by Curran, Tim
He pulled himself out of bed and walked silently to the door.
Tara was just down the hallway by the sound of it. Perhaps right outside Lisa’s room. He stood there. The door was slightly ajar. He listened. “If you do bad things you’ll have to be punished,” Tara was saying in that flat mechanical tone. “You know I won’t have a choice.” There was a pause. A scraping sound like she was dragging her fingers over the wall. “I’ll do what you want. But remember our agreement.” Another pause. “You’ll get what you want as long as I get what belongs to me. Do you understand? I’m asking you if you understand.” Another pause and he thought she made a horrid dry giggling deep in her throat. “Then it ends tonight and that’s our agreement.” He heard her sighing. “Yes, her husband’s been nosing around. He was a cop. It’s in his blood. He won’t interfere, though. He’s old.”
He went back to bed.
Who or what was she talking about?
Tara was whispering in the hallway but he couldn’t be sure what she was saying. He was almost certain she was no longer on the phone—if she had been in the first place—maybe just talking to herself now. The thing that scared him the worst was the idea that she really was mad. That her mind had gone. The evidence was mounting day by day. He brushed his fingertips over the bite marks on his shoulder. Who was it you laid with you last night, Steve? a voice asked him. What mounted you and bit you? It wasn’t Tara. You can’t believe it was her.
It was another.
The door opened and Tara stood there. “You’re awake,” she said, certain of the fact like she could see perfectly in the darkness. “I have something I have to go do.”
“At this hour?”
“Yes.”
“Tara, please come to bed. Please talk to me.”
She stood there for a moment and he had the strangest feeling that she was about to do just that… then he heard her pulling on her clothes. “You need to leave, Steve. I’ll talk to you about everything tomorrow. Then it will all make sense to you and you’ll understand why I did what I had to do. Until then you’ll have to trust me.”
“Tara…”
That voice again, but now with an edge sharp enough to slit a throat: “Do you trust me?”
No, no I don’t trust you at all because you’ve been acting like a fucking crazy woman and we’re all scared half to death for you. You’re behavior is irrational. You’re thinking is skewed. Even the words that come out of your mouth are warped and incomprehensible. But what he said was, “Yes.” His heart winning out again, his escalating love for the woman suppressing natural instinctive fears. “Of course I do.”
“Good. I knew I could trust you. You’ve always been my rock.”
She came over to the bed and held onto him, kissing him.
“You should go now,” she said.
“Tomorrow?”
“You’ll know everything.” She stood there, waiting for him to get dressed. “Hurry, Steve. You won’t want to be here when I get back.”
67
The house was a sculpture of time and silence, the subtle drift of dust and the whisper of the woodworm within the walls. Here in the dining room, beneath the wrought-iron eight-arm chandelier where cobwebs were strung as thick as bridal lace, the table was layered with a patina of settled grime. Plates were heaped upon plates, glasses overturned, crockery shattered, silverware scattered like bones, bits of rotting food abundant with plump bluebottle flies. Those seated there in cerements of mold-speckled velour dresses, support hose, buckled shoes and square-shouldered Sunday suits were like antiquities stored in trunks and glass museum cases, withered and wanting things, mannequin-eyed and puppet-grinned, all silent, all expectant, dusty finger to dusty lip, eyes sunken into dark varnished orbits.
Then the stillness was broken by a wizened voice like a quill pen scraping parchment: “Plenty of red on the cheeks! That’s it, kid! Your mother always was a clown so now you’re bringing out the real her!” Uncle Alden was completely in his element now that Henry was making fools of Mother Rose and Aunt Lily. “Ha! Ha! Ha! This kid’s a riot! An absolute riot!”
Mother Rose sat there, candlelight throwing deep-hewn shadows over her grim disapproving face. While Uncle Arlen slapped the table and raised a cloud of dust, she watched him, a derisive and hateful gleam in her eye. Just you wait, she seemed to be thinking at him. Just you wait because your turn is coming, you can be certain of that.
Elise had joined the throng and sat stiffly, a ghastly smile of stretched rubber at her lips. She hummed a distant, lonely, muted dirge that was high-pitched and resonant like the plucked string of a lyre.
Under the table, looking for scraps, Worm crawled on all fours amongst the pipestems of legs, nuzzling them. Her teeth were chattering with delight.
“Henry, get this crawling vermin away from me,” Uncle Arlen said. “It smells like she’s been rolling in something again.”
Beneath a silken hankie well-gnawed by mice, Aunt Lily whispered, “And I’m sure that we can all guess what that might be.”
Henry painted large red rouged circles on Mother Rose’s cheeks that gave her the look of a garish and somewhat ghoulish circus clown. “There,” he said. “You’re looking better already.” He stepped back to admire his work, strands of glossy black hair hanging over his oily eyes like clumped wireworms. “Tonight, we must present ourselves. Tonight we’ll have a visitor.”
Aunt Lily sat motionlessly like a wax mannequin, waiting, wondering, not knowing and it was killing her. She had to know who was coming. She just had to know. For who was the biggest gossip in that room and who was the purveyor of least kept secrets? Who had been the one, when Henry had fallen into that glum spiritual depravity following his father’s death, that dragged him by the ear out into the cemetery? Your father is dead and you must know that and accept it. And Henry, oh poor Henry, delver of darkness and digger of tomb-scraps, who could not comprehend that death was an end and not a beginning of mystic sepulchral joy, had turned away, throwing himself at the foot of a leaning centuried monument, fingers brushing flecks of lichen from a worn epitaph, tracing the green-furred cracks in the stone with an almost tender and erotic joy. I wish to lie in state, he said, pressing his face to the blades of grass and breathing in deeply of the dark soil beneath. Dead, you hear me? He’s dead, dead, dead, Aunt Lily told him. But Henry had refused to accept that. Aunt Lily had tried, certainly she had tried to straighten out his head.
And now… more secrets: dark secrets of pure velvet. Oh, to know them, to clutch them to your bosom like precious jewels and know—know, mind you—that they were yours and yours alone!
Her fingers were wiry umbilicals threading the broach at her throat. They shuddered, they drummed, they floated up and descended like butterflies: busy, inquisitive, curious beyond decency. Who? Who? Who could it be? She just had to know. Something built in her throat, filled her mouth, slid off her tongue: “Who is it, Henry? Dear boy, tell me who it can be!”
Henry laughed. “Soon you’ll know.”
“I demand to know now!” Mother Rose said very firmly, looking positively obscene with her rouged cheeks and the scarlet smear of lipstick on her mouth. With her pale and seamed complexion, she looked much like a vampire that had just enjoyed a midnight orgy of blood.
“He’ll tell when he’s ready, won’t you, boy?” Uncle Arlen said, his lips pulled back from a gap-toothed grin. “He’s always been one for surprises, Rose, hasn’t he? Remember that night not long after Charles went to his just rewards that you found him in his room petting the thing in the box? You knew something was amiss, didn’t you? You could tell by the smell that something just wasn’t right… but when you saw him holding it there, petting its long hair and talking to it like it still had a body! Ha! What a hoot! This kid and his secrets!”
“Boys will be boys,” Aunt Lily said.
Mother Rose scowled. “He was never a boy. I was never certain what he was. Always lurking in the shadows, always playing out amongst the tombs. Unheal
thy, unwholesome, but he could not be discouraged.”
“Boys will be boys,” Aunt Lily said again, feeling she should say something.
Uncle Arlen laughed, ignorant of the spider that webbed his watch chain. “Well, you tried, Rose. God knows you did your very best. Taking him into your room and schooling him. Teaching him how a man is supposed to touch a woman. You tried. You certainly tried.”
Henry ignored them because nothing could sour his mood this night. He painted up Aunt Lily’s tissue-paper face very brightly and never did he once touch her in ways that were unacceptable… though she wanted him to. She certainly wanted him to cup her withered breasts and whisper filthy things in her ear. But he did not. Instead, his breath rushing from his lungs, he scooped up Elise from her place at the table and swung her around like a pale bird, her dress swirling like sallow lilac wings as she crumpled against him, dancing, dipping, cheek to cheek and breast to breast. They danced like marionettes held by jerking, jumping hands. Elise’s spidery fingers clutched at him, her petrified face leaning into his throat as if for a midnight kiss or midnight sup. Together they moved to a low morose humming that came from Henry’s lips. Forward, backward, pirouetting just so with graceful motions that brought great applause from Worm who squatted in a cobwebbed corner, clutching Lazy Baby to her, protectively.
She was chewing on something. Something she found under the table.
“Worm!” Henry said. “You have an appointment. Go keep it!”
She scrambled away on all fours, leaving Lazy Baby alone in the corner with only white and squirming things for company.
Once all were painted and prettied, Henry dashed from the room. Down the stairs he went into the charnel gloom, whistling uncontrollably, a high and piercing whistle that sounded much like the steady uneasy reedy screeching that played ceaselessly within his own brain. He returned a few minutes later, breaking the silence like a web from four walls to ceiling to floor, and presented a full length bridal gown of beaded ivory satin, the chapel train dragging in the dust.
He sat it at the table, draping it over an empty seat, among much applause and hooting from Uncle Arlen, a blushing acceptance from Aunt Lily, and a sinister disapproval from Mother Rose. “You’ll not marry one of your tramps in my house! And not in my gown! You will not defame my vows! I will not allow such a thing! Do you hear me, Mister Henry Borden? Do you damn well hear me? Not in MY gown! Not in MY house! That’s… that’s SACRILEGE! THAT’S BLASPHEMY AND YOU, SIR, YOU CRAWLING LITTLE MAGGOT, YOU SIR ARE A BLASPHEEEEEMER!”
“Bravo!” said Uncle Arlen. “First hot blood she’s had in her, Henry, since the night you stuck your—”
“I am not listening to such talk,” Aunt Lily said. “I refuse to.”
But it was too late; Henry had already made up his mind. “Tonight,” he said, holding hands with the latest acquisition to his collection, “there will be a wedding. My bride’s name is Tara. And she’ll be here soon. So you go ahead and pout, Mother Rose, but we are getting married. Do you hear, you dried up old cunt? We are getting married and if you don’t treat my bride with respect, I’ll take you apart and let Worm play with you!”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“Try me.”
“Tara, eh? I bet she’s a looker all right, Henry,” Uncle Arlen said, smacking his lips hungrily. “Even better looking than this little number… not that you’re not attractive, Miss. But without a head, it’s really hard to tell.”
“Another tramp,” said Mother Rose. “Cemetery harlot.”
“My, my,” Aunt Lily murmured.
Henry scowled. “Pay her no attention. She’s just jealous.”
Uncle Arlen burst into laughter that echoed through the tomblike stillness like shattering black crystal. “Ever since you stopped fucking her, Henry, she’s just been a green-eyed monster.”
Henry ignored them all because they were old flaking mummies peering out from rotting strips of gauze. What did they know of love? Let them gawk, let them stare, and better yet, let them learn. He poured his affections onto the headless woman, pretending it was Tara—caressing and kissing, touching and feeling, reading her like Braille on a tombstone, fingers busy, breath coming heavy, mind rioting with images of the marriage bed.
“I told you you were obsessed with Tara, Henry. She’ll be a beautiful bride,” Elise said. “But you better be careful and you know why.”
Henry did not listen. He only felt his affection for Tara and could not stop fondling her surrogate. Like the busy hands of an old woman polishing a stair rail, he fingered every last inch of his prize, knowing that the affection he showed her was nothing compared to what the real Tara would receive.
And in the ominous and stark graveyard ambience of the old house which was the province of the worm, the silence held.
68
When Tara opened Margaret’s grave, the stench threw her back into the grass where she promptly lost her lunch. Gagging, trying to draw a breath, she pulled herself to her knees, wiping bile from her chin. She waited until the dry heaves passed, shaking and sweating.
Are you going to give up now when you stand so close to Lisa you can nearly reach out and touch her hand? Are you going to lose your nerve because of the stink of putrescence? What the hell did you think a corpse would smell like after being in the ground for two days?
The night was cool, leaves falling from the trees, the woods beyond a womb of silence. A horror that was nearly indescribably took hold of her as she made herself reach down into the black wormy earth and take hold of the first of the Hefty bags. They felt greasy and warm beneath her fingers.
As she pulled them out, one by one, things shifted in them and bile rose in her throat.
Stop thinking. Stop analyzing.
Yes, that was the way to do it. She had to become what she was that night she planted these things here in secret: a beast. Something that did what it had to in order to survive.
That’s it, Tara, put yourself on a shelf and let the beast out. Remember how easy it was when you let the beast have full reign? Remember how the beast buried Margaret? Remember how it almost enjoyed pulling the trigger on Spears?
It’s easy.
Drop to all fours.
Breathe in the smell of the night.
Tara did this, the atavism like a rich vein inside she was tapping. Its hot blood filled her veins, draped her mind in red velvet, left a sweet and satisfying taste of dark metal on her tongue that enlivened every cell in her body.
She could smell the thick loam beneath her hands.
Feel the black soil packed beneath her fingernails.
Hear the furtive scurrying in the brush.
Better. Without such trifling things as rational thoughts, she yanked the bags out of the hole and dumped them on the ground. Then the rug with the torso in it. They all seemed remarkably weightless. She dragged them to the Stratus and heaved them in the trunk, slamming it shut and breathing in great crisp lungfuls of chill night air.
There. Done with part one.
She walked over to the grave and put it back in order with the shovel, scattering leaves and weeds and pine cones about. Then she walked to the edge of the forest and wrapped her arms around a stout pine, fingertips exploring the crevices in the bark. She saw the boogeyman in her mind—a hunched-over, slithering form—and the image filled her with hate, revulsion, and the need for payback.
Still smelling the stench of Margaret’s remains, she opened her mouth and screamed into the night.
69
The conversation started with Steve telling Frank he was crazy to leave the hospital which got him absolutely nowhere, for once Frank Duvall made his mind up to do something, he simply did it. Nothing was going to stop him. Not nurses. Not an ER doc telling him he was in no condition to leave. And surely not Steve Crews. So Steve picked him up at the clinic and walked with him out to his SUV.
Then they sat down inside.
Frank said nothing.
So Steve said, “I’m read
y to hear it anytime you’re ready to tell me.”
Frank just nodded. “Not even sure I want to begin this one.”
“Probably not, but you better.”
So Frank told him. He was still feeling goofy from the drugs that had only just begun to wear off and his ribs and arm were beginning to throb with a repetitive rhythm. “I did nothing but try to stop her. I grabbed her by the shoulder… well that’s all there is. I suppose I’m lucky I made it to the clinic before I fucking bled to death.”
Steve was silent for a time. He was really, really scared. For himself. For Tara. For the love they shared. Shortly after she had cut up Frank, he’d been in bed with her. She had went from an assault to a violent bout of sex without so much as a shrug. She’s gotta be crazy, he kept telling himself. She’s gotta be crazy. But each time that voice chimed in, he seemed to make some excuse for her… but he was plain out of excuses now.
“Well?” Frank finally said.
Steve sighed and told him he had been with Tara later. He did not go into detail and he did not think he had to. “She said she’d tell me what was happening tomorrow.”
“And you were okay with that?”
“Frank, that’s the most I’ve gotten out of her in days.”
“I suppose.”
But what was bothering him the most and had been bothering him since he left her was what she had said to him. She told him to leave. You won’t want to be here when I get back. Meaning what? She would be covered in blood from some nocturnal feast? She would have a head in a hatbox? What exactly?
He told Frank that part and Frank said, “You can take my word for it, Steve: when she warns you away, you better listen.” He pressed a hand lightly to his ribs. Not a good idea. He waited until the pain subsided. “Here’s the time we start making decisions, Steve. Enough pussyfooting around and hoping shit will just get better. I love fairy tale endings like the next chump, but I don’t believe in them where Tara’s concerned. Whatever that phone call was you overheard, that’s the axis of this whole thing. All of this revolves around it. All Tara’s lying and evasion and violence and weird fucking behavior, it spins on that phone call. Let’s not dick around, okay? She’s out of her fucking tree. We can agree on that. But she didn’t get there on her own—she was pushed.”
