GRAVEWORM

by Curran, Tim

  20

  Sometime later… the phone rang.

  Tara opened her eyes and went into panic mode right away. She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She was sprawled on the floor before the front door and the house smelled like Pine-Sol and was gagging it was so strong. She’d been having a nightmare. Lisa. Margaret. Graves. Burying things. Evil moon-faced boogeymen calling on the phone. Then it came rushing back into her head and she felt the dirt on her fingers, her aching muscles, and knew the things she had done and the things she would yet do.

  She did not scream.

  She did not even cry.

  She held it all deep down inside of her, nailing it shut in a box as black laughter echoed in her brain and wracked sobbing choked in her throat. But she shut it off. She shut it all off because there were things that had to be done and she had to put on the proper face in order to do them.

  You are not who you were, Tara told herself. You are someone else that just looks like Tara Coombes and you have to remember that. You have to get Lisa back and it will mean doing terrible things, but you will do them. I will help you. But the world, the world must not suspect. You must look like Tara Coombes. Even if you’re somebody else.

  Even if you’re somebody else.

  The phone kept ringing.

  Nobody would call this late. Nobody but a drooling, evil thing that kidnapped teenage girls, a night-haunter that was frightened of the rising sun as all such things were. It could not go back into its coffin yet, not until it filled its belly with the bitter brine of suffering, not until it leeched itself to Tara’s soft white throat one more time and drank its fill.

  Tara walked into the kitchen and the smell of cleaners reamed her nose out and made her head spin. Her eyes watered. She reached out for the phone in the darkness, picturing the monster on the other end: a bloated, leggy spider whose web she was caught in. Cocooned with silk, the spider liked to unwrap her from time to time to sip from her throat, to suckle her last throbbing artery.

  In her mind, she heard a crunching and squishing sound as a boot crushed the spider flat, reduced it to a mush. And she knew whose boot that was: her own.

  Shutting everything down inside herself, she picked up the cordless. “Hello?”

  “Tara? Tara? Tara, is that you?”

  “Yes… who is this?” It wasn’t the boogeyman. She vaguely recognized the voice. An old man. A neighbor.

  “It’s Bud Stapleton, honey. I thought you were Lisa for a minute… you girls sound alike.”

  He paused and she could hear the tension in his voice. Serious tension. Bud was kind-hearted, but tough and old-school. An ex-cop who was damn proud of every one of the thirty-five years he’d put in on the Bitter Lake force, even if about ninety-percent of it was bullshit, as he liked to say. Now he was prattling. A guy who rarely said more than “yup” or “nope” on the phone.

  This all passed through Tara’s mind at the same time the reason for his very late, or very early, phone call did: Margaret had not come home. Bud, according to Margaret, was given to drinking beers on the couch before the TV where he very often fell asleep. He must have woken and found that his wife had not returned from the Coombes’ house.

  This was trouble.

  This was an angle that Tara had not considered with all the rest of it coming from every conceivable direction and knocking her flat. Margaret. Margaret was missing. It would mean the police. An investigation. And if all that wasn’t trouble enough, the sort of trouble that put Lisa in worse jeopardy than she already was, Bud was no fool. He was an ex-cop. He knew how to find out things. Even if the police found out nothing, Bud would not give up so easily. He was always bitching about the young, modern force: “Goddamn little boys with laptops playing cop, mouths barely off their mommies’ titties. Encounter sessions and support fucking groups. Tasers and pepper spray. Jesus! In the old days we took a man down with our bare hands like real cops. We got bloodied, we got bruised, but we got paid to do a fucking job and we did it. Me and Bobby Stemick, Frenchy Levesque, Jib Hanlon, Mike McKean… we were real cops. Not like now, not like now…”

  Bud was old, but at heart was still a cop. Stubborn as all hell.

  Tara did not need this new wrinkle.

  Think!

  She had to have a story.

  And then she did.

  “Sorry to call you so late, Tara, but… well, thing is, Margaret’s not here. Bed’s not slept in. Before I start raising hell about it, I just want to make sure she’s still not there.”

  Tara licked her lips. They were very dry. Like her hands. Dry with grave dirt, soil packed under her fingernails. “No, she’s not here, Bud. I mean, I can go look around, but no one was here when I got home last night. Lisa’s down in Milwaukee with her Uncle Joe and Aunt Claire for a week, so I just figured Margaret didn’t come over. No reason for her to.”

  The lie came from her lips perfectly, as if she were reading from a script. Even the bit about Uncle Joe and Aunt Claire in Milwaukee. They were real all right, except that they were in Belgium for a month visiting Claire’s nephew who was in the Army and had just married a Belgian girl over there. Tara had spoken to Claire about it on the phone three days ago. If the police tried to contact them, they would be unavailable. Yes, yes. It was amazing how good of a liar Tara was. She had never been worth a damn at it before. But now… yes, things had changed and she was not the same person.

  She would lie.

  She would swindle.

  She would even cover-up crimes or commit murder if it meant getting Lisa back and God help anyone who stood in her way.

  “Well, she went over there around four as usual, Tara.”

  Tara waited. Then she said, “What did she say? She must have known Lisa was gone.”

  It all hung on this. If Margaret had said she was going to watch Lisa, then there would be questions. Uncomfortable questions.

  Bud said, “I didn’t talk to her. She just left while I was varnishing a chair in the garage. Called out to me how she’d be back late as usual. Figured she was going to your place.”

  “This sounds funny, Bud. I don’t like it.”

  “Yeah. Well. I better look through the house one more time. She’s not so young anymore, you know.”

  In other words, maybe she fell and hit her head or had a goddamned stroke and I better go look for her corpse. Tara could hear the dread and pain in his voice and something inside her ran warm at the sound of it. It bubbled up her throat, brought tears to her eyes and she wanted to admit it all, scream it out at him over the phone, but she didn’t dare.

  She could not afford pity.

  Not for others.

  Not for herself.

  “I’ll let you know,” Bud said and hung up.

  Tara set the phone back in its cradle. She knew this was not over by a long shot. Yes, people turned up missing from time to time, she knew. Even in Bitter Lake. But usually they were younger people fleeing debt or bad relationships. Teenagers who ran away. And sometimes hunters disappeared out in the deep, dark woods during deer season and nobody found them. It happened. More often than the authorities liked to admit.

  But not elderly people.

  Like old, firmly-rooted trees, they did not just vanish.

  And when they did, it was usually because they had dropped dead in a remote location or lived alone and nobody found their bodies for weeks.

  Tara did not like what would come next.

  Because much as she dreaded it, the police would come to see her. They would be asking questions. And not just once either. This would be an ongoing thing and she would have to deal with it. She would have to be smarter than them and cast no doubts at their feet.

  Yes, this was how it would have to work.

  Tara plotted it out in the darkness and took a fresh rag from the cupboard and began to scrub the counters.

  She did this for well over an hour.

  21

  “Let’s see if your mood has improved any, Lisa.”
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  Henry stalked silently, weaving his way amongst headstones and crumbling slabs to the older section of the burial grounds. He moved up weed-choked hills crested by morose, shadowy vaults and craggy trees. And beyond to an overgrown run of cedar-shrouded gravestones. Markers set flat into the earth. At one time, he knew, this had been sort of a Potter’s Field where the poor and destitute had been buried. It was wholly unused now.

  Except by him.

  He dropped his spade and went down on his knees at the fresh grave.

  He dug out handfuls of cool black earth with his bare hands.

  He pressed the earth to his face, reveling in the pure rich smell of it. He breathed its aroma in deep and his heart beat faster. He wanted to tear his clothes off and roll naked in it, feel it cover him, bury himself in it like he had in the old days. He dug naked beneath the eye of the moon, pawing his way feverishly down until his fingers scratched over the polished lid of a casket and then… and then—

  Not now.

  He couldn’t lose control now.

  The most important thing now was control. To think things out, to use his brain.

  (your brain’s no good)

  “Shut up,” he whispered.

  (but i won’t shut up i’ll never shut up)

  “I’m in control. I know what I’m doing.”

  (you’ll never have control, henry, you’re a deviant… a crawling slinking graverobbing ghoul a naughty little boy that masturbates in graveyards and deflowers corpses they’ll put you in a cage)

  (A CAGE)

  “Quiet,” he told the voice in his head. “Someone might hear.”

  The sun would start coming up in a few hours and he had to be done by then. Sometimes that asshole Spears liked to come to the cemetery office bright and early and attend to his work and get out of there. Henry knew he had to be away by then.

  He gripped the spade and began to dig, piling the earth on the same sheet he had piled it on before so none would get in the grass where it would be hard to get out. The box was only down four feet, the soil still loose. He carefully shoveled out clods of dirt, squaring the grave off meticulously. It took him about twenty minutes. When he reached the coffin, he scraped the soil away from its stained, mildew-speckled surface.

  (she’ll trick you)

  (she’ll use her slit)

  He listened.

  It was quiet in there.

  He thought he would hear her struggling. She had only been down there four or five hours. There should have been enough air in the box and the soil was so loose that there would be more. He recalled that he had buried Worm for six hours once when she had been a bad girl.

  He gripped the edge of the lid, threw the clasp, and opened it.

  Lisa was still there.

  Her eyes were closed.

  “Wake up,” he told her as a wind stirred the trees above and a few stray leaves drifted down into the grave.

  She did not move.

  He reached down and took hold of her. Her flesh was cool. Still, she did not move and Henry wondered if his timing had been off. That had happened one other time. The runaway he picked up outside of town, she had been down too long and—

  (the sweet luxury of that one)

  (flesh like marble as we pushed into her)

  (let’s push into this one, henry, let’s school her)

  Lisa jumped up from the coffin, a scream on her lips.

  She vaulted at Henry, scratching his face, beating at him with her fists, kicking and clawing. He put a forearm against her mouth to drive her back down and she bit him hard. They wrestled in the grave and she nearly got away, but then he got his hands around her white throat and squeezed her windpipe shut with his thumbs and she finally fell limp into the coffin.

  “Bitch,” he gasped, wiping blood from his face. “Fucking bitch… I could have left you down there… I could have…”

  Now she was quiet.

  (don’t spare the rod and spoil the child, henry)

  (discipline her)

  (discipline her now in the box)

  “No,” he said under his breath.

  This was not about THAT. He had to keep a level head here. He didn’t want THAT to mess up the works.

  He hoisted her out of the grave and dumped her atop a worn slab while he quickly filled in the hole. She did not move. He almost wished that she would, because he would have split her head open with the spade. And once her blood stopped running and the brains oozing from her skull had begun to congeal and she was cold, cold, cold, then he would have had his fun with her.

  He filled in the grave.

  (pathetic little boy afraid of discipline)

  “Shut up, mother. I don’t have time for that.”

  (hee-hee-hee, little boy blue come blow your horn)

  He rolled the sod back in place and scattered leaves over the surface. No one would ever know he had been digging there. He rolled up the sheet and hid it and the spade inside a long unused tomb that he had played in as a child and still bore the graffiti he had scratched into its stone walls so many years ago.

  He scooped up Lisa’s still form in his arms and walked back through the graves, feeling her limp arms dangling and head lolling on her shoulders with each step.

  He made for the low stone wall in the back.

  And his car parked on the dirt road in the trees beyond.

  The fun was just about to begin.

  22

  Somehow, Tara managed to sleep after her phone conversation with Bud Stapleton. She took a hot shower and then lay naked atop her sheets and passed out cold. And as she slept, she dreamed that she found not Margaret’s dismembered body in the kitchen but Lisa’s. But she couldn’t find her head. She looked in cupboards. In the refrigerator. The Lazy Susan, pawing amongst the cans. She emptied the freezer. And, in a strain of dark comedy, she checked all the Tupperware containers. Then she opened the oven and there was Lisa’s spitted head in a roasting pan. Her lips had been sewn shut with kitchen twine and bulbs of garlic had been shoved up her nostrils. Gray and seamed and stitched, her blonde hair hanging in greasy loops, she looked like an evil shrunken head from an old voodoo movie.

  Tara stood there, staring at Lisa’s decapitated head.

  She reached into the oven and plucked the head from the roasting spit. It was much lighter than Margaret’s had been, and some submerged dream-reasoning reminded her of this. The flesh was cold and almost moist, mucid with slime. Black blood ran from it like refrigerated India ink. It was ghastly, all shriveled, but she did not toss it aside. Instead, she brought her face in close to it until she could smell its sweet, high roadkill stench. Then she spoke to it. You got us both into this, Lisa. I don’t know how you met the man who snatched you, but couldn’t you see that he was a depraved thing that had crawled from the slimiest cellar of hell? Didn’t you know he was the boogeyman? Couldn’t you see the poison in his eyes and smell the sewer drainage of his rotting mind? And then she began to cry, for this was her sister, the only family she had. Lisa was dead, dissected by some sinister night-monster and never ever could she be put back together again.

  Then Lisa opened her dead, glazed eyes.

  And in those eyes, not just suffering and horror, but… accusation and blame. A fearful recrimination that told Tara that Lisa blamed her for it all, that every minute of her black, dirty, and violent death was her fault and, dear God, why had she let it happen? Why had she let that deranged fiend do this?

  Tara woke.

  The sun was up and she was shivering, bathed with sweat. Her body ached, her muscles were corded tight, a strange and muted buzzing in the back of her head. She laid there like that for a time, feeling absolutely nothing, not even her hurting body. Just an immobile thing incapable of movement. Tears ran from her swollen eyes, but she was not aware of it.

  I just need to know that she’ll be taken care of.

  Promise me.

  Finally, she got up, the guilt eating away her guts.

  She walked naked to
the window, utterly detached from the idea that she might be giving the mailman or one of the neighbor boys a cheap thrill. She just stood there, looking out at the day, which was quite sunny and bright, colorful leaves drifting from the trees. It was a lovely autumn day, the kind that makes you feel good to be alive.

  But Tara was not glad to be alive.

  She was not glad of anything.

  To her eyes, finally stripped of the blinders that had once shown her a world of love and promise and potential, she could see only grayness and despair. She could see into the black heart of it finally and recognize the grim patterns at work. Autumn leaves were pretty to the eye, but they masked the truth of seasonal change which was that the leaves were dying as a presage to the white funeral of winter that was surely coming, blighting everything in its path.

  People were out working in their yards, raking and trimming hedges, cleaning dead flowers from pots and putting lawn furniture away for the year. Industrious little things that waved to each other, chatted, lent a hand when one was needed. A very pastoral scene and the sort she had always enjoyed watching. But that was all superficial and she could see that now. For beneath the veneer of those smiling, harmless, helpful faces were brains thinking dark and unpleasant things, plotting crimes and dreaming of sating animal lusts and appetites.

  Civilization and society were, after all, only skin deep and it was beneath that skin where the depravities and twisted urges and malevolent impulses lurked.

  Sighing, she closed the curtains, suddenly aware of her nakedness.

  She was not ashamed.

  Something inside her wanted her to flaunt it, wanted her to go running down the street, kicking through leaf piles. That was the beast within that was only held in check by self-imposed laws that kept men and women busy and productive and de-clawed in the cities and not running naked and feral in the fields and woods. She peered through a slit in the curtain, afraid now of what was inside and what she was becoming, knowing that each and every person she could see had a grinning, voracious beast locked up inside them. They all wanted to shed their clothes and run wild and free or something inside them did. Only they didn’t dare because they didn’t want to become spectacles or be locked away by others of the human tribe who were held in bondage by their own crass inhibitions.