The Cool Room by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 67

Having returned to the cellar, Sam laid down on his cot. But after covering himself with the blanket, he heard the light sound of steps coming from the floor above. Still being worked up from killing Frank, he carried his anger up to the first floor. He knew Frank was dead, and hearing the footsteps again experienced a mix of frustration and fear. There couldn’t possibly be anyone else in the house. Walking toward the back, he saw that the door of the cool room was left open. Entering the room, he looked over to the floor and saw Frank’s lifeless body lying in the corner, exactly where he had fallen. But looking over at the cooler drawer where the young girl’s body had been stored, Sam was shocked to find it missing. His heart raced as sweat beaded up on his forehead. For a moment, he thought that his associates were playing some cruel joke on him.

“Come on!” he yelled. “Enough of the bullshit! Get out here and put that thing back where it belongs!” Again, he heard light steps running across the floor and walking out of the cool room, Sam stood in the hallway listening as he tried to pinpoint their location. As if the sound of footsteps wasn’t frightening enough, the silence that followed was far more terrifying.

“This shit isn’t funny,” he said. “When I find out who’s doing this shit, I’m going to fucking kill you.”

Sam was suddenly struck by a feeling he couldn’t explain and turning around was faced with the young girl whose body he had violated less than an hour ago. Standing naked in front of him, she bore the suture lines of a recent autopsy. Her body had not yet begun to bloat, but was covered with the pallor yellow of death. In spite of the eye caps placed to hold her eyelids shut, her expression forced them open in a grimace of rage. As Sam stood paralyzed with fear, she reached her stiffening hands up and prying her fingernails under them ripped the eye caps off, taking the underlying corneas with them. With his psychopathic personality came a propensity for violence. Now, he stood in front of the young girl who had, until now, been in storage in a funeral home, embalmed and to some degree disemboweled. His mental instability always seemed to insulate him from feeling fear, but in that confrontation what he felt was something far beyond fearful. For the first time in his life, Sam was terrified.

“What the fuck is going on?” he said. The pale specter suddenly reached up and grabbed him by the throat. Sam’s reaction was to grab its cold hands in an effort to free himself, but unable to defend against the attack, he curled up a fist and struck the ghastly figure across the face. This too proved ineffective as he continued his attempt to fight off his attacker.

With his brain shutting down, Sam launched one final attempt to free himself and striking out tore his fist through the sutures and into the abdominal cavity. Unable to remove his hand, he looked into the face of his killer as a growl rolled out from between her clenched teeth. As though watching a scene from a horror movie, the last thing Sam would see was a heavy string of brown drool escaping her twisted smile. With his consciousness fading, he felt a distinct crack from high on his throat, followed by an inability to breath. As his pupils dilated, the living corpse released its grip, letting Sam fall to the floor. On his way down, his hand slipped out of the ghostly woman’s body cavity, leaving it with a heavy coating of greenish fluid. The sound of Sam’s body landing on the floor got the attention of those still in the cellar and rising from a light sleep they debated not only on what might have happened but who would investigate it. “You guys are a bunch of fucking pussies,” Dwayne said. “I’ll go check.”

Dwayne always seemed to be a take-charge person, having a plan B for everything. A life of dealing drugs once resulted in an arrest. Yet, he managed to escape conviction due to a technicality. The judge had essentially been played due to his lawyer’s skill and had no choice but decide on acquittal. Walking out of the courtroom with a smile, Dwayne realized how close he had come to spending twenty years to life behind bars. From that time on, he vowed to himself that he would be far more careful in the future and would take the time to think things through. Planning and resourcefulness were always the keys to success. Realizing this when they met, Sam would take full advantage of Dwayne’s intelligence in operating his illicit enterprise, as long as Dwayne knew who was in charge. It was never stated, but Sam also knew that if any of these men acted to compromise his ‘business’ they would have to be made to disappear. The method would have to be quick and devoid of any undue mess.

However, Dwayne remained suspicious of most everything people did, and Sam was no exception. As their ring leader, he held sway over the group through his charismatic words, but this did not to stave off Dwayne’s suspicion. But the one thing that could always lighten his suspicion was the almighty dollar. Money always seems to be an excellent motivator for anyone with a great need for it, and if it meant the difference between homelessness and having a roof over his head, then the choice was obvious. It didn’t take much convincing for him to ally himself with Sam. Now, there were four – a big enough group that it could easily be managed easily and small enough to go largely unseen under the right circumstances.