by Ike Hamill
“Kitty?” Lynne called at the next junction. This time the cat started growling continuously. It only paused to draw air. Lynne used the sound as her beacon.
Something muttered back at the cat and Lynne stopped. Her breath came up short, and Lynne panted shallow, quiet breaths as she tried to control her panic. She raised the stun gun and backed up a half-step while she tried to take a deep breath so she could slow her pounding heart. She wanted to be able to hear—to listen past her own heartbeat and the cat’s growling—so she could make out the muttering voice.
Finally, she was able to make out a bit—“…away and leave a poor old woman alone to sleep.”
Lynne crept forward, towards the cat and the voice. She thought if she could be quiet enough, the person wouldn’t hear her coming. Lynne’s nerves were tempered by the helpless, grandmotherly quality of the voice. The owner of that voice didn’t sound strong enough to be a menace. Lynne moved quietly, but the old woman spotted her approaching flashlight.
“Who’s there?” called a frightened, frail voice.
“Lynne rounded the last corner and found that the tunnel came to a dead end. A small lantern lit up the end of the tunnel, but its weak glow was trumped by Lynne’s lights. Squinting against the flashlight, a gray-haired woman huddled against the far wall. Between Lynne and the old woman, the cat crouched, growling at the hag.
“What are you doing here?” asked Lynne.
“What are you?” the woman asked back. “I’m just sitting here. Is that your cat?”
“Maybe,” said Lynne.
“Well get it out of here. I hate cats, they carry all kinds of fleas and disease. Unclean animals,” said the woman. She still held up a hand in front of her face to ward off the glare of Lynne’s flashlight and headlamp.
Lynne lowered her hands and then remembered to raise the one with the stun gun back up, just in case. She pointed her headlamp up towards the ceiling and then looked down her nose at the old woman.
“Thank you,” the woman croaked. She sounded tired and defeated. Lynne’s heart went out to her. She was reminded of her own grandmother. “Can’t you just get that cat out of here?”
“What are you doing down here?” asked Lynne.
“I live down here,” the woman replied.
“Ew,” said Lynne. She glanced around at the clay walls and figured the woman must have a more suitable place fixed up somewhere, if she was even telling the truth. “And what do you have against cats?”
“I don’t know,” said the old woman. “They’re just so slinky and boney. I played with one when I was a kid and it was always sliding around everywhere. I just don’t like them.”
“Huh,” said Lynne. “Well you’re going to have to come with me,” she said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said the woman. She was squatting in the corner and she hunched over a bit more, collapsing more into a ball with a face peering up. Lynne considered her options. She didn’t want to touch the old woman—her clothes were disgusting and her ratty, tangled hair looked like it harbored multitudes of infestations.
“I’ll leave you down here with the cat then,” said Lynne.
“He’ll get bored some day,” said the old woman. “You don’t get to be my age without being able to survive common pests,” she spat at the cat who hissed in response.
Lynne took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She didn’t detect anything supernatural about the woman—no Sparkle—but the whole situation was weird enough that Jenko would doubtless want a chance to interview the hag himself. The tunnels made her feel exposed. There were too many branches and turns and corpses in the walls. Lynne wanted to get out of there, but wanted the woman to go too.
“Okay, come on,” said Lynne. She stabbed the stun gun in the direction of the old woman. “Don’t make me use this,” she said. She tried to sound threatening but even to her own ears the threat sounded more like a question.
“I’m not afraid of that thing,” said the old woman. She pulled her torn cloak around her knees, and looked like she was settling in to wait things out. After scratching her face casually with her long fingernails, the hag jammed her pinky up her nose and began rooting around.
Lynne frowned. She took a step towards the woman and bent her knees so she could pick up her cat. To free up a hand, she tucked the flashlight in the armpit that held the stun gun. The old woman didn’t flinch; she didn’t even seem to be paying attention to Lynne. She pulled her old strings of hair in front of her craggy face. Lynne was close enough to smell the woman. She smelled like hot sweat and chicken soup. The two smells combined to form a stink akin to urine.
Lynne picked up the growling cat. He was rigid in her hand, like a coiled spring. His growl wavered as she adjusted her grip and jostled the cat. Lynne noticed that the old woman cowered before the raised cat, like she was magnetically repelled by him.
“Let’s go,” said Lynne.
“No.”
“Come on. I’m done screwing around,” said Lynne. She pointed the cat towards the old woman and moved a half-step closer.
“No! Get that think away from me!” yelled the hag. She shuffled further back towards the corner. Lynne circled to drive her forward. “What’d I ever do to you?” demanded the old woman.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” said Lynne. She didn’t know if that was actually true or not. “We just need to interview you, for the thing. You know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Well, get going. You’ll find out,” Lynne said. Her bluff wasn’t working, so she led with the cat.
The old woman skittered out of the way of the outstretched cat. Lynne almost had to touch her with it to get her out of the corner though. Prodding the woman down the tunnel, Lynne marveled at how rigid the cat was in her hand. She was carrying him like a loaf of French bread, or like the day she had found him—dead and stiff under that bed. He was heavier now, as if the act of breathing added heft, and he was growling, too.
Lynne didn’t have any problems finding her way back through the maze of passages, but her neck was starting to ache from being hunched over for so long, and her thighs burned with the exertion. Her cat’s low growl started to ramp up as they neared the last branch. Lynne pulled the cat back at first, thinking it was getting louder because of proximity to the woman. That didn’t help. He mixed his growls with hissing and paw-jabs, coming alive again in her hand.
“Keep moving,” Lynne ordered.
The woman stopped and turned halfway around to fix a malevolent eye on the hissing cat—“You stink of slavery, Domitius,” she said to the cat.
Her little gray and white cat—her coiled spring—erupted in her arm and flew out at the old woman. Revealing surprising speed, the old woman darted out of the way and shot down a side passage. They had left her lantern back at the dead-end, so she disappeared quickly in the dark, apparently able to navigate these tunnels without a light.
“Shit,” Lynne hissed to herself. “What the hell?” She looked back at the narrow passage that led past the scary skull and back to the exit. Then, she looked down the dark tunnel where the old woman had disappeared. She’d accomplished nothing but getting dirty—the old woman had disappeared and the cat had vanished after her.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said.
From the dark passage, through which the woman had fled, her cat appeared, strutting. He held his tail straight up and sauntered past Lynne, towards the exit. Lynne followed him with her flashlight and then looked back down the tunnel. After considering for a moment, she decided to cut her losses. She backed away from the old woman’s passage and followed her cat towards the ladder where she had come in.
The cat paused at the shaft with the unevenly-spaced rungs. She stuffed her flashlight and stun gun into her back pockets so she could hold the cat with one hand and climb with the other. It was slow going. She kept looking back down to make sure that nothing was going to grab her foot and try to drag her back down. Jenko was waiting at the top.
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“Let’s go, it’s time to get out of here,” said Jenko.
“Why? What’s up?” asked Lynne. “Tubers getting restless?”
“Nope, the cops are coming,” he said. “Just saw them cross the bridge." He pointed down the river. Lynne got the cat and Jenko picked up the black bag. The two headed up the path to the top of the hill.
“What about that guy?” asked Lynne.
“He’ll be fine as long as the Tubers don’t get to him before the cops arrive. They’re going to have their hands full,” said Jenko. He nodded back towards the gravesite they’d just left. The other campers were getting closer, but moving very casually, like dogs circling a dead snake. None of them wanted to chance getting bit, but they were all curious.
“Why? What will they do?” asked Lynne.
“Probably tear him apart, if they get enough people together to get brave,” said Jenko. Lynne questioned him with a glance, so Jenko continued—“Let’s say you’re dedicating your life to Tubing. You’re trying to wake up your dead sister, or uncle, or lover from the dead. Then some asshole, posing as a Tuber is running salvage on all the graves? Wouldn’t you be pissed off a bit?”
“Salvage?” asked Lynne. “That’s what they were doing?”
“Yeah, what did you think?”
“I don’t know, I thought they were… I don’t know. There was an old woman down there in the tunnels. I tried to bring her up, but she got away.”
“Wait. You found a grave rat?” asked Jenko.
“Yeah, I guess so. Is that what they’re called?”
“Harvester,” said Jenko. “They’re typically called a Harvester. That’s crazy that you found her. Nobody ever corners a Harvester. How did you even track her down? Did they just start? What, was there like just one tunnel or something?”
“No, there were tons of tunnels,” said Lynne. “But the cat led me to her. He had her pinned down.”
Jenko unlocked the car and they climbed in. When the doors were closed, Lynne placed the cat on the back seat. She’d had enough of the cat for the day.
“So the cat found the Harvester,” said Jenko. “Clever cat.”
“She really didn’t like cats,” said Lynne. “I used him like a cattle prod almost, but then she got away at the last second.”
“Try to look somber,” said Jenko.
They passed two police cars who were coming the opposite way down the long drive. When they’d cleared the authorities, the conversation resumed.
“So how’d she get away?”
“She said something that pissed off the cat. Something about Domitius,” said Lynne.
The cat meowed, it almost sounded like a question, and he jumped over the center console and landed on Lynne’s lap. She pet him for a second and them placed him in the back seat again.
“Say that again,” said Jenko.
“What? Domitius?” asked Lynne. When she repeated the word, the cat repeated his performance, landing in her lap and purring.
“I think that’s his name,” suggested Jenko. He turned towards the cat—“Domitius,” he said. The cat growled a response. “Or maybe a command. I don’t think he likes it when other people say it.”
“Jenks, he’s a cat,” said Lynne.
“Nothing’s just a cat, Lynne,” said Jenko. “Tell me more about the tunnels.”
Lynne did her best to describe the underground setting of the cemetery without coloring the account with how she felt. She was practicing for the report she knew she’d have to file with the field office. Jenko listened closely, but didn’t ask many questions.
When she got to the end of the story, it was Lynne’s turn to ask a question—“You seem to know all about these Harvesters. What are they?”
“They’re like scavengers, collecting the stuff people leave behind,” said Jenko. “They’re old, they go back forever. I mean the concept of Harvesters, not any particular one. Although they do always seem to be really old. Maybe they’re all old because the cement linings discourage new Harvesters from starting in the trade? Stainless steel and brass coffins... Too much work these days.”
“So they just steal from the dead?” asked Lynne.
“You’ve really never heard of them?”
“Nope.”
“They’re nothing, really, just parasites. You take anything that gets set aside or thrown away and there will be someone who steps in to snatch it up. Probably started back in Egypt or China where they used to bury people with all kinds of riches. Doesn’t happen so much anymore. Anyway, a Harvester will move around, working one graveyard until it’s tapped and then moving on to the next one. They get some kid, sometimes it’s their own son, but that’s not very common. Somehow they trick the kid, or maybe charm him, and he becomes their helper. Defends them while they work. It’s got to be a pretty rough business. You get caught and people are going to be really pissed off.”
“So people know about them?” asked Lynne.
“A person doesn’t, but people do. You get people together in a group and they’ve got a collective memory that knows more than any one individual. That’s probably what was happening back there. Any one of those Tubers wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that someone was digging tunnels to rob those graves. But you get them all together like that, let them find out that there’s a fake headstone over a tunnel, and they’ll come up with the idea pretty quick. I used to have a friend that worked a cemetery. They see a lot of stuff they’re not telling anyone. They just turn a blind eye to that stuff, or else they lose their jobs. I was with him one day when he was digging a fresh plot with a big backhoe. He cut right into a Harvester hole. He didn’t want to say anything, but eventually he admitted that they find them all the time. Every graveyard you go to has them.”
“Seriously?” asked Lynne. She thought about her own grandmother for the second time that day. It had been hard to watch her coffin lowered into the ground, but it would have been ten times harder if she’d known that eventually her sweet Meemaw would be picked over by a hag.
“Yeah, but like I said, Harvesters were rapidly disappearing until the Tuber movement kicked in. Now you’ve got all kinds of people hanging around the graveyard at all times.”
“Doesn’t that make it harder to work?” asked Lynne.
“Nope, easier,” said Jenko. “Since it’s completely normal for people to be on the premises at all hours, they can more easily move away all the dirt without arousing suspicion.”
“But I thought you said that all the cemetery workers just turn a blind eye?” asked Lynne.
“Yeah, but still, you go moving around that much material in a sleepy cemetery, and somebody has to eventually notice. So that’s another reason why they were disappearing. Until the Tubers, people just didn’t hang out in cemeteries the way they used to. They were pretty much deserted. Now they’re busy all day and all night. A Harvester could do almost anything and it wouldn’t seem a bit out of the ordinary with all the stuff going on at that cemetery,” said Jenko.
Jenko turned left at the end of the bridge. They had arrived from the right.
“Hey, wait a minute, the field office is back north, why’d you turn left? Shouldn’t we go file a report?” asked Lynne.
“We will later, but we’ve got two more graveyards to check out first,” said Jenko. “We were supposed to do just two today, but I called in when you were in that hole and reported our situation. They said since our cover was blown they were going to send in another team. That means we have to pick up their other shift while they cover ours.”
“Two more,” sighed Lynne. She was already exhausted. She patted the dust from her pants and pulled down the visor to see if she still looked presentable. Assuming they were headed back to report, Lynne had wanted to look like she had been busy, but now that she knew they were still on the clock, she didn’t want to appear sloppy.
“More Tubers?” Lynne asked.
“Oh yes,” said Jenko.
LYNNE LET THE CAT—Domitius, sh
e now called him—jump down to the ground. It was almost midnight. She pushed up out of the car and said goodnight to Jenko. With her head lowered, she shuffled up to her front door. Blue and green lights flashed on the ceiling of the living room. The cat had disappeared into the bushes, but Lynne wasn’t worried about him. She looked at her summer flowers, starting to wilt from the heat. Lynne vowed to water them in the morning, before the sun got too hot.
When she opened the front door she called the cat. “Domitius,” she said. It took him less than three seconds to appear at her side. She smiled to herself and opened the door. Carrie and Barry were watching Letterman. They muted the set when she walked in.
“Hey Lynnie, where you been?” asked Barry.
She plopped down in the chair that faced the couch. Her housemates were curled up together on the couch. Even though Barry was a man, he and Carrie were like sisters, only closer. They worked together, watched TV together, and prevented each other from ever finding a love interest. They were sharing a big bowl of popcorn, the result of popping a full-size and snack-size bag and emptying them in the same bowl. A bowl of carbs—that’s what they called it. Domitius jumped up on her lap and curled up. Her hand moved to his head automatically.
“Work,” she sighed.
“Again?” asked Carrie. “You let them walk all over you on your first week, and they’re going to make a habit of it. You remember that time I had to chew out Doctor Nosebleed?” she asked Barry.
“Nusbaum,” Barry clarified.
“I had to set him straight my first week. You can’t expect your RN’s to water the plants and vacuum the rugs,” said Carrie.
“I’m fine,” said Lynne.
“You look tired,” said Barry. “I’ll do your chores, why don’t you get some sleep.”
Lynne tilted her head back and sighed—she had forgotten about chores. She didn’t have to look to know that Carrie would be shooting Barry a dirty look. Carrie hated it when people had to be reminded to do their chores. She considered it a crime against the household; an assault of thoughtlessness.