The Grave - An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels)
Page 23
"Joshua, please. Joshua, please. Andy. It's your Andy."
Wavering. Face shifting to soft, to warm, to cotton, to parchment. Hair darkening, glinting, greying, falling in rotten tangles over his wrists. Eyes wide, eyes narrowed, pleading and promising and sinking into hollows. Her breasts firmed, thrust, and sagged, her stomach flattened and stretched, and he compelled himself not to notice when flags of skin broke from her fingers to cling to his hands.
"Joshua, please. Joshua . . . please. I love you. I won't leave you. Joshua, please, don't . . . send . . . me . . ."
Blood seeped from one corner of her mouth; she had bitten through her tongue. He could taste blood in his own mouth; he had bitten through the inside of one cheek. Her nostrils flared and widened, the nose collapsing in bloodless flakes, falling inward, vanishing, while her blackened teeth began rattling down her throat.
The door. He heard someone pounding at the door. The knob turning weakly, the frame trembling slightly.
When he felt his fingers began to slip into slime, he yanked his hands away and leapt off the bed, wiping his palms hard on his jeans over and over while the ceiling's glaring eye outlined the robe that settled down around the corpse. He fell against the wall, licking his lips and staring. Inched his way around the outside of the room, trying not to see, listening instead to the faint knocking at the door. He considered climbing out to the porch roof and dropping to the ground, changed his mind when he remembered there was still Murdoch left to face. The knocking stilled. He held a hand over his mouth and pulled open the door.
The hallway was dark. The light from the room spilled timidly over the threshold, over the crumpled bundle of clothes that lay huddled against the baseboard. A hand poked from a red plaid sleeve. A hand bunched loosely into a fist. A hand whose flesh lay in grey patches on the flooring.
He pulled himself to the staircase, climbing along the wall, and twice nearly fell as he used the banister for a crutch. A moment . . . an hour later he was standing outside and there were fireworks in the sky. Shivering, still naked to the waist and without his shoes and socks, he watched the display until it was over. Then he hoisted himself to his father's shoulders and walked slowly back to town.
By the end of the week he was done with the police. He had told his story as he had planned to do while Andrea was still . . . Andy. This time, however, he merely said he had no idea where she had gone. They believed him. They comforted him. They pitied him his ordeal so soon after his accident. His parents, at Fred Borg's request, flew back from Colorado, soothing and urging, but he did not want to leave the village, could not run from the place he still called his home. He said nothing to anyone about the ceremony in the hills; and when all the bodies had been exhumed, identified, were taken away to be reburied, he drove out there the night his parents left and set fire to the clearing.
By the end of the month, with Oxrun gossiping about a new scandal at the college, he broke out of his house to put an end to self-pity. Several jobs were waiting for him when it was learned he was back in business, but he only accepted those that took him out of state. He traveled alone. He did his work. He visited his parents, he saw dozens of movies, he found some quiet beaches he had thought he'd forgotten.
And on Labor Day he returned, picked up his repaired Buick from King's Garage, and drove home smiling.
He did not expect that his life would change much, though he knew now the supernatural was not something reserved for children. He suspected, however, (and with brief surges of regret), that it would be some time before he would be able to escort a woman again, and sometime after that (unless he were lucky) when he could forget his last intercourse and resolve the impotency that plagued him. A year or two, maybe five, maybe ten, and his mind would somehow rationalize the farmhouse, the graveyard, drift Andrea to a memory that was only faintly disturbing. On the other hand, he knew full well it might never happen at all, and he resigned himself to the possibility that he could be forever alone, and haunted.
The thought did not cheer him, but it served curiously to calm him. It was something he could accept—like Felicity's passing.
The one thing he would not do was let it drive his mind away.
So he was grinning, sometimes whistling, when his parents called on the morning of his birthday, to wish him well and reinstate their gentle urging for his moving.
And he was grinning, sometimes whistling, when Peter Lee treated him to dinner at the Chancellor Inn. With Fred Borg and his wife, Karl Tanner and his date, Dale Blake and her husband, Sandy McLeod and his girlfriend.
All right, he thought then, so I won't be alone.
And he was grinning when he walked home, and grinning when he went to bed.
He didn't mind, then, the dreams of Andrea as she'd been and the loving they had shared. The process of healing and continuing, he told himself as he stirred. Shaking his head in half-sleep, sitting upright and blinking.
A glance at his watch; it was just before midnight.
"Happy birthday, Josh Miller," he whispered as he grinned . . . as he turned to the open window . . . as he saw the wasps pouring in.