A Writhing of Maggots
Good people are rarely suspicious. They cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing; usually they accept the undramatic solution as the correct one and let matters rest there. Then too, the normals are inclined to visualize the psychopath as one who’s a monstrous in appearance as he is in mind, which is about as far from the truth as one could well get… These monsters of real life usually looked and behaved in a more normal manner than their actually normal brothers and sisters; they presented a more convincing picture of virtue than virtue presented of itself— just as the wax rosebud or plastic peach seemed more perfect to the eye; more of what the mind thought a rosebud or a peach should be, than the imperfect original from which it had been modelled.
–William March, The Bad Seed
There is blood all over the room. It’s on the walls and it has seeped into the cracks in the floor. There are smears of it on the doorknob and bloody hand prints on the lampshade, the light switch, and the walls. There is even a large pool of it congealed under an old-fashioned occasional chair, where the victim’s corpse is securely zip tied. As if by some occult magic flies have appeared for a macabre banquet, on the lampshade, on the light switch, on the walls, but mostly under the final earthly remains.
That’s the thing about a bludgeoning, the blood spatters everywhere.
Sherman Melvin Jacob was short, overweight, unkempt and more than slightly casual about personal hygiene. His nose was flattened from a beating he suffered as a youth and a complexion that looked like someone set his face on fire and then put out the flames with a golf shoe. Sherman Melvin Jacob was one other thing. He was absolutely, positively and unequivocally dead.
Someone had done a very meticulous and thorough job of making certain that Sherman Jacob’s death was horrific, up-close and personal… very, very personal.
His run down little house just a block south of Skokie’s main drag, Dempster street… had a rickety fence overgrown, carpeted with weeds. It was a small frame house that badly needed painting, the last structure on a block that had been cleared for a slum clearance district, showing a sad face to the world.
The interior was worse than the places described in the tabloids about hoarders. Filled with old newspapers, crushed Golden Arches bags containing greasy burger wrappings, dirty clothes and crumpled Styrofoam coffee cups and the mummified remains of franchise pizzas in their boxes that weren’t worth eating when fresh. Jacobs abode closely mirrored his disheveled self. It wasn’t always like this, not when his mother was alive. Back then it was clean and neat. Mama Jacob had a pride of place that was not transmitted to Sherman.
He was a “loner” for the most part spending most of his time on his computer. He was not a pleasant or likable person, but he was doggedly persistent.
His one redeeming attribute was that he was a “squirrel whisperer”. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a milder form of autism, he was a loner in high school, antisocial and awkward, (which earned him his broken and misshapen nose).
Jacob began interacting with his neighborhood’s friendly gray squirrels in 2012. Once hand tamed, he idly wondered what one would look like with a hat on its head. The resulting picture became an internet sensation. Pleased with the result, he gave a copy of the photo to his mother, who loved it.
The squirrels helped Jacob come out of his shell.
“The squirrel’s actually a good way to break the ice”, he explained when asked, “because I’ll be sitting here petting a squirrel and other people will come over and we’ll just start like feeding the squirrels together and talking about them.”
It would take a while before anybody missed Sherman Melvin Jacob, about three weeks to be exact…
“A Wake of Vultures” is available at Amazon.com Paperback $16.99 Kindle $2.99
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