The cool night air felt hot and heavy in his lungs by the time he finally reached his car again. Donny did a fast skid around the tail end, slipping in the oily muck as he did so. Only fast reflexes stopped him from losing a few teeth against the rear bumper. Gathering his feet again, Donny made the mistake of looking toward the junkyard proper.
From the nearest piles, bits and pieces of tin cans and broken glass bottles rolled free and joined together in a dance, almost as if they were caught in a whirlwind. The faint moonlight shot streaking stars of light off of the reflective surfaces in the vortex; Donny looked on as the litter took shape.
Crusted plastic forks from a dozen different picnics met with Pepsi cans and used Kleenex Facial Tissues in a blinding swirl, then glued themselves to the remains of a dead iron and its frayed cord. Last week's Sunday paper wrapped itself around an old child's shoe, and Donny wondered through his amazement if the shoe was one of those lost by Amos Newberry so long ago. The skeletal frame of a ten speed Huffy wove itself into the mass, and as Donny watched, the junkyard gave birth to a nightmare.
The figure stood as tall as Donny, but was disproportioned. One arm was thin, made mostly of newspapers and what looked like part of a lamp. The other was much thicker, built it seemed out of an old seat cushion from a car, and a few broken bottles. The legs were made from an unsalvageable upright vacuum cleaner and a mop; both glittered with the reflected light from a hundred shards of glass. The torso was made from a thousand discards. But the head--ah, now there was a prize--was constructed almost entirely out of the broken glass, held together by God only knew what. The apparition took one tentative step towards Donny, and a horrid shriek split from its mouth to fill the still air.
Donny whirled quickly when he heard the same hissing rattling sounds coming from behind him. This one looked a little less comical, and a whole lot more dangerous; this one had a derelict chainsaw for its right hand and forearm. Even with half the teeth missing from the chain, it looked horrifying as the remaining blades went into motion.
The sounds of falling debris were coming from all around him, and Donny stared in amazement as more of the things formed. Carlos had screamed when he died. Donny just laughed and laughed, no sanity left in his mind. He kept picturing the looks on the faces of Antonio Vigil and his buddies when they made their next delivery.
Somebody should have told him that the landfill was all filled up. Maybe he could have talked to Carlos, made him see things the right way. Maybe he could have just quit, left on good terms and kept his mouth shut. Maybe he could have used the incinerator on the other side of the trailer.
The odd figures of debris and foul rot moved together to surround Donny Waters, and Donny brayed hysterical laughter into the night. The laughs faded quickly, followed by whimpers and screams, and wet slicing noises, lastly by the final gasp of air to leave Donny's body.
The garbage made its own noises as it sifted back to the same piles it had come from. The wind through the hills of discarded Americana no longer moaned; it screamed, a wounded beast that was, at last, ready to fight back.
The sun was barely rising when the boys tramped their way into the landfill, school books and lunches set just on the other side of the chain link fence that surrounded the place. There were four of them, and they came for the same reason so many children had come over the years. There were secrets inside the place, and maybe even treasures.
"Are you sure about this, Billy?" Tommy Lundt's voice shook a bit as he looked around the place. He'd heard there were big guard dogs that would tear a kid apart for braving the junkyard.
Billy Waters looked back at his friend and squinted against the glare. "Yeah, doofus. My brother works here. Donny says there's all kinds of neat stuff you can find."
"Like what?" That was Earl Hanscomb. Earl was a bigger kid and the main reason that Billy decided to show off. Earl was cool, and he almost always had stuff that no one was supposed to have. Just yesterday, he'd had cigarettes with him and had been willing to share.
"I've been in my brother's room. He's got bunches of Playboys he picked up here."
"Seriously?" Earl sounded excited about that idea, and Billy smiled, knowing that if he played it the right way, he could get in good with the older boy.
"Shit yeah. There might even be a Hustler or two."
They moved into the landfill with renewed excitement, fears about dogs and giant rats paling next to the idea of seeing naked women. Around them, the wind howled, and the discards of a thousand lives and countless hidden deaths moved slowly into position.
Mary's Blessing
Knowing when somebody was about to die was one of Mary Ellison's unique gifts. More often than not, Mary felt that her psychic abilities were a curse. More often than not she desperately wished that someone else was burdened with her special talents, if they could truly be called talents. Mary Ellison was not gifted with the ability to find lost objects, nor was she able to predict the future at a whim. Mary just suffered many a moment of Deja vu and on rare occasions knew when someone close to her had been hurt. Oh, those abilities didn't bother her all that much; it was the other "gifts" that caused Mary to hate her so-called sixth sense.
It was the ability to know when someone was about to die that made Mary rush up from the depths of peaceful slumber and scream into her pillow in the darkest hours of the night. That, and the, thankfully, rare occasions when she heard what she thought must be ghosts calling from the cemetery over near the Baptist church.
Like tonight: The restless spirits seemed to be in rare form, shrieking out their suffering to the winds and praying that someone in the world of the living could end their suffering; someone like Mary, someone who could hear their voices when they talked.
* * *
"Better luck with the next patsy, ghosts. I'm too damned tired to even bother with you." The words were whispered. Mary was afraid that she might offend one of the dead if they ever heard her. A grumpy ghost might decide that it would be more fun to move on over to the house and say, stay right in Mary's closet, where it could make a habit of howling away and knowing that only she could hear its macabre voice.
Mary stared at the shadow patterns that ran across her ceiling and tried not to think about what her brother was doing. Dylan was a big boy now, eighteen years old, and more than capable of making his own decisions; even if they included the wrong ones, like hanging around with Glenn Cobb and the rest of his druggie friends.
She watched the patterns shift and stretch from the ceiling to her wall as a car went past the house. At one-thirty in the morning she had better things to do with her time than worry about her brother, especially when she had to open the diner in less than five hours.
Sleep was almost a hopeless concept by that point, but even a few hours were better than none at all. Mary pulled herself into a fetal position, flipping onto her side. She had just reached the pull-pillows-up- over-the-ears-in-a-futile-attempt-to-get-some-sleep stage, when the voices suddenly stopped.
After that it was easy to get rest. Already suffering from what had to be the first stages of serious sleep deprivation, Mary's eyes were closed almost before she knew what had happened.
It was only much later, when the problems that were soon to come her way were mostly over and she had time to really sit back and relax, that she realized the sounds had never stopped abruptly in the past; they had always pulled a slow fade that took a few hours, sometimes a few days.
* * *
Dylan was a little nervous about this whole scene, but if Glenn said it would be fun, then Dylan was willing to give it a try. He was sitting in the back seat of Glenn's Le Baron, Willis to his right. The front seat held Glenn, and Glenn's best friend Pete. "Hail, hail, the gang's all here."
Pete looked over at Dylan, eyes already bloodshot and a perma-grin stretching his thin lips into a lazy smile. Pete reached back and offered another hit off his joint to Dylan. Dylan shook his head no, Willis took Dylan's toke along with a few of his own. With h
is lungs working overtime to hold in the pungent smoke, Willis managed to ask Dylan what he was talking about in a voice that was barely above a whisper.
"Just thinking about what my sister always says, about there being ghosts in the cemetery."
Willis opened his mouth to reply, but Glenn beat him to it. "Your sister's a fucking nut case, Dilly. Only girl I know who can trip the night away and never need to worry about chewin' on stamps to do it."
"Fuck you, Glenn."
"Only in your dreams and my nightmares, Ellison."
Dylan let it rest. Normally Glenn wasn't that bad about it, and the dude could kick his ass. The last thing Dylan needed was to have Glenn use him as a battering ram against a few headstones.
The whole gang was buzzing along on whatever shit Glenn had been passing around earlier. That suited Dylan just fine. As the button on his shirt pocket said, "Reality is for people who can't handle their drugs." Besides, if he wasn't bopping along to the chemical tune that was playing in his head, he would have never had the guts to come along on this little adventure of Glenn's; he always had his grand schemes.
"I know, let's go trash the graveyard and rustle us up some fun with dead people. Whattaya say, kiddies, won't that be a grand ol' time?" Dylan could not suppress the bitter, sarcastic thoughts. Even mellowed out as he was, he could still feel his balls pull into his stomach at the thought of how his sister looked on the nights when the "Natives were restless," as she liked to put it. To hell with what Glenn liked to think, Dylan fucking KNEW what his sister went through, he heard her scream her self awake on nights when it was really bad. Sometimes he even heard her cry herself to sleep afterwards, on those nights when she could manage to go back to sleep.
Dylan forced thoughts of his sister out of his mind as they pulled up to the Summitville Baptist Church. Even with the growing crime rate in Summitville, the head honchos at the church had never quite gathered the necessary assets to get a fence put around the cemetery. To date there really hadn't been a need for one. I mean, what kind of sick bastards would desecrate a graveyard?
The Le Baron's trunk was filled with all they would need: Spray paint, crowbars, even a twelve pound sledge hammer. "Guess the preacher's gonna scrape up those funds now."
The whole merry crew had discussed the lack of proper protection for the cemetery earlier, every last one of them laughed at Dylan's joke. Except for Dylan, he really didn't find the situation very funny. The more he thought about the whole thing, the more Dylan wished he was at home. With a characteristic sign of impatience, Dylan flipped his long bangs out of his face and hopped out of the car.
Glenn, Willis, Dylan, and even Pete stared out at the tombstones for several minutes; no one moved in the early morning darkness. Out away from the lights of Summitville proper, buried in the silence of what the town called its suburbs, the air felt colder and the light fog that had blanketed the town was more obvious. Bashing a few headstones had been Glenn's idea, but even he didn't look like he wanted to be here.
* * *
The headstones and statuary of the old cemetery stood in the darkness solemnly waiting for the group to make their decision. Scanning the edifices, not a single one of them thought that this would be fun anymore; not a single one of them would admit to their discomfort. What if the others thought he was wussing out?
No one wanted to be the first to back down, and so the whole crew started unloading their tools. Along with the various mechanical devices, there was another twelve pack of Budweiser. Desecration was, after all, thirsty work.
Glenn and the rest of the group started into the silent field, glad that the area had real tombstones instead of those little plaques that you could walk right over. With the plaques, they'd have trouble seeing who was buried where, and they'd risk actually stepping on some of the areas where coffins were buried.
The gang all stopped what they were doing a second time and listened for the sounds of Dave Simpson's patrol car coming by. The only sound they heard was a low mournful howl of the wind as it caressed the tombstones and monuments to the dead.
Glenn took the first swing with his sledgehammer, missing his target and planting the galvanized steel head into the damp grass. "Fuck, missed the bitch." With his words, the cemetery's almost mystical hold on them was broken, and the destruction began in earnest.
In a matter of minutes the whole group was quietly laughing, tipping over headstones and painting whatever slogans came to mind on the marble that was too heavy to topple and too thick to break. The adrenaline from their systems--fueled by a mixture of too much alcohol, too many nervous thoughts, and too much of Glenn's pharmaceuticals--made the work easier than if they were actually being paid to do the strenuous labor.
Willis was the one that lost it first. Willis was the one that dropped his pants and defecated on Simon Monroe's broken marker. After that they all went a little wild. Everyone laughed this time, even Dylan. It was funny, it really was. It was to die for.
* * *
Otis Miles had worked at the First Baptist Cemetery for ten years, and unlike so many in his profession, he was not known for tipping back a few too many during his working hours. Nor was he known for exaggerations or the telling of ghost stories. Otis simply did his job, earned his money, and stocked away what he could towards his retirement. Otis was, in most people's opinion, a damn fine man. No one thought less of him for the work he did, perhaps because he did it so well.
Otis took great pride in maintaining the cemetery. He was careful of the flowerbeds, and he made absolutely certain that the grass was trimmed around each of the headstones. He had his own family here, after all, and it was only proper to respect the dead.
When Otis Miles saw what the group had done to his graveyard, he openly cried tears of outrage. The dignified order that Otis had struggled to maintain was gone, replaced by chaos and spray paint. Whoever had torn the cemetery apart had been very thorough, even making certain that no part of the lawn larger than a pillowcase was left unmarred. Trenches had been cut into the lawn, gaping sores of muddy soil erupted from the neatly trimmed grass. But it wasn't the damage to the lawn, not even the broken statues that qualified as the worst of the damage, no that honor was left for the violated graves.
Otis stared at the earthly remains of George Willingham, placed meticulously between the thighs and uplifted skirt of Amelia Thornton, and stared at the abomination for several minutes, tears of shock and shame gone, replaced by cold, numb hatred. Then he went to his office in the church, and he called Dave Simpson.
Otis knew better than to touch anything. If he touched even one shred of the evidence, something might be lost, some vital clue as to who had committed such sacrilegious acts. Otis desperately wanted the criminals caught. He wanted them tried and hung. This went well beyond vandalism; somebody would pay for what they had done, if not at the hands of the law, then at Otis' own hands.
* * *
Dylan slept late, waking sometime before one P.M. He was exhausted; feeling pain in muscles that he had forgotten even existed in the human body. With a groan he flipped over in his bed so that he faced the ceiling. The whole damned room flipped with him and continued a slow, lazy roll even after he had stopped moving. Oh Lord, how he hated the bed spins. One foot flopped to the ground, clutching desperately at shag carpet with his toes in an effort to stop the wild rotations. No good.
Dylan stayed as still as he could for as long as he could, then he bolted into the bathroom, careening off of the wall on his way, and paid homage to the porcelain goddess. What came out looked to have a little red mixed in with the myriad other colors, and Dylan swore he would lie off of the hooch for a while. It was as he was staring into the dirtied waters of the toilet that he noticed the ring out of the corner of his eye.
On his right hand, on the ring finger, there was a ring that he knew all too well. The ring had belonged to George Willingham, the principle at good ol' Charles S. Westphalen High School, his alma mater. It was a beautiful ring, 24 carat gol
d, in the form of three serpents interwoven. Each of the snake heads had a small emerald for an eye, and in the center of the heads, held in place by the open mouths, a star sapphire.
Oh my yes, it certainly was a beautiful ring, a regular family heirloom for the Willinghams. And it had been buried with the principle when he died two years back. The whole night came to Dylan like a flood of waters from a broken dam, and even as he tried to cry out his denial, he shoved his face back into the toilet bowl. Long after his stomach was empty, the dry heaves continued.
* * *
Mary was in fairly good spirits when she came home from work. The day had gone smoothly enough, the tips had been good, and Karl Golden had actually spent extra time there just so he could flirt with her. At this rate he was bound to ask her out in the near future.
Then that little special treat of hers, that certainty that someone she cared for was in serious trouble, crashed into her head. The feeling hit her like a slammed door, damn near knocking her down to her knees. She had enough presence of mind to grab the doorjamb before she could fall.
With the whole room fading into a gray sort of fog, Mary made for the couch in the living room, falling short of her actual goal and having to climb onto the sofa. Just as quickly as the feeling had arrived it faded away again. "Oh, just passing through to see if we were still welcome, glad to see you, gotta go." Mary giggled half hysterically as she sat in the twilight.
Had she been in a better state of mind, Mary might have heard the whimpering cries coming from the basement where her brother sat, using a pair of needle nose pliers to pull at the ring which adamantly refused to let go of his finger.
Discarded Blessings Page 2
