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“Yeah, I’m Freddie Faris, the gardener. The one that found him.”
“Do you suppose,” the reporter asked, “that we could go inside and talk?”
The sky was a cheerless sheet of dull steel. All about them the silver whine of the wind cut through the cold, unjeweled branches of the trees lining the street. Cars crashed and banged and whirled by, some throwing dirty brown sprays of mist up from the wet pavement.
“Sure thing,” Freddie said, surveying the forbidding sky with distaste. “I’m not supposed to go nowhere unless I’m on break but, what the hell. There ain’t much a gardener can do on a day like today.”
The reporter followed Freddie’s slightly hunched, lean figure into the hallway of the apartment building. He didn’t even seem to mind tromping through the puddles that the reporter had to clumsily skirt in her high heels.
Once inside and comfortably away from the drizzle and wind, Freddie turned his stubbly face towards the reporter. His eyes were washed out, like two holes.
“This better?”
“Much. You say you’re the one that found him? Mr. X?”
“Yeah,” Freddie said. He lowered his eyes and lit the blackened stump of a half smoked stogy, planting it in a corner of his mouth before looking back up.
“That was the damnedest thing that’s ever happened to me, like something you read about in the papers or see at the movies.” His face had a hunted look, but his voice was firm.
“I didn’t know Mr. X pers’nally, only who he was and where he lived. Just well enough to throw up a hand and say ‘hey’. He was away most of the time, but I knew a lot of his friends, his secretary. Once in a while his daughter would show up, though it’s my understandin’ they didn’t get on real well. But to hear most people talk, he seemed like a decent egg.
“It was really funny how I found him. Not funny ‘har, har’ you know, but strange. All day long on the day he... on the day he died, I had this feelin’ there was somethin’ floating around in the air like a big bird. All I can say is that it was a weird feeling.” He shivered. “Christ, I hope I never feel nothing like that again.
“I ain’t superstitious, but while I was trimmin’ the hedges, I kept lookin’ around, trying to figure out where that feelin’ was comin’ from. And it felt strongest whenever I looked at Mr. X’s apartment, which is on the second floor.”
“What did you do, then?”
“Like I said, I ain’t superstitious or one to believe in ghosts or witches or things like that, but I kept feelin’ like Mr. X was in some kind of trouble. That feeling of something whirling around in the air kept gettin’ stronger and stronger ’til it well nigh made me sick. Then it just seemed to flare and the next thing I know, I’m runnin’ up the stairs to Mr. X’s apartment.”
The reporter wrote hastily. “And then?”
“I rapped on the door hard a few times and hollered out ‘You okay, Mr. X, or somethin’ like that. And then, I know it’s crazy”- and the reporter, who thought it all sounded crazy, looked up with renewed interest- “but I heard this sort of sizzling sound. It was like the sound you hear when you strike an arc with an argon welder, and I coulda swore I smelled something burning. Not smoke, you understand, but something burning. But I know that couldn’t be because by the time I got in there he was already... he was already dead. There wasn’t even any smoke.
“I busted the door open. I probably wouldn’t of used a key even if’n I’d had one. And there he is, or what’s left of him, sittin’ in a chair.” Freddie’s hollow eyes sought out the reporter and his voice lost most of its control.
“I never seen nothing like that, Miss….?”
“Mrs. Simmons.”
“Miss Simmons. He was just sittin’ there in his chair like he was gettin’ ready to watch Wheel of Fortune, only there wasn’t anything left of him but bones. God, it was awful, Miss Simmons. I don’t ever want to see anything like that again. There he sits, just as purty as you please, you know, with his naked jawbone grinnin’ at me, and there’s this little, ashy black clump sittin’ on top of his head. It really did look like a bush that’s been caught in a brushfire and still has its shape, until the next strong wind comes along and crumbles it to dust.”
Freddie’s eyes glazed over and he seemed to be staring inward at some mental screen where a scene filled with all the loving brutality of ‘70’s vintage Savage Cinema played out.
“I could see his arm bones comin’ out of his short sleeved shirt and there was little black lumps all over them like the wax that runs down the side of a candle. It looked like his flesh had just melted and ran on his bones. And there’s this rotten smell like green leaves burnin’ and I keep feelin’ this feelin’ like there’s somethin’ in the room with me, just crawlin’ around like a snake, lookin’ for somewhere to go, or somebody to get into.”
Freddie began to cry.
“I could still see his wedding ring on the bones of his hand. It was only a lump with a lot of little pinprick holes in it like it had melted and cooled down real fast. The clothes he’s wearin’ and the chair he’s sittin’ in ain’t even singed. Here’s Mr. X all burnt up -one of the cops I called said it would of took a blow torch to burn somebody up that bad- and nothin’ around him is even scorched.
“Under his chair is a greasy stain on the carpet- body fat that’s been rendered out- and there’s twisted bundles and thick cords of some kind of white tissue runnin’ up and down the bare bones. Nerves, I guess.
“But the worst thing was his eyes. They hadn’t burned, you see, and they were just sittin’ in their sockets, starin’ at me….”