The Grave - An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels)

by Charles L. Grant

  Murdoch grinned again. "You really are a bright one, you really are." He nodded. "They die on their birthdays. But they don't really, you see."

  "No, I don't see." And he wasn't sure he wanted to, wasn't sure his acceptance of this bizarre explanation would take once he had a chance to think about it further. Assuming, he cautioned a burgeoning hope, he would have time left to do any thinking at all.

  "Oh, they live again," Murdoch said, stepping around the grave. "Not in fact. You'll never see that little bitch again, Joshua. But she will live. What made her birth date special will be transferred to another, will be used, will be . . ." He smiled. A death's head smile. "Will be used."

  "To keep you alive."

  Murdoch frowned. "You try for too many answers at once, my friend. You'll be confused again if you don't watch out."

  "I am," Josh admitted. "But what you forget is that people out there"—he gestured toward the village— "know I'm gone from the hospital, know about the Stanworths. They'll be looking for me, you know. Sooner or later they'll find this."

  "Tell me something, Joshua," Murdoch said, "how stupid do you think I am?"

  It was then that Joshua realized Murdoch had been closing on him, was less than ten feet away and moving swiftly. He turned to run, to hunt for a weapon, heard Murdoch shout a warning, and could not help a look toward the trees.

  The wasps were gone.

  But in that moment of hesitation Murdoch threw himself at his legs, and Josh barely thrust his hands out to keep the ground from breaking his jaw. They rolled, Josh kicking and Murdoch clinging, the quiet in the clearing broken only by their grunts. Clots of earth rose, weeds snapped, Murdoch slowly climbed Josh's legs until he had a grip on his belt. A fist, then, into the man's face, pummeling to draw blood that splashed from his nostrils. Murdoch yelled and released him, and Josh stumbled to his feet. There was no thinking, no plan; his rage had supplanted the wiser course of escape—he was in the air before he knew what he was doing, covering Murdoch and grabbing his hair, pounding his head against the ground while he wept. Saliva flew from his mouth, tears from his eyes, and he didn't care about the wasps or the police or the fact that Don was Andy's father. He wanted to kill him. He wanted to split the man's skull and gouge out his brains, scatter his blood to whatever force the man had harnessed. He screamed out his fury. Screamed until he felt a sharp weight crash across his shoulders.

  Chapter 24

  This is getting monotonous, he thought. The pillow was soft, the mattress soft, the sheets beneath his naked chest cool and stiff from a recent washing. A desultory breeze spiderwalked across his spine, and he could feel the hairs stirring at the back of his neck. And a scent he was unable to place— pungent, aromatic, not labeled at all with a hospital's mark. The house, then; someone had carried him back to the house after someone else—the old woman?—had clubbed him unconscious. But instantly the memory of the blow returned he realized he had been given no added pain. There was no pain at all, anywhere it should have been. The scent once again, and the giving, sliding feel of an oily balm spread thin across his shoulders. He tested them without lifting his head from the pillow—there was no stiffness.

  A moment to test the room for company. He heard nothing, no one, sensed only an open window and the light streaming unchecked. He opened one eye, the other, eased himself gingerly onto his back.

  It was a bedroom. Small, the walls uneven, the floors bare. A window directly opposite the foot of the bed, another to his left. A chest of drawers, vanity table and stool, wall-hung mirror on the right. No curtains. No frills. The plaster was aged, cracked, and going yellow. The whole room smelled of decades of disuse, though as far as he could tell, it was extraordinarily clean.

  He closed his eyes briefly, took several deep breaths in preparation to move. He had no doubt that the door sharing the wall with the headboard was locked, but he wanted to see what was outside, to see if the world as he thought he'd known it was still there to be seen. He wouldn't have been surprised if it wasn't.

  The bed frame creaked when finally he swung his legs over the side and sat up. With hands splayed by his buttocks, he stared out the near window. At trees, at tantalizing glimpses of distant hills and fields, a single huge orchard losing its flowers to a dark fresh green. He stood. Waited. Felt no dizziness and made his way to the second window. The front porch roof, a slice of the driveway, a segment of the road. There were no cars that he could see; the MG and the Jaguar had been moved. By the sun glaring at him he knew it was late afternoon; he had no idea, however, what the day was.

  His arms stretched toward the ceiling and he twisted from side to side without moving his feet. He felt surprisingly strong, so much so that he frowned. Deeper when he heard the touch of footsteps on the floor outside the door. Quickly, he hurried to the bed and lay down, staring at the ceiling and waiting. His right hand was a fist, hidden by his hip.

  The door opened slowly, an entrance to a sickroom. Closed just as silently, with a sharp intake of breath.

  Her hair was hidden beneath a red towel turban, the rest of her swathed in a thin white robe imprinted with oriental trees and birds on the wing. She wore no makeup, her face gleaming with a blush that marks the newly washed. When she sat on the edge of the mattress he did not move, though he was tempted to move away. Instead, he rolled his gaze toward her, sorting through the questions, the demands, to say only: "Why?"

  Her smile was resigned, her gaze lowered to her lap. "He's afraid of you."

  "Don't!" he said sharply. "Don't cover for him, Andy, for god's sake. I saw the grave. I know it's for me. I must be the . . . I don't know, the final killing he needs." He laughed, once, explosively and without humor. "Listen to me, will you? Jesus, I'm talking like he wants to fix my car, not my wagon." He laughed again, then reached out for her hand. It was cold. Fear cold. "Andy, why the hell . . . all this time, why the hell didn't you get away? Why didn't you say anything to me?"

  "Would you have believed me?"

  He nodded. Considered. Shook his head. "Of course not. I would have thought you were crazy."

  "Do you now?"

  "For not getting away, yes. You could have at least tried to warn me. To warn . . . oh god, poor Fel."

  "You saw the wind," she said. "You've seen what he can do. How far do you think I would have gotten, huh? He would have brought me back anyway. Josh . . ." She covered his hand tightly. "Josh, do you have any idea what this last year has been like? Christ, do you have any idea at all?"

  "No. No, I suppose I don't." He followed a tormented crack in the ceiling. "I guess the train . . . he didn't want me dead, did he? To frighten me."

  She shifted and he moved, and she was sitting cross-legged beside him, the robe drifting away from her thighs. "You were watched because you might cause trouble if you caught on . . . and believed it when you did. The office thing, the other at your house, it was to bother you, to keep you off balance. The bathtub, too. You were never in any danger. Not then." She began to toy with his fingers, stroking them one by one, scratching them idly. "The train. He wanted to kill you, then. I wouldn't let him. I'd been passive until then, thinking he would let you go. Then he would let me go and we could be together. But he wanted to kill you. I stopped him." She sighed loudly. "Your car was always moving, you know. Most of it was an illusion. I just stopped the train, and you hit the tree, just like the police said."

  His eyelids fluttered, lowered, while his hand climbed to reach over her wrist. "Fel. She had it all, or most of it, anyway." He paused. "Lloyd? Do you know about Lloyd and Randy?"

  He heard her hold her breath, heard it sift through her nostrils almost as a whimper. "Dr. Stanworth gave him the information he needed. Randy helped him. Then you started getting nosy, and he panicked. He told Don he wouldn't have anything more to do with it. He said you could make real trouble if you wanted to, and ruin it all."

  "But why?" Josh whispered, then held up his free hand. "Never mind, never mind. That freezing in time business. Don p
roved it to Lloyd, and Lloyd jumped at the chance. Randy, too. Yeah. Randy would, you know. She started coloring her hair long before it would have started greying. I think she would have slit her throat at the first hair."

  He sat up suddenly and took hold of her shoulders. "Christ, and all the time you were forced to cover for him you were trying to cover for me as well. Jesus, Andy, you're a hell of a woman!" He kissed her, stroked her back, smelled the shampoo she had used and the lingering touch of her soap. "And that old woman? She's real, isn't she. Yeah, sure she is. Don was telling me the truth about that much; she's your mother, and she's after this freezing thing too. They're in it together, and you're the one who has to . . . shit." He slapped at the mattress as he released her and slid back to rest against the headboard. The agony that paled her face made him wince, made him caress her arm with one finger.

  "Josh, it's been . . ."

  "Don't," he said. He glanced at the door. "Where is he?"

  "In the graveyard." She swallowed. "Josh, he's drugged you. You've been out for three days."

  He wanted to protest. Checked himself when he saw the tears working their way onto her cheeks. Looked toward the front window blindly, remembering without reason all the Fourth of Julys he had spent here as a child—the fireworks in the park just after dark, the band concert in the gazebo, the parade down Centre Street, the picnic tables spread over the ball-field, the wading in the spring-cold pond. His father carrying him home on his shoulders, his mother, walking silently beside.

  "All right," he said decisively. "At least I know one thing."

  "What?"

  "He's not immortal, Andy. I mean, he can live forever as long as he has his victims, but he can be killed in the meantime, right? I could see it in his face when we were fighting. He was afraid to die. He was afraid to die!"

  "We all are," she said softly, a forefinger marking a trail down the center of his chest.

  "I know," he answered quietly. "But this time we're going to beat him." His grin was bravado. "What have we got to lose, Andy? Either we kill him, or he kills us and keeps on killing. Him and your mother. We either stop it all now, or we get stopped."

  "I'm afraid."

  "So am I."

  Her hand reached his belt buckle, in one smooth motion unfastened it and unsnapped the top of his jeans. But she did not look at him. She only moistened her lips.

  "When?" he asked.

  "After dark," she told him. "It doesn't have to be then. There's no special time, as long as it's before midnight, before the day is over. But he usually waits until after dark so there's no one around. And out here . . ."

  He nodded, then reached out to still her hand. He needed to think. Somehow he had to get into the woods and to Murdoch with a weapon before whatever ceremonies, whatever rites there were to be performed had started. Before Murdoch could summon the wasps, the train, god only knew what else to stop him. And once the man had been taken care of, he and Andy could concoct a story to tell the police. They would have to be told, if only because the families of the dead would have to know where the bodies of their loved ones were.

  "Joshua?"

  He hadn't realized how dim the room had become. Twilight had taken most of the sun's glare. Shadows were slipping down off the sills. The breeze had quickened, had sent a chili to the air, and he felt his skin raise in gooseflesh as Andrea uncrossed her legs and crawled over to straddle him. He wanted to stop her, but his hand cupped a breast instead, slid down the front of her robe and he watched as the white material hissed off her shoulders and pooled on his legs. Backlighted, she was dark, made taller by the towel still wrapped around her hair. His mouth opened. She traced his lips with a finger. Rose and slipped his jeans down off his hips, grabbed him and inserted him and settled herself again. Moving so slightly he could barely feel her aside from the warmth. Moving so tenderly he wondered if he were dreaming. She touched his eyes with her thumbs. She touched his nipples with her tongue. Moving. Twisting. Lifting her chin, arching her back, her hands braced on his knees and her knees pressed to his ribs.

  He almost laughed aloud when the fireworks in the park began filling the sky.

  But despite her languid motion, despite the perspiration that encased both of them in thin glass, he could not free himself to disown his fear. At night, she had told him; he would begin it all at night. He wanted to cooperate, wanted it desperately. If they failed, there would be no more touching, no more loving; if they failed, no more . . . anything.

  He closed his eyes tightly, demanding a respite from his runaway mind. He opened them to see her, take all of her in and remember it all. A hand out for her breasts, and his fingers brushed over the towel—it had loosened and was falling, and he tried to swipe it to one side.

  "Hold," she groaned. "Hold, damnit, hold."

  The faint sound of crackling, of rockets brightly dying.

  He grunted and reached for her hips, determined to do as she'd bidden. He had to lift himself slightly, to get slightly closer. Cursed the shadows that threatened to veil her, that swarmed over his vision and made her breasts sag, gave a pouch to her belly, took the flesh from her thighs.

  "Hold," she whispered between gritted teeth, and her head whipped side to side while Josh bucked to end it.

  She sighed and her breath gurgled; she slumped back over his legs. Grinning. Mumbling to herself, brushing her hands softly over his chest. Josh helped her, massaged her, disengaged as she moaned and knelt beside her to kiss her, yanking the towel from beneath her head to lose himself in the cloud of her hair.

  "Hold," she muttered.

  "Hey, it's over," he said, laughing softly, poking at her shoulder. "Andy?" He kissed the hollows of her throat, her cheek, her forehead. Almost gagged as he backed away when he saw all the grey stiff as straw where there should have been black.

  Hold.

  He scrambled off the bed, trying not to vomit, pulling his jeans to his waist and fumbling with the buckle. In five strides he was at the door, and a slap of his hand turned the ceiling light on.

  There was nothing about the woman that reminded him of Andrea; nothing, that is, except the mocking laughter in her black eyes. The rest of her was caved in, incredibly wrinkled, pocked with brown and sagging rolls of fat. She rolled agilely to a sitting position and calmly drew on the robe, all the while watching him, daring him to run. Her hair was matted dark with perspiration, the deep lines under her eyes giving a sadness to her expression. Her lips, once soft, were brittle and cracked; her cheeks, once round, were hollowed and boned. Wattles beneath her chin. Claws for fingers.

  Sneeze and she'll crumple, he thought, fighting horror. Fighting, and losing, and dropping to his knees and retching in the corner. Tasting bile. Tasting salt. Grabbing for his stomach to force himself to stop. Standing again and leaning against the wall while she brushed both her hands through what remained of her hair.

  "Well, Josh," she said brightly, "aren't you going to wish me happy birthday?"

  He had little strength left to think it all out. He only knew what he was doing while he was acting.

  She laughed and tossed her head, arched her back and offered him her breasts. Thrust her hips at him and laughed again.

  "Stupid," she said. Then, "No, no you're not. A little young, a little foolish, and very much the romantic." Her voice, tinged with a shrilling whine, softened somewhat, lost some of its grating. "I do love you, you know," she said. "I have to. It's what makes this day more special than the others. The new cycle, the new energies, all fueled by love, and by love that's returned." She smiled coyly, grotesquely—all her teeth had turned black.

  The breeze strengthened and she glanced toward the window.

  "He's about ready, I guess," she said, as though she were talking about the weather. "A good man, Donald is. A very good man. He plays the father part very well, don't you think? He's been with me for ages." She laughed, nearly screamed. "Ages. My god, for ages!"

  Josh took a step toward her. Lies. All of it lies. All o
f it manipulation.

  "That night he was drunk he almost told you, you know. It's hard toward the end, for everything. I had to keep reminding him to hold on so he could keep his image, keep from . . ." She giggled, and ran her hands down her sides.

  Hold! she had said; talking to herself, not to him . . . not to him.

  "Hold." She lifted an eyebrow in a careless shrug. "You know, you could have gone to Boston, even to New York, and I wouldn't have been able to reach you." She looked down at herself and shook her head sadly. "I can't even be the way I look until it's over. Until we put it all together and drink the lives we've trapped down there in the ground." Another shrug, this time with her shoulders. "Ah well. Don's very protective. He has to be. He knows what will happen to him if something happens to me." She looked pointedly toward the door, then back to Josh. "He'll be back before you can kill me, you know. Why not be a stoic? Damn, and I wanted you all baffled and innocent right to the end. Ah well. Ah well."

  He heard footsteps on the porch, let his shoulders sag, felt disgust and revulsion work his stomach again.

  "And just think," he heard her say. "If you had listened to your friends instead of me, you would have realized you really did love poor little Felicity . . . and I would have been forced to start all over with someone else. I don't think I would have killed you, though. Don's the one who likes vengeance, not me. It would have been easy. There was always poor Lloyd. You realize, of course, he told us about the wasps. He was trying to get on Don's good side, to get out of the deal." She grinned. Blackly. "Don wouldn't kill them. No matter. I had fun doing it myself. You should have seen Randy when she saw what I—"

  Lies. Manipulations. Everything . . . lies.

  He lunged. Andrea shrieked and scrambled backward across the mattress, too late to reach the other side when he landed hard on her chest and fixed his hands around her throat.

  Claws raked at his face, gouging at the corners of his eyes; claws tore at his neck, pulled at his hair, stabbed across his shoulders; her knee rammed toward his groin, struck his buttocks instead; her mouth opened and she tried to snap at his arms, his jaw, his chest with her teeth. Her eyes rolled. Spittle whipped from her tongue. She bucked and nearly sent him over her head. Her screams subsided to an erratic rasping, and he could hear someone thudding lamely along the hallway. Could hear bloodsurf in his ears. Could hear her trying to talk to him.