Graverobbers Wanted: No Experience Necessary am-1

by Jeff Strand

  Chapter 10

  THREE HOURS waiting in a graveyard after dark starts to get to you. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s all the dead people hanging around underground. Whatever it was, by the time my watch said it was ten minutes to midnight, I had a major case of the creeps, the willies, and the heebie-jeebies. At least the flesh-eating zombies were keeping themselves hidden away.

  I sat there for another ten minutes and the same nothing that had been happening all night continued happening. I wondered if the killer was hiding someplace else, waiting for me to drive by. Maybe without somebody acting as bait (which was to be my job in the original plan), he wouldn’t show up. Regardless, I was going to wait at least another half hour before I gave up.

  Then I heard a faint beeping, like an alarm clock going off. For a moment I thought it was mycreeped -out,willied , andheebie-jeebied imagination, but a few more seconds convinced me that, yes, I was definitely hearing a beeping. You weren’t generally supposed to hear beeping in a cemetery at midnight, so I had a pretty good idea that this had something to do with the reason I was here.

  I surveyed as much of the graveyard as I could see, whichwas most of it .Nobody around. The killer could have left a beeper any time before our stakeout, maybe even before Jennifer hired us.

  Reluctantly I emerged from my hiding spot, turned on the flashlight, and began to walk toward the beeping sound. It was hard to gauge exactly where it was coming from, but after a couple of minutes I pinpointed the spot and knelt down beside a small hole in the ground, about the size of a dime.

  I stuck my finger in thehole and pulled away dirt until I’d revealed a small kitchen timer. I shut it off, and then removed the note that was taped to it.Once again, the same blood-red letters.“Find Jennifer Where You Find Love.”

  What was that supposed to mean? Find Jennifer where you find love? What was it, singles night at theEverlifeCemetery ? Had I really sat around for three hours waiting for this?

  Okay, stop it, I told myself. It obviously means something. Be a non-suckydetective. Get that brain into gear. Find Jennifer where you find love. Find Jennifer where you find love.

  Love.My heart gave a jolt as I suddenly wondered if they’d involved Helen, but that was ridiculous. The killer certainly hadn’t stashed Jennifer under her hospital bed.

  Was I supposed to find love here, in the cemetery? This was entering some really sick territory.

  Lovers buried together? That was a possibility, but there had to be dozens of them around. Something left by a lover? Once again, there could be dozens of them. But hey, maybe the killer just wasn’t any good at narrowing things down. It was worth looking.

  I began to wander up and down the rows of tombstones, shining my flashlight on each one. Wherever I found flowers, I poked through them, but found nothing interesting. This was going to take forever.

  And then I had a sudden brainstorm. There may not be many people around with the last name “Mayhem,” but there were plenty with the last name “Love.”

  I picked up my pace, looking only at the names. Five minutes later, I stopped at a pair of small, cracked tombstones.Timothy and Karen Love.Both of them 1892-1954.“Died in each other’s arms.”

  There was a basket of flowers resting in front of the tombstone. If this was wrong, I was going to feel like a total creep, but nevertheless I turned the basket over and shook it until something fell out.A picture in a frame.

  It was not a nice picture. It was a picture of a woman screaming. Not Jennifer. I actually thought I recognized her, an actress from some zero-budget horror films. The picture was probably a shot from one of her movies.

  The interesting part was the frame. It was one of those frames with a little speaker inside, so you can record a short message. It was intended to be something like “I’m thinking about you” or “You’re always in my heart.” I suspected that the message here was going to be something quite different.

  I pressed the button and was treated to the sound of a female shriek, followed by some maniacal laughter that sounded like it had been generated from a computer. Then a sound bite that I recognizedfromTheExorcist , a demonic voice proclaiming “This sow is mine!”

  A chorus of children: “You’regonnadiiiiie , you’regonnadiiiiie .”

  A musical sting, the kind you hear right as the monster bursts out of nowhere.

  An old man speaking in a careful, calculated tone: “True horror exists deep beneath the surface.”

  Another female shriek.

  A hysterical man: “Blood! Blood everywhere! It covers the walls! It covers the ceiling!”

  TheTwilightZone theme.

  A whisper: “Look beneath…look within…”

  The recording ended.

  It took me several seconds to remember to breathe. Sweat was pouring down my sides, and I was getting the kind of headache I always got before a really difficult test in college.

  “It’s nothing,” I said aloud. “Just some guy with a bit of a twist in his personality trying to mess with my mind, that’s all.”

  “DIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIE !!!”

  I dropped the picture in shock, and then willed my stomach to untangle itself from my spinal column. Just a little bonus sound bite, like the hidden tracks you can find on some CDs.Nothing to keel over dead from.

  But I also had nothing to go on.

  Okay, “true horror exists beneath the surface” was probably a clue. I didn’t like that clue, because it implied that I was going to have to dig up another grave, and I was trying to cut down.But where? The Love’s site certainly didn’t look like anything had been added to it recently. Was I going to have to wander around, shining my flashlight all over until I found a patch of ground that looked recently-filled?

  “Look beneath…look within…”

  It had to refer to digging up another grave.Or else the tombstones of Mr. Beneath and Mr. Within. The only other thing I could look beneath was the picture.

  I picked up the frame, half expecting it to tell me to DIE! DIE! DIE!again . I removed the picture and found another note behind it.

  “Good guess. But wrong.”

  What a prick.

  Okay, fine, it wasn’t behind the picture. Where else was I supposed to look? I wandered around the nearby tombstones, searching for an area that might have something newly-buried underneath it, but there was nothing.

  Maybe I was supposed to smash open the picture frame.

  I turned it over. Better idea. Look in the battery compartment.

  I pried open the compartment and saw four tiny batteries.

  Then one of the batteries fell out, revealing a very small, folded piece of paper. I unfolded it and letters I could barely even see spelled out “OLE.”

  Ole?Spanish for Bravo? What was this, congratulations for not going absolutely berserk up to this point?

  I shook the frame and the other batteries dropped out. Three more pieces of paper fell to the ground. After I retrieved and unfolded them, I had the following fragments: “US,” “MA,” and “UM.”

  Great.Another puzzle.And I was the kind of person who cheated at Scrabble.

  “Us” and “Ma” could refer to people, I guess, but what were “Um” and “Ole” supposed to mean? Was I supposed to be searching for a Mexican couple who lived with their mother and used verbal tags?

  Maybe these could be unscrambled to form another name.

  No! I had it!

  With a little rearranging the fragments formed…MAUSOLEUM.

  I headed over to the closest mausoleum, which was also the larger of the two. The door was chained shut with a shiny new padlock, but when I walked around to the back there was a patch of earth, about as long as a coffin, that, while firmly packed, could easily have been replaced recently.

  Jennifer could be down there.

  If so, she’d probably been there since last night.

  This was not going to be pretty.

  Now I decided that the best course of action was to run to the car, drive to the neares
t phone, and get the police. If Jennifer was buried alive, every second might count, and I wasn’t going to get very far trying to dig with my bare hands. But I took a moment to shine my flashlight around the area, just in case I’d missed something, and there it was. Another one of those notes, taped to the mausoleum wall near the ground. I tore it free and read it. “13 left, 27 right, 4 left.”

  I hurried to the front of the mausoleum and turned the dial of the padlock to that combination. It popped open, and I threw it aside. I pulled open the heavy wooden door, shined the flashlight inside, and immediately saw what I was supposed to find. Two shovels.A lantern.A Walkman. And yes, a note.

  “Dig her up yourselves or suffer the consequences,” the note read. “But you may want to hurry.”

  I grabbed one of the shovels, the lantern, and the Walkman and rushed to the back of the mausoleum. Opening the Walkman, I saw that the tape inside was labeled “MusicTo Dig Up Graves By.” Oh, yes, this guy was certainly a prick.

  I spent the next half hour digging as rapidly as I could. I kept the Walkman volume low so that I could hear if anyone approached, but I got to listen to songs like “Digging in the Dirt” by Peter Gabriel, Perry Como singing “Dig You Later,” Randy Travis singing “Digging Up Bones,” They Might Be Giants singing “Dig My Grave,” and “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” by AC/DC.

  Then I struck coffin.

  I quickly removed more dirt until the lid was exposed enough that I could open it. This was made a bit more difficult because I was trying to keep myself in a position where I wouldn’t get shot if bullets started firing through the lid.

  I knocked on the lid with the shovel. “Jennifer?”

  Silence.

  I could think of so many things I’d rather do than open this coffin. Root canals, alligator wrestling, parent-teacher conferences…bring `emon!

  But I got the shovel in place, and then pried it open.

  There was not a corpse inside.

  There wasn’t a live body inside, either.

  The only thing inside the coffin was a video camera.

  Great.I’d spontaneously generated six ulcers over a stupid video camera. I picked it up, and then shut the lid. It was an older model, heavy and clunky. Probably not something that would be missed if it were taken out of the Ghoulish Delights office.

  I sat down against the wall of the mausoleum and examined the camcorder more thoroughly. I ejected the tape inside and saw that it was labeled “You’ll like this.” I stuck the tape back in, and then unplugged the headphones from the Walkman and inserted them into the headphone jack of the video recorder. I peered through the viewfinder and pressed “play.”

  A black-and-white image appeared. It was Jennifer, her hair much longer than when I’d met her. She wore a black leather outfit and high heels. As she walked onto the empty stage, the camera zoomed in on her face, and she gave a spank-me-you-bad-boy smile.

  “WelcometoGhoulishDelights , ” she said, sounding like she was on a commercial for a 1-900-DO-ME-NOW line. “I’m sure you’lllooooove what we’ve got in store for you. But before we get to the good stuff, let’s hear a word from our sponsor, Profit Jewelers. You know, nose rings, lip rings, navel rings, and a wide variety of otherpiercings are the fashion right now, but Profit Jewelers, always the innovator, has taken things one step further.”

  The camera panned over to where a woman I didn’t recognize sat on a chair, smiling broadly and waving at the camera like a professional model. She was very attractive except for the ring protruding from her left eyeball.

  “Yes, eye rings,” said Jennifer. “They’re what all the top stars are wearing, and as an extra-special bonus, theyhuuuuuurt when they go in.” She purred these last words, but for some reason I still wasn’t convinced to go get my eye pierced.

  She began to scratch her back. “Don’t you hate that one little spot on your back that you can never seem to reach? Usually somebody is here to scratch it for me.” She made this sound like one of the most erotic acts imaginable. “But tonight I’m on my own, so I’ll have to improvise.”

  Jennifer ripped off her left arm in a spray of blood, and then used it to scratch her back. Even with a one-inch, grainy black-and-white picture it wasn’t a very convincing special effect.

  “That’ssoooo much better,” she told the camera. She tossed the arm off-screen. After a series of loud chewing sounds, a skeletal arm was tossed back to her. “Now, before we get to our main attraction, it’s time once again for CookingWith Chef Pierre.”

  The camera followed her as she walked over to an oven, upon which rested a large metal pot. A man who had obviously been dead for quite some time was standing by the oven, tied to a pole so he wouldn’t topple over. “This is Chef Pierre,” Jennifer explained.“Master of culinary treats. So, what have you got for us today?”

  Steam poured up into her face as she removed the lid. She inhaled deeply, and sighed with pleasure.“Ooooh, my favorite. Now, this creation is for those who love spaghetti, but don’t find it quite hearty enough.” She dipped out a spoonful of the contents.Intestines.

  “I wonder if it’sdone? ” Jennifer grabbed a foot-long segment of the intestine and flung it against the wall. It stuck. “Ah! Perfect!”

  I shifted my position, wondering what I was supposed to be getting out of this. Maybe they wanted me to promote a new restaurant.

  “And now, it’s time for our feature presentation,” said Jennifer. “His name is…well, you don’t really need to know his name to enjoy it, so here we go!”

  The scene switched to a bedroom. There was a young man on the bed, maybe in his mid-twenties, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. He’d been tied there, spread eagle, a gag over his mouth. The camera zoomed in close on his face, revealing eyes wide with terror. If this guy was an actor, he was good. But I didn’t think he was an actor.

  The camera pulled back from his face, and then began to circle him as the person taping this walked to the other side of the bed. The man watched it the entire time. There was no sound, but you could tell he was whimpering.

  Then the camera operator’s gloved hand came into the frame, holding a pocket knife. It was opened to aspork .

  I pressed the fast-forward button just as the camera operator went to work on the man’s upper leg. For nearly five minutes I watched what was happening, and even in speeded-up motion on the tiny screen it made me violently queasy. Thespork was not the only tool used. The corkscrew was especially grisly.

  I wanted to believe that it was all just special effects, but I knew that it wasn’t. It was all one continuous shot, with no opportunities to replace the live actor with aKaro syrup-filled dummy. And when the pocketknife was upgraded to a hatchet, the man flailed around too much for his missing right arm to have been simply tucked out of sight.

  No actor could maintain that level of terror and agony for so long.

  This was real.

  I took it off fast-forward as the man was finally allowed to die. The gloved hand, now drenched with blood, gave a thumbs-up sign to the camera. The screen faded to black.

  Jennifer reappeared, smiling mischievously. “Ooooh,thathad to hurt, don’t you think? That’s all for this episode, but let’s see some coming attractions.”

  The picture cut to a young woman tied to a chair. The scene shifted four more times, showing two other women and two men, all tied up and ripe for the torturing. Then the scene returned to Jennifer.

  “I hope you’ve enjoyed Ghoulish Delights, and I hope you’ll come see us again some time.”

  She blew a kiss at the camera,then ran her tongue over her upper lip as the picture faded out.

  I fast-forwarded to the end, but there was nothing else on the tape.

  Now what?

  That was an easy one to answer. I was going straight to the police.

  Chapter 11

  I DIDN’T bother to rebury the coffin. Screw it. The cops were going to get the full story. The whole situation had been out of control before, but now it was too
much for me to handle. Let the police deal with the lunatic making snuff films. This stretched well beyond the death of Michael Ashcraft, and I was done with it.

  I walked along the side of the road at a brisk pace, the video camera tucked under my arm. No cars passed as I made my way to the church where Roger had parked. I half-expected The Apparition to show up and offer me another lift. It had been that kind of bizarre evening.

  The flashlight battery died about halfway there, forcing me to walk in total darkness. I found it hard to be surprised.

  I got in the car and took a couple of minutes to compose myself before I started the engine. I didn’t want to get in a wreck and leave my kids with two parents in the hospital, or one in the morgue.

  I pulled onto the road and searched the AM radio stations until I found the easiest listening music on the dial. I needed a station that would advertise itself as “Music for the aging, comatose kind of guy.” My nerves were in desperate need of soothing. I thanked God I’d never tried drugs, or this would have sent me into an acid flashback for sure.

  I let the music calm me down for about two minutes. Then a phone rang.

  Roger didn’t own a cellular phone. Unless he’d bought one within the past couple of days and forgot to mention it, I had a pretty strong suspicion that this was not going to be a call I wanted to hear.

  The phone rang again. It wasn’t difficult to locate, wedged between the front seats. I picked itup, noting that it looked just like the one Jennifer had given me, extended the antenna, and answered. “Hello?”

  “Having fun?”

  It was a very low, computer-generated voice, spoken in a monotone. Apparently the killer had one of those voice disguiser gizmos after all.

  “Who is this?” I demanded.

  For a few seconds I could only hear a faint clicking, as if somebody was typing on a keyboard. Then the voice again: “I’m the villain in your life story.”

  “Listen to me, you deviant freak, I’m not playing your game anymore. As soon as I hang up on your sorry ass I’m calling the police.”