By theseustoo

(Disclaimer: this series of stories is completely fictional and none of the persons, places or institutions in these stories are real, but figments of my own imagination. Any similarity to any real person, place or institution is entirely coincidental.)

Swannee, though tall and ruggedly handsome, was that rarest of all types of man, a faithful one. He loved his ever-fertile and almost always pregnant wife and ten tin lids; he was looking forward to the eleventh, so that he’d have his own cricket team; and the faintest trace of the remotest possibility that he might ever allow himself to entertain the slightest thought of ever being unfaithful to his beloved wife, Catherine, had not even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing his mind… in spite of the brevity of the journey.

Swannee was also just daft enough to be honest and to love simplicity; all the lies and deception which invariably accompanied infidelity were far too complex for his simple soul, so infidelity was the very last thing he would ever consider with anything but horror and revulsion.

His wife loved him for it with absolute devotion, of course. Named after the Catholic saint who had been executed by being crucified to a spinning wheel of fire, Catherine loved her husband deeply and felt it was her Christian duty to pump out as many sprogs as she could for him… She would give him the cricket team he had always said he wanted! She was almost there… another three months and she would pop sprog number eleven… Her beloved Swannee would finally have his cricket team! However, recently, she had secretly begun to wonder, with just a trace of nervous trepidation, whether or not he’d want the two reserves…

As a result of his native simplicity and his state of constant domestic bliss, what with all those willing and helpful children to help him with the chores around the house, Swannee was absolutely oblivious to the attention some of the female staff-members were beginning to pay him during their lunch hours. He was quite sure they were ‘just being friendly’. “Though by gum,” he thought to himself, as Loreen leaned forward to give her order in a deeper and huskier voice than usual, “…they were certainly very friendly… and I’m sure that pinch on the bum was just a friendly tease… it doesn’t mean anything at all, really… I hope I don’t catch her cold, it sounds serious from the huskiness of her voice…”

Loreen’s cleavage loomed large in Swannee’s vision and he was reminded that he’d promised to take the cricket team to the hills for a camping expedition in the near future… This weekend would probably be good, he supposed, as he bent to extract a hot pie from the oven.

He couldn’t help wondering why it was that Loreen and Paula always ordered items which came either from the oven or from bottom cupboard just above floor level; he was beginning to get serious back pains from all that bending over. He began to suspect, not without reason, they were competing to see who could make him bend over the most. Now he was sure they hated him because they seemed to tease him all the time, and they made him work so hard; bending over all the time like that. There was nothing he could do about it however; he had a job to do; the cricket team must be fed; he just had to serve these two temptresses their lunch and try to ignore any ‘unusual’ remarks or behaviour.

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Loreen could not believe her outfit was having no effect at all on her intended victim; yet it seemed as though Swannee were completely unaffected by even the sexiest of her work outfits; he had not even appeared to notice her fishnet stockings and suspender belt, even when she sat down facing the serving hatch and ‘accidentally’ allowed her short skirt to ride up over her thighs to reveal a small triangle of her black lace panties; her fishnet stockings went unnoticed and her cleavage ignored.

“How,” she wondered, frustratedly, as she checked her assets in a restroom mirror, “…can he ignore all this?! Is he gay?!”

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Paula too found Swannee’s obliviousness to her charms extremely frustrating; all the more so as she had noticed that one of the cleaners, the infamously nicknamed, “Loose-lipped Loreen” was quite obviously making a play for what Paula now considered ‘her man’. Was it her imagination or her jealousy, she asked herself, or was Swannee beginning to succumb to that Loose-lipped Loreen’s charms? She had seen him stare at Loreen’s ample bosom for what seemed like ages yesterday; was he a ‘big tit’ man? She wondered, regarding her own small but pert breasts with a dubious expression on her face. Is that why he hasn’t noticed me yet? Okay, she decided instantly, tomorrow it’s the padded bra!

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Elaine slowly turned the cards over; she’d decided against a ouija board because she didn’t want to involve her assistants. So she’d waited until they’d gone off to lunch before she took out her tarot cards and did a reading for the morgue, hoping the ether would favour her with some information about the lurking presence she now knew was haunting the morgue…

Perhaps, she thought, it was a ‘lost soul’ who’d been unable somehow to find its way to the ‘Other Side’. But she dismissed this idea very quickly; true, some souls did become earthbound for various reasons, but she had sensed something unusually terrible and evil about this one…

The first card she turned up was ‘The Fool’… a naïve young man setting out on an adventrurous journey or about to have a new experience; though not a bad card, it warned about the possibility of trouble as a result of the fool’s naivety and inexperience.

The fool was ‘assisted’ by the High Priestess, a woman of significant spiritual ability would help him with this novel experience. The ‘Death’ card which followed seemed perfectly logical, representing natural change; it’s meaning being more to do with the symbolic ‘rebirth’ which this card implied, rather than actual death itself…

These two cards were ‘crossed’ by ‘The Empress’… a powerful woman was preventing the natural change from happening. In the position which represented the immediate future, however, was the ten of swords; this card may very well indicate death, but even if it didn’t mean death it certainly meant an awful lot of trouble: The card depicted a knight, slain by ten swords, still sticking upright out of his prone corpse, making him look like a weird party-wiener, with ten cocktail sticks in a single wiener…

Trouble, she thought… and maybe even death, was coming to the morgue…

Very spooky, she thought… but the cards never lie. The question is, she now asked herself, who are these people? And what is their connection to the morgue; if she knew that, she would have a much better chance of understanding what the cards were trying to tell her… And what did all this have to do with the lurking presence she had sensed in the morgue; and which presence she still seemed to sense, just beyond the fringes of her consciousness…

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