Partygoers used coffins for tables, slamming shot glasses onto the polished lids. They slopped beer onto the plush carpet and ashed cigarettes into the sterling silver urns that Blane’s daddy had bought for future clients.
Mind you, half the town had said their final goodbyes to the people they loved in that funeral parlor. There was an outcry, for sure, but it was Blane’s house. If he wanted to run it down, there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.
One day in mid-summer, somebody called up the sheriff and reported Blane missing. We ain’t seen him in weeks, they said. A couple day bender was one thing, but weeks? The sheriff went out there and knocked on the door, but nobody answered. Eventually, they busted in.
Later, the sheriff said his guts felt twisted like barbed wire going into that house. He knew something was wrong, but in he went with his deputy, and the smell hit ‘em the minute they walked through the door. A rancid, rotted smell, and the flies were so loud they thought Blane had left some piece of embalming equipment turned on.
They covered their noses and walked in. They searched the first floor, disgusted by broken bottles and dishes of molded food everywhere. Both the sheriff and the deputy had been to that house, see. The sheriff’s own mother had died not two years before and had her final service there at The Crawford House.
It was the most beautiful house in Roscommon in those days. Edwin Crawford had spared no expense when he’d built it because he had believed in honoring the dead. He called the house his gift to God. But his son, Blane, had practically destroyed it in the year he’d owned it since his father had passed.
Anyway, they searched and searched and couldn’t find Blane. It was the deputy who’d said to follow the buzzing sound. They’d been thinking the whole time it was a fan or some other machine they were hearing. They went down the stairs. That’s where the embalming room was, in the basement. There were coffins down there too. A room full of them.
They walked into that room full of coffins. At first, the sheriff thought he was staring at a black coffin. He even started to tell his deputy how morbid that seemed, a black coffin. But as he looked, he realized it was moving. The coffin wasn’t black at all. It was covered with buzzing, writhing flies.
He and the deputy started waving the flies away. Shoo- shoo. And finally, they got close to it. The smell was so bad, the deputy retched before they even opened the coffin. The sheriff flung up the lid and…
Jake had paused at this moment, moving closer to the fire so his face glowed orange
Blane Crawford’s dead, decomposed body was lying inside, but it was so rotted, you could barely make out his face. The skin had slid away, leaving meat and bones, and worst of all were the maggots. Maggots the size of pickles crawling in and out of his eye sockets. Those men turned and ran from that house. They ran like the devil was gonna’ crawl outta that coffin and pull them inside.
“You don’t know that! How could you know that?” Jerry had demanded, but Max remembered the look on Jerry’s face, the terror outlined in the deep groove between his eyebrows. He’d felt a similar expression on his own face.
“Swear it on my life,” Jake had said, tapping a finger on his chest. “Mr. Ketchum told me. And he knew. He was alive back then. So anyway,” Jake continued, shooting an irritated glance at Jerry for the interruption.
They sent some poor black kid in there to get the body. Nobody else would touch it, but they paid, and he said he’d do it. It was so rotten, he had to carry it out in buckets.
The sheriff started looking into Blane’s death. They did an autopsy, but couldn’t find anything wrong with him. So, he started asking around town. Maybe someone killed him. He had more than a few enemies for sure. Guys he’d scammed out of money, women he’d screwed and never called - that kind of thing.
They never figured out what happened. The final theory was that Blane crawled in there himself and got stuck. Maybe he was fixing to scare someone who was coming over. One of his friends said he’d been complaining about headaches, so the sheriff though he might have tried to sleep in there because it was dark and quiet. And then there were the vampire theories. Nobody loves coffins like a vampire, but nothing ever came of that.
“Mister, Mister!”
Max looked up to find the girl holding out his ice cream cone. From the look on her face, she’d been trying to get his attention for a minute.
“Sorry,” he said, taking the cone and quickly licking the ice cream that had already dripped down the side. “Mind lapse.”
She smiled and turned back to the soft serve machine.
Max returned to Ashley and Sid, wishing he hadn’t thought of The Crawford House at all, wishing he’d never offered to tell the tale that followed.
But at the expectant looks on their faces, he knew he couldn’t back out.
“That’s one of my favorites too,” Sid said, nodding at Max’s ice cream as he scraped the last of his sundae from the bottom of the plastic bowl. Ashley still had half of hers left.
“The perfect combo,” Max agreed, forcing a smile and half-considering an excuse to leave.
He dreaded telling the story, though he didn’t quite know why.
Whatever it was, reliving that night in The Crawford House felt like opening a door, a secret door tucked deep in the cellar where strange black light leaked around the crevices. Where the thing inside wanted you to open the door, but once you opened it, you couldn’t close it again. Once you’d seen what was inside, you couldn’t unsee it.
“Tell us about going into The Crawford House,” Ashley said, handing the rest of her ice cream to Sid.
His eyes lit up. “Thanks, Ash!” Sid took the ice cream and ate it in two bites.
Max sighed and licked his own ice cream.
“I was thirteen,” Max started.
“We’re both going to be thirteen in the fall,” Sid told him, bobbing his head happily.
Ashley shot him a silencing look, and he clamped his mouth shut.
“I’d been camping out with my two buddies,” Max continued, “and my brother came out to our bonfire. He told us the story of The Crawford House and of Blane Crawford, who had died there.”
From the looks on Ashley and Sid’s faces, Max knew they too had heard the story of Blane Crawford’s gruesome demise.
“I’d been to the house a few times, but I’d never gone in. Well, that night, Jake started razzing me about being scared. He’d gone in, he’d told us. He’d gone into the embalming room and taken a scalpel. He’d given it to Margo Reeves, and she’d kissed him.”
“Margo Reeves?” Sid exclaimed. “She’s my next-door neighbor. She has twin girls. They’re like this big.” He held up his index finger and thumb.
“They’re a little bigger than that,” Ashley told him, rolling her eyes. “Go on,” she said.
Max laughed, realizing he shouldn’t have used Margo’s name. The last thing he needed was an angry phone call over a kiss that happened a lifetime before.
“I got fed up with Jake’s pestering, and I wanted to one-up him. That’s the problem with being a younger brother. You do everything second. It starts to piss you off.”
“Tell me about it,” Sid grumbled.