by Curran, Tim
Henry grinned as he remembered that night.
Exhuming the old witch beneath the wan light of a thin-edged moon. Scattering her bones like jackstraw in the night. Relieving himself on her, anointing the sacred cow in piss. Later, he had come back and gathered her bones up and dumped them back in the vault so a scavenging dog didn’t make off with one of Granny’s femurs. Something like that could cause trouble… raise questions.
And Henry had always been so devilishly careful.
Gramma Reese surely had not been the first he’d exhumed. Nor the last. There’d been plenty back in the good old days when it was all just good, clean fun. Not like now. Not serious business.
Behind him, Worm was worrying at the girl.
(she’ll need discipline again, a firm hand)
“Leave her alone,” Henry snapped at her.
Worm knew how to obey. He didn’t like to be stern with her, but sometimes he had to be. Left unsupervised, Worm could get out of hand. She would bite the girl and Henry didn’t want that.
“Here’s what we’ve been waiting for, Lisa,” he said in a lewd whisper, throwing open the unearthed coffin. “A nice quiet place for you to rest.”
9
Sometime later: a sound of tapping, thudding.
Lisa Coombes opened her eyes, closed them. Opened them again, saw only darkness. There was an aching throb in her head and a sticky, warm wetness at the back of her neck. Thoughts raced through her mind. Gray thoughts, shapeless thoughts lacking both form and content.
Thud.
The sound registered, but made very little sense. Someone knocking? She was dreaming… she had to be dreaming.
Thud.
Blurry memories ran through her head. A road. A man. A doctor. A ride. A maniac. That insane girl. Her house… then… then she just couldn’t remember.
Barely conscious, her fingers reached out blindly and touched… satin. Mildewed folds of satin knitted together, quilted. Rotting satin that came apart in her fingers like moth-eaten cloth. She couldn’t lift her knees up more than five or six inches. When she tried to sit up, her face pressed into the unyielding caress of moist, ragged silk.
And that stink… that hideous stink.
A box, her mind screamed through the fog, you’re in a box.
A coffin.
A casket.
Her lips peeled open in a warm scream and then everything went black again, her concussion getting the better of her.
10
Tara managed to drag herself from the kitchen after a time.
But like maintaining her sanity, it wasn’t easy.
Nothing was easy or even real any longer. It couldn’t be. Her brain had now locked down quite firmly and refused to accept anything. Even the most rudimentary of sensory responses went out the window.
Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was insanity. Maybe it was both.
Her mind was short-circuiting, thoughts jumbling, as it tried to react to something the likes of which it could not properly process. Occasionally, some lucid and logical thing would occur to her… but these were few and far between. She was crawling on her hands and knees, wriggling along like a slug, soiled with blood, with vomit, with her own urine. Her mind stumbled along with no linear sense and this at a time when she most desperately needed structure.
It was pointless to reason this out.
Best just to breathe.
What I need is a gun, she decided. Just in case the bad man comes back. Then I can shoot him. Shoot him down in cold blood. Cold blood. Stuff I put my hand into surely wasn’t cold, cooling, but not cold. And not hot. Not hot like the summer had been, hot hot hot. Glad it’s just about over. What a long hot one it was. We had a strike at Valve-Tec, the machine shop. It was a bad one. Busy as hell at the Union Hall whenever there was a strike and how am I supposed to put in overtime when I’m at the Starlight just about every night? A gun. Yes, I need a gun. The bad man hadn’t used a gun… maybe a knife or an axe… Christ, another school year and school clothes for Lisa and it’ll cost a fortune and what if he’s still in the house, the bad man? Laughing and laughing and laughing, lookit the crazy bitch crawling around, dragging her ass on the carpet like a poisoned dog I ought to slit her fucking throat pull her head off like the cork from a bottle and put it in the drying rack with the other one that silly crazy fucking snatch don’t she know I got her sister don’t she realize what I’m going to do to her oh no oh no everything’s going black fuzz blowing black fuzz oh God oh God…
11
Henry patted the earth down, satisfied with a job well done.
But there was no time to lounge about and enjoy his special little world this night. Or what was entombed beneath his feet. Too much work to be done and precious little time to do it.
Wasn’t that always the way?
A man just never had the time to appreciate his own great works.
He checked his watch. After midnight.
(quit lollygagging, do you hear me? there’s work to be done while the moon is still high snap to it!)
“Yes, mother,” Henry said.
12
When Tara’s eyes came open again, she wondered why her bed was so hard. But it wasn’t her bed. Her cheek was pressed against the rough nap of the living room floor. Then she knew.
She knew everything.
Trembling like a wet kitten, she pulled herself up to a sitting position. Immediately, the room spun and she went down again, striking her head against a chair arm. There was an agonizing hollow popping that made her see constellations. If nothing else, the pain cleared her mind.
Brought everything home with nightmarish clarity.
And this she did not need.
Or want.
But she knew she had to act, had to do something, had to quit losing it and slipping into la-la land.
Wiping her lips off with the back of her hand, feeling the crusted blood at her palms, she pulled herself up. Made herself stand. She was not in a good way either physically or psychologically. The first thing she had to was to get the hell out of here. Make it to the Carroll’s or the Petersen’s. Better yet, over to Pauly Costello’s place. Costello was a mean, ornery old bastard. He’d been a war hero in Vietnam and was still tough as steer hide. Besides, he had guns. Lots of guns.
Where was her cell?
In her purse?
Tara steadied herself, refusing to truly process that body in the kitchen and what was written on the fridge in blood and what it all would mean to her and her life in general. That was for later.
Get going. Get the police.
Slowly, with great effort, she started to move. She knew she was probably in shock. She found the little table in the entry. Her purse. She dug out her cell, leaving sticky red smears on it. She found her cigarettes and tried to get one in her mouth while attempting to dial 911 and dropped first the cell, then the cigarette. She tried a second and third cigarette and dropped them both, then threw the pack against the wall.
She picked up her cell.
She had to use it because the other phone was in the kitchen and that would mean going back in there, into that fucking slaughterhouse, and nothing on earth could compel her to do so. She kept trying to dial the cell, but her fingers were numb and stupid and it was like trying to type with boxing gloves on. She threw the cell, too, knowing that she had to get to the neighbors. The guy with the guns.
GUN CONTROL IS HITTING WHAT YOU AIM AT.
That’s what the bumper sticker on Costello’s rusty Ford F-150 said. Tara had always thought it to be the paradigm of deluded right wing conservatism, the type of thinking that remained firmly entrenched in brainwashed, archaic values as the world moved forever forward, grinding the old school firmly beneath its heel. Crazy thinking. But sometimes you needed crazy bastards to win the war. Or at least to wage the first battle.
The door.
She grasped the door knob by its tarnished brass handle, feeling a deadly weight in her head, sure that the bad man would be waiting out t
here.
Then the phone rang in the kitchen.
And kept ringing.
Ignore it and get out of here, Tara thought.
But then she turned and ran into the kitchen, having to step through the blood and see the butchered remains of Margaret, her head filled with that wet, fleshy stink of raw meat. As she reached for the phone, she saw something she hadn’t before: the back door was ajar, a series of dirty footprints and scuff mark leading from it to the blood and remains.
She practically tore the cordless from the wall.
“LISTEN TO ME, WHOEVER THIS IS!” she shouted into the receiver. “THERE’S BEEN A MURDER HERE AND I THINK MY SISTER HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? THIS IS NOT A FUCKING JOKE! CALL THE POLICE! THIS IS FOR REAL! CALL THE FUCKING POLICE—”
And through the thunder of her panicked voice, she heard a low, awful, evil voice speak to her from some dead and dark place:
“I’ve got your sister.”
Maybe there was something relevant she should have said. But when her lips parted, all she managed was, “What? What the hell did you just say?”
“You heard me,” that vile voice sang out. “I’ve got Lisa. I’ve got that little cunt tucked away high and dry.”
For a moment, Tara felt hopeless… bovine, stupid. But it didn’t last long. Something dirt-mean and horrendously pissed-off clawed right up from her core. “Listen to me, you sick little freak! If you’ve got her, then you better fucking let her go right now! Do you hear me? Because if you don’t, if you don’t—”
“Shut up!”
“You shut up!” Tara cried into the phone. “You shut that fucking pisshole you call a mouth or I’ll fucking tear your balls out through your fucking throat! Let her go! Goddamn you, let her go!”
“SHUT UP!” the voice raged, all razors and sharp edges. “SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU GODDAMN WHORE YOU CUNT YOU DIRTY SICK FORNICATING BITCH! SHUT THE HELL UP BEFORE I SEND YOU HER FUCKING HEAD IN A HATBOX! DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THE FUCK I AM SAYING? I’LL KILL HER! I’LL SLICE HER UP! I’LL FUCKING CUT HER STOMACH OUT AND FUCK HER CORPSE! GET IT? GET IT? DO YOU FUCKING GET IT, CUNT?”
Tara got it, all right.
The meaning was perfectly clear. Her skin went hot, then cold. Bursts of light like cool, dim neon flickered irregularly. Her guts felt like they wanted to crawl up the back of her throat. But she got it. She got it so good that there was a sharp pain in her chest and she almost passed right out then and there.
She glanced at the caller ID. NO INFORMATION, it read. So he was smart.
“What do you want?” she sobbed. “God in heaven, what do you want?”
There was silence then. A drawn-out impossible silence that seemed to go on and on as if this creep, this fucking psycho had not really decided yet exactly what he wanted. She could hear him breathing fast and labored like he was excited. And that just seemed totally out of place because only living things breathed and he was a monster. Things like him lived in graveyards, in miasmic swamps, they skittered in black sewers. But they were not real. They were not human beings.
“What do I want?”
Tara controlled her own breathing. Locked her fear away. “Yes. What do you want?” She spoke calmly, patiently, her voice even. “What is it you want? I’ll do anything you ask, just please don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my sister. You can have money, anything. You can even have me… but don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her.”
She could hear him smacking his lips with a moist, slopping sound. It made her physically ill. Like the sound of a stomach being pumped.
“I don’t want money.”
“No?”
“No. And I sure as hell don’t want you.”
“Then what? Just tell me.”
“We’re going to play a game, Tara. A special game I thought of. Only I know the rules and if you don’t do exactly what I tell you, you lose. And if you lose… if you don’t follow the rules… Lisa dies. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Tara had all she could do not to pass right out. She had to clench down hard with her teeth to keep from doing so. The throbbing pulse in her throat was like the beat of a drum. “Yes, yes.”
More breathing. “First off, I want you to do exactly what I tell you.”
“Yes, yes! Whatever you say!”
“Don’t patronize me, cunt.”
“I’m sorry! I—”
“Just shut up and listen. Because this is how it works.” He smacked his lips again and she shuttered. The sound of an oyster being tongued from its shell. “First off, don’t call the police. This is strictly between you and me and your sister. No cops. And no friends and no relatives either. Strictly hush-hush. You understand?”
Tara told him that she did.
“And don’t even dream of fucking with me, all right? I’m watching you all the time. If the cops come over there or I see you at the police station, she dies. We don’t bargain, she dies. Is that nice and simple?”
“Yes.”
“And before you get any ideas about getting the law and tracing this call… wise up. Got it?”
“Of course. But my sister, Lisa—”
“Lives as long as you do what I say.”
Oh, dear God, what was this animal up to? What was his game? Was Lisa really safe or had he been beating her? Raping her? Torturing her? Or had he already done something much, much worse?
“You haven’t hurt her?”
“No. Not yet.”
“And you won’t?”
He laughed then. Cold, bitter cackling, a disembodied sound like an echo in an empty house. “Just do what you’re told.”
“Yes, yes. I will. Tell me.”
“The first thing I want you to do is to clean that place up. Clean up the blood, get rid of the… the body. Bag it up and bury it somewhere no one will ever find it. Can you do that?”
Tara did not think she could. “Yes.”
“This is how the game starts.”
“Lisa—”
“Then get going. Your sister doesn’t have much time left.”
“But—”
“Tara. Don’t waste my time. Don’t waste Lisa’s.” His tone was ominous, even worse than before. “Tara, I’ve buried your sister alive.”
13
Henry Borden laid in the cellar where it was cool and dark.
He remembered other times in the cool darkness. He remembered the man standing over him, the man who had caught him laying with the dead. The man who was his father who just stood there with that dim, faraway look in his eyes, his face suddenly very old, very worn like something that had been used too much. Those eyes had been shocked, then they looked angry… no, not angry, disgusted. Sickened. The mind behind them turning in febrile circles now that it had been shown the unspeakable, the unnamable.
“What in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing?” the voice had said with a sharp, resounding impact like a knife stuck in a wall. “You… you… you can’t do this… you can’t be doing this thing… it’s obscene, it’s awful… it’s… it’s… it’s FILTH!”
Trembling, naked, Henry just laid there, clutching the bloodless white corpse of the girl to him.
(she’s mine all mine you can’t take her from me)
(mine… MINE)
He wanted to say: “No, no… it’s not what you think…” Because that’s what people on TV did when discovered in a compromising position. But he did not say it because now that the truth was laid bare, he did not want to dirty it with lies because it was exactly what his father was thinking.
There had been a smooth swishing as his father’s belt escaped its loops. The snap of leather. Then the belt was coming down again and again, striping Henry with purple contusions. It did not stop until his father was sweating and moaning, tears washing down his red-hued face.
(I LOVE her can’t you see that I LOVE her)
His father left him.
Henry clutched the dead girl, whimpering.
Three days later his fat
her would die. He would not speak of the shame his son brought upon him. Disgraced, humiliated, and revolted to his core, he would go to his grave silently, thankfully.
14
Tara screamed or moaned or simply gasped; she could not be sure later. Only that it felt like everything inside her had been drained out at once. Her knees hit the floor, a black rushing sound filling her head. I’ve buried your sister alive.
She has air, Tara. As long as you cooperate. But when you don’t… when… you… don’t…
Hurry, Tara… the clock is running.
The line went dead.
And so did Tara.
15
Henry Borden sat in his house, in the dark. Something black and deadly slithering around in his belly. He pulled the voice-activated digital voice recorder from inside his coat and dropped it on the table. He found himself motionless. More so, frozen with inaction. There really was nothing more that needed doing… not yet, anyway… but still he felt he should be doing something.
In the darkness, he thought it all over.
Although he pretty much figured that he had Tara Coombes by the short and curlies, there was always the chance she might turn on him. Panic and call the police. He wasn’t terribly worried about that, but hell, you just never knew with women.
(you just can’t trust them, henry, evil to the core, every one of them like snakes, just like snakes, turn your back on them and they’ll sink their venomous fangs right into your neck! they have that slit between their legs and it is the root of all worldly evil, they were thrown out of eden because of that slit, henry, because of what they liked to do with it)
His mother’s words. She might have done a lot of terrible things to him, but she never lied. You could give the queen bitch that much. She was honest.
Henry’s father used to say that the most dangerous thing in the world was the hole between a woman’s legs.