GRAVEWORM

by Curran, Tim

“Listen, Frank. You aren’t gonna believe this.”

  “Go ahead. I’m already in shock.”

  Steve buried his face in his hands. “When I went there today, I was so fucking in love with her. And I shouldn’t be saying that maybe, being how you were with her first… but, fuck, I was so in love with that girl. I jumped up onto her porch and knocked and then the door opened and suddenly, suddenly I just wasn’t in love anymore.”

  “Meaning?”

  Steve looked at him now with bloodshot eyes. “For one second there I didn’t even think it was Tara. I thought it was someone else. She not only acted different but she… she looked different if that makes any sense. She looked like a fucking worn-out skeleton wearing Tara’s skin. I know how that sounds. But it was her and it wasn’t, you know?”

  “Almost like an impostor?”

  “Yeah… you know, like that movie where the aliens come down in those pods and mimic people. What a stupid comparison, but it almost fits.”

  “Have you talked to anyone else?”

  “Me? No. Just you. I didn’t know who to talk to.”

  Frank considered it. “What about Lisa?”

  “Tara said she’s out of town or something.”

  “What about Tara’s friends?”

  Steve made a snorting sound. “Friends? C’mon, Frank, she doesn’t have any friends. She barely has time for me.”

  “She used to chum with Jan… that girl she works with.”

  “At the union hall? No, not anymore. Tara sees no one, Frank. She doesn’t have time with two jobs and Lisa and that house. Christ, I’m lucky if I see her once a week. She’s alone, Frank, and I get the idea that she likes that just fine.”

  Frank didn’t say anything to that.

  He knew how single-minded she could be concerning her sister, doing everything she could to fill that gap left by the death of their parents. He just sat there, trying to make sense of it and find a rational thread, but his hands came up empty. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings into the air.

  Then he smiled.

  “What?” Steve said.

  Frank shrugged. “Funny, is all. For so long now I hated your guts. Couldn’t stand the thought of you. I used to wish that Tara would come to her senses and drop your sorry ass, take back up with me even though I knew it was sheer fantasy. I just wanted you gone. I wanted you out of Bitter Lake. I wanted you to go back wherever guys like you come from. The idea of you in the same town with me was like a slap in the face. I felt… humiliated.” He pulled off his cigarette, studied the fibers in the carpet. “When Tara dumped me, I just couldn’t believe it or maybe I didn’t want to believe it. I called her four, five times a day after she broke it off like maybe it had all been some fucked-up joke and she would come to her senses. I used to wake up in the morning after a long night of self-pity and Budweiser and think, today is the day when Tara realizes she made a big mistake. I used to leave my door open so she could get in, so she could be waiting for me when I got home from work. It’s fucked up, I know. But I was hurt pretty good and I can’t believe I’m telling you any of this. Tara used to come over now and again, make a secret special meal for me. After she went off with you, there were still things of hers in the ‘fridge. You know, things she used to cook with… bulbs of garlic, little jars of mushrooms and little cartons of cream. I couldn’t bring myself to throw ‘em out because it was the only connection I had to her when she still gave a fuck about me.”

  As Steve heard these things he almost looked… well, guilty. Like he had been the very instrument of Frank’s pain and he was uncomfortable with that. There was a great sympathy in his eyes that he could not hide and did not even attempt to. “Shit, Frank… Tara never stopped caring about you. It wasn’t about that… it was… well, I don’t know. I guess she just moved on. I don’t know. We never talked too much about it. But now and again she would tell me about something you two had done and I could tell that those memories were important to her.”

  Frank didn’t know if it was true, but it sure felt good to hear. Like a great rent in his heart had finally been sutured up. “I was so in love with that girl, Steve. She left a bandanna here she used to wear… pull her hair back with… well, damn, I used to sleep with the fucking thing because it smelled like her. And don’t you dare laugh or I’ll give you a matching set of welts.”

  “I’m not laughing, Frank.”

  No, he wasn’t, but Frank himself was pretty close to busting up. Had somebody told him this morning that Steve Crews and he would have a scuffle that night and then eat some eggs together and have what amounted to a good cry afterwards, he would have laughed so hard his face would have split open.

  But here they were.

  Opening up to one another.

  “What’re we gonna do, Frank?”

  Frank felt something wet at his eye and wiped it away. “Well, there’s only two things we can do. We either burst in there together or I go alone. Either way, we confront her. But that won’t work and you know it. Tara will have a cow if she thinks we’re doubting her state of mind or her ability to handle her life. You know that.”

  “Tell me about it. What’s the second alternative?”

  “We do a little checking.”

  “Checking?”

  “Sure. Something’s going on and we have to figure out what, so tomorrow, we start nosing into her life. See what’s what.”

  “And if we do? And if it’s bad?”

  Frank swallowed. “Then we confront her with it. We won’t have a choice. Kind of like an intervention. If she’s cracking up, we got to move on this.”

  “Oh, shit. She’ll go ballistic.”

  “Let her. It’ll be for her own good.”

  “Sure,” Steve said. “You just convince her of that.”

  38

  Candles were burning.

  Lisa, as sickened and terrified and devastated as she was, watched them, studying the long shadows they threw against the cobwebbed cellar walls and as she did so she thought about Worm. Because here in the gloom and the dank-smelling confines of the cellar was the only world that Worm had ever known and quite possibly the only world she would ever know.

  And what was that about?

  What was it really all about?

  Henry—that was the freak’s name, she’d learned—was a monster that slept during the day like a vampire and Worm… who or what exactly was she? That’s what Lisa kept wondering. She was dirty and animal-like, simple in most ways, but vicious and bloodthirsty if you crossed her or Henry set her on you. An absolute horror, truth be told, a filthy skittering graveyard rat… and yet, she was still a little girl. Mentally, anyway. Who was she? How did she come to be here?

  She crawled out of a fucking tomb, Lisa told herself. She came from where things like her always come from: graves, ditches, black soil.

  But that was an oversimplification. This whole situation was incredibly complex but that did not mean that either Henry or Worm were terribly smart—because Lisa did not believe they were—but that the circumstances that brought the both of them and this house of horror into being were dizzying in their complexity. Nothing was simple here. This was a puzzle. An acrostic. A jigsaw. A Japanese puzzle box. Lisa spent much of her free time with logic problems and Sudoku puzzles. And as much as she despised the idea, as much as she simply wanted to scream her mind away… already her brain was coming at this like any other problem, knowing the keys were Henry and Worm.

  That’s the way. Sort it out. Think it over. They have weaknesses and you must ferret them out. No time to be a teenage drama queen because it’s all up to you right now. There’s a way out of this and only you can figure it out.

  A puzzle.

  Work it out.

  Find your way out of the maze.

  Lisa was hanging on now by a worn thread. But she had to grip it tightly. No theatrics, she warned herself. Cooperate. They must believe you are their friend and no threat to them. Her breasts were aching from being bitten and suckle
d by Worm, that horrible little monster who had chopped up Margaret.

  And she had to wonder then and there if her mind would ever be right after this and maybe it wasn’t even now. Maybe she was insane, maybe her mind had frayed and this was all some hysterical, demented nightmare she was living within the confines of her own skull.

  But she didn’t believe that.

  It would be too easy.

  And nothing now was easy.

  After Worm had… had suckled her—she hated the sound of that—she had passed out, fallen asleep, something. When she woke, Worm was there, crouched next to her like some awful grinning monkey. Not saying anything, just watching her, and Lisa could almost hear the thoughts in her head: I’m right here, pretty girl, as I’ll always be right here. We’re friends now and playmates and sisters of the skin and wasn’t it funny how old Margaret died? How she screamed when I hacked her apart, drowning in a mist of her own blood? Did you notice how her eyes bulged and how her tongue lolled and how she screamed out globby tangles of blood as I brought the hatchet down into her throat again and again? It can be that way for you too, my sister, if you don’t play with me and love me and let me press myself against you. No, I won’t hack you apart because HE wouldn’t like it and I don’t want to make HIM angry. But there are other ways. I’ll put my mouth on you every night and lick your face and suckle to your tits and if that doesn’t do it there are other things I can lick and suckle until your mind runs like warm gooey wax…

  Oh, dear God, dear God. Then Worm was gone, knowing she had done her share of damage. But now she was back. Somewhere near. Lisa could smell the savage, violent stink of her, the graves she crawled in and the things she gnawed in unhallowed tombs of rot.

  “I see you, pretty girl,” a voice said. “I spy you with my good little eye.”

  Oh Jesus.

  Worm came crawling out of the darkness on all fours, her dirt-smudged face bone-yellow in the candlelight, shining with grease and sweat, her dirty hair stuck to her forehead and cheeks. She had something white and small in her hand and Lisa realized with an involuntary gasp that it was a human skull. A very small human skull, jawless and hollow-socketed, glistening as if it had been polished. Worm had a bone, which was also appallingly small, and she beat the skull with it like a drum, humming some incomprehensible tune in her throat.

  Lisa swallowed down her fear and disgust. “That’s very nice music… how did you learn to play like that?”

  Worm stopped playing and stopped humming. She just squatted there, rodent-like, head cocked to the side like a confused animal, like maybe no one had ever paid her a simple compliment.

  “I… I… I just do it. Henry doesn’t like it.”

  Lisa noticed that she was wearing jewelry, lots of jewelry—beaded necklaces, gold chains, dozens of rings, bracelets. It was gaudy and ridiculous, but Worm had no fashion sense. She was a simple little girl playing dress-up, a savage fascinated by fancy baubles.

  “You have pretty rings,” Lisa told her. Easy. Don’t lay it on too thick. Don’t confuse her.

  Worm studied the many rings on her fingers in the light from the candles. They caught the glow and held it, glimmering, shining, sparkling. Lisa noticed with a rising horror that a great many of them appeared to be wedding bands.

  “They’re mine,” Worm said. “Not yours.”

  Lisa swallowed again. “I know. They’re just pretty. I have lots of pretty jewelry back at my house. I like jewelry.”

  Worm sat on her scabby knees and pulled her shirt up. Her belly was perfectly round, almost waxy, and there was no doubt she was pregnant. In her navel, crusted by old bloodstains, there was a belly ring, tiny and silver.

  “Where… where did you get such pretty things?” Lisa asked, knowing she must exhibit no fear because Worm was practically an animal and she would smell the fear the way a dog would.

  Worm sank down to the dirt floor, still holding out her fingers so her rings could be admired. “In the boxes,” she said. “There are people in the boxes and I take the rings from them.”

  Lisa choked down a scream. Graverobbers, she thought. Ghouls and graverobbers. She forced a thin smile onto her pale lips. “Oh. They’re very, very nice.”

  Worm crawled closer and Lisa saw that she was indeed an animal because she moved very furtively with quick jerking motions, pausing every few feet to sniff the air. It was inconceivable and hideous, but that’s what she was doing. There was an atavism at play her, a primal backsliding, and the very idea of something like that was simply horrifying.

  But she would not show it.

  Could not show it.

  Worm was so close now that her stench was right in Lisa’s face; a salty, corrupt odor that was immense and flyblown like rotten meat and dried blood, rancid fat, and earthy decay. It was not so much the stink of death but of things that fed on death… vultures, buzzards, rats and coffin worms. It sweated out of the girl, overpowering her violent body odor. She was greased with it.

  “Do you want one of my rings?”

  Lisa said, “They’re yours, I—”

  Worm hissed at her, her black-specked yellow teeth on full display. “You’re so pretty, Lisa! Do you want one of my rings?”

  “Yes!”

  Worm slid one off and pushed it down onto Lisa’s right index finger. She was not very careful about it. A sliver of skin was peeled away from the knuckle and when Worm saw the blood she pressed her lips to it and sucked it.

  “Better,” she said, her teeth pink-stained. “Is it better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now we’re friends, Lisa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you’ll play with me?”

  “Yes.”

  Worm leaped forward. Her breath smelled of decay. She nibbled on Lisa’s earlobe. “Sssssh!” she whispered. “You can’t tell Henry. It has to be secret. I’ll show you everything later. But sssssh!”

  With that, Worm scampered away, giggling. Where she went, Lisa did not know. She was just gone into the darkness and Lisa knew she herself was in absolute mortal peril here and if she did not play along and think her way out, her death was going to be extremely long and ugly.

  39

  Night was a time when you could get things done.

  That’s how Dennis Spears saw things and you could never convince him differently. Spears was the director of Hillside Cemetery, which was not a full-time position, but more of a part-time managerial thing. Spears had a real nine-to-five thing over at Cumberland Paper in Stevens Point where he had his hand in on marketing and R & D, made a shitload of money and had forty people under him, most of them junior execs and middle management types whose career path at Cumberland revolved around how much they sucked his ass.

  The directorship of Hillside was something of a tradition in his family.

  It went right back to great Granddaddy Spears who had come from Yorkshire, England in the 1840s, made a name for himself as something of robber baron in his drive west to Wisconsin, and turned Bitter Lake from the sprawling lumber camp/fishing village/railroad spur sort of place that it had been to the real town it now was. And from generation to generation since, a Spears had always managed Hillside. The Spears family saw it as something of a community service, but Dennis Spears saw it as a right pain in the ass.

  The shit he had to do to maintain appearances.

  Generally, he only showed up at Hillside once or twice a week, in the very early morning or late at night and signed a lot of papers that had been dumped on his desk. He went through the books, made sure the manager-cum-secretary who ran the office was doing her job and that the caretaker and his part-time staff kept the grounds in order.

  And this is exactly what he was doing tonight.

  Instead of climbing into his warm bed with his twenty-three year old wife, who was also quite warm, he was out at the goddamn boneyard, bulling around through the paperwork. Needless to say, he was not in the best of moods. The cemetery office was out behind the chapel and just up the
road from the mausoleum. It was an old brick building, chilly and damp and dank-smelling, and he was all alone.

  Not that he was bothered by such a thing.

  A cemetery was just a cemetery, day or night, and there was not a superstitious bone in Dennis Spears’ body. Still, he wasn’t real thrilled to be there in his little office listening to the wind moaning amongst the graves and throwing dead leaves against the windows while he burned the midnight oil. His only company was the little radio he had tuned to some talk show about alien abductions and the ever-present scratching of his pen, the pecking of his fingers at the keyboard of his laptop.

  And it was as he was so employed that he heard a sound.

  It wasn’t much… just a peculiar squeaking sort of sound.

  It could have been anything… a tree branch brushing over the roof of the office, a stray twig blown against a window. There was no need to be concerned… yet, he was. He didn’t expect a midnight visitor dressed in the cerements of the grave or anything quite so melodramatic, but he was struck by the sense that the sound he heard was not at all accidental.

  It was on purpose.

  Which meant…

  Turning down the radio, he listened to the wind. Now and again a good gust shook the office and the lights flickered. It sounded lonely and desolate out there. He looked at his watch. The screen of his laptop. The door leading from his office.

  He kept listening, a hint of gooseflesh at his spine.

  And that’s when he heard a creaking noise.

  It was unmistakable. Just as its source was unmistakable; the main door to the outer office had just been thrown open. He could hear the wind out there, much louder now that the door was open. He could feel frigid fingers of night slipping beneath his own door. It rattled momentarily in its frame.

  That first sound, that squeaking… it was the doorknob being turned, he thought then. And now the door has been thrown open.

  Although a little floor heater chugged away to dispel the cold, a trickle of sweat ran down his temple. His heart sped up in his chest, skipped a beat as it tripped over its own galloping rhythm.