GRAVEWORM (25 page)

Billy No-No screamed.

“
Enough of that,” Worm told him. “Mother can fix her up. Bad little girl.”

Dirdree’s head giggled in the corner, then it spoke:
“We want a new friend, Mother. Why don’t you bring us a new friend to play with?”

Worm thought that was a good idea, but only Henry knew where to get dolls and he told Worm she must never go looking for dolls herself.

“
There’s only us, Dirdree. We must play together.”

“
There’s Lisa.”

“No, Henry would not like that.”

“
Get her!”
Dirdree said.
“We can play funny games with Lisa.”

Well, if Henry didn’t find out it would be okay. Lazy Baby liked the idea and was giggling behind her stitched mouth. Billy No-No was chattering his teeth in delight.

“
Well…”

“
Please, Mother, Lisa is so lovely… show us how lovely she is…”

Worm said she would think about it. Luckily, she knew how to sew and stitch. She had seen Henry do it and sometimes he let her help. Worm got her needle and thread and began to sew Dirdree’s head back on, humming as she did so. She had sewn her babies up before. Sometimes she pulled Billy No-No’s arms and legs off and did the same with Dirdree, then switched them, sewing them in place so Dirdree had boy’s legs and Billy No-No had girl arms. It was very funny.

Lazy Baby liked that game best.

When Dirdree’s head was stitched back into place, Worm wiped things off her hands onto her soiled dress.

Dirdree was grinning again.
“I like Lisa! Bring her to us, Mother! She’s so lovely! I want her to be our special friend so I can love her… and bite her…”

44

Tara.

Tara.

Fucking cunt. Fucking whore. Fucking bitch. She was taking the fun out of the game and she didn’t even care! She was supposed to be horrified and broken after killing Spears… why wasn’t she? WELL? Why the hell wasn’t she?

Henry paused, leaning against the vault door, his ring of keys trembling in his hand. He had to calm himself. Being calm was so important in life. If you were not calm, you made mistakes and as Elise had told him again and again he could not make mistakes. He stared out across the graveyard, finding solace and warm contentment in the shadow-draped monuments and leaning headstones. He listened to the creaking tree limbs high above, the leaves blown against marble faces.

Still… that Tara. That damn Tara.

I
will keep my promise. And you had better keep yours.

Who did she think she was to make demands?
He
had her sister.
He
held the cards.
He
had the power. She was his puppet. His pawn. His plaything. Yet, like the miserable bitch she was, she was making a blind grab for authority. Instead of being broken and cringing, she was rising up out of her shell, trying to confuse him with her vile feminine dominance. Talking to him like that. Like… like she was his mother. Like he would listen to what she said and obey like a good son, a good dog, a sniveling little worm.

In the back of his head, he could hear his mother laughing.

Grinding his teeth, he tried his keys on the vault door, scraping each one across the rusting metal for purchase. He went through seventeen of them before he found one that worked.

I want my sister back, alive and unharmed.

(fuck you, witch! i’ll give you the little cunt in a bag, do you hear me? in a fucking BAG)

I will not go back on my promise and you better not go back on yours.

(shut up!)

Because if you do.

(SHUT UP!)

God help you.

The door swung open with an unpleasant groaning of metal fatigue that sounded impossibly loud as it echoed through the marble forest. The breath of the vault was cool and earthy, a scent of wilted flowers and autumn leaves and deep, dark, subterranean decay. He crossed the stone floor, thinking that this was the sort of place to bring Tara. Get the uppity little bitch in here and lock the door, push her down on a slab.

“
No,” she would say. “Please… please… not here, Henry.”

But Henry would only laugh coldly at her fear, her unease, her horror in this chamber of the dead. He would approach her slowly and she would shudder and he would giggle with a scraping, rasping sound that would echo through the vault, the music of the necropolis.

Yes, that’s what he would do.

He could see it all in his mind now with a frightening clarity.

Taking up his crowbar, he approached the berth of ELIZABETH SAUNDERS, 1997—2012. He caressed the smooth brass faceplate, feeling a vague electric thrill that was nearly erotic. He gasped. He slid the tip of the crowbar under the lip of the plate and popped it free after some exertion. It clattered to the floor.

“
Yes, Tara. Here. In this place. Witnessed by a host of the dead.”

She would beg for mercy but there was no mercy for cunts. They asked for IT and they got IT. Uppity Tara Coombes with her slutty little sister. Tara would begin to sob. She would claw frantically at the iron vault door and

(the box the wooden box under your fingers pull it out)

it would do her no good. “Come over here, Tara. On the floor. I want you on the floor.” But she would cower as rats grown fat on coffin litter scratched in the corners and a wind of mourning blew across the cemetery in the tortured voices of lost souls.
“Please, Henry… please…”
Oh yes, because that’s how they always got when it came down to it, when they

(the lid pop the lid free what’s inside oh dear god)

knew there was no escape and they belonged to you and you alone and the realization dawned in their lovely little heads that you owned them. Oh yes, that’s how it would be. Tara. The apex bitch, the predatory snatch, the obscene cunt, the queen of whores. She would fight because that’s how it was: they liked to fight, they liked to

(fingers pulling her free her gray leathery face)

pretend they didn’t want IT. But they always wanted IT. Each and everyone of them and especially BITCHES like Tara Coombes who thought they were so fucking SMART. Thought they could play him and use him and make him do things he did not want to do. Yes. He would slap her senseless and tear her clothes off, let her feel the chill of the grave against her naked skin. Then he would touch her… warm, inviting, hot-blooded and taut-muscled, nipples hard from the cold and

(the cerements the burial gown strip it away expose her)

from desire. Because she wanted it. She wanted him to rape her in the dust and crunching brown leaves, to lay her down on the flagstone floor amongst the wilted petals of orchids and white roses and take

(on the floor yes on the floor the sheared cerecloth)

her here in this night-riven sepulcher, this Golgotha of rustling shadows. To show her that he was the master and not she. That he pulled the strings and she was his dancing puppet who would do exactly what she was told. Yes, she would beg for it as they were wrapped in a common mold-speckled winding sheet, and he would

(the cold clay tearing biting scratching rolling in it)

make her cry out and scream with the shrieking of violated tomb angels as he thrust into her, her voice taking flight like a winged seraph and his teeth drawing honeyed gouts of blood and his nails scratching, digging deep into her

(graying flesh)

skin until she could take no more, limbs trembling, winding around him, tighter and tighter, squeezing him, owning him, claiming him as

(the taste the taste the necrotic sweetness)

her own. The wanting, the needing, the mortuous kiss oh the sweet mortuous kiss upon

(blackened seamed lips grinning death angel face)

her throat, her mouth. Dear Lord of Catacombs, the pleasure of the charnel house, the cool rapture of the mausoleum, two bodies moving with a pulsating death march. Fingernails splintering on crypt stone and thrusting, thrusting, reaching higher realms of funeral delight, the soft dark entombment of lusting bodies seeking the cold and perfect silence of the oblong box and the caress of the worm and enshrouding perfume of noxious graveyard damps as rustling armies of graveyard

(fucking fucking FUCKING HER YES)

rats pour from the crumbling walls in ravenous, verminous rivers and his bride writhes beneath him in a maggoty marriage bed of rotting silk and fungi-caked satin

(hands around her throat squeezing)

(oh god pulling tearing ripping it off at the roots)

and cries out as they both reach the ultimate release of their nameless and unspeakable passion in the dead watches of night.

Henry lay there, breathing hard, trying to catch his breath, trying remember who and what he was while part of him, that tomb-loving shadowy other he kept secretly interred in a narrow box, wondered why it mattered at all.

Tara.

“
Now, my darling,” he said to her. “Now we know who owns who and who grovels at whose feet.”

(touch me touch me again)

Pulling his clothes back on and wiping sweat from his face, his pink tongue wormed at his lips, hungering for the giddy intoxication of the exhumed, of flesh sweet with mortuary perfumes and embalming spices.

“
No, Tara. Not until you beg.”

(oh please master please)

He swept her up from the floor and she was remarkably light in his arms like a bag of bones. Stepping out into the night and leaving their nauseous marriage chamber behind, Henry crossed the sleeping, wind-rustling graveyard with his bride. It was only when he dipped his mouth down to kiss his betrothed that he remembered that she no longer had a head.

45

She slept, she must have slept because she came awake there in the kitchen, curled on the floor, the beat of her heart like something tiny and muffled scampering through her chest. Along the walls, the shadows were beckoning things welcoming her to a world of soft darkness where you could hide away like a child beneath a blanket.

Tara sat up with a sudden, inexplicable cry.

She did not come awake as she used to—slow, fuzzy-headed, groggy beneath a crust of sleep—but like an animal: bright-eyed, tensing, ready to spring.
Something has happened here, Tara, and do you know what that is?
That little voice, that little awful voice… was it her voice? She did not recognize it. It was alien, disturbing, like hot sour breath against the nape of the neck in the dead of night. It did not belong and yet it belonged completely and it had given her a puzzle to solve. Her mind filled with a cool blackness, her raw fingers like rusting hayforks, she pulled herself along the floor on her belly.
That’s it,
the voice told her,
now you’re in the zone.
She crawled over the linoleum, a machine of flesh and blood obeying unspeakable rhythms, grotesque thoughts skittering through her head like frightened mice.

Her shoulders bunched.

Her heart raced.

Something inside her pulled up, cornered, baring its white shining teeth.
Invasion. That’s what: invasion. Now you know, Tara, now you can feel it in you like a dark wine, can you not?
Yes, yes, she could. While she had dared sleep—dreaming, dreaming she was an owl hiding in a tree, waiting for a rodent to swoop down upon—there had been invasion. She sprung to her feet and ran hysterically from one end of the house to the other, turning on lights, filling the tomb of sleeping shadow with light to see by, light to work by and—
oh no, no, no, no, how do they dare?—
she saw the invasion: spiders. Spiders had spun cobwebs over the walls, her clean, sterile walls. And not just webs, but careful silky plaits and sweeping parasols and fine intricate ruffles. And maybe even worse… she could smell death again, a morbid perfume that oozed from the walls in a yellow effluvium.

Tara knew she could not stand for it,
would
not stand for it. Out came her battalions of buckets and pails, ammonia-smelling cleaners and pine-smelling disinfectants, sponges and scrub brushes and rags. She started to clean, scrubbing and wiping and sinking her stinging fingers into pails of hot water and the pain it brought was like a holy penance and she dwelled in its house and was content there, for all dirt and filth and scum had to be cleaned away by her hand and none other.