GRAVEWORM

by Curran, Tim

  Good God, don’t you know this is hard for me too? Don’t you know that I threw away my life in Denver and took these shitty jobs just so you’d have an ordinary life and not have to move away from your school and friends? Jesus Christ, Lisa, work with me here! Help me out!

  All you ever do is yell at me!

  I do not! Just act your age!

  You don’t even like me! You criticize everything I do!

  I do not! Just act responsibly! Jesus, Lisa, I partied too when I was your age, but at least I was smart enough to empty the fucking ashtrays!

  But despite the warnings, groundings, yelling, and threats of bodily harm, the parties went on. And on.

  Finally, Tara had no choice: seventeen or not, Lisa was getting a babysitter. Somebody to watch over the house and Lisa while she was gone. She chose Margaret Stapleton from down the block. Good old Margaret. Sturdy, tough, and a born-again Christian to boot.

  Lisa barely tolerated her, but was nicely intimidated.

  Tara adored her.

  Margaret had raised three daughters and a son. Four good kids… well, maybe her oldest, Ronny, had sold some weed in high school, but he was now a lawyer, so who was complaining? Under Margaret’s eye, there were no parties. No excessive phone calls. No boys in the house. Margaret was a hard master, but she was exactly what Lisa needed.

  Tara! She’s a tyrant! She won’t even let us watch horror movies! She thinks there’s Satanic messages in my music! She’s Medieval!

  Heh, heh, heh, good old Margaret!

  Tara stepped out of the car and dragged herself into the house, still hoping for a night like no other.

  She would not be disappointed.

  6

  Lisa was being dragged through the grass.

  It was cool and damp. Leaves stuck to her and sticks scratched her arms. She blinked her eyes open, moaning beneath her gag, holding back the screams which had been bottled up for so long now. The more she struggled, the harder she breathed and given that her mouth was taped shut, the harder it was to breathe.

  She knew now more than ever that she had to find something to hold onto, some inner mantra, some warm sacred cow she could call her own, because if she didn’t, if she let her fear suck her into a whirlpool of blackest terror or let her brain go into oh-my-God meltdown mode, she was finished.

  She had to keep it together.

  Because there was more going on here than just being abducted by a couple psychos, much more and if she didn’t smooth out her mind she would spend her last hours suckling the dark milk of depravity.

  Because she had seen what happened to Margaret. Maybe she’d passed out somewhere during that atrocity, but she’d seen enough to know that these two grave-crawlers that had her were not ordinary in any sense of the term.

  Oh God, Margaret…

  As much as Lisa bitched about her, hated her, raged against the machine that was Margaret, she had in fact cared for the old lady. With Tara working all the damn time, Margaret had filled the void of emptiness and in her own grandmotherly way, she had become more than a watchdog or the neo-Nazi that Lisa claimed she was. Margaret was old school—hell, she was 19th century—espousing her traditional values and somewhat archaic (and fanatical) belief system, but her heart was good.

  She cared.

  She did not deserve to end up as a cleaved carcass on the kitchen floor, reduced to basal anatomy by the perverse and creative imagination of that creeping, grave-dirty, tomb-smelling girl.

  Lisa tried to put it out of her head. There would be time for trauma later, right now she had to keep it together.

  She knew where she was.

  And she tried to fight back the madness that tickled in her brain.

  She had been dragged up grassy hillsides, down through leaf-choked hollows, her arms and legs knocked off jutting tree roots, knotted boles, and leaning monuments.

  Now she was here.

  At this awful place.

  Pale moonlight filtered down through latticed tree branches above, illuminating tombstones, markers, the rectangular shafts of burial vaults. This was Hillside Cemetery and the man who had brought her here was humming. At home amongst the headstones, shadows, and seething graveyard damps.

  He was not human.

  Lisa was certain of that much.

  He was a monster.

  He was a ghoul.

  Behind her, like a child playing tag, the girl darted through the headstones. Hiding behind them. Creeping over them. Perching herself atop certain ones like a vulture and staring up at the moon above. Now and again, Lisa could hear the girl’s chattering teeth.

  Like she was hungry.

  And again, the immortal question in Lisa’s mind: What do they want from me? What do they want? What the hell do they want?

  The man dragged her through an opening between two sepulchers which seemed to be sinking into the ground, drowning in a cloying nest of shadows. Grave markers leaned this way and that in solemn battalions. The man pulled her forward and dumped her on a heap of black, moldering earth in which things were crawling.

  Peering from behind a hedgerow that glistened with droplets of dew, the girl giggled.

  Lisa looked at her, smelling her rancid stink, and made a moaning sound. The girl shook her head, dirty locks falling over her face. She held a single finger to her lips. “Shhh.”

  A grave.

  An open grave.

  That’s what this was.

  Lisa looked back at the man. He stood atop the mound of black graveyard earth, framed by moonlight and crisscrossed tree branches. With his cadaverous face, flapping black coat, and the shovel held firmly in his fists, he looked like some old-time graverobber.

  The girl scampered over to Lisa on all fours.

  She put her face in Lisa’s own.

  Lisa looked up into the black glistening eyes punched into that pallid mask. A droplet of drool broke against Lisa’s cheek. She squirmed and thrashed, smelling the girl’s breath which was flyblown and black, the breath of an animal that had been chewing on things long dead.

  The man said something and the girl leaped away like a faithful dog.

  He set his shovel aside and reached for Lisa.

  His cold hands gripped her arms.

  He lifted her up into his arms and continued to hum a morbid dirge.

  7

  It was terribly quiet.

  Almost unnaturally so.

  Every light was on in the house which was not like Margaret at all, but very much like Lisa. Tara set her purse down, stretching and working the kinks out of her back. The living room was spotless. The TV was off. Strange. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any noises anywhere. She could hear the toilet running down the hall. The anniversary clock ticking on the mantel. Nothing else.

  Was Lisa in bed already? And Margaret…

  “Lisa?” Tara called out. “Margaret?”

  No answer.

  Not even a hint of activity.

  Tara stood there, staring into the empty living room without knowing exactly why. She was rooted to the spot. She could hear her own heart beating in her ears. What was it she was feeling? Something like a flat dread in the pit of her stomach, a nervous emptiness. Was it the silence? That awful, brooding silence that told her that she was completely alone?

  She shook her head.

  She was just tired. Exhausted, really.

  God, but it was funny what you could do to yourself if you let your mind wander. What she needed was a beer, maybe a slice of pizza, some Letterman, and a good night’s sleep. Lisa was usually watching TV now… some reality crap. Margaret didn’t approve, but she always let Lisa have a few concessions.

  You gotta let ‘em go a little tribal sometimes, she always said.

  Tara lit a cigarette even though she was supposed to be quitting. She stretched again, her neck and back popping like the joists of an ancient house.

  “All right,” she called out, becoming more concerned by the moment as her voice echoed through the house.
“What gives, people? You two playing hide-and-go-seek or what?”

  Shaking her head, she pulled off her cigarette and went into the kitchen, trying her best to ignore that dead, rustling feeling in the pit of belly. She rounded the corner and it was at that precise moment, as her feet skidded on something wet and slippery on the linoleum and she almost went down, that everything she held dear, everything she trusted, fell to pieces around her. A scream clawed up her throat and by the time it reached her lips, she was unable to open her mouth. Unable to do anything but stare in shock and listen to a white shrieking inside her skull.

  There was blood all over the floor.

  It was sprayed up onto the walls.

  It looked as if an animal had been slaughtered in there… except it was no animal.

  It was Margaret.

  Or something that could have been Margaret.

  What skin hadn’t been peeled away was the color of bleached flour, the blood that nourished it pooled in a sticky puddle on the floor, spattering the walls, spraying the counters in wild whorls. Margaret had been skinned and dismembered.

  Her arms were hanging out of an open, bloody cupboard door like somebody had tried to shut it, but it swung back open on its own. Tara was only truly aware of the wedding ring on the left hand, shining with droplets of blood.

  Margaret’s legs were folded on a chair.

  Her torso was dumped by the stove.

  Her head was placed in the drainboard in the sink.

  And although that face was drenched with blood, the expression on it was shockingly clear. And if Tara would remember nothing else of that night, it would be the twisted, agonized look on that grimacing face.

  The room spun, lost clarity, went this way and that.

  Tara slumped to the floor.

  She did not remember vomiting anymore than she remembered screaming, but she had done both. Congealed vomit was splattered down the front of her blouse. A glob of it was smeared over her Starlight name-tag. At that particular moment, everything had taken on the fuzzy tones of a dream. She knew or remembered very little. She was seeing her own life from a distance and it did not seem real. Like a movie. A movie about some woman who had left a good paying job in Denver to come back home to Shitsplat, Wisconsin to raise her kid sister after the death of her parents. She worked two jobs to make ends meet and had a boyfriend named Steve who was real sweet but she never had time to see him. Then one warm night, that woman named Tara had come home hearing the crickets singing and the moon was big and very yellow and she found another woman—whom she loved dearly—hacked to pieces like a joint of beef. Yes, it must have been the plot of some horror movie she had seen because things like that did not happen in the real, sane world and she wished the dream/movie would end, that she’d wake up dear God in heaven please let me wake up because this can’t be happening IT CAN’T FUCKING… BE… HAPPENING—

  And then she did wake, snapped out of her fugue.

  But it was still there… the dismembered body, the blood.

  So much blood she could hear it dripping and it was in the air like a mist and on her lips with a sharp metallic taste like dirty copper. Tara sat there, shaking, her face wet with tears she could not recall crying. On the floor, on her hands and knees, she realized she was resting in a sticky pool of thickening blood.

  She screamed again, holding her red-stained palms up before her face.

  She screamed until her throat was raw and the air was bled from her lungs. Until snot ran from her nose and her eyes bulged from her head. But it wasn’t because of the blood or Margaret’s remains. Because, suddenly, even all that seemed almost acceptable in some mad, vacant quadrant of her brain.

  No, it was because of something else.

  What was written in blood on the white face of the refrigerator:

  I’VE GOT YOUR SISTER

  8

  Bathed in wan moonlight, his brow beaded in sour sweat, Henry Borden stood above an open grave with the girl in his arms. He could hear Worm playing in the mulling shadows, sniffing around the headstones. The air smelled chill and dank and this thrilled him to no end… the smell of cold things, buried things, marble and granite. The girl in his arms had passed out again. Silly little twat. How could she not be stirred by this night? How could her blood not run hot and sweet in this place?

  (because she doesn’t know the sweet joy of cold earth)

  (you must teach her teach her)

  Henry looked up.

  The tree limbs above that crisscrossed the starry sky were all oak and maple and elm, all very old and very silent like everything in this place. Leaves fell from them in the wind.

  He paused, breathing deeply.

  The dank air filled his lungs like honeysuckle. This was an ageless place, a timeless black womb and his favorite place in the world.

  Just think of the history.

  People here had died in wars, their last breaths were of battlefields and suffering—Hue and Tarawa, Gettysburg and Belleau Wood, Chosin and Kuwait and Iraq. They had died of childhood epidemics, diphtheria and influenza and smallpox. They had passed silently of old age, a hundred stifling memories on their bluing lips, or violently in industrial accidents or highway fatalities. Some had even been murdered. A few had taken their own lives.

  Oh yes, this place was a museum of the human condition.

  There was no other place like this.

  Henry wished he could speak with them all, know what secrets they’d taken to the grave with them.

  He had come of age in this place.

  As a child, he had helped his father square-off graves and trim weeds and roll out sod over the newly-interred. He remembered the jingling ring of keys his father carried on his belt. Keys to each and every lichen-encrusted tomb and sagging vault. The morbid joys of those days had been his and his alone. The other children just hadn’t understood.

  As a teenager, Henry never ran after girls or scored touchdowns. There had been no dances or bands or Friday nights at the movies. No, he had been here. Amongst the fallen, worn tombstones and jutting monuments. Beneath the sullen funereal glare of winged seraphs and graying cherubs, he had dreamed a thousand cold dreams of death. Elysium delights. And music? There was no grunge or metal or even top-forty, his songs were elegies and hollow gonging funeral bells. His hobbies weren’t video games or playing guitar, but delving amongst charnel house and silent crypt. His blood did not run hot at the perfume of the homecoming queen, but from the noisome damps of the grave. He pressed his naked and yearning body against gleaming caskets and icy marble. And like other teenage boys, he lost his virginity, but in ways which were unspeakable.

  And romance?

  Oh, there was grand romance. Just being here was to be enfolded in the arms of a lover long lost… a lover that wore a shroud and whose face was a leathery death-mask. For death had its admirers and one of them was Henry Borden. He worshipped at its feet, admiring its dark beauty and singing sonnets over its decayed cerements—

  “Get to it,” Henry finally told himself.

  In the distance, Worm made a growling sound.

  He had to get things done. No time for sweet, craven sepulchral fantasies. For the first time in years, probably since he’d been out of the Army, he was on a schedule.

  But his mind fell into memory as it often did and he was in a warehouse in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm, a Graves Registration Specialist with the 24th Infantry Division. The fighting was hot and heavy and the bodies kept coming in—Americans, Kuwaitis, coalition troops—so many that they could not be properly processed and they were heaped like cordwood and he was alone with them in the dead of night: chalky faces spattered with blood, tangled limbs, cleaved torsos, a jigsaw of human anatomy that had to be sorted and identified even though the latter was pretty much impossible and many of the remains shipped stateside were of doubtful identification.

  “Just give ‘em something,” Major Colbert had said. “Give ‘em something to bury. Anything.”

  T
hey just kept coming in and the process of sorting them went on day after day after day until the system was so overwhelmed it began to collapse under its own weight. Understaffed, undersupplied, there was little to do but pile the dead soldiers in heaps and work through them a little bit at a time.

  Henry worked the night shift, sifting and sorting, bagging and identifying… and then one night as he stared at the jumble of corpses he felt the old unnatural urges take hold of him until he was sweating and shivering, aroused to the point of pain. Nobody would know. Nobody would see him. He was all alone.

  So he crawled into the sea of the dead, sliding like a worm through the charnel depths, sinking himself in the litter of war and he was content. He was happy. That constant gnawing in his belly was satisfied. He was among the dead he so loved, secreted there amongst the cold meat. It was all so calming that he must have fallen asleep because that’s where they found him the next morning—

  Henry licked his lips and set the girl down.

  (what kind of animal are you, son? what the hell made you desecrate the dead?)

  He jumped into the grave.

  Spade in hand, he began to dig, to unearth the coffin he had stolen and secretly buried here by moonlight under a thin layer of soil in the open grave.

  Stolen?

  Hardly. It was not exactly theft when something was already in the possession of the family. After all, it had been his grandmother’s coffin, hadn’t it? Gramma Reese, the supreme shrew who had bitched no less than three husbands into the grave. After thirty years in the family vault the old whore had scarce need of a coffin.