Charnel House

by Anderson, Fred

  The three beers had migrated from his belly to his bladder while he was in the crawlspace, so he moved away from the porch and further down the exterior wall a little, then urinated into the thick growth. This would all be over soon and he could go home to the trailer and get more acquainted with the rest of that case of Pabst. Maybe it would help him forget this night ever happened. But first, he had one last thing to do.

  The crackle of the Mylar blanket seemed as loud as fireworks in the cramped confines of the crawlspace as Garraty dragged the dead boy toward his final resting place. It was slow going, especially as the ground drew closer to the skeletal frame of the house. Every time Garraty advanced a foot or two, he had to awkwardly turn and hitch the body forward the same distance. By the time he’d reached the makeshift grave, his arms and back sang from the effort and a stitch in his side made it hurt to take a deep breath. Add a few trips to the gym to that life makeover list, my man.

  Motes of dirt and dust billowed into the Maglite’s beam when Garraty rolled the wrapped corpse into the hole. The boy tumbled limply over the edge, landing on his side atop the blanket with his misshapen split head twisted around like he wanted to catch one last bit of weak light on his upturned face. Looking up at Garraty still with those half-lidded eyes. Those goddamn blood-filled eyes.

  “Who are you, kid?” he asked, and the sound of his own voice coming out in that shuddery whoosh of breath caused him to start nervously. As if the boy would answer. Why were you out so late by yourself?

  He took a deep breath, then slithered forward so that he could reach down to the body. He checked each pocket for identification—mindful of the gift in the back that was beginning to soak through the denim of the boy’s jeans—but found only a ten dollar bill, which he tucked into his own pocket. Kid doesn’t need money where he is. I do. Ten bucks is enough for a new ice scraper. He felt the dead eyes on him, cold and still on his heated flesh. On his face. He couldn’t finish this with the little bastard watching him. He swiped his hand across the kid’s lids to shut them once and for all. To stop the judgment. He wasn’t a bad guy; he’d just had a shitty run of luck. First the wife, then the job, now this. The last thing he needed was some dead kid staring at him with this kind of mute awareness that said I think you are a bad guy, buddy, and it’s high time you stop lying about it to yourself. He didn’t need that shit.

  Goddamn right I don’t. What he needed was to get out of this hellhole before he drove himself crazy.

  Garraty reached across the hole and pulled one of the piles of dirt toward him, raking in with his hands and trying to ignore the sound of it pattering like a gentle rain on the dead boy’s clothes and Mylar blanket. God, he could use a drink. Whatever buzz he’d had while he was digging—okay, let’s not kid ourselves here, my friend, it was maybe a little more than a buzz—was gone now and he was left alone in the crawlspace with his black thoughts and the boy he’d killed. It was time to get himself cleaned up, to ditch the booze and start over fresh. Take a little responsibility and go out Monday to look for—

  “Toomey,” the kid said in a thin, reedy voice that was more wheeze than words.

  Garraty froze. A world away, the faint discordant blast from a train horn rose in the night like the cry of a prehistoric beast.

  Imagined it, just like I thought I heard my name. Who wouldn’t be imagining things in my situation?

  The thought of exactly what his situation was right now hit him funny and he barked out a sharp peal of hysterical laughter that was a little bit like a shriek, high and feminine. The sound struck him as even more funny than his original thought had and he laughed harder, this time closer to normal, without the scrim of terror around the edges. The kid was dead alright, no one could survive those injuries.

  But what if he had spoken? What if he was still alive, trying to communicate? Maybe Toomey was his last name.

  The laughter withered in his throat, and silence ruled the cramped space. Garraty reached over and picked up the Maglite and shined it down into the hole.

  The boy’s eyes were half-open and filled with blood.

  “Oh Jesus,” Garraty said. He didn’t like the way his voice wavered. “Oh my fucking Christ in heaven.”

  The Maglite winked out and perfect darkness fell on them.

  Before he could stop himself, Garraty jerked up and away from the opening, certain that the boy was clambering out of the hole with his misshapen head and shit-filled pants. Coming for him. A nail sticking out of one of the joists raked across his left shoulder, tearing his shirt and digging a fiery furrow in his flesh, and he yelped. His head banged on the subfloor above and a shower of crawling things fell on him, skittering and skating on his skin and clothing in a frenzied race to get away from his flailing hands. A spider darted across his ear and onto his face, the tickle of its legs maddening in the inky blackness, and he slapped it away.

  Garraty bit back the scream trying to build in his chest, thumbing frantically at the button on the Mag. His heart thundered in his ears, and gooseflesh prickled his arms. Don’t lose it, he told himself. He’s dead, and you’re letting this shit get to you. Hold it together. Bugs aren’t going to hurt you. He blinked furiously in the darkness, trying in vain to see something. Anything. The blackness was complete. He shook the flashlight and tried the button again, his breath coming in short harsh gasps that sounded like barks. Nothing. It was as dead as the boy in the hole before him.

  The Mylar blanket crackled in the grave.

  Garraty moaned in a low voice and felt sudden warmth spreading in his crotch. Bugs. Gotta be the bugs. He shook the flashlight again, then gave it a solid whack into his open palm and when the light came back on, weak and flickery, and he nearly burst into tears. Cave crickets crept on the floor around him, leggy and spider-like. He ignored them and shined the light into the hole. The boy hadn’t moved, of that he was certain. He still lay on his side, head twisted at that awkward angle.

  Garraty exhaled in a shuddering whoosh. He resisted the urge to keep the light trained on the boy, daring him to move, and instead turned it on his shoulder, which burned like a motherfucker. The nail had plowed a row deep enough to plant corn in, he thought. Hot blood oozed from the gash and ran in a trickle down the back of his arm. A square steel head, black with age, jutted out from the joist on his left, shreds of skin hanging from it. Calgon, take me away, he thought, and his old friend the giggles came back, threatening to take him away for real.

  He didn’t think he’d like where he ended up.

  Toomey.

  Had the boy really spoken? Garraty wasn’t sure. Even if he had, the kid was past saving. They both knew that, right? The boy was dying—if he was even still alive—and all he needed from Garraty was a little nudge in the right direction. When you thought about it, it would almost be an act of mercy. The pain must be something awful. Trying to save the kid—Toomey—would mean pulling him out of the hole, dragging him back to the opening in the far wall, loading him into the back of the Prius, and driving him down to the hospital in town. Agony upon agony for him.

  And then the questions would begin, whether the kid lived or died. Why weren’t you watching the road, Mr. Garraty? Why were you out so late up there in the hills? Why were you driving so fast? Why didn’t you call 911? Why are you so dirt-caked and sweaty? Why does your breath smell like a brewery?

  Sure, he could come up with some good answers, maybe even some great ones, but the questions would keep coming, why, why, WHY? It would never end. Eventually, he had no doubt that they’d wear him down. That’s what the cops did. They badgered and badgered, just like your shrew of a wife did, until you couldn’t take it anymore and finally broke down and—

  Garraty heard the protesting squeal of old hinges as a door opened somewhere in the house above him. Then heavy footfalls as someone—something—approached. Who’s that trip-trapping over my bridge? The gait was odd. Off somehow. Thump. Scrape. Thump. Scrape. Unbidden, he heard the girlish voice of Tanner Frank in his head, full
of malicious glee. Old Jeremiah Barlowe and his bum leg. Shot to shit in the first World War! God, he had loved to tell that story, how the man who returned from Europe a wounded hero died a jabbering cannibal in this very crawlspace.

  The sound boomed in the tight space as the footsteps drew nearer. With each step, vibrations thrummed in his shoulders where they pressed against the low joists. Blood roared in his ears. In his mind’s eye, Garraty saw a sallow slumped shape shambling across the room with the bloodied wall he’d seen through the window earlier, dragging one twisted leg behind it. Its moon face was just a pale smudge against the still dark night, with dark hollows where eyes should have been. It moved with purpose, straight toward a spot in the center of the room where something on the floor had caught its attention.

  Old Jeremiah Barlowe, still watching over his charnel house.

  He became aware that the beam from the Mag had drifted up with his imagination, and now pointed at the subfloor. The weak beam twitched with his shaking hand. On the dreadful movie screen in his head, the spot in the room above glowed as if a spotlight shone beneath it, spraying light up through the gaps in the ancient flooring in shards of white that slashed the ceiling like the claws of some great beast. Garraty slid his thumb over to the button on the flashlight and pressed it, this time welcoming the darkness. Praying the thin light hadn’t been seen by the nightmare above.

  Something banged to the floor directly over his head and he bit the heel of his hand to keep from screaming. A sprinkling of dust fell across the back of his neck, soft as gossamer. Another thud, and he knew—knew—the slumped thing lay prone on the floor now, pallid face pressed to the rotting pine only a foot above him. Searching for him. If he turned the Mag on and looked up, what would he see looking back at him through the gapped wood?

  The temperature in the crawlspace seemed to have dropped ten degrees. Silence felt like a weight pressing down on him as he waited for the thing above him to do something. Anything. Nothing could be that still. Nothing alive, anyway. It was as if the thing had simply laid down and died.

  Or had already been dead.

  Or it was never there.

  Oh, it was there alright. He remembered the tingle of its footsteps through the joists against his shoulders, the tickle of dust on his neck.

  Just like you remember hearing something say your name, and the thing you thought you saw in the flashlight beam. Neither of those was real, and neither is this.

  Silence filled the crawlspace. He felt his heart slowing. If something were there it would have moved by now. The sounds coming through the floor had been amplified earlier, almost deafening. He’d hear the slightest movement.

  But you won’t hear anything because there’s nothing there.

  Garraty pressed his hands to the ground and raised himself slowly into the knell between the joists, thankful there was no light to show him any creepy-crawlies that remained up there. The nail that had torn the fabrics of his shirt and his body scraped at his shoulder again as he inched upward. Still there was no sound from the floor above. Thick spiderwebs crackled around his head and draped his face. His ear touched rough wood and he froze for a moment, then pressed it against the subfloor. Acrid dust tickled his throat as he drew in a breath and held it, and he sensed rather than saw the closeness of the joist brushing the tip of his nose.

  He heard nothing from the house.

  Cool fingers snaked around his right wrist then, and the scream Garraty had bitten back earlier now rushed out of him in a high, warbling rush. He jerked his arm away from the edge of the grave and that chilly grasp, and dropped to the powdery earth, the presence—or figment of his imagination—above forgotten. His breath came in great ragged gasps, like he’d been climbing a mountain. Scuttling backwards across the crawlspace, he didn’t stop until his ass fetched up against the bowed beam behind him.

  He couldn’t shake an image in his head: the kid, pulling himself out of his grave like something from a George Romero movie, then dragging himself through the darkness toward him, his one clawed hand clutching for purchase in the loose soil because his legs didn’t work, the splintered bones of his other arm digging a furrow in the dirt like the walk-behind planter his father used for corn and green bean seeds every spring in the back yard garden when Garraty was a boy. Blackening lips stretched wide in a feral grin. A hungry grin, just like the one Jeremiah Barlowe must have shown his pint-sized—scratch that, his snack-sized—victims in 1943.

  Place is fucking with me, he thought. Had the fingers on his wrist been real? There was no way the boy could have reached up from the bottom of the hole to touch him. Hell, Garraty had needed to hang over the edge just to be able to check the kid’s pockets, and his arms were close to a foot longer. It simply wasn’t possible. The kid would’ve had to sit up, and he was in no shape to do that. Never mind the split that cleaved his skull, what about that awful twist to his back, and the breaks in both arms? To top it off, he was laying on a Mylar blanket that made enough noise to wake the dead, no pun intended, ha ha ha, and Garraty hadn’t heard a sound before he felt the hand on his arm.

  Before he thought he felt the hand on his arm.

  Maybe the beer hadn’t been such a good idea after all. He didn’t feel drunk, but hell, maybe the adrenaline rush of being in this foul place had him fooled. Made him think he was sober when he wasn’t. A lot of beer mixed with a little imagination and suddenly he was a screaming ninny, like a teenaged girl in the haunted house the Jaycees set up in downtown Decatur every October. All it took was a little suggestion by his subconscious, and a distant blast from a train’s airhorn became squealing hinges, or a cave cricket on his wrist became the grip of a dead boy, or a raccoon lumbering across the room above became a ghostly Jeremiah Barlowe coming to check up on him. Hadn’t thought the same thing of a rat before?

  Garraty realized he’d left the light by the hole in his haste to get away. Jesus. He was more like a preteen girl in the Jaycees haunted house. He crept forward in the perfect blackness, hands running back and forth on the dirt in search of the metallic tube. Going slowly, taking his time. If he knocked the light into the grave with the dead boy and had to go in after it, feeling his way around the corpse, well, that might be the thing that sent him over the edge into loony land. No matter what his rational mind said.

  His fingers brushed the Maglite and he seized it. For a moment he wanted to kiss the damn thing, to rub it on his face like a purring kitten, reveling in its power to keep the demons at bay. When he pressed the button the flickery beam of pale light seemed as bright as the sun, and he nearly wept with relief. Garraty crept to the edge of the grave and shined the light down on the corpse.

  The boy stared back at him through half-lidded eyes.

  “Toomey,” he whispered.

  Garraty screamed again and before he could stop himself he snatched the ice scraper from the edge of the hole, raised it as high as he could overhead in the cramped area, and brought it down blade-first into the gaping maw atop the boy’s head. It made a wet, squelching sound as it sank in all the way to the handle. The faint cheesy smell he’d noticed earlier when he picked the boy up billowed up at him. Garraty yanked the scraper loose—pulling with it a large pinkish chunk of brain matter that flew off the chipped blade and vanished into the darkness behind him, hey hey Jeremiah, have a taste of Toomey—and drove it home savagely a second time, then a third, the Mylar blanket beneath the boy crackling merrily as the body shucked and jived from the impacts. The solid utensil struck bone on the final blow, deep in the kid’s head. Scraped the bottom of the barrel with that one, Garraty my man, he thought in a kind of detached wonder.

  “Oh Jesus fuck,” he moaned, and jerked his hand away from the ice scraper. The handle jutted out of the dead boy’s head like an exclamation point punctuating his last thought. His breath came in great jagged gasps. “Take me down to Bryce and lock me up with the crazies.”

  Or down to Holman to be locked up on death row until they put me down like a rabid
dog.

  What the fuck was wrong with him? Elementary, my dear Watson. It didn’t take one of the rocket scientists from NASA over in Huntsville to answer that one. The house had gotten into him. Or Jeremiah Barlowe.

  Or maybe this is the kind of person you really are.

  Garraty shook his head. The place was fucking with him, of that he was sure. Was the voice in his head even his own? He wasn’t completely sure anymore. But what he was sure is that what was done was done, and he couldn’t change that. He just had to live with himself, and hope that in time he could put all this behind him. Get going on that fresh start he’d been promising himself.

  He leaned the Mag against the nearby pier, then reached out and dragged a mound of dirt into the hole. He followed it with another, and another after that. The boy never made a sound, though the Mylar blanket had plenty to say as the dirt piled higher. He worked at a fever pitch, forcing his mind to stay elsewhere—anywhere other than on the task at hand, and what he’d done with the scraper. Despite the effort his forehead stayed dry. The temperature had dropped even more and now the crawlspace felt as cold as, well, as a grave. The thought raised the ghost of a smile on his lips.

  The hole filled quickly, and soon fresh dirt rose in a lone hump where it had been. His nails were ragged and bleeding, and dust and dirt seemed to coat every part of him. But the deed was done and it didn’t matter now if young Mr. Toomey had been alive or if Garraty imagined it all.

  And that’s that.

  He shone the light around the area, looking for any evidence of his presence. Nothing but the tire iron and freshly mounded dirt, which would settle and sink soon enough as the boy... diminished. Good. Garraty wriggled his way back to the bowed beam and slunk under it, turning around as soon as he could. This time it was less about seeing the exit and more about not seeing the new swell in the earth behind him and everything it signified. He began to crawl toward the indigo rectangle.