by Joseph Rubas
After a few sluggish minutes hearing the occasional blood-chilling thump and moan from downstairs, I figured that my eyes would be well enough adjusted to aid me; there was a stove light on in the kitchen, and maybe I had even left the bathroom light on down there. I took a step forward, then another, and before I knew it I was on the third step from the top, mashing my body against the wall. A flash of lightning lit the foyer, and in the ghastly glow I saw the front door, the end table where I sat the day’s odds and ends, and the coat rack next to the door. For a wild moment the rack appeared to be a hostile human standing stiff and motionless. My heart nearly exploded from my chest before I saw what it was. I let out a shivery breath and slowly took the next two or three steps, frantically trying to breathe slowly and quietly, so not to alert the burglar to my presence. From the back of the house, toward the kitchen, I heard a thump, and the clatter of something glass bursting on the floor. There was a sound like feet shuffling on linoleum and then another ghostly moan which struck an icepick of abject terror into my knocking heart. At that moment, I nearly abandoned my expedition, but pushed on.
I stepped off the last step and onto a board which moaned like the as-yet unseen asshole breaking shit in my kitchen. I froze up for a long moment, my ears tuned to hear the slightest sound. A roaring crash of thunder startled me nearly into a heart attack. I heard another moan from the end of the short hall leading to the kitchen, but it sounded no more excited than before. I took a step forward. To my immediate left was the arch into the parlor, which also opened on the small kitchen. If I was right, then the asshole was somewhere in front of, or beside, the door at the end of the hall. I could go through the parlor, making a giant C, and come in behind the noisy burglar.
I inched into the parlor. My eyes were useless in here; it was as dark as the hall upstairs had been. I took a tentative step forward and promptly tripped over something. I clattered to the floor in a tense heap with a monstrous thud that rattled the windows and shook the floor like an earthquake.
“Shit!” I muttered frantically, realizing that my Pearl Harbor had been canceled, that if a fight was going to happen it would be face-to-face. With my heart pounding, blood thumping in my temples, and pent-up breath caught in my bursting lungs, I jumped to my feet and nearly sprawled once more over the small coffee table. I blotted my sweaty palms on my jeans…and realized that the knife was gone. I almost dropped to my knees in a distraught search, but before that could happen, a flash of lightning bathed the room in its horrible glow…and I beheld the person who had entered my home unwarranted. In the brief flash, my heart stopped, my lungs dried up and crumbled, and I was filled with such terror that it physically hurt. I didn’t scream. I didn’t have the wind or the rational mind to do anything but doubt what I had seen in the brief, revealing light.
For standing in the threshold between the kitchen and the parlor, the selfsame entrance that I had been planning on using to surprise my uninvited guest, stood a dull cemetery horror beyond my power to properly describe. In that brief flash I saw this man’s face was not only a bloodless hue, but that half the flesh had deteriorated on his right cheek, revealing a dark, gaping cavity. He wore what may have been a dusty burial suit. His eyes had been, possibly in my imagination alone, two pools of dark hunger, gazing at me, and past me, into the fiery depths of hell.
Only a second after being plunged back into darkness, the ghoul began limping towards me, dragging one useless foot along. He let out a long, low moan. I couldn’t see this monster; he was coming at me in total black! Thankfully my paralysis broke and I was able to stumble backwards, my mind reeling and my veins pumping ice water. I backed into the hall, and shortly the ghoul followed, dirty arms outstretched and mouth, full of jagged yellow teeth, open in a wide O. The hot reek of corruption radiating off of him was terrible.
I can’t really recall what happened; I may have been in shock. In any case, my mind has taken great lengths to cover up at least some of what took place, and I do not wish to uncover those horrid memories and expose them to sunlight. Some things are better left to rot in darkness, and those terrible moments of my life are free to turn to dust, unmissed.
The first clear memory that I have is of me on the parlor floor, the thrashing beast atop me, held away from my face by my shaking arms. The thing was powerful, it tried and tried to lower itself, so that its mouth might partake of my flesh, I figure. I was panicked, incoherent, like an animal snared in a trap or pinned in a corner by a larger adversary. At risk of being mauled by this creature, I punched the beast’s face with all the strength I could muster. Again and again I bashed and bashed, before my hand slipped through the ghoul’s sodden face, into its brain cavity beyond, and became mired in what felt like cold mud.
The beast went limp; its legs stopped thrashing and kicking, the head fell and lolled, and its hands, hitherto grasped weakly around my biceps, loosened. It was dead.
A bit of the stinking fluid dripped from its wound and onto my cheek, and my mind convinced me that, acid-like, it was sizzling through my flesh. I summoned the last bit of strength left me and pushed the dead weight of the fiend off onto the floor. I lay there panting and drenched in sweat, heart still thumping and adrenaline coursing through my veins. The smell of decay was in my nostrils and on my clothes; every time I breathed though my nose, I could smell rot and earthy graveyard dirt; every time I breathed through my mouth, I could taste the evil flesh of the monster.
Still trembling with terror, I staggered off to the bathroom and scrubbed my hands, trying desperately to get the gunk off of them.
Done, I shambled into the kitchen, hyperventilating. There was a bottle of booze in one of the cabinets. Which one? I tried to remember, couldn’t, rooted around, and found a half empty jug of Captain Morgan under the sink.
After a long, steadying drink, I gathered the guts required to go and check out the thing that I had murdered. I reluctantly moved into the parlor, crunching broken glass underfoot like brittle snow. In soft lamplight I stood over the monster for a long time, mesmerized by it. The face was caved in and leaking, closely resembling a rotten apple. His skin was a ghastly gray and his suit was covered in dirt; the stench of him was nothing short of incredible.
Mouth clamped tightly shut against a rush of hot stomach bile, I dropped to one knee, my shaking left hand covering my nose. With my right I hesitantly reached out and gripped the white undershirt of the beast and ripped; the damp fabric tore easily. When I saw what waited for me under the shirt, I gasped and stood so quickly that I nearly toppled over backwards. I rushed to the bathroom off the kitchen and lost the contents of my stomach and nearly my sanity. I had had hope before, but now there was no denying what the thing was. For under the ghoul’s shirt, on the gray mottled flesh, so cold that it seemed to radiate a chill, was an ugly Y-shaped incision.
Shaking and hyperventilating, I washed my acidic mouth out in the small marble sink next to the toilet. In the smudged mirror, my eyes were wide and bloodshot. I took several deep, shaky breaths before I forced myself to return to the parlor. For a long time, I stood over the body, dazed and blinking my eyes.
No, this is impossible, this can’t be happening.
But it was.
As dawn approached in the east, I picked the knife up from the floor and went into the cool morning through the kitchen door which had been left standing ajar by the ghoul. The storm had quieted, the ground was wet, and the world smelt fresh and clean. There was a small shed in the backyard that my uncle had built back in the seventies, made to look like a barn. The door was padlocked and I didn’t know where to find the key. With my mind playing scenes from Night of the Living Dead, imagining every natural sound as the approach of some unimaginable beast, I panicked and kicked the door open. Feeling only slightly as if I had tipped over a headstone, I hustled into the musty darkness, redolent of grease and gasoline. The mower was in the middle of the space, and from feel alone I found the tarp where my uncle had left it back in August or September ‘88
. I pushed away the cinderblocks holding the corners down with my feet, and balled the tarp up. I nearly ran back to the back door, and when I was once again in the house, I locked the door.
I laid the thin, time-eaten tarp on the parlor floor and, regretting that I had not taken the time to search for gardening gloves, used two oven mitts to roll the body of the hellion on. Some vile yellowish cemetery fluids had soaked into the carpet, and I made a mental note to rent a carpet shampooer from Food-Lion before Monday, when the young doctor and his wife returned for a follow-up tour of the house
I monitored the morning news on Fox 5, and discovered to my great relief that a Romero-like zombie invasion was not underway. I thought briefly of calling the police, but that was crazy. If the cadaver in my care was an escapee from a local cemetery, what would be the outcome of calling the law? They would lock me up for grave-robbing and brand me as insane or a necrophile. It would be better to handle this myself.
After a bout of fitful sleep plagued by wretched nightmares, I loaded the tarpaulin-wrapped body into the back of my Isuzu Trooper. It was dusk, cooling down as the sun sank in the west in a glorious show of orange and purple, and it would be pitch black when I arrived in Bealeton, halfway across the county.
The dead stink filled the car as I drove east on dark highways, the radio lowly whispering Krokus songs. I obeyed the speed limits to the letter, was a more cautious driver than usual, and did nothing whatsoever that would draw attention to myself.
North of Bealeton along Route 17, just south of a spot-in-the-road called Opal, a dark, decrepit farm sat forlornly off the highway amongst a tangle of weeds and underbrush. My parents owned the place and planned to pass it on to me when they went; nobody lived there, and hadn’t since around the time Charles Manson was making a mockery of the California justice system. The place was mostly land, with only a rickety home, a small barn, a chicken coop, and a rusting Packard sitting in tall weeds next to a small pond full of geese shit and slime.
I parked the Trooper in the back field of tall brown grass, kept the headlights blazing and the radio playing, and used a shovel taken from my uncle’s shed to dig a deep hole in the rich black soil.
Making sure that the beast would never again rise, I gave him a few more quick whacks in the head with the shovel after I had dragged him from the storage compartment. I thought of taking his head off entirely, but I was tired, paranoid of being spotted by a passing police cruiser, and more easily sickened than I previously thought. I just rolled the corpse into the hole and, sweating buckets despite the cool breeze, filled it in. The nocturnal chirping of crickets and bullfrogs under the music soothed me, and I believe that I nearly fell asleep while working, for I can’t clearly remember filling in the last three or so feet.
Weary and sore, I covered the freshly turned dirt with a large gray piece of wood and set a course for home. Call me a coward if you will, but I still can’t drive along that road, let alone visit the farm. I’ll sell it soon as my parents move on.
To this day, nearly fifteen years later, that night haunts my sleep. I sold the house to a developer, who knocked it down, thankfully, and I still have terrible nightmares about the whole affair. I found out not too long after, in the Daily Pickett, that the body who wandered into my aunt’s home that night was Stanly Warren, a 31-year-old high school teacher from Marshall who died the previous March of some unspecified illness.
The Picketts Meade Sheriff’s Department was baffled by the robbery in Pinewood Cemetery and by the fact that instead of a six-by-six hole they found what appeared to be an earthen tunnel burrowing down. Even though things didn’t rightly add up, they called the whole thing the work of a common grave-robber, and it slowly faded from the papers as bigger and badder things came along; from front page to second, fifth to last.
But I was plagued by horrible dreams that left me shivering, panting and paralyzed with fear in my bed. I suffered anxiety attacks for a number of years, and was instilled with a phobia of cemeteries, morgues, hospitals, and every other conceivable place closely associated with death and the dead. For a while I was even held in the grip of an insane obsession focusing on Stanly Warren (what was he like in life? What did he look like? What was his political affiliation?), and devoured whatever information I could find on the man, which wasn’t much. I even introduced myself as an old friend of his to his widow and interviewed several of his students for a non-existent newspaper.
Finally managing to put aside my debilitating terror, I visited his grave one sunny afternoon about three years after that horrible night, my chest tight and my eyes oscillating absent mindedly over the long rows of gray and white marble headstones. I nearly fled several times after imagining angry beings crouching behind the leafy trees which dotted the tract, hiding inside the occasional bush, and peering hungrily at me from behind gravestones; but though wavering, my resolve remained.
With constricted breathing, a thundering heart and watery bowls, I found the simple gray marker denoting the second-to-final resting place of one Stanly Warren; and was immediately struck by the inscription above his name, between the busts of two chubby-cheeked angel children, eyes cast admiringly Heavenward, who closely resembled the Campbell’s Soup Kids. I don’t know if it was a macabre coincidence or a frightening prophesy from beyond; they say God has a sense of humor, but I never imagined the Lord’s tastes in such matters would be so morbid.
For etched into the rough stone were the chilling words: Only Sleeping.
For Love
They’ve been saying a lot of awful things about me in the press. I've seen a few papers and heard a newsbreak on the radio in the sheriff's office. VIRGINIA CANNIBAL CAPTURED; NORTHERN NECK NECROPHILIAC WAS LOCAL DOCTOR; HOUSE OF HORRORS STUNS NATION. I saw myself on Fox 5 last night being transferred from the Warsaw town jail to the Richmond County lock-up, dressed in a tweed jacket and jeans, my hands behind my back and my head down, grim-faced deputies leading me down a set of stone steps. Reporters were shoving microphones in my face and shouting questions at me like I was the president. I can't help but find a bit of amusement in that.
But I don’t find amusement in what they’re saying about me, all of the dirty, vicious, sensationalistic lies. I shouldn’t let it perturb me, but I can’t help it. I never murdered anyone. I swear before the throne of God I never harmed a living soul. All of the remains they found came from corpses. I didn’t eat human flesh, either. I’m sure keeping people in the freezer led to that assumption, but it’s simply not true. And it’s not true that I had sex with any of them. That’s just sick. I never made love to them, any of them, Veronica included. Veronica especially. My love is purer than that. I wasn't motivated by perversion or lust. She was my angel, I would never defile her with...that.
She was so beautiful when she first walked into my office, so young and fresh, her skin glowing with vitality and her eyes dark and exotic. In ten minutes I was smitten, in twenty I was infatuated, in thirty I was in love.
She was ill. Unbearable stomach pains, shortness of breath, dizziness. Even now I can hear her warm, sweet voice as we discussed the symptoms, her sitting worriedly on the examination table. She was so scared, and it took all my power to keep from putting my arm around her. I wanted so badly to comfort her in a way that professionalism didn't allow. I longed to hold her and whisper into her ear, to stroke her cheek and make the pain go away.
But I couldn't, and it made me sick. I could only write a prescription and send her on her way.
That night, she was the only thing I could think of. I was tormented with a burning passion that I knew would never be requited. I paced the floors most of the evening, my chest tight and my heart aching sharply. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t, so I took a drive through the country and only came back home at dawn.
I ate a light breakfast, and then vomited into the toilet. Done, I stared at myself in the mirror above the sink, studying my wrinkled face, my bloodshot eyes, my white beard, my glasses, my sweater vest. Such a lovely young cr
eature would never want a man who could pass for Freud in a cheap made-for-TV movie.
That thought eviscerated me, and I puked again. Is this love? I wondered, true love? What an awful feeling!
That day and the next dragged by in a blur of anguish. On Thursday I was too dejected to get out of bed. On Friday, a day which was always slow, I caved in, and did something I promised I wouldn't do: I pulled out Veronica's number and called her under the pretense of medical curiosity. Her mother answered, and gave the phone to her goddess of a daughter.
"Hello, Miss Myers," I said, my mouth dry and my heart pounding, "this is Dr. Cosgrove."
"Hi," she chirped, "how are you?"
"I'm fine," I said with a small smile, "and you?"
"Much better."
“That's good to hear," I replied dully; I had actually been hoping the symptoms persisted so I could see her again.
God, how I wish I never had!
On Monday, she was in my office again. I was overjoyed to see her, but her hollow eyes gutted my heart. She had been up the entire night in agony.
I...don't want to think of the weeks that followed. It's too painful, the way her life drained away. I made regular visits to her home, although house calls are unheard of, even in rural Virginia, and brought her the best gifts I could lay my hands on. Flowers and chocolates, stuffed animals, a locket engraved with her initials. She was so modest, and accepted my presents only with reluctance. I never confessed my love aloud, but I’m sure she saw it in my eyes, and felt it in the way I tenderly handled her.