GRAVEWORM (22 page)

“
They’re mine,” Worm said. “Not yours.”

Lisa swallowed again. “I know. They’re just pretty. I have lots of pretty jewelry back at my house. I like jewelry.”

Worm sat on her scabby knees and pulled her shirt up. Her belly was perfectly round, almost waxy, and there was no doubt she was pregnant. In her navel, crusted by old bloodstains, there was a belly ring, tiny and silver.

“
Where… where did you get such pretty things?” Lisa asked, knowing she must exhibit no fear because Worm was practically an animal and she would smell the fear the way a dog would.

Worm sank down to the dirt floor, still holding out her fingers so her rings could be admired. “In the boxes,” she said. “There are people in the boxes and I take the rings from them.”

Lisa choked down a scream.
Graverobbers,
she thought.
Ghouls and graverobbers.
She forced a thin smile onto her pale lips. “Oh. They’re very, very nice.”

Worm crawled closer and Lisa saw that she was indeed an animal because she moved very furtively with quick jerking motions, pausing every few feet to sniff the air. It was inconceivable and hideous, but that’s what she was doing. There was an atavism at play her, a primal backsliding, and the very idea of something like that was simply horrifying.

But she would not show it.

Could not show it.

Worm was so close now that her stench was right in Lisa’s face; a salty, corrupt odor that was immense and flyblown like rotten meat and dried blood, rancid fat, and earthy decay. It was not so much the stink of death but of things that
fed
on death… vultures, buzzards, rats and coffin worms. It sweated out of the girl, overpowering her violent body odor. She was greased with it.

“Do you want one of my rings?”

Lisa said, “They’re yours, I—”

Worm hissed at her, her black-specked yellow teeth on full display. “You’re so pretty, Lisa! Do you want one of my rings?”

“Yes!”

Worm slid one off and pushed it down onto Lisa’s right index finger. She was not very careful about it. A sliver of skin was peeled away from the knuckle and when Worm saw the blood she pressed her lips to it and sucked it.

“
Better,” she said, her teeth pink-stained. “Is it better?”

Worm leaped forward. Her breath smelled of decay. She nibbled on Lisa’s earlobe. “Sssssh!” she whispered. “You can’t tell Henry. It has to be secret. I’ll show you everything later. But sssssh!”

With that, Worm scampered away, giggling. Where she went, Lisa did not know. She was just gone into the darkness and Lisa knew she herself was in absolute mortal peril here and if she did not play along and think her way out, her death was going to be extremely long and ugly.

39

Night was a time when you could get things done.

That’s how Dennis Spears saw things and you could never convince him differently. Spears was the director of Hillside Cemetery, which was not a full-time position, but more of a part-time managerial thing. Spears had a real nine-to-five thing over at Cumberland Paper in Stevens Point where he had his hand in on marketing and R & D, made a shitload of money and had forty people under him, most of them junior execs and middle management types whose career path at Cumberland revolved around how much they sucked his ass.

The directorship of Hillside was something of a tradition in his family.

It went right back to great Granddaddy Spears who had come from Yorkshire, England in the 1840s, made a name for himself as something of robber baron in his drive west to Wisconsin, and turned Bitter Lake from the sprawling lumber camp/fishing village/railroad spur sort of place that it had been to the real town it now was. And from generation to generation since, a Spears had always managed Hillside. The Spears family saw it as something of a community service, but Dennis Spears saw it as a right pain in the ass.

The shit he had to do to maintain appearances.

Generally, he only showed up at Hillside once or twice a week, in the very early morning or late at night and signed a lot of papers that had been dumped on his desk. He went through the books, made sure the manager-cum-secretary who ran the office was doing her job and that the caretaker and his part-time staff kept the grounds in order.

And this is exactly what he was doing tonight.

Instead of climbing into his warm bed with his twenty-three year old wife, who was also quite warm, he was out at the goddamn boneyard, bulling around through the paperwork. Needless to say, he was not in the best of moods. The cemetery office was out behind the chapel and just up the road from the mausoleum. It was an old brick building, chilly and damp and dank-smelling, and he was all alone.

Not that he was bothered by such a thing.

A cemetery was just a cemetery, day or night, and there was not a superstitious bone in Dennis Spears’ body. Still, he wasn’t real thrilled to be there in his little office listening to the wind moaning amongst the graves and throwing dead leaves against the windows while he burned the midnight oil. His only company was the little radio he had tuned to some talk show about alien abductions and the ever-present scratching of his pen, the pecking of his fingers at the keyboard of his laptop.

And it was as he was so employed that he heard a sound.

It wasn’t much… just a peculiar squeaking sort of sound.

It could have been anything… a tree branch brushing over the roof of the office, a stray twig blown against a window. There was no need to be concerned… yet, he was. He didn’t expect a midnight visitor dressed in the cerements of the grave or anything quite so melodramatic, but he was struck by the sense that the sound he heard was not at all accidental.

It was on purpose.

Which meant…

Turning down the radio, he listened to the wind. Now and again a good gust shook the office and the lights flickered. It sounded lonely and desolate out there. He looked at his watch. The screen of his laptop. The door leading from his office.

He kept listening, a hint of gooseflesh at his spine.

And that’s when he heard a creaking noise.

It was unmistakable. Just as its source was unmistakable; the main door to the outer office had just been thrown open. He could hear the wind out there, much louder now that the door was open. He could feel frigid fingers of night slipping beneath his own door. It rattled momentarily in its frame.

That first sound, that squeaking… it was the doorknob being turned, he thought then. And now the door has been thrown open.

Although a little floor heater chugged away to dispel the cold, a trickle of sweat ran down his temple. His heart sped up in his chest, skipped a beat as it tripped over its own galloping rhythm.

Out there, the sound of the wind was muted as the door was shut again.

The wind could have done it.

But he knew it was not the wind. For what had come into the office here in the dead of night had come in on purpose.

Silence.

His chest feeling tight, a prickling at the nape of his neck, Spears opened the top drawer of his desk soundlessly. He knew there was no gun in there, no knife, not so much as the dreaded ultra-sharp letter opener. No, in the drawer were paper clips, Post-It Notes, Hillside Cemetery Stationary, a variety of pens, pencils, white-out, but nothing more dangerous than a few push pins for the corkboard.

His throat was dry as coal dust, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. And it occurred to him at that precise moment that he had never been so scared in his life. And he did not like that. For Dennis Spears was the sort of guy that inspired fear, that sent lackeys scrambling under their desks and made temps beg for mercy.

But now he was dreadfully, irrationally afraid because he knew whoever had come into the office out of the charnel darkness was standing right outside his door like the lady in that Poe story, the one who had scratched her way out of her coffin. Which was a hell of a thing to be thinking right about then.

It took some doing, but he cleared his throat. “Is somebody out there?”

There was only silence, but a silence that was thick with apprehension, with foreboding. He could almost hear that person breathing out there. Almost… smell them. Not a smell of the grave, but a smell of soap, maybe a lingering after-odor of perfume. And that was somehow worse.

He picked up his cell phone.

He would call the police, he would—

The door whispered open, a cold breath of night coming in with it. He could smell autumn leaves and dirt wet with dew. There were shadows out there in the outer office gathering. He could hear the clicking of the clock. Then one of the shadows stepped forward and he jerked with the shock of it, his cell clattering over the desk blotter.

A woman.

Not a ghoul, not a shadow from a crypt.

A flesh-and-blood woman.

She was tall and slender and almost feline dressed in black jogging pants and a black leather jacket. Auburn hair was tossed over one shoulder. It was wind-blown, a stray leaf caught in it. She was quite pale, only a hint of blood pinching a bit of color into her cheeks. Her mouth was full-lipped, pulled into a scowl. And her eyes were the blue of cracking spring ice.

“
What… what do you want?” Spears asked her.

He didn’t know who she was, but if he had seen her before he would have remembered. For though she was not beautiful in the common sense, she was pretty, striking even. Her face was blank of emotion like a blackboard that had been wiped clean and her eyes were unbearably cruel. The way she looked at him made his guts go to sauce.

“
I’m here for you,” she said.

That voice… no, it was not some evil whispering voice from a late night movie, but there was definitely something disturbing about it that made waves of sickness come rolling up from the pit of his belly. He found that he suddenly could not breathe, could not weave a single rational thought in his brain for that voice, that awful voice… it was not the voice of a pretty woman, but the voice of something savage and animal, the sort of thing that killed because it had to kill, spilled blood because it needed to smell the death of its prey.

Spears gasped and in gasping, remembered with a hallucinogenic clarity going to the Milwaukee Zoo with his mother when he was seven years old. How she looked down at him as she held his hand and how he had looked up at her, feeling connected to her like they were part of the same whole. The monkey house. The reptile house. The bird house. The rhinos and elephants. It was fascinating. Then they had stepped into a glass enclosure and were staring into the run where the tigers were kept. Most of them had been dozing in the wet July heat… but one of them, a big Bengal with a froth of saliva at its mouth, had walked over to the glass. It did nothing threatening really, just sat there on its haunches and stared at them. Spears could remember how it drooled, the raw appetite in its eyes. It was telling them quite plainly that if it hadn’t been for the glass it would have taken them down. That he… a small, plump, and spoiled boy… was nothing but meat to it. That his blood was merely for quenching its thirst and his bones only for sharpening its teeth. Life existed to be taken and that was the first rule of the jungle and also the last.

The memory flashed through his mind because the woman, this intruder, this crazy bitch was looking at him like that tiger had looked at him. Not the way a civilized woman would look at you, but the way something would peer out at you from the depths of a meat-smelling cave.

There was death in those eyes.

A pure and seamless death unsullied by morality or ethics.

“
Listen—” he began, rising as he felt death circling him.

The woman, her expression unchanging, pulled out a gun. And Dennis Spears, who was a gun collector, recognized the weapon in her hand as a .25 caliber automatic. A gun with absolutely no range, yet deadly efficient up close.

“
Now wait a minute,” he said. “Wait a fucking minute here… I don’t know what this is about, but I’m a rich man… I can get money for you… I can get you anything you want,
but please don’t—”

She did not blink. Her eyes were huge and scary. “It’s not about money, Mr. Spears. It’s about my sister. If I don’t kill you, then he’ll kill
her.
I don’t want to do this, but you have to see that I really… don’t… have… a… choice…”

“
Wait!”