"Mort"

Mort, Doc, Spike, Harry Glass, Friday, Thursday, and other characters from The Undertaker and His Pals (1966) are in the public domain.

Dedicated to T.L.P. Swicegood

1930 – 2020

CASE FILE: INDIV-EV91365-Prime

SUBJECT NAME: “Mort,” real name unknown. Aliases have included Mortimer L’Amour, Morty Dannis, and, most recently, Mort Yggian.

STATUS: Unknown.

CLASSIFICATION: Homicide, Anthropophagia_related, Occult_likely

PRE-CONTACT SUMMARY: “Mort” first became known to this organization when his crimes were publicly exposed in 1956 by private detective Harry Glass. Mort and two colleagues, “Doc” and “Spike” (real names unknown), conspired to murder several dozen persons in the city of Glendale, California for a variety of criminal purposes over the course of at least three years.

Glendale had its first contact with motorcyclists shortly after the Second World War, when veterans returning from the European front took up motorcycling as a hobby, sport, and lifestyle in the wake of their experiences with such vehicles in combat. Most bikers in the Glendale area behaved responsibly, but motorcycle culture received a bad name by the end of the 1940s due to a few isolated incidents of property damage, most of them motivated by alcohol. Between 1946 and 1956, Glendale held four votes to ban motorcycle travel within city limits, but none of these passed, as they were all based exclusively on a small handful of noise complaints and a couple of smashed mailboxes. It was only in 1956 when Glendale residents were able to provably connect motorcycle culture to violence, when several witnesses reported a trio of masked motorcyclists abducting people around town. At first it was believed that these were simple kidnappings, but soon the bodies of the victims began to turn up, having been robbed of their valuables and murdered. A panic overtook Glendale, but local authorities were unable to find leads in the case due to the masks the cyclists wore. It is unlikely that the connections between these abductions would have been discovered if not for the travails of Mr. Harry Glass.

Mr. Glass was a private detective based out of Los Angeles who occasionally made day trips to Glendale with his secretary and fiancee, Anne Poultry. During a visit to Glendale’s Greasy Spoon Cafe, Glass and Poultry met “Doc” and “Spike,” the cafe’s proprietors, who, unbeknownst to them, selected Anne as a victim in their latest criminal scheme. Not twelve hours after the couple had their meal, the restaurateurs mounted their motorcycles and kidnapped Ms. Poultry from her home, whereupon they took her to a remote location and murdered her. But this was only the beginning of what they had planned for her.

The secret ringleader and most important party in this scheme was “Mort,” who operated the Shady Rest Funeral Parlor on the opposite side of town from the Greasy Spoon. Mort would offer funerary services to the bereaved friends and family of the people who Doc and Spike killed. The contracts Mort offered included a number of loopholes and secret fees that allowed him to bilk the grieving parties dry when it was too late to back out. Furthermore, the funerals would display the corpses only from the waist up, because the lower halves of the bodies were used in the Greasy Spoon Cafe as part of the establishment’s cuisine, to save Doc and Spike on the rising costs of meat. None of the trio displayed any qualms over tricking their own community into committing cannibalism, much less any of their lesser crimes. Indeed, they seemed to find a grim humor in their work, having selected Anne Poultry as a victim simply on the basis of her surname. They found it amusing to serve “breast of Poultry” on their menu the following day.

The origins of this scheme remain unclear, but it is speculated by some that “Spike” was in actuality a Nebraska man named Scott Todd, who spent time in jail at various points throughout his life in six different states for a variety of petty assault charges. It seems that at an early age Todd took his surname to mean that he was a descendant of early 19^th Century murderer Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The historical Todd was aided in his crimes by one Mathilda Lovett, who turned Todd’s murder victims into meat pies and sold them to the London public. Scott Todd enjoyed cutting people, especially women, with a barber’s straight razor—as his mania developed, he evolved to borrowing Mrs. Lovett’s modus operandi for economic reasons as well as sadistic ones. As for “Doc,” his identity remains a mystery, and may in fact be reality-negating in nature, but he was known to introduce himself to Greasy Spoon customers as “too good for medical school.” Harry Glass recalled that Anne Poultry heard a rumor that Doc was kicked out of medical school for being “weird.” It seems he possessed an unusual fascination with the human body, desiring to combine medical science with the fine art of commercial meat-packing.

After Anne Poultry’s murder, Mort approached Harry Glass with an offer of a funeral, little knowing at the time that he was setting the stage for his own undoing. Glass accepted the offer but called out the loopholes in Mort’s contract, strongarming the undertaker into reducing his fee substantially. Mort tried to take revenge by stuffing Anne’s body into a wooden shipping crate, but this only earned him a harsh beating at Glass’ hands. Despite this, Glass did not suspect Mort’s role in Anne’s murder. He set out to find the masked motorcyclists who had kidnapped her, as he believed they were the true killers.

During his investigation he was approached by a young woman named Friday, who had applied to an ad he’d put out for a new secretary. When she accepted the job she and Glass began to fall in love. Unfortunately, Mort again chose to take revenge once he spotted the pair together. He order Doc and Spike to kill Friday and process her as they had Anne before her. Once again, Glass was left heartbroken by the murder of the girl he loved.

It soon transpired, however, that Friday had an older sister named Thursday, who joined up with Glass to avenge her sister’s death. The pair uncovered Mort’s alliance with the masked motorcyclists. Doc pursued Glass on his bike in an effort to murder him, but in the course of the chase he was struck by a shipping truck and apparently killed. Meanwhile, Mort killed Spike with acid over a previous disagreement regarding proper use of the corpses—Spike wanted to go back to using the entire body for food, which would cut out Mort’s side of the business. After dispatching Spike, Mort tried to kill Thursday, but he failed and was forced to flee. After escaping, he broke into Harry Glass’ office in an attempt to murder the detective. According to Glass’ account, he was talking with Thursday in his office and was making a wild gesture as a demonstration of what he was saying. He was holding a knife at the time, and as his arms swung out, the knife pierced a nearby curtain, which turned out to be Mort’s hiding place. The blade pierced the undertaker’s skull and killed him instantly—his body tumbled out onto the floor, shocking both detectives. Thursday denied police allegations that Glass had in fact killed Mort deliberately, though she refused or was unable to explain the fresh bruises that covered Mort’s body.

Glass and Thursday thereafter made a public statement to the press exposing the guilt of the terrible trio. The Glendale motorcycle murders had finally come to an end. To cement this fact, the people of Glendale passed a city ordinance banning motorcycle travel, which remains in effect to this day.

CONTACT SUMMARY: Though Doc, Spike, and Mort were apparently all killed as a result of their crimes, Mort’s body went missing from the morgue shortly after Glass and Thursday’s press statement. Later, a police search of the Shady Rest Funeral Parlor showed that many significant items had been removed from it at a point after Mort’s death. While the coroner who examined the body insisted that Mort’s brain injuries completely prevented any chance of recovery, it was concluded that the undertaker had somehow survived and escaped the morgue. Police sought clues to where he could have gone, but with no results.

In 1966, nearly ten years to the day of Mort’s apparent death, Harry Glass and his wife Thursday were found stabbed to death in their home. The knife used to kill them was left at the scene of the crime; it was the same knife that Glass had run through Mort’s skull. Due to the unusual nature of the first spree of crimes, we at NOCTURNE assumed jurisdiction, and elected to send Lt. Iago “Yog” Kirk to investigate, separate from the work of the local police. Kirk’s mission would be to locate Mort, who was believed to still be active in the Glendale area, and apprehend him if possible.

Upon arriving in Glendale, Lt. Kirk decided to check out the abandoned Greasy Spoon Cafe, which had failed to sell upon the deaths of its owners and had not yet been bulldozed by the city. The cafe was left as it was on the day Doc and Spike died. During his search of the cafe’s basement, Kirk found a secret alcove which contained a book written in an unknown language. Later analysis at NOCTURNE headquarters revealed that the language the book was written in was one of many spoken on Continent Z, a possible future landmass of Earth believed to exist thousands of years in the future in the same timeline as the so-called “Night Land” (see File TIMESCAPE-1912). The presence of this book in the restaurant seemingly confirmed the existence of anomalies surrounding the true identity of “Doc,” as well as the theorized connection between “Mort” and occult rites. (For more information on the theories connecting Mort’s crimes with cult activity, see File PHENOM-EV070663, “Blood Feasts and Other Ancient Weird Religious Rites.”) At the time, Lt. Kirk was unaware of these facts, as they would only come to light after his investigation.

Lt. Kirk was leaving the cafe basement with the book when he was confronted by a tall figure wearing dark robes and a silver mask. The figure refused to answer Kirk’s request for identification, causing the Lieutenant to draw his sidearm, whereupon the figure produced a knife and tried to attack him. Kirk fired pointblank at the figure and seemingly grazed his neck. He dropped the knife and ran away, with Kirk giving chase. Though the robed assailant soon managed to lose himself in the streets of Glendale, Kirk followed the blood trail, until he came to the edge of the local cemetery. Within, the blood-drops drew sparser and fainter, but they led to a freshly-dug grave, whose stone bore no name. It seemed as though the masked figure had descended into the grave, burying himself below the dirt in a matter of instants through some unknown means.

Unwilling and unable to disturb the grave, Lt. Kirk chose to depart the cemetery. He would note the presence of an unusually ugly individual who, unbeknownst to him at the time, matched the description of the Washington Square Churchyard Entity (see File PHENOM-EV1895-Prime, “The Yellow Sign”), who he believed simply to be the cemetery watchman. In spite of the grotesque, worm-like appearance of this man, Kirk returned to his hotel and turned in for the evening.

That night, the Lieutenant was awoken by the sudden appearance of seven robed figures, each of whom wore the same silver masks as his attacker in the Greasy Spoon. He was unable to grab his sidearm in time and was bound and gagged by the figures. They hoisted them onto their shoulders and carried him out of town, for a distance of approximately four miles. They came eventually to a body of water Kirk identified as Hollywood Reservoir. The area was unusually bereft of people, even for this time of night.

There was an eighth figure at the lakeshore, who also wore robes and a silver mask. When Kirk was brought into view of this figure, he removed his mask, revealing the face of Mort.

The robed kidnappers removed Kirk’s gag, but kept him tied up as they set him on the ground. The two proceeded to have the following conversation:

MORT: Lt. Iago Kirk, they call you?

Kirk refused to speak at first.

MORT: Don’t worry, I know your name regardless.

KIRK: Who are you? And what do you want?

MORT: You already know me, Lt. Kirk! I am Mort, the undertaker.

KIRK: But—how did you survive your injury from ten years ago?

MORT: As a mortician, I know much about death. Including how to escape it. But it’s also a simple fact that death will never come to me. I suppose you could say—I am Death.

KIRK: You’re insane, is what you are. Just like your costumed pals.

MORT: They revere me—or rather, they will. In a time far off, a time yet to come, they will.

At this point Kirk tried to stand, despite his bonds, but one of the robed figures kicked him back down.

MORT: Your friends at NOCTURNE—they call you “Yog,” yes?

KIRK: My close friends. Easier on the tongue on “Iago.”

MORT: And your middle name—yes, I see it—Sothoth. What a strange name.

KIRK: My father...said it was Egyptian. I always took his word for it.

MORT: Your name is Yog Sothoth Kirk? Then perhaps you grasp that I am Mortyggian. I am the god of Zulbhasayiir. I am he who waits among the dead, who worms his way through the charnel-pit, who feasts at the Black Table.

KIRK: None of that means anything to me.

MORT: Oh? Then perhaps this will.

Lt. Kirk’s memory became spotty at this point, but from he remembered, Mort began to change shape, shedding his human form for something else. According to Kirk: “It was like a shadow, an enormous shadow stretching up towards the clouds. It had tremendous height and fantastic depth and a heavy weight to it, and it looked like a nest of coiling serpents, spiraling with immense speed into the air like it was trying to climb up to the moon.

“And it was like Death. Cold and empty and eternal. And I heard it laugh.”

As soon as this entity departed, his robed abductors suddenly disappeared. Over the course of the next hour Kirk was able to untie himself from his bonds and alert NOCTURNE command.

Two days later, Yog Kirk was recalled from duty in Glendale. It was a stormy night when he departed, and on his drive out he passed by the Shady Rest Funeral Parlor—which, like the Greasy Spoon, had been left standing since the crime a decade prior. According to Kirk, the sign over the door had changed suddenly to read “ZULBHASAYIIR.” Before Kirk could photograph the altered sign, a lightning bolt struck the building and started it on fire. Despite the best efforts of both Kirk and the local fire department, the funeral parlor burned to the ground, leaving no trace that it was ever even there.

CONCLUSIONS: If Mort Yggian is not an avatar or disguise of the Charnel God of Continent Z, then he is possessed by his spirit. Our priority should be in continuing to sever abtemporal connections between the Continent’s timeline and our own. The challenges of temporal manipulation might indicate the value of recruiting Entity “Liar” as an associate (see File INDIV-Lambda-Iota-Alpha).

Our linguists have attempted to translate the book that Lt. Kirk recovered from the Greasy Spoon, but as of this writing we have called a vote on suspending the project. The program leader, Dr. Harper, seemingly translated a few passages from the early pages of the book, but shortly thereafter he reported to the mental health unit with the anticipation of developing psychosis from what he read. True to the doctor’s own prediction, he has since lapsed into a psychotic fugue wherein he attempts to describe entities and events from Continent Z. Since these descriptions would likely also spread psychosis to listeners, he has been quarantined for the time being.

We have successfully incinerated texts such as these in the past, and though some have resisted, in their own ways, it seems that fire is the most effective way to destroy them. Though the vote is still pending, it seems likely that destroying this book is the best way to facilitate our longterm goal of neutralizing abtemporal contact with reality-negating futurescapes.