Excerpt from...

The funeral parlor was calculatedly quiet. Everywhere one could sense the invisible hand of a Murnau or a Fritz Lang; the thick carpetry, the organ, the chiaroscuro produced by the lighting, all contributed to an eeriness, a distortion of perspective, a deliberate reverential hush. Even the plants lining the walls were too mannerly, as if afraid to be conspicuous in their vitality.

The director frowned as Wolf hurried in, hung up his ragged jacket, and crossed the antechamber to the recess in which the switchboard was situated. The old man sat down in front of the array of lights, buttons, and wires, affixing the headset over his ears.

The director slid out from behind his polished teak desk, left his office and traversed the gloomy entrance foyer, stopping on the other side of the reception partition. He glared down at Wolf.

"You're late again."

Wolf nodded.

"This makes the third time this month."

He received no answer. His employee sat with lowered head and drooping shoulders.

"I should think," the director resumed, "that since we only use you two nights a week, it would be easy for you to arrange your affairs so as to be punctual!"

Again, Wolf nodded glumly.

"I'll speak plainly, Wolf. You are being tolerated on sufferance. Any irregularity whatsoever will result in termination of employment. This is your last chance."

Pivoting on his heel, the director stepped daintily across the dark inlaid marble floor, reentered his office long enough to wrap a cashmere scarf about his neck and don a grey topcoat with fur collar, then departed for the night, carefully closing the thick walnut door behind him.

His own breath was not the only scent of mortality that disturbed Wolf. Decay pervaded his life.

It rose from the uncollected garbage strewn in the unlit corners of the stairwell he climbed each night to reach his fifth-floor apartment.

Even in the funeral parlor, headily scented with incense, his sensitive nose detected the putrescence of decomposing flesh.

Corpses terrified him. Though they kept the bodies in the basement, where he never ventured, he imagined their sightless eyes staring upward, penetrating the floorboards, prickling at the soles of his feet, lewdly ogling his back and legs...

At midnight, he patched through a call to the embalmer from that man's wife. He hated plugging into the hole connecting the phone with the preparation room. He imagined the formaldehyde wafting up the wires, seeping out of the socket into his chamber.

A few minutes later, the embalmer hurried into the entranceway with his coat on. Explaining that he had a family emergency, he told Wolf to listen for the back bell. There was a hearse scheduled to arrive.

Wolf pretested that his job had nothing to do with hearses, but the embalmer left without paying any attention.

Wolf was alone in the mortuary.

Time crept by, and the shadows kept pace. Huddled in his cubicle, Wolf shrank from every night noise and wished the phone would ring to take his mind off the dreadful solitude.

He began to nod off. At 1:45, the back bell clamored, startling him out of an uneasy sleep. Heart pounding, he leapt to his feet.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO READ MORE...

According to Marvin Kaye, the original book in which this story appeared is back in print.
Says Marvin: "The Possession of Immanuel Wolf and Other Improbable Tales," originally published by Doubleday has been reissued by Wildside Press. The story is longer by several thousand words from the version that appeared in my anthology, Brother Theodore's Chamber of Horrors. "The arrangement between Theodore and I was that he would retain total control of all film rights, but all literary rights were mine. The story should be credited "by Marvin Kaye (with Brother Theodore)."
The details of the collaboration were these: Theodore wanted to film the story with him playing the lead. When I asked him if I could print his Foodism lecture in my anthology, at first he agreed, but then changed his mind and asked me to please write this idea he had in mind. He outlined some of the plot and gave me a few books to read as research, most importantly, The Mind of Adolph Hitler, and a lengthy excerpt from The Morning of the Magicians. I developed the plot and did all the writing. When the draft was done, Theodore added a number of Wolf's most dramatic remarks, which were inserted into the last section of the story, all of them in CAPITAL LETTERS, so it is easy to tell which things were directly from Theodore..."

Excerpt from...

Once there were three little pigs. Naked, ugly, and utterly devoid of the essentials in life such as a switchblade knife or can of mace, they were easy prey for the "non-pigs" of the world, particularly the big bad wolf.

"I have built a house of straw," said one of the pigs. It is hard to tell which one, since pigs tend to look alike.

"I have built a house of straw," said the other pig, who, proving my theory, not only looked like the first pig, but built the same house.

"You are both nothing but swine," said the third pig, who distinguished himself by his foul temperment. This was due primarily to a quirk of anatomy which put the two big snout-holes at the wrong end, and a small puckered opening up front. Not only did he have trouble inhaling, but nobody wanted to be nearby when he exhaled.

The two pigs who had houses of straw, happily scampered into them at the approach of the big bad wolf. The wolf, undaunted, blew each house in. Each time a pig tried to escape, the wolf snapped a garbage can over him and kept it there until the pig suffocated. Thus, began the invention of the canned ham.

However our fable is not about the dawn of the age of invention.

The third pig, who did not build his house of straw, simply stood out in the open and waited for the wolf to arrive. The pig did not object in the slightest when he too, was suffocated inside a garbage can and gobbled up.

This is because this third pig knew that he was suffering from trichinosis, and was only too glad to make life miserable for someone else by passing on the incurable disease.
Especially to the wolf, a notorious anti-Semite and unkosher beast.

Within a few days, the wolf began to stagger about his lair (which was made of stucco; created from the hardened vomit of several lizards). The wolf got over his staggering when he fell down dead.