chocolate and chocolate chip mint with hot fudge and sprinkles
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Bodies
Rating: PG-13
Challenge: Chocolate Chip Mint #14: saturated, Chocolate #19: solitude
Toppings/Extras: hot fudge, sprinkles
Wordcount: 370
Summary: Miss Audrey Hawes is the woman for bodies.
Notes: My goodness she scares me.
Miss Audrey Hawes was the woman for bodies. If you had one and needed to be rid of it, she was the woman to call in on. There were lots of ways of doing it, especially if you were as inventive as she was in this particular field of art.
Her usual method was the great furnace in the cellar of her small bedsit on the corner of Bridestone Street. Quite happily she would heave a body down those long, narrow steps-bound tight in a blanket becoming sticky and drenched in blood-and open the front of the furnace with one talon wrapped in damp cloth.
It would slide in quite easily and she would sit and mend one of her drab, tatty petticoats by the flickering light of the furnace, crackling of the fire and the stench of charring flesh thick in the dank air. Eventually the furnace would burn itself out and once the blackened metal stopped ticking she knew it was cool and would reach in for the bigger bones that wouldn’t burn to ash, slipping them into a burlap sack to throw to the dark waters of the Thames.
If they wanted some other method, there were always the pigs. She owned a little cart just the right size for a human corpse-she would pile it with logs or rags or canvas and ride it just to the outskirts of Uxbridge and to the pig farm there. Miss Hawes knew a lot about pigs. They could get through several corpses per hour, every part of them, even the bones.
And even though she was a scrawny little witchlike creature, Miss Hawes was good with a shovel. The old-fashioned way, she called it in her head, when she decided that burying was a better choice for that body. There were little spots all over even busy London: she could always find them.
She didn’t have friends. This didn’t surprise most people. She was a wretched, pale, emotionless denizen of the night, crawling around London Town with blood on her apron and a midwife’s cap low over her face.
Everyone knew: everyone involved in that sort of business. Miss Audrey Hawes was the woman for bodies.