Whistling Past the Graveyard

by Jonathan Maberry

  There was an ambulance parked halfway onto the curb outside of Colleen’s Knit-Witz yarn shop. And two patrol cars parked crookedly, half blocking the street and slowing traffic to a gawking crawl. Lefty pulled his bike as close as he could get, but all he saw was the chief and a deputy talking in the open doorway of the shop.

  The chief of police was a weird little guy who walked with a limp. A long time ago, before the Trouble—and everything in Pine Deep was measured as being before the Trouble or after it—Chief Crow had owned a store right here in town. A craft store, where Lefty’s cousin Jimmy used to buy comics. Jimmy was dead now. He’d been badly burned in the Trouble and hung himself six years ago.

  Lefty only barely remembered the Trouble. He’d been five at the time. For him it was a blurred overlap of images. People running, people screaming. The state forest on fire. Then all those helicopters the next day.

  In school they all had to read about it. It was local history. A bunch of militia guys dumped some drugs into the town water supply. Drove everyone batshit. People thought that there were monsters. Vampires and werewolves and things like that.

  A lot of people went crazy. A lot of people died.

  Every Halloween the local TV ran the movie they made about it, Hellnight, in continuous rotation for twenty-four hours. Even though in the movie there really were monsters, and the militia thing was a cover up.

  Lefty’d seen the movie fifty times. Everyone in town had. It was stupid, but there were two scenes where you could see tits. And there was a lot of shooting and stuff. It was pretty cool.

  Chief Crow wasn’t in the movie—the sheriff back then had been a fat guy name Bernhardt who was played by John Goodman, who only ever played fat guys. But the guys in school said that the chief had gotten hurt in the Trouble and that was why he walked with a limp.

  Now the chief stood with his deputy, a moose name Sweeney who nobody in town liked. Sweeney always wore sunglasses, even at night. Weird.

  A friend of Lefty’s broke out of the crowd and came drifting over. Kyle Fowler, though everyone called him Forks. Even his parents. The origin of the nickname wasn’t interesting, but the name stuck.

  “Hey, Left,” said Forks. He had a Phillies cap on and a sweatshirt with Pine Deep Scarecrows on it.

  “S’up?”

  They stood together, watching the cops do nothing but talk.

  “This is pretty f’d up,” said Forks. He was one of the last of their peer group to make the jump from almost cursing to actually cursing. Saying ‘f’d up’ was a big thing for him, though, and he lowered his voice when he said it.

  “Yeah?” asked Lefty, interested. “I just got here. What’s happening?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Colleen,” said Forks. “I mean Mrs. Grady. Lady who owns the store.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “Dead as a doornail.”

  “How? She was old, she have a heart attack or something?”

  Forks shook his head. “They don’t call the cops out for a heart attack.”

  That was true, at least as far as Lefty knew.

  “So how’d she die?”

  “Don’t know, but it must be bad. They have some guy in there taking pictures and I heard Sheriff Crow say something about waiting for a forensics team from Doylestown.”

  Lefty cut a look at him. “Forensics? For real?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  Forks started to say something, then stopped.

  “What—?” asked Lefty.

  His friend chewed his lip for a minute, then he looked right and left as if checking that no one was close enough to hear him. Actually there were plenty of people around, but no one was paying attention to a couple of kids. Finally, Forks leaned close and said, “Want to hear something really weird?”

  “Sure.”

  Forks thought about it for another second and then leaned closer. “Before they pushed the crowd back, I heard them talking about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About the way she died.”

  The way Forks said it made Lefty turn and study him. His friend’s face was alight with some ghastly knowledge that he couldn’t wait to share. That was how things were. This was Pine Deep and stuff happened. Telling your friends about it was what made everything okay. Saying it aloud gave you a little bit of power over it. So did hearing about it. It was only knowing about it but not talking about it that made the nights too dark and made things move in the shadows. Everyone knew that.

  Forks licked his lips as if what he had to say was really delicious. “I heard Sheriff Crow and that big deputy, Mike Sweeney, talking about what happened.”

  “Yeah?” asked Lefty, interested.

  “Then that doctor guy, the dead guy doctor…” Forks snapped his fingers a couple of times to try and conjure the word.

  “The coroner.”

  “Right, then he showed up and started to go inside, but the sheriff stopped him and said that it was dark in there.”

  Lefty waited for more, then he frowned.

  “Dark? So what?”

  “No, look, all the lights are on, see?”

  It was true, the Knit-Witz shop blazed with fluorescent lights. And, in anticipation of Halloween, the windows were trimmed with strings of dark brown and orange lights. All of the shadows seemed to be out here on the street. Underfoot, under cars, in sewer grates.

  “Yeah, but the sheriff told the coroner guy that it was dark in there. And you know what the doctor did?”

  “I don’t know, get a flashlight?” suggested Lefty.

  “No, dummy, he crossed himself,” said Forks, eyes blazing.

  “Crossed…?”

  Forks quickly crossed himself to show what he meant. Lefty made a face. He knew what it was, it was just that it didn’t seem to fit what was happening.

  Then Forks grabbed Lefty’s sleeve and pulled him closer. “And Deputy Sweeney said, ‘I think it’s them.’ He leaned on the word ‘them,’ like it really meant something.”

  They stared at each other for a long time. It was Lefty who said it, “You think it’s happening again?”

  Forks licked his lips again. “I don’t know, man, but…”

  He didn’t say it, but it was there, hanging in the air between them, around them, all over the town.

  Like an echo of last summer.

  Nine people died in the space between June second and August tenth. A lot of bad car crashes and farm accidents. In every case the bodies were mangled, torn up.

  It wasn’t until the seventh death that the newspapers began speculating as to whether these were really accidents or not. That thought grew out of testimony and an inquest by the county coroner who said he was troubled by what he called a ‘paucity of blood at the scene.’ The papers provided an interpretation. For all of the physical damage, given every bit of torn flesh, there simply was not enough blood at the crime scenes to add up to what should be inside a human body.

  In August, though, the deaths stopped. No explanation, and apparently no further speculation by the coroner. It just ended.

  They turned and looked at the open door of Knit-Witz.

  I think it’s them.

  Lefty swallowed dryness.

  It’s dark in there.

  “You know what I think?” asked Forks in a hushed voice.

  Lefty didn’t want to know, because he was probably thinking the same thing.

  “I think it’s the Trouble again.”

  The Trouble.

  Lefty looked away from the store, looked away from Forks. He studied the sky that was pulled like a blue tarp over the town. It was wrinkled with lines of white clouds and the long contrails of jets that had better places to be than here. A single crow stood on the roof of the hardware store across from Knit-Witz. It opened its mouth as if to let out a cry, but there was no sound.

  Lefty felt very small and strange.

&n
bsp; Movement to his left caught his eye and he turned to see Mr. Pockets five feet away, bending to pick through a trash can.

  Lefty touched his jacket pocket. He had a Snickers bar and he pulled it out.

  “Here,” he said, holding it out to the old hobo.

  Mr. Pockets paused, one grimy hand thrust deep into the rubbish, then he slowly turned his face toward Lefty. Dark eyes looked at the candy bar and then at Lefty’s face.

  The smile Mr. Pockets smiled was very slow in forming. But it grew and grew and for a wild moment it seemed to grow too big. Too wide. Impossibly wide, and there appeared to be far too many of those big, white, wet teeth.

  But then Lefty blinked, and in the same instant he blinked Mr. Pocket’s closed his mouth. His smile was now nothing more than a curve of lips.

  “May I?” he asked with the strange formality he had, and when Lefty nodded, the old hobo took the candy bar with a delicate pinch of thumb and forefinger. Mr. Pocket’s fingernails were very long and they plucked the bar away with only the faintest brush of nail on flattened palm.

  The hobo held the candy up and slowly sniffed the wrapper from one end to the other with a single continuous inhalation of curiosity and pleasure.

  “Peanuts,” he said. “Mmm. And milk chocolate—sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, skim milk, lactose, milkfat, soy lecithin, artificial flavor—peanuts, corn syrup, sugar, milkfat, skim milk, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, lactose, salt, egg whites, chocolate, artificial flavor. May contain almonds.”

  He rattled off the ingredients without ever looking at the wording printed on the label.

  Forks was watching the cops and didn’t seem to notice any of this happening. Which was kind of weird, thought Lefty.

  Mr. Pockets began patting his clothing, a thing he did when he found something he wanted to keep. His hands were thin, with long spidery fingers, and he went pat-a-pat-pat-patty-pat-pat, making a rhythm of it until finally stopping with one hand touching a certain pocket. “Yes,” said Mr. Pockets, “this one has an empty belly. This one could use a bite.”

  And into that pocket he thrust the Snickers bar. It vanished without a trace, and Lefty was so mesmerized that he expected the pocket to belch like a satisfied diner.

  Mr. Pockets smiled and asked, “Do you have another?”

  “Um…no, sorry. That was all I had.”

  The smile on Mr. Pockets’ mouth didn’t match the humor in his eyes. They were on a totally different frequency. One was friendly and even a little sad, but there was something really off about the smile in the old man’s eyes. It seemed to speak to Lefty, but not in words. In images. They flitted through his head in a flash. Too many to capture, too strange to understand. Not shared thoughts. No more than looking at a crime scene was a shared experience.

  “No,” Lefty gasped, and he wasn’t sure if he was repeating his answer or saying something else. “I don’t have anything else.”

  Mr. Pockets nodded slowly. “I know. You gave me what you had. That was so nice, son. Soooo nice. That was generous. How rare a thing that is. I thank you, my little friend. I thank you most kindly.”

  It was the most Lefty had ever heard Mr. Pockets say at one time and he realized that the old man had an accent. Or…a mix of accents. It was a little southern, like people on TV who come from Mississippi or Louisiana. And it was a little…something else. Foreign, maybe? European or maybe just…Yeah, he thought, foreign.

  “You…” began Lefty but his voice broke. He cleared his throat and tried again. “You’re welcome.”

  That earned him another wide, wide grin, and then Mr. Pockets did something that Lefty had only ever seen people do in old movies. He winked at him. A big, comical wink.

  The hobo turned and walked away, lightly touching his pockets.

  Pat-a-pat-pat.

  After a moment Lefty realized that he was holding his breath and he let it out with a gasp. “Jeez…”

  Forks finally looked away from the crime scene. “What?”

  “Man that was freaking weird.”

  “What was?”

  “That thing with Mr. Pockets.”

  “What thing?”

  Lefty elbowed him. “You blind or something? That whole thing with me giving him my Snickers bar and all.”

  Forks frowned at him. “What are you babbling about?”

  “Mr. Pockets…”

  “Dude,” said Forks pointing, “Mr. Pockets is over there.”

  Lefty looked where his friend was pointing. On the far side of the street, well behind the parked ambulance, Mr. Pockets was standing behind a knot of rubberneckers.

  “But…how…?”

  Forks said, “Look man, it’s getting late. I need to get a new calculator at McIlveen’s and get home. I got a ton of homework and besides…”

  Forks left it unfinished. Nobody in Pine Deep ever needed to finish that sentence.

  It was already getting dark.

  “See ya,” said Lefty.

  “Yeah,” agreed Forks, and he was gone.

  Lefty pulled his bike back, turned it under him, and placed his right foot on the pedal, but he paused as he saw something across the street. Mr. Pockets was standing by the open alley way, but he wasn’t looking into it; instead he was looking up. It was hard for Lefty to see anything over there because that side of the street was in deep shade now. But there was a flicker of movement on the second floor. A curtain fell back into place as someone up there dropped it. Lefty had the briefest after image of a pale face watching from the deep shadows of the unlighted window. Someone standing in darkness on the dark side of the street. Pale, with dark eyes.

  A woman? A girl?

  He couldn’t be sure.

  Mr. Pockets turned away and glanced across the street at Lefty. He smiled again and touched the pocket into which he’d placed the Snickers. He gave the pocket a little pat-a-pat, then he walked into the alley and disappeared entirely.

  Lefty Horrigan see-sawed his foot indecisively on the pedal.

  It was nothing, he decided. All nothing.

  But he didn’t like that pale face.

  It’s dark in there.

  “Yeah,” Lefty said to no one, and he pushed down on the pedal and drove away.

  -4-

  Lefty chewed on all of this as he huffed up the slope at the foot of Corn Hill, standing on the pedals to force them to turn against the pull of gravity. Aside from Lefty’s own weight, his bike’s basket was laden with bags of stuff he needed to deliver before dark. His afterschool job was delivering stuff for Association members and now he was behind schedule.

  The sun was already sliding down behind the tops of the mountains. A tide of shadows was washing across the farmers’ fields toward the shores of the town.

  He rode on, fast as he could.

  Pine Deep had a Merchants Association comprised of fifty-three stores. Most of the stores sold crafts and local goods to townsfolk and tourists. Lefty and two other kids earned a few bucks making deliveries for people who couldn’t spare the calories to carry their own shit to their cars, their homes, or in some cases to their motel units. On October afternoons like this Lefty enjoyed the job, except for that fucking Corn Hill. In the winter he called in sick a lot, and he never lost his job because people always assumed a fat kid got sick a lot.

  Lefty pumped his way up Corn Hill until he reached Farmers Lane, turned and coasted a bit while he caught his breath. He had four deliveries to make today. The first was here in the center of town, and he made the stop to drop a bag of jewelry supplies—spools of wire and glue sticks—to Mrs. Howard at the Silver Mine. She tipped him a dollar.

  A dollar.

  Which bought exactly what? Comics were two-ninety-nine or a buck more. Even a Coke was a buck and a half. But he pasted on one of the many smiles he kept in reserve and made sure—upon her reminder—not to bang the door. She told him that every day. Every single day.

  Then Mrs. Howard went back to gossiping with two locals about what was happening down
at Knit-Witz. It seemed that the town already knew.

  The town, he supposed, always knew everything. It was that kind of town.

  As he climbed onto his bike, Lefty heard someone mention The Trouble, and the others cluck about it as if they were sure bad times were coming back. People threw out The Trouble for everything from a weak harvest to too many blowflies around a car-struck deer on Route A32. Everything was The Trouble coming back.

  It’s dark in there.

  Lefty wondered if there really was something, some connection. The town might know—or guess—but he didn’t. And he didn’t like the half-guesses that shambled around inside his head.

  He turned around and found Corn Hill again and went three steep blocks up to the Scarecrow Inn to deliver some poster paint. They were gearing up for Oktoberfest and had two of the waitresses making signs. The bartender told one of the waitresses to give Lefty something. The girl, Katelyn, a seventeen year old who lived a few houses down from the Horrigans, gave the bartender’s back a lethal stare and gave Lefty fifty cents.

  Lefty stood there, legs wide to straddle his bike, holding the handlebar with one tight fist and staring past the quarters on his open palm to the girl’s face. He didn’t say anything. Anyone with half a brain could understand. She did, too. She understood and she didn’t give a wet fart. She waited out his stare with a flat one of her own. No, not entirely flat. A little curl of smirk. Daring him to say something.

  Katelyn was pretty. She had a lot of red curls and big boobs and she wore a look that told him that no matter what he said or did, this was going to end her way.

  Hers. Never his.

  Not now. Not ever.

  Not just because he was a thirteen year old fat kid.

  Not just because she had the power in the moment.

  She gave him the kind of look that said that this was small town America, he was fat and only moderately bright, living in a town that fed on fat and moderately bright people. They fueled the machinery and they greased the wheels. Her look told him, in no uncertain terms, that when she was eighteen, she’d blow this town like a bullet leaving a gun.

  She would. He wouldn’t.

  It was always going to be like this. She’d always be pretty. No matter what else he became. Even if he grew a foot and learned to throw a slider that could break the heart of a major league batter. She would always be pretty.