Dig Ten Graves

by Heath Lowrance

  I was dead and I didn’t care.

  But I did need money. Throwing my last ten dollar bill at the vendor had been a stupid move. I could get by with stealing food, if I had to, but the whole episode had left me drained and tired. As night came rolling in, the rumbling in my stomach grew more insistent, and I knew I’d have to eat soon or pass out right there on the street.

  I walked through the night, trusting to providence to provide me with an answer. Providence didn’t let me down.

  It was almost three in the morning, and I’d been walking for what seemed like years. My feet were swollen in my shoes, my stomach tied in knots of hunger, my throat dry and my head pounding. My eyes had been downcast, mostly, watching the dirty and broken sidewalk get dirtier and more broken. And when I finally looked up, I was a little surprised to find that I’d walked all the way to the East side, the absolute worst part of town. It was a dark, deserted street in an industrial area, the only light coming from a flickering streetlamp at the farthest corner, and not a soul around.

  Not a soul, except for the thin, nervous young man leaning against the sheet metal wall of a factory.

  “Hey,” he said, with a slight nod. He wore tight jeans and one of those cut-off tee-shirts showing off a scrawny midriff. Mascara outlined his big blinking eyes.

  “Hey,” I said back to him. I smiled.

  He sniffed, ran the back of his hand under his nose. “Lookin’ for a date?” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, man, I sure am.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Come over here.” He managed a sickly grin and started into an alley that ran behind him.

  Hands in pockets, I followed.

  A few feet in, he faced me, moved in close, put his hand on my crotch. “You want me to suck it?” he said. “Or you got somethin’ more serious in mind?”

  “Something more serious,” I said.

  I grabbed him by the throat with my dead man’s hands.

  He started to scream right away, but I slammed him against the wall and his breath wheezed out, stinking of cigarettes and spearmint gum. He started to slump, but I held him up, smashed my fist into his nose. It sounded like a vase being broken under a cushion, and blood washed hot over my fingers. I hit him again, the second time getting less crunch and less blood. His eyes rolled back.

  I jabbed him in the gut and he didn’t even have enough breath left to grunt. I let him fall that time, kicked him in the head once on the way down. When he was sprawled on the concrete I kicked him again, and then again, in the face and neck.

  While he lay there, unmoving except for the shallow rise and fall of his frail chest, I stepped back, breathing hard. I glanced around the alley. A few feet away, I spied a broken beer bottle.

  I staggered over to it, picked it up. I staggered back.

  He looked up at me with blank eyes, not even enough strength to beg for mercy.

  I started in with the broken bottle.

  Three minutes later I was done and he was nothing but a scattered mess of blood and ruined flesh. I was on my knees over him, and my throat was raw and I realized I’d been screeching and wailing the whole time, like some mad banshee. I was covered with his blood. Pieces of him were on my shirt and in my hair and he was not the young man he’d been, not anymore. He wasn’t anything.

  I’d taken it all away from him. Just like Molly had taken it all away from me.

  “There,” I screamed at him. “There. How do you like it? How do you like it?”

  And I realized there were tears in my eyes. No, not just tears. I was bawling. I was sobbing like a baby.

  “Goddamnit!” I screamed at the corpse. “Goddamnit!”

  Because I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t dead, after all.

  I was alive, and that was worse.

  The Bad Little Pet

  Peter Lampner lived in his new two-bedroom house for almost three days before he first saw the thing he came to know as The Shape. It was big and black and indistinct, and seemed to grow from the corner of his vision like a creeping cataract.

  He was in bed, half-asleep, when The Shape loomed out of the darkness on the far side of the bedroom and glided silently toward him. He peered at it through half-closed eyes with the sort of numbness that accompanies a half-awake state. He didn’t feel fear, exactly, but an uneasy, muddled confusion.

  The Shape was an enormous mass of dark disconnecting itself from the shadows. It seemed to hover over Peter’s bed, and Peter began coming truly awake then, chills playing along his arms and something like terror gripping him. He thought, oh crap a ghost a demon holy crap who would have thought am I going to die?

  Part of The Shape—only part of it—came toward his face and he flinched away, pressing the back of his head into his pillow. It’s going to strangle me, he thought. It’s going to wrap that inky blackness around my throat and throttle the life right out of me. He squeezed his eyes shut, felt The Shape near him, felt the part of it that came toward his face…

  Felt it brush against his hair.

  Felt it… brush against my hair?

  Gently.

  Lovingly, even.

  The Shape stroked his head with a sweet, kind caress, its black formlessness cool on his brow. Peter opened his eyes and gazed up at The Shape. It was still only a gently swirling mass of black, its edges indefinable and obscure, that seemed to take up all but the very edges of Peter’s vision.

  He sensed something coming off it in undulating waves. Something… content? Kind?

  As The Shape lovingly stroked his hair, Peter thought—with an insight that wasn’t much like him, really—that this being could crush him if it so chose. It could utterly destroy him in a fit of pique or anger. But instead it loved him, or at the very least felt something like calm affection.

  And so Peter felt himself drifting back into sleep, with The Shape stroking his brow, and he felt the contentedness and kindness of The Shape with each gentle stroke, and right before falling entirely back into slumber Peter felt something else, too.

  He felt the soft velvet chains of being completely and irretrievably owned.

  He worked in the accounts receivable department of a big office downtown. The next day, in the break room, he mentioned the dream (because by that time he’d become certain it was a dream) about The Shape.

  Rich, the guy who occupied the cubicle next to his, said, “Shape? Hey, man, was it Natalie Portman? ‘Cuz I had a dream about her the other night, did I tell you?”

  “Yeah, Rich, you mentioned that.”

  “Right. Was it Natalie Portman in your dream?”

  “No. It was just a shape, you know, all big and black—“

  “Big and black?” Chuck said. Chuck actually worked in customer service, but the three of them generally took lunch together. “Big and black? Say, Peter, you trying to tell us something?”

  Chuck and Rich laughed heartily, and Peter smiled with the patience he’d learned after so many years with the two of them.

  “Yeah,” Rich said. “Did the shape look like Samuel L. Jackson, maybe? Or Denzel Washington? You got a thing for the brothers now, Peter?”

  Laughter all around, and Peter forced himself to chuckle good-naturedly. Why, he thought, did I bother to bring it up to these two morons? His head hurt a bit and he wished he’d sat somewhere else for lunch.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got a thing for the brothers now. Once you go black, right?” and Chuck and Rich laughed and laughed and laughed and slapped Peter on the back.

  It was his first house after renting for most of his life, and at thirty-three his parents and friends thought it was long overdue. “Grown-ups own, son,” Dad had said. “This renting business, it’s for the birds. Think of all the money you’ve funneled right into some landlord’s back pocket ever since you left home. All that money could have gone into a place of your own, a place you could really call home.”

  Peter didn’t argue, although he saw very little difference between funneling money into a landlord’s back pocket and
funneling money into a bank’s loan department for the next thirty years of his life. Who really cared? But for the sake of peaceful family relations, he’d taken the small suburban house just four minutes from the freeway when the real estate agent offered him a deal.

  They were standing in the small kitchen, after taking five minutes to tour the house and admire the new windows and faucets, discussing the water pressure and the hardwood floors and the Michigan basement. The agent—a rather bony woman, middle-aged, with the smell of stale cigarette smoke clinging to her company blazer—had said, “The lady who lived here before was a real character. Never married, the whole forty-odd years she lived here. Always had cats, though.”

  “Oh,” Peter had said. “Like a crazy cat-lady kind of thing, right?”

  “Well, not exactly. Not tons of cats running around or anything like that. As far as I know, she only ever had one at a time. Her name was Mrs. Semple. Passed away about a year ago.” The agent looked at Peter sharply, as if she’d just caught herself before stumbling off a cliff, and said, “Not in the home, though, heavens no. She passed away in a nursing home downtown.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “God bless her, huh?”

  “Yeah, God bless her.”

  The agent had said, “So what do you think?” and Peter said he thought it was just fine and the agent smiled broadly and shook his hand.

  Two weeks and thousands of pages of signed documents later, Peter moved into his new home.

  Like everything else that had ever happened to him, Peter felt barely in control of the whole process. He felt—when he actually took the time to think about it—that he actually had very little influence in the direction his life took; things just sort of happened and if you didn’t want to go completely insane you just sat back and let it go. He envied those guys who seemed so on top of things, so… in charge. How do they do it, he would ask himself some nights, when the feeling of being a tiny boat in a huge ocean would almost overwhelm him. How do they do it? How do they wrest control of their own worlds from the iron grip of fate and circumstance?

  If I knew that, Jenna would never have left me.

  So he would shrug mentally and roll over and drift into sleep, thinking, that’s a question for better men than me.

  When he made it home from work, with twilight just settling in and slinking gray light touching the walls, he found his dinner waiting on the table.

  He set his briefcase on the kitchen floor next to him and stared dully.

  Dinner?

  It looked like… chicken. Half a chicken, roasted, with a steaming baked potato and lightly steamed broccoli.

  His favorite.

  He’d had a headache all day, and now… Uneasily, Peter glanced around the kitchen, saw no signs of anyone having been there—no dirty dishes, no clutter, no nothing—except the dinner, still hot, judging from the steam drifting off the potato.

  He said, softly, “Hello?” Then, with more force, “Anybody here?”

  No answer.

  It’s a prank, Peter thought. One of the guys is lurking somewhere in the house, maybe in the bedroom, struggling to keep from laughing out loud. A weird prank, to be sure, and more than a little irritating, but what else could it be?

  Peter backed away from the meal on the table and went into the bedroom. Empty. He tried the bathroom, the study, back into the living room to look behind the couch. He even opened the door to the basement and peered down into the darkness before deciding no one would be so dedicated to a practical joke they would hide in the pitch blackness down there until Peter arrived home.

  Peter was alone in the house, alone with the meal that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere… the meal that smelled really, really good.

  He went back into the kitchen and stood in the doorway staring at the chicken and potato and broccoli.

  “Huh,” he said.

  When was the last time I came home and found dinner waiting for me? When was the last time someone cared that much? Even Jenna had never done anything like that for him before.

  And damn, it smells great.

  He was salivating and before he knew it he had sat at the table and began eating.

  And it was delicious.

  Half-asleep that night, The Shape again came to him, stroking his hair and purring soft words of affection. Peter smiled, stretched luxuriously in his bed, and fell into sleep with the soft blackness caressing his forehead.

  He awoke the next morning to find breakfast waiting for him.

  “You disappoint me,” Jenna had said. “But I suppose I should be used to it by now.”

  They were sitting in his old living room, only days before he moved into the new house, and boxes of his belongings surrounded the ratty sofa he’d owned for too many years. He’d done all the packing himself. Jenna was conveniently out of town during most of that time, and Chuck and Rich couldn’t be reached.

  She’d said the words without rancor, almost with a resigned sadness. It would have hurt if Peter hadn’t been immune to it by now.

  “If you’d only said yes,” Jenna continued, not looking at him. She sipped her glass of wine and pulled away when he tried to scooch closer to her. “Your boss already has doubts about you, why would you give him more ammo?”

  “I’m not interested in taking over any new accounting contracts. How many times do I have to say it?”

  “It’s not a matter of being interested, Peter, it’s a matter of showing you have initiative. How do ever expect to get ahead with the company if you don’t tackle new challenges?”

  “What makes you think I’m interested in getting ahead? I like my position just fine.”

  She scowled at him. He was used to the scowl. She never really looked at him anymore, not without the scowl. “Well, that’s just great, Peter. Don’t worry about the future, God no. They’re outsourcing low level jobs like yours all the time, don’t you know that?”

  “They aren’t going to out—“

  “The only ones who make it, Peter, are the ones who step up to bat. The ones who take the bull by the horns and wrestle some personal control over their lives. When we first met—“

  “When we first met,” Peter interrupted, “I told you I wasn’t a career-minded kind of guy. I don’t live to work, you know, I—“

  “If you say I work to live, I swear to God I’ll scream.”

  And so they’d sat in silence for a few minutes.

  When Jenna finally stood up, he watched her with a sort of dead expression on his face and she’d said, “I don’t know, Peter. I… I need to think. I need to think about us, about where we’re going as a couple. You can’t just coast through life, just letting things happen. You’re a man. I wish you’d start acting like one.”

  She left, and Peter only saw her twice after that. Once, right before he moved, when she came by to tell him she’d thought it over and believed they needed some time apart, and then again, when they met for coffee and she said she’d wanted to see if he’d made any changes in his life or had thought things over.

  “You’re destined for mediocrity, Peter,” she said, long after he felt she had the right to say such a thing to him. “Life is just going to… happen to you.”

  Again, dinner awaited him when he arrived home from work. Steak this time, with French-fried potatoes and a spinach salad. A can of beer sat next to a frosted glass by the plate.

  Peter smiled through the pain in his temples, setting down his briefcase, stomach rumbling. He didn’t remember buying a steak last time he went grocery shopping, but who cared? One never argues with steak.

  He loosened his tie and sat down to eat. The steak was perfect, cooked medium-well, just as he liked it. He made appreciative noises, gobbling it down, not bothering to pour the beer into the glass, just drinking right out of the can.

  About halfway through the meal, The Shape appeared. Hazy and indistinct as usual, it seemed to take up the whole corner of the kitchen, by the stove. Peter placed his knife and fork down gently on the plate, slowly c
hewed the piece of meat in his mouth. The Shape hovered patiently.

  Finally, Peter said, “Thank you.”

  The Shape buzzed deeply, vibrating the floor. Peter felt it through his shoes.

  He said again, “Thank you. For dinner.”

  The Shape gave off pleasant echoes of emotion, pleased.

  “You… you’re very good to me,” Peter said. “I don’t know why. And I don’t know who you are, but… you’re very kind. Thank you.”

  The Shape made a sound that made Peter think of sonic echoes underwater, the sort whales make. It was deep but gentle and anything but threatening. A word seemed to rise up out of the depths, a word that sounded like Petey.

  Peter said, “It’s Peter, actually. I… um. I don’t really care to be called Petey.”

  And again, from the depths of The Shape, Petey.

  It moved across the kitchen toward him, an enormous approaching black hole. It stroked his neck and his shoulder, scratched him gently behind the ear. It rubbed his temples.

  “Ha,” Peter said. “That feels nice. Thank you.”

  He picked up his fork again and started back in on the steak. While he ate, The Shape loomed nearby, like a protective parent.

  He’d just popped some aspirin and was getting ready for bed when his mother and father called to tell him some wonderful news.