GRAVEWORM (10 page)

She had to have a story.

And then she did.

“
Sorry to call you so late, Tara, but… well, thing is, Margaret’s not here. Bed’s not slept in. Before I start raising hell about it, I just want to make sure she’s still not there.”

Tara licked her lips. They were very dry. Like her hands. Dry with grave dirt, soil packed under her fingernails. “No, she’s not here, Bud. I mean, I can go look around, but no one was here when I got home last night. Lisa’s down in Milwaukee with her Uncle Joe and Aunt Claire for a week, so I just figured Margaret didn’t come over. No reason for her to.”

The lie came from her lips perfectly, as if she were reading from a script. Even the bit about Uncle Joe and Aunt Claire in Milwaukee. They were real all right, except that they were in Belgium for a month visiting Claire’s nephew who was in the Army and had just married a Belgian girl over there. Tara had spoken to Claire about it on the phone three days ago. If the police tried to contact them, they would be unavailable. Yes, yes. It was amazing how good of a liar Tara was. She had never been worth a damn at it before. But now… yes, things had changed and she was not the same person.

She would lie.

She would swindle.

She would even cover-up crimes or commit murder if it meant getting Lisa back and God help anyone who stood in her way.

“
Well, she went over there around four as usual, Tara.”

Tara waited. Then she said, “What did she say? She must have known Lisa was gone.”

It all hung on this. If Margaret had said she was going to watch Lisa, then there would be questions. Uncomfortable questions.

Bud said, “I didn’t talk to her. She just left while I was varnishing a chair in the garage. Called out to me how she’d be back late as usual. Figured she was going to your place.”

“
This sounds funny, Bud. I don’t like it.”

“
Yeah. Well. I better look through the house one more time. She’s not so young anymore, you know.”

In other words,
maybe she fell and hit her head or had a goddamned stroke and I better go look for her corpse.
Tara could hear the dread and pain in his voice and something inside her ran warm at the sound of it. It bubbled up her throat, brought tears to her eyes and she wanted to admit it all, scream it out at him over the phone, but she didn’t dare.

She could not afford pity.

Not for others.

Not for herself.

“
I’ll let you know,” Bud said and hung up.

Tara set the phone back in its cradle. She knew this was not over by a long shot. Yes, people turned up missing from time to time, she knew. Even in Bitter Lake. But usually they were younger people fleeing debt or bad relationships. Teenagers who ran away. And sometimes hunters disappeared out in the deep, dark woods during deer season and nobody found them. It happened. More often than the authorities liked to admit.

But not elderly people.

Like old, firmly-rooted trees, they did not just vanish.

And when they did, it was usually because they had dropped dead in a remote location or lived alone and nobody found their bodies for weeks.

Tara did not like what would come next.

Because much as she dreaded it, the police
would
come to see her. They would be asking questions. And not just once either. This would be an ongoing thing and she would have to deal with it. She would have to be smarter than them and cast no doubts at their feet.

Yes, this was how it would have to work.

Tara plotted it out in the darkness and took a fresh rag from the cupboard and began to scrub the counters.

She did this for well over an hour.

21

“
Let’s see if your mood has improved any, Lisa.”

Henry stalked silently, weaving his way amongst headstones and crumbling slabs to the older section of the burial grounds. He moved up weed-choked hills crested by morose, shadowy vaults and craggy trees. And beyond to an overgrown run of cedar-shrouded gravestones. Markers set flat into the earth. At one time, he knew, this had been sort of a Potter’s Field where the poor and destitute had been buried. It was wholly unused now.

He pressed the earth to his face, reveling in the pure rich smell of it. He breathed its aroma in deep and his heart beat faster. He wanted to tear his clothes off and roll naked in it, feel it cover him, bury himself in it like he had in the old days. He dug naked beneath the eye of the moon, pawing his way feverishly down until his fingers scratched over the polished lid of a casket and then… and then—

Not now.

He couldn’t lose control now.

The most important thing now was control. To think things out, to use his brain.

(your brain’s no good)

“
Shut up,” he whispered.

(but i won’t shut up i’ll never shut up)

“
I’m in control. I know what I’m doing.”

(you’ll never have control, henry, you’re a deviant… a crawling slinking graverobbing ghoul a naughty little boy that masturbates in graveyards and deflowers corpses they’ll put you in a cage)

(A CAGE)

“
Quiet,” he told the voice in his head. “Someone might hear.”

The sun would start coming up in a few hours and he had to be done by then. Sometimes that asshole Spears liked to come to the cemetery office bright and early and attend to his work and get out of there. Henry knew he had to be away by then.

He gripped the spade and began to dig, piling the earth on the same sheet he had piled it on before so none would get in the grass where it would be hard to get out. The box was only down four feet, the soil still loose. He carefully shoveled out clods of dirt, squaring the grave off meticulously. It took him about twenty minutes. When he reached the coffin, he scraped the soil away from its stained, mildew-speckled surface.

(she’ll trick you)

(she’ll use her slit)

He listened.

It was quiet in there.

He thought he would hear her struggling. She had only been down there four or five hours. There should have been enough air in the box and the soil was so loose that there would be more. He recalled that he had buried Worm for six hours once when she had been a bad girl.

He gripped the edge of the lid, threw the clasp, and opened it.

Lisa was still there.

Her eyes were closed.

“
Wake up,” he told her as a wind stirred the trees above and a few stray leaves drifted down into the grave.

She did not move.

He reached down and took hold of her. Her flesh was cool. Still, she did not move and Henry wondered if his timing had been off. That had happened one other time. The runaway he picked up outside of town, she had been down too long and—

(the sweet luxury of that one)

(flesh like marble as we pushed into her)

(let’s push into this one, henry, let’s school her)

Lisa jumped up from the coffin, a scream on her lips.

She vaulted at Henry, scratching his face, beating at him with her fists, kicking and clawing. He put a forearm against her mouth to drive her back down and she bit him
hard. They wrestled in the grave and she nearly got away, but then he got his hands around her white throat and squeezed her windpipe shut with his thumbs and she finally fell limp into the coffin.

“
Bitch,” he gasped, wiping blood from his face. “Fucking bitch… I could have left you down there… I could have…”

Now she was quiet.

(don’t spare the rod and spoil the child, henry)

(discipline her)

(discipline her now in the box)

“
No,” he said under his breath.

This was not about THAT. He had to keep a level head here. He didn’t want THAT to mess up the works.

He hoisted her out of the grave and dumped her atop a worn slab while he quickly filled in the hole. She did not move. He almost wished that she would, because he would have split her head open with the spade. And once her blood stopped running and the brains oozing from her skull had begun to congeal and she was cold, cold, cold, then he would have had his fun with her.

He filled in the grave.

(pathetic little boy afraid of discipline)

“
Shut up, mother. I don’t have time for that.”

(hee-hee-hee, little boy blue come blow your horn)

He rolled the sod back in place and scattered leaves over the surface. No one would ever know he had been digging there. He rolled up the sheet and hid it and the spade inside a long unused tomb that he had played in as a child and still bore the graffiti he had scratched into its stone walls so many years ago.

He scooped up Lisa’s still form in his arms and walked back through the graves, feeling her limp arms dangling and head lolling on her shoulders with each step.

He made for the low stone wall in the back.

And his car parked on the dirt road in the trees beyond.

The fun was just about to begin.

22

Somehow, Tara managed to sleep after her phone conversation with Bud Stapleton. She took a hot shower and then lay naked atop her sheets and passed out cold. And as she slept, she dreamed that she found not Margaret’s dismembered body in the kitchen but Lisa’s. But she couldn’t find her head. She looked in cupboards. In the refrigerator. The Lazy Susan, pawing amongst the cans. She emptied the freezer. And, in a strain of dark comedy, she checked all the Tupperware containers. Then she opened the oven and there was Lisa’s spitted head in a roasting pan. Her lips had been sewn shut with kitchen twine and bulbs of garlic had been shoved up her nostrils. Gray and seamed and stitched, her blonde hair hanging in greasy loops, she looked like an evil shrunken head from an old voodoo movie.

Tara stood there, staring at Lisa’s decapitated head.

She reached into the oven and plucked the head from the roasting spit. It was much lighter than Margaret’s had been, and some submerged dream-reasoning reminded her of this. The flesh was cold and almost moist, mucid with slime. Black blood ran from it like refrigerated India ink. It was ghastly, all shriveled, but she did not toss it aside. Instead, she brought her face in close to it until she could smell its sweet, high roadkill stench. Then she spoke to it.
You got us both into this, Lisa. I don’t know how you met the man who snatched you, but couldn’t you see that he was a depraved thing that had crawled from the slimiest cellar of hell? Didn’t you know he was the boogeyman? Couldn’t you see the poison in his eyes and smell the sewer drainage of his rotting mind?
And then she began to cry, for this was her sister, the only family she had. Lisa was dead, dissected by some sinister night-monster and never ever could she be put back together again.

Then Lisa opened her dead, glazed eyes.

And in those eyes, not just suffering and horror, but… accusation and
blame.
A fearful recrimination that told Tara that Lisa blamed her for it all, that every minute of her black, dirty, and violent death was
her
fault and, dear God, why had she let it happen? Why had she let that deranged fiend do this?

Tara woke.

The sun was up and she was shivering, bathed with sweat. Her body ached, her muscles were corded tight, a strange and muted buzzing in the back of her head. She laid there like that for a time, feeling absolutely nothing, not even her hurting body. Just an immobile thing incapable of movement. Tears ran from her swollen eyes, but she was not aware of it.

I just need to know that she’ll be taken care of.

Promise me.

Finally, she got up, the guilt eating away her guts.

She walked naked to the window, utterly detached from the idea that she might be giving the mailman or one of the neighbor boys a cheap thrill. She just stood there, looking out at the day, which was quite sunny and bright, colorful leaves drifting from the trees. It was a lovely autumn day, the kind that makes you feel good to be alive.

But Tara was not glad to be alive.