GRAHAM MASTERTON
BURIAL
Contents
New York
One
Two
Three
Phoenix
Four
Five
South-East Colorado
Six
Seven
Colorado
Eight
Nine
Chicago
Ten
Eleven
New York
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
New York
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
A Note on the Author
New York
Naomi was right in the middle of peppering her cod chowder when she heard a sharp scraping sound from the dining room. Slowly she lowered her ladle, listening hard. A sharp scrape like somebody dragging their chair out without lifting it. But of course there was nobody there. Michael and Erwin were still at the synagogue; she wasn’t expecting them back for nearly an hour.
She waited and waited; the chowder simmered, the lid covering the potatoes softly rattled. But the sound wasn’t repeated. All she could hear was muffled rock music from the Benson’s apartment above her, and the echoing of car-horns from the street below. The front door was protected by three deadlocks, a chain and two bolts, so it was hardly likely that anybody could have broken in without her hearing him.
She leaned forward a little so that she could peer through the dining room door. It was only half open, so all she could see was the darkly varnished sideboard with its crowds of framed photographs and its cream lace runners, and the corner of the dining table, and the back of one chair. The light from the candles swivelled and dipped, distorting the shadows; and for a split-second she thought she saw a dark and hostile shape. But common sense told her that there was nobody there; and that it was nothing but light and dark, and the draught from an open window.
She took the strawberry shortcake out of the freezer and set it on the counter to defrost. Then she opened the oven to make sure that the chicken pieces were browning nicely. For a moment her glasses were blinded by the steam.
She closed the oven door, and it was then that she thought she heard it again. The very slightest of scrapes.
She opened and closed the oven door once more, just to make sure that it wasn’t the hinges that had scraped. Then, wiping her hands on her apron, she cautiously approached the dining room door. From here she could see herself reflected in the mirror over the sideboard, a plump, pale woman with a flat Eastern European face and deep-set eyes, her rinsed hair tied with a bright red headscarf. A woman who had been startlingly pretty once, twenty-nine years ago, when she and Michael had first furnished this apartment, and who still retained a girlishness that all of their men friends found appealing. But her knuckles were reddened from housework, and from years of office-cleaning, and although she was still pillowy-breasted, too many potatoes and too much cream had made her zaftig, and she didn’t like to go without her corset. She could diet, she supposed; but food was her only real pleasure, apart from television and singing (she loved choirs and opera), and maybe life was too short to give up such an important pleasure.
She reached out and pushed the door a few inches wider. She paused, listened.
‘Who’s there?’ she demanded. At the same time, thinking how stupid she was. A burglar was going to say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only me, the burglar?’
She waited a few moments more. The shadows flickered, the clock ticked softly on the bookcase. She suddenly felt that she had been standing here for years, at this half-open door — that her fate was waiting for her, just out of sight. What kind of fate, she couldn’t tell. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to find out.
‘I know there’s nobody there!’ she announced, and flinging the door wide open she stepped into the dining room.
She was right. There was nobody there. Only the table set for dinner for three, with its red tablecloth and its white lace overcloth. The best crystal glasses shining, the napkin rings polished; flowers arranged in the centrepiece, which was a porcelain figure of an old Hungarian flower-seller leading a donkey and cart.
The challas loaves were ready, covered with a cloth, the kiddush cup was filled with wine. She had already lit the Shabbes candles and said a prayer for her family, for their health, and their peace and their honour.
She walked around the table, touching everything with her fingertips — glasses, cutlery, side-plates, as if to make sure that they were all sanctified and pure. The Shabbes evening was one of the few times when a woman became a priestess in her own home, endowed with the ability to bless those she loved.
She looked into the living room, too. Nobody there. The big brown upholstered chairs were empty, the television cabinet closed; the whole room smelled of furniture polish and room spray. A little shabby, maybe, a little tired, but a houseproud woman’s home.
Maybe it was rats again. They had been infested with rats three or four times in the years they had lived on 17th Street. Each time the building managers had cleared the rats out and sworn that there was no way for them to get back in, but she had been raised in the Bronx and she knew about rats. They could gnaw their way through solid concrete, given enough time.
She returned to the kitchen. She dusted the chowder with a little nutmeg and decided it was ready although for some reason she wasn’t very hungry any more. The chicken was doing fine: all she had to do now was to cream the potatoes.
Then — there it was again. That scraping noise. Then louder — chair legs dragging, table legs dragging. The tinkling of glasses and cutlery. She opened the drawer and took out her largest breadknife, and stood rigid and terrified — listening.
I should dial 911, she thought. There must be somebody here. No rat could make a noise like that. Rats may be able to chew through concrete but they can’t move furniture.
She crossed the kitchen, holding the knife rigidly upright in front of her, trying to control the trembling in her hand.
She reached the telephone and lifted it off the wall. Keeping her eyes fixed on the dining room door she punched 911 with her left thumb, then lifted the receiver to her ear.
Nothing. The phone was dead.
She replaced the receiver and tried again. Still nothing. No dialling tone, no ringing tone. She tried one more time, and then hung up.
‘If there’s anybody there,’ she called out, ‘my husband and five other men will be home in about a minute. So if I were you, I’d get the hell out.’
She listened. No reply. She hoped if there was somebody there, that whoever it was had believed her. If six men were coming home soon, how come the table was only laid for three?
‘I’m warning you,’ she called. She felt as if she had a thistle caught in her larynx. ‘You have five seconds to get the hell out, then I’m calling the police and the neighbours and God help you.’
Instantly, the apartment was filled with a thunderous banging and colliding of furniture. Doors slammed, glass splintered, chairs toppled over. The huge mahogany sideboard which had once belonged to her grandmother was abruptly and noisily dragged out of view, shedding framed photographs and ornaments and most of her collection of glass paperweights.
She was too terrified even to scream. She stood breathless, gasping, listening to the last tinkling of broken glass; the muted thrumming of rock ’n’roll. What kind of intruder came into your house and pushed all your furniture around? And how had he moved that sideboard? That sideboard weighed a ton. Michael and Erwin had once had to ask Freddie Benson to help them shift it just three feet.
Perhaps it wasn’t an int
ruder, after all. Perhaps it was subsidence. These old houses in the Village had been pretty hastily thrown up, on the whole, when Manhattan had been forcing its way uptown almost daily — street after street, square after square, fashionable one week and derelict the next. Their surveyor had warned them that the ‘entire fabric is suspect: structural wood is partly-rotted and the roof tiles have become porous with age.’
All the same, the house was built on solid rock, and there were no serious cracks in the walls. And she couldn’t feel any subsidence. The floor would have had to slope at almost 45 degrees for that sideboard to slide.
She took two or three careful steps towards the dining room. She whispered a prayer that Michael and Erwin would come home early.
‘I have a knife,’ she said, ‘and I know how to use it.’
She wondered if she had made a serious mistake, telling the intruder that she was armed. It was highly likely that he had a knife of his own; or even a gun. Afriend of hers, Esther Fishman, had been shot in the left side of the face by an intruder, and even six years later she was still psychologically traumatised and badly scarred, and spoke like a ghastly parody of Donald Duck. She thought of Esther and almost decided to drop her knife and run for the front door. Better to lose everything than to end up like Esther.
But this was Shabbes evening; and this was her house; the house which she had prepared for her husband and her brother-in-law. She was Eshes Chayil, the woman of valour, ‘clothed in strength and honour.’
She opened the dining room door. She couldn’t believe what she saw. All of her furniture was crowded against the opposite wall. Chairs, table, sideboard, bookcase even the rug had rumpled up underneath them. Everything on the dinner table was heaped up against the wallpaper: the napkins, the glasses, the challas bread, the salt-cellar.
Even more disturbingly, the pictures on the walls were hanging sideways, as if gravity had changed direction and was trying to pull them towards the opposite wall. The oil-painting of Russia that her Auntie Katia had bequeathed her: the hand-tinted photograph of her great-great-uncles, on their arrival in Brooklyn, 1887. The drawing of Coney Island that Henry had given her when he was eleven. The only picture that was hanging properly was a small framed arrangement of dried flowers.
She approached the furniture with a terrible feeling of bewilderment and dread. No intruder could have done this. She had heard that the devil sometimes tried people’s patience on the Sabbath, trying to shake their faith in God on the very night before their holiest day; and also to tempt them into working when work was forbidden. He would tear all the clothes in a woman’s wardrobe so that she would be tempted to sew; or turn her bread into chalk so that she would be tempted to bake; or make a man’s children sick so that he would have to carry them to the doctor.
There was a strange sour smell in the room, like nothing she had ever smelled before. She thought at first that it was the candles, that the tablecloth might have been burned, but the seven-branched menorah must have been instantly snuffed out when the table shifted, because it lay tilted against the bread-basket and none of its candles was lit.
She had lit each of those candles for her children, for her children’s souls; and for Michael’s soul, too; and Erwin’s.
‘Oh, God protect me,’ she said. She didn’t know what to do. She approached the oil-painting and tried to pull it down into a normal hanging position, but when she did so it immediately swung back to the horizontal. She tried again, but again it swung back.
‘Who’s here?’ she screamed, her voice as shrill as wet fingers dragged down windowpanes.
She pushed her way back to the living room. Empty, shadowy, but still permeated with that sour offensive smell.
‘Who’s here’ she screamed again.
She ran around the apartment. The bedroom, with its pink quilted bed. The bathroom. Her frightened face suddenly met her in the mirror, and refused to smile. The spare room, where they kept the rowing-machine. The unused, unloved rowing-machine. Michael’s den, crowded with books and pennants and golf clubs.
‘Who’s here?’ she whispered. Her hands trailed along the walls, touching, pressing, as if to reassure herself that she was walking through real and solid surroundings.
She returned to the dining room. The furniture remained where it was, crowded against the wall. She stared at it for a very long time, breathless. Then she took hold of one of the dining chairs, and carried it back to the centre of the room, and set it down. She watched it, half-expecting it to tumble back to the wall, but it stayed where it was. She found another dining chair, and carried that back to the centre of the room, too, and set that down next to the first chair.
‘Nobody’s here,’ she told herself. ‘Only me. It’s my furniture, it goes where I want it to go.’
It’s my foinitcher. She hated her accent. She had taken elocution lessons, but she couldn’t shake it completely. Maybe her friends didn’t hear it, but she always did. Dere was a little goil who had a little coil. Besides, she didn’t want to talk, not now. Somebody may be listening. Somebody may be hiding. And so long as she talked, she wouldn’t be able to hear him. She wouldn’t be able to hear him breathing. She wouldn’t be able to hear him creeping up behind her back.
She turned, quickly. There was nobody there. There was nothing to do but to drag all the furniture back (apart from the sideboard, she’d have to leave that to Michael and Erwin, and probably to Freddie Benson, too).
She managed to push the table back, and straighten out the rug. Two of her best crystal glasses were broken, snapped-off stems. The flower-seller’s donkey was missing an ear; and her best lace tablecloth was soaked in wine and water. The glass-fronted bookcase had opened, and there were heaps of books on the floor. Exodus by Leon Uris; The Promised Land by Moses Rischin; The Golden Tradition by Lucy S. Dawidowicz. Michael’s bibles, almost. She knelt down and picked them up.
The Golden Tradition had fallen face down, spread open. As she closed it, she saw that the two open pages were blank. She turned to the next page, then to the next, and to the next. Then she riffled through the book from beginning to end. All of the pages were blank.
Maybe a notebook, she thought. A book of days. But then she picked up Exodus and she had read that copy of Exodus herself, that very same copy, and all the pages of Exodus were blank, too.
Desperately, she picked up book after book. Not a word inside any of them. They had all been wiped clean, as if they had never been printed. She stood up stiffly wiping her hands together. I’m sick. Something’s wrong with me. Either I’m sick or I’m asleep. Maybe I fell asleep while I was cooking. There was so much to do, after all. If I go back to bed and lie down, and then maybe open my eyes … maybe this will all be a dream.
She knew this had to be a dream. She would never have broken her best crystal glasses, except in a dream. She would never have broken her donkey’s ear. She would never have let the Shabbes candles go out.
She set up the menorah on the table, took a book of matches out of her apron pocket, and relit the candles, closing her eyes briefly with every fresh flame, praying for Henry and Anne and Leo with every new flame; and for Michael, and Erwin, and for herself.
After she had lit the seventh flame, she opened her eyes. The shadows from the candles were dancing on the wall. But over on the right-hand side, one shadow remained completely still — not dancing, not even trembling, like the shadows of the chair backs. A dark, hunched shape that could have been the outline of a horse’s head or a kind of badly distorted goat.
She stared at it for almost a minute, praying for it to move, daring it to move, but while the other shadows flickered and whirled, it remained totally motionless. Brooding; dark; engrossed in its own dreadful stillness. She lifted the menorah so that all the shadows would swivel and sink. She moved it from side to side, so that all the shadows would shift from left to right. Still it stayed where it was, hunched, motionless, a shadow that refused to obey all the normal rules of light and shade.
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sp; She put down the menorah and crossed the room to the wall. She placed her hand flat on the shadow, cautiously at first, then with more confidence. It was definitely a shadow, not just a dark mark on the wallpaper. So how come it always stayed exactly where it was?
It was then that she noticed another, smaller shadow, on the far end of the wall, almost in the corner. This shadow remained motionless, too, although it was much more recognizable as a man. He appeared to be sitting with his back towards her, his head resting on his arm, as if he were thinking about something, or tired.
After a while, the hunched shadow suddenly moved. She stepped quickly and nervously away from it, one hand raised in front of her to protect herself although how could a shadow jump off a wall? Her heart was pumping so hard that she felt sure that everybody in the entire building could hear it, knocking against her ribcage. The shadow moved, dissolved, shifted and then moved again. It was still impossible for her to say what it was. It appeared to have an enormous bulky head, with strings of loose flesh hanging down from it. It reminded her of that terrible movie The Elephant Man, which Michael had once insisted they watch together. (‘It’s culture … you want to watch The Price Is Right for the rest of your life?’)
Without warning, the hunched shadow lunged across the wall and dropped on top of the figure on the far end of the wall. She watched, mesmerized, as the two shadows appeared to struggle and fight. She kept turning her head, kept looking behind her, to see if there was anything in the dining-room which could be throwing such shadows, but she was alone; she and her furniture, and her flickering seven-branched menorah.
It was like watching a struggle being played out in a 1950s detective movie, shadows against a window-shade. Except that this wasn’t a window-shade, it was a solid wall, and shadows couldn’t be seen through a solid wall.
She was so frightened that she felt like running out of the room, running out of the apartment, bursting into the synagogue and begging Michael to come home. But the hunched-up shadow was tearing the smaller shadow to pieces, lumps and strings and rags, and she had to stay to see what was going to happen.
Burial Page 1
