GRAVEWORM (32 page)

“We’ll have to wait and see.”

“
You wait and see,” Bud said, tossing aside his magazine. “I’m going to find out.”

“
Be careful with that,” Wilkes warned him. “Stay away from that woman. She doesn’t look like a good one to rile.”

Bud stood up. “You do what you have to do and I’ll do what I have to do.”

60

Frank and Steve came up with a plan where they would take turns watching Tara’s house until she showed. Sort of a half-assed TV cop stakeout but it was all they could think of. When she showed, whoever was watching would call the other. It was workable.

Steve was on duty, so Frank took the long way back to his apartment, driving down by Lyman Park as the last rays of the sun spiked through the tall elms and shadows twisted thickly through the picnic grounds. He saw a woman in the distance walking her dog, moving back toward town. There was a vacancy to the park that was oddly disturbing. In July it was bustling with people, music, stands selling root beer and ice cream, kids flocked out on the beach… now just absolutely desolate.

He took the winding drive out to the beach for no other reason than he really had little else to do. He checked his cell. Nothing from Steve. The wind picked up as he neared the beach, leaves rustling and limbs bending.

He parked by the beach house and walked down by the concrete breakwater and sat there, remembering everything yet nothing in particular. It was getting dark and he stared out over the strand at the water, lighting a cigarette with a cupped match and reminding himself he needed to quit.

He thought about Steve.

He thought about Tara.

He’s screwing your girl, you know.
The thought jumped into his head unbidden and he chuckled under his breath.
No, not my girl. Not anymore. If she ever was in the first place.
He’d been so bitter about it for so long that it amazed him now how easy it was to let go. But that was the nature of life, he supposed, it was easy to let something slide from your fingers that you’d never really held in the first place. All you had to do was admit it wasn’t yours.

In the distance, he heard a dog bark, low and wolf-like.

The wind brought a chill to his spine, his bare arms. He watched the water breaking into foam over the beach, depositing bits of driftwood and lakeweed.

Behind him, a stick cracked.

Pulling his eyes from the turbulent gray lake, he turned and saw a shape pass into the trees beyond the beach house. It was none of his business who it was, but he was somehow fixated with seeing them. His nerves were still a little funny after Tara’s house and someone being out here with him when he thought he was alone made his guts pull up tight.

He walked over to the beach house.

He saw the shadowy road winding back to the park. Tall, wind-rustling trees lined it to either side. He saw the shape moving through them, very near the water’s edge.

It was Tara.

He could tell by the way she moved.

Knowing he should call Steve, he tossed his cigarette and jogged across the lot and into the grass, following her with his eyes and calling out,
“Tara! Tara!”
but she kept moving away from him. As he ran, the lake breeze blew in his face smelling of dank things and lake mud and congested weed. Tara moved through the trees, a drifting graveyard angel, the wind throwing her hair around in wild conflicting currents.

He caught up with her and grabbed her by the shoulder. “Tara,” he said and she turned, face chalk-white and eyes black in the dying light. She felt impossibly bony beneath his fingertips, frail like a corn husk that would shatter into chaff.

Through bared teeth, with a reedy whispering voice she said,
“Get away. You’re not playing the game. Nobody invited you…”

But he would not let her go. He tried to pull her back as she made to go and she fought from his grip with a twisting, serpentine sort of motion that made his heart skip a beat. Eyes gleaming like chrome, she coiled herself for attack—

“
Tara… wait a minute now…”

—
and leapt at him, hooked fingers going for his eyes, a froth of foam on her lips like she was rabid. He caught her wrists and turned his hip as she tried to knee him in the groin. She fought and shook, her wrists hot in his hands, her body moving with fluid almost boneless contortions. He threw her down and she looked up at him, hair in her face, ribbons of saliva hanging from her lips which were pulled back from even white teeth. She looked absolutely primeval.

She hissed at him and jumped.

Frank grabbed her wrists again as she came for his eyes and she fought frantically in his grip, head whipping from side to side, saliva and foam bubbling from her mouth, snot looping from her left nostril across her cheek, strands of hair stuck to her face. She was insane. Absolutely fucking insane.

“
Jesus, Tara, now wait, just wait a minute here—
”

But she didn’t wait. Her wrists were almost greasy in his fists and she pulled herself free, teeth coming at his face, gnashing, biting, trying for his throat. He had no choice: he pushed her off balance and slugged her in the face with a short stiff right. She let out a cry and folded up at his feet.

Then she was up again and he was shouting at her, but she came on with renewed ferocity and he saw something silver flash in her fist like an arc of electricity. It slashed over his arm and jabbed into his side, scraping against his ribs… and then she turned and fled, fading into the shadows and he went to his knees, filled not only with horror but a rage at what she had just done. He pressed a hand to his ribs and it came away red with blood.

She had stabbed him.

She had actually stabbed him.

He thought for a moment he saw her running through the trees but he couldn’t be sure. Only that he heard something echoing out over the lake: a distorted, hysterical laughter of triumph and hate.

Feeling the blood spilling down his side, he stumbled off toward his truck, breathing in the cool night air.

61

Tara fell into the weeds at the border of the lake. They were thick and coveting, threaded with the webs of spiders. On her belly she moved through them, crawling, inching along. She crept through the grass, smelling the earth and the black darkness of the lake. When she reached the water and smelled its dankness filling her head, she dipped her face into it again and again until the heat drained away. She brushed leaves from her hair.

She had no memory of attacking Frank Duvall.

There was only the lake, the grass, the night.

“
I have to get back now,” she said. “It’ll be time to play the game soon.”

On her belly, she crept through the weeds until she found the grass. Then she ran, first on all fours, then upright into the wind.

62

Steve was dozing off when Tara walked right past his car. By then, the moon was beginning to come up and her eyes glimmered like shiny new quarters as she crossed through the yard and went up the stairs and inside.

Swallowing, Steve thumbed Frank’s number but there was no answer.

C’mon, Frank! We had an agreement!

He forced himself to relax and waited there another five minutes, then ten. There were still no lights on in the house. He tried Frank’s number again and there still was no answer. Maybe he fell asleep. Maybe he was in the shower. Maybe he was taking a shit for that matter. Regardless, Steve wasn’t going to wait.

“
Fuck him,” he said under his breath and crossed over to the Coombes’ house.

He rapped lightly on the door and then opened it. “Tara?” he called out into the mounting silence. “It’s me. It’s Steve.”

The shadowy rooms were filled with hunching shapes and he thought he saw several move in his direction. Then a voice,
her
voice, drifting down the stairwell like floating lace:
“I’m up here, Steve.”

The sound of her voice was enough to make him take a faltering step back, his body leaning toward the door and the night and the safety beyond. He forced himself forward, each step heavy, something like a headache throbbing in his skull that was not a headache but something older, almost like a rhythmic tribal chant, telling him to get the hell out for Here There Be Monsters. It was flat, uncompromising survival instinct… crude, rude, even painful, but it had his best interests in mind.

He grasped the banister.

He made the second step before he began to get dizzy and reality seemed to be flying apart around him into hammering/exploding purple-black dots. It was then he knew that he wasn’t breathing, that his windpipe was shut down to a pinhole. He realized this just as he also realized that his body was fighting against him. It really did not want to climb those steps so he was pulling himself up by the stair rail, his heart so heavy it felt like a brick pounding in his chest.

You wanted to see her, asshole, and now you’re going to.

Up in the corridor, he saw light flickering and traced it to its source: Tara’s room. The door was partially closed and from the quality of the light spilling around its edge, he knew she had candles going in there. Candles usually meant one thing with Tara, but he did not dare let himself think that even though already his hormones were gearing up.

Now.

Of all times.

He opened the door. Yes, candles were glowing—three or four of them atop the bureau—and Tara was on the floor, squatting, arms wrapped around herself, rocking gently back and forth. She was mumbling under her breath.

“Tara?” he said.

She stood up, completely naked and he drank her in. His guts seemed to suck into themselves. There were cuts across her thighs, belly, and arms, even her breasts. And recent ones by the looks of them. So either she had crawled nude through a picker bush or…

“
Tara?” he said. “What happened to you?”

She stepped forward and her face was like a pallid smear of grease, her eyes red-rimmed holes threading into blackness. She reached out for him and something inside him cringed momentarily for the long-limbed, wavering shadow she threw against the wall looked momentarily like some withered old hag—crooked and contorted, arms like the twisted branches of a dead tree. But it was imagination, a trick of the light, because the woman coming toward him was definitely Tara: high-breasted, leggy, dark hair cascading down one shoulder, her ravenous sexual appetite on full display.

“Take off your clothes,” she said.

“
But Tara…”

“
Do it,” she said and there was a suggested tone in her voice that she would not ask again and her voice… it was like being dipped in amber, melting into it, being encased by it. There was a moment of weird, atavistic fear, but it faded quickly.

He did as she asked even though he knew it was all wrong. His mind jumping with conflicting, swirling dark thoughts, he was almost embarrassed to realize he had an erection. There were so many questions to be answered and so many things to be worked out and yet there he was, allowing himself to be effortlessly seduced. In his mind he saw Frank’s face and he felt guilty. Then Tara was on him, wrapping herself around him like a climbing vine, a parasitic growth, and he let it happen in a shocking display of heat and need. She pushed him back on the bed and took him in her mouth, not so much using her lips or her tongue but her teeth. Nibbling, nipping like she was teasing not him but herself, just having a little taste before she sank her teeth in. And despite all the fears and worries and confusion in Steve’s brain, he liked it, he
loved
it. Then she mounted him and there was no tenderness or love, it was all simple animal lust, violent, wild, even painful. And when it was done he was laying there… sweating, aching, sore. She had bitten into his shoulder and drawn blood, scratched his flesh raw. His hips felt bruised where her thighs had slammed against him.

Laying there in the dark, he knew it wasn’t right.

Tara could be very inventive in bed.

But she wasn’t like this.

This,
he supposed, was inner turmoil externalizing itself. It sounded like half-ass, armchair psychoanalysis, but he did not doubt it for a moment. There was something inside her, something dark, something unknown, something
scary
and he had just gotten a peek at it. He had seen it grinning at him, a meat-smelling thing with teeth and claws and, yes, appetite.

And I’m not too proud to admit that this woman is scaring the hell out of me.

He held onto her in the darkness. Her flesh was hot and sweaty and throbbing. He tried once and then twice to get her to speak, but she would not say anything. She clung to him tightly, breathing low and even, and her body language told him that she craved a silent, pressing physical connection and no more.