Charnel House

by Anderson, Fred

  On the way to the living room, Garraty detoured into the kitchen. The beer waited on the counter, warm as the piss he’d just squirted all over the floor in the bathroom. He could see the remaining cans in the box, stacked like cordwood. Inviting him to take one, just one. A beer would take the edge off the frisson of fear he still felt. Probably clear some of that cotton out of his head, too. Help him think clearly, maybe figure out what the fuck was going on with the dead kid watching him from across the street.

  Knock it off, Garraty my man. You’re turning over a new leaf, remember?

  But the can of Pabst already seemed to be in his hand. He didn’t know how it had gotten there; he’d only been looking. A little warm, a lot comforting. It really would help. Besides, it was only one beer. He popped the tab and chugged until the can was empty, then he crushed it in his fist and slammed it into the trash. Two points. His eyes watered and his throat burned and he felt a massive belch building in his stomach, but the beer already seemed to have doused the candle-flame of worry. He plucked another from the case and went into the living room.

  The old woman had returned to her book, the cigarette dangling from her mouth. A thin streamer of smoke curled up and around the halo of her wild gray hair. The boy was still there. He looked exactly the same, except he had turned a little so that he was now facing the window near the door of Garraty’s trailer, where Garraty stood peering through a half-inch gap. It was like the kid had some kind of freaky x-ray vision and had watched Garraty make his way through the trailer to the room where he was now.

  Or like he’s not really there, and you’re imagining every bit of this, the same way you imagined all those things last night.

  He took a pull from the can and considered this.

  The boy mouthed Toomey at Garraty, and watched him through half-lidded eyes caked with dried blood.

  The woman turned a page in her book.

  Garraty finished the beer in one big gulp and let the blind fall into place. Fuck it. He knew the kid wasn’t really there, knew he couldn’t be there, but if his mind was going to insist on playing tricks on him he was going to prove it once and for all. Put the dead back to rest, so to speak. The deadbolt snickered back when he twisted the knob, and he pulled the door open and stepped out onto his homemade steps. The kid hadn’t gone anywhere. Out here, Garraty could hear the soft mutter as he chanted his one-word soliloquy, but the more he thought about it the more the words seemed to be coming from inside his head rather than across the way.

  Toomey. Toomey. Toomey.

  Even more evidence that it was his mind fucking with him. Garraty tossed the empty beer can back into the trailer—he didn’t want to give the old bat over there any ammunition—and descended the stairs and started toward the boy. The concrete pad was warm under his bare feet. Honeysuckle was in bloom somewhere nearby, and the sweet scent filled the air. He felt the weight of the boy’s flat dead gaze on him. For a figment of his imagination, he sure looked—

  “Joe Garraty, you get some clothes on or I’m calling Sheriff Langston!” the old woman shrieked, and Garraty blinked stupidly over at her. He understood the individual words just fine, but their collective meaning was having a little trouble penetrating the thick layers of cotton batting that still seemed to be so tightly wound around his head. She was launching herself from the rocker now, the paperback tumbling forgotten through the air. “This ain’t that kind of neighborhood, there’s nice people here! Keep away from me, you pervert!”

  Understanding coalesced in the cool fog of his mind as the gist of her words came together, and his eyes dropped to look down at himself in a dreamy kind of slow motion. He wore nothing but yesterday’s tighty whities, only they weren’t really so tight or white anymore. The front was yellowed from last night’s pissapalooza when he hit the kid with the car, and the briefs were so old there was plenty of sag in the elastic. His balls were practically hanging out, jangling around against his legs like a couple of kiwis in an old sock as he crossed the lane. Who needs nightmares about forgetting to get dressed when you can to it for real? he thought in stuporous wonder. What a sight he must be, lurching toward her trailer in his skivvies, one hand wrapped in bloody paper towels and duct tape!

  He looked up at the gray-haired woman, thinking I’m no pervert, lady, this ain’t what it looks like, but before he could even open his mouth to say anything red flowers bloomed in his vision and bright agony exploded in his right temple as an atomic bomb went off on the side of his head. He staggered back a step, and then he was falling with the word stroke ping-ponging around inside his skull, bouncing off the walls of his brainpan. He hit the pavement ass-first, teeth clacking together like castanets. Instinct brought his hands down to keep him from falling all the way over and really cracking his skull, and when his left palm smacked into the asphalt it felt like he’d plunged his arm into a hornet’s nest, all the way to the elbow. He threw his head back and shrieked in raw bestial agony. Over the roar of blood in his ears he heard the tinkle of glass breaking and then the world went fuzzy for a while as Garraty and his consciousness fought to stay married.

  Something was running down his face. He raised a hand that seemed disconnected, like it was tethered to a helium balloon that lifted it from the road to his temple, and cautiously pressed it to the side of his head. Even that soft touch brought a wave of pain so strong his stomach clenched and he thought for a moment he was going to upchuck warm beer all over his pale, flabby legs. Each beat of his heart delivered a throb that began in his head and ended in his knee by way of the palm of his left hand, only to him the normal lubDUB lubDUB lubDUB the rhythm sounded like tooMEY tooMEY tooMEY. When he lowered his hand to look, whatever was on his fingers was clear. Not blood. Cold.

  Shards of wet glass lay on the pavement around him, sparkling in the afternoon light. Thick glass, like you might find in a heavy tumbler. Motherfucker. The old woman had thrown her iced tea at him, just reared back and let loose like Sandy Fucking Koufax sending a fastball right down the center. Runner take your base, he thought. Whee!

  “That’s for being a dirty old man,” the crone cawed, and cackled her raspy laugh. “Now get up out of the street ’fore I come down there and really show you what for. We got kids living around here!”

  Kids.

  The boy.

  He ignored the laughing woman for a moment and looked to the spot next to the stoop, where the dead boy had been standing in the bed of pansies a moment before. The flowerbed was empty, as Garraty had expected it to be, because the dead boy was in the ground under the Barlowe house. Maybe his overactive imagination was laying somewhere on the asphalt with the broken glass now. Good riddance.

  Garraty closed his eyes. God, but every part of him hurt! He couldn’t concentrate for shit with the throbbing, and he didn’t have any meds for pain here outside of the aspirin and Tylenol PM. Back at home there was a whole cabinet of good stuff, Lorcets and Percocets and even a handful of oxycodone tablets Tina got when she had her gallbladder taken out. She was religious about saving that shit—for a rainy day, she always said, even though that rainy day never seemed to come—and practically kept enough around to open her own drugstore if she wanted to. But that was all the way across town, and Garraty knew he wouldn’t be welcome, even if he showed up sporting a lump on the side of his head to rival the one on the boy he’d buried barely twelve hours ago.

  “I’m calling the sheriff myself,” he said, but his voice didn’t sound nearly as defiant as he’d wanted. She’d really done a number on him with the glass. Maybe he’d have a concussion to go with the tetanus. “Get you for battery. Maybe even attempted murder.”

  “I wish you would!”

  He wouldn’t, of course. That would be even more stupid than wandering out of the trailer in his underwear had been. He still needed to take care of the Prius; he hadn’t even looked at it yet to see how much visible evidence there was on the front bumper. The last thing he wanted was some Deputy Dawg sniffing around here because of hi
s dispute with the woman across the way. What happened to your hand, Mr. Garraty? Why are you limping? And why is there blood all over your car?

  No. What he needed was to get his ass back inside the house for awhile. Let her calm down, then come back out here and clean up the car. In the meantime, maybe a drink would help his head. Something more than beer. There was a bottle of vodka chilling in the freezer that would do the trick. He got up slowly, moving like he was closer to seventy than fifty, keeping his wounded hand close to his chest. When he stood straight—or as close to straight as he could get—everything went fuzzy again, and he nearly lost his balance. Closing his eyes helped. He waited for the feeling to pass. Once it had, he shuffled back to his trailer in silence. To her credit, his neighbor held her tongue.

  At the door, he turned and looked back across the street. The old woman watched him, a disgusted sneer curling her upper lip. Standing on the concrete pad where her behemoth old Cadillac baked in the sun, the dead boy regarded him through half-lidded eyes crusted over with dried blood. Hello Toomey, my old friend. You’re back to stare and judge again.

  Garraty raised his right hand and extended his middle finger, grinning through the pounding in his head and hand. Fuck the both of them. He went into the hot trailer and shut the door behind him. The vodka waited.

  11

  He was back in the crawlspace of the Barlowe house. The darkness pressed in on him like a great beast, its weight crushing the breath out of him. Somewhere nearby were the hole and the dead boy lying on his Mylar shroud, but Garraty didn’t dare reach out to feel. Something else was in the darkness with them, some slumped thing with a pale smudge of face and dark hollows for eyes. Close. He sensed its nearness, smelled the odor of its corruption. He didn’t dare move. If he were to stretch out one hand to find the grave and instead touch the cool slate flesh of the other...

  Something brushed his face and Garraty bawled like a terrified calf separated from its mother. Fingers, his mind jabbered. Bone fingers. He tried to scoot away from the touch and bumped into something hard and unyielding. One of the old brick piers. The blackness was perfect. He had no idea where he was, no clue which way to go to escape.

  He could hear the thing chittering, insect-like. The air grew colder and those fingers plucked at his clothes, picking at him the way the sagging beam had when he scooted under it. Whatever shared the darkness with him seemed to have no problem seeing in it. Garraty rolled to the left to escape, sending up clouds of powdery dust that stung his blind eyes and coated his throat.

  Still the thing came toward him. Something clittered across the brick pier and in the eye of his mind Garraty saw a skeletal hand grabbing at the worn support, using it to pull the slumped shape forward. He rolled again—anything to keep those bony fingers from touching him again—only this time the ground vanished and he spilled into the hole, landing on the dead boy. Fetid gas belched from the mouth of the corpse, washing over his face in a cool rush, and he gagged. The boy’s arms snapped up and around his shoulders, pulling him close. Overhead, the thing that had been following him chuckled, delighted. Garraty struggled to free himself from the embrace, but the harder he fought, the more entangled he seemed to be. The dead boy tightened his grip, bringing their faces closer and closer.

  Garraty moaned when the icy lips pressed against his ear.

  “Toomey,” the dead boy whispered, lover-close, his grave-cold breath chilling Garraty’s neck.

  Garraty jerked awake with a start.

  He was on the couch in the living room, still in his underwear. Pale pink light from outside fell through the blinds and infused the room with a soft glow, but he couldn’t tell if it was still Friday evening or if he’d slept the night through to the morning. The way his head felt he thought it was probably the latter. He’d been pretty drunk. He sat up and got his first real look at the room. Empty beer cans lay scattered across the turd-colored carpet like spent casings at a shooting range. The dry vodka bottle rested on the back of the couch, its cap nowhere in sight. He thought maybe he’d been at the blinds again, peeking out in a drunken haze for the dead boy or old woman. His head ached, either from getting brained by the tumbler earlier or a hangover. He didn’t know which. Probably both.

  When he stood the room rocked to and fro like the deck of a ship on stormy seas, and a wave of nausea rolled over him. He wondered if he had a concussion from the impact of the glass. Wasn’t nausea a symptom of that? He walked slowly down the hall to the bathroom—at least his knee felt better—using the wall for guidance.

  The fluorescent hum made him think of insects buzzing in his head and in his dreams, and he remembered the cool rubbery feel of the dead boy’s lips on his ear. Garraty shivered and tried to put such thoughts out of his mind as he emptied his bladder. The nightmare had been so real. That had to be the booze, he thought. Drunk dreams were the worst. This had been a monumental fuckup, one he couldn’t repeat if he expected to find a decent job. A good HR representative could spot a drinker a mile away, from the bloodshot eyes to the too-fresh breath. He needed to get his shit together before Monday. Not that he’d get any interviews that quickly, but it never hurt to be optimistic. With the way you could apply for jobs instantly now on the computer, it stood to reason that an aggressive company could respond just as fast.

  He flushed the toilet and took a look at himself in the mirror. Christ, this white light was harsh. Dark circles spread beneath his eyes, and he thought he’d picked up a couple of new lines in his forehead. He rubbed one hand against his cheek. Thick stubble—more salt than pepper these days, he noted ruefully—and rumpled bed hair made him look like a bum. All he needed was a bindle and a shitty fedora to complete the package. A mottled blue-green bruise crept out of his hairline near his right temple, where the woman across the street had beaned him with the iced tea glass. It looked like a patch of mold growing on his face, he thought. Strange color. He touched it gingerly and was pleased to find the pain wasn’t that bad. Maybe the old crone hadn’t hurt him as badly as he first thought. He needed a shower, but it would have to wait. There was something else he wanted to do first.

  Garraty fetched the bottle of aspirin from the medicine drawer and tapped four out into his good hand. He popped them into his mouth and dry swallowed them, grimacing at the bitter tang they left behind. His stomach clenched in protest, and hot bile rose in the back of his throat. The paper towel bandage had torn loose from his left hand, he saw, and all that remained were a few sticky threads from the duct tape. The wound looked better. Not as angry. The flesh was knitting together nicely. Liquor. It does a body good.

  He left the bathroom and crossed the hall to his bedroom. His phone was on the dresser, where he’d left it when he got home from dealing with the accident. The missing kid ought to be all over the news by now. Garraty wanted to know his name. Was Toomey a John? A Richard? Or was he something less classical and more modern, like a Brandon or Jesse? Maybe a news story would explain what he’d been out doing in the middle of the night, and would surely have a picture of what he looked like before the car had done so much damage to his head. Garraty wanted to see him. He just wished he could do his search on a real computer instead of his cell—peck-typing on the tiny screen was an exercise in frustration—but like everything else good in his life, the computer was at the house.

  Before he could activate the phone someone knocked on the front door. Garraty froze. The jig is up. Someone saw you. The projector in his head whirred to life. There was a sheriff’s deputy at the door, standing straight and tall, his wide-brimmed hat keeping the morning sun out of his eyes. One hand resting casually on the butt of his service weapon in case the jackhole suspect inside the shitty trailer tried to give him any trouble. Maybe it was the same one Garraty had seen sitting in his patrol car at the train tracks in the fog, waiting for the midnight freight run to pass through Belleville on its way to—

  The knock came again, harder this time. Chill out. No one knows. They can’t. Garraty set the phone on th
e dresser and went down the hall. In the living room, he pulled back the edge of one of the cheap blinds and peeked out. Luis Mendoza stood on the bottom step, looking expectantly up at the door. His white pickup was parked in the lane just behind the Prius—the Prius he still hadn’t cleaned, he realized. Alarm stabbed through his gut. Had Luis noticed anything unusual about the car? The imprint of a boy’s face on the bumper, perhaps, or a spattering of blood across the hood?

  The handyman raised his hand to knock a third time.

  “Hang on a second, man, I just got up. Let me get some clothes on,” Garraty called. Hiding from Luis would have done him no good; the man had a key. If he wanted in, he was coming in.

  Garraty glanced at the room with a critical eye. Luis liked beer every bit as much as he did, but Garraty suspected his fastidious little hombre had never awakened amidst a mess of empty containers like this. Best do a little picking up before he opened the door. Luis was probably here because the old lady had said something to him. It wouldn’t do to look like a boozehound any more than he already did. He snatched the vodka bottle off the back of the couch and carried it into the kitchen so he could get the trashcan for the Pabst empties. What he found there stopped him cold.

  The trash overflowed with empty cans, and two more empty liter Popov bottles peeked out at him from the heap. What the fuck? He didn’t have two more bottles of vodka. And for that matter, there were at least fifteen cans in the next room, and another thirty or more here. There had only been, what, a little less than a case left yesterday? He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. I went out while I was drunk, and I don’t remember it. How many people had spotted him driving around in his murder-mobile? What had they seen... and who had they told? An instant later, a second thought: I should be dead after drinking so much in a single night. No wonder I can’t remember.