The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Long story short, that’s how Doug wound up manning a shovel. The money was decent and frankly, he needed the bank. “Answer me one question, though,” he said to Craignotti. “Where did you get all that shit about Sheila Morgan, I mean, why did you use that to approach me?”

  “Oh, that,” said Craignotti. “She told me. Was trying to trade some tight little puddy for a ride outta town.” Craignotti had actually said puddy, like Sylvester the Cat. I tot I taw . . . “I laughed in her face; I said, what, d’you think I’m some kinda baby-raper? I woulda split her in half. She threw a fit and went off and fucked a bunch of guys who were less discriminating. Typical small-time town-pump scheiss. She musta lost her cherry when she was twelve. So I figured you and me had something in common – we’re probably the only two men in town who haven’t plumbed that hole. Shit, we’re so fucking honest, folks around here will think we’re queer.”

  Honor and ethics, thought Doug. Wonderful concepts, those were.

  There were more than a thousand graves in Hollymount Cemetery, dating back to the turn of the 19th century. Stones so old that names had weathered to vague indentations in granite. Plots with no markers. Minor vandalism. The erosion of time and climate. Cog-gins, the undertaker, had collated a master name sheet and stapled it to a gridded map of the cemetery, presenting the crew picked by Craignotti with a problem rather akin to solving a huge crossword puzzle made out of dead people. Doug paged through the list until he found Michelle Farrier’s name. He had attended her funeral, and sure enough – she was still here.

  After his divorce from Marianne (the inevitable ex-wife), he had taken to the road, but had read enough Kerouac to know that the road held nothing for him. A stint as a blackjack dealer in Vegas. A teaching credential from LA; he was able to put that in his pocket and take it anywhere. Four months after his arrival in Triple Pines, he attended the funeral of the only friend he had sought to develop locally – Michelle Farrier, a runner just like him.

  In the afterblast of an abusive and ill-advised marriage, Michelle had come equipped with a six-year-old daughter named Rochelle. Doug could easily see the face of the mother in the child, the younger face that had taken risks and sought adventure and brightened at the prospect of sleeping with rogues. Michelle had touched down in Triple Pines two months away from learning she was terminally ill. Doug had met them during a seriocomic bout of bathroom-sharing at Mrs Ives’ rooming house, shortly before he had rented a two-bedroom that had come cheap because there were few people in town actively seeking better lodgings, and fewer who could afford to move up. Michelle remained game, as leery as Doug of getting involved, and their gradually kindling passion filled their evenings with a delicious promise. In her kiss lurked a hungry romantic on a short tether, and Doug was working up the nerve to invite her and Rochelle to share his new home when the first talk of doctor visits flattened all other concerns to secondary status. He watched her die. He tried his best to explain it to Rochelle. And Rochelle was removed, to grandparents somewhere in the Bay area. She wept when she said goodbye to Doug. So had Michelle.

  Any grave but that one, thought Doug. Don’t make me dig that one up. Make that someone else’s task.

  He knew enough about mortuary tradition to know it was unusual for an undertaker like Coggins to also be in charge of the cemetery. However, small, remote towns tend not to view such a monopoly on the death industry as a negative thing. Coggins was a single stranger for the populace to trust, instead of several. Closer to civilisation, the particulars of chemical supply, casket sales, and the mortician’s craft congregated beneath the same few conglomerate umbrellas, bringing what had been correctly termed a “Tru-Value hardware” approach to what was being called the “death industry” by the early 1990s. Deceased Americans had become a cash crop at several billion dollars per annum . . . not counting the flower arrangements. Triple Pines still believed in the mom-and-pop market, the corner tavern, the one-trade-fits-all handyman.

  Doug had been so appalled at Michelle’s perfunctory service that he did a bit of investigative reading-up. He discovered that most of the traditional accoutrements of the modern funeral were aimed at one objective above all – keeping morticians and undertakers in business. Not, as most people supposed, because of obscure health imperatives, or a misplaced need for ceremony, or even that old favorite, religious ritual. It turned out to be one of the three or four most expensive costs a normal citizen could incur during the span of an average, conventional life – another reason weddings and funerals seemed bizarrely similar. It was amusing to think how simply the two could be confused. Michelle would have been amused, at least. She had rated one of each, neither very satisfying.

  Doug would never forget Rochelle’s face, either. He had gotten to play the role of father to her for about a week and change, and it had scarred him indelibly. Given time, her loss, too, was a strangely welcome kind of pain.

  Legally, disinterment was a touchy process, since the casket containing the remains was supposed to be technically “undamaged” when removed from the earth. This meant Jacky and the other backhoe operators could only skim to a certain depth – the big scoops – before Doug or one of his co-workers had to jump in with a shovel. Some of the big concrete grave liners were stacked three deep to a plot; at least, Craignotti had said something about three being the limit. They looked like big, featureless refrigerators laid on end, and tended to crumble like plaster. Inside were the burial caskets. Funeral publicists had stopped calling them coffins about forty years ago. “Coffins” were boxes shaped to the human form, wide at the top, slim at the bottom, with the crown shaped like the top half of a hexagon. “Coffins” evoked morbid assumptions, and so were replaced in the vernacular with “caskets” – nice, straight angles, with no Dracula or Boot Hill associations. In much the same fashion, “cemeteries” had become “memorial parks”. People did everything they could, it seemed, to deny the reality of death.

  Which explained the grave liners. Interment in coffins, caskets, or anything else from a wax-coated cardboard box to a shroud generally left a concavity in the lawn, once the body began to decompose, and its container, to collapse. In the manner of a big, mass-produced, cheap sarcophagus, the concrete grave liners prevented the depressing sight of . . . er, depressions. Doug imagined them to be manufactured by the same place that turned out highway divider berms; the damned things weighed about the same.

  Manning his shovel, Doug learned a few more firsthand things about graves. Like how it could take eight hours for a single digger, working alone, to excavate a plot to the proper dimensions. Which was why Craignotti had been forced to locate operators for no fewer than three backhoes on this job. Plus seven “scoopers” in Doug’s range of ability. The first shift, they only cleared 50 final resting places. From then on, they would aim for a hundred stiffs per working day.

  Working. Stiffs. Rampant, were the opportunities for gallows humor.

  Headstones were stacked as names were checked off the master list. BEECHER, LEE, 1974–2002 – HE PROTECTED AND SERVED. GUDGELL, CONROY, 1938–2003 – DO NOT GO GENTLY. These were newer plots, more recent deaths. These were people who cared about things like national holidays or presidential elections, archetypal Americans from fly-over country. But in their midst, Doug was also a cliché – the drifter, the stranger. If the good folk of Triple Pines (the living ones, that is) sensed discord in their numbers, they would actively seek out mutants to scotch. Not One of Us.

  He had to get out. Just this job, just a few days, and he could escape. It was better than being a mutant, and perhaps getting lynched. He moved on to STOWE, DORMAND R., 1940–1998 — LOVING HUSBAND, CARING FATHER. Not so recent. Doug felt a little bit better.

  They broke after sunset. That was when Doug back-checked the dig list and found a large, red X next to Michelle Farrier’s name.

  “This job ain’t so damned secret,” said Joe Hopkins, later, at Callahan’s. Their after-work table was five: Joe, Jacky, Doug, and two more guys from t
he shift, Miguel Ayala and Boyd Cooper. Craignotti sat away from them, at his accustomed roost near the end of the bar. The men were working on their third pitcher. Doug found that no amount of beer could get the taste of grave dirt out of the back of his throat. Tomorrow, he’d wear a bandana. Maybe.

  “You working tomorrow, or not, or what?” said Craignotti. Doug gave him an if-come answer, and mentioned the bandana. Craignotti had shrugged. In that moment, it all seemed pretty optional, so Doug concentrated on becoming mildly drunk with a few of the crew working the – heh – graveyard shift.

  Joe was a musclebound ex-biker type who always wore a leather vest and was rarely seen without a toothpick jutting from one corner of his mouth. He had cultivated elaborate moustaches which he waxed. He was going grey at the temples. His eyes were dark, putting Doug in mind of a gypsy. He continued: “What I mean is, nobody’s supposed to know about this little relocation. But the guys in here know, even if they don’t talk about it. The guys who run the Triple Pines bank sure as shit know. It’s a public secret. Nobody talks about it, is all.”

  “I bet the mayor’s in on it, too,” said Miguel. “All in, who cares? I mean, I had to pick mushrooms once for a buck a day. This sure beats the shit out of that.”

  “Doesn’t bother you?” said Boyd Cooper, another of the backhoe jockeys. Older, pattern baldness, big but not heavy. Bull neck and cleft chin. His hands had seen a lifetime of manual labor. It had been Boyd who showed them how to cable the lids off the heavy stone grave liners, instead of bringing in the crane rig used to emplace them originally. This group’s unity as mutual outcasts gave them a basic common language, and Boyd always cut to the gristle. “Digging up dead people?”

  “Nahh,” said Jacky, tipping his beer. “We’re doing them a favor. Just a kind of courtesy thing. Moving ’em so they won’t be forgotten.”

  “I guess,” said Joe, working his toothpick. He burnished his teeth a lot with it. Doug noticed one end was stained with a speck of blood, from his gums.

  “You’re the teacher,” Boyd said to Doug. “You tell us. Good thing or bad thing?”

  Doug did not want to play arbiter. “Just a job of work. Like resorting old files. You notice how virtually no one in Triple Pines got cremated? They were all buried. That’s old-fashioned, but you have to respect the dead. Laws and traditions.”

  “And the point is . . . ?” Boyd was looking for validation.

  “Well, not everybody is entitled to a piece of property when they die, six by three by seven. That’s too much space. Eventually we’re going to run out of room for all our dead people. Most plots in most cemeteries are rented, and there’s a cap on the time limit, and if somebody doesn’t pay up, they get mulched. End of story.”

  “Wow, is that true?” said Jacky. “I thought you got buried, it was like, forever.”

  “Stopped being that way about a hundred years ago,” said Doug. “Land is worth too much. You don’t process the dead and let them use up your real estate without turning a profit.”

  Miguel said, “That would be un-American.” He tried for a chuckle but it died.

  “Check it out if you don’t believe me,” said Doug. “Look it up. Behind all that patriotic rah-rah-rah about community brotherhood and peaceful gardens, it’s all about capital gains. Most people don’t like to think about funerals or cemeteries because, to them, it’s morbid. That leaves funeral directors free to profiteer.”

  “You mean Coggins?” said Joe, giving himself a refill.

  “Look, Coggins is a great example,” said Doug. “In the outside world, big companies have incorporated most aspects of the funeral. Here, Coggins runs the mortuary, the cemetery, everything. He can charge whatever he wants, and people will pay for the privilege of shunting their grief and confusion onto him. You wouldn’t believe the markup on some of this stuff. Caskets are three times wholesale. Even if they put you in a cardboard box – which is called an ‘alternative container’, by the way – the charge is a couple of hundred bucks.”

  “Okay, that settles it,” said Miguel. When he smiled big, you could see his gold tooth. “We all get to live forever, because we can’t afford to die.”

  “There used to be a riddle,” said Doug. “What is it: the man who made it didn’t want it, the man who bought it had no use for it, and the man who used it didn’t know it. What is it?”

  Jacky just looked confused.

  His head honeycombed with domestic beer, Doug tried not to lurch or slosh as he navigated his way out of Callahan’s. The voice coming at him out of the fogbound darkness might well have been an aural hallucination. Or a wish fulfillment.

  “Hey stranger,” it said. “Walk a lady home?”

  The night yielded her to him. She came not as he had fantasised, nor as he had seen her in dreams. She wore a long-sleeved, black, lacy thing with a neck-wrap collar, and her hair was up. She looked different but her definitive jawline and frank, grey gaze were unmistakable.

  “That’s not you,” he said. “I’m a tiny bit intoxicated, but not enough to believe it’s you.” Yet. There was no one else on the street to confirm or deny; no validation from fellow inebriates or corroboration from independent bystanders. Just Doug, the swirling night, and a woman who could not be the late Michelle Farrier, whom he had loved. He had only accepted that he loved her after she died. It was more tragic that way, more delusionally romanticist. Potent enough to wallow in. A weeper, produced by his brain while it was buzzing with hops and alcohol.

  She bore down on him, moving into focus, and that made his grief worse. “Sure it’s me,” she said. “Look at me. Take a little bit of time to get used to the idea.”

  He drank her in as though craving a narcotic. Her hair had always been long, burnished sienna, deftly razor-thinned to layers that framed her face. Now it was pinned back to exhibit her gracile neck and bold features. He remembered the contour of her ears. She smiled, and he remembered exactly how her teeth set. She brought with her the scent of night-blooming jasmine. If she was a revenant, she had come freighted with none of the corruption of the tomb. If she was a mirage, the light touch of her hand on his wrist should not have felt so corporeal.

  Her touch was not cold.

  “No,” said Doug. “You died. You’re gone.”

  “Sure, darling – I don’t deny that. But now I’m back, and you should be glad.”

  He was still shaking his head. “I saw you die. I helped bury you.”

  “And today, you helped ww-bury me. Well, your buddies did.”

  She had both hands on him, now. This was the monster movie moment when her human visage melted away to reveal the slavering ghoul who wanted to eat his brain and wash it down with a glass of his blood. Her sheer presence almost buckled his knees.

  “How?”

  “Beats me,” she said. “We’re coming back all over town. I don’t know exactly how it all works, yet. But that stuff I was buried in – those cerements – were sort of depressing. I checked myself out while I was cleaning up. Everything seems to be in place. Everything works. Except for the tumor; that kind of withered away to an inert little knot, in the grave. I know this is tough for you to swallow, but I’m here, and goddammit, I missed you, and I thought you’d want to see me.”

  “I think about you every day,” he said. It was still difficult to meet her gaze, or to speed-shift from using the accustomed past tense.

  “Come on,” she said, linking arms with him.

  “Where?” Without delay his guts leaped at the thought that she wanted to take him back to the cemetery.

  “Wherever. Listen, do you recall kissing me? See if you can remember how we did that.”

  She kissed him with all the passion of the long-lost, regained unexpectedly. It was Michelle, all right – alive, breathing, returned to him whole.

  No one had seen them. No one had come out of the bar. No pedestrians. Triple Pines tended to roll up the sidewalks at 7:00 p.m.

  “This is . . . nuts,” he said.

  S
he chuckled. “As long as you don’t say it’s distasteful.” She kissed him again. “And of course you remember that other thing we never got around to doing?”

  “Antiquing that rolltop desk you liked, at the garage sale?” His humor was helping him balance. His mind still wanted to swoon, or explode.

  “Ho, ho, very funny. I am so glad to see you right now that I’ll spell it out for you, Doug.” She drew a tiny breath of consideration, working up nerve, then puffed it out. “Okay: I want to hold your cock in my hand and feel you get hard, for me. That was the dream, right? That first attraction, where you always visualise the other person naked, fucking you, while your outer self pretends like none of that matters?”

  “I didn’t think that,” Doug fibbed. Suddenly his breath would not draw.

  “Yes you did,” Michelle said. “I did, too. But I was too chicken to act. That’s all in the past.” She stopped and smacked him lightly on the arm. “Don’t give me that lopsided look, like I’m the one that’s crazy. Not now. Not after I died, thinking you were the best damned thing I’d found in a long time.”

  “Well, there was Rochelle,” said Doug, remembering how cautiously they had behaved around her six-year-old daughter.

  “My little darling is not here right now,” she said. “I’d say it’s time to fulfill the fantasy, Doug. Mine, if not yours. We’ve wasted enough life, and not everybody gets a bonus round.”

  “But—” Doug’s words, his protests had bottlenecked between his lungs. (And for-crap-sake why did he feel the urge to protest this?)

  “I know what you’re trying to say. I died.” Another impatient huff of breath – living breath. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know if it’s temporary. But I’ll tell you one thing I do know: All that shit about the ‘peace’ of the grave? It doesn’t exist. It’s not a release, and it’s not oblivion. It’s like a nightmare that doesn’t conveniently end when you wake up, because you’re not supposed to wake up, ever! And you know what else? When you’re in the grave, you can hear every goddamned footfall of the living, above you. Trust me on that one.”