Her legs weak with terror, she moved past another grave, no longer worrying or caring about being disrespectful.
Still, she was immediately sorry she did it. For she cut the corner too close as she ran by, and she bumped into the corner of the vault with her hip. The motion was enough to force her to turn and face the headstone. Two hands, nothing but bones covered with rotting, dead flesh, poked through the earth and pointed toward her as if they knew she was there.
Jilly tripped in her effort to move away, sprawling almost flat on her face. She managed to catch herself with both palms at the last minute, although she still landed hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs and make her gasp for her next breath. She ignored the burn in her hip where it made contact with the corner of the vault. It was just as easy to ignore the singe that moved through her hands and elbows and knees where she’d landed on the ground. What was impossible to ignore was the searing pain in her chest as she tried to breathe.
She felt the hands firmly grip her right ankle. The coldness of them touched her through the leg of her pants and her sock. And she was too terrified to look at them. She tried to scream again and again, but all that she was able to get out was a hoarse, whispered gush of air that was quickly lost to the wind. She kicked at the hands with her left foot, making contact. The bones snapped, sounding a bit like a branch snapping from the trees overhead. The hands stayed attached to her ankle, but were no longer attached to the arms where they had been a mere second before.
Jilly scrambled to her feet, tried to ignore the pressure of the hands that still held her ankle, tried to breathe, tried to keep from fainting as darkness threatened her, and turned back toward her car.
She froze and stared, horror gripping her as nothing ever had.
Five graves were open, completely, earth scattered about in all directions, vault lids pushed aside as if they weighed nothing. Five dead, rotting corpses in various degrees of decay drew closer to her, gathering slowly about her, stalking her, as a pack of wolves would close in on a deer. Revolted, disbelieving, she took a step backwards, only to bump into the stiff, but now standing, carcass that had held her ankles fast. She knew who it was because, when it wrapped its stick-like arms about her, Jilly saw it had no hands, only stumpy decay at both wrists. Those wrists pressed into her chest where her sweater closed, not far from where her heart raced in her chest. Even through her sweater, she felt the hard boniness of them, just as she smelled the horrible decayed smell of something much worse than a rotten potato in her cupboard. She panted, desperately trying to draw oxygen through her closed throat. Black spots swam before her eyes.
The five corpses drew closer, sounding almost funny in the quiet cemetery as bone clanked against bone in their efforts to move.
“We want you to stay and play with us, Jilly,” the one rotting corpse before her said. Its voice was raspy and its bare teeth clanked with its words, sounding strangely like a drum beat, accenting the syllables.
Jilly didn’t waste precious time wondering or questioning how this horrific thing before her could know her name, much less how it could speak at all. The shock of her situation was taking its toll. Only the thought of escape and the thought of getting out of the grasp of the terrifying skeleton thing that held her prevailed.
“No . . . No . . . No . . . No . . .” she said over and over.
Instinctively, Jilly kicked at the thing that held her. With another snap of brittle bone, the leg broke and the thing fell backward. Yet, it still managed to hold Jilly with its arms. As it fell, Jilly tumbled to the ground with it. Several bones broke and smashed with a series of snapping and crushing sounds. The arms of the thing still held on to her. The back of her head hit what she knew must have been the chin and teeth of the skull. She tried to roll to her side, roll out of its gripping hold, but it wouldn’t let her move. The others above her cackled and let out sounds that sounded like laughter, their joints and teeth clicking and popping. They knelt around her. One of them pulled at her sweater. Another one poked her with a bony finger, as if it was trying to tickle her in the ribs.
“We’ve been waiting for you, Jilly,” one of them said.
“You’re beautiful, Jilly,” another said.
“We want you to stay with us forever, Jilly,” said the third. It reached up with fingers that still had some flesh attached and lovingly caressed her cheek. With the last of her fading strength, she pulled one hand free and scratched at the brittle hand where it touched her face.
Crushing pain gripped her chest. She no longer tried to comprehend the how or why this was happening to her. Her mind and body now worked on mere instinct, trying simply to survive. The sounds that came from her own throat were nothing more than simple, harsh grunts with the breaths her lungs forced out. Her heart galloped faster than a racing horse and couldn’t keep the pace much longer.
“I want you, Jilly,” one of the horrifying things said. “I want you forever. Promise you’ll stay with me forever.”
Unable to stop the thing on top of her, Jilly stared with wide eyes and indescribable terror as the skeleton with huge protruding teeth drew closer and pressed its mouth to hers in a kiss much like a lover would, only there were no lips to mold to hers. There was just the harsh, brittle hardness of the teeth and face bones. A rancid taste assaulted her. Her heart could take no more of the terror these beings brought to her. After one last beat that felt nothing more than horror, it stopped altogether.
And darkness as black and empty as the graves around her swallowed her forever.
Standing several yards away near the end of the row of graves, a lone dark figure watched her. As he finished feeding on Jillian McComb’s fear, he leaned down and blew out the candle that was lit on the ground near his feet. Then he walked away without looking back.
* * * *
Chief of Police James Winchester made his way into the cemetery. His stride was not fast; it was, however, determined and precise, and those milling about, appearing lost and standing in the way, quickly moved aside for him. Ronald Ghetts, one of the five men in his department, started to speak, and James halted his words by holding up the index finger of his right hand.
“If you or any one else here makes a remark about how this girl looks, or that she has great legs that are wasted, or that she died in an appropriate place, or if anyone—and I mean anyone—calls me Jimbo, it will be the end of all the teeth in your mouth.” He didn’t add to hell with the fact it would probably be the end of his career, too. Just then, he didn’t really give a damn. The last thing he needed was to listen to Ghetts’s nasally, irritating voice making some unnecessary comment.
He gave a damn that a young girl was dead. He gave a damn that he’d thought that by getting out of Chicago and coming to Medusa’s Island he would be able to end the evil he felt here before he’d have to see dead bodies. But the three teens who’d died the night before while driving drunk after a party on Newland’s Beach reminded him that death was everywhere, no matter where evil lurked. It wasn’t murder, but it was a horrific task of breaking the news to family and cleaning up the mess. So James was almost wishing he was back in Chicago. There was, after all, something comforting about repetition, even if it was something as horrible as murder. But then, he reminded himself, he’d had more reasons besides murder to get out of Chicago and lay low for a while.
Lucky for Ghetts, as well as the men he worked with, and for James’s career, no one made any jokes about the dead girl. And no one called him Jimbo.
“What have we got?” he asked Deke Price.
Deke was the closest to a partner James had ever known, and he had known Deke for a very long time. “Female, age twenty-four, named Jillian McComb,” Deke replied as he pulled back the top of the piece of plastic covering the body to reveal Jilly’s face.
Her eyes and mouth were open. If she had been alive, James would have thought she was staring up at the darkened sky and seeing—perhaps even screaming at—something that terrified her.
Knowing just about everyone on the island, James recognized her. “She sold me my house,” he said more to himself.
“Yes,” Deke said.
“How’d she die?” James asked, working to send his anger to some hidden place where Deke couldn’t see it.
Deke shrugged, a motion that was so alien to a man like him, it looked phony. Deke knew things. Deke looked at a scene and just knew things. It was a knack that made him one of the best cops James had ever had the pleasure of calling colleague. He’d had the pleasure of calling him friend for much longer. For the first time since James had known him, Deke looked baffled, almost confused. “I don’t know.”
This was not a good sign, and sent James’s foul mood even deeper. “What was it, a robbery gone bad?” Did robberies going bad even happen in places like Medusa’s Island, or in cemeteries, for that matter? He supposed it was possible. Yet, everything about this girl, this place, appeared so wrong, so out of place. Absently, James slipped on a glove and touched her face, moving her head to the side. He had to look at her neck, had to make certain there were no bite marks. There weren’t.
“No, her purse was found over there.” Deke pointed beyond where James stooped near the body. “Her wallet, with approximately twenty-three dollars in cash and change and two credit cards inside. There’s nothing out of place. She carried a very organized purse.”
“I’ll want to see the contents. What else do you know?”
“From what I can see so far, there’s no evident wound, no blood,” Deke explained. “There’s no bullet hole, no knife wound. There aren’t even any evident bruises. Only these scratches on her cheeks and neck, see?” He pointed to fresh scratch marks on Jilly’s face and throat.
But no bite, James thought again. He should feel better; he didn’t. “Maybe she choked on something,” he muttered.
“Yeah, maybe,” Deke replied without sounding convinced.
“Or maybe it was something that scared her pretty damned bad,” James pointed out.
“Yeah, she looks pretty terrified,” Deke agreed.
“Find anything else?” James asked, surprised that he needed to ask.
Deke shook his head. “No. It’s been too dry for any soft earth where there would be footprints, but there’s not even any flattened or stepped down grass. There’s no shell casings, no sign of a struggle. She fell right here, and stayed right here.”
“Who found her?” James wanted to know.
“A guy named Percy Blackwell. He lives in the first house outside the cemetery’s gate. He’s not the caretaker, but he closes and locks the gate every night at eight o’clock. That’s what he was doing when he found her,” Deke explained, looking at James with his usual flat expression of one brow raised, as if he, too, thought there might be questions in that.
James looked at his watch. It was eight-forty-four. “It was probably pretty dark at eight o’clock.”
“I mentioned that to him,” Deke put in. “He said he saw her white scarf fluttering in the wind.”
James looked down at her again. She was wearing a white scarf. “Call Doc Jenkins and see how soon he can perform an autopsy.”
“You want him to do it?”
“We can call the guys on the mainland, but it looks like a storm blowing in. Hell, they don’t even want to make the trip out here in decent weather. They probably won’t show up for three days, and I want to know if she was strangled with that scarf or if she died from some unknown heart problem.” Or something worse, he almost voiced, but didn’t.
“I thought of that, too,” Deke said. “But I don’t see any marks on her neck except for those scratches. And she’s pretty young for a heart attack.”
“Unfortunately, that isn’t unheard of,” James put in. “She came to put flowers on her sister’s grave.” He clearly remembered Jillian, just as he remembered her sister who’d withered away from disease before losing the battle.
“Yeah, her sister’s grave is over there, by her purse. Today’s the one-year anniversary of her death. There are fresh roses. She probably brought them.”
“Hell,” James said, “two sisters dead on the same damned day.”
“It bites, doesn’t it?”
At his choice of words, James looked hard at Deke, but Deke was looking at the dead girl and didn’t notice.
“I think there’s another sibling, a brother, lives in North Carolina somewhere. See what you can find out,” James said. The soft breeze of the falling evening blew his hair and the wrong, cold feel to it lingered like a bad odor. Looking down at the girl’s horrified expression, he knew this was far from a simple heart attack. “And get this body to Doc’s. I want to know what he finds as soon as possible.” He thought he knew what Doc would find. He hoped he was wrong.
Chapter Three
Cold Walls
James walked through the cool, dank hallway of the clinic basement to the morgue. The morgue was merely a small room with a couple metal slab tables in the middle and two refrigerated slots at the far end to keep bodies cool.
Not liking the darkness or the smell of strong antiseptic, he fought down the shudder that threatened to shimmer up his back. This was a small clinic, the only one on the island, run by Doctor Dwight Jenkins. Doc, to everyone who knew him, was a very qualified man who had been in medicine for many years. His expertise showed he had seen and treated everything from disease to battle wounds, and he had spent most of his life on this island. He was loyal to its inhabitants and, like James and Emma Gray, had seen unmentionable things. James knew that after seeing Jilly McComb, those unmentionable things might have to be mentioned.
Still, he wondered, as he made his way to the small room where the dead were kept, why did every hallway leading to a morgue look alike, with cold, dark, blue tiled walls? Was it really because blue was supposed to be a cool, calming color? James didn’t think the tiles were calming. They were down right cold, making him want to run in the other direction.
James attempted to breathe in slow, shallow breaths to keep the bitter smell out of his nostrils. It didn’t help. The strong smell of disinfectant lingered in the air and burned his nose and touched his tongue with a bitter, vinegary taste. Why couldn’t the morgue smell like the orange disinfectant used upstairs in the rest of the clinic?
He came to the doors leading into what Doc often called the cooler. Light spilled out from the small space near the floor, but except for that, the doors were metal and dark. He pushed his way into the cool room. Its bright lights hurt his eyes, and he was forced to stand just inside the doorway for a long moment while his eyes adjusted.
“Hello, James.”
He didn’t have to be able to see to recognize Doc’s voice. “Doc,” he greeted in return.
His eyes adjusted, and he saw that Emma Gray, Doc’s assistant was with him. “Hello, Emma,” he said.
“Hello,” she replied.
He wished she spoke more. She had a rich, husky voice for a woman. He often thought that with her voice, she should be on radio or reading the six o’clock news on television instead of working in a small clinic on an island in the middle of nowhere. She wasn’t bad on the eyes, either. Blond, tall, lean, small facial features with the greenest eyes he’d ever seen. He had to force a swallow when he looked at her. But he knew more about her than she knew he did, so he never pushed her to talk with him. However, with what he’d felt earlier and with the terror he’d seen on Jillian McComb’s face, he had the feeling that the time was quickly approaching when she would have to talk with him. Until then, he would be patient.
Beyond Emma, James saw Jillian McComb’s head and legs.
“You didn’t want to wait for my report, huh?” Doc asked, turning back to his work.
“No,” he replied bluntly. “I wanted to know your initial thoughts.”
“Well, then, you’re just in time. We’re just finishing with her autopsy. But I don’t know if I have any real answers for you.”
“How’d she die?” he asked, stepping around
to the end of the table where he could see Emma’s face. “That’s the main question.” He didn’t point out that he was almost certain he knew how she’d died. He just hoped he was wrong. He hoped more than ever that Doc would tell him this girl had some congenital heart condition.
Both Doc and Emma wore paper gowns and surgical gloves over their scrubs. Paper hats covered their hair, but Doc’s mask was pulled down and rested below his chin.
All he could see of Emma were her deep, cutting green eyes, a much deeper green than the scrubs she wore. She looked at him, silently addressing him. He wished he could read her thoughts, but that was an invasion he wanted no part of. He would rather she shared her thoughts with him. James wanted to reach out to her, just feel the warmth of her hand, as he had wanted to do so many times before. And just as before, he didn’t dare move.
Doc stitched the large “T” incision that he had made between Jillian’s breasts and cut straight through to her navel.
“Gosh, how could I guess you would ask cause of death first?” Doc said, giving him nothing more than a glance as he continued with his work.
“Does that mean you don’t have an answer?” James worked as hard not to stare at Emma as he worked not to look down at Jillian McComb. He wondered if Emma had any clue as to how much he wanted her, how much he thought of her.
“Technically, no.”
“What does that mean, technically?” James had to ask. He was still hoping for a heart problem or some hidden disease, anything but what he suspected, even though he wasn’t exactly certain what he suspected.
Doc paused in his sewing and looked up across the slab at him. “I can tell you what caused her death, but not what killed her.”
Under other circumstances, James might have chuckled. He did not chuckle now. “Those two aren’t one and the same?” he asked instead.
“Judging from the adrenaline in her body, the condition of her bronchioles, the lactic acid build up, especially within the heart itself, combined with the look on her face, I would say she died from fright since she wasn’t dressed to run a marathon,” Doc explained.
No Fear Page 2
