Autopsy

When all of the girls had finished, the remnants of apple were cleared away, and a new figure entered the room. He wore no mask, but there was no sign of his face – instead a shirt, topped with a ruff, covered his head, giving the impression of a decapitated man. A model head was carried under one arm.
‘Ooh, the headless horseman!’ said Dodo.
‘He hasn’t got a horse,’ the ballerina pointed out, but Dodo ignored her.
The witch and skeleton carried a carved wooden chair into the centre of the circle and the horseless headless horseman sat on it, placing his head on his knees. The chair was carved from ebony, with back and seat padded in red satin, and gave the impression of not being a chair so much as a seated coffin.
I’m being ridiculous now, thought Dodo as that crossed her mind. Whoever heard of such a thing? She smiled at the man and sternly told herself not to let her mind run away with such silly notions.
‘A man has died,’ announced the horseman, and Dodo kept smiling, because obviously this was part of the game and not a pronouncement of actual death. ‘We do not know how. The only clue left behind was the body itself.’
The girls in the circle giggled and shuddered.
‘It is our job to make that dead body talk and so discover the truth. Let the autopsy commence!’
There were little shrieks of nervous excitement as the room was plunged into darkness. ‘First the eyes!’ said the man, and Dodo also shrieked as two slimy objects were suddenly dropped into her hands.
‘Here, take these,’ she said to the inky blackness on her left-hand side, where she knew the little ballerina to be, and the ballerina gasped as the spheres were passed on to her. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dodo. ‘I’ve played this one before. It’s just peeled grapes or something.’
‘They’re too big to be grapes,’ the girl pointed out.
‘All right, maybe they’re … I don’t know, apricots. Or plums. Ugh!’ This last was as something new was passed on to her: a mass of slimy strands. ‘Spaghetti, I bet,’ she said, as the horseman announced, ‘Now his guts!’
The game continued, with more and more slimy and strange items being passed round – ‘His liver! His fingers! His heart!’ – until they got to the grand finale: ‘His brain!’
Something cold and clammy, a lump of bumps and ridges, landed in Dodo’s outstretched hands. ‘Cauliflower?’ she said out loud.
There was a deep, rumbling, unpleasant laugh. Suddenly a number of candles flared to life around the room. The light was hazy, but Dodo could see clearly that in her hands she held something grey and wrinkled.
It was not a cauliflower.
She looked up at the headless horseman, who was still laughing away. The laughter was coming only too clearly from the severed head sitting on his knees.

***

Murder in the Dark, Tales of Terror