The Secret Funeral

By: Jordan Seifert

My mom and my sister and I pulled up in our clunker car into the parking lot of the old Oats factory. It had been abandoned in the late 80s after the company sunk due to bad business, I was told. There had been lay about sons and nephews working the upper ends of the company for too long and it killed them. As far as most people know, it's just an empty, useless factory with a padlock the size of a head on the door.

The windows were broken all around the building, holes and cracks in the glass recovered by nearly two decades of spider webs and soot. The bricks were etched and spray painted from a hundred vandals and bored teenagers. The walls were there now to keep them out just as they had been before.

I was sitting on the hood of the car. I had always wondered why black, like the black on the car, attracted light to it. Black like the night; it’s as if the day time is trying to cover up the darkness, but it can never do it. It can make the night shine, but it can never erase it. My arms were gonna be good and burned sitting the way I was so mother beckoned me down.

"Maxi, go find your sister, she's wandered off." I let out a sigh and slid off the hood, looked down at myself and noted I looked good in my small blue top, frilled along the neckline, and my tight white pants. It made me feel more grown up to dress this way. Casual, but attractive. A 13 year old girl has to look good. My hair still made me look like a little kid though. Mother insisted I wear a blue bow in my hair to match my top. I couldn’t separate myself from my little sister enough, I thought. I wanted to be older, didn’t want to be like her.

It took me a good ten minutes to track down my sister, Lani, climbing a small cherry tree around the corner of the humongous building. I had passed her twice trying to find her but failed to look upwards. She wore a pink shirt embroidered with a pony and pink sweat pants and pink and white striped shoes with a similar bow in her hair, pink.

"Get down from there. Mom'll have a fit,” I called.

"Aw, Maxi, It's not like she'll see me." Her logic was that if mom couldn't see, I couldn't tell. Of course, I wouldn’t tell, but a quick handed threat was always enough.

"I'll tell mom you were up in the tree, and then she’ll have you aborted." I had tricked her into believing mom could have us aborted any time before we turned 18, which was always a convenience. I used it constantly to threaten her and made her feel death was nearby. She wasn’t the brightest bean in the bunch, but I loved her, even if I did enjoy scaring her just a bit too much.

I felt the cool shade on my skin as I reached out to help Lani from the tree. She didn’t realize she wouldn’t be able to get out by herself, and it was a damned good thing I was there or else she’d have fallen and probably broken her arm. I grabbed her by the hand and pulled her along. Lani was slow, and liked to dawdle constantly. We arrived from around the side of the building just in time to see a clunky red truck pull in a few spaces away from us, the wheels screeching to a halt. An older man, maybe 60, climbed out and slammed his door, paint chips falling to the ground. He wore jean overalls with a white shirt underneath, although it was mostly brown, red and various other colors due to all the stains it had amassed. He wore steel toed work boots which clunked along the parking lot as he walked.

"You guys the Makos?” he asked. His raspy old voice was inquisitive, but he already knew it was us. He didn’t seem polite at all.

"Yes, that's us," my mom replied. “I’m Sara, and these are my daughters Lani and Maxi.” A very polite woman, I don't see how my sis ever thought she had it in her to kill anyone. The man shook my moms hand, and then ruffled mine and my sisters hair. I didn’t like that he thought of me as a little kid he could just pick on like that.

He walked over to the door and put his ear against it, knocking on it. I didn’t know why he needed to do that. The echo was probably audible from 10 miles away. As giant as the padlock on the door was, I hadn't expected the size of key that he pulled out. It was sheathed at his side, and the size of a large knife. He could have cut up a roast with it, or served Christmas dinner. He pulled the lock off the chain and all 70 or so pounds of it fell to the ground, a poof of dust spilling into the air. Lani coughed and rubbed her eyes. The parking lot was filled with sand that spilled over from the crab grass lawn.

We slowly filed into the building, taking note that it probably hadn't been opened in months. Visible specs of dust filled the air and the sunlight could barely make it in through the windows due to the brown build ups all over them. It made the light filtering in discolored and ugly to look at. Every step echoed with emptiness. It was a factory through and through though, with loud and sharp looking equipment scattered everywhere. Red painted lines were work stations where the employees stood, probably wearing white smocks with giant sound reducing headphones and big goggles to protect their eyes and ears.

"This place used to be filled with a hundred people each day," the old man groaned trying to break the silence. My mom made quiet conversation with him, not really interested.

“My father used to work here,” she said. “He was on the assembly line. He worked here right up until the day he died.” Lani and I were lost in our own thoughts, and maybe a little bit in each others. I wasn’t really concentrating on anything other than the sheer disgust the building brought me. It was hard to breathe, the air tasted gross, and everything was ugly, dirty, rusted.

We had received a phone call 3 days earlier from the man who was now leading us through the building, scraping his hand along every machine that came within reach of him. The man had called us up and introduced himself as the care taker of the Keslerville indoor cemetery. None of us had ever heard of it, and at least my mother was intrigued by it, especially when she found out where it was. He had informed us my mothers uncle had passed on, Dexter Milling. Mom had never known she had an uncle Dexter and was initially in disbelief. But the man told us we could go to the library and check out our families genealogy with a program on their computer. Checking the family records downtown, we did find out she indeed had an uncle she'd never been told about. Probably with good reason too, given his history. He was arrested and incarcerated for raping a 9 year old girl 15 years prior to now, and after having been released only 2 weeks earlier on the same charge. The girl he raped, she was the same age as my sis. He died in prison a couple of weeks ago, God knows how he survived so long. I had always heard that child molesters didn’t have a very lengthy life expectancy in prison, but he made it. I felt sick knowing that he made it. I had no sympathy for his death, and I could only hope he had died alone. There could be nothing worse than dying completely alone.

The man who referred to himself only as the Care Taker told us that mothers uncle Dexter was buried in the Keslerville indoor cemetery. He told us the reason we had never heard of it was because it was a secret to the community.

“It’s been there since less than a year after the old Oats factory closed down,” he informed us. “It’s a cemetery that’s kept away from the general public and it’s only for- for violent murderers, rapists and other horrible criminals of the like.” Murderers, rapists, evil uncles, I thought. “It’s so that no outraged passers by or righteous and vengeful vandals can get any sort of revenge by defacing the graves. It ain’t so much for the bad guys, it was made for you people. Ain’t nobody wanna see their families grave covered in red paint and mean words. Ain’t nobody wanna see someone they loves grave spilled right over on its side. Almost every town’s got one, but practically nobody knows that.”

Mom had agreed to let us come see our uncles grave because the idea interested her, and because her father had worked in the Oats factory right until he died only a few short months before it closed altogether. She wanted to see where her father worked, because she’d never had a chance to. She missed her dad badly, we could tell, and wanted to know anything about him that kept his memory alive. He was special to her, and so, this dirty old Oats factory that meant nothing to me or my little sister meant the world to her.

Lani was fidgety. She was getting bored even though we’d only been walking ten minutes, twisting and turning through the buildings machinery workings. She started to ask me, of all the people, questions. I brushed my hair back and answered as politely as I could.

“What’s that machine for?” she asked. I had no answer I could give her. I just squeezed her hand and tried to keep her from cutting her head off on one of the many hundreds of saw blades and threshers in the building.

I looked above us to see an office with a foggy glass window, the only unbroken one I’d spotted yet, and I thought to myself what must it have been like to look out and see a hundred people working for you and a select few of your lazy buddies. No wonder big business types are so full of themselves, I thought: Wearing ten thousand dollar suits with 200 dollar haircuts and golden ties and even cuff links, socks and underwear that cost a pretty penny. I then realized they lost it all, but I didn’t feel bad for them. It was due to their laziness it happened. Sympathy’s not a strong point for me.

Finally the ground changed from cement to a steel tile that clanked under us as we walked. The four of us started to work our way down a cold steel spiral staircase in the far end of the factory, trying to stay as close as possible to the man. Without him we couldn’t get much farther. Every single step we took clanked loudly, and my ears started to ring loudly, my teeth turning to an inaudible grit, noticeable only to myself. It was pitch black under ground the factory, and even harder to breathe than in the upper floor, which I quickly missed. I coughed this time instead of my sister, and my mom swung to look at me in the dark, even though there was no hope of actually seeing me, or even my outline. The Care Taker reached over the side of the staircase and pulled up a switch bringing on a light. I thought that was a weird place to have a switch, but didn’t question it. I had also thought we were still endlessly far away from the bottom, but it was only another 20 feet or so.

We marched the last few steps to the ground and each of us began to take a look around at our surroundings. The cement flooring had been torn up, with the edges of the floor still there, jagged and crumbling, with a factory wall running all across the room. A large red stripe about my height from the floor was the only thing that was even close to a decoration. The ceiling was tall, easily 25 to 30 feet, and the light barely reached us, making the room a dimly lit sanctuary. Still we were much further than that underground. This must’ve been the third or fourth basement, and my sister asked why the building would have so many. The old man payed no attention to her, and I didn’t have an answer yet again.

The ground, a dirt with a pale dead grass growing out of it in weak patches was filled with basic grey stone graves. They were a rectangular shape. They appeared to be all business. Each grave was the same, and every one was engraved with a name, date of birth and date of death, and the persons last known words. They were all surprisingly violent or sad, but I couldn’t bring myself to care that these people died desperate knowing what kind of men they were.

"I'm gonna kill you," read one. I found it humorous, unlike my company.

"I'm gonna die." My morbid sense of humor was never appreciated like I thought it should be.

The man lead us to the back of the room. The ground felt uneasy. Knowing I was standing on dirt hundreds of feet underground bothered me, and made me feel nervous. I felt like I could fall at any moment into the center of the Earth and never be seen again.

"Ehh, Mr. Milling’s in the next room," the man notified us. I wondered why they’d started to bury corpses next door when this one still had tons of room left to bury people, if you can even call them people. The humongous door glided open to welcome us, and he ushered us in. The Care Taker stood in the doorway and walked back into the first room silently. He slammed the door behind us, leaving us alone in an empty room, dark except the center. My ears began to ring and I could barely hear my surroundings. WE pounded on the door. My sister didn't understand what was going on. I could hear her shouting inside her head, wondering when we were going to be let out of the darkness. She finally started to cry.

"Mom, is the man aborting us?" My mother looked down at her, tears in her eyes, and didn't say a word.

This man was smart, I thought. I didn’t know how I could think of something like that at a time like this. He checked family histories, he found out these things. How many times had he tricked people? It must be dozens. Keslerville was a violent city, and people like us couldn't have been too hard to track. Or did he change our family history? Did we ever even have an uncle Dexter? I wanted to know so badly.

I felt so feminine and helpless. A girl of 13 shouldn’t be in this situation. Just a little kid. I wondered why I put so many limitations on my own sex and myself. I wondered if my sex had anything to do with why we were chosen, or why we were chosen at all. I had so many questions.

The ringing in my ears faded. I heard a sound, and something moved into the light in the center of the room. My mind couldn't comprehend what it was seeing.

"Oh God," I said, "it's watching me."