The light of the moon illuminated the inscription on the slab. It read simply—Tommy Cooper.
“Gah!” he shrieked, as he leapt to his feet and stared at the stone with horror.
Tommy blinked his eyes hard and looked again. Now, the slab read, Caroline Eades, 1841-1865. Underneath that was inscribed: and baby Lucy.
“Hoo-hoo!” called the owl. The sound came from very nearby and Tommy scanned the trees wildly. He was nearly mad with terror when he spotted a pair of luminous eyes watching from the branches above of him.
“Relax, asshole,” came a voice from behind him.
Frantically, Tommy spun around and spotted Nicky. He was sitting in a natural depression, legs outstretched, and back up against the stone wall of a small crypt. He was grinning, obviously enjoying Tommy’s discomfort. Moonlight glanced off of a pane of glass in the front of the tomb. He could easily make out the words ‘Nathanial’s Tombe’ on the placard above the window. Nicky had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hand.
“Come on,” Nicky said, offering the bottle. “Have a drink on me.”
Tommy looked on with further amazement at the area surrounding the crypt. The crypt, with its stone retaining walls, combined with the natural depression beneath a copse of trees, formed an obvious focal point. Pots of white and yellow daisies, red geraniums, and orangey marigolds formed a neat circle, radiating out from this head. There was a break in the circle of flowers at the foot of the radius—a gateway of sorts—right where the number six would be if this were a clock. More flowers, planted in a straight line on either side, created a pathway up the center of the circle, leading toward the crypt. And toys… On the ground, in front of every single potted plant, lay some sort of toy. A toy train here, a baseball there, and an old baseball glove nearby. On the stone in front of the crypt, Tommy noticed a set of jax and a small, red, rubber ball.
“What the—? Who?” he wondered aloud.
“I give you Beth’s mystery man,” Nicky said, gesturing in a circular motion that encompassed the grounds.
“Beth? Beth did all of this?” Tommy was shocked.
“Yup. This is where she’s been, Tommy. This is what she’s been doing every day since the two of you broke up. This is where she spends all her time now, while you figure she’s out whoring around.”
Tommy, stunned, turned in a slow, tight circle, perusing the grounds. It was like a wonderland of flowers, colors standing out in stark contrast to the grey headstones and the crystal blue of the moonlight. He noticed a pinwheel, planted in Nathanial’s circle just to the right of Nicky. It spun one lazy revolution as if in greeting and then stopped short.
“Geez, this is creepy,” Tommy said. “I’ve got goose bumps everywhere! Let’s get out of here.”
Another pinwheel, a different one this time, began to spin, slowly at first and then sped up. There were at least a dozen of them shooting up out of the ground from all over Nathanial’s circle.
“Weird, isn’t it?” Nicky said. “They just do that. There doesn’t need to be a breeze or anything.”
The pinwheel stopped abruptly.
“Let’s go, Nicky,” Tommy answered. “This place creeps me out.”
“Nahhh… I like it here. It ain’t gonna hurt you, Tommy. It’s just pinwheels.”
“But there’s no breeze tonight! What the hell, Nicky?”
“Well if you can’t handle this, you can’t handle being with Beth,” Nicky pointed out. “She’s all over this creepy cemetery stuff.”
“Kind of a moot point, don’t you think? Since she broke up with me and all.”
Tommy walked up the pathway to where Nicky sat, and took the bottle. A drink would certainly help. He drank deeply, choking and spasming toward the end. Wiping his mouth on his balled up fist, he handed the bottle back to Nicky.
“Maybe,” Nicky said, “But she still loves you and I think you know that.” Nicky chugged on the bottle and handed it back.
“I don’t know anything anymore,” Tommy answered quietly.
“Oh, that’s such bullshit!” Nicky said angrily. “That girl’s been in love with you since forever, Tommy!”
Tommy raised the bottle and drank again.
“Well she sure has a funny way of showing it,” he hissed. “Look… I don’t know what happened at that concert, but I sure as hell know that something did. You were there. What the hell did she do that she feels so guilty about?”
A pinwheel to his right began spinning. And another to his left. Tommy almost didn’t care anymore. He’d come here for answers and he was hell bent on getting them.
“Nothing happened!” Nicky protested. Except that he looked nervous now. Tommy, standing directly over him and staring into his face, saw his eyes shift down and to the left.
“You’re lying, you bastard!”
“Calm down, Tommy!”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, you son-of-a-bitch! You were there! You know who she was with!”
Several more pinwheels began to circle. Fully half of them were now in motion, and Tommy turned his head to watch them.
“What the hell?” he said. “What the hell is going on here?” He was angry and he was scared. But he felt like he was on the verge of the truth of things. He took another pull on the bottle and turned back around to face Nicky full on.
“Look at me, Nicky,” he demanded. “LOOK AT ME!”
Nicky did.
“Who was it? Who did Beth sleep with that night?” The rest of the pinwheels were spinning now, each and every one of them increasing in momentum. Tommy could almost hear a whir as the energy built and they turned rapidly.
Tommy could sense Nicky’s fear. He looked like a caged animal, caught and cornered, and Tommy could almost taste his submission.
“WHO WAS IT, NICKY? TELL ME THE TRUTH!” he shouted. He just didn’t give a damn anymore.
“IT WAS ME, OKAY?” Nicky screamed back. “It was me, Tommy and it wasn’t like we planned it. It just… happened.”
Tommy froze. He felt like he’d been hit by a planet. The pinwheels stopped short. For a long moment, nothing moved in the clearing, nothing breathed, as Tommy stared Nicky down. He took a deep breath and another drink. He opened his mouth as if to speak and stopped. He turned in a circle as if looking for a place to run, and then finding no place to escape the hurtful words, turned back again to face Nicky. Anger poured out of his narrowed eyes.
“You son-of-a—” Not only could Tommy not find the words he wanted, he could not stand still either. He began to pace up and down the path. “You asshole!” Three steps toward the outside of the circle of flowers and then a half turn. “You lying son-of-a—”
Nicky said nothing, refusing to look at Tommy.
Three steps back toward Nicky and the pinwheels were once again in motion, spiraling briskly. The whirring sound returned and grew louder by the moment.
“So, it was you all the time,” Tommy said, turning and making his way toward the edge of the circle again. He needed space. Needed to get away from Nicky, to get out of there. He was nearly clear of the pathway when he had a final thought and turned back around.
“Why, Nicky? Why?” He was looking straight at Nicky, but images of Nicky and Beth making love were raking across his vision. “Of all people, why you?” he asked.
Nicky raised his head and looked Tommy straight in the eyes now. An awkward grin played across his face. Coldly, he answered, “Because I could.”
The pinwheels went crazy then, spinning out of control. The whirring grew to a cacophony and Nicky slammed his hands over his ears. Tommy heard nothing, saw nothing but red. He drew back his right arm and slung the bottle of Jack Daniel’s straight at Nicky’s head. Or so he thought…
“YOU BASTARD!” he screamed, his rage murderous.
The bottle shot through the air like a bullet, and rocketed headlong into the glass window. As the glass shattered and burst inward, the entire world cleared out of the place. It was as if a giant vacuum had instantly sucked the plac
e empty. The pinwheels fell still and silent, and all life stopped to focus on the window of Nathanial’s tomb. Not content with merely breaking the window, the bottle sailed inside the tomb and slammed into the head of the small coffin inside. There was an audible pop as the rotted wood gave way and fell to the side. Tommy watched in agony as a small skull rolled past the Jack Daniel’s bottle, out of the coffin, and out onto the ground.
It came to rest just inches from Nicky’s right leg.
“Gah!” Nicky screamed and scrambled sideways and to his feet. “What the hell, Tommy?”
“Oh. My. God.” Tommy said, looking at the thing in horror. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Shit! What are we gonna do now?” Nicky asked.
We… he’d said ‘we.’ And all the anger drained out of Tommy. That was Nicky for you—if Tommy was in trouble, then Nicky was in trouble too. In for a penny, in for a pound. Nicky stepped closer to the skull, slowly, as if the thing might come alive at any moment. He gave it a gentle poke with the toe of his shoe and when nothing happened he bent down and picked it up.
“Christ’s sake, Nicky!” Tommy said in horror.
“What?” Nicky asked. “It’s just an old bone, Tommy. It’s dead. It can’t hurt you.” Nicky turned the skull over in his hands, examining it like a specimen. “It’s kind of cool, really.”
And then all hell broke loose. From the trees at the edge of the clearing, a twig snapped, followed by the sound of brush moving.
Nicky’s head snapped up and the two locked eyes.
“Someone’s coming!” Tommy hissed.
He broke into a run, heading for the opposite side of the clearing, and Nicky followed. Frantically, they passed stone and slab and hit the forest on the other side without slowing. Blindly, madly, they ran to escape the horror that was the clearing and the thing that they had done. They ran as if there were no tomorrow.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The forest intersected with Route 23 at about three miles west of the cemetery. It was there that Tommy and Nicky finally stopped running. Route 23 was sparsely populated and heavily forested on both sides. It was all but abandoned at this hour.
Tommy burst through the underbrush, his lungs on fire, and dropped to the ground beside the road. He needed to catch his breath and rest his legs. Nicky crashed through directly after.
“Oh my God, Nicky! That was—” he was just getting ready to say ‘close’ when he noticed what Nicky had in his hand. The words died in his brain. There, cradled in Nicky’s right arm like a football, was the skull.
“Nicky?” Tommy’s voice was tight. “You brought it with you?”
At first, Nicky looked confused by this, and then he realized what he was carrying.
“Shit!” he cried, looking at the skull with horror. “I never meant to! Just started running, man!”
“Aw, hell no!” Tommy said. “What are we gonna do with it now?”
Nicky dropped down beside Tommy and set the skull in the grass between them.
“What indeed,” he said. “We can’t go back now.”
He immediately stripped off his tee-shirt and began rubbing the skull with it.
“What the hell? What are you doing?” Tommy was incredulous.
“Fingerprints. I’m wiping it clean of fingerprints, Tommy. I really don’t want to go to jail for this.”
Tommy watched as Nicky finished polishing the skull. When he was done, he wrapped the tee-shirt around it, concealing it completely.
“We gotta ditch this somewhere,” Nicky said calmly.
“We should take it back,” Tommy said. “We should put it back in the tomb.”
“Are you crazy?” Nicky asked. “I ain’t going back there right now. Someone else is up there. You heard it. That’s all we need is to get caught carrying this thing back to the cemetery.”
“Maybe it was just an animal,” Tommy said hopefully. “A deer or something.”
“You know it wasn’t.”
And he did. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did know.
“Gotta ditch it,” Nicky repeated. “Gotta find a place where this’ll never be found.”
“The river?” Tommy asked.
“Nah, man. That’ll never work. What if it floats?”
Tommy didn’t know if it would or not, but he was certain that he didn’t want to guess and be wrong about it.
“We could bury it,” he added.
“I don’t think so,” Nicky answered. “Something would dig it up for sure. And then just our luck some hiker would come along and find it in the woods. Or someone’s dog would drag it back home and drop it on the porch. No. It’s got to be somewhere that no one ever goes—never will go—not in a million years. Or at least for a while, until we’re out of here.”
They sat in silence for a few moments, thinking. Tommy was at a total loss. He was new at this whole finding-a-place-to-bury-a-body thing.
“Got it,” Nicky said matter-of-factly. And that was Nicky too; cool under fire. He always knew how to fix things. “The old Perkins place.”
“The Perkins place?” Tommy asked. “Aw, no, Nicky, I ain’t going to the Perkins Place. No one is crazy enough to go out there after what happened—”
“Exactly.”
What happened at the Perkins place was well-known. The place was an old, abandoned farm, and it had sat empty for the last thirty years since the bank had foreclosed on it. It was at the end of Henley Road, though you could barely call it a road. It wasn’t much more than a dirt pathway through the trees, and lay several miles northeast of Tommy’s house. There was a creek on the farm, and once it had been a popular fishing spot for the neighborhood kids. But then, about five years ago, Johnny Ramputti and his best buddy Chris Testani had been fishing out there and come up missing. They were twelve years old at the time. After days of searching with no luck, an unusual and God-awful odor led Officer Wheldon to shine a flashlight down the old dry well out in front of the ramshackle house. The two bodies, already beginning to decompose, were rather unceremoniously hauled up and out of the well and then laid to their final rest in the cemetery at the Catholic Church on the other side of town. The creepy thing, though? The thing that frightened the entire town, including Tommy, who’d been only slightly older than Johnny and Chris at the time, was the fact that the boys were naked when they found them. Naked and battered beyond belief. The facts of the case had never been made public since it was an on-going investigation. But rumors flew. Every citizen of Goshen believed those boys had been raped and murdered, right there in broad daylight, mere miles from town. The case had gone cold. The perpetrator, if there was one, had never been found. For all Tommy knew, he was still lurking: attending church with his neighbors, shopping for groceries in the same store, or maybe even sitting next to them at the movies. One thing was for sure, though; no one traveled Henley Road anymore. No one went out there for any reason.
“Any other ideas?” Tommy asked.
“Nope. It’s the perfect place. C’mon, Tommy, it’ll just take a few minutes and then this will be over with and no one the wiser. And if anyone ever were to find it out there, they’d all think it was the murderer who put it there anyways. It’s the perfect plan—the best way for us to get off the hook.”
It took them all of a half hour to hike back to Nicky’s car. Rather than go back through the woods and Potter’s Field after, they walked Route 23 back to the corner and turned onto Tommy’s road. It was only about another five minutes to the cemetery parking lot and Nicky’s car.
As they climbed in, Nicky set the wrapped skull on the dash and began fiddling with the tee-shirt. When he was done, the tee-shirt puddled around the skull like a scarf. He turned the thing slightly so that it was looking straight at Tommy.
“You are such an asshole,” Tommy said. “Can we put this thing in the back? Please?”
“You are such an asshole,” Nicky mocked in a high-pitched voice. The intention was to make it sound like the skull was doing the talking. Still a littl
e tipsy from the Jack Daniel’s, Tommy could almost believe that it was.
Nicky chuckled. “I don’t know,” he said, “It might be more fun to keep it. We could have a blast with this thing.
“Hey, Tommy!” he cried in the high-pitched tone again. “What say we fire one up and take the slow road home?”
Just then the radio knob turned a hard right and snapped to life. Static burst from the speakers. Tommy whirled to look at Nicky, whose hands were planted firmly on the wheel at ten and two. As they watched in horror, the red station indicator moved slowly up the number line. Static turned into the snippet of a song, and then back to static as it continued to move.
Nathanial's Window- The Wrath of Jesse Eades Page 5