‘Maybe it was bull to begin with. The treasure, I mean.’
‘Sorry, bud.’
‘No worries. I guess we’d better get going then, if Martin isn’t going to point the way for us—’
Doug grabbed Jesse’s arm excitedly. ‘Gah! Of course! Maybe Martin is trying to point the way.’
‘You mean—’
‘Yeah! Maybe I re-animated the old fart!’
The friends stood unmoving in silence for a long minute as their eyes adjusted to the dim light of the funeral home and their ears picked up only the comforting hum of refrigeration.
Jesse swore he could hear Doug’s lips slip back from his teeth as he smiled.
‘I got the pricklies,’ Doug murmured.
‘Well.’
‘Shall we?’
‘Yes.’
They went downstairs, stepping lightly. Jesse carefully retrieved the keys from his pocket and unlocked the interior door delicately. The scrape of the latch retracting seemed thunderous. The handle squealed in protest, a banshee in the dark. Jesse pushed the door open and jumped back lithely. Silence. Shaking fingers reached through the door and felt along the cool and clammy wall for the light switch. Jesse jerked his hand upward and the lights began their buzz and dance.
The gurney was on its side, the cardboard coffin nearby. The corpse of Martin Edelson had apparently just about escaped from the blue covering cloth before whatever force that drove him had dissipated. He was sprawled out, face-down over the green tile floor, the left, clawed hand still in mid-push at his side, the other reaching over his head towards the door.
Jesse didn’t know what to say. He was surprised at what Doug came up with.
‘Did you embalm him?’
‘N—no—’
‘Hmm.’ Doug walked over to the corpse and squatted down on his haunches to try to see the face. ‘That confirms something I’d long suspected: the dead are basically useless. If you jumpstart the system immediately after death, maybe . . . but your old fella here—his blood is coagulated, the electricity in his body has dissipated. It would take a mammoth amount of mystical energy to get even more than thirty seconds out of him. If I had a week to prepare, I might—’
Martin’s left hand shot up with a sound like creaking leather and caught Doug’s ankle. Doug yelled in surprise and tried to back away, but the corpse’s grip was strong and Doug fell backwards to the floor. The thin wisps of white hair on Martin’s head shook convulsively as the neck strained and cracked to show his terrible face, the opaque glaze of the eye, the rattling hinge of the jaw opening to let out a dry gargling, choking hiss. Jesse felt a warm buzz at the base of his skull and an encroaching dizziness. The sharp pain of a nail bending back as he try to dig his fingers into the wall brought him back from the verge of his faint and shocked him into breathing again. He crossed to the struggling pair and stomped repeatedly on the corpse’s arm as Doug yelled and kicked. Some separate recess of Jesse’s mind wondered at his action, but his consciousness was too disengaged to consider a superior solution. Suddenly the withered arm went limp and its grip on Doug’s ankle dropped away. Doug leapt up and away from the body. As he did in the graveyard, Doug doubled over as violent coughs clashed with wheezing gulps of air. And again, as before, a fey laugh soon merged with the efforts of his lungs.
‘Were you trying to put out a campfire?’ Doug eked out between gasps, then laughed hoarsely as his torso convulsed.
‘Huh.’ Jesse stood staring dumbly down at the body on the floor. ‘Huh,’ he said again, several times, until that, too, became something like a laugh. ‘Cleanup on aisle three.’
When Doug arrived for the funeral the next morning, he and Jesse could each see the other was suffering both from physical dilapidation and from a need to converse. Fortunately, the ordeal of the funeral was soon exhausted. Doug waited outside in the emptying parking lot, the smoke from a cigarette searing his already raw lungs, watching a plume of grey and black billow up from the chimney. Small spasms of pain shot out from his roiling, nauseous insides; clammy sweat rolled down his pale and drawn face. Jesse looked little better when he came out from the funeral home, trying to clear his throat repeatedly and spitting phlegm that scraped at his throat as it passed, the taste and the tickle of the matter prompting his gag reflex, urging bile from below.
‘You look like I feel,’ he told Doug.
‘Then I must look . . .’ Doug couldn’t find a finish to the sentence and let it drop. ‘I got something going on inside. Something bad. But there’s a compulsion there, too.’
Jesse recognised the feeling in himself. ‘Yeah. Almost instinctual; I’ve got it, too. Is it, like, mystical leftovers?’
Doug nodded his head. ‘We gotta go back to the cemetery tonight. I think we got that “knowledge” we’re looking for. And I think if we don’t see it through . . .’ Again, he let it drift.
Jesse understood—looking at Doug, it was easy to understand. ‘Can you make it ’til tonight?’
‘No goddamn amateur booby-trap spell and no son-of-a-bitch used-up miser are gonna put me down.’
Doug’s body convulsed violently in response to his defiance. Jesse grabbed his arm to support him. Doug looked up with red eyes.
‘You might have to do most of the digging,’ he said.
Jesse spent the day in that special torment of illness—wanting nothing more than to sleep, and being kept from it by the discomfiture of the ailment. The sun dragged through the sky, a spring breeze flowed like tar over Jesse’s fevered body, songbirds stabbed their trills amongst his pitiful groans. Yellowed pearls of sputum covered the bottom of a red bucket next to Jesse’s bed. His neck was sore with the effort of dislodging the offal that plagued his throat. Finally the day died. Night came down like a lid; clouds gathered and blotted out the slivered moon before it could rise above the horizon.
Just after nine p.m. Jesse rolled out from his bed and shambled to the bathroom. Everything in his throat and chest seemed to move at once and he buckled over, grabbing the sink’s edge as he choked. From his abdomen to his mouth, every muscle clenched and shuddered. Tears spilled down his red cheeks and splashed into the basin. His mouth hung dumbly open as the least little drop of saliva hung like a thread from his lip. He could feel the matter at the back of his throat, scratching. Jesse reached into his mouth. Two fingers and thumb grasped at the slippery filaments. Jesse pulled. As a final, prolonged convulsion rippled through his body, Jesse’s shaking hand pulled the horror from his throat—a slimy mass of wisps of white hair.
They met in the same spot as the previous night. Jesse no longer felt ill, but he was weak, and he dragged the blade of the shovel along the ground as he walked towards Doug. Jesse was shocked at Doug’s appearance; clearly the day passed much worse for him. Doug’s whole body shook with constant tremors of pain. Burst blood vessels lined his eyes, purpled flesh surrounded them. Otherwise, Doug was stark white. Breath seethed laboriously through clenched teeth and over chapped lips.
‘Where . . .’ Doug hissed. ‘. . . have you been’ was the unspoken remainder.
‘I pulled hair—a handful of white hair—from out of my throat tonight, Doug! I nearly choked on it!’
‘Could be worse.’
Doug’s face cracked into a terrible smile. His quivering hands grabbed the bottom of his shirt and lifted. Jesse shone his flashlight at Doug’s chest and nearly dropped it. Long, red welts criss-crossed Doug’s chest and abdomen. Violent, irregular gasps of breath caused his torso to heave uncertainly. Then Doug’s body cramped in pain as he uttered a prolonged whine.
Jesse said, ‘Oh, God’: Beneath the skin, something pushed out from within; new welts erupted in what was clearly the track of the fingers on one hand.
‘No no no no no no no,’ Jesse heard himself say.
‘Oh, my, yesss . . .’ Doug lowered his shirt. ‘I think . . . we should hurry.’
‘I don’t know—I don’t—’
‘I can feel it. I can feel it,’ Doug giggled
grotesquely, ‘pointing!’
With desperate effort, Doug began to shamble through the cemetery, weaving uncertainly through the headstones, knocking against them, stumbling towards the river.
Not more than ten rows from where they started, Doug’s knees buckled and he collapsed, hugging a concrete obelisk like a drowning man on a plank of wood. He remained there, wheezing, whining, moaning, as Jesse came up slowly behind him.
‘Doug . . . ?’
Suddenly Doug lurched forward, sternum first, as though yanked by a rope woven through his ribcage, two rows more he scrambled over before collapsing to the turf.
‘Here! Here!’ Doug pounded on the ground.
Jesse trained his flashlight beam on the headstone marking the plot. ‘Scott Boller,’ he read aloud. The name meant nothing to him. The date of death, however, he guessed (correctly) as the date of his great-grandfather’s retirement.
Doug rolled over on his back, off the plot. Jesse saw a rippling motion beneath Doug’s shirt.
‘Dig,’ came the plea, spat through gritted teeth.
Jesse set to digging with what fervour his exhausted body could manage. The blade cut easily into the spring-soft sod, but turning the heavy earth and shaking it free from the shovel was wearying. He tried to ignore the escalating, anguished moans of his suffering friend beside him. He didn’t notice he was repeatedly wiping away streams of tears blearing his eyes. His shoulders ached and his back was tightening quickly. Jesse knew that the strength of his arms would soon fail completely; already they were shaking so badly he began to lose his grip on the shovel after every stroke and turn. Then, just over two feet down, he hit something.
An unearthly, hollow hiss emerged from Doug’s throat. Jesse saw his eyes roll back and his hands clutch at his shirt. Jesse wanted to look away, but remained entranced until he could determine what was truly disturbing to him—even through the indeterminate shine of the flashlight, Jesse could see that Doug’s hair was turning white as he watched.
Jesse threw the shovel aside and knelt down beside the hole. He pushed damp clods of soil aside, clawed and moved the dirt away from the solid, flat surface he felt beneath. He found one edge, then the others. It was a locker, like an old army locker, Jesse guessed. Jesse felt the hinges on the side nearest him and realised that the top would swing open from the side where Doug lay writhing. Jesse grabbed his flashlight and scrambled around to that side of the grave. He felt Doug’s legs kick against the soles of his feet as his friend’s body convulsed. A loathsome growl began to build behind Jesse as he dug into the dirt and cleared the mud away from the latch. There was a wet, gurgling sound as well, as though Doug had vomited. The case was not locked and the latch moved freely. Jesse jammed his fingers in the crease beneath the lid and threw his arms forward.
Jewellery: necklaces, broaches, earrings, bracelets. Watches of all sorts and sizes, all with silver or gold bands. Stickpins and cufflinks. Small bits of silver and gold, their function understood more readily from the fully formed teeth amongst the smaller fillings. As his flashlight beam danced over the mass of metal, Jesse had no difficulty guessing the source of this bounty: Here were the spoils of the dead, amassed over fifty years, maybe more.
Jesse felt Doug grab his leg. Jesse realised with alarm and relief that the horrible moaning had gone, leaving only the sound of his laboured breathing and the distant traffic passing by. And still, a wet sound. Jesse looked over at his friend and saw his face frozen in a silent howl, an expression of damnable terror. And his two clawed hands gripping the torn shirt, drawn up under the chin.
Jesse wondered what had grabbed his leg.
There was the thing, the bloody stump of an arm reaching out and grabbing at Jesse, jutting out from Doug’s abdomen, struggling out from under the confines of his ribcage.
Jesse screamed. He tried to jump away but the rudimentary hand held his pant leg and he fell to the dirt. He tried to get up again but his mud-caked sneakers couldn’t find any purchase in the sod. But the hand, the talon, the thing was wet, too—with blood; it slid inch by inch down the length of Jesse’s shin and to the cuff until Jesse pulled free and it snapped shut at the empty air. Jesse found the shovel and used it to hoist himself up and to steady his quavering stance. He looked back at the greedy fingers snatching blindly at the end of that bloody stump swinging back and forth like some perverse windshield wiper. Jesse took the shovel in two hands and raised the blade up over Doug’s shuddering body. He brought it down again and again into Doug’s abdomen and chest, slamming the shaft of the shovel like a butter churn; the arm writhed as though trying to pull itself out by whatever hideous roots that had spawned it; blood and mud and whatever other matter might be in that corpse and of that abomination splattered Jesse’s clothes and face until he stopped only when he couldn’t see anymore.
Jesse wiped a forearm across his brow and shoved his nose through the crook of his elbow to wipe away the mess. The arm was destroyed, motionless; tattered flesh hung half-flensed from shattered, rudimentary bone-matter.
Jesse regarded his situation with a mind blank from horror: He was standing in a cemetery, over the exhumed accumulation of his great-grandfather’s pilfering of the dead, holding a shovel, covered in mud and the blood of his best and only friend and the demonic arm that grew from his corpse. Far away, he could still hear the traffic shush by; closer, the river gurgled idiotically as it followed its course through the dark.
Jesse decided: There was really nothing to it but to clean up and make an inventory of the treasure. Fortunately, he knew where to find some old ledger books that would be perfect for the job.
Knott’s Letter
Dear Mr Benner,
I regret to inform you that your son is dead. While I know this report is difficult to hear and the tragedy it relates is difficult to bear, I suspect you are not surprised by the news. Perhaps you and Mrs Benner have reconciled yourselves to the idea already, as it has been nearly a month since Kirk disappeared in the Adirondack Mountains. The authorities might have indicated to you that Kirk’s disappearance was reported to them by Tim Knott—I am he. You had probably never heard my name before then as I befriended your son after you and he had become estranged. You may wonder what information I possess that I would be the one writing to inform you of your son’s passing and not a legal authority. The truth is, I knew at the time I reported Kirk’s disappearance that he was most likely dead: when a few nights more passed without his return from the woods, I accepted my friend’s death with certainty. I have waited this long to write to you because I wrestled with whether you should be informed of the details of Kirk’s last days. I decided it was unfair not to share what I knew, even if what I had to reveal was unpleasant, and even if I had to admit some culpability in Kirk’s death.
Let me explain: If it weren’t for an offhand comment of mine, though we might have yet again pursued the Sasquatch, we might not have done it in the unfortunately successful manner in which we did. I expect your reaction to my mention of that ‘mythical’ animal might inspire you to throw out this letter right away. I hope that you do not. I know that your son’s ardent study of cryptozoology was at the root of the arguments that led to your estrangement. I need to tell you that when Kirk mentioned you and Mrs Benner, while he might vent some frustration over your stubbornness in the matter (a trait you must admit you shared with your son), he would more often lament that your relationship had disintegrated as it did, and he spoke kindly of the two of you and of his youth in Virginia. I hope you will remember the love you felt for your son in those days and continue reading. I think I might be able to show you that, while his passing was untimely and terrible, he did not ‘waste his life’ on his exceptional pursuits.
Perhaps I should tell you about myself briefly, to help you understand from what viewpoint I write. For as long as I can remember, I have had an interest in those subjects often referred to as ‘paranormal’—though that label tends to find itself applied to an unwieldy amount of phenomena. My
belief on any of these subjects was never much more than rumination; I had long ago come to accept that none of these phenomena could be satisfactorily ‘proven’, not only to a sceptic, but even to myself. I found that I still enjoyed entertaining the possibilities these phenomena presented; it was fun for me to think about them, and exciting to colour the world I lived in with their mystery, even if I expected it never to be any more than that. One secret I kept even from Kirk is, my interest results from the discovery that cryptozoology is a very pleasant study: you get to spend a lot of time outdoors, hiking and camping and generally appreciating nature, often in the company of interesting and enjoyable people. I admit I only shared their excitement at the discovery of a ‘footprint’ by proxy, and I was never defeated when a search was ‘uneventful’. You may wonder how I hope to establish the veracity of my narrative by admitting to mild duplicity; I mean only to show that my ‘beliefs’ never clouded my judgment or perception.
I should say something here as well about Kirk’s mindset: I mentioned earlier that the term ‘paranormal’ was very generally applied and used in reference to some things that perhaps it should not. Soon after meeting Kirk I learned that he strongly opposed grouping cryptozoology with ESP, ghosts, aliens, and the like. He believed that cryptozoology is solely a biological study and refuted any inference otherwise. He was searching for animals—if average people thought the animals for which he searched ‘fantastic’, then that was their limited perspective keeping them in the dark until he could prove them wrong. I’m sure you recognise the argument. I hope you won’t be insulted when I say part of the miscommunication between you and your son may have been the result of your thinking being more like mine—lumping the biological with the mystical—albeit with a different prejudice.
Forgive this lengthy introduction. I think you’ll soon see that, without it, you would have dismissed out of hand what I have to write. You may still. Also, I may not have prepared you adequately for the horror I must detail. I hope you understand that I wish to write without hyperbole and reveal the unfortunate truth without embellishment.
Black Horse and Other Strange Stories Page 25