Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary)

by Jeff Strand

  "I need to know that he's okay," I said.

  The blade swirled around in a figure-eight, and then was removed. The person didn't step away.

  "This would be a lot less awkward if you would say something. I thought people like you always had those voice disguiser gizmos."

  No response.

  "Look, I assure you that your whole intimidation thing has been a rousing success! I'm scared! I'll play along with your little game to keep you from slamming that knife through my neck! But you've got to give me some kind of proof that Roger is still alive."

  I let out a grunt of pain as my captor punched me in the face.

  "That wasn't proof," I explained.

  Another punch, not entirely unexpected.I decided to shut up and let things run their natural course.

  Whoever it was stood in front of me, motionless.I could hear nothing but a very soft breathing and Jennifer's muffled crying in the background. Finally, after about a minute, the person walked back to her.

  Jennifer's sobs could suddenly be more easily heard—clearly she'd beenungagged . "Please, Andrew," she begged. "You have to promise that you won't involve the police."

  I had to fight tears of my own as I realized that Roger was probably dead. I mean, was I really supposed to believe that I could just say "Scout's Honor" and be released? Even if my captor really did intend to let me go, nobody could be stupid enough to trust that I would simply return to my everyday life as if nothing had happened, not without proof that Roger was still alive.

  "Okay, listen, Mystery Guest, you want the key, right? I'll give you the key. It's right here in my pocket. I don't want it. Take it."

  I thought I heard a snort of laughter.

  "Okay, so, you probably already took the key. I'm sort of stuck working with nothing but context clues here, so cut me some slack. If you've got the key, there's no reason to keep Roger. I don't know who you are and I don't care, so just free us and go unlock whatever it is you want to unlock!"

  "Andrew, be quiet!" shouted Jennifer. "I have to read you a message. Pay attention. It says `Your friend is alive, and if you ever want to see him again you won't go to the police. If you so much as look at acop, believe me, he will die and he will die slowly. Do you understand?'"

  "Yes, I understand," I said.

  I listened to thescratchings of pencil on paper for a few seconds, and then Jennifer began to read again. "`Do not test me, or your friend will end up like'...oh God no...!"

  Jennifer let out a shriek of terror, which was cut off by the sound of a knife slamming into flesh. I'd never heard that sound before, but there was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was. Jennifer began making gasping and gurgling noises as the knife fell again and again.

  After the final plunge of the knife, the room fell silent except for the sound of dripping. My ears were ringing and my fists were clenched so tightly together that my fingernails were digging into the skin.

  Then the killer began to walk toward me again.

  I was so frightened I couldn't even blurt out a promise to keep quiet. The knife slid back underneath the burlap and moved across my throat the same way as before, this time slick with warm blood. A drop ran down my chest. I sucked in a deep breath as the tip poked a pinprick hole in my skin.

  The knife moved away. I heard the sound of a cap being removed from a bottle, and then my nostrils burned as a chloroform-soaked rag was shoved against my face. Everything went blurry, and I returned to the wonderful world of unconsciousness.

  I WOKE UP in a ditch. There are much worse places to wake up, such as tied to a chair with a burlap sack over your head in a room with a brutal killer, but it's still not the most delightful waking experience. I was lying on my side in the mud, with a nice sharp stick poking me in the thigh.

  To my great surprise, Roger was there as well. I could barely see him in the dark, but he was lying on his back with his eyes closed.

  I sat up, letting out a small groan as my brain neglected to rise with the rest of my body. I reached over and prodded Roger's ankle. "Roger...?"

  He moaned something that was probably "Huh?"

  "You alive?"

  "I don't know yet. I doubt it."

  I pulled up my sleeve, but the face of my light-up wristwatch had been shattered so I couldn't tell what time it was. Since it was still dark, Helen wouldn't be off work and wouldn't have the entire police force looking for me yet.

  "Do you think you can walk?" I asked.

  "Ask me in a few minutes," he said, though I could barely hear him. "I'm still working on whether or not I'm alive."

  I got to a standing position, nearly losing my balance as my legs tried to give way beneath me, then stepped over to where Roger lay. I reached down and offered my hand. "Come on, we need to get out of here."

  I pulled him to his feet. The arrow had been removed and his leg had been tightly wrapped with a cloth. "There's no way I can walk on my own," he said. "But I know how much you like it when I lean against you, so if you'll be a pal and keep me steady I can probably come with you to civilization." He glanced around the area. "Wherever the hell that may be."

  "Nowhere around here, that's for sure," I said. "How's your back?"

  "Hurts.But there's something wrapped under my shirt, so I think the bleeding's been taken care of. If I start gushing I'll be sure to let you know."

  We got ourselves out of the ditch and began to walk along the side of the road, with Roger holding onto my shoulder for balance. I guess it would have been more dramatic had I been able to carry him rather than merely assist him in limping along, but unfortunately my best friend wasn't a tiny woman.

  And why was he here at all? Why the whole setup about not calling the police if Roger was just going to be dumped in the ditch along with me?

  "I miss anything important?" asked Roger, as we walked along the lonely, deserted road.

  "Yeah.Jennifer was stabbed to death."

  "Jesus. You saw it?"

  "I heard it." I filled him in on everything that had happened since I'd been bashed with the chain. Roger shook his head with disbelief.

  "So I came really close to never waking up again," he said with a shiver. "It's been a really good night to be a hypocrite and turn to religion."

  "Well, I figure there are two explanations for you being released with me. Either something went really wrong, and the killer couldn't afford to keep you around, or he already got whatever he was looking for and didn't need you any more."

  "Or else he has something worse in store," said Roger. "Who would have thought that the simple act of digging up a grave could get so complicated? And we didn't even get the twenty thousand bucks."

  About fifteen minutes later, headlights washed over us as a beat-up pickup truck drove around a corner. I stuck out my thumb and it came to a stop beside us. The driver leaned over, threw open the passenger door, and gave us a look of surprise.

  "Gosh, you're exactly the kind of people my mom would've told me never to pick up!"

  The driver was a heavyset guy with glasses and a thick gray beard. He wore a bright red baseball cap with "Kiss Me" written on it. He was in his sixties or seventies...it was hard to say for sure, because his face sort of looked like somebody had yanked his skull out through his mouth then shoved it back in slightly crooked.

  "Well, my mother always said never to hitchhike, so I guess we're even," I said.

  "Hop on in, you two," said the driver, patting the seat next to him. "Actually,lemme find a towel to put on the seat first. No offense, of course."

  "None taken."

  He fished around on the floor until he found a towel that didn't look much cleaner than we were and spread it out on the seat. I helped Roger in, and then sat down next to him, shutting the door behind me.

  "Where're you headed?" the driver asked.

  "To the nearest phone."

  The truck began to move again. "What can I call you two?"

  I pointed to Roger. "This is RogerTanglen , and I'm An
drew Mayhem."

  "Mayhem?That's aninterestin ' last name."

  "Yeah, I think it explains a lot about my life. So what do we call you?"

  "You can just call me The Apparition."

  Roger and I exchanged a resigned look. With the kind of night we'd been having I guess it made perfect sense that we'd be picked up by a weirdo."Any special reason?"

  "Nope.Just like the way it sounds. You two arelookin ' a little bit injured, if you don't mind mysayin ' so. What happened?"

  "A rampaging weed whacker got us. We fought hard but in the end we were just no match for it."

  "That's about what it looks like. I think there might be a rag or something in the glove compartment if youwanna clean up a bit."

  I thanked him and found the rag. It appeared to have been used to clean heavy machinery, but I didn't want to be rude. I dusted my face off a bit, and then handed it to Roger.

  "Looks like you took a few good hits," the Apparition noted, looking at me.

  "Well, some of these marks are from last week's beating, not tonight's," I explained.

  I began to straighten out my rumpled clothes. As I brushed off my leg, I noticed that something was stuck to the mud on my jeans. I pulled it off and held it up to examine it.

  "What's that?" asked Roger.

  "I'm not sure. Can I turn on the overhead light?"

  "Be my guest," said The Apparition.

  I flipped on the overhead light and saw that it appeared to be the corner of a playing card, though not from a traditional deck. It had the number 1 and depicted what looked like the end of a forked tail.

  "I don't know what this is," I admitted. "Maybe it's Satanist currency.A Devil Dollar."

  "I hate those damn Satanists," The Apparition muttered. "I haven't met any, but I sure have read about `em, and what I've read I hate."

  I put the corner of the card in my pocket. It probably wasn't important, but it also wasn't exactly going to weigh me down. And any clue might be helpful if I wanted to track down the killer, not that I was necessarily going to try and do so.

  "Do you know what time it is?" I asked.

  "The radio said it was about two-thirty, but I forget how long ago that was."

  "Thanks," I said. I shared another look with Roger, and we made a silent pact to keep speech to a minimum for the rest of the ride.

  THE APPARITION dropped us off at a convenience store and wished us luck in our future endeavors, especially if they involved bringing harm to Satanists. After finding out from the clerk that it was almost four and that we were thirty miles from Chamber, I went to the pay phone and dug out a quarter. I also thought to check for my wallet, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it hadn't been stolen.

  "Andrew?" asked Helen, after one of her co-workers finally retrieved her. "Are you okay?"

  "Um, no, not really.I'm here with Roger. Do you think you could get off early?"

  "I'll have to do some pleading, but yeah, if it's an emergency of course I can. What happened?"

  "I'll explain it all when I see you. By the way, could you be a sweetheart and bring stuff to help tend to a couple of arrow wounds?"

  After giving the specifics on my location, I hung up and we went inside to buy a few Hershey's bars. The talk with my wife was not going to be pretty, and we were going to need a serious sugar buzz to get through it.

  Chapter 5

  WHEN HELEN finally made it to the convenience store, I gave her one of the candy bars as a peace offering, though I was pretty certain that the astounding power of chocolate wasn't going to get me out of this one. She reacted to our injuries with no small degree of concern, and insisted on checking out Roger's wounds right there in the parking lot.

  "What on earth happened to you guys?" she demanded.

  "Maybe you should wait until you're done fixing him before I explain," I said. "I'd really hate for you to make a mistake because you were pissed."

  She regarded me intently, and then agreed that might be a good idea and took off Roger's shirt. "Whoever did this certainly wasn't a doctor," she said, unwrapping the cloth. "Can you lift your arms above your head?"

  Roger did so with a wince.

  "It got you in the shoulder blade. A couple inches to the right and you could've been paralyzed for life. That's why you shouldn't hang around my husband."

  She cleaned out the wound and redressed it, assuring Roger that he was going to be okay. The leg wound was also not going to cause permanent damage, though Roger would definitely be on crutches for a while.

  "And I'm driving you two to the hospital for x-rays, just in case," she said. "Don't argue."

  I'm pretty stupid on a regular basis, but I wasn't stupid enough to argue.

  As Helen drove us back to Chamber, Roger in the back seat, me in the hot seat, I told her the truth about what had happened. Okay, that's a lie. If I'd told her what really happened, she would have been an absolute nervous wreck and I would have been dead from the stress of living with a woman in that state of anxiety.

  I wanted to stick to the truth as much as possible, unappealing as it was, so I confessed about thegraverobbing bit. However, in the censored version, we'd been caught by a couple of hunters before we could unearth the coffin. Things got seriously out of hand, things were said, arrows were fired, and we ended up getting the crap beat out of us.

  The story sounded credible as I told it, but to be honest my thought patterns were so shaky by this time that I could have been telling my wife that a magical turnip had inflicted our injuries and it would have sounded logical. To Helen's credit, she allowed me to finish my story before freaking out.

  "What in God's name wereyouthinking? " she demanded. "What kind of sick, twisted, demented, deviant thoughts were running through your minds to make you agree to do that? I absolutely cannot believe that the man I married, the father of my children, would do something so appalling!"

  "I had no idea it was going to turn out this way," I said. "I thought we'd dig a hole, grab a key, and go home twenty thousand dollars richer. Nice simple evening."

  "This is just...I mean...it's just...I mean...holy shit, Andrew!"

  "I agree."

  Helen took several deep breaths. "Okay, look, I am so mad at you right now that I can't possibly verbalize it without an aneurysm, but we're not going to get into that right now. You've had an incredibly traumatic experience and I don't want to make things worse for you. But once you're healed, things are going to be very bad for you."

  THE HOSPITAL visit revealed that I did not have a concussion and that if I wanted my face to continue to look nice I was going to have to quit letting people punch me. It also confirmed that Roger's leg and back were going to heal fine, and that he was totally incompetent at walking on crutches. Fortunately, Helen agreed not to call the police to investigate the abusive hunters, since we'd have to explain why Roger and I were in the woods.

  Instead of dropping Roger off at home, we decided to have him sleep at our place. While Helen took a shower, I opened the foldout bed on the couch and spoke quietly with him.

  "We obviously can't go the police," I said, "but we've got to investigate, see what we can find out."

  "Why?"

  "Because the killer's still out there!"

  "Yeah, but he got what he wanted, there's no reason for him to come after us," Roger insisted.

  "You're right, but, Idunno , there's some weird instinct inside me saying that somebody who buries a man alive and stabs a woman to death shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. What do you think?"

  "My leg hurts."

  "Look, you don't have to help if you don't want to, but I'm going to try and find out what the whole deal is. So what do we know? Our suspect is acquainted with either Jennifer or Michael Ashcraft or both.Probably both.Vicious right hook.Decent archer. What am I missing?"

  Roger had nothing to add.

  "Okay, so it's not much, but it's a start." I took the business card out of my pocket. "First thing tomorrow, I'll find out what this
Ghoulish Delights thing is. Maybe we'll get lucky and the killer will be hanging around in bloodstained clothes."

  Roger shrugged. "Could I have an extra pillow?"

  Helen's shower ended. As I heard the hair dryer turn on, I quickly looked through the phone book and found Michael Ashcraft's name. I dialed the number and got his answering machine. It was a man's voice, presumably Michael's. He sounded a little different when he wasn't shrieking.