Levy shakes his head. ‘Not pink - she’ll say it’s too young for her. White, or cream.’
She nods and her fingers brush across the tops of the hangers as she considers the choices. For a moment Levy is fascinated by her fingernails, each of which is painted not one, but three colours, in a bright diagonal pattern. The finishing to the fancy manicure is a tiny, fake diamond on each tip and he wonders if, in her youth, his mother ever had a job like that done on her nails. His musing stops when he realises the woman is about to pull a yellow dress from the rack, which will look terrible with his mother’s pallor. He has never liked yellow anyway. ‘No,’ he says. ‘White or cream.’
She looks as though she wants to argue, then she shrugs and replaces the dress, finds a different choice and holds it up. ‘This?’
He looks at the garment critically, but it’s pretty damned good. He would like it to be perfect, but his choices are limited here and time is marching on; his mother’s body is beginning to show the effects of death’s hand and, as painful as the experience may be, he really needs to put her into her final resting place. The dress has short, bell-shaped sleeves - it’s actually out of season - but perhaps that is for the best, since it will make changing her clothes a little easier and lessen the chance that her arms have swollen so much they won’t fit inside normal sleeves. The whole thing is plain white lace with a princess collar and tiny pearlised buttons running down the front from neckline to a hem that goes just below the knee, with a nice, white satin underdress. ‘This is good,’ he says. ‘Perfect. I’ll pay cash.’
The saleswoman gives him an arch look. ‘Just to make things clear, sir, all sales are final. We don’t accept returns or exchanges.’
‘No problem,’ Levy tells her with a smile. ‘She won’t be bringing it back.’
Each part of this, Levy discovers, is harder than the last.
He’d thought it would get easier as it went on, that the initial loss - that final letting go of spirit from body - would be the worst of it, but bathing his mother for the last time teaches him how wrong he has been. The feel of her papery skin beneath his fingertips, the slow drawing of the soapy washrag along the now-slack flesh of her arms and legs, the way the dry, cool skin of her face drinks in the moisturiser he carefully rubs into it and the rest of her stiffening body … it’s all like a slow, religious ritual, his own parting of the soul, this time his from hers. Levy is a religious man, but knowing that she’s gone on to the Maker and is finally out of pain, which has been substantial for her in the last month, doesn’t make it any better. She’d come to him late in life, after years of separation, and now, selfishly, he wants her back, wants her to be here for the next few years so he can get to know her as he should have. Funny how life and fate can alter a person’s future just by making the paths of two people intersect.
Finally, Levy is done. Clothed in the white lace dress, his mother’s body lies serene and falsely innocent on the bed, like an aged child napping before her first communion. As a closing touch he carefully tucks a lavender-flavoured mint into the dry, toothless cavity of her mouth. The water in the washbowl has cooled quickly in the high air conditioning and Levy’s hands are freezing beneath the constant draught from the vents. Despite this, he is sweating from his work; the strain of carefully turning her as he tried not to bruise flesh already discoloured from settling blood - gravity and nature working against him - has reminded him that time is his enemy here.
His back hurts and Levy lets the heat of the shower rinse away the ache and warm his chilled body, wishing it could go deeper and fill the ice-encrusted abyss that surrounds his heart. As he tries to scrub away the smell of decomposition, he thinks about a headstone for his mother’s grave, the final thing he wants to do for her but cannot because of the time factor and the money. He wants something in grey stone and carved with her name and life dates, maybe with a rose etched into each corner; perhaps he’ll be able to order one for her in a few months, after he makes up the highway hours he’s given up during her illness. In the meantime, Levy has made a marker for her grave out of a piece of treated wood, the kind they use to build decks and which will hold up in the weather. The lettering is nothing more than waterproof paint, but he’s done it up in careful black letters outlined with white, and since as a sign painter he makes a pretty good tracker, it’ll have to do.
Showered and dried, Levy goes to bed and lies in the dark with his eyes open, staring into a blackness that seems eternal and thinking of tomorrow night.
JERUSALEM STAR, Monday - October 16
DEATH COMES TO JERUSALEM
Pope County police discovered the body of Wilma Russell behind the Food Gas ,’N’ Co at the entrance to Interstate 40 early this morning. Miss Russell, a lifetime resident of Jerusalem, was a waitress in the coffee shop of the Gas ‘N’ Go and a member of the Jerusalem North Baptist Church. Other employees said they noticed nothing out of the ordinary when she left work the previous night.
Refusing to reveal the details, Sergeant Brendan did say that there were certain acts done to the victim’s body which made the crime unique, and that it was clearly not linked to any other in the area. This is the first murder in the Pope County area in more than twenty years and the County Police said that while they have no leads at the present time, they believe forensic evidence will help track and convict the murderer.
‘Well?’ Jerusalem’s medical examiner, Terrence Penn, pulls off his bloody latex gloves and tosses them into the bin marked MEDICAL WASTE, then reluctantly turns to face Sergeant Brendan. The man is well-known for his temper and Penn knows he has to be very careful or he’ll find himself on the receiving end of that notable lack of patience. ‘Mind you, I haven’t finished the full autopsy yet, but cause of death looks to be strangulation.’ He nods towards a bloody object in one of the metal bowls next to the table. ‘I dug that out from around her neck, tight enough so you can bet the windpipe was crushed, maybe even severed. I doubt you’ll get any clue from it though - you’re looking at nothing but typical telephone cord, the kind you can buy in a hardware store anywhere.’
The Sergeant waits, fidgeting, and the medical examiner scans the corpse again. It is still dressed and the only areas he’s washed so far are the neck and the face, going after the weapon and cleaning her up enough to take a photo for the police. His gaze pauses at shoulder height and the muscle and sinew gaping on both sides. ‘I won’t be sure until I eyeball some samples under the microscope, but by the angle and edges of the wounds, I’d say her arms were probably removed with some type of saw.’
‘Hacksaw?’
‘I doubt it,’ Penn says. ‘Bone is a son-of-a-bitch to cut through. Wood saw’s more likely.’
The cop grimaces. ‘That same hardware store, huh?’
Penn just shrugs. ‘I’ll get on the computer and spread this around,’ he says. ‘Let the other jurisdictions know and see if they can come up with anything.’
‘No,’ Brendan says sharply. His voice makes Penn jump. ‘We don’t need a bunch of high-nosed official-types poking around Jerusalem and getting folks more upset than they already are. We’ll handle this ourselves and keep things nice and quiet.’
Penn wants to protest, but he knows it’s useless. Besides, because of his past, he likes the idea of quiet and inoffensive, of letting vicious things go until, perhaps, they simply roll over and die on their own.
‘You ever see anything like this up there in the city?’
‘No.’ Penn is in his mid-thirties, a refugee from New York and a much more unpleasant first decade in his career. The implication, the possibility, of what’s lying on the table in front of him represents something he believed he left behind in the tenements and streets of a city filled with hatred and pain. To see it come to roost here, in this peaceful, God-fearing town, makes him feel like a crack has appeared in the edge of his world and revealed an unexpected pocket of poison. ‘And I never thought I would, either.’
Friday, October 27
And
for Levy, it just gets worse and worse.
At least the weather is good. The earlier weather report of possible showers doesn’t carry through and the air stays clear and crisp as the sun sets and the light fades to evening. Levy has taken great pains in the placement of his mother’s casket in the back of his rig, making sure that when it bounces or turns she won’t jostle around too much and get her nice burial outfit all messed up in this most unconventional of hearses, or - God forbid - her wooden bed upsets and spills her onto the dirty metal surface. When it’s full dark he heads towards Peaceful Oakes Cemetery on Highway 240, taking the long way around so he’ll come up by the back entrance, the one the kids use at Hallowe’en when they futz around and play spook jokes on one another. This is a good time of the evening - the caretaker’s gone home for the weekend and it’s early enough so that the sheriff will be more worried about the rednecks spoiling for a Friday night fight at the Magnolia Saloon than he will harmless pranks at the boneyard.
He finds the spot he bought and is pleased to see it’s been well cared for. First he carefully cuts the sod and removes it, laying it out in rolls like he’s seen groundskeepers do before other funerals. That done, Levy starts to dig, and the work is harder than he expected - do they really dig the holes six feet deep? He can’t get the sides as neat and even as they should be, but he does what he can, knowing they have machines for that and he has only his own God-given hands. He gets around four feet down and accepts it as enough; he’s been digging for a couple of hours and each hour that passes increases the chance that the sheriff will cruise by on his nightly rounds. Levy doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong - his mother, his plot of ground in the cemetery - but it would just be a whole lot easier to avoid having to explain it. It takes a chunk of struggling but he finally gets the awkward pine casket that will shield his mother’s corpse from the surrounding soil into its place within the hole he has dug. Panting a little, he leans over and picks up his shovel, knowing that when he fills in the grave, he will be done with this most painful of tasks. And then, the worst of it hits home.
He bends double and sobs, feeling suddenly crushed beneath the knowledge that he is here and she is…there, in that hole, he is putting his mother into a dark, cold hole in the ground and covering her with dirt. It is the right thing to do, but for a minute or two, an eternal one hundred and twenty seconds, Levy feels like he has never done anything so wrong in his life.
But in the end, as he has always done, Levy grits his teeth and does what he has to.
And at last, after so, so long, it is finally over.
INDEPENDENCE REPORTER, Saturday, October 21
BODY DISCOVERED BEHIND RESTAURANT
The Autauga County Sheriff’s Department discovered the body of Janet Liding in the dumpster behind a Peter’s Chicken restaurant on the north side of Independence this morning. Mrs Liding’s husband reported her missing yesterday evening and stated that she did not return home from a shopping trip to the Prattville Mall. Police believe Mrs Liding was killed elsewhere and then moved to the Peter’s Chicken location. As yet police have no explanation for the fact that a significant portion of the body is missing, and a full investigation has been mounted. Mrs Liding is survived by her husband, three children, and one grandchild.
‘How is she?’
Dr Stackforth doesn’t look up from the clipboard until he finishes what he is writing. He has always been proud of the way his penmanship is neat and readable, unlike so many other idiots in his profession who think that the label ‘physician’ entitles them to fall into a ridiculous stereotype that is nothing but a Facade for people too lazy to take the time to control their hands. This afternoon he is especially proud of that control and the way he is able to keep his hands from shaking, despite the condition of the teenaged girl on the hospital bed in front of him, and despite the corpse he had to examine earlier in the morgue. ‘She’s in shock,’ he tells the grey-haired policeman who waits at the entrance to the room. ‘Under heavy sedation.’
The cop’s name is Davis and he nods in understanding and glances at the bed. He already knows the basic info - Mandy Wallace, age seventeen, high school dropout who likes to party a bit on the wild side, as if that had anything to do with anything. ‘Can I talk to her?’
The doctor frowns. ‘She probably won’t wake up until morning. I doubt you’ll get much besides what she’s already said, anyway - she’s just repeating the same thing over and over about how she took out the morning trash and there the woman was when she lifted the lid on the dumpster. It would’ve been better all around if whoever did this had at least shoved the body further down so the girl didn’t see … well you know.’
‘Yeah,’ Davis agrees, and his thoughts skitter back to that terrible earlier time slot during which he and the morgue attendant had lifted out what remained of Janet Liding and strapped it to the gurney. Afterwards he had gone through the garbage in the oversized trash container piece by piece, but the search had been futile - no clues, and no more body parts. Somewhere out in the world a killer with a hunger for high brutality wanders free, and as much as he wants it, Davis knows he isn’t meant to be the man who catches him.
Saturday, October 28
It’s a joke, Charlie the groundskeeper thinks as he stares at the freshly turned mound of dirt at the far back corner of Peaceful Oakes. Kids or something, always trying to be smart-asses, and you’d think that Moreless boy had got enough of their shit when he was growing up. There was something down there, all right, but he damned sure isn’t going to dig it up without supervision, God a’mighty knew what was waiting in there because something sure was - that much dirt just didn’t get displaced and leave a mound like that sticking up outta the ground all by itself, thank you very much.
He shakes his head and drives to the maintenance office, dials up the sheriff while he flips through the logbook until he gets to the chart that tells him who owns what plot way back there. He’s still on hold when his fingernail skims down the page and stops at the appropriate place, and he almost drops the phone when he sees the name. God a’mighty, he had it right on the nose when he’d said there was no telling how cruel people could be. That damned sheriff still hasn’t come on the line so he pulls Tuesday’s newspaper out of the pile by the garbage can and checks the obits - hot damn, there it is for everybody and anybody to see.
He’s just about to hang up when Tyler Benton’s gritty voice finally blasts into his eardrum. ‘What’s up, Charlie?’
‘I’m thinking you better come out to the boneyard, Tyler,’ he says slowly. His brain is still trying to accept the signals his eyes are feeding him from the newspaper. ‘I’m thinking … someone got buried out here last night.’
There’s a pause on the other end while the sheriff tries to understand him. ‘What do you mean “someone”? You telling me you don’t know who?’
‘Yeah,’ old Charlie says. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘There’s no record of anyone named Ida Drannon in the Harmony Clerk’s Office,’ Sheriff Benton says as he scowls at the wooden grave marker. ‘Levy Moreless is as orphan as they come - he was found in the women’s room at Mercy Hospital when he was two days old. They never was able to track down the mother.’
Charlie shrugs. ‘Maybe he finally found her.’
Benton spits a mouthful of tobacco juice off to the side, and while he says nothing, the groundskeeper’s inference doesn’t pass him by. ‘I sent a car to his house but he ain’t there. Neighbour says his rig pulled out this morning, probably doing a run. She says he’s generally only gone a few days.’ He squats and studies the grave marker again, squinting at the letters painted on the piece of wood. ‘Pretty meticulous paint job for a prank.’
He glances back but the groundskeeper only shrugs. ‘Who knows? My Mabel - God rest her soul - was a teacher at Harmony Grammar and she used to bring home some tales, I tell you. Said the kids tormented the Moreless boy something terrible until he got his growth the summer of his
freshman year. After that no one dared - boy shot up to six foot three and turned out to be quite the athlete. Would’ve been on the basketball team except he threw his knee out in a practice game, so he started driving a truck after school for one of the auto parts places.’
Benton nods. ‘Kept on doing the trucker thing, I see.’ He jams his hat back on his head and pulls his collar a little closer against the chilly late October wind. It’s only mid-afternoon but there’s a heavy cloud cover and already it seems dark; he hopes to Christ Moreless knows something about this, because he’s going to be pissed as hell if he ends up having to get a back-hoe crew out here to dig up whatever’s in this damned hole. ‘I’ll give the man two days to get back,’ he says, wondering if he can stretch the deadline if he has to. Probably not. ‘Then we’ll see what’s what.’
Tuesday, October 30
Levy comes back from his weekend run to West Virginia and finds the biggest nightmare of his life.
It has been a difficult trip, a tough fight to get the overloaded eighteen-wheeler through the mountains in a day-long late fall downpour. At times he was barely able to see the road and more than once it had taken every bit of concentration he possessed to keep from running over the beat-up truck of some miner and his family or the wheezing RV belonging to grandpa and the wife that the old man drove maybe twice a year. There’d hardly been a free second on the road to let his mind relax and think the proper kind of thoughts about his mother, the mourning kind that a man, a son, ought to be able to immerse himself into over the week following the righteous burial of a parent. He had planned on heading home and getting a good night’s sleep, then coming out to the graveyard in the morning with a big bundle of fresh red roses from the florist over on Gavin Street, but at the last minute he’d turned his rig onto the Perry exit ramp and headed into the Wal-Mart there. It might be only a quick bunch of daisies, but tomorrow was just too far away - he needed to go to the boneyard and do a little private grieving tonight.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 23
