enough time!"

He sneered...

"Do you know what medical students do to bodies, M'sieu Courbet? They take sharp little scalpels...and they cut them open and take out the insides and cut them open...piece by piece...inch by inch...they probe and slice and cut and study and cut some more...and do you know why the Commissioner of Health issued this decree, M'sieu Courbet. Not in the interest of the city's health! He gets seventy-five francs for each body...from the Conservatory...which he pockets!"

"Stop it! Stop it! Have pity!"

The officer looked around. He looked at Suzette's still white form...

"She is young and pretty. The medical students will especially love welcome her body. So I suggest you raise the money, M'sieu...quickly. Bury her!"

"I...choke...I cannot! I have tried! I cannot even buy food for the children!"

The officer looked at the poverty and squalor...at the pale thin starving children who stared at him with wide frightened eyes.

"Then don't be a fool, Courbet. Take her to the Conservatory yourself...tonight! Line your own pockets with the seventy-five francs! At least you will be able to feed your children..."

"Knowing what they will do to Suzette...sob. How can I?"

The officer turned to go. He shrugged...

"She is dead, M'sieu. She will never know! Good-evening! Till tomorrow...then..."

"Till tomorrow..."

Henri stares down at the river. He thinks of the medical students...gathered around the body...their shining scalpels in their upraised hands...their grinning faces...and then he thinks of the of the children...Marie and Pierre...their bloated stomachs crying for food...their bony fingers searching for crumbs in the floorboard cracks...and then he looks at the body wrapped in burlap lying on the old cart, and he knows what he is doing is right...

"Yes! Yes! I must go on with this! I must!"

The cart rumbles down and off the bridge, the stiff body bouncing upon it...rumbles on through cobble-stone streets, down winding alleys, toward the Paris Conservatory of Medicine...

Footsteps approach in answer to Henri's frantic knock. The door swings open. A face peers out...

"Who is it, this time of night?"

"I...I have a body to sell..."

The door swings open. A shaft of light knifes into the foggy summer night, falling across the burlap-wrapped form...

"A body! Hmm. Is it in good condition..."

"It died today!"

The old man hobbles out into the night...out to the cart...lifts the burlap cover and peeps at the still white face.

"Good! Good! How much do you want?"

"What you always pay! Seventy-five francs!"

Early the next morning, Pierre and Marie ate heartily...the first good food they'd had in months...

"Slowly, children! Slowly!"

"Yes, Papa!"

And they dressed in their new clothes...the clothes Henri bought with part of the seventy-five francs...

"This is the most beautiful dress in the whole world, Papa!"

"And this...the most handsomest suit!"

"Yes, children..."

And together, they walked out into the sunset...

"It's a beautiful day, Papa!"

"Mama always loved beautiful days!"

"Yes, children!"

At exactly that moment, in the Paris Conservatory of Medicine, eager curious prospective doctors cut and sliced and probed at the new body that had arrived that night...and later, just outside of Paris, Henri and the children stood before the gaping open grave, watching the coffin being slowly lowered into it...

"Mama alway said she wanted to be buried on a beautiful day..."

"Good-bye...Mama..."

"Good-bye, Suzette..."

While at that precise moment, the Dean of the Paris Conservatory of Medicine, on his daily tour of the anatomy classes, stopped before the newly purchased body that now lay completely dissected...and shrieked...

"Mon Dieu! It is the Commissioner of Health!"

"Heh, heh! Yep! That's my yelp-yarn, fiends," said Johan, finishing his story. "Henri took a walk that night to try and decide what to do...and the solution, shall we say, dropped into his lap. Of course, he had to coax the Commissioner to drop (dead, that is) by...well...I'll spare you the gory details. Just use your lil' ol' imaginations."

Anne and the Plantars stared at him in horror.

"JoJo, you got dark, boy," whispered Anne. "You got real dark."

"That was...disturbing," said Hop Pop as he put a hand on his chest.

"I need to go lie down," said Sprig as he laid flat on his back.

"I kinda want a hot dog," said Polly.

"So, I end this story with a question: if you were in Henri's situation, what would you do?" asked Johan, grinning wickedly. Anne and the Plantars gave each other uncomfortable looks. "Good-night, everyone."

To be continued ➟

From EC Comics' The Haunt of Fear Issue 21.