The Dentist - Part II

The symphony had come to a pleasing cadence as The Dentist carefully polished each extraction and placed them into a glass jar. He sat down in front of his rusty Underwood. The embossed keys were thick with grime. After adjusting his glasses slightly, he punched in a date and a name. The label got smeared with dirt and blood as he slid his hand over it, affixing it to the jar. A drop of blood landing caught his attention. It was pooling on the floor just beneath the wooden operating table. He needed to get the body moved so that it could be ready for disposal, but first, he admired his faceless patient. The odd smile of the exposed jaw, no longer distorted by flesh, satisfied him. He checked his antique pocket watch. Disposal was only a matter of timing - and the repeating static thumping on the old turntable meant he was right on schedule. He slid his bare hand up and under the bottom jaw, grabbing her face, and pulled the table into a dark earthen hallway. The hall, with just a few scattered boards for stability, seemed to weep with seeping trickles of discolored water. At a slight downward slope, he only needed to hold on, until reaching the beast. For two years he had been buying used pieces and parts online, slowly constructing an industrial tree chipper in a sublevel below the basement. The behemoth machine was built so that it would drain directly into an adjoining sewage tunnel that then drained into a river eight miles away. The beastly machine generated a lot of noise. No one in this farming community, not in the four years since, had ever suspected his unassuming practice was also mulching estranged hitchhikers. The decrepit house, just off the highway, was on the market for years before The Dentist found it, rotting from the ground up, as if slowly being eaten by the damp and muddy earth it sat on. He resurrected the place, and the townsfolk adored him.

As if on cue, a rumbling, some dirt and dust unsettling, and the whole tunnel shook. The Dentist slid the body into the chipper, closed the lid, and turned it on. It's jumping, bumping, and bone shattering sounds were muffled by the passing train above. The Dentist turned and pushed the table back up the hall.