Shallow Graves

by Kali Wallace

  “I can taste how scared it is. Little child, what a wretched thing you will become.”

  She was right in front of me. Her mouth was a red gash.

  “I know it is frightened. Mother can help. Ask me if I can take it away. Ask me if I can carve it out like a festering wound. They told it, wretched dead thing, go to Mother, she has an appetite like maggots, go to her in the darkness and she will take away the putrid rot, the stink it carries. Mother will gnaw and gnaw and gnaw until it’s gone. She’ll take your gift and keep it here in her pretty glass cages.”

  All around us the sand shivered.

  “Go on. Go on, ask. Ask me if I can reach inside and tear out all its ugly worms and keep them here with me. Ask me if the dead thing can be alive again.”

  I couldn’t speak. I wasn’t breathing. My heart wasn’t beating. I was shaking so much the flashlight beam danced over the tunnel, glinting off the smooth curved jars, but her yellow eyes with their angular black pupils never wavered.

  “Ask me!” she roared.

  The walls shook and the trapped sand quivered. My heart jump-started with a painful kick. One small jar, still carrying a label for baby food, slipped from a stack. It fell to the floor and shattered. The sand snaked away in twisting, spidery lines.

  When the sand was still and the ringing in my ears faded, I whispered, “Can you?”

  She laughed again, but quietly, an amused chuckle so much worse than her loud, wild laughter. Limping and swaying, she shuffled a few steps, gathering up her blanket with one hand. Beneath the folds of fabric, her legs were covered with coarse black hair and they bent the wrong way and the feet at the end weren’t feet at all, but hooves.

  “Sweet dead thing. Give me your rotten little heart. It’s a good gift. You won’t miss it a bit.”

  She reached out to me and I mirrored the motion, my hand moving without my permission, drawn up as though lifted by a puppet string. My fingers were still curled into a fist around the keys. The long bone claw of her forefinger traced over the inside of my forearm, its tendons and veins, and her twisted metal thumbnail pressed into the bone of my wrist. She broke the skin and blood welled.

  I jerked my hand away, but she didn’t let me go. My arm hit a jar; it toppled to the side, knocked into another. They both fell and shattered. The sand hissed and crawled away from the broken glass, rolling like worms toward her split black hooves.

  Not worms.

  Fingers.

  The sand gathered into the shape of a hand, twisting and reaching, fingers curling up from the stone. Lumps rose through the hand and there was the shape of a nose, the curve of a jaw. Mouths opening in silent screams. Blank eyes, crumbling jaws, creeping along the floor, pressing against the glass.

  I tugged my hand again. Her thumb and forefinger pressed deeper into my wrist. The pain had been distant before, a mild sting, subdued and softened by the beseeching tone of her voice.

  But when I tried to break free it surged to the surface in a flash of crippling agony. My entire arm was on fire, every muscle and tendon spasming in pain. I cried out and doubled over, but still she didn’t let go. Blood flowed over my fingers and dripped to the floor. Where it struck the ground, the creeping sand recoiled and scattered.

  I hit her wrist with the flashlight, tried to break her grip, but she only laughed.

  “Give it to me to keep,” she said, still laughing, still laughing. “It will be so happy here.”

  The pain spread up my arm, a white-hot cascade, and I could feel it in my skin, in my blood. Pure mindless instinct had me sucking in quick, painful breaths, and my heart was beating wildly, out of my control. Every jolt of my pulse drew the gritty-hot press of her claws deeper into my body, deeper, deeper, until her hand was part of my wrist, my arm was her arm, my heartbeat and her laughter, her hunger and the cold, cold fear coiled deep in my gut, all the same, twinning together in an unbreakable tangle, and it hurt it hurt it hurt, but it would hurt worse to stop her, I couldn’t stop her I should just let her take it take me take me apart lock the dark monstrous heart of me away it was better that way she would keep it safe it was a good gift—

  The flashlight fell to the floor. Flickered, blinked, but it didn’t go out. I hadn’t felt it slip from my fingers, but I heard the clatter, and I saw the yellow light momentarily fail, and in that brief space between noise and darkness her voice faded from my mind, and the cries and pleas of all her victims, captured for me in Brian’s memories, returned. She had made me forget them, but she couldn’t silence them completely.

  “My dear, my dear,” she said. She wasn’t laughing anymore. “Stay with Mother.”

  I grabbed the nearest jar and swung it at her face with all my strength.

  She shouted in surprise, and I grabbed another, and another, flung them at her head as quickly as I could. The first hit with a dull thunk. The second cracked, and sand slithered from the break. The third shattered, an explosion of shards slicing into my skin, and she bellowed with outrage. Her grip on my wrist loosened, and I flung another jar at her, this one aimed at her arm.

  She let go and I fell backward. I crawled after the flashlight and scrambled to my feet, turned as she was grasping at my shoulder, my upper arm, slicing through my shirt and my skin. I dove away from her, knocking jars down behind me, one after another. They crashed across the narrow tunnel, a racket of breaking glass and rasping sand. Her breathless laughter and the galloping clatter of hooves followed.

  I didn’t remember the keys clenched in my fist until I saw the iron gate ahead. I pushed through the gate and swung it shut, but I wasn’t fast enough.

  Her hand closed around my upper arm and she pulled me back, yanking my shoulder and head into the gate. The blow stunned me for a moment and I sagged, my head spinning, my legs weak. Her fingers were cold, her touch like ice, like wind off the lake on a winter day, like the emptiness of space. I leaned into the iron bars and swung at her arm with the flashlight, hit her wrist with a loud crack of plastic on bone.

  She shrieked with laughter and slammed into the gate. Metal groaned, bolts ground against rock, and gravel showered around us. She was holding my arm and I couldn’t pull free, so I grasped at her claws with my fingers. The blades cut into my hand and her laughter was a cold mist, a falling night, a shadow.

  A suffocating, overpowering shadow. She had killed so many people.

  I let go of her claws and grabbed her wrist. Her face was inches from mine, her yellow eyes with those long black slits for pupils, her filthy skin, her dark hair matted with dirt and mud and blood and straw. Her smile was wide and wet and red. She grinned with all of her teeth and shook me, hard, lifting my feet a few inches from the ground and knocking me against the gate. But I didn’t let go. I held on, my bloody fingers on her clammy skin, and I pulled.

  I couldn’t finish it, couldn’t do to her as I had done to the others. She was too strong. It was like trying to hold the ocean in the path of a tsunami. But I didn’t need her to snap apart at my touch. I only needed to surprise her.

  Her laughter broke off with a gasp. I dropped to the ground, twisted, and lunged away. The flesh of my upper arm tore free of her claws.

  She rammed into the gate again, bellowing with fury, the agonized creak of metal and grind of rock lost under the strength of her cry. It filled the tunnel and made the mountain tremble, but I was already running. I jumped over the corpses, kicked through the skeletons, ran and ran and ran and didn’t look back.

  THIRTY-NINE

  AT THE SECOND gateway I shoved the rock out of place, closed the gate, and locked it. My hands were shaking so badly it took me three tries before I got the right key. She was still shrieking. Sometimes it sounded like laughter, sometimes like screams, sometimes so loud it felt as though she were right behind me. I forced myself to look back.

  There was nothing in the tunnel behind me. No yellow eyes, no cloven hooves, no stoop-backed bundle of rags.

  But I didn’t slow down. I kept running.

  I didn�
�t know I was near the surface until the final gate was in front of me. I inhaled the clean scent of the forest, and it was the best thing I had ever smelled. I stumbled through the gate and shouldered it closed, took the padlock from my pocket and snapped it into place. It was such a little thing, a tiny metal lock, but I didn’t have anything else. I pulled on the gate. It didn’t budge.

  I rested my forehead against the cold iron and listened.

  I couldn’t hear her anymore. I didn’t remember when her screams had stopped, or if they had only faded with distance.

  Three gates and three locks. I didn’t know if it was enough.

  I shone the flashlight into the tunnel, almost certain I would see her yellow eyes. But there was nothing. There was only darkness.

  I kept the flashlight on as I made my way down the trail. Past the old cabin, past Mr. Willow’s body. I could barely look at him. He was a blink of khaki trousers and blood. My shoes kicked noisily through the underbrush and fallen needles. I stopped every few steps to listen to the babbling creek and the wind, to hold my breath and still my heart and wait.

  I waited to hear a laugh, a wet-rough cackle, bending iron, breaking glass. The whisper of sand on a stone floor. Sand that had once been a person, or part of one, whatever parts Mother decided to keep for herself.

  The night was quiet. I walked faster. The wounds on my wrist and arm were closing; my fingers stung, but the blood was drying. They were far from the worst injuries I had received recently. I probably wouldn’t even have scars.

  A mile or so from the mine, the old dirt road intersected another. There was a wooden fence and a metal farm gate. I climbed over and looked at the crooked PRIVATE PROPERTY sign before turning away.

  I had no idea which way to go, so I chose uphill, toward the starlight and the clear open sky. In the car it had felt like we had driven forever into the heart of the mountains, but when I reached the top of the ridge, the city lights were close, bright and enticing just over the hills.

  I put Lyle’s flashlight away and took Zeke’s phone from my backpack. Two rutted, unpaved roads met on that ridge. There were no houses nearby, no passing cars.

  But I did get a cell signal. I found the number for J and hit Send.

  It rang a few times, then there was a sleepy, “What?”

  I winced. “I, uh, sorry. Jake? This is Breezy, um, from yesterday. Zeke gave me his phone and told me—”

  “What the hell?”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  Something rustled on the other end, following by a soft thump and “Wake up, asshole,” and a muffled “Ow.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Zeke said. He didn’t sound like he had been asleep.

  “It’s—really?” I looked at the phone screen. 3:46. It had been twilight when I went into the mine. “I didn’t—sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “What do you want? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice shaky. “I’m fine. I’m just kind of stranded? I was wondering if you could give me a ride. Um, again. I mean, yeah, again. But I’m not all the way in Wyoming this time, and I swear I’m not going to try to blackmail you or anything, and—and there’s something in it for you, at least, if you want, but I don’t know how you usually—”

  “What— Hey, stop. What are you talking about?”

  “Dinner for a week,” I said.

  Zeke was quiet for a moment. “Where are you?”

  “Oh. I have no idea. I was in the trunk when we drove up here.”

  “The trunk?”

  “Not my idea. Wait a sec.” I had to cross the road to get a closer look at the signs. One was a name, the other a county road number. “They’re both dirt roads. There’s nothing around here. But we didn’t drive very far from Boulder, I don’t think.”

  Zeke said something away from the phone, then came back and said, “Yeah, whatever, we can find it. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah. Definitely. Fine.” Saying it three times absolutely made it more convincing.

  “Is there anybody else there?”

  “No. Just me.”

  “Okay. We’ll be there.”

  I tried to say, “Thank you,” but he had already hung up.

  I put the phone in my pocket and sat down on my skateboard, hugged my legs to my chest. Even with the glow of the city lights, the sky was filled with stars. The Milky Way was a bright smear overhead. I tilted my head to the side to look at it edge on, imagined myself floating in space outside the galaxy, seeing it as a massive, elegant spiral, and our sun as an insignificant speck. I spotted a satellite, gnat tiny and swift, and watched it until it disappeared behind the trees. Too slow to be the ISS. It was farther away, lifeless, empty.

  The wind rose. I shivered and rubbed my arms.

  Three gates. Three locks. It had kept her in for decades. She couldn’t get out.

  I reminded myself to breathe.

  FORTY

  I STOOD WHEN I saw headlights and heard the growl of the truck’s engine. Jake was driving. Zeke slid over to let me in the passenger side. They didn’t ask me anything except, “Are you hurt?” and “How far?” and I didn’t offer anything more than “Not very.”

  Jake stopped the truck in front of the gate. I jumped out to open it, but when I had my hand on the latch, metal cold beneath my fingers, I couldn’t do it.

  The headlights cast long, distorted shadows over the narrow dirt road. Me, impossibly tall, and the horizontal bars of the gate like a silhouetted prison. The tunnel of trees stretched into the forest in shades of washed-out yellows and greens. Somehow that artificial light was worse than darkness would have been.

  “Breezy?”

  Zeke got out of the truck behind me, and a second later Jake did too.

  “What is it?” Jake said.

  The last thing I wanted to do was follow that road again.

  I was shaking my head before I realized what I was doing. “I can’t. I can’t go back there.”

  Even where I stood, in the light, behind the false security of a green farm gate, it was too close to the mine. Too close to her.

  “We should leave,” I said. But I couldn’t turn around. That would mean putting my back to the forest and the road. My hand was still on the gate; I flicked the latch open and closed, open and closed. “We shouldn’t be here. We need to go.”

  “Okay,” Jake said gently. He put his hand over mine, didn’t even flinch at the blood caking my fingers, and stopped the soft metal click of the latch. “Can you tell me what’s up there?”

  I felt a burst of annoyance that he was talking to me like that, like I was a little girl afraid of the gaping black space beneath her bed. But it steadied me too. It was better to be annoyed than addled with fear.

  “I’m not going back up there,” I said. I tried to sound stubborn, not terrified. He wasn’t fooled. “You want your dinner, go get it yourself.”

  “Okay. Zeke can stay here with you. Tell me how to get there.”

  “It’s past the end of the road. There’s a trail, it goes over a creek, and this old cabin—” I pulled my hand away and turned to face Jake. “You can’t go past the old cabin. Even if— He’s there, by the old cabin. The body.” I didn’t want to say his name out loud. He wasn’t a person anymore. There wasn’t anything left of him except the memories I had stolen. “But you can’t go past that point. You can’t. For any reason. Don’t go to the end of the trail.”

  “What’s at the end of the trail?” Jake asked. He wasn’t afraid. Worried, yes, but mostly curious.

  “Something you’re not going to see, because you’re not going that far,” I said.

  Jake hesitated, then shrugged. “Fine. I won’t.”

  “Promise me.”

  At that he started to look more concerned. “All right. I promise.”

  It wasn’t enough. “Promise him,” I said, pointing at Zeke. “Promise him you won’t go past the old cabin.”

  Jake said, “Okay. I swear to both of you that I won�
��t go past the cabin. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  I opened the gate for him, and he drove away. The red taillights disappeared into the forest.

  “You are completely freaking out,” Zeke said.

  “I am not.”

  “Yes, you are. What’s down there?”

  “Will he be able to find it?” I asked. It, because that was easier than him. “I didn’t give him very good directions. Does he even have a flashlight?”

  Zeke’s answer was wry. “We’re not good at much of anything, but finding dead bodies in the dark is one thing we can do.”

  “Oh. Right. Makes sense.” I inhaled slowly, tried to get control of my breathing, tried to slow my heart rate. It wasn’t working. “Will he do what he said? Will he— I mean, he won’t get curious or something? Keep going?”

  “No, he’ll come right back,” Zeke said. “Maybe if he were alone he’d do something stupid, but not with us waiting for him.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I wouldn’t have let him go if I wasn’t.”

  “Okay. That’s good. Okay.”

  I felt exposed and unsteady standing there in the middle of the road. My knees felt shaky, my feet were sore, my head aching. The torn skin of my fingers stung with sweat and dirt. I was tired. I was so damn tired. I sat on the top rail of the fence and let my shoulders slump.

  Zeke said, “What happened, anyway? How did you get up here?”

  “Violet,” I said. “The girl I was looking for. I found her. She was . . . she was having doubts about her life choices. She wanted me to do something for her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I didn’t want to go through the whole afternoon. “It’s a long story.”

  Zeke came over to sit beside me on the fence. “Why would you help her?”

  “It’s not like she was going to kill me.”

  “Someday you’re going to get tired of saying that.”

  “I’m already tired of it. I’ve only been a reanimated corpse for a few weeks and I’ve already used up all my zombie jokes.” I rubbed my hands over my face, regretted it when I felt the scrape of grit and dirt on my skin. “I don’t want to talk about it.”