by Jamie Mason
The ghost of a smell slid past him on the breeze, punting his heart up into his throat. Only a privileged few live to full grown without being able to recognize the smell of rotting meat. When it’s coming from the fridge to remind you of a neglected electric bill, it’s merely disgusting. But out in the open, all he knew was that something had died close at hand.
For Boyd, on this night and in this place, the smell of death was just about enough to send him bolting back the way he’d come, all the risk of it be hanged. But the sound that had nipped at his ear in Phil’s yard came again, this time clearer and unmistakable—a plaint, a whimper, an undeniably feminine mewl floating up to him from a dark heap a short ways ahead in the clearing, halfway to the house, and right smack between him and the mulch bed where he’d put Katielynn.
All the clarity he’d ever owned tilted away, and a terror-senseless thrill blazed up every nerve. It pulled him forward while desperate reasoning spawned a litter of explanations for why injured-girl sounds mingled with grave stink hung in the air only a little more than spitting distance from the spot he’d buried his murdered wife. His beautiful wife. His young, sweet, laughing, faithless wife.
Boyd flung himself sideways into a tight gap between two bushes at the far wall of the shed. A hailstorm of possibilities clattered against the full-on surety that Katielynn was dead, dead as dead had ever been. Moaning or no moaning up ahead, there was no coming back from what she’d made him do, no matter how much he’d wished it at the bottom of his whiskey glasses. That the cops had been poking around was proof enough. She was stone-cold and just as silent, as was her rat bastard lover. Moreover, she’d been gone for years. He gripped this fact between his temples to clamp down on the wavering doubt that was trying to throw a load of what-ifs over the certainty that Katielynn couldn’t possibly be making that noise.
He crouched in the weed-skirted shrubs, the smaller twigs snapping against him, while the sturdier branches of the bush dragged at his skin and hair, ripping payback from his hide for busting up the tender spring fronds. Boyd, not breathing, not moving at all beyond the thrumming pulse that forced his temple against a broken stem, ran through his choices as he listened for the sound again. He could stay put, or he could crash through. The hedge curled around him, clotting up the darkness and blocking the breeze.
Only two things could steal the will from Boyd Montgomery’s bones. One was a tall drop, and the other was a tight space. He pulled against the urge to thrash his way into open air. His body hummed with the sudden, stupid desire to stand tall, to fling off the greenery and turn giddy somersaults into freedom. The rational part of his brain, without hesitation, argued very much for the opposite—to wait out any chance of ever seeing what was out there in the grass from just exactly where he was, thank you very much, not making a sound, no matter that it took till sunup. He was going light-headed in the debate. A leaf, or something crawling on one, tickled Boyd’s ear, teasing him to swat at it and yell. Self-control tightened down like a straitjacket.
Someone was messing with him. Maybe they’d guessed he’d come, set him a trap. Boyd shimmied out from between the bushes through the eye-watering pull of branch-combed hair, and he pressed himself against the shed wall. He ducked a look around the corner and saw the mound on the grass snap to a peak, another muted cry calling out to the raving soft spot that was blooming over his common sense. He flattened back against the wall, his eyes squeezed tight to keep the sight of the roiling nightmare from going any deeper. It had to be the cops. Please, God, that was the only explanation. Either that or something hell-sprung wasn’t the least bit impressed with the reasons why he’d done what he did on that long-ago day. The thing had come to intercept him, waiting for him here on the very ground where it had happened, just to have a go at his soul.
He swung around for another peek, but a foot too far this time to keep him from stumbling out from behind his cover. He threw out a hand, catching only the loose hasp of the shed’s open latch, but the metal plate and the wobbling, loose padlock were hardly enough to reel in his misstep. A racket of wood on metal brought a shovel handle toppling over his toes and the noise of it ruined his stealth, but it also rattled loose the cage door of his recklessness. He swept up the handle, swinging the head of the shovel into position high over his shoulder, and made for the murmuring bundle.
It rolled and bucked as he approached. Ten paces out, Boyd could see whatever it was wriggling under a plain, old camping tarp. Something that unremarkable, so very of this world, gave him pause to think more clearly, though his feet didn’t bother to take advantage of it and propelled him onward anyway.
Eight of the ten paces spent, Boyd’s calculations abruptly snuffed out on the last breath his lungs looked to replace. The tarp crackled and flew open at the far edge.
As much as he immediately decided that he would prefer to take his chances with the police, Boyd was convinced that the other scenario had opened up a portal and he was indeed staring down a hell horror that would play on everything he loathed. Two figures slithered into view on a waft of decay—one dark and still, a man made faceless and anonymous by his tattered wrappings, and the other a pale woman, turned from Boyd, and nuzzling up against her gruesome lover. A contorted chortle climbed the woman’s throat and raced up to merge with the replay in his head of Katielynn’s last naughty giggle.
17
Most nightmares are caged in their realm by implausibilities. The sleeper slogs through quicksand in a fun house of frightening nonsense and disjointed mumbo jumbo. But everything’s all better once the bedside lamp is back on, because reality, even when it’s bad, is easily distinguished from night terror. Except for the trying-to-scream dream. That one’s pretty much spot-on.
Leah’s throat strained to cry out, but the weight of the fear bogged down the sound and pressed it thin. She managed a hiss, high in her throat, then a guttural, warped whine. And just like in the dream, that deformed sound was even scarier than what caused her to make it in the first place. The thing beside her was simply a biology lesson.
The sheet had shifted open, the plastic ripped away from the shoulder and torso. Pale ribs peeking through a mushy gap and a glimpse of collarbone oriented the shape of her tarpmate, but the head remained mercifully hidden in its bindings. Leah still clasped the forearm fleshed in dark sludge, now gone warm under her grip. She snatched her hand away, fingers splayed to keep the jam from mingling.
She scrambled to her hands and knees, but the aspect change wreaked havoc on her head wound, which throbbed a booming tempo. A look ahead only brought on the spins—house-woods-thinginthetarp; a swirl of moon-stars-treetops. She swiped her slimy right hand through the grass and kept it flat on the ground for counterbalance as she drew into a crouch. She held her head together with her left hand and winced at the pulse clumping along in the goose egg that bulged there. Her heart whirred and her vision grayed as she wobbled to her feet, but an unsteady three-count was all it lasted. One trembling half step and her clay legs showed their true colors, dropping her back onto the grass. Leah slapped at the ground and whined through gritted teeth. She rocked onto all fours, and without waiting for the merry-go-round to slow, she launched an attempt that not only didn’t work, but toppled her over backward. Her shoulders scudded up against a squelchy something; her head was cradled in an almost comfy nook. The crackling rustle of plastic sheeting was loud in her ears. Her aching eyes rolled to see what she already knew: the rest of the covering had been nudged aside and she was cheek to jowl with the livid, grinning horror.
• • •
Jason yanked the towel away from his face and scowled to sharpen his hearing. He thought he would have grown used to the taste of his heart at the back of his throat by now, but there it was—metallic, warm, and sickening again. Fresh beads of sweat sprung up in the stubble on his upper lip. And once again from outside the window, the low, halting moan, louder and grimly for certain this time. It was the lethargic pause between bleats that renewed the watery wa
rmth in his innards. All his mind’s eye would show him was a groaning Harris: trailing his shroud, bagged blind, and staggering through the back door.
He considered closing himself up in the closet and counting to ten thousand, but the only thing more terrifying than the thought of seeing what was yowling out in the backyard was the stealthy silence that played in the spaces when whatever-it-was went quiet.
Jason crept back to the narrow window over the commode. He’d nearly sprained his neck trying to keep his porcelain seat and a simultaneous watch over the covered heap on the lawn. He’d abandoned the view only long enough to rinse his hands and face. Now he drew the curtain back, one finger sneaking it open one eye’s width. His heart, which had been crashing red thunder through his temples for most of the night, stopped cold.
• • •
Guilt wears track shoes. Sprint, marathon, or cross-country, it doesn’t matter. It runs tireless to catch you, and it carries a sledgehammer. From the backyard to his bathroom was a short dash for the dread reflex, and that he hadn’t even considered that the dead girl might not be dead made the blow all the heavier. The light of relief at having not killed a perfect stranger was well smothered under the bushel of new anguish—how was he ever going to account for any of this to a live person?
But the new addition to the scene in the backyard pushed that problem to a distant second place on the podium for prize-winning disasters. It left him blinking, but not breathing. It was simply impossible.
His car had been stolen from outside the library once when he was a teenager. He’d walked to the spot at the curb where he’d parked it and stared, dumbstruck, at the bare blacktop. His brain had, over and over, laid down the card showing him the little red hatchback, trying to match it to the picture of empty space in front of him, but a phantom game-show buzzer insistently voided the transaction. This was very much the same. His senses were overflowing with unpleasant trivia, but his brain offered up nothing but plain white banners where the explanations should have been. Urgency, though, whispered a cold clarity into his head; this time, he couldn’t just stand there and fret.
She was fighting to her feet, chest heaving, limbs flailing, and terror flowing out from her in waves that he could feel right through the window glass. But far, far worse than all that was the improbable new addition to the cast. A man was standing behind her. It wasn’t Harris. Thank God. That was the only thing that could have been more horrible, but this man was blessedly too tall, too blond, and too dry. And from somewhere, somehow, more recently familiar. The man had cocked Jason’s own shovel back over his shoulder and he stood two giant mother-may-I steps braining distance from the girl.
In only seconds he would finish her off or she’d whirl and discover him. In either case, chances were better than average that she’d scream, waking the neighbors or, God forbid, the dead. Her fear and vulnerability bored through the wall, straight through Jason’s hesitancy, and he was out the door before he’d formed a strategy that could possibly yield any good result.
• • •
Boyd didn’t seem capable of moving beyond the trembling that rattled the shovel in his upraised arms. The girl had flung herself back and forth over the canvas with not so much as a glance spared in his direction. Her performance clearly wasn’t for his benefit or, thankfully, for his damnation either, but before he had the chance to hazard a guess at what was going on, her eyes found his. She’d spun and swiveled as if the ground under her were layered in greased marbles, and her final fall had left her tucked under the chin of a glistening skull that, in the scuffle, had mostly popped free of its plastic hood.
When she did see him, he was instantly reminded of his threatening pose by the naked terror in her expression, but a rough call of “Hey! No!” reached him from near off his right side. Before he could decide which way to play it, a speed-launched weight slammed him sideways onto the ground. The unseated shovel rapped at least three spots on his head on the way down, the sharp edge of it slicing a notch into the sweet spot at the tail end of his eyebrow. The hard spindle of the handle bit into his hip as it dug in under him.
The man landed half atop Boyd, driving the shovel’s haft against his hip for a second sting, and the pain made up Boyd’s mind for him—he’d had about enough. The first people he’d dealt with since the cops in his kitchen were turning out to be near as much of a hassle as the police themselves had been, if not more so. No ghosts. No demons taking sport from his blame. Just two roadblocks. Noisy, blundering idiots who ought to be in bed. A thread of blood turned the corner at his lashes and slipped into his eye, so that the other one watered up in sympathy. He raised a hand to scrub the blood and tears away, but the man on top of him swatted his arm down, struggling to pin him into place.
“Go! Go!” the man called to the girl, who stood stunned, transfixed by the body on its tattered wrappings.
Her pale skin shone through swatches of dirt and blood. “Oh, God. Is that Reid?”
The name set Boyd’s head fizzing and he lost track of the fight against the man holding him down. “What did you say?”
“Is it?” She put the back of her hand against her mouth and shook the other loose on its wrist. A shuddery exhale threatened to escalate into a full-fledged breakdown. “Is it Reid? Why is he still here? I thought they’d taken him. They just left him outside? On the ground, for Christ’s sake?”
Boyd felt the old, smoldering school-shame flood into him. He’d almost always had the right answer somewhere in his head, but could never get to it and get his hand up before some other kid earned the gold star, the place on the team, the smile from the smart girl in class.
“What is this mess?” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Is Katielynn out here, too? What have they done? Where is she?”
Jason held his breath as he watched the girl behind him and the wiry man underneath him take in the vision that had plagued him into paranoid seclusion. Whatever these two thought it meant, Harris, as an image, had lived alone in Jason’s mind since the last time the bastard had shouldered past him over the threshold on his way in and flopped lifeless in his burial bindings on the way out. But the world didn’t end. No rumble ripped open the ground and swallowed Jason whole. The fact of it sizzled through him—he was still here. And, for a change, he wasn’t the most clueless person in the group.
“You people are sick.” The blond man upended Jason, pulling himself free with the strength of indignation. “Y’all can leave that Reid, that no-good piece of trash, just wherever you’d like, but you oughtn’t drop Katielynn that way, out in the open for God knows what to get at her. Where is she?”
The woman’s gasp drew them all to a shared stop. “Oh my God. I’ve seen your picture! It’s him. They told me he was dead, but it’s him.”
“Who?” asked Jason.
“Run!” she said. “He killed them. He killed them both!”
Kill and run and hi-fi hysterics fed into Jason as if they hadn’t always been the order of the evening, and indeed an integral part of his entire week. He scrambled away toward her call just as the bits came together for him. Jason worked the important words from the stream of everyone’s overtaxed consciousness. Girl and blond guy took up their rightful name tags in Jason’s mind—the fiancée, Leah Tamblin, and Boyd flipping Montgomery. That’s where he’d seen him. Bayard had shown Jason a picture in the case file.
“Now wait!” Montgomery hooked his arm over Jason’s lurch. “I ain’t got traffic with you. I’ll have your car keys, but that’s all I want.”
Jason had never been particularly attached to his car, but the thought of being left with no way to cart Harris off the lawn or drive himself out of town, if it came to that, which was looking more and more likely by the second, had him swearing a silent vow that the very last thing he’d see before he died was his key ring dangling from Boyd Montgomery’s fingertips. He lunged upward quite respectably, but not as far outward as he needed to, so Montgomery was up and on him before he’d cleared two stride
s.
They struggled over a small patch, trampling divots out of the grass and bruising each other’s feet until they staggered over the slick edge of the tarp. Jason enjoyed a split second’s triumph when the other man lost his legs first. The gloat faded once he realized what had caused the slide, half a heartbeat before their tangle landed. There wasn’t enough firm substance left in the pile to technically fall on Harris, so the finale was more of a splashy dive into him.
For the first time all night, it seemed, Jason held the advantage. He was already familiar with the sound and the stench and the slip of it all, so even though the bile ran north in him, the horror of it had largely been spent. Boyd, however, squirmed and retched and hissed little hacking yelps during his wet skid through the center of the wreckage. Harris’s acid-eaten bones broke beneath them, and what had been pulp was ground to paste in their wrangle.
Jason clambered over the other man and was nearly free of him, but a lucky bit of flailing married one of Jason’s belt loops to a one-fingered death grip by Boyd. He pulled Jason back down, but Jason, one horror for the night stronger than Boyd Montgomery, drove an elbow sideways into Boyd’s windpipe and thrashed free. He bolted for the house, as best he could on rubber legs, catching Leah, who stood suspended in petrified fascination, and dragged her with him.
• • •
Boyd had heard it said, and even from his own lips on occasion, that something or another had made his skin crawl, but he realized now that he’d never meant it. He had scraped specks of his twin brother’s brain off the radiator with a table knife and not wanted to leap from his own hide as badly as he did right here in his old backyard. A cool, wet reek matted his hair, while his fouled collar buttered the back of his neck in shivery strokes.
