Scarsdale Crematorium (The Haunted Book 4) Read online

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  Prologue

  Part I - Camera Tricks

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  PART II - Inter vivos et mortuos

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART III – Intractable

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  END

  Author’s Note

  Scarsdale Crematorium

  The Haunted Series

  Book 4

  Patrick Logan

  Prologue

  The only sounds that could be heard in the helicopter were the chuffing of the blades and the rain pelting on the windows.

  But other than that, not one of the passengers said a word.

  Robert’s eyes were downcast, his gaze locked on his blood-covered hands. They were trembling.

  He had taken a man’s life today, a man that had been alive. This wasn’t like James Harlop or George Mansfield or even Andrew Shaw.

  This was different.

  Father Callahan had been a living, breathing human being, and although his body had been torn in half and he’d been well on his way to death, Robert had pushed him over the brink. He had killed him—mercifully, certainly, but his actions weren’t without repercussions.

  And that said nothing of what Sean had done: killing the man with the bound hands, shoving the warden into the Marrow.

  Robert interlaced his fingers, trying to force them to stop shaking.

  “So,” Cal said at long last, breaking the silence. Robert lifted his eyes, a process that was strangely laborious.

  He was exhausted—mentally and physically spent.

  Cal wasn’t addressing him; instead, he was looking at the boy in the round glasses, his eyes bulging from behind the thick lenses that were streaked with blood.

  “So, you want to be a ghostbuster, do ya?”

  Allan Knox didn’t respond. Instead, his hands continued to fiddle with the shattered remnants of a camera that rested on his lap. Instead of answering, the man—more a boy than a man, really, although it was clear that he had aged considerably this day—removed the oddly undamaged red lens from the camera body. He wiped some blood from the red lens, then held it up to one eye and stared through it at Cal.

  What he said next surprised all of them.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice dry and hoarse. He cleared his throat before continuing. “Yes, this is what I always wanted.”

  Robert stared at Allan, his mouth twisting into a grimace. He bit his tongue, a scathing remark hiding just behind his teeth.

  How could you want this? This…this death…death everywhere. How can anyone want this?

  Robert wished more than anything that he had never become immersed in this world. Even though Shelly had scolded him for the words, when he had uttered them back then, he had done so partially in jest. This time, however, Robert really wished that he had been in the car with his family when they’d died.

  When Amy had died…

  Amy…how is Amy involved in all of this? Why is she involved?

  So many questions rattled around in his skull that it made his head spin. He had gone into the fiasco thinking that he might get some answers out of it, but, if anything, his time at Seaforth had only made things more confusing.

  Carson…

  “ETA eleven minutes to the estate,” the pilot’s voice crackled in his headset.

  And the book—Inter vivos et mortuos—what was in the book that Father Callahan wanted me to see? That he would waste his final words on telling me to get it? Was it about Amy? The prophecy?

  “Got it,” Sean answered.

  Robert shook his head.

  The book…I need to find the book. It has to have answers in it.

  “No,” he croaked.

  Everyone in the helicopter turned to look at him: Sean, Shelly, Allan, Cal. Even Aiden in the copilot’s seat whipped his head around.

  He wasn’t sure if they were more shocked by what he had said, or by the simple fact that he had spoken.

  Robert turned his gaze to the window, a deliberate effort to make sure that he wasn’t convinced otherwise by Shelly or Cal after he said what he was going to next.

  “I’m not going to the estate,” he said simply.

  “What? Robert—” Shelly leaned toward him as she spoke, but Robert just closed his eyes and shook his head. After a deep breath, he opened them again and mustered the courage to look at her.

  Shelly had since leaned back in her chair, arms folded across her ample chest. Yet despite her frustrated posture, her expression didn’t match.

  Her features were painted in sheer sadness.

  “I can’t go back,” he nearly whispered, once again averting his gaze. “There is something else I need to do.”

  Part I - Camera Tricks

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  Chapter 1

  Jonah Silvers grunted and wiped his forehead with the back of his gloved hand. The glove was black with soot, serving only to spread the grime around rather than removing it.

  He spat on the concrete floor before turning back to the oven and peering inside.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, shaking his head. He had turned the burners off too soon, again. Wiping sweat from his eyes, he could see that not all the bones had been rendered into dust; he could still clearly make out the skull, the hip bones, even an outline of a spinal cord covered in black soot.

  Jonah glanced around as he weighed his options. It would take another thirty minutes or so just to get the oven up to temp, and now that what was left of the body had cooled, it would take at least another hour before they would be reduced to dust.

  His eyes eventually wandered until they fell on the body bag that he had opened right before he had switched off the oven. The woman’s face stared out at him with cold, dead eyes. He had pulled the thick plastic bag down to her navel, revealing large, white breasts.

  “It’s your fault, Mrs. Kyra,” he said, then stifled a giggle. His eyes remained locked on the woman’s pale breasts, and it took all of his willpower to look back to the oven.

  There was more than just Mrs. Kyra to get to today; there were three more bodies to be burned, and it was already closing in on midnight.

  Jonah made up his mind, and pushed the shovel forward. Then, with sweat pouring from his face from the heat still radiating from the oven, he used the corner to shove the skull to the very back. He did the same with the hip bones. Thankfully, what he had thought was a spinal cord ended up being just air pockets le
ft behind from the old bones. Jonah scooped a shovelful of soot, and poured it into the plastic lined box at his feet. Dust puffed up and clung to the exposed areas on his face, wrists, and neck that were slick with sweat.

  Jonah barely noticed.

  After several more shovelfuls, he turned his attention to the bag, eying the gray powder inside the dark bag.

  It’s enough, he surmised. Shit, I doubt anyone even looks in these things.

  Satisfied with his work, Jonah leaned down then lifted the box and slammed it on the table behind him with the three others. Then he turned back to Mrs. Kyra.

  Jonah tilted his head to one side, inspecting the woman again. Her eyes were sunken, her cheeks sallow. The makeup that they had used for the open casket had either been wiped away, or her present state of decay had limited its effectiveness.

  Still…she didn’t look half bad for a fifty-three-year-old dead schoolteacher.

  “Aw, it’s too bad we don’t have more time to play, hon. Would love to teach you some things…some things that I didn’t learn in school.”

  Jonah snorted as he bent to pick her up, giving her left breast one final hard squeeze. Seeing his finger marks remain on her pale flesh, which didn’t return to its original shape, brought about another chuckle.

  Then he got to business, hoisting her body onto his left shoulder with a grunt. She was heavier than he had thought, and Jonah needed to force his considerable gut backwards to make sure he didn’t topple forward under her weight. At a mere five foot three, Jonah was glad that his build—thick, overweight—kept his center of gravity low, rooted.

  Dropping Mrs. Kyra’s body onto the table beside the cremated remains, he began the process of taking her out of the bag. Sure, it would have been easier to do this on the ground, but it was dark in the basement, and he wanted to get a good look at her. Jonah slipped her feet out of the body bag first, offering a long, lingering look at the mound of pubic hair between her legs. He cursed himself at not planning his time right, before he pulled her all the way out of the bag and putting her on his shoulder again.

  Jonah pivoted, and dropped the body onto the lip of the oven. He had intended on putting her on her ass first, then lowering the top half of her body, but Mrs. Kyra had some meat to her ass and thighs, and he again underestimated her weight—and her state of rigor.

  The body fell backwards, and for a brief moment Jonah tried his best to hold her upright. But it was a losing battle, and what did it really matter, anyway? Mrs. Kyra was dead.

  Jonah stepped away from the oven and watched as her body fell, her head cracking loudly off the ceramic tiles. Her body even bounced a little before coming to a complete rest.

  Placing his palms against the soles of her feet, this time prepared for her weight, he leaned in and shoved hard. A horrible scraping sound—toughened, leather-like skin passing over the remaining bone fragments—echoed inside the oven, but Jonah paid this no heed.

  He had heard it before—many times.

  After a final heave, he headed around the side of the large oven, which he sometimes joked would make the world’s fastest pizza, and then hammered the big red button with a filthy glove-covered palm. There was a throaty rumble from somewhere below his feet, followed by the hiss of gas being released. Jonah quickly walked to the front again, eager to watch the body burn.

  This was his favorite part—watching as the flames first licked at the underside of the bodies, causing the skin to bubble and then turn black. The smell was bad, even he recognized that, but he was so lost in a euphoric state as the hair burned, the eyes sizzled and popped, the breasts deflated, that he barely noticed.

  And deep underground in the basement of the Scarsdale Crematorium, Jonah was free to watch at his leisure. It was times like these that he relished.

  The first of the flames shot up from the grates below, sending a roaring heat that splashed his face, illuminating his wide nose and soot-smeared features in an orange glow.

  His lips parted in a sneer, and he could feel the front of his pants, covered in a thick, heavy apron, start to tighten.

  Some days, if he was lucky, the flames would cause the body to sit upright. It was rare, but it did happen.

  Jonah knew he should be putting the other remains away, fill out the stupid completion log that his asshole boss made him do each time, and that he was already behind schedule, but he just had to watch.

  Just for a little while.

  Just until Mrs. Kyra was no longer recognizable.

  And then, to his absolute delight, as the flames continued to blacken and crisp the underside of her body, Mrs. Kyra started to rise.

  Jonah clapped his hands together in glee, the tightness in the front of his pants growing to such an extent that it made it nearly impossible to stand upright without causing him discomfort.

  The oven was more than ten feet deep and four feet wide, but it wasn’t very tall—at only three feet high, when Mrs. Kyra’s body started to bend at the waist, it could only make it to a third of the way to a sitting position before her head, eyes still blank, cloudy orbs, thunked against the top. There was a sizzle as the skin on her forehead bound to the hot ceramic.

  “It’s a good day,” he whispered to himself, his eyes twinkling as they reflected the flames. “A real good day.”

  He had been working at the crematorium for more than three years now, and had cremated hundreds of bodies in that time, but this was only the fourth time that a body had sat up like this.

  The first time it had happened, Jonah had nearly lost his shit. And that time—that one time—he had been glad that Vinny had been there with him.

  “Happens sometimes,” the man had told him in his dopey, nasally voice. “Dunno why, and it’s freaky as hell, but it happens. That’s why I put the screen up.”

  But Jonah hated the screen—a mesh-like door designed to keep the heat in, but one that also blocked his view.

  Now, on this fourth occasion, the body sitting up had a completely different effect on him.

  Case in point: the tightness in his jeans.

  He lived for this shit—who would have thought that dropping out of high school after being bullied ad nauseam for years would have landed him here? There was no way that even the shithole that was Scarsdale should have hired him given his history.

  But they had, and now he was here.

  And he fucking loved it.

  It was his calling, that much was obvious. It made him wonder why his guidance counselor had suggested a plumbing apprenticeship, of all things.

  Fuck that.

  As Jonah watched, Mrs. Kyra—which incidentally wasn’t her real name; every woman in the crematorium was named after his high school teacher, the one that had scolded, then touched him—continued to rise with unusual determination. Her forehead continued to push into the ceiling of the oven, forcing her neck forward.

  “Oh, this is a very good day,” he said with a giggle. In fact, it was so good that he reached around his neck and slipped the apron off, letting it drop to the floor in a heap. Then he grabbed his erection through his jeans, squeezing it hard with the filthy glove.

  As he watched, fixated by a mixture of pleasure and disgust, the flames continued to burn her lower half, causing her legs to blacken to a crisp. But because she was sitting up, her top half, including her pasty white breasts, was relatively unscathed. Protocol was to force her back down again using the shovel, at least that was what Vinny did, but there was no way that he was going to do that. In fact, the way she was sitting up…if her lower half weren’t so charred, he would have considered taking her out again and having his way with her.

  Mrs. Kyra continued to sit up, the pressure on her forehead such that it was causing her throat to bulge out like a goiter. And yet the pressure seemed to be increasing instead of subsiding.

  The other three bodies that had sat up had slowly lowered again as the temperature inside the oven reached a certain threshold. But this…this Mrs. Kyra seemed to be sitting up even hard
er as the temperature rose.

  “Yeah, a very, very—”

  But something happened, something so unexpected that even Jonah was at a loss for words.

  The pressure was too much for Mrs. Kyra’s tight, dead flesh, and her throat suddenly split, a surprisingly clean and bloodless gash that caused her head to flop backward, revealing the inside of her throat.

  “Wow,” he whispered, momentarily pausing his rhythmic grasping of his erection.

  This was new. And new was exciting.

  But what happened next made Jonah immediately soft. The two halves of her neck started to move, like a giant, lipless mouth. And then, as he swallowed hard, he thought that the movements started to look less random, as if trying to form words.

  And then, to his utter horror, he heard a voice.

  “Jonaaaaaaaaaaaaah.”

  “Wh—wh—wh—wh—?” Jonah blubbered. He stumbled backward, but his progress was halted by the table with the bags of ashes on them.

  “Jonaaaaaaaaaah,” that lipless gash hissed just loud enough to be heard over the sound of the roaring flames. “Come join me in here, Jonaaaaaaaaaaah.”

  “Wha—what the fuck is going on?” he stammered.

  This was new, but it wasn’t so exciting anymore; instead, it was downright terrifying.

  Jonah crouched down, his eyes still locked on Mrs. Kyra’s neck wound, and grabbed the shovel in his right hand, before rising to his feet again.

  “Jonaaaaaah, it’s nice and cozy in here. Why don’t you join me?”

  Jonah swallowed hard and gripped the shovel even tighter. And then, inexplicably, he took a step forward.

  “Yes, that’s right, Jonah, join Mrs. Kyra…join meeeeeeeeee!”

  “No,” he whispered, but his actions belied his words. He took another step forward, then another. And then he dropped the shovel, which clanged loudly on the cement floor.

  The last thing Jonah Silvers wanted to do was to move closer to the oven, with or without Mrs. Kyra speaking to him. The heat alone was unbearable.

  And yet he continued to slide forward. It was as if this woman, the one with the breasts that were still deformed from his squeezing, had some sort of hold on him.