After Midnight
Page 9
Eventually, she became too sick to remain at home. She was admitted to the local hospital on the twenty-fifth, and I visited her twice a day, held her hand, whispered encouragements to her, read her poetry and the Bible. I was at her side that Sunday morning when she fell into her coma, and on that Thursday night when she died.
She was buried on a Monday as the heavens wept. I can't remember most of that horrible day; I was numb, in shock. Once I returned home, I sank into my Lazy-Boy and stayed there, alternately gazing into space and weeping. Even after the sun had set, I sat unmoving, mired in grief.
I was there the whole night and most of the next day. I only rose to attend to the butcher’s son, who was hurt during football practice at the high school. I dragged myself through another three cold, lonely days before Veronica visited me in my dreams, a glowing vision in white, her hair done wholesomely up with ribbons and her lips pink and glossy in the moonlight. She lay next to me, warm and fragrant, and held me close through the night.
The next day, I went to her grave and knelt on the dirt; perhaps I was hoping to communicate with her soul, or maybe I just wanted to grieve. I can’t clearly remember what brought me there, or what kept me there; all of that was blown away when she spoke to me from the ground.
“Willard...is it you? Willard, it’s dark. I’m afraid.
She wasn’t dead! Thank God, she wasn’t dead! It was all a part of her plan. She faked her illness and death so that we could run away together. I should have known. A life so beautiful and vibrant would never end so senselessly.
“Go,” she told me, “come back tonight. I’ll wait for you.”
I walked through the wrought iron arch and back into the world of the living, delirious with joy. Back home, I packed a bag and waited for nightfall on the porch; it seemed as though an eternity passed before the day began to seep from the western sky. At 9:30, too excited to sit still, I put my bag, a shovel and a spade into the car and drove aimlessly to and fro.
Finally, it was 11:30, as good a time as any, I supposed; the cemetery was relatively isolated, wedged between the Potomac and a two-lane highway flanked by thick foliage. There was a caretaker, but he rarely tended the grounds.
By the time I parked on the dirt service road two miles from the gate and three from the main highway, my heart was racing and my breath came in short, fiery gasps. In less than an hour, Veronica would be mine forever, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish. I didn’t know where we would go, but I didn’t care. As long as I had her, nothing else mattered. I love Virginia and the Northern Neck, but for her, I would leave and never look back.
It was ten to twelve when I got the shovel from the trunk and walked up the road. The gates were padlocked, so I clambered over the stone wall. I’d never been in a cemetery at night, and was surprised to find something like fear creeping up my spine; in the moonlit darkness, the headstones rising from the ground were alien and grotesque, and the voice of the chill wind was actually the hushed tones of the restless dead.
Smiling and damning myself as a fool, I climbed to the top of the hill and found Veronica’s grave.
“I’m back,” I panted.
“Oh, Willard! Hurry!"
I hurried as much as I could. Two and a half hours later, sweat slathered and exhausted, I scraped the lid of her coffin, and my heart nearly exploded out of my throat. “I’m almost there!” I cried with a laugh. Somehow, I summoned the strength to partially raise the head of the casket and opened it with trembling fingers, my heart stopping when I saw her in the silvery light. She wasn’t alive, as I had expected; she was dead. My angel, my love, my heart...she was dead.
I must have blacked out. The next thing I fully remember is holding her in my arms and sobbing against her breast.
I couldn’t just leave her there alone to...rot, so I reburied the casket and brought her home with me. I gave her the back bedroom and held her through the night, weeping and whispering her name.
The next day (or was it the day after that?), I forced myself to part from her and drove to Tappahannock. There, I bought things to decorate her room; pink curtains, paint, frilly pillows. I spent the afternoon making the room worthy of her, and then, as dusk drew on, I laid with her in my arms, my love, my desire, my beauty.
For a time we were so happy. I couldn't wait to come home to her. I would hold her hand and read her poetry, make her eloquent dinners, and buy her the best clothes.
But despite my best efforts, she began to decay. Her arms, her legs, her face. I tried using synthetic materials, but they were never satisfactory, never quite real enough. I suppose you could say they shattered the illusion I had of her being alive.
I can’t recall the first time it ever occurred to me to…use human flesh, but I do remember a dream I had in which Veronica suggested to me that I should “Harvest the bounty of the earth.” We were on a hill in feeble moonlight. She was standing before me dressed in glowing white, a beautiful smile on her face. She swept her arm back, and I saw a vast cemetery, rows and rows of headstones rolling back toward the horizon. From the ground then rose a multitude of corpses, all of them young women. “They are me and I am them,” Veronica said, and then I awoke in a cold sweat, panting and scared.
I was appalled at the thoughts blossoming in my mind, but also curiously attracted to them. They seemed bizarrely genius, if hideously unpleasant.
I began scanning the obituaries of every paper from the Northern Neck and telling myself that I wasn’t doing what I thought I was.
The lie ended on a Monday; as I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a bagel, I came across a death notice that caught my attention and nearly sent me jumping for joy.
A high school cheerleader in Colonial Beach had died the previous Friday after falling from a bleacher; the poor girl fractured her skull on the pavement, sending jagged slivers into her brain, and was pronounced dead on arrival at Mary Washington University Hospital. The black-and-white face staring back at me, sweet and smiling, resembled Veronica only passingly, but I could ascertain that they were roughly the same in size and shape.
All that day my conscience tormented me. Did I really plan to defile a young girl’s grave, the final resting place of a daughter and sister sodden with tears?
When the sun sank into the Potomac and all the gruff fishermen who troll its waters sailed home on crimson water, I nearly decided against my ghoulish aspirations. No. I won’t do it. I'm a country doctor, I said to myself; I may know nothing about preserving dead bodies, but there are other ways. There have to be.
But Veronica decided me. She was…God help me, she was rotting, falling apart, her bones were starting to stick through in places. I had to act quick.
The cemetery where the girl was buried sat in a glen near an old plantation house ten miles inland. I parked my old station wagon on a dirt road through the forest and stole into the somber tract. The soil was freshly turned, and flowers were piled at her headstone like an offering to a goddess.
With each shovelful of earth my heart ached with remorse. When I reached the dusty coffin, I again almost abandoned my plan. But then I thought of Veronica at home, decaying in the back bedroom like some dirty, festering secret, and that pushed me over the edge. I opened the casket and pulled the girl out. Her eyes had popped open sometime after the funeral, and she stared at me reproachfully. I carried her back to the car and put her in the trunk, then returned and filled the grave in, silently praying that her family would never have to know.
The ride back home was the longest twenty minutes of my life. I parked around back, and took her in through the kitchen. I carried her down to the basement, laid her carefully out on the workbench, and then stomped upstairs and fell into bed, every muscle in my body sore and quivering.
I dreamed of the girl in the night. She somehow got out of the cellar and came to me, furious that I had disturbed her rest.
But Veronica protected me...
In the morning, I was reluctant to perform the operati
on, but I had no time to spare. First, I carefully removed her arms with a chainsaw, then her legs. When I was done, I hung the torso on a meat hook and vomited.
Composed, I fetched Veronica and brought her into the basement. I still wasn’t sure exactly how to go about it. I thought that perhaps I would…switch body parts. Give Veronica the girl’s limbs, and the girl Veronica’s. But at the last minute I realized all I had to do was graft the new flesh over Veronica’s…frame.
I used almost every part of that first girl. When I was done, I buried her in a shallow grave in the forest.
Veronica looked beautiful.
I treated and cured the flesh this time, and it took considerably longer to decompose. Two months later, in June, I had to go out again. Another young girl, this one from Warsaw. By the end of the summer I had run out of money and lost my job, so I could no longer afford chemicals to keep the flesh, which meant that I had to go out more and more. It seemed that every other week I would embark on another grizzly field trip.
After each surgery, I buried the leftovers. Eventually, however, I became overwhelmed and started letting things pile up: whenever I found the time (which wasn’t often), I took what I could and dumped it into a ravine in the woods.
This past November, my transgressions were finally discovered. Apparently, one of the girls I had taken was murdered by her step-father, something no one knew for quite some time. The King George County Police exhumed her one rainy afternoon…and found her coffin empty. The caretaker of that particular graveyard, an old alcoholic named Corliss, confessed that he had found two graves disturbed in August, but had quietly put them right. In the end ten of them were found to have been raided.
It pained me. God, it did. I hoped no one would ever have to know. Every night the news featured someone weeping and pleading for the return of a loved one. I desperately wanted to oblige, and even hatched a plan to rebury what I could in its rightful place, but the risk was too high; so high that I almost stopped going on my nocturnal hunts altogether. But Veronica needed me, and I provided for her.
But it was continual. Rot always set in and I would have to go out again. I never killed and I never ate anyone. I swear to you. I did only what I had to, and I only did it for love. Veronica knows that.
The Roomer
The middle-aged woman stood at the sink, looking out of a tiny window on the back yard where her son play-wrestled with the tenant who lodged in Sarah’s old room.
A tear streaked down her face; it was too hard to think about Sarah, who had been run down in the road by a high school teacher and his wife while she had been sleepwalking.
Jack had said locking the doors at night would keep their daughter inside the house, but that idea failed miserably by the time she turned six.
Anna watched the man and her son play in the ashy dusk. The man would do as he had for four months; once done playing with Jake, he would eat dinner and go to work (wherever that was). He returned at dawn, exhausted and slept the entire day.
Anna had not masterminded the idea of renting out her dead daughter’s room, in fact she had been tearfully opposed to the idea all along but, as Jack pointed out, they needed the money.
Jack’s job as a police dispatcher on the graveyard shift hardly covered Sarah’s funeral costs, so they advertised the room in the paper. For nearly a month they had interviewed prospects, and the only one Anna liked off the bat was Adam. He was a charming and very sweet man. Tall, with a sweep of black hair over his gaunt face, he was almost as handsome as Jack had been in high school.
As Anna opened the stove and checked on the roast she was making, the back door banged open.
“No fair, Adam! You wrestled in school,” Jake panted, his face flushed and sweaty, his dirty blond hair plastered to his forehead.
Adam, wearing his uniform of black jeans and a white tee shirt, smiled. “I never even won a match. Face it, you stink”.
Jake smiled, “No I don’t”.
Adam nodded his head, “You stink like an outhouse in August!”
Jake playfully lunged for Adam’s waist, but was captured in a lightning quick sleeper hold, which attested that Adam wasn’t as bad a wrestler as he claimed.
“Say uncle,” Adam teased.
“Never!” Jake howled.
“Say “please Uncle Adam, spare me”.”
“Fuck you!”
Anna spun on her heels and stared what she hoped were daggers, her mouth hung in a perfect O of surprise. “Jacob!” she cried.
Adam released the Jake to his punishment.
“I have never heard you speak like that!”
Jake was now looking down at his red canvas All Stars, his face showing the puppy dog shame that only a 13-year-old boy could muster.
“Sorry mom; I just got caught up in the moment.”
Anna nodded. “Okay, now go wash up; you have dirt and defeat all over you.”
Jake looked at her, now it was his mouth that hung. “Mom!”
Anna tried to smile. “Just teasing; now go on, get.”
He be-bopped off.
Anna stood at the sink and watched the last sunlight drain from the sky, taking with it the horrible pink and orange colors that looked grotesquely like blood.
Jack returned from his trip to Wal-Mart half an hour later with several plastic bags in his burly hands.
“Hey, babe,” he said as he sat the bags down onto the table, and kissed the nape of her neck, which sent a shiver down her spine.
“Hey,” she replied.
“Dinner ready?”
She nodded.
Jack set the table and called the boys into the room. After saying grace, they all sat down. Anna noticed that Adam, as always, had the smallest portion on his plate that she would let him get away with.
Jack ate in silence, she knew he dreaded the 11 o’clock hour, when he would have to leave for the sheriff’s office. He was tired, and looked fifty-six instead of forty-five.
Sarah’s death had taken a lot out of him, and the late hours that he worked coupled with depression left him looking like a walking corpse.
Jake was done with his food first; he tossed his plate into the sink and went off to his bedroom to play Xbox or watch The Three Stooges.
Adam was next; he washed his plate then trampled up the stairs to get ready
Jack stood, patted his gut though his blue flannel shirt and said “I guess I better go get ready for work.”
Anna rose and began to clear the table.
While doing her chores, she heard the guitar riff to one of Jake’s AC/DC CD’s, and knew that he would be playing Halo 2 while he listened to the music that his parents had grown up hiding from their parents.
Oh God, I miss Sarah, Anna thought as she leaned over the sink, hoping to hold back the coming tears.
When she was sure that the storm had passed, she went back to sluggishly washing the dishes. Ten minutes later, the sound of Jack’s heavy frame descending the stairs awoke Anna from a daydream
Memory, damn it
in which Sarah was five, and Anna was brushing her hair.
Do I look like a princess mommy?
And how Anna had laughed at how cute that comment was.
Yes you do, sweetie.
She was nearly in tears when Jack rested his hand on her shoulder.
“I think I better get going, I know it’s early but I want to stop off at Jim Hessler’s house; he bought himself a new shotgun.”
Anna laughed, her voice watery. “It’s all guns and sports with you men.”
“Don’t forget about beer and farting, we like that stuff, too,” he said, and kissed the nape of her neck.
Jack left half an hour later, and the first floor of the house was maddeningly quiet while Jake played video games in his room.
Anna watched a little bit of American idol, but couldn’t focus, so she tried reading. 101 Best Kept Cooking Secrets.
After learning to make hamburgers taste like they were steaks, she dozed off.
She sat sipping coffee and looking out over the side yard. When nothing interesting had materialized in the tiny green strip of land which sat between the Montgomery household and the weathered brown fence that separated them from their neighbors, she found a People magazine stuffed under a pile of light bulbs and batteries in the utility drawer, and lost herself in the glamour.
After nearly an hour, Jack stumbled through the door looking like death warmed over.
“Jack!” Anna blurted.
Jack nodded, “I’m fine, it was just a long night,” he said as he plopped down into a hard wood kitchen chair. “Too long.”
Anna saw how pale he was, the dark bags under his eyes.
“What happened?” she asked.
Jack grunted. “First off, there was a train wreck over by Picketts Meade. Exxon tankers. Thank God they didn’t go up.”
She was already getting him a Coke from the refrigerator.
“Then an entire family died out in Culpeper, the guys on the scene said it looked like they all just died, no wounds or anything”.
Jack opened the Coke and took a long swallow.
“Negative for gas or anything like that.”
Anna listened without really hearing.
“That has nothing to do with it,” he admitted, “I just been feeling sick for a week or so.”
Anna nodded. He did look like shit.
After Jack was done telling her about his possible cold and the night before, he went upstairs to sleep.
Anna cleaned the house a bit, but was done by noon.
After a light lunch, she rode down to Food-Lion to buy a pack of chicken.
It felt good to be out of the house and away from the tight enclosed space that had become her world for the past half a year.
She decided that she wanted to get out more often; the sitting around and staring at the walls was starting to get to be a little much. She might start by taking Jake to the WWE show in Richmond at the end of June.