The Last Act of a Travelling Prankster

The Last Act of The Travelling Prankster

He sat alone at a corner table in the large restaurant staring at the other customers. Brenden hadn't requested that particular table beside the pale doors to the kitchen, but his slightly tatty suit had caused the waiter to hide him away from the richly dressed diners who chatted away oblivious to the small man who watched them intently.
Glancing down at the worn leather briefcase beside him, Brenden sighed. Nearly twenty years it had been his companion on the road, one filled with samples that he took from one independent toy store to the next. Fake vomit, dog shit, and flies in ice cubes, jumping beans, hand buzzers, smoke and stink bombs, Groucho Marx glasses with nose and moustache attached, he'd sold them all. He'd become known as 'The Travelling Prankster' and business had been brisk in the early years, but computer games and the closure of numerous toy stores had seen a steady decline until he'd been forced to retire.
'Just before the diagnosis,' he thought with a shake of his head as he sat at the table in the restaurant, which was decorated in earthy colours that brought to mind a grave. 'At least I'll get the last laugh.'
He swatted away a small clothes moth which emerged from his sleeve, its own dining rudely disturbed by the arm now thrust into its home. Brenden watched with satisfaction as it flitted to the next table and drowned itself in a young woman's soup.
A smile graced his bloodless lips as she lifted her shiny spoon and sipped at the moth and leek soup, not suspecting the recent addition of a winged corpse to her starter.
'A corpse,' he thought with a hint of bitterness as his gaze turned to the napkin and its silver collar engraved with an art nouveau design of enlaced flowers. 'Death must follow blossoming. The petals of life must dim and fall.'
A young waiter exited the kitchen doors and teetered over his table, ungainly in his height and seemingly too thin to possibly defy gravity, and yet by some feat he managed to stay aloft. Brenden looked up at him and imagined his thin, blonde hair to be clouds about his lofty head touched with the gold of sunset.
'Here's your squid, sir,' said the young man, bending over as he laid the white plate before the customer, descending to mortal realms from his heavenly height.
Brenden nodded his acknowledgement and the young waiter, his expression inscrutable, but his blue eyes loitering over the frayed cuffs of the black jacket, left him with his food.
Looking down at the plate set before him, Brenden swallowed hard. 'Christ, am I really going to be able to eat one of these?'
In the centre of the plate where piled five squid in a loose pyramid of sack-like bodies and limp tentacles, suckers still visible. 'It looks like they've fished them out of a tank out back,' he thought as he picked up his fork and prodded the creature atop the slimy pile.
To his relief it didn't move, though he continued to half-expect a sudden bid for freedom from one of the grey brethren. It was as if they were feigning death just so they could find an opportune time to make an escape. None moved. The tentacles remained still and he tried to pluck up the courage to go ahead and eat one of the beasts which reminded him of the kind of phlegm he coughed up thanks to the cancer in his lungs.
Sticking the prongs of his fork into the top squid, he then raised it to his mouth. Brenden grabbed his glass of wine with the other hand and readied a wash-down of house red.
He closed his eyes and the beast was consumed with mouth wide and one, quick swallow. As it slid down his gullet and nausea consumed him momentarily, Brenden raised the glass and downed his drink in one.
Sitting for a few moments while his sickness subsided, he then picked up his briefcase, rose from his seat and went to pay, a couple more moths escaping from the suit jacket.
Once outside, he strode purposefully down the darkened, winter street, his shoulders hunched. A cold wind reddened his hollow cheeks and toyed with his thinning, brown hair. Scratching the greying stubble on his cleft chin, he entered the Rat and Ferret and walked up to the bar.
'Four bottles of Blue Wicked, please,' he said to the tall and hawkish gentleman behind the bar. 'And don't worry about a glass.'
He was swiftly served and drank the bottles of bright blue liquid one by one in large gulps. In barely a couple of minutes all were empty before him on the green beer towel laid upon the bar and he burped in satisfaction.
'Thirsty or something?' asked the barman, looking at Brenden over his half-moons with this eyebrows raised, high cheekbones like razor blades in his parched face.
Brenden smiled at the man, but said nothing as he readied himself to go out into the cold night. 'Well, this is it my old chum.'
Turning, he walked back to the door and out into the biting wind with the briefcase in his right hand. He walked across the pavement, waiting as a lorry drew close.
With a deep sigh, Brenden stepped in front of the vehicle, giving the driver no time to avoid collision and ensuring a quick death by radiator grill, his end announced by the screech of the articulated lorry's tyres, a dirge suited to a travelling salesman.
The patrons of the pub came running as the driver of the lorry, dazed and horrified, climbed down from the cab. They gathered around the front of the vehicle where the bloodied body lay. An open briefcase was clutched in its hand, the contents scattered on the road, a pair of wind-up false teeth dancing and chattering on the tarmac in the wide-eyed hush
***
The mortuary was filled with a respectful hush as the coroner and his lovely assistant looked down at the next cadaver on their long list of forthcoming investigations. Dr. Brown viewed himself as a detective, each new corpse a chance to solve the case, to show his expertise, even if only in identifying the last meal consumed by the deceased.
'Scalpel,' he instructed Miss Hoover without turning, regarding his subject from behind thick, black rimmed glasses, beady eyes taking in the vertical lacerations on the man's bruised and battered face. Radiator grill, he thought with an almost imperceptible nod to himself and a smile of satisfaction as he quickly regarded the case notes lying on the table beside the corpse and saw how the man had died.
Miss Hoover, Kristin to her friends, in no way saw herself as a sidekick in his adventures, but rather as an unfortunate waif who took the job only because of burgeoning debts and the resulting red letters of final demands along with threats of court action.
With slender, pale fingers sweating in their rubber sheaths, she picked up the desired implement from a tray beside her. A thin sheen of sweat had built on her forehead despite the coolness of the room and she wiped it away with her forearm, the edge of the blue hat that kept her blonde hair in place starting to irritate her sensitive skin. Trying to avoid looking at the dead man's terrible face, she turned back to Dr. Brown.
He deftly took the scalpel and raised it high in the air above the still form, like an eagle about to dive for the kill. Then it plunged, blade glinting in the strip-light. With a precision learnt of many decades plying his dark trade, Dr. Brown sliced into the corpse's cold flesh, itching to see within, to unravel the mysteries of this man's interior, to search for clues as to his apparent suicide.
With eager fingers he pried inside the cadaver and then sliced open the stomach, which was surrounded by clotted blood, dark and glistening.
Miss Hoover, despite trying to avert her gaze, glanced down when she saw the unusual colour in her peripheral vision. Her blue eyes widened and before her stomach could convulse due to sudden sickness, she fainted and fell to the pale grey floor with a dull thud.
Dr. Brown looked at the open stomach before him in shock and horror. It was stained blue, a blue with a glowing aura. In the midst of that blueness lurked a monster with tentacles, its lidless eye staring out at him.
He recoiled and inhaled sharply, expecting the foul creature to leap out at him. Stumbling as he took a step back, he slipped and fell to the floor, his heart pounding and fingers trembling as he continued to grasp the scalpel and adrenalin pumped through his veins.
Composing himself with deep breaths, Dr. Brown rose to his feet. Reaching for a camcorder upon the metal cupboards lining the bland walls, he then captured the images on film, mindful that no one would believe such a tale without proof.
Dr. Brown put the camera back in its place and then proceeded to examine the contents of the corpse's stomach while Miss Hoover came too with pale face and wary eyes. 'I believe it's simply a squid,' he stated as she sat on the floor, raising the said beast, one of its tentacles clasped in the prongs he was wielding.
As the blue creature dangled horribly in the air Miss Hoover vomited onto the floor tiles. Her body convulsed and her eyes shut tightly, watering as she expelled breakfast in a rush of heat and bile.
***
The next day Miss Hoover did not return to work, but left a message on the mortuary's answer phone to the effect that Dr. Brown could stick the job up one of the orifices he rarely explored on the cadavers that found their way onto his cold, metal table. It was a message left with great sincerity and a satisfied smile, for Miss Hoover didn't need the job anymore.
She sat at the small, round table in her kitchen-diner, the walls only half painted as they were transformed from deep red to warm cream. A smile curled her naturally pouting lips as she looked down at the tabloid headline, one which had earnt her a good deal of money in no time flat.
'The Real Alien Autopsy,' it read, and accompanying it was a still from the film Dr. Brown had taken, the stomach glowing blue as the tentacled beast lay within its glistening lair. He'd told her of his actions while she was recovering from the shock the previous morning and, though not immediately, she had come to realise the worth of such footage.
Kristin chuckled as she sat at the table and dipped her spoon into her bowl of cornflakes, brown eyes taking in the article which accompanied the headline. Unaware that a small clothes moth had drowned in the milk, she ate breakfast in amused pondering as the spirit of Brenden Pickles, which was everywhere, yet nowhere, watched in silence.