A Death in Common Sampler
Bodies Found in 6 th Avenue Basement
MONMOUTHSIDE HEIGHTS --- The Monmouthside Township Police Department executed a search warrant two days ago on Charles Lee Eaton's home on 6 th Avenue. Working on neighbors' complaints of a week-long terrible smell, the police found Eaton, age 62, dead from an apparent suicide-by-hanging. No explanatory note was found, and Eaton had no relatives or friends.
"We hardly ever saw him," stated Adara Al-Muhsi, a neighbor. "He largely kept to himself. My kids were always frightened of him. He once spat at my daughter for trying to sell him Girl Scout cookies."
The sentiment was largely echoed by other people on 6 th Avenue. What police found in Eaton's home, however, provided a shock. Bodies, in various states of decomposition, were tangled in his basement. There seemed to be no unifying demographic, in terms of age, gender, or ethnicity. For a serial killer, this is not normal behavior, according to Dr. Anthony DeLucci, adjunct criminal justice professor at Monmouth University. "Your average serial killer has specific tastes. It's part of a fetish. It's systematic. It's almost ritualistic. Charles Lee Eaton demonstrated none of that."
Eaton's erratic killing also came as a surprise to the Monmouthside Township Police. Detective Lattrell J. Johnson stated that, "Identification of the remains is ongoing. We cannot release names, but so far, none of the victims so far identified have been reported missing. They could be locals. They could be tourists. We don't exactly know.."
Further details are not available as of this writing. One source, close to the consulting forensic team brought in, did speak on the condition of anonymity. "I have been part of murder investigations for 15 years. I've never seen anything like this. There's no logic, at all. Only one thing comes close to fitting the established profile. Each of the victims had wadded up sheets of paper stuffed into their mouths. These contained writing, but the similarities end there. Each had a different set of handwriting. Some were typed, and others printed out. Some were written in the first person, while others seemed to tell stories about other people. We're still trying to find a pattern."
Detective Johnson asks that anybody with any information, whether on Charles Lee Eaton or somebody who has recently gone missing, contact the Monmouthside Police's Charles Lee Eaton Special Task Force.
LL Soares
Parched
I am his first.
I see crows where there are none.
They hover around me, aware,
ready to pluck out my eyes.
And so I tell myself
there are no crows,
But it does not console me.
It is hot and I am on the ground, looking up
at the sun. My skin has dried
like parchment my cracked lips, once thirsty and sore
are now gone. Even the sun
doesn’t bother me anymore.
I look straight into it, unscathed,
unafraid
I faintly remember how it ended --
a knife, my heart removed.
But I cannot remember my name or life
he has left me here to wither
in the sun
dumped off at the side of the highway.
Until now, I knew nothing of basements,
like the others, those kindred spirits
who have found me.
In my dry mouth, a crumpled paper,
a poem he read to me before I died.
Then, its significance escaped me.
Now, it seems to have been my elegy.
L. L. Soares’s fiction has appeared in such magazines as
Cemetery Dance, Horror Garage, Bare Bone and
Gothic.net, as well as the anthologies
Best of Horrorfind 2, Right House on the Left, and
Traps. His poem "Circles" appeared in the magazine
Space and Time. He is an Active member of HWA and current co-chair of the New England Horror Writers (NEHW).
Jerrod Balzer
The Little Corpse
Stanley would punch you in the crotch, sneering
It’s “little person,” fucker!
The last one was his night manager,
at the Snappy Snack Shack. It was always
the same, job after job. See that Ford truck
with the camper on the back? With the garbage
scattered around it and the burn barrel in front?
Stanley’s crotch punching kept him sleeping there
and not the roach motel room that he had
when times were good. The crack whores next door
thought he was so adorable. After the truck
stopped working, he sat in front of a First National.
When business men and finance execs
refused his whiskey scented pan-handling,
and called him a stupid, dirty midget,
he punched them in the crotch.
Finally, an old wrinkled guy in a flannel shirt
gave him a twenty dollar bill and said,
Will you help clean my house?
They didn’t talk while they walked. He was led
to the bathroom, a tub full of soiled filet knives.
Now Stanley’s job is easy – keeping his friends
company. They are just like him, still and staring
wide-eyed. He’s sprawled on an obese woman
made lighter when she burst a few days ago.
Her stench is all over him now, but he’s still happy.
In his new home, they don’t call him midget.
Or little person. Or anything at all.
Jerrod Balzer has written two film novelizations,
The Double-D Avenger and
Frankenstein Vs the Creature from Blood Cove, and has short stories appearing in
Tabloid Terrors: I was a Sasquatch Sex Slave and
Nessie Tried to Pimp My Wife. He is currently working on a serial titled
Fear the Woods.
Barry Napier
A Biography of Flowers and Thorns
He often sat on park benches,
his crisp black suit pressed like a face against cold glass.
He watched people mourning from afar,
as he sat two blocks removed from the pain and despair that stepped out of black sedans and into churches that smelled of dead flowers and frost.
It was the snow that did it to him,
falling around him like tiny atom bombs that detonated quietly in his hair.
No one noticed him there, no one cared to see
as he watched, week after week, the world offer up its dead to the living dead—
the living dead that had jobs and mortgages and secret fantasies about plunging a knife into a breastbone or punching their spouses while they made love.
Their lives
(and perhaps his own)
so sporadic and useless and dull.
Random.
Like free verse spilling from a jar;
pen to paper, start to finish.
He watched them carry the caskets into churches
and heard the primal moans of despairing wives and husbands and children and lovers and accountants and people who had only met them once, drunk at an office party.
He watches them as they march like a defeated platoon
and sees them holding hands and sipping from flasks and laughing quietly behind their hands about something unrelated to the dead.
He watches them file into churches,
through Winter’s breath,
past dead and forgotten flower beds.
He sees the wilted roses screaming at Winter,
taunting the faceless season with its aged petals and paramount thorns—
all colored by the blood of passing seasons.
Frozen petals falling to the ground like morbid confetti, celebrating the end of another life
as the people continue to march on, inside, away from the totality of everything.
A parade of coffins and flowers and remembrances,
placed around an awning that had been used for cookouts in the summer,
covered white with fallen snow.
From his park benches, from a hidden space behind the cemetery gates,
he watched the roses sliding down arched slabs of granite
like children on sleds in the road.
A name is engraved upon the granite;
it is a name that will forever remind the bereaved of the snow and the cold.
For dying flowers, a dying rose,
the frost—the untouchable element—plays the killer.
The rose—fragile, beautiful, flawed—plays the victim.
To destroy, to create;
both are simple functions.
He remembers all of this as he sits in the basement, the bodies around him.
There are footsteps overhead and they sound like the chiming of funeral bells.
One of the bodies next to him whimpers,
moans, shudders.
Screams.
The falling funeral bell footsteps grow louder, closer.
This is his frost approaching, a knife in hand no doubt.
And he, the flower, sitting idly by in the cold,
left to watch as another group walks through the cold and into the open maw of a church;
to bare witness to a body put into the ground.
The frost arrives; it promptly destroys the screaming rose.
Its petals are peeled, exposing the precious things beneath
and its thorns prove useless.
Another petal falls,
withers, wrinkles.
Becomes nothing.
He eyes the frost, wishes they could share a park bench together,
and feels nothing as his first petals are peeled away.
Barry Napier has a BA in Professional Writing and is currently going through a starving artist stage (aka a freelance writer). His fiction has appeared in publications such as Bound For Evil, Southern Fried Weirdness, It Came From Planet Mars and Northern Haunts. He lives in Lynchburg, VA with his wife and children where he is currently at work on his second novel and a collection of short stories.
