by Curran, Tim
“WHAT IS THIS?”
Henry Borden stepped into view. “What have you been doing, Worm? What are those things doing outside of the secret room? You’ll ruin everything! You’ll ruin the game!” He had a corpse in his arms with dangling gray limbs. He kicked Worm and she made an animal-like squealing sound, dropping Lazy Baby whose head broke free and rolled across the dirt floor.
“Not my baby! Not my baby!” Worm whined, trying to put the head back on again as Henry dumped his prize next to Lisa and began to slap Worm viciously until she rolled over and offered her ass to him and then spun around, snarling, anxious to draw blood.
And all the while, Lisa screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed as her mind came apart like delicate candy glass… head thrashing, eyes wild and glassy, saliva bubbling from her lips in a pink froth.
“SHUT HER UP!” Henry shouted at Worm. “YOU BETTER SHUT HER UP IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU!”
Worm snarled at him again and he kicked her. She let go with a short sharp doglike bark and then leapt on Lisa, her scabrous hands gripping her throat and squeezing and squeezing until Lisa’s mind began to close up like a hothouse flower, petals folding into themselves and sap running cold and dead. Teeth gnashing and mouth foaming, Worm continued to bear down, squeezing harder, pressing Lisa’s windpipe shut, banging her skull against the cellar wall again and again as darkness exploded in her head and she sank into serene oblivion, a voice very much like her own wailing in its madness: thank god thank god oh thank god—
48
Tara’s eyes peeled open: they were bright and aware with an animal intensity as was the brain behind them. There was a threat nearby and she had sensed it in the depth of some twisted nightmare of the chase.
Yes.
She could smell the threat—decomposition.
She leaped naked out of bed and ran about the house turning on every single light again, beads of sweat running down her brow and plastering her hair to her face.
That stink.
Where was it coming from? Down on her haunches at the bottom of the stairs, she sniffed like a dog. Smelling. Casting. Locating. The kitchen. It was coming from the kitchen and she had to take care of it before the entire house reeked like a plundered tomb.
Drip, drip, drip.
On all fours she crawled madly into the kitchen.
Drip, drip, drip.
She stopped at the archway.
Drip, drip, drip…
Yes, the stink was oozing out of the walls like blood from a slit artery. In her mind she could see the yellow festering streaks the stink left as it trailed down the walls and pooled on the kitchen floor. It was flooding. The kitchen was flooding with vile charnel perfume. If she didn’t take care of it, it would sink the kitchen in loathsome grave stench.
Into the closet. Plastic buckets. Mr. Clean. Pine-Sol. Lysol. She emptied them into the buckets and filled them with steaming hot water from the sink sprayer. She filled a Dutch oven with water and turned the burner on high to get it boiling.
She went after the walls with a scrub brush.
The floor with a mop.
The appliances with a sponge.
She soaped and scoured and disinfected, scrubbing and swabbing and sanitizing. She went at it until she was glistening with sweat, her hair dripping wet, moisture pooling beneath her eyes and running down her cheeks. Her lips tasted of salt and her sense of smell was numbed from antiseptic cleaners. When the water was boiling, she poured it right in her buckets, scalding her hands as she recharged her sponges and scrub brushes and rags. She cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Washing down the countertops, scraping them with a razor in search of residue. She polished the stainless steel sink basin, the faucet, the spigots. Nothing eluded her. She even got out a fine-bristled toothbrush to get at anything she might miss.
And when she was done, she started again.
And again.
She went at it for a solid hour before she was satisfied. And then, sobbing and moaning, an agonized cry twisting in her throat, she collapsed on the kitchen floor with rags in her hands.
In her dreams, she could smell a pervasive rot.
It was gagging.
49
In a gloomy, candlelit cellar in a gloomy house of death:
Worm squatted in the corner, sucking her thumb.
Lisa’s still form was slumped against the wall, head hanging to the side, eyes sightless and staring.
And in the dirt before them:
Henry with the cadaver of a woman he not-so lovingly referred to as Tara. He was breathing hard on top of her. Pushing. Pushing. Deeper. Teaching her, yes, schooling her as he had schooled Worm, loving Tara in front of her to show his displeasure with her.
Breath barely coming.
(discipline her, henry)
Lungs filled with fire.
(she’s ours and we have her now)
Loins slapping.
(soon… soon we’ll have her)
Climax building.
(just like we’ll have the other tara)
(ours)
(ours alone)
(soon… soon you can return to mother)
And beneath him, the moldering and thoroughly putrefied headless corpse was ground into the dirt, gradually breaking apart.
50
Tara jerked awake on the kitchen floor and for some time had no idea where she was or her minor little place in the universe at large. But she did know what had wakened her and that was Lisa’s voice. Lisa’s voice shearing through her muddled dreams like a straight razor and filling her being with a cold, weary sickness that made her moan and pull herself into a trembling fetal position there on the floor.
Lisa was hurting.
Lisa was in danger.
Lisa was dying.
Lisa was dead.
The thoughts and possibilities stumbled through her mind and she shook and whimpered, feeling so unbearably helpless, weak and pathetic. But still that voice, the one at the back of her skull cried out: I’LL FIND YOU, LISA! I’LL FIND YOU AND I’LL FIND HIM AND WHEN I DO WHEN I DO—
Yes, she knew exactly what she’d do and she closed her eyes.
Drifting off.
Grinning.
Part Three:
Dead Skin Mask
51
Detective-Sergeant Wilkes stood outside the Hillside Cemetery office while the coroner’s people and CID techies came and went, buzzing about like bluebottle flies around an especially juicy brown turd. He paid little attention to them. He was looking out across the grounds, watching leaves falling from the trees. Cool night last night and the cool nights brought autumn that much faster this far north. Second of September and already it was beginning. Stray leaves fell from the big oaks and maples, clustering around gravestones and blowing around the doors of crypts.
Fingerman came from inside, stood there, a good cop for the most part, but big and gangly the way they built kids these days, weaned on too many cop shows, always going on about his “gut-instinct” and “bad feelings” like one of those carefully pressed and polished Hollywood cops on the tube. Too stern, too cool, lots of bullshit dramatic pauses like he was David Caruso or one of those glamour boys reading from a script. But that’s the way they turned ‘em out these days down at the Academy. Like they were all pressed from the same mold.
“Pretty cut and dried, you figure?” Wilkes asked him.
“Whatever is in this business?” Pause. “It’s a funny world.”
Wilkes liked that: the script was getting better all the time. Sounded like something Charles McGraw might say in an old cop movie. All the kid needed was a cigarette now, only these young cops never smoked, bad for your health and all. Still, a cigarette dangling from the kid’s lower lip would have completed the picture.
“What are you thinking?” Fingerman asked.
“Nice day. That’s what you got to love about the fall of the year,” Wilkes said, breathing in
deep and exhaling. “Cool nights. Good sleeping weather. Warm days, good for working outside. Raking leaves. Giving the grass a good last cut before winter. Maybe edging the walks.”
“That’s what you were thinking?”
“Sure. I’m a simple type of guy.”
But Fingerman didn’t seem to believe that. “Did you happen to give a thought to the dead man in there?” he said.
Wilkes nodded. “Sure.”
“And what did you think of that?”
Wilkes watched the leaves. “Weird business, is what I thought. A guy shot down in cold blood out at a cemetery office. Nice set-up for a murder mystery. Something out of Hitchcock.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.” This kid was really something. But he was chomping at the bit, wanting… no, needing… to get down to the business of being a cop and solving crimes. “Why don’t you run down the pertinents for me?”
The kid was happy now. Cop business. He pulled out his little notebook and went through it all by rote just like they’d taught him at the Academy. He had a stiff, mechanical sort of delivery he’d have to work on. “Dennis Patrick Spears, aged fifty-five. Divorced. No children. Some kind of R & D exec for Cumberland Paper. He manages the cemetery part-time, a family thing. He’s got a place down in Steven’s Point, a cottage in Egg Harbor, and a wife half his age. He comes here late at night or early in the morning to do his business. He took two rounds, one in the lung, the other in the throat that took out the carotid. Bled to death. Small caliber, probably a .25 or a .32, possibly a .380. Ballistics will figure that out. Um… lot of blood, but no tracks in it.”
“Shells?”
“Nope. Not that we could find. Looks like the area was policed.”
Interesting, is what Wilkes thought. A guy is working late in the cemetery office, doing some paperwork by the looks of it, somebody comes in and gives him two slugs, picks up the shell casings, and off they go. Not much there. Could have been just about anybody.
“What’re you feeling on this one?” he asked Fingerman.
The kid just shrugged. “He’s an exec. He got to the top somehow and probably has a few enemies. No sheet on him so I think we can rule out the hardcore criminal element. His watch—a Rolex Submariner, worth about eight grand—was untouched as was his wallet which held about three hundred bucks. So it’s not robbery.”
“How did you get all that background?” Wilkes asked him. “The watch?”
Fingerman was pleased with himself and he beamed. “It’s called a Blackberry,” he said, holding out his cell. “Voice, internet connectivity. Also, I asked the uniforms in there.”
Wilkes had to smile, too. “Say, you’re pretty good at this cop stuff. You ever thought of doing it for a living?”
Fingerman’s smile faded. “You always have to go on, don’t you?”
Poor kid. As Dennis Patrick Spears was taken out in a zipped plastic body bag, Wilkes watched Fingerman get his dander up. He didn’t like being toyed with and Wilkes toyed with him constantly and being his superior, that was his right. Still, Fingerman did not like it. But before he got hot under the collar and started pissing about things and Wilkes had to tell him to grow the hell up, Wilkes said, “What are they making the T.O.D. at?”
Fingerman swallowed it down. “Just before midnight, roughly.”
“No witnesses, I’m guessing,” Wilkes said, looking around at the crowded headstones. “Nobody out here would report a gun shot.”
Fingerman ignored that. “CID pulled latents off the door, the desk, you name it. Some of them probably belong to Spears and the rest to God knows how many people pass through here in a week. We’ll be asking a lot to hope one set belongs to the perp.”
Wilkes stood there, thinking. “How do you plan on handling this?”
“I… um… well we’re going to talk to the victim’s wife, his family, his co-workers, a few others that work here at Hillside. Lot of Q and A, I guess—keep our fingers crossed that something comes of it. Other than that…”
“About what I figured.”
Wilkes didn’t need to go back and eyeball the crime scene, he’d already had a gut full of it by then. In his mind, this was a premeditated murder: somebody with a grudge, a hate, or an axe to grind knew the routine, knew that Spears worked late, so they came in, surprised him, and put a few into him before he could so much as say how-do-you-do. The sort of person who planned out a cold-blooded killing like this knew enough not to waltz through the blood and leave any footprints and probably wore gloves.
That was how it stood.
“We need heavy background on this guy,” he told Fingerman. “I’m guessing that somewhere in his past or present there is a thread that will lead us right to our perp… if we can get our hands on it, that is.”
“I’m going down to Stevens Point to nose around, ask a few questions. That is, if you can live without me for a day or so.”
Wilkes smiled. “It’ll be tough, but I’ll try.”
What he didn’t tell the kid was that he was getting one of those cop feelings himself. An old lady disappears. Strange. Then a guy is gunned down at a cemetery. Double strange. Neither of these things were the sort of activity you’d expect in a quiet little burg like Bitter Lake, population eight thousand. A teenager or two might drop from the radar now and again, runaways, or a hunter might get gunned down out in the woods… but this didn’t wash. He knew he was crazy trying to connect the dots between these two incidents, yet he couldn’t seem to help himself.
When they were sitting in the state car, he said, “Ever get anything on that Coombes woman? She still bothers me and I rightly don’t know why.”
Fingerman nodded. “Tara Coombes. Ran her sheet and there’s nothing. No priors. Not even a parking ticket.”
“She’s clean, as Peter Gunn used to say.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“She was lying to us, you know.” A statement.
Wilkes nodded. “I figured as much.”
“You gonna go have another talk with her?”
“Maybe tomorrow. I’ll sleep on it. Hell, that girl’s been through a lot. Anybody can see that. But is that because she’s running herself ragged trying to give her kid sister a decent home life or is there another reason?”
Fingerman was quiet for a time. “I can’t stop thinking about her eyes.”
Wilkes couldn’t either and that was the thing that was keeping him up at night. Every time he closed his eyes he could see them looking at him. And why was that? He did not know. But it had almost been like there was something hiding in them, something crouching in the darkness, something almost feral and almost inhuman as if the mind behind them had become unhinged and she was putting forth a great effort to conceal that very fact. He wanted to believe her story. He wanted that very much because, knowing her history, he respected her for what she was doing and he wanted to go easy on her… but those goddamn eyes kept watching him, peering out from the shadows of his mind, electric and cutting.
As they drove out of Hillside, Wilkes studied the changing colors in the trees. Just starting, but how pretty it all was. How fresh was the air and how lonely did the tombstones look all leaning, white and weathered, holding down what was beneath them. Funny how graveyards could make you feel: small, insignificant, your own mortality slowly winding down day by day.
You got something happening inside you and you know it. You got the mother of all gut feelings about Bitter Lake only you won’t admit it to yourself.
That was true enough, but he didn’t dare mention it to the kid because the kid would make too much of it just as he himself was making far too little of it.
52
Although he couldn’t bring himself to eat, Bud Stapleton knew he had to keep the kitchen clean, so he dunked all the coffee cups into the sudsy water and slowly, meticulously, washed them, liking the feel of the hot water as it chased the cricks and numbness from his old knuckles which were more than a little swollen with
arthritis. Some mornings it was bad and he had all he could do to make a fist and on others, his fingers were just stiff and clumsy. The hot water felt good and the very act of doing something—even if it was just washing half a dozen coffee cups—distracted him somewhat.
At least he wasn’t listening.
For the phone to ring.
For the footsteps of cops on the front porch bearing bad news. But really, by that point the news could not be good. He would be seventy-four next year and Margaret was only a year younger than he. If her mind had drifted off and she had wandered somewhere, well, she wouldn’t survive the exposure. Not after this long. It had been nearly forty-eight hours. Oh Marge, where in the Christ did you go and what happened to you and if you were in trouble why didn’t you call?
A sob built in his chest and moved up into his throat but he would not allow it. He set the cups in the dry rack and wondered just what it was he was going to do now that he had to face the very real possibility that his partner of fifty-one years would never come home again and he would be alone, so very alone.
Drying his hands, he hung the towel with the yellow mushrooms on the stove rail the way his wife would approve of—carefully folded, mushrooms right-side up and not upside down—and moved down the hallway, passing the antique copper-framed mirror that Margaret just had to have at that auction in Clintonville. That had been a nice fall day like this one, warm with just a hint of chill in the air, a slight blush beginning to touch the leaves overhead. He saw himself in the mirror—a stoop-shouldered old man in a wrinkled flannel shirt and green work pants, white hair receding, facial lines deepening and beginning to look craggy—and did not like the image presented. Old now, everything going to hell. He looked like a threadbare old rag that had wiped up too many spills and polished too many countertops and was ready for the ragbag. Death was coming and he could feel its shadow moving closer by the day. He did not welcome it. Old people often said they weren’t afraid of death, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Maybe you understood it better than you did in your thirties and forties, but you did not welcome it with open arms and measure yourself for a shroud.
