You Will Welcome Death

Some may remember sitting in a darkened room, watching Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery.” Each episode began with an unusual painting, about which Mr. Serling would deliver a brief monolog, something along these lines:



“Consider, if you will, what may be the most well-known and oft-copied works of a man named Henry Fuseli, scholar, man of the cloth, and painter of the different and disturbing. Like many artists, he sketched sometimes before mixing his pigments. The subject of our tale is a simple pencil drawing, perhaps a preliminary study for Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” paintings.

“Carl Singleton is a would-be art dealer. We will let him tell you about his find himself.”



Not many people showed up for the widow Collins’ sale that dank October day. The house was slated for demolition to allow construction of a new highway interchange. Apparently, her fight with the state to keep the place took too much out of the old woman. They found her in the parlor, hanging from a noose. Her suicide note was taped to an over-turned chair. The rats were well-fed by old Mrs. Collins.

As the owner of “Carl’s Curiosities,” I sometimes act as “dollar man” at estates sales and auctions. I’m the guy who pays a dollar for any lot the auctioneer can’t sell for more. There’s a lot of trash, but I also get vintage costume jewelry, antique dishes or photos, or clothing I can put together to sell as costumes. Often, there are things I can use around my apartment and store, like hardware and garbage bags. Fifty dollars spent on auction rejects usually buys at least that much in useable household or office supplies plus items I can sell for a tidy profit.

The sign outside says, “Antiquities, Oddities, and Art From Around the Globe.” Some of my inventory fits that description, but a lot of it’s junk. The store is basically an indoor flea market.

Some things the auction crew brought out of the Collins house smelled of death. I got stuck with all of that, a dollar added to my bill for every musty item of furniture, linens, or clothing tainted with corpse-stench. Many lots were cardboard boxes filled with God knew what. That was common with this type of sale. A worker would bring an over-stuffed carton to the auction block, and people bid based on what the auctioneer said and displayed of the contents.

A helper brought a box to the auctioneer, sparking the usual frenetic monolog. “Okay! What do we have here? Looks like items from the bedroom! Couple of sealed bottles of shampoo, some light bulbs, and a drawing! Who wants it for fifty bucks? Fifty? It’s a pencil sketch, folks! Looks old! Frame it and hang it over the mantel! Fifty? C’mon, folks! Fifty? Fifty? Twenty-five! They’re halogen bulbs! None in the package, but they might work! Ten bucks! Gimme ten!”

He milked it like a good auctioneer does with every lot, but by default, it joined the pile in my truck.

I stopped at the landfill after the sale to get rid of things that smelled too bad to take back to my shop. Rufus met me at the dock. “Whoa, Carl! What’d them boys do? Stuff what was left of that old witch in one o’ them boxes?”

“I got stuck with some real junk, Rufus. I wish I had a gas mask. The dust and mildew is bad enough without the rotting corpse smell.”

“Well, c’mon, drive up on the scale. Ah’ll help yuh unload.”

As we struggled with some smelly furniture, Rufus said, “Wonder what it was like when they found her. They say she was dead two weeks.”

“I went inside to look around, but I couldn’t take it. Some of this stuff should have been worth good money, but it’s ruined.”

“Ah wouldn’t trust nuthin’ from that woman’s place. She was a witch or into voodoo or devil worship or somethin’.”

“There were no pentagrams, chicken entrails, or skulls, so I doubt that. I think she was just a lonely, bitter old woman. Her husband shot himself in their bed years ago, you know. Living in that horrible old house where he died took its toll.”

“All’s I know is, Carl, if yuh find anythin’ weird, or a Bible with pages tore out or stuff wrote funny, call a preacher.”

“You watch too many movies, Rufus. There are no witches or evil spirits. You know that.”

“Ah know what’s good fo’ mah immortal soul, too.”

I drove back to the shop with the windows open. After a long shower, I went downstairs to unpack my treasures. There was some nice costume jewelry, bundles of old letters, unused packs of shoelaces and thumbtacks, and a few pieces of cutlery. Eventually, I got to the box with the light bulbs.

One of the bulbs worked when I tested it in an ugly desk lamp I bought somewhere. Nice and bright. I re-arranged my desk so I could spread out the rest of the contents of the carton.

At first, I was going to throw the drawing into a box of stuff going to the trash, but then I took a better look at it. The auctioneer was right. It was old, or at least, the paper the artist used looked old. The drawing itself was … odd. I dialed my phone.

“Main Street Rare Books,” a familiar voice answered.

“Hey, Frank! It’s Carl. Are you busy?”

“Not too busy for you, buddy.”

“Could you take a look at something I bought?”

“What’s the title?”

“It’s not a book. It’s a pencil sketch. Looks like a woman with a monkey sitting on her chest and a horse in the background.”

“You’re supposed to be the art dealer, Carl.”

“True, but you’re the one who knows paper. That’s what I’m curious about. I think it could be pretty old.”

“Come over now. Let’s see what you have.”

I put up my “Back Soon!” sign and walked down the street. Between customers, we spent time in Frank’s office, studying my find under a magnifying glass.

Frank leaned back in his chair. “That’s a really strange drawing. A dead woman, a baboon, and a horse.”

“What’s that written on the back?” I asked.

“It looks like, ‘Consideres hoc vel pati. Vos excipiam mortem.’ It’s Latin. I’m pretty rusty. Let’s see….” Frank rummaged through a messy bookcase behind his desk for a Latin-English dictionary. “Okay, a literal translation would be, ‘Respect this, or suffer. You will welcome death.’ Sounds like a curse!”

“God, Frank, you’re as bad as Rufus at the landfill. When he helped me unload the junk from the sale, he told me to call a preacher if I found anything ‘wrote funny’.”

“This is from the Collins auction?” He turned the drawing over and studied the image again.

“Yeah. Look at it. Rufus would run screaming for the hills if he saw this and heard your translation.”

“Did you get anything else from the house with hand-writing on it? Maybe we can compare the penmanship.”

“There were a bunch of letters that looked like they may have been from Collins to his wife while he was in England during World War Two. Stamp collectors come into my shop sometimes, so I saved a box of that stuff.”

“Go get it, Carl. If we can figure out who wrote this, it may tell us something about the sketch.”

An hour later, we agreed. The hand-writing on the back of my new find appeared to be by Mr. Collins, who shot himself some fifty years earlier. With some on-line searching, we found his obituary from the local newspaper.

Mr. and Mrs. Collins were recluses. Mr. Collins was reported to have been “in ill health for some time” before he took his own life. His wife was outside with a zoning officer serving a complaint about the appearance of their property. They both heard the gunshot, and they found the body and the note together. The police and the coroner said it was a clear-cut suicide.

“I don’t know about all this, Frank. If Collins was a brick-layer, where would he have learned to write in Latin?”

“You met my grandpa, Carl. He was a brick-layer, but he was far from stupid. Maybe Collins was an old-school Catholic.”

“Whoever drew this was pretty good with a pencil.”

“One thing is certain. If it was Collins, he used old paper. If this is his work, it can’t even be eighty years old, since he’d be ninety-three if he were still alive. This paper looks hand-made. The top and sides are straight, like they were cut with a knife and straight-edge, but the bottom looks like someone tore it from a bigger piece. This could be a lot older than eighty years.”

“It seems familiar, like I saw the same theme in an art history book somewhere. Maybe it’s a sketch someone made before doing a painting. I’ll have to do some research, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen this idea before.”

“Maybe Collins knew it was old and valuable, so that’s why he wrote his note.”

“Could be, but it’s hard to believe he was a connoisseur of the arts. I got stuck with some framed ‘masterpieces’ from the house, too – paint-by-numbers with mistakes, dogs playing poker, and Elvis on black velvet.”

“Sounds like old man Collins believed in self-euthanasia. Maybe he got tired of suffering with a terminal illness.”

“Yeah, but it has to be bad to shoot yourself in the mouth where your wife will find you.”

“You were in the house today. What was it like?”

“She couldn’t have changed much after he died. The whole place looked like it was stuck in the 1960s. The bedroom wallpaper still showed bloodstains.”

“That’s creepy, Carl. She apparently never left the house after his funeral. They say she had her groceries delivered, but didn’t go outside. Why would she stay locked up in the house where her husband killed himself? She even refused to move out when the state offered her a lot of money for the property.”

“Some of the stuff I got from the sale is pretty old. How do you test the age of paper?”

“You could send it to the lab I use for non-destructive testing, but they’re expensive. I’d hate to see you spend a lot of money on a sketch that isn’t worth anything. Since I live and breathe old books, I know enough to run some crude tests myself on just a piece from the edge down there where it’s torn. If you frame it, you’ll have to trim it anyway.”

“All right.”

He tore a sliver of paper from the ragged bottom edge, sealed it in a plastic bag, and put it on his workbench. We talked a bit more, and then I took my drawing and went home to finish picking through the late Mrs. Collins’ trash.

Hours later, I thought I should be hungry, but I wasn’t. In fact, my stomach didn’t feel right at all. My eyes and nose burned, probably from dust and mold on some of the things I was handling. When an ugly headache threatened to join my other discomforts, I went upstairs to bed, hoping to sleep through the worst of whatever bug I was catching.

Before dawn, sirens woke me, fire trucks screaming past my building and stopping nearby. I opened my window and smelled smoke, so I got dressed and went downstairs to the sidewalk. Flames roared from a building in the next block. Frank’s store and his apartment above it were fully engulfed.

“What happened?” I asked a woman in pajamas and an overcoat.

“There was some sort of explosion, and then there was fire everywhere. They think he’s still inside.”

The roof collapsed a moment later, and fire crews directed more of their attention to the safety of neighboring buildings. There was nothing to be done for Main Street Rare Books or its owner.

I stood on the sidewalk, sick with grief, watching Frank’s funeral pyre. There was no point in hurrying back to my shop to open for the day. Fire equipment and hoses blocked the street. Being ill, and now trying to deal with this, I couldn’t face customers.

Later that day, I was in my office in the back of the store, sorting through more of the treasures from the Collins sale and watching a report on the local news about the fire. “Officials have confirmed that a body was found in the ruins of the building. We have unsubstantiated reports indicating that arson is suspected in this tragic pre-dawn fire.”

The bell over the door jingled. Two men in suits walked in. I went out to meet them.

“Are you the owner?” the taller one asked.

“Yes, Carl Singleton. How may I help you?”

“I’m Detective Joshua Hayes, and this is my partner, Detective Mario Bertoli. We’re with the Homicide Division. We’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Singleton.”

“Homicide?”

“Lead story on the local news, sir. The fire at Main Street Rare Books this morning was intentionally set. We believe it was the owner’s remains that were found inside. Until the coroner tells us he died of natural causes before the fire started, we’re treating this as an arson death, which means it’s a homicide. We understand you knew the owner, Frank Brown.”

“Yes, I did. Wait! What’s this about? Do you think I had something to do with it?”

“Not at all, sir. If we did, Detective Bertoli would have read you your rights. We need help. Anything you can tell us could point us in the right direction.”

“How well did you know Brown?” Detective Bertoli asked.

“We’ve been close friends since high school.”

Hayes looked up from his notepad. “When was the last time you spoke with him?”

“I was at his shop yesterday afternoon. He knew a lot about old paper. I bought something at the Collins auction I hoped he could help me identify.”

“What was that, sir?”

“A drawing. Guys, are you sure it was Frank?”

Bertoli answered. “He hasn’t been seen since the fire. His car was in the parking lot. The coroner has his dental records.