The Warden of the Castle Read online

  He wanted to move his feet, but couldn’t. The skin was attached to the sheet and he saw on the corner of his eyes the sheet become bloodied. It was his own blood! The cheeks of his ass melted and sank into a hole in the sheet and he felt as his hot blood bathed the center of the mattress. Then, the sheet started moving and bending from one of the corners. It covered his whole body and twisted face, shouting as it disappeared under the sheet. He tried to kick and move his arms, but the sheet had already trapped him. A puddle of blood stained the sheet and it slithered as the throat of a snake, sucking him, fusing over his skin and flesh until it became flat once again. The blood stain started shrinking, as if it were being soaked up. The bones cracked and the screams stopped. A moment later, there was a sound of something like a burp or a chainsaw and the sheet rested on the mattress as if nothing had happened.

  The lightbulb had been the only silent witness of what had happened.

  7

  Ayanna hit her head twice on the door, but she finally noticed that it was ajar. Apparently, when the door had been slammed the lock plate had broken. She pushed the door open and looked inside.

  “William, are you there?” her voice sounded hollow, empty and without reverberation. Her heart suddenly shrunk when she saw no one was there. The room was still untidy, except for the soft sheet. “William? Are you in the bathroom?”

  There was no response.

  Her hand rested on the sheet and she felt on her fingers its softness. She sat on the edge of the bed and straightened up the lamp. She laid on the bed looking at the lightbulb that hung from the ceiling. Her hands caressed the sheet. It is so soft, she thought. Then, she felt something strange on her skin.

  The Undertaker

  They were all there. To be more specific, they still were there, hands on the table and staring at him. They were silent. In the background, the wood burnt with a faint cracking. The warden, spread on his comfortable couch, looked at them disdainfully.

  “What? Not scared enough?”. His voice boomed through the room. No one answered, and he frowned. Only the sound of his chubby fingers tapping in the table broke the silence. Suddenly, his eyes shone in the darkness.

  “I have another frightening story for you!” He leant forward and started talking. “Once upon a time, there was an undertaker just days away from retirement. He looked emaciated and bony after over forty years burying the good people of Boad Hill. He had never wondered when would be his time or who would bury him. However, he was always saying ‘I’m gon’ die, someday’. One evening, almost at dusk, he was patrolling the cemetery when he saw a figure moving in the shadows. He tripped over something only to discover it was the coffin he had just buried. It was opened and a trail of water went from the coffin in a zig-zag pattern that led to the silhouette of a man. He soon realized it was the dead man and that the other side is not something to be talked about lightly.”

  The warden stopped talking and breathed in. He noticed that the beady eyes of the guests seemed to recover their lost light.

  1

  Jack Jones sat on a grave sweating profusely under the midday August Sun in 1983. It hadn’t been so hot in Boad Hill in the last 30 years and Jack Jones knew that. He dried his forehead with a filthy handkerchief. He lightly opened his mouth and showed the cemetery his bare yellowed set of teeth, which was missing a couple molars. His dense beard, grey as his hair was, covered his chapped lips. A can of warm beer rested on the floor next to him. “Pisswarm,” he thought. After rubbing the handkerchief on his forehead, he took a look at it, just in case he found something interesting. He got up and kept it in the back pocket of his jeans, which were so dirty they looked more black than blue. He constantly rubbed his thigs with his bony fingers.

  “God damn this heat! It’s gonna be the end of me!” he told the hundreds of tombstones in the cemetery.

  His dog came out of the gatehouse wagging his tail like a broom sweeping the floor. He barked a couple times and went closer to his owner lowering the head. His tongue hung on one side of his mouth. Not even Jack knew what breed was that fleabag. It had been abandoned at dusk in front of the door of the goddamned cemetery. It was raining and the poor thing cried. Now it was three years old. Sometimes Jack Jones gave the dog a swallow of beer, just to see what would happen. Nothing. The dog asked for more, his eyes would grow wider and it wagged its tale effusively.

  “Hey, Timbo! It’s hot as hell today,” he patted his head with a bony hand.

  He thought about the other half of the world, where the sun would have set behind the mountains and temperatures would be lower. “They sure are,” he thought. They went to his red Ford van. It was a rickety and rusty thing, but at least the wheels had air in them and it could start.

  “Let’s go get more beer,” he proposed the dog. The animal kept wagging his tail in the front seat, so maybe he had understood him. A huge black cloud came out of the exhaust pipe of the van and the engine roared as if something were hammering it from the inside. He reversed, turned right and went straight ahead towards the exit of the cemetery.

  “One of these days I’m gonna die,” he whispered as he crossed the metal gates. He drove with his hands tightly closed around the sticky wheel. Inside the cockpit, it was even hotter, and he continued grumbling.

  2

  Jack Jone’s debts couldn’t wait anymore, and Tommy told him that if he wanted more beer and food for the dog, he would have to pay up a couple of hundreds of dollars that he owed. Jack kept on swearing he would pay. He got a good salary, but the goddamned old man was a grade A drinker and all the money went down the sink. They both got into Tommy’s store.

  “Jack, I’m sorry, but if you want something, You’re gonna have to pay for it-“

  “I know, goddamn it,” said Jack Jones. “I’m gonna pay you, one of these days, anyway. The damned dog eats more and more every day, and with this heat I need a drink. One of these days they will find me dead in the cemetery or inside my van.”

  Tommy shook his head as she got into the room. She was the one actually in charge of the house. She was called Lindsay, though she didn’t look like one. She got closer to the counter.

  “We have nothing,” she said in a hoarse voice.

  After a long silence in which the three of them looked at each other while the dog panted, Jack finally talked.

  “I will pay you, goddamn it. Next week.”

  “You better do.”

  “How much do I owe you, anyway? A hundred bucks, two hundred?” He leant his scrawny body to one side and the other mechanically as he did so many times.

  Finally, Jack Jones went out of the store with a bag of dog food and a couple of boxes of beer. The woman had added $20 to his debt and had disappeared just as he had appeared.

  As she did so many times.

  3

  That evening, Jack Jones drank a beer after another while he watched a baseball match: the Red Sox vs. Who-the-Fuck-Cares. He only cared about watching his favorite team. In all Maine. There wasn’t a team with professional players, so he had to go with Boston’s. He spent the rest of the evening drinking, burping and farting.

  The night crept on them.

  “One of these days I’m gonna die,” whispered Jack Jones.

  4

  At midnight, he woke up and went to the bathroom. Once he was there he took off his filthy underwear and pissed loudly for a long time. The dog was next to him, showing his pink tongue. After finishing, he pulled his underwear back up and went back to bed, followed by the damned dog.

  And before falling asleep, he thought about them again.

  5

  They must’ve been thirteen or fourteen when the whole thing with the leeches happened. Jack Jones had come up with the idea of skinny dipping in one of the pond near the town. They spent time splashing each other, screaming and laughing. With Jack Jones, the tallest, that day were Nico, the funny one, Robbins, the blondie, and Norton, the fatty. Although he had met some fat people with a self-love higher than the Rocky Mo
untains, Norton was not one of them. He did love eating anything that crossed his path: burgers, French fries, and, specially, ice cream. Lots and lots of ice cream — chocolate, vanilla, mint, strawberry, it didn’t matter. Now, when it came to walking in front of girls, he had a hard time. However, he didn’t mind being completely naked in front of his friends.

  When the sun moved and the shadows extended, the boys decided that it was time to end the game. When they came out of the water, one of them screamed of pure fear. It was Norton.

  “Aaaaah! Holy shit! What’s this?” He tried to brush away something that looked like a stain on his chest. It was a black, long shape surrounded by blood.

  “It’s a leech!” Shouted the blond boy pointing at it and laughing.

  Norton ran to the edge of the pond as if he had a rocket shoved up his ass. He kept on screaming when he got to land and tried to pull the leech off of his skin.

  Nico laughed out loud until he felt something in his groin. He leant forward and saw a leech stuck to his balls. Jack Jones pointed to another one, which was next to his belly button.

  “Fuuuuck! Take this shit off!”

  All of the realized that they had at least three leeches on their bodies and got the hell out of there as fast as they could, screaming of pain and bleeding on the dirt. One of the boys even forgot to go back to get his underwear, but they never noticed.

  6

  All of them were dead now. Jack Jones had buried them one by one in the cemetery where he worked. Norton died of lung cancer; Robbins, in a car crash, and Nico passed because of a heart attack when he was just 56 years old. Jack Jones, the only survivor, put a rose on their grave on the anniversary of their deaths. He drank a bottle of whiskey and chatted with them for a while before crawling back home, crying.

  “One of these days I’m gonna die,” whispered Jack Jones.

  7

  Jack Jones thought that it was a comforting job, after all. He dug the graves with a small digger. He cleaned the graves, swept the roadways from leaves and the petals of flowers. Sometimes, he even changed the location of some bones at the request of the family. He also had a small BB gun to kill the rats, big as dogs, that roamed the cemetery. It was a compressed-air Crossman Rifle M4-177, very similar to the popular M4 machine gun used by the legendary American army. It shot 4.5 projectiles with a pump of compressed-air. The gun weighed a total of 2 kilos.

  He did all of that while getting a whole six-pack of beers in his gut. That Summer of 1983 he wondered for the first time about when he was going to die, and who would bury him; where would his body be located in that cemetery he knew by heart. For the first time, the hairs at the back of his neck stood up and he felt nauseous.

  “One of these days I’m gonna die,” muttered Jack Jones as he spat on the dirt.

  8

  He was exactly six months away from retirement and still he had not died. After working for forty years in the local cemetery, he had never called in sick, except for a couple days where he had had the mother of all hangovers or he had been outright drunk. He felt happy about the prospect of retiring, but at the same time, he thought that the sooner he was out of the job, the sooner he would meet the new undertaker, and that made him feel nervous.

  Two weeks later, he found out that Donald McKinley, one of the richest people in Boad Hill, had died of an ictus, probably while he was counting a stack of bills.

  9

  He had dug the grave with his small, loud digger and he had made a hole big enough for three people of his size. This thought made him smile, although it wasn’t that funny. The dog barked a couple of times when the first relatives arrived at the place where Donald would be buried. Jack Jones had to shut him up. Two women got closer to the grave. They were wearing black clothes, naturally, and their eyes were swollen of crying. Further away, the priest and the car carrying the body were also approaching. The car was covered in flowers and was followed by lines of slow-walking people, including the remaining relatives and friends. Jack Jones wondered where would his maiden be among the crowd, as he got up from the sunk seat of his digger.

  The ceremony lasted almost half an hour. At the end, some chosen people threw some dirt over the coffin. The widow had tried to jump on the coffin, but somebody had managed to stop her in time. His daughter placed a rose on the grave and blew on her hand pointing it to her father to say goodbye.

  Then they all went away and Jack Jones came back to the hole with the digger, followed by the dog, that run around him barking and wagging its tail.

  He had to cover the coffin with dirt. The sun had already set on the horizon, leaving them alone at least for some time, but the evening was still hot.

  Jack Jones picked up a shovel and threw dirt on the coffin

  10

  “One of these days I’m gonna die,” he said once again. And who won’t? We all will! Even the poor dog. He started getting even more apprehensive until a dark whirlpool formed in his mind. He drank the rest of the beer and burped. There was nothing on TV that he liked, and he trailed off. “When am I going to die?” He picked up another beer and shared it with his furry buddy.

  Suddenly he heard something from the outside, from the cemetery. It sounded like a bundle of dry twigs breaking. He squinted his eyes and focused on trying to listen. The dog barked.

  There was something going on outside.

  11

  He walked as cautiously as he could, but he had downed a couple of beers and couldn’t be very stealthy. The dog followed him silently with his nose glued to the floor. Jack Jones turned the flashlight on. It was a dark night and the moon wasn’t bright enough to light the night enough to see the long shadows of the gravestones.

  “Is there somebody there?”

  Ridiculous. If somebody was trying to smash his brains in, they wouldn’t be so nice as to answer with a “yes, it’s me, I’m here”, so the question fell flat. It was all silent for a moment, broken suddenly by a clack, clack. He pointed the light to the source of the sound. There was nothing there, but a stone gravestone with the words “John, I will always be here with your!” written in it.

  He heard a dry sound of something being dragged on irregular ground. Jack Jones moved the light and the dog barked once. He stared at the new place the flashlight was lighting, but he saw nothing. The sound grew louder and closer. Now it was clear that it was a pair of shoes on the ground as somebody walked around him. Jack Jones, absolutely wasted, moved the flashlight around incessantly without success. Nothing. The dog moved a bit forward and Jack followed. They walked for about thirty seconds before falling forward. The flashlight fell from his hands and broke when it hit the floor, making the light disappear. He felt something hot flow in the back of his head. When he touched it with his filthy hand, he realized it was blood. The dog barked and licked his owner in the forehead, wagging its tail.

  Frrrrr, frrrrr...

  Jack Jones had run into the open coffin of the late Donald McKinley, but he was not inside it, which he found out when he felt the inside of it. There was a track of thick stains on the ground that went away from it in a zig-zag pattern.

  “Shit! Grave-diggers!” screamed Jack Jones while he licked his own blood from his lips.

  The coffin was unburied, on the grass. He supposed that the thieves had unburied it and stolen the corpse of Donald McKinley, but that wasn’t what had happened.

  12

  A silhouette was now advancing towards him. Frrrrr, frrrr. The sound grew louder and the silhouette turned into the figure of a man. Donald McKinley. Jack’s heart started beating quickly like a hound running after a hare. Beside him, the dog started barking insistently, almost hysterical, and deafened Jones.

  “It is cold,” whispered Donald McKinley extending him his hand. He looked bruised and swollen, and reeked worse than Jack himself. The dog retreated as he kept barking and, at that moment, Jack’s heart stopped like a broken engine. His pupils dilated and thought, in an instant, one of these days I’m gonna die, and he did.
The dog ran away tripping over his own paws.

  13

  Before passing away, Jack Jones knew who would bury him, and swathe moment of his death. It he could have written something on his grave, he would have chosen “one of these days I’m gonna die”, but he could not.

  Donald McKinley buried him. He placed a rose on the ground and kept walking around the cemetery of Boad Hill.

  He was the undertaker.

  The A+ Girl

  “Now that was a good one, wasn’t it?” A smile appeared on his round face. “Death is always death, and when it comes it doesn’t give you second chances.”

  One of the guests started clapping silently, but not very enthusiastically. The eyes of the warden stared in the darkness, but the clapping had already stopped.

  “I see you are not very impressed.” He pointed at the crowd with his finger. “But I have another story to tell you. It’s called, well...” He coughed. “The A+ Girl”.

  The audience started murmuring in unison, but immediately fell silent. They never spoke. They only listened and showed their boredom or appreciation with their facial expressions. In the castle, only the warden spoke, not the guests. Dead men don’t tell tales.

  “In my new story, a married man has several affaires with different women, until one day he meets an A+ girl. She was a gorgeous woman, with long legs and big eyes that had a green shine to them. He was delighted, because she was way above his league. His name was Richard, and he had booked a hotel room to meet with her. Definitely nervous, he goes to his appointment with her, when she tells him that she needs to take a shower first. He sits on the bed and something calls his attention. An opaque, thick stain appears there where she had stepped. He didn’t think twice about it. When she came out of the bath, naked, she started shredding her skin. Her arms, longer now, ended in huge claws. She opened a big, dark mouth with teeth that oozed a gelatinous substance, and, then, made love to him.