Royal Grafton
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING GATE #12
chapter ten
If she listens carefully, she swears she can hear it.
Snow covered the grave of her brother, giving it a sense of peace he would have found abhorrent. Mason Verger was a man of flash and destruction, and though he had placed his desire to be next to his pigs in his will, he had also specified that a prominent mausoleum be built to celebrate the largesse of his life and his influence upon the farm animals he so very, very much adored. Specifically the pigs, and further still certain ones he had named and had kept for breeding stock, though his use of the term was very loose indeed. It was quite a thing of irony to know he'd died while cheating on his favoured beast with a sheep.
The mausoleum would never be built, Margot was determined to ignore that request. Her brother's insane whims and sickening proclivities were enough to deal with in life and she wasn't about to build a monument to his stupidity in death.
She sometimes wonders if this was the right decision, and there were times just after Mason's funeral that she had visited his tender grave and heard that soft knocking she swore she heard at the funeral home, and then she would shake her head and step away, cursing herself. Leave it to Mason to pester from beyond the grave, begging more and more of her as he always did. He'd nearly bankrupted the company with his problems, and Margot and Alana had come to the rescue of the Verger empire, bringing it back to prosperity despite his mishandling of major accounts and his slimy scandals that even grocery store rags found disgusting. No, after a scant few days the guilty psychosomatic knocking stopped and Margot heaved a sigh of relief. It was just a grave, after all, filling up with worms.
She never visited it again after that first week.
But come closer, and you will understand that Margot is not just a whiskey soaked damsel with a misplaced sense of guilt. You would have heard that tap-tapping too, and in your far more lucid state and sober awareness you would have understood that what is beneath the earth is not always inert.
Freshly buried in his grave, Dr. Abel Gideon tries to shout, but his severed vocal chords make such an effort impossible. He is in a tight space, the rotting body of Mason Verger above him near choking him with its formaldehyde stench, the trickle of chicken blood seeping past Mason Verger's pillow and into Dr. Gideon's open, mangled throat.
There is no note of explanation, of course, no match to light the interior to tell him he is in the lower half of a gaudy coffin, set to suffocate in due time. Though the fate of the man is terribly cliche, he shall have several days to lament how his restful, rich retirement package had become so perverted in interpretation. It was the sort of contract a devil might construct. On the first half of the third day as all the air in the coffin finally fled and Dr. Gideon was left gasping like a suffocating goldfish, he had to wonder...
Maybe the devil had.