Michael doesn’t need to look. The smell is enough to tell him he was right.
Chapter Eleven
They pull bodies out of the ground all day.
Michael is not allowed to sleep. He’s beginning to hallucinate again, but not the dark swirling things he’d seen before. Now he’s seeing crocodiles and dripping faces. He’s exhausted. His new melting awareness erases the certainty he held last night. Now as he answers the same questions for the fifteenth time, it doesn’t even cross his mind to mention a previous familiarity with the place, real or otherwise.
“Grabbing at straws,” he says. The coffee cup shakes in his hand so he puts it down on the flimsy folding table. The tent offers shade, but it is still hot. He’s sweating fatigue and nicotine like a crushed sponge. Even Sergeant Galloway is sweating.
“So, in the middle of the night, you got up from your comfy bunk at Poulson’s and booked it down here—in the middle of the night—because you were grabbing at straws?”
State Trooper Perez watches from the doorway. He at least gets to feel the breeze in the door.
Michael wonders if Galloway regrets closing the flaps for this new interview.
“I couldn’t sleep. McCallister wanted to go to Vegas. Driving at night isn’t a crime. Hell, in the desert, it’s a good idea.”
Craig had called 911 and they’d dispatched Galloway.
He took one look in the hole and radioed for help from Las Vegas.
Perez showed up after dawn, about the same time as the trucks and tents from Sin City. Galloway demanded to lead the crime scene, but Michael knows that someone from Vegas, a detective, is on their way. In fact, he’s late. Galloway is trying one last time to crack the non-existent case before he’s relieved.
“Makes no sense,” he says. “How’d you know to dig there?”
“Craig found it. The plant was dead. The shrub. The sage, acacia, whatever the hell it was. It was dead. He noticed it. I just drove down here and wandered into the vacant lot. Talk to him.”
“We have,” he says. “He said that you had a hunch. He says you think that that missing trucker was hijacked and killed and buried here. How’d you know about the others?”
“I didn’t,” he lies. He’s so tired. “We only found the one. Isaac Lowe.”
“How do you know it’s Lowe?”
“Isn’t it?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Sergeant,” says Perez from the door. “They found another.”
“What? Is that six now?”
“Eight,” he says.
“You have some explaining to do Oswald.”
“Whatever,” he says and puts his head down on the table.
Galloway leaves the tent.
The heat is stifling, a mummy’s shroud of baking bandages and sweat pressing in on him, holding him in air too hot to breathe. He sucks it inside him in gasps. His insides are cooking. He knows his head is. He hears songs that can’t be there, smells sandalwood that’s not in the air, sees faces he might or might not know, but definitely aren’t in the room with him.
He’s left alone to wait for hours. He might doze, he might pass out, he might skirt the plains of reality, in and out of consciousness, across layers of time and sanity, but he does not rest. When the noise of the newcomer rouses him from his fit, he is no less tired than before.
“You found the body?”
“Who are you?” Michael says. His eyes burn for lack of sleep. His mouth is clammy and thick. His breath toxic.
The man before him is in a suit. His blue striped tie is loosened and the top button undone. From his haircut and his shoes, his suit and swagger, Michael figures him for FBI.
“The name’s Hall,” he says. “Agent Hall.”
“Thought so.”
“Oh?” he says. “You had a premonition about me too?”
Michael can’t blink his eyes enough to put out the fires in them so keeps them shut.
“You look like a G-Man.”
“G-Man? How quaint. Tell me how you knew there’d be bodies here.”
Michael opens his eyes and tries to take a measure of the man, see if he’d let him rest if he asked him to. He sees no mercy in him.
“I told Galloway everything. Didn’t he tell you?”
“Tell me again,” he says and sits down across the card table from him.
Michael tells him the same story he told Galloway. He makes it about hunches, and not being able to sleep, knowing that he looks like he could sleep on a bed of nails. Hall listens, makes some notes on a yellow legal pad, and then shakes his head.
“Why’d you call Galloway?”
“I didn’t call anyone. Craig called 911. They sent Galloway.”
“He’s ruined the crime scene.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Don’t get smart,” he says.
“Agent Hall,” says Perez from the doorway. “Call for you.”
“Take a message, cadet.”
The slight is not wasted on Perez. He raises an eyebrow. “It’s the governor.”
“What?”
Perez nods. “Galloway has the phone.”
Hall storms out of the tent.
Michael blinks.
Everything is a blur.
“How you holding up Jarrad?” asks Perez. “You need anything?”
“What? Who?”
“I’ll get you some water, brother,” he says. “Don’t let them rattle you. Mother won’t like that.”
Blink, Perez isn’t in the door flap. Michael is alone, but a water bottle has appeared in his hands, cold and sweating wet. He twists off the lid and drinks. It is bland and plain but washes the coffee from his teeth and soothes his tired throat.
Blink, Perez is back. He has his hand on his shoulder. He’s kneeling beside the table looking into Michael’s face. The pose is familiar and natural, but it strikes Michael as more meaningful than just a friendly gesture.
“Mother knows why you did this, but I want to know who you are,” he says.
Michael looks into Perez’s face, but his eyes won’t focus. It’s as if he’s looking through a desert mirage in shadow. The afterimages are burned in his retinas and he blinks against the inky halo surrounding the trooper’s face.
Perez takes his hand off Michael’s shoulder and reaches into his back pocket. He whips out a long blue bandana, shakes it open with a snap, and uses it to wipe sweat from his neck. Michael hears the sound of change rattling and instinctively reaches for his pocket to catch spilling coins.
“What?” says Michael trying to remember if he’d been asked a question. “What do you mean?”
But he’s alone.
He rubs stinging sweat out of his already burning eyes and searches the room for another soul. There is none. His mouth is dry as ashes. He goes to drink from the new water bottle, but it is empty. He can’t remember drinking it, neither it or the two empties at his feet beside a nest of crushed coffee cups. He’s suddenly not sure the trooper was ever here at all. It might have been Hall or Craig. It might have been no one.
“Cordon off everything. No one talks to the press but me. Nobody.” Hall’s voice carries into the tent, but the agent doesn’t appear.
The heat is unbearable. Michael feels his brain boiling out his ears. He gets up, goes to the door. No one is there. He steps out and sees the sun low on the horizon. He glances at his watch. It’s early evening. Time slipped again, but this time at least, he has an excuse.
The clearing is not as he remembers it. It is crowded with cars, vans, tents, trucks and earth-moving equipment, but all these are still. It is the people who are animated, thirty or forty at least, some in suits, many in uniforms, most with masks over their faces and blue gloves on their hands. One group leads a dog on a long leash. The dog trots forward and back, stops, smells the ground, digs a little and then barks in alarm. One of his handlers drags him away while another pulls a twelve-inch wire marker flag out of a sack and plants in the spot. The plain is littered with such flags.
The scene reminds him of an archaeological dig he saw on television, except where stakes are tied together to mark a digging site, they are bound with yellow police tape instead of string.
A truck loaded with chain-link fencing arrives. Men unload the segments and assemble them around the clearing. As each section is put down, a green tarp is attached to it to keep curious eyes away.
The fencing chore draws diggers away from a shallow hole near a blue honey bucket. They gladly drop their shovels to help make the wall.
No one pays any mind to Michael. He can’t see Hall, or the troopers, or Craig, but there are more tents, some with fans and open flaps. There’s even an RV with air conditioning and a flushing toilet. He assumes everyone’s in there.
He walks north toward the spring, hoping to find quiet and shade, wanting to be on the other side of the fence before it’s assembled. Before he gets there, however, he notices the rows of bodies laid out under a portable awning.
Two people in green plastic suits shuffle around them with clipboards and tongs.
Michael approaches them counting sixteen black open body bags and room for more.
“Female, late fifties. Caucasian. Overweight. Brunette wig. No identification. Six months to one year. Best guess: strangled.” The man speaking into the tape recorder is so bundled up in a hood, goggles and gloves, plastic bags around his shoes, that if Michael hadn’t heard him speak, he couldn’t have guessed his sex.
“Skeletal remains,” he says moving to another bag. “Brown hair. Bridge work. Clothes suggest male. Maybe six feet. Two years at least. Best guess, also strangled.”
The bodies are all in different stages of decay. Some are bare skeletons, a pile of bones piled under a central skull. Others have flesh, dried or rotted. Three are grouped together and in the same condition, half jelly and cloth.
He recognizes the blue shirt Craig unearthed the night before and bends over it for a closer look. From the shirt, work boots, and jeans Michael guesses it was a man but he has a hard time putting a gender to what he’s looking at. He sees a thing—a wet husk—stinking leather pulled over a knobby form, melting in places to black ichor and pollution. The one eye that stares out at him in a half-squint is lifeless and cold; the other an obscene cavity.
The man could have been Isaac Lowe but he can’t be sure. He doesn’t look anything like the man in the photo. He doesn’t look anything like a man at all. He is however, the “freshest” of the cadavers he sees. His skin wriggles from the movement of feasting beetles and larvae. His head has been tilted upward and Michael sees a deep indentation on his throat. His esophagus is crushed. He thinks he might be looking at friction marks around the neck, but he can’t be sure. It might be scarring from rodents, a fishing injury, or his own delirious fancies.
An idea stirs inside Michael’s burning mind, a dreadful, ghastly idea—a pattern. A memory.
No one is looking.
He kneels beside the corpse and unbuttons the shirt. The smell makes him turn away. Pungent tears run down his face. He plunges his fingers into the mushy flesh searching for button holes in the rotting clothing. His stomach heaves but he resists the urge to vomit.
With the shirt unfastened, he peels it open. The cloth sticks to the skin and pulls up layers of fetid flesh. Michael’s fingers are black with the rotten goo and he’s getting dizzy from holding his breath. He imagines himself fainting, toppling forward into the sludgy rotten corpse and makes himself focus. He takes a gulp of air through his mouth so as not to smell the corruption knowing he’ll be tasting it later.
He bends down and studies the discolored, decomposing flesh and sees them. They are right where they should be, right where he thought they would be. Right where he would have put them. They are a series of five stab wounds in the abdomen and another two in the chest between the ribs into the lungs.
The sight of the wounds, more than the sight of the body, more than the stench of decay, drives Michael away.
He runs.
“Hey! Wait. Who are you? Stop!”
Michael ignores the coroner. He wants to throw himself into the spring, wash away the smell, the sight, the filth in his mind.
“Whoa, hold up there, Oswald.”
Craig grabs his arm and swings him around. “You get some shut eye?”
“No,” says Michael.
“You look terrible.”
“Is it the driver? Is it Isaac Lowe?”
“They don’t know yet. Somebody told me it might be days, maybe weeks or longer before all the bodies are identified. There’re pulling up old ones. I heard Agent Hall say something about this being an old Mormon Trail cemetery.”
“So that’s the story they’re going with.” Michael throws up all the water, coffee, and sugar from his stomach.
“Whoa, not on the shoes.” Craig lets him go.
Wracked by convulsions, staggering for balance, Michael’s fevered mind shows him the devil.
She stands on the plain before him, a towering black woman, wild eyed and malevolent. She howls in delight, striking down both men and monsters with gore-splattered weapons; sword and spear, rope, claw, and fang. She howls a tiger’s roar that shakes the world with terror.
Michael screams once and falls to his knees. He vomits dry until black bile drips down his chin and his breath is crushed out of him by his own muscles.
The woman is beautiful and terrible. She stands towering above him, her dreadful eyes fixed on him.
He’s paralyzed.
She scoops him up in a bowl of gore and draws him to her bare chest.
He smells rot and blood, decay and ashes. Death.
She engulfs him in her many arms—a suffocating embrace, sticky and cold.
He makes to speak—to cry, to scream—but he has no breath to make it. Grasping his throat, gasping for air, Michael collapses lifeless to the ground.
Part Two
For Terror is thy name,
Death is in Thy breath.
And every shaking step
Destroys a world for e’er.
Thou “Time” the All-Destroyer
Then come, O Mother, Come!
Chapter Twelve
Consciousness returns in false starts.
There is stillness, then noise. Nothing, then something. Darkness, then pale cream florescent bulbs overhead. He stares up at them for a long time, not moving. He absorbs the light. There is no heat, but he is not cold. He is not sore. He feels nothing, and that is how he knows he’s alive.
After a while, he lets himself remember how he got here. He recalls the dead at Crystal Springs, remembers the spongy slime of the corpse with the stab wounds. The smells. Water, rot, corruption, ashes. He remembers vomiting. Airless. Dead. And the woman.
Remembering her makes his heart beat faster. He’s frightened, not that she will return terrible and awful, but that she won’t. He longs for her, and this is new. He senses a stirring in the hole he’d felt growing inside him for years.
“You’re awake.”
A man in a lab coat over a blue shirt and matching tie shines a penlight into his eyes. His nails are manicured, his hair molded to casual perfection, his manner practiced, his body mass index ideal. He has to be the doctor.
Michael tries to speak but can’t. There’s a tube down his throat and another down his nose.
“Don’t try to talk,” the doctor says. “You’ve been very sick. Do you remember coming here?”
Michael shakes his head. The movement is a strain.
“That’s normal,” the doctors says.
Michael tries to raise his arm but can’t. At first he thinks he’s too weak for the effort, then he feels the straps around his wrists and grows alarmed.
“Don’t try to move,” says the doctor. “You’re restrained.”
Michael grunts angrily shaking at the shackles.
“Hold on there. Don’t struggle or we’ll have to tie you down harder.” He says this with a friendly smile that is at once reassuring and ma
ddening. “You just relax for a while. Let’s give it some time. If you behave, we’ll see about the straps. How does that sound?”
Michael can only stare at the man and his sanctimonious smile. Rage floods his veins. If he were let free just then, he’d strike the doctor, strangle him for his condescension. He tells himself to be calm. He remembers that stealth and precision are the way of it, not rage. The tiger is not angry when he hunts and that is why he is a great killer. And he must pick his targets wisely.
Michael lies back. His anger leeches away as quickly as it arrived. He wonders at it. He’s irritable. He’s not usually irritable. Even under the leaden fog of a twelve-hour binge, he’d not been this way before. When he looks into the doctor’s understanding face, he doesn’t see an agent of healing and compassion, but a smug elitist, inferior to him both morally and spiritually, lording over him by virtue of cash and caste.
Nicotine withdrawal?
“Now don’t answer me with words,” the man says. “Just nod or shake your head. Do you understand?”
Michael nods.
“Do you know your name?”
Yes.
“Is your name Sally by the Sea Shore?”
Michael arches and eyebrow and shakes his head.
“Are you Michael Oswald?”
He nods.
“Good. Are you in pain?”
No. No physical pain.
“Are we in a church?”
No.
“Are we in a hospital?”
He shrugs and nods. The ceiling looks like a hospital. What little he’s been able to smell and hear suggests hospital, but it could be a trick question. He could be in jail.
“Do you know how long you’ve been here?”
He shakes his head.
“Would you like to?”
Michael is sick of the games. His temper rises and he’s afraid it’s showing. He tells himself that he won’t do himself any favors by being belligerent. That was the lesson of the Dormitory. He contents himself with a furrowed brow and a slow nod in answer.
“You’ve been here three weeks, closing in on four,” he says. “Do you know why you’re restrained?”
What Immortal Hand Page 10