Ghost?

by Alan Shils

Ghost: A figment of precarious perception glued to faulty fact with unimaginable imagination. My definition and you may disagree. Nevertheless, beliefs can have serious effects even though ghosts are bogus as three-dollar bills.
	Before my mind turns into Swiss cheese, or my heart says, “I quit,” I will tell you exactly what happened and not a silly anecdote like Grandma rushing from the barn yelling, “I saw the ghost of Grandpa.” 
	No, I haven’t gone squirrelly because I’m old. Go squint at newspaper microfilm and dig in musty land and tax ledgers. Read agency and insurance company reports. You’ll see. It’s all there. But those records can’t tell you what I can. Caution my friend. Like caveat emptor, caveat bookworm, let the reader beware.
~
Tom and I were friends since first grade and he could get fixated. During our early teens he found a book about sex and we studied it with intensity. Tom got the notion of a reverse of the birth process. What may constitute a ‘death canal?’ We scoured the library and decided there was no such thing.
	Tom believed in ghosts and I wanted nothing to do with that crap. We argued ghost pros and cons all summer because boys like to taunt each other. Let’s skip ahead several years.
	After World War II, we both went back to college. I stayed in engineering but during his sophomore year, Tom decided to invent and market a death canal.
	He dropped his education major and enrolled in mortician school, passed the state and professional certifications, got his license and purchased a spacious old house that he converted. Upstairs he had plush décor for mourners and downstairs, he installed high tech gadgets to prep, preserve, present and dispose of bodies. 
	After firmly establishing his business, it was time to begin creating his:
Reverse Birth Service
For the Highly Discriminating

It took two years for Tom to realize his death canal housed in what resembled an attached greenhouse. During construction, he often took me behind the scenes to brag about progress.
	Everybody has a good idea what a birth canal is but what would a death canal look like and how might one work? Think of a big pipe, like a large storm drain. Now, get that ugly cement or corrugated metal image out your head and replace it with a giant, fancy, inviting looking, something-like-a-vagina tube as though such was removed from a colossal woman dozens of feet tall. Tom gave that large fancy ‘pipe’ a decorative and stately appearance, specially the entrance. It was over three feet in diameter. The whole thing was twenty feet long and the far end vanished behind a wall. The pipe was flexible but you couldn’t deflect it with your hand. Built-in actuators provided a smooth peristalsis to advance a body, opposite in direction, to that of a neonate. Had some pictures of it but they got lost.
	By today’s standards the thing was crudely controlled; no PCs back then. Of course, a body could have been dead when it entered the canal but that would be idiotic. A live person must enter to achieve the reverse of a live birth.
	Tom knew that only a tiny sub-set of the dying would be both interested and able to afford his process. Client-0001, heading a new invoice category, was a wealthy screwball who convinced his family that if they wanted to stay in his will they better back his unorthodox last wishes. On the appointed day, I’ll call him Mister Bye-bye, appeared. Poor bastard was all skin and bones from his terminal illness. His narrow drag-shadow included a remnant of nervous immediate family, his curious doctor, a minister he had annoyed for decades and the few friends left after a soon-to-end, cantankerous, ninety-five year, general pain-in-the-ass life.
I still remember the music, lighting, flowers, aroma, rate and method of death, body treatment, prayer, and other details that filled several pages of neatly typed and itemized costs.
	One need not have died from a toxic injection. Some may have wished electrocution or other trauma. Today, perhaps the reenactment of a fatal illegal drug deal may be in fashion, with corn starch substituting for cocaine, though I only know that from TV. Anything could be staged. Tom offered fantasy endings both sexual and non-sexual and was happy to entertain any other demise imaginable. He believed in ghosts and, ‘The customer is always right.’
	How can a death canal be legal?  Before he spent a cent on his dream machine, Tom got assurance from a special court that he was not killing anyone. Three judges decided that the client would be a suicide as Tom had simply provided a novel means for them to do it. Tom was not even assisting. Key to the court’s decision was that only the departing must press the start button to initiate his own death. Small point, but it was critical.
~
	Tom insisted I witness his genius embarking upon its maiden voyage. With me, in the one-way mirrored Observation Chamber, apart from the Family Sanctuary within the canal room, were the police chief, a judge, two reporters and Tom’s staff, all of us fascinated by the pending action and view of the death canal’s vulva artistically decorated in a ‘shaved’ motif.
	Legalities and other arrangements completed and anticipation politely pulsating, Bye-bye was lifted and slid into the opening of the reverse vagina by those titled, PPB’s, Pre-Pall-Bearers. They slid him into the canal far enough for the actuators to grasp his feet.
	Tom held the start button out and Bye-bye weakly lifted a frail finger to press it. With that touching touch, his 4’-9” shrinkage slowly vanished within the hungry, patient mechanical vagina. He had set sail on his voyage to oblivion, a dust to dust fulfillment. Why rush? Bye-bye will be dead for a hell-of-a-long time. Or… Maybe not. Please. Forget I said that.
	The music and lights changed subtly and all maintained a respectful stance of curious muteness. Bye-bye’s fresh widow - I can still see her - was stoically supported on her two ivory handled heavily gold and jewel encrusted canes, and she was in neither any condition to nor of a mind to jump into the canal and accompany her obnoxious husband to hell. She had a mountain of money to squander.
	Bye-bye had selected lidacane with potassium cyanide mixed in a Budweiser, slowly injected so he could enjoy his dirge a bit longer while lumbering to eternal slumbering.
 	Finally, his heart, if he had one, permanently stopped and his body stopped conveying as it protruded into the back room. The music faded, the lights brightened and everyone discreetly drifted away.
	Tom thanked everyone in the Observation Chamber while basking in congratulations over a Champagne toast to the future of his death canal.
	When the other guests had left, Tom insisted I hang around. We entered the back room where a technician had extracted the body and transferred it to the crematorium. Next day, upon cooling and grinding, his widow received the ashes in a super expensive showpiece urn that negated the need for any graveside theatrics. Had he been required, Tom would have summoned his limos to transport all to the cemetery and then back to their mansion for a pre-will-reading feast.
 	Will-reading was not within Tom’s realm though he would sometimes lament, “I could make a nice buck as a lawyer on the side.” But he was also a practical amateur philosopher and hastened to add, “Forget it. Only twenty-four hours in a day.”
The technician left and I again offered my congratulations. Most doubted the thing would work and were skeptical he would ever get a client. But Tom had proven all of us wrong.
	Tom killed the lights and locked the door so we could go for celebratory drinks and dinner. On the way out, he asked me, “Did you hear that?”
I had heard nothing.
~
The death canal received many more clients and amenities. The configuration of the entrance could be customized for size, race or other preference. Clients could die at any rate, in many new ways and with different degrees of awareness. One couple wanted to “go out” together during their final sex act. Don’t the French call it, “The little death?”
~
Soon, big funeral conglomerates wanted to buy Tom’s operation. Not a chance. He had a death-grip on his death canal patents and wasn’t about to part with anything. Tom assured me, “The hell with those fat-cats because it’s my turn to become a money-fat, putty-tat. But don’t you worry, buddy, we’ll always be friends no mater how filthy rich I become.”
I believed him but I also heard, or imagined I heard, a low-pitch, almost seductive, bedroom groan that may have revealed something like, That’s what he thinks. Thinks what? That Tom will become filthy rich? That we’ll always be friends? If I heard anything.
	Tom rode his money-train until the day he was adjusting the death canal and slipped from his perch on a ladder. The machine had been set on its highest transit rate and an extra syringe of potassium cyanide had been loaded for a ceremony the next day. Tom fell into the opening. The actuators engaged and he died within seconds and was deposited on the floor in the back room. 
Next morning, when the tech went to make final adjustments for a client, Tom was discovered and the panic was palpable. Nobody found Tom until then because we thought he had gone fishing. Half a dozen times a year, for two or three days, nobody dared disturb him as he relaxed in his rowboat.
~
	Experts’ official reports never answered my undying questions: Why was the toxic injection loaded and armed at so early a stage of preparation? Why were no safety interlocks installed? Why would anyone want so high rate of transit? Most clients wanted to savor their demise. But our recently departed Tom thought a fearful client might want a quick end. Tom even had a client who wanted a wood chipper. Permit me a short digression…
	It would have been fun to rent a chipper, fire it up it in the parking lot and shove a client’s chain-saw removed arms, legs, etc., into it and spew bloody body chunks over neighbors’ houses and yards. Fun, but not very friendly. Certainly not legal. So Tom purchased a giant whole tree eater packing a hundred horsepower engine. He extended the facility and built a new entrance. He tastefully decorated the chipper and it gleefully accepted the client, whole. Tom added a collection subsystem to contain the debris in a tank. Finally, not wanting to deliver sloppy remains, he heated and vacuum evaporated most of the water from the once chunky-fluid customer and then poured him into an industrial blender, added some emulsifier and biocide, and gave him a spin until he was an acceptable tooth paste like consistency. Tom thought of this process as a ‘cold’ variation on cremation, perfect for those who feared the fiery oven, please forget they are dead. He marketed this process under the banner:
Cream-Ation
Your Smoothest, Most Comfortable Departure

After several months’ shutdown, I, as in me, reopened. I had inherited the business! How absurd was that? I knew nothing about the funeral business. In fact, I knew nothing about any business. But Tom had written me a letter, via his attorney, wherein he stated that he had no family and feared for the future of his death canal in the hands of a monster funeral franchiser. He also said I was the only one he could count on to protect his death canal from big operators and asked me to do that for him. I did not know how to refuse.
	The first decision I made was that the canal would get safety features. Regular death, whatever that is, is bad enough without it being accidental.
	I had no patience to return to school for certification so I decided to stick to the intent of Tom’s wishes and oversee the operation via professionals. I also fended off corporate pirates which was almost fun.
~
I arrived about five one morning to catch up on paperwork. I was going to leave early to attend a parlor owners’ meeting. They pestered me to be the feature speaker at next year’s big-bash dinner and I had decided to accept. Why not? If I owned the place, I should wear the whole Halloween costume.
	As I walked to my office, I called down the back stairs and side hallway, “Harry, I got us coffee.” No answer. Maybe he was running water in the basement or had finished early and had gone. Harry was our janitor-handyman who worked from 4:00 to 8:00 AM. He kept the place spotless and had been with Tom since he opened and when he had timidly requested a raise, I gave him a bump. It was hard to find good help.
	I started into papers that were squealing for attention. If Harry was still here, he would see my light and stop by.
	At eight-thirty both my secretary and one of my sales agents arrived. There was only one body downstairs so Jerry, a mortician, would be in later to prep it for tomorrow’s sendoff. Shortly after eleven, Jer was shaking in my office doorframe sputtering, “Downstairs boss.”
	There was Harry - halfway along the death canal. Dead.
~
All hell broke lose. I didn’t think I would reopen. Harry’s widow went nuts and sued, prodded by her ambulance-chasing brother-in-law, for his percentage far more than her benefit. The slime-ball would have crippled my business if my legal eagle hadn’t successfully outmaneuvered him.
	Eventually, the authorities ruled Harry’s death as accidental. Their theory involved a stuck relay and a command pulse that simultaneously caused the newly animated labia-major to snag Harry and suck him to his demise. The rate setting was ‘high.’ I wasn’t thrilled with the explanation but it was the official story so I stuck with it. The technical and legal problems now belonged to the equipment suppliers.
	My question was, aside from what really happened to Harry, did I want to reopen the business?
	Jerry later confided to me that when he found Harry, he thought he heard a nasty woman’s whisper-groan-gasp-like noise that sounded a little like, Got-cha.
~
I re-opened. The allure of the death was still strong. A few people hated it and wouldn’t do business with me because of it, but many more were drawn by its mystique. Even people of middle class means were so interested, but couldn’t afford the ride, that I hired an engineer to design a low-cost process to accommodate them and still turn a nice net profit. Maybe I do have some business talent?
~
	One day, short my regular salesmen, while I was giving the pitch, there came a blood-curdling scream from the basement. I put on my finest, “Please relax and I’ll be back in a moment,” act and tore downstairs.
	Gladys, my secretary, was being chewed to shreds as though by a shark. She was already half hamburger and bled-out. Frozen with shock, I heard what sounded like a faint but chilling, very sexy humming from the canal uttering, de-li-shus… De-li-shus.
~
That was it. Whatever agency had a glimmer of jurisdiction virtually welded my business shut. I would have anyway. I barely got away without criminal charges sticking to me. Me! As if I had anything to do with those horrible tragedies. I wouldn’t be able to go near any funeral related business again, maybe not even as a stiff.
	Officials investigated up, down and sideways and concluded there was a very odd malfunction in several devices. I read their report three times and my conclusion, to this day, is bull.
	What has always bothered me, all these decades, is: What the hell really happened? Was that death canal possessed? By what? How? From where? Is it still amongst us?
No. No, no, no… We know there are no such things as ghosts. Right?