GRAVEWORM (5 page)

He paused, breathing deeply.

The dank air filled his lungs like honeysuckle. This was an ageless place, a timeless black womb and his favorite place in the world.

Just think of the history.

People here had died in wars, their last breaths were of battlefields and suffering—Hue and Tarawa, Gettysburg and Belleau Wood, Chosin and Kuwait and Iraq. They had died of childhood epidemics, diphtheria and influenza and smallpox. They had passed silently of old age, a hundred stifling memories on their bluing lips, or violently in industrial accidents or highway fatalities. Some had even been murdered. A few had taken their own lives.

Oh yes, this place was a museum of the human condition.

There was no other place like this.

Henry wished he could speak with them all, know what secrets they’d taken to the grave with them.

He had come of age in this place.

As a child, he had helped his father square-off graves and trim weeds and roll out sod over the newly-interred. He remembered the jingling ring of keys his father carried on his belt. Keys to each and every lichen-encrusted tomb and sagging vault. The morbid joys of those days had been his and his alone. The other children just hadn’t understood.

As a teenager, Henry never ran after girls or scored touchdowns. There had been no dances or bands or Friday nights at the movies. No, he had been
here.
Amongst the fallen, worn tombstones and jutting monuments. Beneath the sullen funereal glare of winged seraphs and graying cherubs, he had dreamed a thousand cold dreams of death. Elysium delights. And music? There was no grunge or metal or even top-forty, his songs were elegies and hollow gonging funeral bells. His hobbies weren’t video games or playing guitar, but delving amongst charnel house and silent crypt. His blood did not run hot at the perfume of the homecoming queen, but from the noisome damps of the grave. He pressed his naked and yearning body against gleaming caskets and icy marble. And like other teenage boys, he lost his virginity, but in ways which were unspeakable.

And romance?

Oh, there was grand romance. Just being here was to be enfolded in the arms of a lover long lost… a lover that wore a shroud and whose face was a leathery death-mask. For death had its admirers and one of them was Henry Borden. He worshipped at its feet, admiring its dark beauty and singing sonnets over its decayed cerements—

“
Get to it,” Henry finally told himself.

In the distance, Worm made a growling sound.

He had to get things done. No time for sweet, craven sepulchral fantasies. For the first time in years, probably since he’d been out of the Army, he was on a schedule.

But his mind fell into memory as it often did and he was in a warehouse in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm, a Graves Registration Specialist with the 24
^th
Infantry Division. The fighting was hot and heavy and the bodies kept coming in—Americans, Kuwaitis, coalition troops—so many that they could not be properly processed and they were heaped like cordwood and he was alone with them in the dead of night: chalky faces spattered with blood, tangled limbs, cleaved torsos, a jigsaw of human anatomy that had to be sorted and identified even though the latter was pretty much impossible and many of the remains shipped stateside were of doubtful identification.

“
Just give ‘em something,” Major Colbert had said. “Give ‘em something to bury. Anything.”

They just kept coming in and the process of sorting them went on day after day after day until the system was so overwhelmed it began to collapse under its own weight. Understaffed, undersupplied, there was little to do but pile the dead soldiers in heaps and work through them a little bit at a time.

Henry worked the night shift, sifting and sorting, bagging and identifying… and then one night as he stared at the jumble of corpses he felt the old unnatural urges take hold of him until he was sweating and shivering, aroused to the point of pain. Nobody would know. Nobody would see him. He was all alone.

So he crawled into the sea of the dead, sliding like a worm through the charnel depths, sinking himself in the litter of war and he was content. He was happy. That constant gnawing in his belly was satisfied. He was among the dead he so loved, secreted there amongst the cold meat. It was all so calming that he must have fallen asleep because that’s where they found him the next morning—

Henry licked his lips and set the girl down.

(what kind of animal are you, son? what the hell made you desecrate the dead?)

He jumped into the grave.

Spade in hand, he began to dig, to unearth the coffin he had stolen and secretly buried here by moonlight under a thin layer of soil in the open grave.

Stolen?

Hardly. It was not exactly theft when something was already in the possession of the family. After all, it had been his grandmother’s coffin, hadn’t it? Gramma Reese, the supreme shrew who had bitched no less than three husbands into the grave. After thirty years in the family vault the old whore had scarce need of a coffin.

Henry grinned as he remembered that night.

Exhuming the old witch beneath the wan light of a thin-edged moon. Scattering her bones like jackstraw in the night. Relieving himself on her, anointing the sacred cow in piss. Later, he had come back and gathered her bones up and dumped them back in the vault so a scavenging dog didn’t make off with one of Granny’s femurs. Something like that could cause trouble… raise questions.

And Henry had always been so devilishly careful.

Gramma Reese surely had not been the first he’d exhumed. Nor the last. There’d been plenty back in the good old days when it was all just good, clean fun. Not like now. Not serious business.

Behind him, Worm was worrying at the girl.

(she’ll need discipline again, a firm hand)

“
Leave her alone,” Henry snapped at her.

Worm knew how to obey. He didn’t like to be stern with her, but sometimes he had to be. Left unsupervised, Worm could get out of hand. She would bite the girl and Henry didn’t want that.

“
Here’s what we’ve been waiting for, Lisa,” he said in a lewd whisper, throwing open the unearthed coffin. “A nice quiet place for you to rest.”

9

Sometime later: a sound of tapping, thudding.

Lisa Coombes opened her eyes, closed them. Opened them again, saw only darkness. There was an aching throb in her head and a sticky, warm wetness at the back of her neck. Thoughts raced through her mind. Gray thoughts, shapeless thoughts lacking both form and content.

Thud.

The sound registered, but made very little sense. Someone knocking? She was dreaming… she had to be dreaming.

Thud.

Blurry memories ran through her head. A road. A man. A doctor. A ride. A maniac. That insane girl. Her house… then… then she just couldn’t remember.

Barely conscious, her fingers reached out blindly and touched… satin. Mildewed folds of satin knitted together, quilted. Rotting satin that came apart in her fingers like moth-eaten cloth. She couldn’t lift her knees up more than five or six inches. When she tried to sit up, her face pressed into the unyielding caress of moist, ragged silk.

And that stink… that hideous stink.

A box,
her mind screamed through the fog,
you’re in a box.

A coffin.

A
casket.

Her lips peeled open in a warm scream and then everything went black again, her concussion getting the better of her.

10

Tara managed to drag herself from the kitchen after a time.

But like maintaining her sanity, it wasn’t easy.

Nothing was easy or even real any longer. It couldn’t be. Her brain had now locked down quite firmly and refused to accept anything. Even the most rudimentary of sensory responses went out the window.

Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was insanity. Maybe it was both.

Her mind was short-circuiting, thoughts jumbling, as it tried to react to something the likes of which it could not properly process. Occasionally, some lucid and logical thing would occur to her… but these were few and far between. She was crawling on her hands and knees, wriggling along like a slug, soiled with blood, with vomit, with her own urine. Her mind stumbled along with no linear sense and this at a time when she most desperately needed structure.

It was pointless to reason this out.

Best just to breathe.

What I need is a gun,
she decided.
Just in case the bad man comes back. Then I can shoot him. Shoot him down in cold blood. Cold blood. Stuff I put my hand into surely wasn’t cold, cooling, but not cold. And not hot. Not hot like the summer had been, hot hot hot. Glad it’s just about over. What a long hot one it was. We had a strike at Valve-Tec, the machine shop. It was a bad one. Busy as hell at the Union Hall whenever there was a strike and how am I supposed to put in overtime when I’m at the Starlight just about every night? A gun. Yes, I need a gun. The bad man hadn’t used a gun… maybe a knife or an axe… Christ, another school year and school clothes for Lisa and it’ll cost a fortune and what if he’s still in the house, the bad man? Laughing and laughing and laughing, lookit the crazy bitch crawling around, dragging her ass on the carpet like a poisoned dog I ought to slit her fucking throat pull her head off like the cork from a bottle and put it in the drying rack with the other one that silly crazy fucking snatch don’t she know I got her sister don’t she realize what I’m going to do to her oh no oh no everything’s going black fuzz blowing black fuzz oh God oh God…

11

Henry patted the earth down, satisfied with a job well done.

But there was no time to lounge about and enjoy his special little world this night. Or what was entombed beneath his feet. Too much work to be done and precious little time to do it.

Wasn’t that always the way?

A man just never had the time to appreciate his own great works.

He checked his watch. After midnight.

(
quit lollygagging, do you hear me? there’s work to be done while the moon is still high snap to it!)

“
Yes, mother,” Henry said.

12

When Tara’s eyes came open again, she wondered why her bed was so hard. But it wasn’t her bed. Her cheek was pressed against the rough nap of the living room floor. Then she knew.

She knew everything.

Trembling like a wet kitten, she pulled herself up to a sitting position. Immediately, the room spun and she went down again, striking her head against a chair arm. There was an agonizing hollow popping that made her see constellations. If nothing else, the pain cleared her mind.

Wiping her lips off with the back of her hand, feeling the crusted blood at her palms, she pulled herself up. Made herself stand. She was not in a good way either physically or psychologically. The first thing she had to was to get the hell out of here. Make it to the Carroll’s or the Petersen’s. Better yet, over to Pauly Costello’s place. Costello was a mean, ornery old bastard. He’d been a war hero in Vietnam and was still tough as steer hide. Besides, he had guns. Lots of guns.

Where was her cell?

In her purse?

Tara steadied herself, refusing to truly process that body in the kitchen and what was written on the fridge in blood and what it all would mean to her and her life in general. That was for later.

Get going. Get the police.

Slowly, with great effort, she started to move. She knew she was probably in shock. She found the little table in the entry. Her purse. She dug out her cell, leaving sticky red smears on it. She found her cigarettes and tried to get one in her mouth while attempting to dial 911 and dropped first the cell, then the cigarette. She tried a second and third cigarette and dropped them both, then threw the pack against the wall.

She picked up her cell.

She had to use it because the other phone was in the kitchen and that would mean going back in there, into that fucking slaughterhouse, and nothing on earth could compel her to do so. She kept trying to dial the cell, but her fingers were numb and stupid and it was like trying to type with boxing gloves on. She threw the cell, too, knowing that she had to get to the neighbors. The guy with the guns.