Chapter 9
I slowly picked myself up despite the cold of the cellar and walked back into the freezer. The sound didn't stop, but I had to clear my eyes of what I saw.
"It makes no sense," I whispered to myself as the cold began to seep into my bones yet again. The canister I had pried open was open.
I shook my head. I remembered I had closed it, right? "I must have closed it," I said to reassure myself, though I wasn't convinced.
My eyes were definitely deceiving me!
I looked towards the source of the sound. The dead man that was once inside the now-empty canister sat at the table, with his head turned towards the pieces of paper on it.
The man was dressed in a suit and his hair was white. Not snow white, but white with ice crystals showing he was frozen.
That is wrong, I thought to myself.
"Friend, aren't you a bit cold?" I asked as I took slow steps forward, until my hands became numb from the cold again.
The man said nothing. He raised his head and looked at me with a pale, expressionless face. The man was quite dead, and his hair, at least the white of it, was simply ice crystals.
I felt his mind beginning to shut down as he kept questioning himself and believing Michael and the driver.
"So it was true," I said suddenly. The person's skin was a deadly cyan color, a gray that showed he must have been dead for at least more than a few days.
There were already spots and pieces of skin missing from a few areas of his face, like his cheekbones, parts of his temples, and the tip of his nose.
The dead man opened his mouth, closed it, and looked back at his paper. I stopped in front of the dead man and took in his visage yet again.
"He's truly dead," I said to myself as I waved my hand in front of the dead man.
But the man looked familiar. Strangely familiar, in fact. I couldn't quite put my finger on where I had seen him, but I was certain he knew the man from somewhere.
"I wonder if his family would miss him, or did the strange man upstairs become a grave digger as well?"
I suddenly heard the sound of the stairs creak. Someone was running down the wooden stairs. The cellar door was harshly slammed shut and I heard the thin mqn yell out something in anger, as well as the crushing sound of boxes.
The man yelled out again and stepped into my view. Of course, I didn't move. Aside from the fact that I thought I was most likely frozen in place due to the cold, the surprise was still too much for me.
"How did you find this place?" the skinny man asked, his eyes wide with horror and fear.
"It wasn't a very difficult thing. Your cellar was dark, this room had all the light in it, and the walls were woode ."
"Wood, exactly, a very good idea of hiding a freezer. The wooden panels made it rather visible in some places… but less of that and more of your friend here. You seem to have many of them," I pointed to the remaining kind of stares that lined the walls behind the shelves.
"Are you having a party or something? You have no friends, you really need to hang out with dead people?"
The man shook his head furiously. "You weren't supposed to see this place. You weren't supposed to see it!"
"But alas, I did. And I'm here, and I have questions the size of this country," I pointed to the dead man and suddenly had a bright idea.
From the corner of my eye, I saw that the skinny man was still in a daze. I immediately grabbed the chair the dead man was in and lunged at the dead man myself, pushing it towards the strange man at the door.
The man's face grew wide with shock and fear as he began to stumble backward. But I was already ahead of him; I ran past the dead man and the chair towards the skinny man.
In a practiced move, I grabbed the gun from his hand and tackled the skinny man to the floor.
The man suddenly started laughing. "So, that's how it is," he said.
"In situations like this, people beg for their lives, you know." I panted as I placed my knee on the man's skinny back.
"But I'm tired, and I'm too cold for this. Let's go upstairs and talk, shall we?" I pulled myself up, still cool and shivering, and held out a hand towards the skinny man, who was now lying face up and looking at me with surprise on his features.
The man grabbed my hand and allowed himself to be pulled up.
"Did you open that one canister? All of them?"
"I only opened one. I'm sure I closed it. You have a lot of explaining to do, you know?" I walked ahead of the man and opened the door of the cellar.
Behind me, I heard the sound of the freezer door closing and began to come the wooden stairs.
Once I reached the kitchen, I made a beeline for the sink and washed my hands and face.
"Would you like coffee?"
"I don't want to know about anything but the story. Why are there dead men in your basement?" I said, and I moved towards the living room.
"Fair enough." The man had a nervous smile on his face as he led the way to the living room.
Once I sat down on the soft couch, I was very grateful for the warmth I felt. Granted, the couch was dirty, but I didn't mind it.
The ordeal I had just been through was more than enough to take my perception of cleanliness away from me briefly.
"How much do you know about witches?" the man suddenly asked, taking me by surprise.
"All I know is that they exist. Too long in this business to know that the supernatural is always out of the fingertips of those who look for it. I'm not looking for it," I lowered my voice.
"Yes. My name is Tim. It's quite obvious that I come from humble backgrounds, but… I found myself in a very tight position once upon a time with Robert and a few other people."
"You're not making much sense," I remarked as I felt the warmth return to my fingertips and the shiver leave my body finally. "You're not making much sense."
I rubbed my fingers against each other until i felt the warmth heat up my hands.
"Tell me, Tim, are you telling me you know Robert from somewhere?"
"Yes. We attended the same university. Somehow we found ourselves as friends despite our obvious social differences. In fact, if I remember correctly, such a terrible character I was, the only one who could keep up with him. Everyone else was driven away. I should have allowed myself to be driven away too because what he did to me was unforgivable."
"So you killed the man with witchcraft. Wow, Tim, or should I call you Doctor Tim?"
Tim shook his bald head. The sides of his head still had hair but now being slicked back with sweat.
"Just how does a man sweat so much?" I asked myself, perplexed by yet another strange topic.
Tim's face looked sorrowful. His eyes had turned to the ground and his lips were downturned. "Revenge… I only sought to correct what was wronged. The things Robert did… if any man lived with it, you would go mad."
"Yet you survived, didn't you? You survived and you sought revenge."
"Robert didn't leave me much of a choice. But let me tell you what truly happened. If I let you keep going like this, you're going to make the wrong assumptions."
" I already have the wrong assumptions. Telling me the story wouldn't really change much. But please, help yourself," I found myself already planning how I was going to call the coroner and tell him of my find.
"Robert invited me to come to Haiti with him. Of course, I had never been there before. I hadn't even thought about going there once in my entire life, but Robert convinced me.
Robert said we had a small assignment and it was part of our research topic. Like a fool, I believed him. But we traveled to Haiti. It was on the trip there that Robert began to tell me strange things. And it wasn't just Robert.
We were on the yatch thay he owned, and Robert kept asking me how much I made in a day, whether or not anyone would miss me back home.
I was an orphan, so I told him no one would, barely lived on $10 a day. I didn't have a problem with it. I would eat a few things here and there, drink a lot of water, and I was mostly hungry but I was fine."
"I knew that my life would change once I became a doctor, so I studied hard for it and saved up the money for my scholarship." I was impatient at the heavy backstory Tim was giving me.
I began to tap my hand on my thigh without rhythm, further adding to my impatience. "Can you cut to the chase?"
"The long and short of the story was that I, too, was by murdered Robert. His motivations were not important, neither was it important who Robert was when he was young," Tim continued.
I felt the need to interrupt I but decided to wait until he finished his ludicrous story. There are many things that have been ludicrous lately, and one of them was the fact that there were dead men in the freezer and the basement.
I already knew that somehow Tim could control bodies, but I didn't want to test fate too much.
"So what happened?" I found myself asking.
"There are dead people everywhere. They were being controlled by witchcraft. Men, women, children. It was such a horrible sight. And Robert wanted to do the same. Robert wanted to control the dead."
I felt his my widen at the confession. "Robert was a good man. Robert was an outstanding man. There's no way that Robert would want to do something so clandestine. Don't lie to me. It would do you a great disservice if you do," Tim shook his head.
"I'm not lying. Robert wanted… he said it was his family. His whole family had been involved in that, and it was a rite of passage.
The whole thing was confusing for me during the trip, but I remember he kept pressing into my childhood and my upbringing. At first, he seemed friendly about it until we got to the plantation. The entire area was filled with dead people.
They were working the fields, carrying things. Some of them were dressed in clothes from nearly a century ago."
"So you're saying zombies were on the plantation."
"I'm not saying zombies were on the plantation. You saw the men downstairs, and I'm sure you must have heard the real story of how Robert died. I sent Mr. James to him."
"Was Mr. James part of this? Did Mr. James put you up to this, or was Mr. James part of your plan?"
"He was with us, at least not initially. Mr. James came in much later. But he was there in Haiti." Tim fell silent after a while, and his face was a mask of grief and pain.
I could see this, of course. I wasn't so insensitive to discount the man's suffering, but the man had committed murder, and I needed to know about the bodies in the basement.
"Where did you get them from? I didn't kill them, if that's what you mean. I'm a doctor, you know. I used to work at a morgue, but that's not important. What's important was that Robert killed me. Robert killed me in Haiti."