The rural town of Descourve was a town with a long, uneventful
history. A brief stay as county seat is the closest it ever came to dignification. The glory days, though, were
now long gone and the ambassadors and dignitaries never came anymore. The borough, for that's what it is really
classified as, is situated on the muddy and oft times flooded banks of the Ralapariso, more a stream than river.
The population was stagnant, even decreasing as a minimal but noticeable stream of emigrants left for the warm,
sunny beaches of Floridian climates or friendlier confines in a pleasant sun-touched community rather than the
bleak pit in which squatted Descourve, ghost town while still alive.
The most suitable establishment for this town of no repute would
be a funeral home and, as if by custom order, the very edifice resided on the mainstream of traffic, the Hostler
Family Funeral Home. The Nazi architects themselves could not have designed a more forbidding building, one of
shadows and rotting wood, wasp's nests and broken shingles. To this house a man named Gustave Teratio commuted
once a day, as he had every day for the last eleven dreary years. Today however, would be his first, last, and
only break in routine- today was the day he submitted his resignation.
Toiling among cadavers is a gruesome at best business, not one
that left much room for creativity. Gustave relied on his apparent strength of heart and bitter disposition to
maintain his composure while he was on the clock. He had been mistreated as a child, often neglected, and had to
resort to releasing his pent up emotions in a slow, steady stream of hostility. Quick to anger and always aloof
he had kept out of schoolyard affairs, concentrating solely on survival until released into the outside world.
Today he would finally break free from the shackles and cast aside
his shadows.
