Shivers 7

by Clive Barker

  “Gotcha.” Digger toed the ground. It gave a bit, sucking in the bottom of his foot, but not much. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He walked towards the water. “Not even over—”

  “That’s far enough,” warned Frank. “Just to be safe, I’m treating this as a crime scene until we’ve got enough daylight to check things out carefully. That’s why I didn’t want you to drive out here—if there are other vehicle tracks out here besides ours, I want to keep them distinct. If you come back with a ’hoe around noon, we’ll be ready for you.”

  “Guess I better start walking then—it’ll take me damned near that long to get back to my car.”

  2.

  Ellen Rankin’s feet were killing her already, and she’d only been on shift for a couple hours. Wearing these new shoes without breaking them in first had been a very bad idea. She pushed the breakfast cart toward the last door on the hallway, thankful that this task was almost done. She pushed open the door and saw Colleen was drowsing, as usual, while Agnes sat staring out the window.

  “Beautiful morning, isn’t it, Agnes?”

  The older woman turned from the window. “Yes, it is, Ellen. A beautiful morning, indeed. A brand new day.”

  Nurse Rankin stopped dead in her tracks, the breakfast tray in her hands listing precariously. Agnes was the elder equivalent of a poster child—for senile dementia; she hadn’t said anything remotely sensible in the five years Ellen had worked here.

  “Agnes? Are you…feeling all right?”

  “Absolutely. I’m back.”

  “Back? Back from where?”

  “I hid. All these years, I just hid. But you know the worst thing?”

  “Wh-what?”

  The old woman was staring at her, pupils dilated and distilled with a strange gleam.

  “I remember.”

  Ellen had to fight the urge to take a step back, so intense was the woman’s expression.

  “I remember all of it.”

  * * *

  After so long spent huddled in a dark corner of her mental cell, Agnes Woolrich found it invigorating to step out into the sunlight and come alive again. But she stopped short of being happy about her emergence. For with consciousness came memories, and with memories came shame.

  At long last, Agnes remembered… and on this day she was not alone in remembering.

  3.

  “Well, if you fellas happen to see Leon, you be sure and tell him I want to talk to him, all right?”

  “Will do, Chief.”

  “Sure thing, Frank.”

  Frank Depp nodded and turned to cross the street. Behind him, the two old-timers continued murmuring as he walked away. He couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, yet he felt sure he knew the gist of it.

  “You know, Frank has turned out to be a fine young man.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not his father.”

  “No. But who could be? He was one of a kind.”

  Ad nauseam.

  It was a sentiment that he’d grown used to. When your father was a local hero, it wasn’t easy walking in his shadow, let alone his very footsteps, but you either learned to live with it or let it drive you crazy. Frank had finally done the former, but it hadn’t been easy.

  Ken Depp had been a three-sport star in high school, a stellar student, a war hero, a devoted family man, active in his community, and the chief of police—what wasn’t to love about him? And loved he was, as evidenced by the many friends he counted and the endless adulation he received. The hero worship even went so far that he’d been on the receiving end of years’ worth of deep discounts, outright gifts, stock tips, and the like—despite his protests—to the point that the Depp household had never wanted for much, and Julia Depp had wound up a pretty well-to-do widow. Even Ken Depp’s death two years ago from a heart attack hadn’t served to stem the flow of admiration. Frank was surprised that they hadn’t yet erected a statue in his father’s honor in the town square.

  Of course, something as solid and permanent-seeming as a statue might not fit in all that well in Placerton. The town had an unsettling newness to it, a complete lack of history and tradition, owing to the fact that it—or more accurately, the current version of it—had only been in existence for thirty-some years. To Frank, the town somehow seemed incomplete and superficial, all tilt-up walls and prefab structures; sort of like a Stepford village. The town’s elders liked to say that the new Placerton had no soul, usually just prior to launching into a nostalgic, almost reverential description of the old town.

  One of those old-timers was Leon Urban, the cemetery owner, and Frank’s search for him so far this morning had proved fruitless. Urban had begun managing the cemetery in the early ’60s, after his dad retired, and had apparently overseen the move to the new cemetery—which, not coincidentally, was also located on land owned by his family. Frank wondered just how that transaction had gone down, way back then. That particular suspicion was just one of several that Frank was harboring like a yacht club beset by a squall. He thought, for example, that it was likely not an accident that Urban was nowhere to be found at the moment. Word had no doubt traveled quickly in certain circles following Frank’s wake-up calls the previous night to Henry Orthlieb, the town’s mayor during most of the ’60s and ’70s, and Carl Eckersley, the long-time head of the water company. If there was anything shady that needed to be kept covered up, chances were the parties involved were laying low and making sure they had all their ducks in a row. Frank realized he was jumping to all sorts of conclusions, but that was the problem with being a cop—you got so used to people lying to you that you got to the point where you didn’t trust anybody anymore.

  But he’d decided to abandon, for the moment, his search for Urban. Frank was only a couple of minutes from Orthlieb’s house, and thought that paying an unannounced follow-up visit to the ex-Mayor was a grand idea.

  * * *

  After three rings of the doorbell and several knocks, Frank had been about to give up on his brilliant Orthlieb-interrogation idea when the door finally opened. He suspected… but there he went again; he needed to keep those lunging suspicions at bay. A housekeeper had led him through the cavernous house, which sat on a bluff overlooking Placerton, with spectacular views across the lake to the west. Orthlieb was lounging in a backyard Adirondack chair, half in the shade, with a cup of coffee and the day’s newspaper.

  And, so far, he’d proven just as unreceptive to Frank’s queries in person as he had the previous night on the phone.

  “It’s like I told you—that was a very long time ago. I don’t recall much about it, mostly because there’s not much to recall. There were a great deal of logistics involved, but they were all just tedious details, really. There were no under the table deals, as you seem to be insinuating. If there had been, I’d certainly have known about them, because I was in the middle of everything.”

  “So the cemetery move was by the book, as far as you know?”

  “Yes,” sighed Orthlieb, not bothering to hide his exasperation. “As I said, the decision was made to move all the graves to the new cemetery. There weren’t nearly as many graves back then, so it wasn’t an enormous undertaking. So to speak.”

  “And you don’t think that Urban decided to maybe pocket some of the proceeds and leave a few coffins behind?”

  “No, I can’t see Leon doing that. In fact, I was out there one afternoon when he was … disinterring caskets. I couldn’t forget it if I tried—one of the caskets fell to pieces as they were levering it out of the ground. Not a pretty sight.

  “Regardless, I saw him removing caskets, just as he was supposed to. I guess it’s possible that he could’ve missed one, or even more than one. Not all the graves were well-marked, especially the ones in the potter’s field section.”

  “Potter’s field section?”

  “Yes, you know—the drifters, the vagrants, with no money of their own for burial. When such a person dies, the city takes the expense of burying them—or at least we did back then; I
expect it’s the same now. But there wasn’t enough money to buy them headstones. I believe the cemetery manager just kept track of their plots in a chart in his office. It could be that one of those vagrants was accidentally… misplaced. So to speak.”

  “Seems like a convenient excuse.”

  “Chief… Mr. Depp… Forgive me, but were you even born then? Your father was in charge of this town in those days. I may have been the mayor, but he was the Chief of Police; he ran this place. You think a man such as your father would’ve stood for anything like what you’re suggesting?”

  Frank understood the comparison, and implied insult, for what it was.

  “No,” he said slowly, refusing to rise to the bait. “No, I don’t expect he would have.”

  “You’re chasing ghosts, Chief. Things that happened so long ago that there’s not even many of us left now to remember it. And nothing illegal about any of it. My advice is to let it go. Just…”

  4.

  “‘…let it all go.’”

  “So, pretty much the same thing that Orthlieb told you, huh?”

  “Not pretty much—exactly the same thing Orthlieb told me. It’s like him and Eckersley got together to get their stories straight, but got them a little too straight.”

  “Sounds pretty fishy,” said Digger, raising one eyebrow.

  “Yeah, it does to me—” Frank’s voice faded, as he realized his brother was kidding him. “Look, just because I’m paranoid…”

  “…doesn’t mean everybody isn’t out to get you,” finished Digger. It was a time-honored exchange.

  Digger cracked his knuckles, stretched his neck a little. He was enjoying the late afternoon sunshine and the break from his work, but knew he should get back to it before the light started to fade and see what else he could find. The day’s digging had so far yielded two more bodies.

  “You want my two cents?” he asked over his shoulder as he started to walk to his backhoe.

  “Why not? You’re going to give it to me, anyway.”

  “The potter’s field story seems pretty reasonable to me. I haven’t found that many bodies, and they all seem to be in the northwest corner.”

  “I know,” sighed Frank. “You’re probably right. It’s just… I’m not ready to close the book and absolve everybody just yet.”

  “Of course not. If you gave up that easily, Dad would roll over in his grave.”

  Digger climbed up into the backhoe’s cab, yanked the throttle, and fired up the engine before Frank could offer a reply. He swiveled his seat around, swung the bucket back over the edge of the hole with practiced precision, and lowered it in.

  He was taking his third bite out of the soil when he saw from the corner of his eye Murphy go running past, heading for Frank. Something about the deputy’s urgency, and the expression on his face, made Digger stop what he was doing and watch. He realized the deputy was trying to shout over the din, and cut the engine.

  “Say again?” yelled Frank, as the sound spiraled down.

  Murphy was half-covered with mud, and a little out of his breath from his run. “Another skeleton,” he exhaled. “Over there.”

  “Another one?,” asked Frank. “This goddamned cemetery is leaking people. They must’ve floated all over the place.”

  “This one isn’t from the cemetery. And it didn’t float anywhere.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Come see for yourself—it’s in a basement over here.”

  Curious, Digger climbed down from his cab and followed the two men as they made their way across a debris field of bricks, rotted lumber, and the occasional stump. When they were about a hundred yards from where he’d been working, the deputy slowed and pointed to a rift in the ground.

  “It was partly filled in with mud, so I didn’t notice anything at first. But then I noticed the sun was glinting off something, so I climbed down there. That’s when I uncovered him.”

  “Uncovered—” started Frank, but stopped when he got close enough to see over the lip of the hole.

  There, looking up forlornly at them with empty eye sockets asking where his rescuers had been decades ago, when he needed them, was another skeleton. But this one was chained to a thick, rusting pipe.

  5.

  “I have to admit—it’s one of the stranger things I’ve seen.”

  “It just seems so… spontaneous.”

  “Well, her recovery may have been prompted by some external factor, or it may have just happened, for reasons that we don’t yet understand.”

  Nurse Rankin looked down the hall and through the open door, where Agnes was again gazing out the window, as if seeing the world for the first time.

  Rankin lowered her voice further, and asked, “Is it a permanent recovery, do you think, or could she slip back into dementia?”

  The doctor shook his head. “It’s temporary. People with her condition can sometimes experience periods of lucidity, but the recovery is never permanent.”

  “Before you got here, I was looking at her file. I knew her condition had never changed during the time I’d been here, but I wanted to see how far back it went. Sixteen years she’s been here—and displaying Alzheimer symptoms the entire time! And for who knows how long before she got put here? How common can it be for someone to experience this kind of recovery after that long of a time?”

  “Extremely uncommon—but not unheard of.”

  “There’s a reason, you know.” The corner of Nurse Rankin’s mouth curled upwards.

  “There usually is.”

  “I mean, a reason why she’s been in this condition for so long—and for years before her family even brought her here, from what they say.”

  “I know, I’ve heard the rumor. I’ve heard just about everything in my day, Ellen. I’ve been consulting here for more than twenty years, you know.” As if to emphasize his point, the doctor ran a hand over his shining bald pate. “I was here when Mrs. Woolrich’s family checked her in.”

  “And…?”

  “And what? They didn’t walk in and announce ‘Please take our mother. She’s had Alzheimer’s since the old town was submerged,’ if that’s what you mean. I seem to remember that they did say she’d been exhibiting symptoms for quite a while and that she’d finally become too much to handle, but that may just be my imagination filling in the blanks—whatever they said, it should be somewhere in her records. Her family moved away right after they checked her in. They pay her bills, but as far as I know, they never come to visit her.”

  As if she’d heard them talking about her, Agnes Woolrich suddenly turned and looked directly at the pair in the hallway, then walked over and closed the door to her room.

  * * *

  Agnes felt better as soon as the door swung shut, cutting off the inquisitive stares and conspiratorial whispers from the hallway. She’d spent so long wandering alone inside the confines of her own head that the presence of others seemed like an intrusion, especially when they were so curious, so intent on peeking into her life.

  Relief from prying eyes was easily obtained, but peace from her own thoughts was not something Agnes had managed to achieve. It was likely not something that she would ever manage.

  She sagged, her descent stopping only when the backs of her thighs met the edge of the bed. A sluggish breeze crawled in through the open window, rustling her stiff gray curls and bringing with it the smell of lilacs, and the odor of something long dead.

  As if brought by the breeze, more memories flowed over her. With them came an overwhelming sense of disbelief at what she’d been a party to.

  How had she ever been convinced that the end justified the means? Some meaningless materialistic gains in exchange for the casual manipulation of so many lives…and, ultimately, the loss of one life, a life that had once been so very dear to her. Had she been drunk with power, mad with misplaced love? Or was there truly nothing at which to point a finger, no cause or excuse for her behavior? It was a mental exercise with no benefits, mindless aerobics that w
ould shape no goal.

  But while torturing herself with recollections might serve no purpose, Agnes herself did possess a purpose. For just as she’d been a pawn in a larger scheme thirty-eight years ago, so now were her actions being directed. She wasn’t sure by who, or what, but she didn’t bother to question. She knew what she had to do, and that was enough.

  Her gaze was again drawn to the window, where the breeze sent a tattered curtain of leaves fluttering to the ground. Nothing escapes the Earth, she thought. In the bottomless depths of its existence, certain things were neglected for a time, but nothing was ever forgotten. In the end, everything was drawn to its bosom, submerged beneath is smothering soil.

  * * *

  She picked up the phone. It hadn’t been hard to get his number; it wasn’t even unlisted. He’d always enjoyed the spotlight, and cast himself as a man of the people, even as he was stepping on their heads in order to climb over them. The phone buzzed angrily in her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Henry. This is Agnes.”

  “My God! I’d heard you had some sort of miraculous recovery, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “Word must travel fast.”

  “It does when you’ve got your ear to the ground. I still keep track of everything that goes on in this town.”

  “I’m sure you do, Henry. And I’m sure you still control a fair share of it, too.”

  “Now that you mention it, I suppose I do.”

  “I knew that you would. But you don’t control me. Not any more.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I remember everything that happened. And that there needs to be an accounting.”

  “Listen to me, you…” Orthlieb paused. She could hear him struggling to maintain his composure. “If you try to go public with this now, everyone is just going to think that you’re exactly what you appear to be—a crazy old woman.”

  “Don’t worry, Henry. I’m not talking about ‘going public.’ I’m talking about making amends.”

  A wordless sound of derision came from the other end of the line.