GRAVEWORM (40 page)

She almost started laughing.

Henry stood there uneasily, his face masked with dried blood from the scalp wound where Tara’s bullet had creased his skull. He had lost a lot of blood and was dangerously pale, his eyes bloodshot to a frightening degree like two ripe cherry tomatoes.

Graveworm.

Nothing but a graveworm.

A parasite.

He pulled himself up out of the grave, a mindless automaton, a zombie awaiting its master’s orders. So Tara gave him what he needed: “Hand mother the shovel, Henry.”

He looked at her.

“
The shovel, Henry. Hand it to me.”

“
Yes, yes, yes… you said when it was done I could come to you,”
he sobbed.
“That I could come back to you… that you would open your legs and take me back… back into the darkness… back where it’s safe…”

He seemed to be aware for the first time that he was still hanging onto the shovel. He handed it to her, not daring to meet her eyes and she had to wonder what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and what sort of twisted politics created something like him.

Tara took the shovel.

She breathed in.

She breathed out.

Your moment. Now.

Dropping the flashlight, she hefted the shovel in both hands. Stout wooden handle. Iron spade. Henry looked up at her.

And she hit him with it.

A glancing blow that gashed open his forehead and splashed blood down his face. He barely had time to register this when she hit him again, this time catching him fully in the side of the face, the blade of the shovel ringing out against his cheekbone. He cried out, driven to his knees at the edge of the grave, letting loose with a high, almost girlish scream, the flesh peeled from the side of his face and hanging there in a bloody flap.

Tara hit him again.

She brought this one down with everything she had in a wicked roundhouse and the shovel smashed into his face, propelling him backward into the grave. His nose was shattered, the left orbit collapsed into a pocket of blood. He squirmed in the earth, squealing, gagging, trying to move, trying to escape, fingers pawing over a face which was like raw hamburger by that point.

Then he stopped.

He was not dead… but he was where he wanted to be: in the black box, curled up in the black grave-womb he had sought for so many years. Back inside his mother. Back in the safe confines of her narrow house, her oblong box.

Tara felt no pity.

She slammed the lid closed.

Inside, Henry made obscene cooing sounds.

Tara took up the shovel, began throwing clumps of black earth down on top of him but it wasn’t enough. She went down on her hands and knees, bulldozing the soil into the grave until there was no more Henry Borden. She kept it up until the grave was filled.

Then she stood and stomped atop it to make sure that the dirt was packed good and tight.

Her mind filled with a howling desert wind, her flesh sweating cold and hot, her teeth chattering and her limbs quaking, she stumbled free of Hillside Cemetery.

She made it to the gates before her legs went out from under her and then she clung to the wrought-iron uprights, waiting for a good wind to blow her down.

83

It was Steve who found Tara clinging to the graveyard gates. It was he who ran to her in the darkness, a dozen flashlights bobbing behind him, and took hold of her. She was cool to the touch, stiff, unyielding. She did not respond to his voice. He had to physically pull her hands from the uprights and when she came free, her whole body went loose and she fell into his arms.

He thought she was dead.

But she was unconscious.

She’s wearing a wedding dress… a ragged, bloody wedding dress. Good God, what is this about?

He picked her up in his arms and realized that she was much thinner than she had been just a week before when he had last scooped her up as a gag.
We had laughed then. I remember us laughing. I remember we laughed a lot.

“
Tara,” he said. “Tara? Can you hear me?”

By that time, of course, Summer Lane was crowded with state, county, and local police vehicles. The CID people wouldn’t be there for another hour. Cops surrounded Steve and Tara in a circle, flashlight beams illuminating them.

Steve carried Tara back and sat her in the grass by a police cruiser.

That’s when her eyes fluttered open. “My sister… he killed my sister, Steve,” she said, not surprised to see him, not surprised by anything. “He kidnapped Lisa and he killed her.”

“
No, honey, no. Lisa’s okay. He just… just tied her to the chair. She’s not dead. She’s going to be fine, just fine.”

But even as the words left his mouth, he did not believe them. They were cardboard. Synthetic. False. He didn’t know exactly what Lisa had been through but it had been incredibly bad. This much he was sure of. But would she be fine? Could she ever be fine after an experience like that? He just did not know. He only knew that Tara was in his arms and things were making sense, at least some of them were. And that would have to be enough for now.

Tara’s eyes were staring at him. They saw him, yet they seemed to be looking far and away into some other place and Steve did not want to imagine what that place might be.

“
Lisa’s going to be fine,” he heard himself say and was amazed by the conviction in his voice. “And you’ll be fine too. I swear to God, you’re going to be fine too.”

And it was then, after so many days, that it seemed to hit Tara. Not just hitting her, but slamming into her with violent force, engulfing her, consuming her, owning her. She shook wildly in his arms, her head thrashing back and forth, her teeth gnashing, and a scream—long kept secret, long kept under lock and key—rushed from her mouth, shrill and screeching, voiding the pain within and echoing out through Summer Lane and across the cemetery beyond.

She kept screaming.

And screaming.

And screaming.

Steve held onto her as she moved in his arms, the madness coming out of her like poison. Behind him, Wilkes and Frank just stood there. Both of them had never felt so completely helpless in their lives.

Finally, the screaming ended.

Lisa appeared, shrugging off the EMTs that were trying to patch up her wounds. She pushed past Wilkes and Frank. “I want to see my sister,” she said, her mouth still bloody from where the stitching had been. “I want to see my sister right now.”

Tara looked up and realized then that it was true: Lisa was alive. She really was alive. After crawling through the dirtiest, blackest bowels of hell and defeating the boogeyman, she’d gotten what she wanted: her sister. Lisa was all right. She had freed her from the crawling graveworm.

Lisa went on her knees and held Tara and Steve held both of them.

Fighting back tears, Lisa managed to say,
“Thank you, Tara. Thank you for saving me. I love you so much.”

They held onto one another, the bond sure and firm and immovable. Tara and Lisa trembled as they hugged one another, listening to Steve’s voice. It was soft yet resolute and confident: “We’re going to be okay now. We’re all going to be okay.”

And for reasons not completely understood by him, he believed this.

—
The End—