When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3)

by Laura Giebfried

“Must be Eliot,” he said, glancing at the clock. “School's out.”

  When it sounded as though he was safely holed away in his paint-fumed room, we cautiously snuck from the office, lightly shut the door behind us, and crept through the front hallway towards the door. As Jack opened it and ushered me through, Mea raised her head from my arms and gave a loud, distinct bark that echoed through the first floor.

  “Fuck,” Jack whispered, halting in his spot as the sound ricocheted off the walls. We waited for a long moment to hear whether Eliot would move from his room to investigate the cause of the noise, but after several minutes of utter silence, we both breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Let's go,” Jack said, pushing me through the doorway and closing it behind us.

  I set Mea down and the three of us hurried down the front path, slipping slightly on the icy hill and tumbling part of the way, before we finally came to a stop at the bottom. As Jack ran a hand through his hair and breathed a sigh of relief, I slowed to catch my breath which had hastened far before we had stepped foot outside of the house.

  “That was close,” Jack said, grinning in delight at what might have been a terrible encounter.

  As I began to nod in agreement, though, something pulled my eyes back to stare at the house upon the hill. It was still and lonesome in the cold, and the falling sunlight turned the pink paint into a salmon color that burned against the white snow; and there, in the upper left-hand window, staring down at where we were standing at the base of the hill, was Eliot. He had seen us, after all.

  “Let's just get out of here,” Jack said, tugging my arm as I pointed it out to him. “He'll tell his father in a matter of hours, and I'd prefer to be somewhere where it's more difficult for him to rip my throat out.”

  We opted to go to Mrs. Coffey's, which was filled with patrons who were getting something to eat after work that day, thinking that the surplus of people surrounding us might prevent any unfortunate accidents that Mr. Perenna might be planning for us. As we took a seat at one of the tables in the back, Jack reached for a cigarette before remembering that we were inside and stowing the pack away again.

  “It didn't stop him from trying to kill us at the church, though,” he said unhappily. “If the guy's willing to take out a priest, a few of Mrs. Coffey's customers won't be much different.”

  “A good quarter of the town is here,” I said, exaggerating only slightly as I looked around the place. “He's not going to do anything while we're here.”

  “So we've just got to find a way to pin this on him before he does away with us for good,” he said, his voice flat and unenthusiastic. “You want to call Karl?”

  I shook my head.

  “No, I – I can't.”

  “Oh, right,” he nodded, seeming to understand, before adding, “He's got his hands full with your dad's death.”

  Allowing him to believe that that was the reason I couldn't ask Karl for help, I lowered my eyes to the table.

  “What'll it be for you boys tonight?” Mrs. Coffey said, coming over to us. “Or should I guess? A coffee, of course, for you,” she said, looking at me, “and … rye toast, blackberry jam?”

  I nodded, but Jack shook his head.

  “No?” she said, looking at Jack. “Elderberry? Or did you want some of the cheese bread – there's an end piece or two leftover from the lunch crowd, but it's not much –”

  “No, that's alright,” he said, giving her a small smile. “I'm just not very hungry tonight.”

  “Not hungry?” She eyed him as though he must have been gravely ill. “Never thought I'd hear that.”

  She turned and retreated back to the counter to get me a coffee, and neither Jack nor I spoke again until she had placed it on the table and left us alone again.

  “So let's just go back through what we know,” Jack said lowly, lowering his chin down so that it was nearly touching the tabletop as he leaned in to speak to me. “Mr. Perenna shoots Tommy through the head in the woods, then covers it up as a tragic accident. Three years later, when Anna's nearly the same age, he kills her, too, and calls that a suicide. We start to ask questions about it, and then he tries to kill us.”

  “But why?” I said, returning to the part that we had failed to find a plausible explanation for. “It doesn't make sense.”

  “Can we just assume the guy's a psycho for the time being?” Jack asked. “Look, he obviously has his own agenda, and he's used to getting his way around here, so maybe this was no different. He kills his kids, then comes after us when we start asking questions about the whole thing.”

  “Or maybe he wasn't after us, and he was trying to kill Father Taggart,” I said.

  “Be serious, Nim: no one tries to kill a priest. That's just asking to straight to Hell.”

  “As if he was headed anywhere else,” I countered, rolling my eyes. “But think about it, Jack: what if we weren't his target? What if he really set the church on fire to kill Father Taggart?”

  “And why would he do that?”

  I chewed the insides of my mouth.

  “Maybe he confessed to him,” I said slowly. “Maybe … maybe he felt guilty, and he wanted to get it off his chest ...”

  Jack looked momentarily intrigued by the idea before frowning again and shaking his head.

  “But that doesn't make sense,” he said. “He came after us twice before that – remember? Once in the graveyard after we snuck into the crypt, and then when he tried to get you in the church.”

  I looked at him steadily.

  “I told you, Jack: those were hallucinations.”

  “You think they were hallucinations, but I don't,” Jack said. “I knew someone was chasing us that night, and just because I didn't get a good look at him –”

  “But I did see something in the church,” I cut in, “and it wasn't human. It wasn't even possible. It wasn't real, Jack.”

  Jack sighed, clearly not convinced.

  “Okay, so maybe that one was a hallucination,” he said resignedly. “But the one in the cemetery –”

  “They were both hallucinations,” I said firmly. “I recognize the shape and height and everything, and I know when I'm – I can recognize that type of thing now. I don't get … I don't get confused by that sort of thing anymore.”

  It was too hard to explain to him fully what I meant, as he couldn't have known the feeling of having something both so disturbingly realistic and plainly nonexistent tugging simultaneously at his mind, but I did my best, anyhow. I couldn't allow him to believe that the figures that I had seemingly seen in the tortured corners of my mind were anything other than fragments of what I had meant to leave behind in the waters off the coast of the Bickerby shore, especially not if it meant that Father Taggart could be in harm's way.

  “Just think, Jack: Father Taggart would have died if you hadn't gotten him out,” I said. “He was trapped in there, right? The fire was set on the first floor, and we didn't even noticed it until it had nearly engulfed half the building, right?”

  Jack shifted to either side, thinking what I had said over.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I mean, you definitely have a point.”

  “So what if he's in trouble, not us?” I said, my thoughts skidding from one to the next rapidly as I thought it all through. “What if Mr. Perenna's plan is to kill him, and then just drive us out of town by blaming the church fire on us?”

  Jack blinked, but still didn't look convinced.

  “Listen, Jack: Father Taggart knows what we're up to, right?” I said. “We asked him about it, and he said himself that he didn't think Anna had committed suicide – right? And considering the fact that no one's ever so much as believed a word of what we've said before, why would he be so convinced that we're right?”

  Jack's elbows slid forward on the table, and his torso flattened until his chin was completely resting on the table.

  “But if that's true, and Father Taggart's staying at the Perennas' ...”

  “He wouldn't actually kill him at his ow
n home, though, would he?” I said. “I mean, he's not stupid –”

  “He's got bad knees,” Jack said quietly. “He has trouble climbing stairs – that's why he couldn't get out of the church: the fire blocked the door, and the window in his room was too high –”

  He stood up so abruptly that his chair toppled over and smacked against the floor, clattering against the linoleum with a noise that quieted the chattering of the other patrons.

  “I've got to go get him,” Jack said. “He could easily push him down the stairs, or – or make it look like he fell in the bathroom or something –”

  He was out the door so quickly that I had to scurry to follow him, and halfway to the door I realized that I hadn't paid for my untouched cup of coffee. Fumbling for my wallet and throwing far too many bills down onto the table, I exited the bakery after him and had to squint through the darkness to see which way he had gone.

  “Jack – wait!”

  I grabbed Mea from where I had tied her up outside the shop and hurried to catch up with him.

  “I'm going to go to the Perennas',” Jack said, only consenting to halt as something occurred to him. “You go to the churchyard, alright? He might still be there, and if Mr. Perenna gets him alone, there's no saying how he might stage his death –”

  I nodded and we set off in opposite directions: he turning up the path towards the hill at the far end of town, and me running across the town towards the gates to the cemetery, Mea close at my heels.

  “Light, light, light,” I muttered upon reaching the cast iron fence, fumbling with my phone and shining the screen so that I could see where the posts turned into the gate. Mea found it before I did, slipping through the opening that would allow us to get to the churchyard faster than the path through town, and I ducked beneath the chain to follow her.

  With the phone flashing bursts of light back and forth in front and behind me as I ran with it in my hand, I maneuvered through the graves in as direct a path as possible to get to the other side. Now that the church was no longer standing, though, there were no colorful lighted windows to indicate where it was, and I paused halfway through for fear that I had not gone in a straight line after all.

  Head bent low and hands clutching at my legs as I breathed sharply in and out to catch my breath, I coughed against the cold air that seemed to have frozen my lungs into weighted bags inside my chest. As I struggled to build up momentum to run again, the thought of reaching the priest moments too late flashed across my mind, and I pushed myself up and continued onwards through the thick snow.

  I had barely moved through another line of graves when I halted again, though this time it was out of a loss of direction rather than fatigue. Looking about me, I realized that I ought to have passed the gruesome-looking statue of the angel by now, but instead I had come to a slope leading downwards to a small, frozen ditch.

  Fidgeting to turn the phone on again, I held it up and turned in a circle to look around me: the trees created shadows all about, and the headstones were no better as they crowded more densely around me. Just as I had nearly made a full revolution, I spotted the angel thirty feet or so in the distance, and for once I was glad to see its broken hand reaching outwards to me.

  “There you are,” I muttered, taking a step forward.

  And then, quite suddenly, something else appeared in front of my vision that blocked the path between where I stood and where I was going. It was familiar even though I had only seen it twice before, and neither time clearly, and all at once my entire form began to shake from something other than the bitter cold.

  The demon-like creature cocked its head at me with careful, curious interest.

  “It's not real,” I said lowly, though I subconsciously took a step back even so. “It's not – not real.”

  Beside me, Mea had begun to bark: the loud, sharp noise cut through the empty cemetery.

  “It's not real, Mea,” I told her, knowing that she must have sensed my fear as she had the previous two times that the hallucination had come to me. “It's alright: it's not real. It's not there.”

  She continued to bark, her head lowered and her ears flattened as she stared at the spot where it ought to have been, undoubtedly barking at the horrifically crafted angel statue rather than the far worse sight that I saw.

  “It's – it's okay,” I continued, holding my hand out to her in the dark in the hopes that my voice might calm her. “It's not real. It's not real. It's not ...”

  But it looked real, and it felt real, and before I could begin to tell myself otherwise, another instinct kicked in and overwhelmed the rest, and I turned and shot off in the opposite direction, no longer concerned with Father Taggart but myself instead, and I clambered over the uneven ground and weaved in and out of headstones to get myself away from it, Mea yelping and sliding over the icy turf after me.

  “Fuck,” I said, slamming into an unseen headstone and knocking the breath from my lungs. As I stood momentarily halted, I turned to look for the demonic figure and saw to my horror that it was grappling at headstones as it continued to make its way towards me.

  And as I clutched both arms to my stomach to ward off the pain, it occurred to me that a hallucination wouldn't have had so much trouble getting over the slippery ground as I would have had, and that it wouldn't have been capable of holding my head down in the holy water as I had thought that it had back at the church that day, because my mind wasn't tricking me into trying to kill myself: I could see that now. Because, looking at the thing moving towards me with a feeling of utter fear, it was all too apparent that I certainly didn't want to die.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, straightening back up and scurrying around the grave to make my way away from it. “What the fuck is that thing –?”

  But no sooner had my mind tried to process the answer than the figure caught up with me, and I stumbled backwards and barely managed to keep from falling down the slope by clinging on to the nearest piece of granite and clutching myself to it with all of my might. Mea was standing in front of me barking wildly as the thing approached, but yelped and scurried away as it reached us and pushed her aside with an easy kick of a booted foot.

  It reached the grave where my fingertips were wrapped tightly around and looked down at them with its unmoving expression, and then, quite deliberately, it raised its own hands and slammed them down atop of mine. I could feel the extremities crack against the stone and immediately reacted by pulling them away, too late in realizing what the action had caused. Boat shoes slipping out from beneath me, I fell backwards over the slope and launched down the hill at a speed accelerated by the smooth, icy ground, my thoughts going into overdrive and my form gaining more and more momentum until my head struck with full force against something brick-hard, and I stopped and slumped against someone else's grave.

  My thoughts sunk in and out of black, and in the cold I could feel something warm running from my hair down to my back, moistening my sweater with a sticky liquid. As my vision came to again, I blearily looked up at the figure that had carefully climbed down the slope after me. It's hands were folded in front of it, and its inhuman eyes were resting on me softly.

  And from so close up, the darkness hid the majority of the distorted face with its gaping mouth and stretched, sagging skin, but nothing could hide the unmistakable, sickening stench of oil paints that were wafting from the cloth and jagged material.

  It was Eliot, hidden beneath a hand-crafted mask.

  Ch. 18

  A light buzzing had begun in my ear, not unlike the sound of some distant insect in the grass during the summertime that could only be heard when the rest of the world was fairly silent, but there was such an utter, bone-cracking chill all around me that I knew that it couldn't be so: it wasn't summer, and there was no life around me at all.

  My eyes opened partially before fluttering shut again, heavier than the rest of me felt combined, and a horrible sound escaped my throat as I tried to let out a moan. My head was pounding sharply, though it
was now leaning against something softer and my legs had been straightened since they had crumpled beneath me upon hitting the gravestone. When my eyes opened fully, the sky was blacker than ever, and not a single star or moon gleamed within it.

  “Nim?”

  I gurgled upon hearing Jack's voice from somewhere beside me, and as I made to lift my head, I realized that his hand was behind it to cushion it from the hard wall behind us.

  “You alright?” he asked, though his tone suggested that he already knew the answer.

  “Where … are ...”

  “The crypt,” he said, cutting me off to save me from speaking. “The Perennas' crypt.”

  I groggily blinked my eyes, hoping to make out something other than darkness, but it seemed largely impossible. As I scraped my leg against the floor in an attempt to drag it up to my chest, though, I could make out the distinct smell of mildew and disintegrated bones.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Jack's breath hit my face, and the smell of cigarette smoke was oddly comforting in comparison to the other scents around us. As I cleared my throat and tried to regain a hold of my breathing, the memory of what had happened in the cemetery finally returned to me.

  “Jack, it's not Mr. Perenna,” I said, moving my arm to clutch onto his. “It's –”

  “Eliot, I know.” There was a brief silence as he finished the sentence for me, and then he continued, “He got me sometime after getting you.”

  “How?”

  He couldn't have fooled Jack in the way that he had me. It had only occurred to me in that moment that he had been standing right outside the door to his father's office eavesdropping when I had told Mr. Perenna that I was schizophrenic, and had used the information in order to frighten me into thinking that I was losing my mind and send me back to Connecticut. If I hadn't have felt as though every one of my bones had been broken, I would have kicked myself for not seeing it sooner: I had known that he was creative, and he had as good as told me numerous times that he neither wanted me there and that I was doomed for trouble. More than anything, though, I should have known that he had been the one to start the fire: the church had been missing in the painting that he had done of the town.