Reply To: The Bygone Corner

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The Wax Man was what they called him later; Dr. Crawford Hux was who he had really been. He was not young- no, not anymore. He’d married, had a family, and then it fell apart. His wife, well. She died first, after two years of a degenerative brain disease. His daughter had no disease though: she died in a car accident.
And just like that, the sane, rational doctor found himself lying alone at night, keenly aware of his shaking, wrinkled hands. Keenly aware he was going to die. And just like that, the thought began to scare him; and then, consume him.
First he looked to science, but it failed him. He thought about cryogenics, but no one was willing to invest in it yet. One day, they said, it might be feasible. One day? He could die tomorrow!
And so began his quest for the occult, and it didn’t fail him- not exactly. It was simple, transfer your soul to a wax body, kill someone with it, and then replace their head with your own. It was, he told himself, like surgery; just surgery, to keep himself alive.
But the catch was simple; it couldn’t be any corpse. It had to be someone he killed himself, and it had to be someone who wanted to die.
And here is where he failed.
He found people dying in cancer wards, and suicidal men and women. Some of them agreed to die, and he did it; yet when he tried to carry out the rite, it simply didn’t work. And now, slowly, his wax was beginning to melt: and he was afraid. He lashed out, madly killing, desperate to find a host; but whether they accepted death or not, it never worked.
It was in a warehouse where the masked hero finally found him. There was no fight; he was melting away, little of him remaining. He told the masked man his story and asked, why? Why would it not work? It’s because, came the answer, no human truly wants to die. Not really.
As he melted away and the papers declaimed him as the Wax Man, the Wax Killer, a man in a mask walked on knowing that all the men and women who lived, had some part of the Wax Man in them.


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