August's Eyes

by Glenn Rolfe

  At the mention of her husband’s name, Sarah looked at him.

  “I thought that’d get your attention. Has he figured it out yet?”

  She looked confused.

  “Probably not. He forgets others so easily, doesn’t he? Thinks of himself and what’s best for him.” August pulled a spider from his mouth and stared at it. “Has he ever mentioned a boy he knew around here back in junior high?”

  She shook her head from side to side.

  “No? Well, has he ever told you about the time he saw his friend get kidnapped?”

  She shook her head again; tears slipped from her eyes.

  “I suppose it’s not exactly the heroic kind of story you tell your lover. Selfishness is such an ugly thing, wouldn’t you agree?” He walked over to her, holding out his arm and watching the black spider crawl onto the back of his hand. After a few seconds, the spider scurried from his arm over his chin, past his nose, and disappeared into one of his black eye sockets.

  Sarah squealed and tried to hide her face.

  He grabbed her chin and made her look at him. It was cruel, but August leaned in close. “Well, we all have a price to pay for our sins, even the ones we forget.”

  She tried to recoil but he brought his mouth to her cheek.

  He opened up and the spider skittered from his tongue to her flesh. She screeched and jerked, trying to shake it off. Several more quarter-sized arachnids joined the eight-legged dance party.

  August got up, shut the door, and left her in the company of fear.

  * * *

  Sarah trembled in the darkness. The horrible, awful boy, it was him. It was the kid without eyes from John’s dreams. August. What was going on? Impossible horrors from books she’d read – fiction, those were fiction – regardless, Sarah and John were somehow dealing with his nightmares come to life.

  What had August said? “Did he tell you about he boy he saw get kidnapped?”

  If that was the case…. God, what else had John not told her?

  Defeat settled in around her, like the nuclear fallout from the worst day of her fucking life.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Pat arrived early, waiting on Fuller. He’d tossed and turned all night and felt like a zombie this morning. Despite the golden sunlight trying to warm the cold from his bones at the cemetery gates, he shivered as though a ghost had wandered through him. Pat turned and imagined the van driving down the path between the graves, the Ghoul of Wisconsin behind the wheel, leering at him.

  In his head, he heard a voice he’d never heard in his life: “Feelin’ like a hero, huh? Gonna add another body to the count? Be a big man in town that solves a cold case? Pretty big deal. Pretty big target.”

  In his years of watching shows like Criminal Minds, Cold Case, and Unsolved Mysteries, Pat never imagined he’d land in the middle of a story like this. True crime, small town, serial killer….

  His phone told him it was after eight already. They’d met up no later than seven-thirty so far. Even then, it was because Fuller stopped off to get them lunch. This felt different. It could be the lack of sleep or all the nightmares he’d uncovered yesterday. He thought the choice of the word ‘nightmares’ was funny considering John’s current battle with his dreams.

  Fifteen minutes later, Pat decided to get started. He needed to get to work, even if only to take his mind off Fuller’s unexplained absence. Fuller had given him a copy of the key to the storage shed, so he pulled out the mower and decided to start there. As he took off the padlock and opened the door, a shape in the back corner of the shed caused him to let out a whimper, one that would only be more embarrassing if Kelsie Johnson were here to witness it, and stumbled away from the door.

  Upon further examination, Pat saw it for what it was – a jacket hung on a shovel.

  “Jesus, I gotta fucking relax,” Pat said.

  * * *

  After finishing cutting the grass and collecting all the dead or dying flowers from graves, Pat took his first smoke break. He couldn’t help but smile as Fuller pulled up in his truck.

  “Holy shit, Mr. Fuller,” he said as the old man stepped from the vehicle. “I thought you’d gone and died on me.”

  “I ain’t ready to join our friends here just yet, junior,” he said.

  The grin on the old man’s face delivered a swell of relief. Pat wasn’t sure if he actually thought Caswell had killed the old man, but he certainly couldn’t say it wasn’t in serious consideration.

  “Take a seat,” Fuller said.

  Pat set down the giant black trash bag full of dead flowers and hopped his rump up on Fuller’s tailgate.

  “What,” Pat said, “no lunch this time?”

  The old man laughed and patted him on the back. “Remind me when we wrap up, and we can swing by the A1 Diner on our way out.”

  “I was just messing with you—”

  Fuller waved him off and scrubbed at the salt and pepper whiskers covering his weak chin.

  Pat fell silent awaiting his forthcoming declaration. You didn’t have to be Sherlock to see the man had something he wanted to say.

  “You surprised me,” Fuller said.

  “Yeah, I tend to do that to a lot of people.”

  “I bet,” he said. “You’re dedicated, hard-workin’, motivated. That ain’t what you see in the kids these days.”

  Pat wondered how many kids Fuller actually took the time to get to know. He thought about posing the question but held his tongue instead, preferring to hear what the man had to say.

  “I mean it,” Fuller said. “I thought for sure you was gonna whine and mope and do a half-ass job. But you—”

  “Surprised you?”

  “Yeah, and don’t interrupt me. I got something I mean to say and I think if you can shut your yap for a second and stop crackin’ wise you might like what I’m tryin’ to tell ya.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Fuller.”

  “Seein’ what you done today, what you done this past week, I think you deserve a real shot. How’s about you take over my daily duties – I’ll swing over for the burials, of course. You not being old enough to run the backhoe or knowing how to handle the machine…yet. Think that’s something you can do?”

  Pat didn’t know what to say.

  “I…yes, I won’t let you down.”

  “Don’t go makin’ promises, just say yes, sir, and we’ll get at it.”

  Pat shook Fuller’s outstretched hand. “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  They were finished within the hour and made the diner shortly after one. Mr. Fuller agreed to subcontract not only the Helen Cemetery but also Babbs. Pat had his foot firmly in the door. Caswell was another story, but at the moment, Pat felt more accomplished than he could remember ever feeling in his entire life.

  “One other thing I gotta tell ya,” Mr. Fuller said between bites of his burger.

  “What’s that?” Pat asked, sipping his lemonade.

  “You ever wonder why it is we got so many graveyards in this town?”

  “No, but I mean…I guess, no, I never really thought about it.”

  Fuller scratched his chin and gazed out the window. “This area was tribal land. Passamaquoddy. Hell, there was a time half the population here had Injun blood in ’em. Some out of love, some from somethin’ worse. Anyway, when James Spears and what was left of the 34th regiment came home to Maine, they wanted to stick together and build their own community. Spears decided to take this land as his own and start his family and this town…let’s just say he didn’t have the etiquette to do so properly. No, he barged in with his men, told the natives to clear out. When they didn’t, he and his men, heroes in the war but now twisted from it, went on and slaughtered those too proud to leave and any man, woman or child that dared defy them.

  Pat’s throat felt like a dust catcher.

 
“Long story short,” Fuller said, now gazing into his coffee cup, “the natives, what was left of ’em, fled but not before one of them cursed this land.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I do the work in the daytime. Earlier the better. Ain’t no way I want to be out there after dark or anywhere near it.”

  “Why?”

  Pat thought of his strange encounter in the back half of Crescent Cemetery. The shadow, the voice…the damned spiders.

  “Trust me,” Fuller said. “The dead are dead, but that don’t mean they’re gone.”

  “Have you…have you seen ghosts?” Pat asked.

  Fuller fell quiet, drawing into himself. He fidgeted with his spoon, tapping it with his finger.

  “Mr. Fuller?”

  “Ain’t what I seen, but what I heard. Voices, whispers, little things.”

  Pat thought of his own experience.

  “What about shadows?” Pat asked.

  From Fuller’s pale expression, Pat thought the old man was seeing one right now.

  “I’ve seen shapes in the dark, moving between the graves or just beyond, but that’s it and that’s enough. Ain’t worked near sunset since. You’d be best to do the same. Hope I ain’t scared you off from the job.”

  “No.” It wasn’t a lie, not exactly; he wanted this gig, but he couldn’t hide the goose bumps. Rubbing at his arms, Pat said, “I’m good.”

  “Good. That’s real good.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “I think we need to call the police,” John told Janice over the phone. “It’s been twenty-four hours since either of us has seen or heard from her.”

  “But her car’s gone,” the woman said. “She had to have gone off. Maybe she just needs to clear her head without you or me trying to give her our opinions. She’s always been hard-headed.”

  She was certainly that. Still, it felt off.

  “Why wouldn’t she at least let one of us know that she was leaving?”

  “Because she knows we’d try to talk her out of it. Listen, Johnny—”

  John cringed at hearing Janice call him that, but said nothing.

  “When she was oh, I don’t know, nineteen or so, Sarah got mad at her boyfriend at the time. A nice fella named Aaron, I loved him – not that I don’t love you, you know I adore you. When she broke it off with the boy, I was so sure that she was throwing her future away. She just up and took off on all of us. It was only for a couple nights, but it’s what she needed. Scared the death out of me, but she was an adult and she made a choice. I told her yesterday morning to go home. You don’t work things out from afar. She’s probably just as irritated with me as she is with you.”

  It made sense. John remembered Sarah telling him that story. Isolating herself allowed her the space to think and see things more clearly. She said it was a way of resetting her perspective. After hearing that her mom told her to come home it seemed even more possible. Now, if they found her car abandoned somewhere – no, he stopped this train of thought before it could gain more steam. He’d always had a thing for what Dr. Soctomah called ‘catastrophic thinking’. It was part of his anxiety issues. Always preparing for the worst possible outcome.

  “Well,” John said, “if we don’t hear from her by tomorrow, I’m going to the police.”

  “I’ll go right along with you. But let’s give her one more day. If I hear from her, or you do—”

  “I’ll call you, for sure,” he said.

  “Thanks, Johnny. Take care.”

  “You, too, Janice.”

  He hung up the phone and tried Sarah once more, but it went right to voicemail.

  He was pacing again. There was no way he could sit around; he’d never be able to concentrate on a damned thing. And it was too early to start drinking. Besides, he was getting tired of drowning his sorrows.

  * * *

  The pavement felt good under his sneakers. The heat of recent weeks had dwindled to a much more tolerable seventy-five degrees with a bit of overcast delivering a nice breeze. It was a welcom change. John decided to take a slightly different route, heading left at Gilly Street and cutting over to 126 before heading back toward Spears Corner Road.

  Never in a million years could he have imagined cheating on Sarah. Yet, it had happened and nothing short of a time machine would erase that fact. John thought of kids, teenagers caught in a robbery, just trying to score some cash to maybe feed themselves or their mamas and the shop owner goes for a gun, the next thing you know the shop owner’s got a hole in his skull and the kid’s in prison, locked up for a knee-jerk reaction to a shitty situation.

  A situation he got himself into, John’s head reminded him.

  You can’t argue your way out of this one, Johnny boy.

  Not you, too, he chided himself.

  Maybe he did deserve what he had coming. Sarah leaving him, his dreams working on him from the inside out, whatever the hell was going on with Caswell and the green van.

  John stopped.

  Caswell and that damn van.

  When he realized just where he was, John’s gaze turned toward the tree line dividing Fairbanks Cemetery from the Caswell property.

  What if that sick bastard grabbed her? What if she’s trapped in there right now?

  He remembered the brand-new door on that shitty old shed.

  He was contemplating his next move when something wet dripped from the trees and smacked his forearm.

  There was nothing there. More drops thudded against him from above.

  Webworm caterpillars.

  They writhed on the ground.

  He looked up and saw a web over his head was coming undone, dropping the insects down upon him. Moving out of the way, he backed toward the road. More larvae rained down from overhead. He looked up and saw another deteriorating web and another. The number of caterpillars falling was impossible. Thousands of them, landing in his hair, wiggling down the back and front of his t-shirt. He yelped and one landed on his teeth. John spat and gagged as they continued to fall, now pelting him like hail. Using his arm to shield his face, he saw someone in the trees watching him. A tall, lanky shape, black as the night but hiding in the light of day.

  “No,” he muttered.

  Honk!

  The sound of the car horn blaring less than two feet from him scared the shit out of him. John dropped to the blacktop and stared up at the grille of Burt Marsden’s Silverado.

  “John!” Burt shouted. “Jesus, what the hell are you doing? Are you trying to get yourself run over?”

  John’s whole body trembled. He swatted at the invisible bugs he was certain were crawling all over his flesh.

  “John?” Burt was at his side. “Are you okay?”

  “They’re all over me,” he said, searching in vain for the caterpillars. They were gone.

  He gazed back toward the graveyard, scanning the path and the trees above. The webs were there, a few anyway, but they were fully intact; he couldn’t see anything moving on the ground below.

  Burt grabbed him under the arms and hefted him to his feet. “You on something, man?” he asked.

  “No…it’s just…no…I….”

  “Get in, let me give you a ride home.”

  John let Burt walk him to the passenger seat and help him in.

  As they were driving away, Burt went on about how he’d seen John back into the road swatting at his arms and head, but the rest trailed away.

  John couldn’t remember ever feeling so untethered from reality.

  What if he was becoming schizophrenic?

  Did it run in his family?

  It wasn’t until Burt led him through the door of his house that he remembered what he was thinking before whatever the hell it was that just happened.

  He needed to know that Sarah was not in that house.
<
br />   Something tickled his elbow. John twitched, ready to swat at anything dancing across his skin. Nothing was there.

  Maybe he’d go back after dark. Right now, he needed to take a hot shower.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The pounding on his front door woke John from a dreamless slumber. He must have dozed off on the couch. It was already dark out.

  The thumping increased.

  “Hold on,” he shouted, trying to shake off the grogginess.

  When he opened the door, Pat stood there holding a bunch of papers.

  “You have to see this,” he said.

  Thunder growled. A summer storm was brewing, and it looked like it was going to be mean. Black clouds had turned the day to night and the wind was whipping the trees in his yard like they’d tried to steal from the gods.

  “Come on then, get in here,” John said.

  Pat walked straight into the kitchen and began spreading out the papers over the table.

  “What’s all this?” John asked, going for a beer.

  “Do you know the history of Spears Corner?”

  “You mean James Spears slaying the Natives, evil shaman curses, the ghosts of the Spears House, that sort of thing?”

  Pat stopped. “Yeah, how did you know?”

  “I had a very enlightening conversation last night with my therapist. He’s from the Passamaquoddy tribe and he told me some pretty horrendous shit.”

  “Whoa,” Pat said. “What are the chances?” He shook it off and searched through the photocopies on the table.

  “Yeah, pretty eerie,” John said.

  “James Spears was a piece of work,” Pat said.

  “And we have statues of this fucking asshole in town to this day,” John said.

  “Money, man,” Pat said, and shrugged. “Care if I smoke in here?”

  “You know what, go for it.”

  Pat lit a smoke and took a drag before carrying on. “The Spearses still own this town, from the churches to the jails.”