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Authors: Phillip Depoy

BOOK: The Witch's Grave
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I stood, head cocked, trying to make my legs move me closer, when a gust of wind rolled down the slope, scattered more leaves, and revealed the nightmare. There were three bodies stacked one on top of the other against the pine tree. Piled like the seed sacks, partially covered with red clay.
I backed away, unable to comprehend—the shock of seeing the hand was wearing off; I shivered.
Find a phone,
I told myself calmly.
Call Skidmore.
I continued backing up the hill for a moment, stumbling, slipping on wet leaves, then turned and sprinted up the rest of the slope as best I could. Strange noises seemed everywhere; I was very conscious of my own breathing, like a trapped animal. By the time I reached the barbed wire I realized I was making little noises every time I exhaled. There was a ring of fire around my hairline and a torrent of white noise pounding in my ears. When I made it to the truck, I was drenched in sweat.
 
Trade at Gil's Filling Station was slow, as usual, and Gil himself had gone hunting. A teenage boy whose name I could not remember had handed me the phone. I'd made five calls before finding the deputy. Luckily Skidmore knew me well enough to read the sound of my voice and he was a good enough friend to come quickly without asking any questions.
“You want a co-cola, Dr. Deverling?”
I suddenly didn't feel so bad about not remembering the boy's name. “No, thanks. I think I'll go wait outside.”
“You been sick?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Sorry, you're breathing funny is all, like you had a cold. My mother she has a cold.” He sniffed. “A cold, it can be bad. In the head. That's where she's got it.” He blew out a breath. “Right there in her head.”
“I ran to get here, use the phone,” I said distractedly. “I'm a little out of breath is all.”
“You ought to get you a cell phone,” he advised me. “Everybody's got one.”
“I'm just going …” I started for the door.
“You find that Truvy Deveroe yet?”
I stopped.
“Who?” I had no intention of revealing anything to him.
“Everybody at school is talking about it,” he assured me.
Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a secret to hide in Blue Mountain.
Still, I felt I should try. “What makes you think I'm looking …”
“Ms. Needle told you to do it at the church meeting.” He was matter-of-fact, confident in his knowledge.
“I see.” I folded my arms.
Gil's station was a comfortable place for me, the smell of gasoline and Old Spice, cigarettes, the gas heater. I'd played music in the garage with older men since I was ten. The sound of those tunes clung to the splinters in the walls, stuck in the rainbows of oil by the car lift.
“Do you have an opinion?” I asked the boy.
“Sir?”
“Do you have a feeling about Truevine Deveroe?”
“You mean do I think she's what people say?” He grinned. “I got a lots better sense than that.” He straightened. “I'm college prep.”
“That's great,” I said, glad to change the subject. “What do you want to study?”
“In college? Well, I build Web sites, you know. I did one for school; then I just sort of took to it, I reckon. I'm going to Georgia Tech. Be a computer technologist.”
The fact that he worked a little too hard in pronouncing the last two words in his sentence was only slightly less heartbreaking than the fact that his aspiration was eight years behind the times. But what hurt more was the idea that not many years ago this boy's aspiration would have been to work at Gil's, stay in Blue Mountain, marry his sweetheart, play mandolin, have a nice kitchen garden. How long would it be before there were no young people left in
town? And how much longer after that would Blue Mountain be another ghost?
“Georgia Tech,” I said, smiling. “Very impressive.”
His grin covered his face. “Thanks, Dr. Deverling; that means a lot coming from you.”
Skidmore's squad car screeched into the lot at the front of the station.
“That's for me,” I told the boy.
“Take care,” he said, turning his attention back to a bag of potato chips.
I was barely out the door when Skid and Andrews flung their doors open and rushed me.
“What is it?” Skid said softly.
Andrews saw my face, registered concern.
“You're not going to believe,” I began, my stomach burning, “what I found at the Pinhurst mortuary.”
 
By sunset the deputies had counted seventy-three bodies and it was getting too dark to continue.
“We need more people, Skid,” one of the deputies said, wiping his forehead. He was as shaken as the rest of us, face white, eyes bleary.
“I know,” Skid answered. “I just …” he trailed off, watching the last bit of red at the horizon. He turned to me slowly. “By the time I realized the magnitude of the situation …”
“ … it was too late to call anyone,” I finished, trying to reassure him. “You're doing fine. You need to leave a couple of people here tonight, get away from this. We'll all keep quiet until you've had a chance to get your thoughts together, calm down.”
Though how any of us would get our minds around the enormity of the problem was another matter. Bodies stacked, three, five, sometimes more, littered everywhere in these woods. As close to the house as forty yards, as far away as half a mile, and every time a deputy reported in over the walkie-talkie in Skid's hand more had been found. Amazement had long since turned to dull sickness.
“I've never even heard of anything like this,” Andrews whispered for the third time. “Anywhere.”
The bodies were in no order we could determine: some were fresh; some were skeletons; the rest were in every imaginable stage in between. Men, women, children, dressed, naked, wealthy, poor—unknown and all too familiar.
The deputy who had requested more people suddenly sat down on the ground sobbing uncontrollably, grinding his palms into his temples. He had come across the body of his aunt, only recently deceased. He hid his eyes from us; we were too tired to look away.
“I don't even know what it means, Dev,” Skid said softly.
“At first I thought it was some mass murder scene,” Andrews agreed. “Now I have no idea what this could mean.”
We hadn't talked much during the course of the afternoon. As the scope of the phenomenon grew, we talked less. Minds were numb. Eyes were sore. Everyone was shivering and hot at the same time.
I had kept silent, though I was certain I knew what was transpiring.
Both men read my silence.
The air was amber, the wind had picked up, and the chill of it stung. All leaves were rust-colored in the last light of the day; all trees were black; all men were shadows. The gentle slopes around us seemed menacing and harsh, crouched, alive. The night sky was an anvil in the east; stars were sparks struck there, burning holes in the air. Nothing was right.
“What is it, Dev?” Skidmore said.
“In the cellar of the house,” I began mechanically, “and in the house itself, you'll find more of these sacks packed with fill dirt. I think that's what Harding put in caskets instead of bodies, and the rest he's used to cover up the corpses out here.”
The full import of what I was saying was lost on my two friends. They stared blankly.
“Harding has been hauling the remains of his customers out here to these woods, through a trapdoor in one of his workrooms. It leads to his cellar. It would appear he's been doing it for most of the time
he's worked there. The cemeteries, as it turns out, might be more empty than we might have imagined.” I cast my eye over the Poe landscape. “But these woods are quite full.”
“That's not possible.” Andrews would not close his mouth.
“Why would he do it?” Skidmore's eyes bored into mine.
“I have no idea,” I answered. “But I think Able Carter found out.”
That began to register with them.
“Believe it or not,” I confessed, “Donny Deveroe hinted at this. Just this morning.” Seemed a month ago.
“Somebody found out about this,” Skidmore agreed slowly. “That's why Harding was murdered.”
“Able wouldn't murder him for this,” Andrews managed. “He'd want to prosecute, wouldn't he?”
“Maybe they got in a fight about it,” Skid said.
“That's not murder,” Andrews argued.
Debate was interrupted by the crackle of Skidmore's walkie-talkie.
“Skid?” the scratchy voice said.
“Joseph,” Skidmore answered.
“We found another …” but the rest of the sentence was scrambled.
“Say again,” Skid said, monotone, into the speaker. “You found another body?”
“No, sir,” said the voice at the other end. “We found another … whole section.” Black silence. “Looks like fifty or sixty more bodies.”
Crackle.
“Can I come in now? I don't believe I can do this anymore tonight.”
The sobbing deputy lay back against the ground, exhaled roughly, stared up at the waning moon. Night was coming on.
The next morning, Andrews and I were Skidmore's only help. Two deputies called in sick; the others simply hadn't shown up. We stood at the edge of the barbed wire, warming our hands on cups of coffee, watching the woods.
“I called the state patrol,” Skid finally said. “They're sending some. Not till later, though.”
We nodded.
The sun was barely up, reluctant to shed light on the scene. I hadn't slept well. Neither had Andrews from the look of him.
“Hey. What were you two cooking up yesterday?” I said, scanning the deeper woods, mostly to delay our task.
“Yesterday?” Andrews gave it some thought, as if trying to remember his childhood.
“You spent part of the day together.” I had to work to keep a needle point of paranoia at bay.
“That's right. I was mad at you,” Skidmore confessed. “I wanted to teach you a lesson. Andrews and me, we did some paperwork. Got more report from Dahlonega. Said the wound on Harding's head was ‘consistent with the pathology of being struck a blow by a blunt instrument.'”
“But they wouldn't rule out the possibility,” Andrews chimed in solemnly, “that he hit his head on a rock when he fell down the hill.”
“In other words …” I offered.
“Inconclusive,” Skidmore affirmed.
“What about the threads I found in the graveyard?” I ventured. “Truevine's?”
“Nope,” Skid answered blankly. “Far as they could tell, just random threads.”
“Damn.” I rubbed my eyes. “I was sure they had something to do with all this. You didn't do anything else, the two of you?”
“We had a nice lunch,” Andrews said.
“So you were mostly just messing with me, then,” I said.
“Exactly,” Skid agreed. “It was fun.”
“Well, it worked; I was messed with.”
“Job well done.” But Skidmore didn't smile the way he might have the day before.
We knew we were stalling; the subject of the conversation didn't matter the way it might have any other day.
“But we're still considering the whole mess,” Andrews said, gazing down the slope into the shadows, “as motive for what happened to Harding.”
I had to smile at Andrews. “We are, are we?”
“Don't you think?” He turned to me, ignoring the tone of irony in my statement.
“How far does this state property go, Skid?” I asked.
“All the way up to the cemetery. That's where it stops.”
“This land goes all the way to that graveyard?” I couldn't believe it.
“Not so far as the crow flies,” he told me. “You're thinking of how it was when we were kids. The graveyard expanded a little, and the new roads weave all over the mountain from here, but straight shot? It ain't but a mile, I reckon.”
“Why did Harding do this?” Andrews whispered. He'd borrowed one of my old overcoats, knowing we'd be out in the cold all day. It was a long navy blue monstrosity, too big for him, natty, torn at one sleeve. He'd stuffed his hair into a stocking cap and looked like a derelict sailor. Skidmore was in tight official regalia. I'd layered sweatshirts and sweaters, black hunting jeans with big pockets, heavy wool socks, and hiking boots. We were men from three separate realities.
“What's the Wallace Stevens poem, Andrews,” I asked, pulling on
my black gloves, “that goes: ‘Thirty men crossing a bridge into a town are actually thirty men crossing thirty bridges into thirty towns'?”
“‘Or one man crossing one bridge,'” he finished. “It's called ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico,' I think. And I'm not sure you've got the quote exactly right. Why do you ask?”
“That's us. The three of us.”
He nodded. “I'm going into the woods for an adventure; you're going for a cause; Detective Needle's on the job.”
“But we're all going to do the same thing,” Skidmore chimed in. “Let's get to it.”
He was right. We'd wasted enough time. He handed me a small bundle of numbered red tags, Andrews a bunch of blue.
“Start with your lowest number; tag every body you come across.” Skidmore kept his voice dry, businesslike, hollow. “If you run out of tags, call me.” He gave me a walkie-talkie, Andrews had already picked his up. “If you have tags left over, we do the math at noon. Check in with me every so often. Questions?”
A thousand questions assaulted my brain, but none that anyone could answer.
“I take the east, Andrews the west; Dev, you go straight down. It would be better if we kept in eye contact, but the area's too big.” He blew out a breath we could see in the morning air. “Cold for October.” He headed off without another word.
I looked over at Andrews. “Are you okay?”
“Christ,” he said softly. “I'm not nearly
okay.
”
I nodded, reached into my pocket. “Here, I brought this for you. Don't tell Skid.”
He focused his eyes on the bottle in my hand.
“Is that your apple brandy?” Hushed reverence hung his voice in the air around us.
“The same.”
“I think I'm going to cry.” He took the bottle from me quickly. “Don't you want some?”
I pulled a small thermos out of the other pocket. “What do you think is fortifying this coffee?”
“You know you're a genius, right?” he said, pocketing his bottle in the greatcoat.
I headed down the slope.
 
An hour later Skidmore called. He was the first to find another group of bodies. Seven, including a child.
“What's that make the total?” Andrews's voice scratched over the walkie-talkie.
“We're over a hundred,” Skid answered coldly.
I had done my best to keep a more or less straight path from where I'd started. It was slow going because I felt I had to scour every inch of the woods within my vision. I took ten steps, swept everything in a ninety-degree angle from my extreme right to a parallel point at my extreme left. Then ten more steps. Focus was intense, and there was little on my mind. The wind and cold swept away any clinging distractions, and since I had not found anything, the exercise might have been a pleasant meditation—but for the ever-present worry that my eye would come across a pile of rotting corpses.
“How are you holding up?” I asked Skid over the airwaves.
“I'm all right.”
“Signing off, then,” I said. I didn't like hearing his voice so cold.
I thought I must be nearing the lower edge of the cemetery if it was only as far from the mortuary as Skid had said. I scanned the woods in front of me for the line of state barbed wire.
The woods were a perfect autumn world. A few leaves still pinched the branches of the chestnut and sycamore; their kin carpeted the ground. The air was crisp, the sun dodged clouds, and the sky, when it broke through, was hard blue.
I was a little surprised I hadn't seen much animal life. The occasional squirrel, a darting bird, but nothing else. Considering that the land had not been hunted, I'd half-expected to see deer. The terrain sloped grandly up and down twice before trending steadily upward, ascending the gentler side of the mountain toward the cemetery. The trees, never too close, were thinning as the incline grew.
Just as I was thinking how glad I was that I hadn't found any bodies, I saw something black dart past my peripheral vision, to the left. I jerked my head in the direction of the movement, but there was nothing there. Then a rustle of leaves disturbed the silence behind a large fallen tree. Pines toppled regularly in the autumn, and this one had been old. It had fallen recently; the roots still dangled upward in the air.
Bears sometimes found food in fallen trees of that size, a final bite before lumbering off for the winter's nap. I stood very still, my breathing a little too loud, waiting. I hadn't fired a gun since I was a boy, but I wished then I'd brought one of my father's hunting rifles. I was standing in a relatively clear patch of ground, nothing around me, nothing to dive behind or climb up. No big sticks or heavy rocks were anywhere near.
“Dev?”
The walkie-talkie scraped the air all around me, twice as loud as it had been a moment before. I jumped, gasping.
The thing behind the tree did the same. It scrambled, growled, and sprinted away. I heard it more than saw it, but it was large and black.
“Dev?” the walkie-talkie said again. It was Andrews.
I grabbed it out of my pocket.
“What?”
“I'm running low on fuel. Do you have any ‘coffee' left?”
“Christ.”
“What?” he said innocently.
“I was just …” but I didn't finish.
“Just what?”
“I saw something, an animal, but it ran off.”
“What was it?”
“Could have been a bear,” I answered. “But it was a small one.”
“A bear?” His voice was higher. “Are there bears out here?”
“Probably not.”
“But you just said.” His pitch grew.
“Could have been a wild dog, I guess, but …” I stopped. “Oh my God.”
“Do you see it?” He'd jumped an octave.
“It could have been a big black wild dog.”
“Well, be careful,” he mused, calming. “In some ways I'd rather run into a bear than a wild dog.” He hesitated. “So your coffee …”
“It's gone,” I lied. “Sorry.”
“Okay. When's lunch?”
“Andrews,” I shot back.
“Fine,” he said quickly, “I'm going back to work.” His walkie-talkie clicked off.
I tried to see where the dog had gone. It was too much a coincidence, June's telling me about the witch's animal companion, then seeing its twin in the woods. Darting up the final slope winded me, but it brought me to the end of the government property and the barbed wire fencing.
Slipping under it was harder than it had been on the other side. Rocks had been piled on the ground and had to be moved. I still managed to catch my sweater and it took me a few minutes to get loose, all the while convinced that the wild dog would return, find me helpless, and eat my esophagus.
Finally freed, I got to my feet quickly, scanning the edge of the graveyard, trying to get my bearings. I didn't recognize anything.
Find the Angel of Death,
I thought.
Grim as it was, the statue was the perfect landmark, tall enough to be seen from most of the yard and clearly appropriate for the day.
After wandering and skirting impossible bramble thickets, I saw it and headed toward its dark wings.
The statue was weathered, covered with lichens, beautiful in the autumn light. It had been purchased by the Newcomb family to be placed at the tallest point in the cemetery, atop the largest communal crypt. The crypt itself was at least twice the size of my house. It was made mostly of granite; the iron gates guarding the entrance were highly stylized art deco monstrosities, the fashion of the decade in which they were commissioned.
The Angel soared over the building, arms reaching out, gown blowing behind, on its way to gather souls. The substantial wings
seemed quite capable of carrying angel and company away. The angel's face had always been, to me, the most disturbing aspect of the thing. It was smiling. Mona Lisa had learned from this angel. The smile was grim if I stood on one side of the statue, serene from another angle, ominous straight ahead. Deeply troubling.
I thought it best to try and stand beside it to survey the entire yard. It took some doing to scramble up on top of the crypt, but once I was there I could see that others had come before me: beer bottles, cigarette butts, chicken bones decorated the roof. Fine place for a midnight tryst among the ghoulish high school set.
I stood, arm on the statue, and took in as much of the place as I could. Once again I thought the quiet concentration would have been pleasant under other circumstances. I lost myself in the exercise, and time passed in silence.
The meditation was brought to an abrupt end by the sound of something moving in the crypt.
 
Impossible for me to get off the roof without making noise, all sound from within the crypt ceased when I moved.
My heart was thumping, my eyes burning. I was trying not to blink.
Could be an animal,
I thought.
A rat would be right.
My breathing was uncontrollably loud from the effort of quitting the roof.

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