After Midnight (9 page)

Veronica looked beautiful.

I treated and cured the flesh this time, and it took considerably longer to decompose. Two months later, in June, I had to go out again.
Another young girl, this one from Warsaw. By the end of the summer I had run out of money and lost my job, so I could no longer afford chemicals to keep the flesh, which meant that I had to go out more and more. It seemed that every other week I would embark on another grizzly field trip.

After each surgery, I buried the leftovers. Eventually, however, I became overwhelmed and started letting things pile up: whenever I found the time (which wasn’t often), I took what I could and dumped it into a ravine in the woods.

This past November, my transgressions were finally discovered. Apparently, one of the girls I had taken was murdered by her step-father, something no one knew for quite some time. The King George County Police exhumed her one rainy afternoon…and found her coffin empty. The caretaker of that particular graveyard, an old alcoholic named Corliss, confessed that he had found two graves disturbed in August, but had quietly put them right. In the end ten of them were found to have been raided.

It pained me. God, it did. I hoped no one would ever have to know. Every night the news featured someone weeping and pleading for the return of a loved one. I desperately wanted to oblige, and even hatched a
plan to rebury what I could in its rightful place, but the risk was too high; so high that I almost stopped going on my nocturnal hunts altogether. But Veronica needed me, and I provided for her.

But it was continual. Rot always set in and I would have to
go out again. I never killed and I never ate anyone. I swear to you. I did only what I
had
to, and I only did it for love. Veronica knows that.

The middle-aged woman stood at the sink, looking out of a tiny window on the back yard where her son play-wrestled with the tenant who lodged in Sarah’s old room.

A tear streaked down her face; it was too hard to think about Sarah, who had been run down in the road by a high school teacher and his wife while she had been sleepwalking.

Jack had said locking the doors at night would keep their daughter inside the house, but that idea failed miserably by the time she turned six.

Anna watched the man and her son play in the ashy dusk. The man would do as he had for four months;
once done playing with Jake, he would eat dinner and go to work (wherever
that
was). He returned at dawn, exhausted and slept the entire day.

Anna had not masterminded the idea of renting out her dead daughter’s room, in fact she had been tearfully opposed to the idea all along
but, as Jack pointed out, they needed the money.

Jack’s job as a police dispatcher on the graveyard shift hardly covered Sarah’s funeral costs, so they advertised the room in the paper. For nearly a month they had interviewed prospects, and the only one Anna liked off the bat was Adam. He was a charming and very sweet man. Tall, with a sweep of black hair over his gaunt face, he was almost as handsome as Jack had been in high school.

As Anna opened the stove and checked on the roast she was making, the back door banged open.

“No fair, Adam! You wrestled in school,” Jake panted, his face flushed and sweaty, his dirty blond hair plastered to his forehead.

Adam, wearing his uniform of black jeans and a white tee shirt, smiled. “I never even won a match. Face it, you stink”.

Jake smiled, “No I don’t”.

Adam nodded his head, “You stink like an outhouse in August!”

Jake playfully lunged for Adam’s waist, but was captured in a lightning quick sleeper hold, which attested that Adam wasn’t as bad a wrestler as he claimed.

“Say uncle,” Adam teased.

“Never!”
Jake howled.

“Say “
please Uncle Adam, spare me”.”

“Fuck you!”

Anna spun on her heels and stared what she hoped were daggers, her mouth hung in a perfect O of surprise. “Jacob!” she cried.

Adam released the Jake to his punishment.

“I have never heard you speak like that!”

Jake was now looking down at his red canvas All Stars, his face showing the puppy dog shame that only a 13-year-old boy could muster.

“Sorry mom; I just got caught up in the moment.”

Anna nodded
. “Okay, now go wash up; you have dirt and defeat all over you.”

Jake looked at her, now it was
his
mouth that hung. “Mom!”

Anna
tried to smile. “Just teasing; now go on, get.”

He be-bopped off.

Anna stood at the sink and watched the last sunlight drain from the sky, taking with it the horrible
pink and orange colors that looked grotesquely like blood.

Jack returned from his trip to Wal-Mart half an hour later with several plastic bags in his burly hands.

“Hey, babe,” he said as he sat the bags down onto the table, and kissed the nape of her neck, which sent a shiver down her spine.

“Hey,” she replied.

“Dinner ready?”

She nodded.

Jack set the table and called the boys into the room. After saying grace, they all sat down. Anna noticed that Adam, as always, had the smallest portion on his plate that she would let him get away with.

Jack ate in silence,
she knew he dreaded the 11 o’clock hour, when he would have to leave for the sheriff’s office. He was tired, and looked fifty-six instead of forty-five.

Sarah’s death had taken a lot out of him, and the late hours that he worked coupled with depression left him looking like a walking corpse.

Jake was done with his food first; he tossed his plate into the sink and went off to his bedroom to play Xbox or watch The Three Stooges.

Adam was next; he washed his plate then trampled up the stairs to get ready

Jack stood, patted his gut though his blue flannel shirt and said “I guess I better go get ready for work.”

Anna rose and began to clear the table.

While doing her chores, she heard the guitar riff to one of Jake’s AC/DC CD’s, and knew that he would be playing Halo 2 while he listened to the music that his parents had grown up hiding from
their
parents.

Oh God, I miss Sarah,
Anna thought as she leaned over the sink, hoping to hold back the coming tears.

When she was sure that the storm had passed, she went back to sluggishly
washing the dishes. Ten minutes later, the sound of Jack’s heavy frame descending the stairs awoke Anna from a daydream

Memory, damn it

i
n which Sarah was five, and Anna was brushing her hair.

Do I look like a princess mommy?

And how Anna had laughed at how cute that comment was.

Yes you do, sweetie
.

She was nearly in tears when Jack rested his hand on her shoulder.

“I think I better get going, I know it’s early but I want to stop off at Jim Hessler’s house; he bought himself a new shotgun.”

Anna
laughed, her voice watery. “It’s all guns and sports with you men.”

“Don’t forget about beer and farting, we like that stuff, too,” he said, and kissed the nape of her neck.

Jack left half an hour later, and the first floor of the house was maddeningly quiet while Jake played video games in his room.

Anna watched a little bit of American idol, but couldn’t focus, so she tried reading.
101 Best Kept Cooking Secrets
.

After learning to make hamburgers taste like they were steaks, she dozed off.

The next day, with Jake gone off to school, and Jack no doubt stopping off at Denny’s for breakfast with the boys from the station, she was, for the moment, alone with a sleeping Adam, dead to the world, upstairs.

She sat sipping coffee and looking out over the side yard. When nothing interesting had materialized in the tiny green strip of land which sat between the Montgomery household and the weathered brown fence that separated them from their neighbors, she found a
People
magazine stuffed under a pile of light bulbs and batteries in the utility drawer, and lost herself in the glamour.

After nearly an hour, Jack stumbled through the door looking like death warmed over.

“Jack!” Anna blurted.

Jack nodded, “I’m fine, it was just a long night,” he said as he plopped down into a hard wood kitchen chair.
“Too long.”

Anna saw how pale he was, the dark bags under his eyes.

“What happened?” she asked.

Jack grunted. “First off, there was a train wreck over by
Picketts Meade. Exxon tankers. Thank God they didn’t go up.”

She was already getting him a Coke from the refrigerator.

“Then an entire family died out in Culpeper, the guys on the scene said it looked like they all just died, no wounds or anything”.

Jack opened the
Coke and took a long swallow.

“Negative for gas or anything like that.”

Anna listened without really hearing.

“That has nothing to do with it,” he admitted, “I just been feeling sick for a week or so.”

Anna nodded. He
did
look like shit.

After Jack was done telling her about his possible cold and the night before, he went upstairs to
sleep.

Anna cleaned the house a bit, but was done by noon.

After a light lunch, she rode down to Food-Lion to buy a pack of chicken.

It felt good to be out of the house and away from the tight enclosed space that had become her world for the past half a year.

She decided that she wanted to get out more often; the sitting around and staring at the walls was starting to get to be a little much. She might start by taking Jake to the WWE show in Richmond at the end of June.

After she had picked up a few items, she climbed back in the van and drove back toward home. She drove slowly and took the long way down Randall Road, which led out right behind her house on Oak Street. Approaching the back of her house, she saw that Adam has tacked a black blanket or something over the window to keep the sun out.

She pulled into the driveway and sat for a moment listening to an old Credence Clearwater Revival song.

Killing the engine, she looked at the tall white house before her, and felt happy contentment rise within her. When she was a girl in Blacksburg living in a rundown apartment with two poverty-stricken but loving parents she could never have pictured herself in such a beautiful home. She never thought that she’d be happily married to a good man after the denim-jacket wearing snakes she dated in high school.

The spark of her happiness flickered in the wind of Sarah’s death. Her beautiful life wasn’t so anymore, not with Sarah gone. It never would be again.

Anna choked back hot tears,
her hands clasping the wheel so hard they looked bloodless. After a while, a bit of the constriction left her chest, and she got out and carried the groceries into the house.

She glanced out of the window, and saw that a
storm was blowing in. Thick dark clouds covered the sun, and at once it looked more like evening.

Even before Jake came home from school at 3:00, Adam was up and taking a shower. It was rare to see him before dark. He was always so tired, reminding her of Jack.

Upstairs the shower cut off, and Anna could hear the sounds of him dressing.

Outside
, the heavy rain had begun in earnest, droplets of water now stood on the windows.

Adam rushed down the stairs, humming something like “We’re in the Money.” He was dressed in a pair of faded jeans with holes in the knees and a red
Aerosmith
band tee shirt.

He was smiling when he entered the kitchen. “Hello, Mrs. Montgomery.”

Anna smiled as she began to cut a head of lettuce. “Hi Adam, how’s life treating you?”

Adam sighed, “Good I guess.” He sat down on one of the kitchen chairs, and asked, “How long’s it supposed to rain like this?”

Anna gazed out of the window, and then back at Adam over her shoulder. “I guess it’ll be nasty like this until tomorrow.”

Adam was quiet.

A few moments later the front door swung open, and the sound of Jake’s footfalls entered the house. He was soaking wet. “Thanks for picking me up, mom,” he said, going to the freezer and getting an ice cream cone.

“It’s just rain, Jake, you’ll live.”

Ice cream in hand, Jake rushed off to his X-Box without another word.

Adam sat quietly, while outside the storm raged.

When Jack lumbered down the stairs at half past six, he looked even worse than before. His face was as white as paper and the bags under his eyes had turned an ugly black color. When Anna saw his reflection in the window over the sink, she nearly screamed.

“That bad?” Jack asked in a deep voice that didn’t sound like his own.

Anna turned around, and saw
her husband plop into one of the chairs.

“I think I got the flu,” he said in that frightening voice.

“You should go back to bed Jack, you look like crap.”

Jack nodded, “I need sleep like Sid needed Nancy,” he said, and began to rise from the chair.

“I’ll bring you some chicken noodle soup,” she called after him.

“Like hell you will,” he replied. “My mother burnt me out on that shit when I was a kid.”

“She was a smart woman, Jack!”

Jack grunted. “Yeah, she was a real genius.”

With that, he disappeared up the stairs.

In her dream she was in bed, wide awake and staring at the ceiling and watching as headlights from the street washed across it.   She was worried. About what she didn’t know. She was under the impression that it wasn’t about Jack or Jake, but…something that wasn’t right in the house, something unnatural, abnormal, wrong. That concern quickly progressed to fear, but when she tried to stand she found herself wracked with a body-wide pins-and-needles sensation. She let out a short, muted groan…

…and heard the bedroom door creak open, slowly, furtively. Her heart exploded in her chest, and terror overwhelmed her.

“Mommy!” Sarah piped, and the terror turned to indescribable horror.
Sarah’s dead, Sarah’s dead, Sarah’s dead. This isn’t right! This isn’t right!

“I’m home, Mommy!” Sara
h said, and suddenly Anna was free. She turned to face her daughter, and found a skeleton clad in faded, wispy rags, her gaping eye sockets squirming with tangled maggots and her teeth razor-pointed.