Charnel House

by Anderson, Fred

  Something poked Garraty in the back and he yelped and almost dropped the Maglite before realizing he’d been backing away from the sight of that handprint and walked right into a low branch. He laughed—a little shrilly, perhaps—and aimed the light back through the window. Stop being such an asshole. You’ll be out of here soon enough.

  There was an arched walkway in the far wall, leading to the barren dining room and the kitchen beyond. The pea green linoleum floor in the kitchen was cracked and shone dully in the beam, and he saw a drift of dried leaves in there, fallen over decades of autumns from the thick maple branch growing through the window that overlooked the back yard. The cabinets lining the walls had been white in a previous life. He was getting a little exasperated. What had he expected to find in the house, anyway, an airtight old chest freezer with a sign on it that said Stow Dead Bodies Here? Besides, the way that floor looked, he’d be terrified to walk across it even if he had seen something as perfect as that. Two steps in he’d probably break through and drop into the crawlspace, where he’d likely be impaled on a piece of—

  Hold everything, ladies and gentlemen; I think we have a winner!

  Why hadn’t he thought of the crawlspace in the first place? It couldn’t be more perfect. Not only could he plant the kid in the ground to keep the smell down, no one would ever go under there because that was where they found Jeremiah Barlowe seventy years ago, when they came up here looking for him after all those kids went missing. No one was that stupid.

  Well, almost no one. He thought back to his childhood, and the way Tanner Frank’s cousin had tried to go under the house only to bolt out seconds later, terrified of the tricks his mind was playing on him. Grinning at the old memory and his own ingenuity—completely unaware of the way his grin might have looked more like the grimace on a death mask than mirth to someone watching—he followed the wall around the next corner and rounded it, beam on the ground.

  The front porch was in the corner of the L of the house and looked the same as he remembered, all loose planks and peeling steel-gray paint. The curled NO TRESSPASSING sign nailed to the front door facing still hung in the same place, but it had faded almost white. The letters were barely visible. The door itself was missing, and he saw a staircase through the opening, climbing into midnight. Garraty wondered who owned the property now. Not that it mattered, not really, because whoever it was obviously didn’t give a shit about it. He crouched and played the light under the porch.

  The leaf-strewn dirt was littered with planks from the stoop above. A pile of bricks—leftovers from the well, most likely—lay in the corner where the room he’d just been looking into jutted out from the main part of the house. Someone had leaned a sheet of rusty tin—it’s not just for roofs anymore, his mind gleefully crowed—over the opening to the crawlspace. Garraty considered the metal for a long moment. The opening hadn’t been covered before... but before was thirty-five years ago, and there was no way of knowing what had happened during that time. The thing might have been propped there the day after—hell, the same day—he was up here with Tanner Frank and his cousin, or someone might have done it an hour ago.

  Fuck.

  He dropped to his hands and knees on the wet ground and crawled under the porch.

  6

  Dust coated the rusty piece of roofing, deepest on the v-shaped bends stamped into the metal to strengthen it lengthwise. Good. That told Garraty it had been standing there for more than a few days. When he tipped it away from the opening, cobwebs stretched and broke, enough of them that he heard the faint crackle as they snapped. Better. No one had been under here for a long time. He set the piece of tin to one side and stuck his head through the opening to have a look.

  The air under the old house was even cooler than the night, and carried the faint odors of mildew and rot. God knew how many small animals had lived and died under here. Pretending he didn’t remember all the stories about Jeremiah Barlowe and how he’d been found in the cramped, dank space with his face buried in—

  Garraty slammed a lid down on the memory of the old legend. Probably bullshit anyway, stuff kids tell each other to have a good scare. Even if it was true, it happened seventy years ago and everyone involved was long dead and gone. He crawled through the tight opening, trying not to think about ghouls and ghosts and monsters, those figments of imagination we think we’ve outgrown until the right set of circumstances arises and they’re suddenly right there with us again, pulling up a chair and whispering hello, old friend in a voice as creaky as an ancient casket lid. He played the light around the crawlspace, looking for a good burial spot.

  Brick piers rose from the sandy soil in an evenly spaced grid, tiny towers that had once provided solid footing for the beams forming the base of the house. Now several had crumbled and others leaned this way and that, and the floor of the structure above him bowed and sagged crazily. Garraty suddenly felt the immense size and weight of the house bearing down on him, making it hard to take a breath. He wanted to scuttle backwards out of the opening and reconsider the dry well. He didn’t know if he could stay in here long enough to do what needed doing. Take a powder, princess. This place is only as bad as you make it out to be.

  “Right,” he said, and resumed his examination of the crawlspace with the Mag.

  The more he saw, the more he thought it was perfect, despite the niggle of fear tickling the hairs at the nape of his neck. A few more beers would help with that. The dirt in here was loose and powdery, except for a few muddy spots where leaks from above had let the rainwater through. Should be easy enough to dig in, especially if he could find something to augment his bare hands. A slight incline ran from the front of the house to the back corner, where the kitchen was. A little tight, especially beyond one bowed beam that sagged to within a foot and a half of the ground due to a collapsed pier, but he thought he could manage. The corner was as far from the opening as possible, and the squeeze just helped ensure no one would ever try going back there. Eventually the beam would snap and drop the house onto the grave, making it even more inaccessible. He backed out of the crawlspace.

  “Joey.”

  The word floated out of the darkness under the house, so soft he thought at first he imagined it. He froze, listening. Nothing. Even the leaves above had stopped rustling.

  He aimed the Maglite into the hole and for an instant thought he saw a pale moon of face in that distant corner looking back at him through great hollow eyes, its wide black gash of a mouth curved into a sickle of grin, but when he blinked it was gone. His heart stutter-fluttered in his chest, threatening to break into a full gallop.

  Garraty knelt there for several seconds, watching, the beam from the Mag aimed at the back corner. Waiting for something to move or speak. Thinking, get thee hence, dumbass. If his mind was already playing tricks on him now, before he’d even started the really bad work, what was it going to be like when he was in there with a dead kid?

  Under the house with a dead kid... just like Jeremiah Barlowe.

  A rat trundled across the spill of light, its eyes shining red in the beam. Garraty followed it with the Maglite until it reached one of the brick support piers and climbed it, vanishing into the darkness between two joists.

  The crawlspace was empty.

  Of course it was, because the last time anything of substance happened here America had just gotten herself involved in World War II. Jeremiah Barlowe wasn’t still under the house, nor was anyone else for that matter. Besides, what he thought he heard was Joey and no one had called him that since his dad died. It made a certain kind of sense, he realized. The last time he’d been here he was a boy. If he were going to imagine a voice speaking his name, wouldn’t it be that one? The subconscious was a grand mind-fucker, that was for sure. It liked to play games with you.

  He didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he let it out in a whooshing rush. The light twitched in his hand as the adrenaline rush ended. You can do this, but you can’t let your imagination get the best of
you.

  Garraty backed out from under the rickety porch, keeping the Maglite trained on the tenebrous opening. Not that he expected a revenant Jeremiah Barlowe to come scrabbling out after him, skittering across the loose earth like a skeletal spider with his bony arms extended, ready to snatch Garraty back and do to him what he had done to those three children so long ago... but it didn’t hurt to be safe, now, did it? Grinning wildly at his own skittishness, he stood and retraced his steps back to the gap in the hedge thicket.

  After a pause to unzip and water one of the hickory trees, he crossed the front yard to the Prius, where he fetched the case of Pabst from the front seat and set it on the hood. It would’ve been nice to kick back in the car for this, but the smell seemed to be clinging to the vehicle like, well, like stink on shit. Garraty chuckled and pulled a beer from the box and pretended there wasn’t a dead kid in the trunk slowly assuming the night’s temperature.

  He popped the top and drained it as quickly as he could, then followed it with a second. The sky had cleared completely, and the gibbous moon painted the world in shades of blue and silver. He wished he had something stronger than beer. The Pabst could get him where he wanted to be—eventually—but he’d have to drink so much he’d need to piss every fifteen minutes. It would take too goddamn long to wriggle across the dirt to go outside, and trying to take a leak in the coffin-close area was the last thing he wanted to do. Better to save the beer for later, when he had a comfortable couch and a toilet just a few feet away. He took one last can from the carton—might as well make it an even six-pack—then set the box back in the Prius, holding his breath against the stench. He was going to have to visit the car wash in Decatur after this was all over for some of that godawful cherry-smelling shit to get rid of the stink.

  The third beer disappeared as quickly as the first two had. Time to get this show on the road. While he thought the chances of someone coming up to the house were virtually nil, dillydallying was simply inviting trouble. Briefly, he considered driving the car around to the gap in the hedge—there was a can of Fix-a-Flat in the emergency bag he’d seen when he was looking for the light—but then he remembered the random pieces of rusty metal that lay like land mines around the yard. Tire sealant wouldn’t help with much more than a nail, and he didn’t want to have to rely on the shitty little spare unless he absolutely had to. Too many things had already gone wrong tonight. The kid wasn’t that big, anyway.

  He went around to the back of the Prius and raised the lift gate, taking care not to look into the boy’s watchful eyes. Bending into the trunk to scoop his arms under the kid and blanket, his face in the thick of the stink, Garraty thought he was going to upchuck the three beers all over the dead boy, but he managed to keep it down. The body flopped bonelessly in his arms when he lifted it, and threatened to slip free the same way it had when he was loading it. This time he held tight, pulling the boy close against him. The head swiveled and rolled into his shoulder, and Garraty thought he felt the dead boy’s eyelashes on the skin of his neck. Kid’s looking right at me. For an instant he caught a whiff of something faintly cheesy—that’s his brain, right as rain, ain’t life insane! the voice in his head chirped—and then the malodor returned, washing over him like rising floodwaters.

  Garraty lowered the dead boy to the earth. Before he dealt with the corpse he needed a couple of things. He lifted the cover off the spare tire well and popped the tire iron out of its holder. This he placed on the Mylar blanket next to the boy. Next, he walked around to the passenger side of the Prius. When Tina packed the emergency kit for him, she’d included a heavy duty ice scraper, not that he’d needed it yet in the warm Alabama winters. He dug it out now and tucked it into his back pocket with the Maglite, beginning to feel a little like that cat he’d seen in cartoons as a boy, the one with the magical bag of tricks. Really need to call Tina and thank her when this is all over. The ice scraper and tire iron would make pretty shitty tools for digging, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and they’d be better than nothing.

  The emergency blanket folded nicely around the body. One dead kid burrito, coming right up,señor. Garraty hefted the dead boy into his arms and made the journey across the yard to the opening in the thicket, then stepped in. He carried the body along the perimeter of the house, tripping and stumbling over tangles of roots he would have sworn weren’t there before. The kid’s feet bumped and scraped down the siding and scared the shit out of him every time they did. Finally, he reached the porch and set the boy down, hot breath whistling in his nose. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and he felt a trickle run down his side from one armpit. The little fucker wasn’t that heavy, but after two hundred feet or more anybody would be winded, Garraty thought. He reached into the blanket and got the tire iron and tossed it under the porch. It hit the siding with a hollow bong and thumped to the dirt.

  Garraty set the Maglite on one of the crazily slanted steps and aimed it beneath the wooden flooring, pointing it at the black rectangle in the back wall. He crawled under the rotting structure, then took the kid by the feet and dragged him under with him. The Mylar blanket crunched and crackled as the body slid over twigs and pebbles and pieces of the porch. It felt greasy in his sweaty palms. The light reflected off the silver sheet and made shimmering spots all around him, like he’d traveled back in time to the days of disco, when he was last up here with Tanner Frank and his cousin. He worked his way over to the crawlspace opening, pulling the dead boy as he went. Trying not to think about hungry open mouths and pale faces with hollow eyes, ignoring the fecal stench that swirled up from inside the thin plastic skin.

  He left the boy next to the opening and retrieved his flashlight. The kid was staying out here for now, that was for sure. He smelled too goddamn bad to be in that tight space and above ground any longer than he had to. Resisting the urge to play the light over the wrapped body—certain that if he did, the kid’s face would be visible and he’d find him looking out through those creepy half-opened eyes—Garraty ducked into the crawlspace opening, thinking be back in a bit kid, don’t run out on me.

  7

  The tongue-and-groove subfloor above Garraty teemed with cave crickets that scuttled out of the light when it fell on them. He crept toward the far corner of the crawlspace, the Maglite in one hand and the tire iron in the other, trying to pretend the rustling insects weren’t there. At one point not too far from the rectangular doorway, he saw a black widow the size of a ping-pong ball huddled in a corner formed where beam, joist, and floor met, its obsidian body glossy in the wash from the Mag. Hundreds of baby spiders clung to the web around it, tiny specks of crimson and black that glittered like malignant jewels. Garraty crawled past the thing, tensing for the light tickle of legs on the back of his neck as it plopped down on him and skittered across his skin, but it never came. He stopped shining the light up into the crannies after that, hoping that what he didn’t see wouldn’t hurt him.

  As he moved further in, the gradual incline brought the overhead structure—and all the things that called it home—closer and closer. About two thirds of the way back, he reached the sagging beam he’d spotted from the opening. Chunks of brick and ancient mortar lay in a spray where a pier had succumbed to the immense weight bearing down on it and collapsed. Garraty slithered underneath the beam, sharp pieces of debris poking his chest through the flimsy shirt, acutely aware of the house above him. The rough wood plucked at his clothes like skeletal fingers. It seemed to take him a lifetime to get all the way under it.

  On the far side of the beam, the joists were just a few inches above his head, tight and looming. Garraty could hear the rustle of the bugs moving in the shadowed knells. If I was claustrophobic I’d be fucked right now. He continued to move forward until he’d have to wedge his shoulders between two joists to go any further. This was a good spot. The ground was still loose and powdery, at least on the surface. That would make digging easier. He didn’t have to go too deep, anyway. Just enough to cover the kid good and hold the smell do
wn. He propped the Mag against one of the crumbling brick piers and pulled the ice scraper from his back pocket. Holding it at an angle, he drove the corner of the blade into the soft ground and began to dig.

  Garraty worked on his makeshift grave for an hour, the only sounds in the crawlspace his grunts and the occasional sharp clatter of tool on rock. A foot down, the powdery topsoil had given way to an ashen clay and the work got a lot harder. From time to time he stopped to rest, wiping away the sweat stinging his eyes with the collar of his shirt and propping his head on his hand until he got his breath under control. In those periods of quiet reflection, he tried not to think of the dead boy waiting for him in the niche beneath the porch, the blood in his eyes drying to a maroon crust.

  Slowly the hole took shape, then depth, and the piles of earth around Garraty grew. When he’d made it three feet down he stopped. That was deep enough to cover the inevitable smell when the kid started to decompose, he thought, and deep enough to discourage any scavengers. Possums and raccoons were as thick as burrs on a hound out here in the boonies. If anyone ever bulldozed the house to rebuild on the site, they’d probably uncover the kid, but by then he’d be nothing but disintegrating bones. As long as the house had already been sitting vacant and forgotten, chances were damn good Garraty himself would be a moldered skeleton before anyone found the remains.

  The ice scraper was ruined, nicked and dinged so the blade was no longer straight and true. He’d need to get a new one before winter came. Leaving it next to the grave along with the tire iron, Garraty took the flashlight and began to wriggle backwards toward the opening. He didn’t like not seeing where he was going. Didn’t like it at all. Shoulda thought this one through a little better, kemosabe. Once he’d made it under the low beam there was enough room to turn around. God, the way out looked so tiny from here! Slowly, like a grunt working his way through a barbed wire obstacle course in basic training, he crept on his elbows back to the opening and the body that waited there for him. He crawled past the dead boy into the moonlight without looking at him and stood, relishing the crackles and pops in his bones. Goddamn, it had been tight under there.