GRAVEWORM (38 page)

Tara did not fight.

She did not call out.

The cellar was long and murky, dirt-floored, lit by a few sparse guttering candles. It stank much like the girl herself. But as horrible as the odor was, Tara did not so much as flinch or wrinkle her nose.

The girl dragged her over toward a stone wall and dumped her there.

Taking up a candle the girl—if
girl
it was—crawled over in her direction and that’s when Tara got a good look at her. The sight was hideous, of course. A girl… maybe thirteen, certainly no older than fourteen… or perhaps a girl-shaped sculpture of filth. Her hair was long and stringy, her body the most curious and shocking shade of white, all the contusions, scrapes, and cuts, dirt and accumulated grime standing out like garish splashes of warpaint against that smooth porcelain pallor. Her nails were long and splintered, soil packed beneath them. Eyes huge and dark like those of a nocturnal hunter, yet beady, somehow distant and unfocused like the mind behind them. She glistened with a slime of grease and sweat, a noisome and pestilent stink of fusty graves fuming from her.

But the most perfectly appalling thing seemed to be that she was pregnant, if the round ball of her belly was any indication.

Tara kept staring at her.

And in her mind:
These are the things that killed your sister. These are the crawling, lying, squirming maggots that have taken from you and now you have to take from them. Play the game. Do not give the game away. Wait for your moment.

Wait…

The girl apparently did not like being stared at anymore than a mad dog did. Tara could almost see it coming over her. She went from stupid, bovine, and almost confused to a sneering, drooling, wild thing with hair flying and eyes blazing as she dove forward, bearing her teeth. Again, Tara did not even flinch. What was controlling her mind now seemed to understand things she did not. It knew what this girl was, somehow, someway, and it knew exactly how to elicit certain reactions from her.

Watch now, Tara,
it seemed to be saying.
Watch how easy it is.

The girl shrieked with a raw, distraught sort of cry and landed on her, tearing at Tara with her fingers, slapping and hitting and scratching. And when that got no reaction—what held Tara would not let her move, it almost had her paralyzed—the girl went into a feral rage. She bit Tara’s arms, her throat, her shoulders, her hands, she just kept biting and biting and the pain was intense and unbelievable, moving through Tara in sharp waves. The girl drew blood and it still got no reaction so she jumped away and crawled in a circle, then she fell down, hugging herself in a fetal position, rocking there in the dirt.

And her voice, no longer that of an animal, but pathetic and whiny like that of a little girl who knew she was in trouble said, “Are… are you dead? Are you dead?” She began to sob. “Henry won’t like it if you’re dead. He won’t want you to be dead.”

Tara just laid there.

She closed her eyes.

Henry. That is the name I wanted. Henry. Now that we have his name, Tara. We have the power.

“
Oh, please don’t be dead,” the girl wailed. “Please.”

And it was then that Tara smelled the stink of hot urine: the girl was pissing herself out of fear, out of terror, perhaps knowing that she would be punished now.

Henry, Henry.

The girl was sobbing louder. Tara did not look at her. She kept her eyes closed and what was inside her told her this was how the game was played. For
playing dead
was not just some clichéd little maxim from a child’s game, it was a body politic of survival. Something ancient and effective. Nothing took away the power of the predator or the tormentor quicker than thinking his/her/its victim had expired.

What was controlling her mind had forced her body into what biologists called tonic immobility, an anti-predator threat adaptation. In the animal world, it was both a reflexive action and a defense mechanism. And what had long been forgotten in humans, was now reactivated in Tara with her rising atavism. Her mind seemed separated from her physical body by leagues, the connections were tenuous. She was in a state of thanatosis, a true neurological paralysis.

She could not move.

She could not feel.

She was disconnected, what remained of her attachment to her nerve endings completely numbed by massive amounts of endorphins.

The girl continued to sob.

Tara waited.

The game would be played soon.

Her
game.

Her breathing was shallow, her heartbeat nearly nonexistent. She was now in a state very much like hibernation, one not so dissimilar to the voluntary trances that Indian Fakirs put themselves into when allowing themselves to be buried alive.

And somewhere, echoing in the depths of her mind, a voice called from the deep:
Now we’ll see who fucks with who.

78

They sat out on the porch of the Stapleton’s house and right from the get-go, Steve knew it would not be good and it wasn’t. Once Wilkes and Fingerman identified themselves and told them that Bud Stapleton had been murdered and both Steve and Frank were thoroughly interrogated as to who they were and what they were doing in Tara Coombes’ house, Wilkes said, “Margaret Stapleton disappeared. Her husband was murdered. I really don’t like to tie any of this together with Tara Coombes, but everything seems to lead back to her.”

Right then, Steve wanted to rise up and tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about… but it just wasn’t in him to do so. There were too many things about Tara he did not know and felt he could never know. Nobody was as confused as he was.

“
Now, I don’t think that Tara killed Bud Stapleton,” Wilkes said. “We found footprints… bloody footprints… that appear to be those of a child.”

Frank and Steve looked at each other.
A child?
What the hell was that about? Instead of getting clearer, it all became more murky by the hour.

“
The thing is,” Wilkes said in his easy way, “is that we don’t know what’s going on, but Tara is involved somehow. She claimed Margaret never came over that night to watch her sister. That sounded reasonable at first.
At first.
But I found her very evasive. She claimed her sister was staying in Milwaukee with an aunt and an uncle . Okay. Reasonable. Then Milwaukee Metro did some checking for us and discovered that the aunt and uncle—Joseph and Claire Coombes—are currently in Belgium visiting friends. No passport was ever issued to Lisa Coombes so we’re pretty certain she did not go with them.”

“
And that brings us back to Tara Coombes,” Fingerman said. “Why is she lying? What is she hiding? Why the evasion?”

Wilkes stared out into the darkened streets. “Better than that: where the hell is Tara’s kid sister?”

Steve realized then that one thing that connected a lot of this was Lisa and he had left Lisa pretty much out of the equation. And why was that? Was that on accident or on purpose? Lisa had never been around during all this, but then Lisa was as busy as any teenager and he very rarely saw her. What he kept thinking about was when Frank and he searched the house. Everything spic and span to the point of compulsion, but Lisa’s room remained cluttered and disordered. Even then, it had been saying something to him but he could never make sense of it. Now, it was beginning to take on a certain sort of convoluted logic.

Wilkes said, “I’ve had a search warrant for the Coombes’ house for days. I didn’t execute it because, honestly, I just wasn’t sure.”

“
But now you are?” Frank said. “You went in there and you found nothing.”

“
Yes.”

“
If either of you know where she is, now’s the time to tell us,” Fingerman said.

“
We don’t know where she is,” Frank told him. “We were waiting for her.”

“
And what made you think she’d come back?”

Steve started talking then and before he was done he spilled what he knew: Tara’s strange behavior, the phone call, the warning not to be there when she returned, and his funny feeling about Lisa’s cluttered room.

Wilkes didn’t say anything for a time. Finally: “Let’s put it together then… if we can. Margaret is supposed to watch Lisa. Margaret disappears. Lisa is not seen. She has not been in school for days. I checked. Tara is acting very, very edgy. Almost like a woman who’s on the verge of a mental collapse. You were with her earlier tonight. You hear her on the phone and she says… ?”

Steve cleared his throat. “I can’t remember all of it, just bits and pieces.”

“
Start with those,” Fingerman said.

So Steve repeated what he thought he had heard and by that point he couldn’t really be sure himself.
You’ll get what you want as long as I get what belongs to me.
That was the part that truly haunted him. What did that mean? But he had a pretty good idea what it
could
mean with Lisa being gone.

“
And she said what you thought was something like
her husband’s been nosing around? Poking around? He was a cop?
” Wilkes said. “Can you be sure of that?”

“
Pretty sure.”

“
Pretty sure isn’t good enough,” Fingerman told him.

“
Well, that’s all you get.”

Wilkes held a hand up. “Well, I suppose the logical conclusion is that this unknown third party has some hold over Tara and what better hold than her kid sister?”

Steve felt his heart drop. To hear someone else say what he was thinking was devastating.

“
That would be kidnapping,” Fingerman said. “A federal matter.”

“
Well, we have to have cause first to bring in the FBI,” Wilkes said. “And I’m not sure we have that.”

Fingerman went about asking them the same questions over and over. Frank said nothing about Tara attacking him. Steve wasn’t about to bring it up. As they sat there in the shadows and chill air, Fingerman kept hammering away at them like a chisel trying to wear them away and reveal something beneath.

Wilkes, Steve noticed, was not paying attention. He was staring out into the night. Finally, he said, “In the Stapleton house, we found a sheet of paper that Bud was apparently doing some figuring on. He wrote a name down. In fact, he underlined it several times.”

Steve and Frank were looking at him.

“
Either of you boys ever hear of a man name of Henry Borden?”

To Steve it meant nothing, but to Frank, a Bitter Lake native, it carried the worst possible connotations. “I’ve heard about the Bordens,” he said. “In fact, I could tell you a few things that people whisper about in this town.”

As he spoke, Wilkes listened.

And Steve became increasingly sick to his stomach.

79

Blood ran freely from his scalp in cherry rivers as Henry Borden worked diligently on the corpse, on the remains he had retrieved from Tara’s trunk: an offering, a lamb, a plump and fattened calf.

(oh my love my fairest one)

(lay it at my feet celebrate the depth of our union)

He had to concentrate on what he was doing because his mind was a free-wheeling, erratic memory machine choking on its own accumulated waste products. His eyes kept closing, shades drawing down on a dark and grim room. It took real effort to keep them open and he kept imagining one of those cartoons from childhood where sleepy eyes were held open with toothpicks. If he let them shut… oh, peaceful and dark, but not all sweetness and light, he would see ghosts leaping from yawning graves and moody skies filled with black-winged carrion crows and ashes blown from crematory ovens and great funeral sprays rotting to a sickening gut-smelling juice that would make him think of his mother—

(spectral face of gaseous corruption, slack-jawed scream of hate/hunger/lust, impale the bitch see how she gasps)

—
and that was something he did not want to see or know or feel in the concrete depths of his funneling mind.

Stitch and sew, Henry.

Stitch… and sew.

Yes, feel the cold meat beneath your hands. This meat once had a name and to pronounce it aloud is to summon it (Margaret) and you must not allow that to happen. Too many ghosts, too many ghosts ever-circling, ever-chanting, casting their fairy dust of mortuary spices. But the meat… yes, the cold meat, handle it, touch it, fondle it, make it your own. Yes, yes. Squeeze those wormy goodies back in the belly, cold and gut-feeling, moist and crawling and sap-dripping. There. Stitch now, stitch, stitch, stitch. This grinning head, see how it fits so nicely, how the catgut holds it, binds it, keeps it from falling off.