The Summoning

by Bentley Little

  Only why should the Secbnd Coming make her feel this way?

  The Second Coming.

  She wanted to share this burden with Rich, to tell him what was happening, and have him reassure her that everything was going to be all right. But she knew that Rich would not believe that Jesus was coming. He would put it down to religious fervor, would think that Wheeler was either lying or had had some sort of fanatic's delusion.

  She'd probably think that herself if she did not know Wheeler and had not heard for herself the way he'd spoken to his congregation, but there was no way to fake the certainty of that otherworldly elation, that sense of jubilant intimidation that he had so clearly possessed.

  And had possessed all week, now that she thought of it..

  They reached the car, and Corrie fished her keys out of her purse, opening Anna's door.

  "Did Jesus really talk to the pastor?" Anna asked.

  No, He didn't, she wanted to say, but she found she could not lie to her daughter.

  Why would she want to lie?

  "Yes, He did," she said. She walked around to the driver's side of the car. Anna crawled over the seat and unlocked her door.

  "Is Jesus scary?" Anna asked.

  "Stop asking so many questions."

  Anna folded her arms stubbornly over her chest. "Fine. I'll ask Daddy, then."

  Corrie sighed. "No Jesus is not scary. Jesus is nice Jesus loves you."

  " "Like the song?"

  "Yes." Corrie started the car.

  "You don't want me to ask Daddy, do you?"

  "No. I don't think we should tell Daddy. He has a lot of things to think about right now and .. . I just don't want you to say anything to him about what the pastor told us. I'll tell Daddy when it's time, okay?" "What if he asks me?" "He won't ask you."

  "You want me to lie to Daddy?"

  "No, I don't want you to lie," she said, exasperated.

  "Anna, just button up your seat belt."

  "Jesus is scary, isn't He?"

  They pulled away from the curb.

  "Mommy?"

  "I don't know," Corrie admitted. "Maybe He is."

  The phone woke Robert in the middle of a dream.

  He'd been the only living creature left on earth, and he'd been wandering through an endless desert, stepping over the dead dry bodies of men and women, children and pets, keeping his eyes focused on the flat horizon far in front of him because he knew that if he looked down he would see thousands of empty eye sockets focused on his face.

  The ringing of the phone saved him, drawing him out of that hellish world, and he picked up the receiver on the first pause, instantly alert. His eyes found the glowing numerals of the clock in the darkness, registered the time.

  Ten-forty. He'd only been asleep for twenty minutes?

  "Carter," he said.

  "Chief?." It was Stu. ' "

  "Yeah. What is it? .... "There's been some vandalism 0er at the cemetery."

  ;

  "For Christ's sake, you woke me up for that?"

  "I--"

  "You don't have to call me every time some drunk teenager knocks over a tombstone-- ..... "Graves have been dug up."

  Robert sat up, kicking off the covers. "Graves? Plural?"

  "A lot of them."

  "I'll meet you there in five." Robert hung up, put on his pants, slipped into the still-buttoned shirt he'd taken off by pulling over his head, and ran a quick hand through his hair. He pulled on his boots, grabbed his keys and wallet from the dresser, and hurried outside, strapping on his holster. "The night blackness of the desert was obscured in his rearview mirror by the cloud of red taillight-tinted dust kicked up by his tires as he peeled out.

  Stu's cruiser was already at the cemetery, parked directly in front of the wrought-iron gate, and Robert knew from radioing the station that Ted was with him. The red and-blues were off, but the twin white spotlights on either side of the patrol car were trained on the graveyard and illuminated everything that faced the entrance, creating an eerie illusion of flatness. In the high-powered halogen beams, the cemetery looked like a painting or a stage set, an exaggeration of reality, all shadows and highlights--though that sharpness of contrast made it virtually impossible to distinguish the extent of the damage through the dusty windshield of the car.

  Robert pulled next to Stu's vehicle, opened his door, and stepped out.

  "My God," he breathed.

  All of the graves had been dug up and desecrated. Not a single plot remained undisturbed. Behind the bars of the fence, the formerly flat and well-maintained lawn was now a jumbled series of irregular holes and hills of dirt. Many of the headstones had been smashed or knocked over, and scattered randomly about were opened coffins and pieces of coffin, bones and decayed body parts lying atop wood, half-buried in dirt, thrown onto stone. One skeletal hand and connecting radius hung from the low branches of the cemetery's lone palo verde tree, looking fake in the sterile light of the halogens.

  Robert turned on the twin beams of his own spotlights, adjusting them so they shone on an area to the left of that already lit. There was no movement within the cemetery, no sign of Stu or Ted, and he looked around, spot ting the silhouettes of the two policemen in the lighted doorway of the caretaker's house across the street. Turning his back on the cemetery, he walked over to the house, gravel crunching loudly beneath the heels of his boots. Behind Stu and Ted, he could see Lee Hillman, the care taker, just inside the house. The old man looked worried, and he shifted nervously from one foot to another, his hands traveling unthinkingly up and down the inner molding of the doorsill.

  :

  Robert strode up the Cement walk. Like a lot of single old men, Hillman insisted on wearing the hip clothes of the last fashion cycle, which somehow made him look more pathetic and out of it than if he had simply worn the fashions of his own era. Robert had always felt a little sorry for the caretaker, who had never seemed to him to be a particularly happy or well-adjusted man, and he felt even sorrier for him now.

  "Gentlemen," Robert said, nodding his greeting as he stepped onto the porch.

  "I don't know how it could've happened!" Hillman said. "I swear to God!" His voice was higher than usual, his words spoken too rapidly, and Robert realized that he was not only worried but badly frightened.

  "What happened?" . Stu closed the notebook in which he'd been writing. "He says he locked the gate at nine, the way he always does, and everything was fine. He called out and shone his flashlight around, to make sure no one was still inside the cemetery, then he came back home. He took a shower and, when he went to close his drapes, noticed that the cemetery gates were open. He got dressed, walked across the street to investigate, saw that the graves had been dug up and called the station."

  "That was exactly how it happened!"

  "Within an hour? All of those graves were dug up within a single hour?"

  "I swear to God, everything was normal when I closed up at nine."

  "Let's go out and take a look," Robert said.

  Stu nodded. "We were just waiting for you."

  "Do you need me to come?" Hillman asked. "Couldn't I just stay here--"

  "We'd like you to come with us, Mr. Hillman."

  The old man nodded, not daring to argue, and closed the screen door.

  The four men trekked across the street, Robert in the lead. "Does the cemetery have any lights? We'll radio for some portable high-intensities, but until then I don't want to wear down our batteries."

  "We have floodlights, but they're not very strong. Not as strong as yours." .: . "Turn them on anyway. We'll use one car at a time." He nodded toward Stu. "Turn your beams off."

  Robert and Ted stood at the gates of the cemetery as Stu ran over to the cruiser and Hillman knelt next to a black box on the ground. From this angle, the tall saguaros behind and to either side of the graveyard looked like alien sentries standing stiffly at attention.

  The halogens suddenly snapped off, leaving Robert's now off-center beams the only illu
mination. The powerful white spots shone strongly on the left portion of the cemetery, making the larger right part of the graveyard seem even darker. There were shadows within shadows, oddly formed sections of blackness amidst the rubble and de bris. A moment later, the cemetery floodlights came on. They were indeed as poor as Hillman had indicated, mounted on the fence at regular intervals and weakly shining on small segments of ground with a faded yellowish glow.

  Robert walked slowly through the wrought-iron gates into the cemetery.

  All of this in an hour? It was unbelievable, but he had no doubt that Hillman had been speaking the truth. Whatever else he might be, the caretaker was not a liar.

  That's what was so frightening.

  Robert looked carefully around, stunned by the thoroughness of the desecration. Between the time Hillman had closed the gates and called the station, nearly a him dred gravesites had been torn apart, their contents unearthed and discarded. The partial skeleton of what appeared to be a small child lay atop the dirt mound in front of him.

  The not-quite-decomposed body of an old man lay folded over itself to his side.

  He continued forward, skirting the holes, rounding the mounds, Ted and Stu following. Stu had brought a flash light from the car, and he shone it randomly about. The most horrifying thing was that Robert recognized several of the corpses. Lying atop an irregular pile of chunked dirt he saw Connor Pittman, the contours of his young face still visible even after the years of degeneration, the patchy filaments of his hair a parody of his once long blond locks. When the boy had died of a freak heart attack on the school track, Robert had come with the ambulance and helped load the body onto the stretcher.

  Connor had seemed dead to him then, his body nothing more than a discarded vessel from which the soul had fled. But looking at him now, seeing echoes of the teenager he had been in the staring fright mask of a face, Robert was struck by what little change death had really wrought. He found himself thinking morbidly that perhaps there was no such thing as a soul, no mystical invisible essence of being that left the body at the instant of death. Perhaps whatever it was that made a living thing alive died when the body died and simply lay used and spent within the decomposing form of its biological host.

  His gaze moved on, and he saw Putter Phillips and Lavinia Bullfinch and Terry Feenan. The most jarring sight to him was Sally Hicks. Or rather, her head. Sally had died of a heart attack a few years back, and her family had insisted on an open casket funeral. He'd hated to admit it, but she'd looked nearly as good in death as she had in life.

  Now her head, rolled onto its side, sat alone near the base of a century plant, skin peeling off in patchy flakes, black lips curled over her once beautiful mouth in a permanent gap-toothed sneer.

  There were low, scuttling sounds in the darkness, but whether they were caused by lizards and beetles or by the slight breeze that blew from the north, Robert didn't know. He did know that the breeze was not strong enough to dispel the odor of death, decay, and mortuary chemicals that hung thickly over the cemetery. He, Stu, and Ted all had their hands over their noses, but the stench had so heavily permeated the, air that they could taste it. Stu, to his left, spit continuously. Ted closed his eyes, trying bravely not to let the smell affect him, but was soon gagging. A moment later he bent over and threw up loudly next to a spiny cholla.

  Robert felt like retching himself, but he willed himself not to. He turned around, looking for Hillman, and saw the caretaker standing just inside the gate, next to one of the lights. He was about to walk back toward the old man, when he looked down at the broken red-finished wood of a smashed coffin and the realization suddenly hit him: all of the graves had been dug up.

  All of them.

  His head jerked instantly to the left, his eyes easily picking out the familiar spot, even with the altered topography. There, in the far corner, next to two smashed caskets, a broken skeleton had been tossed over a thin, partially clothed wraith. '

  Dad and Mom.

  He took a step toward that section of the cemetery, then stopped.

  Fingers still pinching shut his nostrils, he took a deep breath, tasting death. He did not want to get any closer. He did not want to see. Already the familiar, healthy figures of his parents, so lovingly preserved in his memory, were being superseded in his mind by the two callously mistreated corpses in the dark corner of the desecrated graveyard,

  He stood there trembling. The sanctity of his parents' memory, the dignity of their deaths, the privacy of his own feelings had been violated, and the fear he had felt was replaced by anger and outrage..:: Whoever had done this was going to pay.

  He knew he should call Rich, let him know what had happened. But he didn't want to call his brother. He wanted to protect him from this, to spare him, although he knew that was impossible.

  He closed his eyes. When they were little, he ten and Rich five, he'd found the dead body of their cocker spaniel Roger in the ditch in front of their house one morning. Roger had obviously been hit by a car and had dragged himself out of the road and into the ditch, where he'd died during the night. The dog's black and white fur was matted with drying blood, blood so red that it looked like . catsup, and there was a wet streak of smeared dirt on the road where the dog had pulled himself forward.

  The loss of Roger had hit him hard, and he'd wanted to run back inside and tell Morn and Dad and have them somehow make everything okay, but he'd known that, this time, everything would not be okay, cod not be okay, and he'd sat down on the edge of the ditch and cried, for Roger, for himself, for his parents, and, mostly, for Rich, who'd loved the dog more than anything else in the world.

  He had buried the dog himself, not telling his parents, not telling Rich, preferring to let them think that Roger had simply run away. He'd placed branches and dead leaves over the dog's twisted lifeless form in the ditch that morning and had returned at night alone, picking up the hard bony body, the gluey blood sticking to his hands, and carrying the dog out to a spot in the surrounding desert near a particularly large saguaro where he'd already !idug a hole.

  He had never told anyone the truth, and forever afterward Rich and his parents had believed that Roger had run away and had not come back because he had found another friendly family to live with. They had never given up the hope of getting Roger back, had always thought they would run into him someday in town or hear his bark from someone else's backyard, for years had even made weekly pilgrimages to the small corral behind the vet's that passed for a pound in Rio Verde, but of course they had never found the dog. He had successfully spared them the horrible truth of Roger's death.

  But he could not spare Rich this.

  Robert opened his eyes, glanced back toward his men. Ted, especially, looked stricken, and Robert remembered that the young patrolman had lost his own mother a few years back.

  She was doubtlessly one of the disinterred corpses now littering the landscape.

  "Ted?" he asked. "You want to take a breather?"

  The patrolman shook his head. "I'm fine." He ran a hind through his short brown hair. "Who you figure'd do something like this?

  I ::" "I don't know," Robert admitted.

  Stu looked toward them, the flashlight pointing down at his feet.

  "Where do we start? I mean, do we dust the tombstones for fingerprints?"

  "We look for tire tracks in the road. We take soil samples.

  Footprints should be our best bet. Whoever did this had to walk out of here. He had to step on this dirt somewhere."

  "Unless he flew." Stu's voice was quiet.

  "Knock that crap off." Robert looked from Stu to Ted.

  Both were pale, frightened. They were just kids, he realized Hell, out of all his men, only he and Ben had any life experience to speak of. The rest of them were just... babes in the woods.

  He was just being overprotective. Equally young cops in inner cities dealt with worse things than this all the time. But he didn't know those young cops in inner cities. To him, they were fac
eless men in blue uniforms, like the police on TV crime shows, somehow better trained, more mature, and more competent than his own men. He did know Stu and Ted. They were good men, good cops-good small-town cops--but they had never had to face something like this.

  On the other, hand, neither had he.

  "What are we going to do about the bodies?" Hillman asked from behind him.

  ' Robert turned to face the caretaker. He felt tired all of a sudden and realized that it must be getting close to midnight. "After we're through with our investigation, we'll hire some men to re dig the graves and return the bodies to their proper plots."

  "How'll we tell who's who?"

  "We'll have family members come out and identify the.." remains. If that doesn't work, and if we can't tell by the placement, we'll have to go by dental records." He nodded toward the corner. "My parents are over there." No one spoke.

  Robert bent down to examine the body closest to him, an ancient skeleton wearing the rotted remnants of a dress. He found himself focusing his attention on the ex posed left femur. The bone had been snapped in half. Frowning, he motioned Hillman over. "Is this usual?

  Do bones usually break like this?"

  The caretaker dropped to his knees and squinted at the skeleton's leg.

  "I can't really say. My job is just to take care of the cemetery grounds. I don't know nothing about the bodies."

  "Maybe it broke that way when she fell out," Ted offered Robert shook his head. "I don't think so. Look at how the body's positioned. It's been taken out of its coffin and deliberately placed here. That leg hasn't even been bent How could the bone have broken?" Stu climbed a small dirt mound nearby. "Come here," he said.

  They followed him. His flashlight shone on the femur of another skeleton. This one, too, had been broken. ""Looks like we have a pattern here." His flashlight beam moved on to another corpse lying next to an open new coffin on the other side of the mound, ii

  Hillman gasped. '3esus."

  Robert moved quickly forward, sliding down the pile of dirt, the others following. The body at his feet, though fully clothed and obviously interred only recently, had been shriveled and shrunk and bore an uncanny and uncomfortable resemblance to Manuel Torres's exsanguinated corpse. The same wrinkled parchment skin clung moisturelessly to the skull, the same deflated lips surrounded the overly toothy mouth. It was Caleb Peterson, Robert realized. He'd forgotten that old Caleb had been buried last week. He'd read about it in the paper, but he hadn't known the miner that well and hadn't gone to the funeral.