Dead Center

Prologue

The cast iron smell that emanated from Guardsfield Woods is strangely inviting, especially to the weak, irresistible to those with nothing left. There are bodies here, the bodies of those who sought death before their time. Suicide? Maybe – or something more ominous, something that the town has chosen to forget. Guardsfield folks have an axiom about the woods: “In those woods, you’ll lose more than just sanity, you’ll lose yourself.” And the older folks would sing corrupted hymns about the wood’s ethereal nature to keep the youth away. But still they went venturing into the devil’s forest getting entangled in the black threads of the abyss and lost within the hallways of their now-labyrinthine minds.

And so will I, Robert P. Wilson, venture into the dark abysmal nightmare that will strip me of my sanity, my life and my shame. To my Catherine and Sandra, I apologize for the fiery maelstrom my death will leave behind.

I leave you with the words of Leonard Cohen: Into this furnace I ask you now to venture, you whom I cannot betray.

– Extract from Richard Wilson’s suicide note

Catherine slept on the couch nowadays. She couldn’t stand sleeping alone in the large bed she and Robert used to occupy. It felt cold now that his heat was gone, now that he was gone. All she did nowadays was lie on the blue corduroy-covered couch and philosophize about life and existence. How fragile we are, a small blotch of living tissue in a pool of dead matter. Her psychiatrist said thinking thoughts like that would “not be beneficial to your mental well-being” but they put her to sleep. It was through this sleep meditation that she realized exactly how foolish Rob had been, taking his own life without thinking. Without thinking about her, without showing a ray of consideration for his daughter, Sandra, and without rational (or moral) contemplation. What put her to sleep was the assurance that with him dead she no longer needed to worry — to care — about Rob slamming the front door at 01h00 in the morning. He wasn’t a drunk and he wasn’t cheating on her (no woman in this town would be willing to sacrifice their reputation), which made his early morning appearances even more troubling. She also realized that she hated Robert, but his livelihood was necessary, she didn’t work, but love was a word she had long forgotten. At least he had the dignity to die in the Woods, not like Mr. Graeme, the dental assistant, who went shotgun under the chin in the town plaza two years back.

“Crazy people do crazy things.” Martha West had said when she caught the news of Mr. Graeme’s suicide

Catherine believed Martha, until Rob offed himself. Rob wasn’t loony, maybe sad and lonely, but not loony. Or maybe he was and she was in denial. Catherine’s mother never approved of Robert. He was frail and spoke too little. He was also quite vocal about his atheism, which is why Pastor James was so reluctant to perform the marriage ceremony. Due to that, she felt the need to defend his honor. She was the knight, Rob was the princess in the castle and her mother was the dragon. She had been fighting her mother all her life; she stopped calling her ‘mommy’ at the age of seven, started calling her ma’am.

Pastor James had come over the morning after Robert’s body had been found in the so called Dead Center of the Woods. He acted like he cared when all he was doing was following etiquette. The whole town thanked Jesus that Rob was dead. After the liver situation, they thought he was a degenerate who stole organs for a living. He only stole that one liver, to save a beggar’s life. The beggar had heard that he needed a transplant, but he had to wait until it was his turn. So after Robert heard, he, illegally, acquired a liver and stuffed it in the family’s freezer. He had found a recently unemployed surgeon who was willing to do the transplant in the family’s shed. The procedure would’ve been performed that night, but Catherine, mistaking the human liver for cow’s, had prepared it for dinner. Rob almost puked when he walked in on Catherine and Sandra sitting around the dinner table thanking God for the liver he had delivered onto them. So the beggar died and the unemployed, desperate for money, surgeon sold the story to the newspapers for $30. Soon the whole town knew about Rob’s ordeal. The police gave Rob two choices: tell them where he got the liver and avoid jail or go to jail. Robert cared too much about Sandra, so he told them where he acquired the illegal organ. He had got it from the hospital; he bribed a doctor to cut out a recently pronounced dead accident victim’s liver. After the incident, the townsmen started talking about how the Wilson’s were cannibals and how Rob sold organ’s for a living.