Applewood (Book 1)

by Brendan P. Myers

  * * *

  The nice boyfriend was out of the picture now; the bucket had fallen and hit him in the head. He might even be dead. Carrie was pissed.

  * * *

  Michael just pushed over the gravestones, hoping that tomorrow someone would only have to put them back up on their pedestals, but his brother followed him with the sledge and defaced each fallen marker. Just as he was about to push over the next grave in the row, Michael turned suddenly and motioned to his brother that they should move the fun over toward the center of the cemetery, toward the hulking granite mausoleum that dominated this landscape of death.

  * * *

  Carrie was walking home now. She was covered in blood, but her work was done. She had taken revenge upon all of her classmates. Even the new mother from Eight is Enough had gotten hers, although Dugan wondered whether the gym teacher had really been laughing at Carrie, or maybe she had just imagined it. Either way it didn’t matter now. A car screamed down the street toward Carrie.

  * * *

  They used the sledge to break the cheap lock and hasp off the steel grate guarding the entrance and went inside. Walshie turned on the flashlight. As he moved it along the walls, they could see plaques marking those places in the crypt where bodies had been entombed. Some of them went back to the seventeen hundreds.

  The cavernous mausoleum was dominated by a single large tomb, raised up against the back of the building in a kind of altar. Walshie shone the flashlight on the back wall and they saw a large inscription there: “Let No Mortal Man Disturb This Place of Everlasting Rest.”

  They walked up to the tomb. The granite cover had cracked over time, but the words were still clearly visible, and there was some kind of ancient Greek writing or symbols underneath that. Harris noticed that a narrow gap had opened up between the granite top of the tomb and the tomb itself. He motioned to Cotter that he wanted the pickaxe.

  * * *

  The freaky mother got hers next. She had been waiting for Carrie to return from the prom. She had lit every candle in the house and then attacked Carrie with a knife. Carrie was in no mood for any of it.

  * * *

  Harris had decided at some point that he wanted a head. Maybe he would use it as a bong or to pull pranks on his friends, or maybe he would use the skull as an ashtray, but either way he wasn’t leaving without a head.

  The headache was all but gone now, and he knew that the blessed relief he felt was somehow connected with this newfound desire. The only way to make the relief permanent was to leave tonight with somebody else’s head.

  The four of them managed to lever the top off the tomb, only to see that it was empty. Walshie poked the flashlight inside. A narrow staircase descended into the darkness. They all looked at each other, but only Michael began to back away from the tomb.

  “No way, man. Uh-uh. No way in hell.”

  * * *

  It was the next day or something. Carrie’s house had burned to the ground. The nice girl whose boyfriend had died at the prom walked up to the burned out plot of land where Carrie’s house once stood. She had flowers in her hand and walked over to put them down on the place where Carrie had died.

  * * *

  Cotter, Walshie and Harris walked down the narrow staircase and encountered a locked door at the bottom. The ancient lock was no match for Harris’ pounding, and the door finally opened a crack to emit a wafting cloud of the nastiest odor they had ever smelled. It was a cloying scent, the smell of dank earth and rank sweat mingled with the fetidness of sweetly rotting fruit.

  They turned away for a moment to let it dissipate and then pushed open the door and entered a small room. Their feet crunched on something that had been strewn all over the floor. They noticed that, throughout the room, something had once hung from rotting strings of rope and twine that dangled from the ceiling. Walshie directed the flashlight beam toward one wall, where there was a plain wooden casket. They moved closer and saw the same strange writing and symbols on top of it that had been carved into the granite upstairs. Harris moved to open it.

  * * *

  At the very moment that a hand reached out from beneath the ground to grab the nice girlfriend, Dugan jumped out of his seat and screamed like a little girl as a hand squeezed his own shoulder. He looked at Larry, who was laughing his ass off. He had already seen the movie and had been waiting.

  * * *

  He was in perfect condition. Pale and pasty-looking for sure, but then again, he had obviously been an old man. He had long white hair and a white beard, and was dressed in some kind of a blue uniform that had rotted with age. He still clutched his worn hat in his hands and there was a golden sword by his side covered with fancy inscriptions. Harris figured it had to be worth a fortune.

  With the gold of the old man’s sword glinting upwards, reflecting the pale glow of Walshie’s flashlight on all of their faces, Harris reached down to call dibs on the sword. None of them noticed that the old man’s eyes had begun to slowly open, for none of them knew how long he had been waiting.

  * * *

  Michael was beating himself up for not having the balls to go down there with the others and knew he’d never hear the end of it. Thinking that maybe there was still time to salvage something of his pride, he began walking toward the open tomb. When he was halfway there, he smiled with relief to hear shrieks of laughter and moved a little faster. But as he got closer, he stopped suddenly, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention.

  It dawned on him slowly that those weren’t shrieks of laughter among friends he was hearing—they were screams of terror and fear mixed with pain. He stopped to listen for a moment. It was only after he was certain he had distinguished his own brother’s voice, when he had heard exactly what kinds of sounds his brother made when he was screaming in agony, that Michael started to back away.

  From the darkness of the hole, he began to hear tearing sounds, such as might be made by clothes ripping, or by a large tree limb falling under the weight of winter snow. After that, he began to hear wet, splattering sounds, such as might be made by… something else entirely, and in that moment Michael Harris finally decided that it was long past the time for him to get his ass into gear and run like hell.

  Two

  The Morning After—When last we left our hero— Missing—Michael Harris Returns—Project Planning—Satan’s on my back—Dugan don’t care—Jimmy knows something—Winter—The Library—Dugan skips school—Daniels Diary

  1

  The Morning After

  It was a raw and drizzly morning, although the weather was mild for early November, and pitch black outside. Dugan was in a good mood anyway on this, his favorite day of the year. It was the day that all the clocks in the world set themselves back an hour just to give him an extra sixty minutes of sleep.

  As he rode up to the Korner through the darkness of the early morning, he remembered that a few years back Congress had made some noise about chucking the whole idea, to save gas or something. Dugan was grateful that nothing had ever come of the talk. He always felt a little off on this day, but in a good way, like he was half-stoned or a little bit drunk.

  Christmas was approaching and the Sunday papers got heavier every week. It took Dugan extra time to insert all of the coupons and circulars and Sunday magazines, but after the first batch of newspapers was safely cradled in the baskets, he sat back on the hutch to drink his Coke and read the paper.

  The presidential election was two days away. It looked as if Carter might hang on by the skin of his teeth. Iran and Iraq were at war, and the hostages were about to mark their one-year anniversary as guests of the Ayatollah.

  A strong wind came along suddenly that almost took the paper out of his hands, but Dugan managed to hang on. It did blow the paper open a few pages, and something on one of those pages caught his eye. He saw the word “Grantham” in the headline. He only read the first two sentences before heaving the paper aside and leaping aboard his bicycle.

  He was obliviou
s at first to the Sunday papers piled high in the baskets, acting as a kind of ballast, and pedaled as fast as he could down Route 135 toward the center of town. Halfway there, Dugan could no longer ignore his throbbing legs and tortured lungs, and was forced to slow and sit back to catch his breath. By the time he got to the town center, he was using his right arm to push on his right leg, willing himself forward.

  He arrived just as the first ghostly wisps of dawn began to rise up behind him. Dropping his bike against the short stone wall, he collapsed onto his knees, fighting for breath. When he could finally raise his head, he saw sawhorses stamped with the words Grantham P.D. blocking the narrow entranceway to vehicular traffic. Everywhere he looked, he saw tattered streamers of yellow crime scene tape. He got up after a moment and walked slowly toward the gate, around the sawhorses and into the cemetery.

  There were no signs of vandalism or damage among the ancient grave markers that abutted the road. As he walked further in, past those first weathered stones, he stopped suddenly, the breath knocked out of him. From where he stood, every marker appeared to have sustained some sort of damage. They were toppled, or smashed, or had in some manner been profaned. Dugan saw that those that somehow managed to remain upright during the onslaught had been desecrated in other ways: scrawled with crude words or obscene, cartoon-like genitalia.

  As he walked slowly along the pathway of the dead, he observed that those gravestones bearing the six-pointed Star of David had been singled out for special defilement: a crudely drawn Nazi swastika. He stopped again and began to turn around. He wanted to run, to get far away from this place of death and destruction. He didn’t want to see it. He began to wonder if he would even survive it, and that thought made him stop a moment and think.

  He would live through it, of course. He knew that. But he also knew somehow that if he did go back there, to witness exactly what vileness they had selected for his own mother’s memorial, something inside him would die. He was certain of it.

  Although he wasn’t sure exactly what that thing was, he knew instinctively that it was something good, something valuable. As he stood motionless in the steadily increasing drizzle, he realized suddenly what he was on the verge of surrendering. It was whatever tiny vestige might still remain of the child he once was. It was his innocence.

  Looking around at the damage to all of those carefully chosen monuments to other people’s mothers and fathers, husbands and brothers and sisters, Dugan suddenly felt embarrassed and ashamed. It was as if he had somehow been a part of this or allowed it to happen and not raised a finger to stop it.

  He began to walk with purpose toward his mother’s grave. He owed her at least that much. He kept his head down as he approached her resting place, occasionally stepping over or around the toppled headstones. Where he couldn’t avoid it, his feet crunched loudly upon countless fragments of shattered granite. When he arrived at the place, he raised his head slowly and felt a cold shiver run up his spine. It took him more than a few moments to absorb what he saw.

  The headstone was standing and unmarked. His chill increased as he slowly looked around at the graves on every side. There was not a single headstone in the vicinity that was not marred or defaced in some way except his mother’s. He staggered back before collapsing to his knees on the wet ground. Closing his eyes, Dugan put his head between his legs and for a moment felt a sickening sense of déjà vu.

  When he could, he looked up again toward his mother’s headstone, realizing that when he felt up to it, he was going to have to look at the other side. Perhaps the joke was already on him, and they had indeed saved the worst for his own mother; maybe they were watching him even now from the woods, lying in wait for him to discover the insult on the other side of his poor mother’s headstone.

  He got up, and before he could stop himself, he leaped over to the other side to have a look. It was unmarred. He was ashamed and confused to find himself strangely wishing that her marker had suffered the same fate as all the others. He could have dealt with that. He was not at all certain he could deal with this, this bizarre alternative.

  After another moment, he really did feel as if he was being watched and turned around suddenly to scan the horizon. No cars moved along the wet road down which he had come. He peered into the woods to his left, then looked toward the center of the cemetery, occupied by the large granite mausoleum of the Popes, one of the founding families of Grantham. Only now did he notice that the mausoleum itself had been sealed off.

  Multiple police sawhorses blocked the short steps that led inside. Crime scene tape had been run across the large pillars in front of the building and snaked around the rest of it, leaving no doubt that something had happened there. Dugan started walking toward it, feeling somehow drawn to it, only to stop again a moment later with that same eerie feeling that he was being watched.

  He spun around more quickly, and this time he saw him. Skunk had leaned his own bicycle against the stone wall that marked the entrance to the graveyard, on the opposite side from where Dugan left his, and was bent over and doing something with his hands. As he squinted to get a better look, it occurred to Dugan that Skunk had probably stopped to roll himself a cigarette, from tobacco left in half-smoked butts he’d found by the side of the road or in public ashtrays around town. Raindrops fell from Skunk’s ever present red checked hat. The flaps were down this morning in deference to the cold and wet.

  Dugan looked back at the mausoleum and again felt strangely drawn toward it. He found himself a moment later on the lowest step of the large crypt walking slowly up the steps, though he couldn’t remember just exactly how he got there. But that was all right, because from where he stood now he could smell something… wonderful…like the smell of chocolate chip cookies and fresh baked hot apple pie right out of the oven on Thanksgiving morning with your family all gathered around. It smelled like the pies his mother used to bake. He began to move closer and reach for the gate…

  …when suddenly he couldn’t breathe, and the smell was not cookies or pie but the smell of that time Jimmy stayed over his house and his dog had followed him and gone to sleep underneath Dugan’s porch. It rained for days and days after that. They looked everywhere for the dog but couldn’t find him. A week and a half later Dugan began to see the flies and then he began to smell something awful coming from underneath his porch…

  …and only after running down the steps and across the graveyard, leaping over the toppled gravestones and vaulting over police sawhorses, not until he was back out on the street, did he dare take in another breath and look up to see that Skunk was gone.

  2

  When last we left our hero

  Dugan opened his eyes when he sensed the light recede from the grimy windows and yellowed curtains of the room where he had slept. The last gray light of day had only moments ago faded away to nothing, leaving the room he was in the dusky color of smoke. He closed his eyes again and tried to will himself back to sleep, but when thunder rattled the windows he knew that for this evening, sleep had abandoned him. He had already slept the day away.

  Untangling himself from the old comforter, he sat up drunkenly on the tattered couch and tried standing on wobbly legs. He faltered a moment and reached his hand out against the wall to steady himself. Remembering how to walk, he went stiff-leggedly across the ancient oriental carpet and grabbed his knapsack. Then he went down the hall and into the bathroom, where he swallowed the first of his thrice-daily regimen of pills.

  After a quick breakfast of warm tomato juice and a cold Pop Tart, he was still hungry, so he dug out his rain slicker and boots. He put them on and walked out onto the porch. Although he felt the hankering for some more of that good gas station coffee, he decided instead to take a long walk. He went down the steps and into the backyard, then walked through the drizzle, over the muddy ground, and up and over the small hill into the woods. If anything, the woods were deeper and thicker than they had been when he was a boy, but even in the dark, he knew he would have no troub
le finding his way around.

  It was cold outside, although above freezing. He was cold all the time now anyway so he put it out of his mind. After wandering through the woods for a while, he stumbled upon the first of the three ancient stone walls he knew he would climb over on his way up to the quarry. He stopped for a moment to remember.

  Dugan hadn’t given much thought to stone walls as a kid. Back then, they were just another almost invisible feature of the New England landscape and his daily life. Only after moving away did he realize he would miss them. He remembered seeing a movie about Ireland a few years ago. There were stone walls everywhere: they climbed up and over the highest mountains, and criss-crossed each other in the deepest valleys below. He remembered thinking the Irish must have been as enamored of the walls as were Dugan’s Colonial forebears, although Irish stone walls were white, not the greenish-gray of his own beloved New England stone walls. After a moment, Dugan hopped over the low wall and went deeper into the woods. Along the way, he climbed the two others and then followed the remnants of the abandoned railway.

  Although he felt a strange pull, he took a detour around Lookout Hill to avoid the outcrop of boulders on the other side. There would be plenty of time for that, he thought, and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

  About two-thirds of the way up the hill, the tower began looming above him. Its open and still unbarred windows seemed to stare down on him and follow him as he moved. He thought about climbing the tower, but decided not to. It was still too painful. Instead, he made his way up to the quarry, where he spent the rest of the night sitting on a huge slab of hard granite that jutted precariously out into thin air, thirty feet above the frigid water, thinking about lost friends.