The Creeping (31 page)

“What if it's not just animals buried?” I whisper.

“It will be.” Sam pulls me into his side.

“But what if it's not?”

“Then we'll call the cops,” he says simply, like a phone call could really save us from what I fear. We round a bend, and clouds of heavy stench warm my nostrils. It isn't a rotten odor, but the smell of something hot and sweaty cooking.

“Dinner?” I say, gagging.

“We're close,” Sam says. We slow our pace and creep forward as stealthily as possible. I move as if I'm hunting. We emerge from the tunnel of forest.

“Better switch that off.” I tap the flashlight. The dark really is dark. There's no other word for it. The moon is good for only a stunted glow, revealing the outlines of things but none of the details. And as Dad says, the devil is always in the details.

My legs tremble. This is insane. What were we thinking? Jeanie's killer has been caught. Mr. Talcott confessed. Daniel accepted it. So why am I too brain-dead to move on?

I'm about to tell Sam I've changed my mind when the heaps of dirt come into view. A foot or so wide, two or three long. Tens, maybe hundreds of their outlines. They're too unsettling to not be something awful. My doubts are shushed.

“You keep watch from here and I'll dig.” Sam's mouth brushes my ear, and I shiver. “If you hear or see anything, signal me.”

“What kind of signal?”

“An owl hoot.” I nod and press my lips to his before he moves through the shadows into Griever's yard. Sam stops at the mound closest to me and sinks to his knees. Very slowly and carefully he picks at the dirt with the shovel. It doesn't sound like more than a tiny mouse's scratching. Minutes pass—it could be two or twenty for all I know—and then silence. After a few seconds I can't bite back my dread.

“
Sam?
Are you okay?” I whisper as softly as I can.

Nothing.

“Sam?” A little louder.

Two things transpire next, and they happen at almost the same instant.

“I think I can feel the muzzle of a dog,” Sam whispers, a split second before a deafening boom cracks open the quiet and fills the night with Sam howling in pain.

I
move faster than I have ever moved and ever could move again. I fly in front of Sam, shield his crumpled form, and scream, “STOP. It's Stella Cambren!”

Old Lady Griever's raspy voice comes from our left, the opposite direction of the house. “I told you not to come round here no more, boy. Sneakin' round my house at night. You deserve to get a bullet in your leg.”

“I'm not Daniel,” Sam shouts, although it's more of a wheeze. I drop to my knees, panic radiating through me, hopeful that Mrs. Griever isn't homicidal enough for a second shot.

I fumble over him, hands searching for the wound, lungs filling with the coppery stink of blood. His right leg is warm and wet. “You shot him, you crazy witch. Call an ambulance!”

“Stella, it's okay,” Sam groans.

“It's not okay—you're hurt. Can you walk?” I try to track Griever's movement as I duck under Sam's arm. I have to get him away from here.

He grunts, and I take it for a yes. I move to stand, but my knees shake and my back bows under the weight. We stagger a step forward, and Mrs. Griever starts barking—there's no other way to describe her halting laugh—like this is all a joke.

“You're not makin' it back like that, and I said that boy deserves a bullet, not that he got one. It's rock salt in your leg. Smarts more than a bullet, mind ya, but won't do no damage if we take it out quick.”

“You're insane. I'm not letting you near him,” I yell. “We're calling the police.”

“Careful, girl. You're trespassin' on my land, and if I'm a day over twenty, you came here for answers. You leave tonight, you ain't ever comin' back.”

I try to move us toward the path, but Sam resists. “Stella, she's right. We have to stay. I'm . . . I'll be fine,” he says in a faint voice. I drag my cell out of my pocket. No service. No way to call for help.

“The longer you stall, girl, the longer he'll be in pain. I've got to take the salt from his wound. Bring him inside.”

Her silhouette moves past us, seemingly gliding. It travels up the porch and converges with the shadows. Deep inside the shack there's the scrape of something heavy dragged across the floor, and then a warm glow seeps out the doorway.

“C'mon, this is the only way,” Sam whispers, limping forward and guiding me rather than me helping him. The porch protests loudly under our weight as we lunge over the busted steps. We pause at the mouth of the door. The faint light wafts down a long hallway—longer than I would have expected, given how little and squatty the shack
looks from outside—and smoke makes the air shimmery and thick.

“Sam.” I catch his chin and make him look at me. His eyes have the look of pink-rimmed black marbles. And it's my fault. “I swear I'd get you to the hospital.”

He swallows the pain and smiles feebly. “I know you would.”

Without another word he lifts his injured leg over the threshold and tugs me inside. As we struggle through the last door in the hall, we see Griever hunched over a stone fireplace. Suspended over the flames is a giant cast-iron pot; she stokes the blaze, and the flames lick its sides. She sinks into a crouch and holds long metal tweezers into the heat until their tips glow molten. Sam hobbles to an empty chair.

“I tan leather at night.” She clinks the tweezers on the cauldron. I can just make out a brown solid bubbling up from the water on the surface. It has the look of an empty sack of skin. “Boilin' rather than jus' soakin' keeps the hide from crackin,'” she adds. It's the stench of cooking leather pervading my mouth, lungs, and nostrils.

She rises nimbly from the fire and hurries to Sam's side, where she squats at his feet. She doesn't move like someone who's ancient, about to break down. “Have you done this before?” I ask, eyeing the bottle of rubbing alcohol and strips of gauze.

“When I was younger, I nursed sick folk back to health,” she says, wielding a pair of scissors. She cuts Sam's pant leg off at the thigh. I creep closer and gasp at what I see. Griever gives me a fierce stare, and I get ahold of myself. There are maybe ten or twelve wounds, seething and bubbling where large shards of salt like glass are embedded in the minced skin.

“Why shoot me if you thought I was Daniel?” Sam asks, averting his eyes from his leg.

“That boy's been stickin' his nose round here since he was a scrawny li'l thing just off the breast. Empty stare. Stumbled on him in the woods that same summer your li'l friend went missin', saw his game diggin' the eyes from a squirrel he snared. I got a name for rotten ones like that.” She wags her tweezers in Sam's face.
“Boys.”

I prop my clammy hands on my hips. Griever's words are a line cast into my sea of formless memories. It snatches a few out with it, giving them shape. I remember Daniel sticking potato bugs in a glass jar and shaking once. I remember that he used to collect these spiders that had bloated bellies and wiry crimped legs. He trapped them in an old container with breathing holes drilled through the lid in order to keep them indefinitely. I even remember him going out of his way to step on crickets. Horrible, yeah, but boys are always messing around with bugs and mud. Torturing squirrels is another thing. A sick, demented thing. Not the kind of thing a boy who loves his sister as much as Daniel loved Jeanie has in him. A surge of anger rushes through me, and if it wasn't for Sam grinding his teeth to bear the pain as Griever sticks tweezers into the first festering cut, I'd lose it with her.

“Daniel's only after answers. He's lost his whole family,” I say sharply.

“Is that so?” she clucks. I can't tell if she doesn't know or if she's being sarcastic. “Girl, get to askin' me your questions before I run outta patience with ya.”

I look to Sam for help, but his eyes are scrunched closed, sweat shines on his forehead, and he's rounded forward like he's trying not to be sick. It's painful to watch him, so I pace. “What's buried in your yard?” I ask, failing miserably at delicacy.

Griever doesn't miss a beat. “Animals, but you already know that. I heard you diggin' 'em up and findin' a dog.”

My stride falters. I try to tie my hair back from my face, but my hands are shaking so badly I can't make a knot. Instead I just wring them like some kind of OD'ing schizo. “So there's someone—or a group of someones—who are sacrificing animals in Savage, right?”

Half her face shadowed, she watches me, her good eye trained on mine, the tweezers lingering at the mouth of Sam's open wound. “Same families have been doin' it for generations. Only one of their bloodlines left, though. Don't know how it started, but we've been tryin' to stave off the evil for years.”

My mind plods over her muddy words. “ ‘We've?' ” I breathe.

“Ahhh, there ya go, girl. That's right. I'm the last one.” She turns back to the tattered skin on Sam's leg. “Mind ya, I don't get round like I used to. I got holes in my bones where the age has eaten through. Long time ago there were other families doin' it. Backwoods folks mostly. They've all died off or moved on. Now it's jus' me, sacrificin' the li'l things, givin' 'em proper burials, hidin' their corpses from pryin' eyes.”

“You're saying that your family has been killing dozens—hundreds maybe—of animals? You're confessing to slaughtering house pets?” She doesn't call me an idiot. I'm right. But her smile is a
half sneer, and it's like she doesn't understand what a gruesome confession her silence is. “And you're killing them in sacrifice? You believe you're appeasing the spirits or gods or whatever?”

She lurches at me, bloody tweezers clutched in her hand, still on her knees, and hisses, “Not whatever.
Whatever
is the thing that's sucklin' on the bones of those li'l lost girls.” She jabs the tweezers in the air to make her point and then turns back to work.

Sam braces himself against the chair arms and straightens out of his slump. He pants under the effort it takes to stack each vertebra in a column. He's pasty, and his lips are blue by the time he finishes, but the pain's ironed out from his voice. “The animal disappearances don't just coincide with kidnappings. They happen after accidents, too. How could you think you could stop car collisions, or illness, or fires? Whatever took those girls isn't causing
accidents.
”

She snorts, regarding him. “Who are you to say what evil can and can't do? And I said there used to be other families workin' on stavin' it off. Backwoods folks more superstitious than mine. I know who it's got an appetite for. But other families blamed it for every loss in Savage.”

A cold current rushes through the room, and I start noticing things. I was so focused on Sam that I didn't wonder what kind of hide Griever's tanning to make leather; I didn't see the animal pelts nailed to the wall. There are seventy or maybe a hundred of them, covering every square inch of space. They give off this hot-animal-fur stench that turns my stomach into a roiling sea. Some are furry pelts and others are just leather hides. Dimly I register her
saying, “My family's been the only one goin' round and collectin' their bodies to bury for generations. I don't take their coats off unless they're somethin' special.”

I have to look away. I can't stand to wonder which are dogs and cats. I don't need to examine the hides she considers special. How could a woman who used to nurse people back to health be capable of this? How could
anyone
do this?
Unless
 . . . I sweep my arms, encompassing the room full of animal carnage. “However awful all this is, whatever you're trying to stop is worse, isn't it?”

“There ya go, girl,” Griever growls, grinning.

Despite the heat and the animal carcasses—or maybe because of them—I start to shiver. Griever drops shard after shard of salt onto the floor at her feet. Sam's brow gradually uncreases, his shoulders relax, his breath eases.

“It's been in the woods since before people settled here. Monster,” I whisper, furious that my mouth forms the syllables but helpless to stop it.

“That's jus' a word we use for what we don't understand.” She slices off a long piece of gauze and wraps it around the mangled flesh on Sam's leg. “You'll heal with some scars, but it won't get infected.” She carries her tools back to the fire to sanitize them. I stumble to Sam's side, dabbing his forehead on my sleeve and pressing my lips to his temple.

Griever glides easily across the room and dips a glass into a bucket. She offers the cloudy water to Sam, who takes it and gulps gratefully. Then she crouches on the floor by the fire, watching us,
her good pupil trained in our direction and the milky one veering sharply away.

“The Creepin', ” she whispers hoarsely. So quietly I think maybe I misunderstand. “That's what you're after.”

I shake my head, not getting it. “The Creeping?”

She raises one arthritic finger to her cracked lips, shushing me. “Be careful who could be listenin'.” I look around to make it obvious that we're alone. She raises her eyebrow, mocking me. “It's the name my ma gave it. Other families had their own—those who spoke about it, at least. 'Cause some folks wouldn't for fear talkin' about it would draw it in.”

Sure the room's temperature has dropped a few degrees, I lean closer to Sam, who's staring intently at Griever. She pulls a pocketknife and a thick stick from the folds of her dress and starts whittling absentmindedly, filaments of white bark scattering in front of her like snowflakes.

“What is it?” Sam asks, sounding stronger already.