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    The Protectors
    The Protectors
    The Protectors
    Ebook69 pages1 hour

    The Protectors

    By Val Karlsson

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    About this ebook

    Luke's life has never been "normal." How could it be, with his mother holding séances and his half-crazy stepfather working as Bridgewater's mortician? But living in a funeral home never bothered Luke. That is, until the night of his mom's accident.

    Sounds of screaming now shatter Luke's dreams. And his stepfather is acting even stranger. When bodies in the funeral home start delivering messages to Luke, he is certain that he's going nuts. As he tries to solve his mother's death, Luke discovers a secret more horrifying than any nightmare.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLerner Publishing
    Release dateAug 1, 2013
    ISBN9781467729420

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      Book preview

      The Protectors - Val Karlsson

      Raven

      1

      I’ll never forget the day my stepfather locked me in a room full of caskets and left me there for twenty-four full hours. I had no food, nothing to do but lie in casket after casket. Some were cushioned and lined with satin, some lined with velvet, some just plain, hard wood. I lay in each one, imagining what it was like to be dead.

      I was ten then. And what did I do to deserve being locked in that room overnight? I don’t really know. But then again, my stepfather often got mad at me for no reason at all.

      My mom had left that morning for an overnight trip. She often went out to people’s homes to do spirit-contact sessions, cleansing ceremonies, things like that. She would hold weird rituals with candles and burning herbs. She would go into a sort of trance. My stepfather hated it.

      This was the first time she was going to stay overnight, because of the distance.

      He was in my way, and he was causing trouble, he told my mother after she returned and I had told her what had happened.

      But Sal, you can’t just lock a kid up! And with no food! She hugged me tightly and stroked my hair.

      The look he gave me at that moment—I’ll never forget it. It made me want to run away forever.

      Up until that day, it had been life as usual in a family funeral home. Being in a room full of caskets was nothing new for me, actually. I grew up around coffins, cadavers, embalming tables, scalpels, the laboratory odor of formaldehyde. You see, I lived in a funeral home: Signorelli Funeral Home, my stepfather’s family business going back five generations.

      I spent hours watching Sal in the mortuary prep room in the basement of our big, old, gray house. I learned the craft of preserving bodies for the funeral display. I observed him draining bodies of all their blood and filling their veins with chemicals. I watched him cut into abdomens and chests with the sharp-pointed trocar to suck out the fluids from their bodies. I watched him pump in a formaldehyde solution. When I was tall enough to reach the embalming table, Sal started to let me help him. When you’re older, Luke, you’ll go to school for this and get certified, he’d say. But you will learn everything you need right here.

      I was just nine years old when Dr. Miller died. Sal had me put in the eye caps. That was to prop his eyelids up as his eyeballs started to sink back into their sockets. Then I helped again when our nosy neighbor Mrs. Chase had a heart attack. I held her jaw in place as Sal shot a wire in with an injector gun to keep her mouth shut. That was something she never did while she was alive. I didn’t dare joke about it, though. Sal was always very serious about his work. These were the first of my many hands-on experiences, which got more complex over the next few years.

      I would watch Mom work too. She was the cosmetician. That is, she would dress and put makeup on the dead people and fix their hair. She loved doing it. She felt she was giving people a last bit of dignity before they were buried. It was amazing to watch her transform cold, lifeless flesh and make it look warm and living again. That’s how Mom was. She could bring life into any room, even an embalming room.

      I guess things started getting really weird after I turned sixteen. That fall I was hanging out with Lincoln and my girlfriend, Aisha, a lot. Lincoln had been my best friend since elementary school. He had a pretty strange family too. Both of his parents were alcoholics. Lincoln’s grandfather had died a few years back. He had been a wealthy guy, and now Lincoln’s family lived off the money he’d left them. Lincoln lived in a huge house with a pool. But even Lincoln could see that, with his parents’ extravagant lifestyle, the money wasn’t going to last.

      My mother bought a crystal swan statue on the Internet last night, Lincoln complained one day at lunch. He, Aisha, and I always sat together. Sometimes Lincoln would bring along one of his girlfriends, but today it was just the three of us.

      How much did that cost? I asked, taking a bite of my ham sandwich.

      Twenty, thirty thousand . . . Lincoln scowled.

      Aisha sucked in her breath. "Geez, how big is it?"

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