The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  Tanner looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “If he were standing right here in front of you, what would you say to him?”

  Tanner smiled, the pits in his face distorting. “You’re funny, you know that kid? This ain’t one of those video games you youngsters grew up on. In the real world, you don’t get second chances. But I’ll humor you. If he were sitting right there where you’re sitting now…I’d tell him I’m sorry. That I don’t hate his damned guts anymore. I’d tell him I understand him now. That I am him…Hell, I’d tell him alot.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” the kid said, suddenly standing up. “And for his.” He clenched his teeth together, his jaws thickening. “But you know something? It’s never too late.” He stared into Tanner’s eyes, then turned and walked back out into the sunlight, looking up at the hot blue sky. He turned back. He said, “Today, old Dodd Tanner, Jr., might just be your lucky day.”

  He smiled. Then he was gone.

  Tanner sat still for a long moment, watching the kid meander his way back down the hill. “Well allrighty then. Stupid fucking kid.” He stood up slowly, feeling the little creaks and aches in his bones and tendons. He picked up his empty water bottle and went out into the bare heat. As he went down the slope, his eyes travelled wide across the big span of boneyard below, at the hundreds, the thousands of markers, the inanimate concrete and stone celebrations of ones who once ate and breathed and laughed and hated and loved and lived. Somewhere, he knew, among the vast green acreage, was the body of one who once drank much booze. Old Dodd The Bastard. He was out there. Somewhere.

  * * * *

  By four o’clock it was like one of those Chicago chickens standing inside an oven. Tanner was dead on his feet, and it was good to soak up a few minutes’ worth of tax-funded air conditioning. After he and the kid had finished filling in the second of the two hillside holes (with no more conversation; Tanner felt he’d gotten too damn personal with the strange boy, something quite contrary to his character), Cowboy Rick’s big white hat and winning smile had come along in the Go-Buggy to inform them that the rest of the day they’d be changing the dirty bags out of trash cans scattered throughout specified cemetery sections, but that first they’d get a fifteen or so minute break in the Maintenance garage.

  By the time they got to the garage, Mexico Juan and Phil The Wino were already lounging in chairs at a beat-up card table, Phil with his second-hand boots propped up on the top, one with a hole worn clear through to a dung colored sock beneath. Tanner had been right: the pair had had themselves an easy-breezy day, picking up debris across the eastern edge of Lugar De La Paz with steel poke-sticks, sweeping dirt from off the few intertwining walkways, and, in general, being lazy asses, while Raul Jantillan rode around to unknown places in his Go-Buggy all day; even though he’d done very little real labor, Phil mentioned three times (Tanner counted) that he was about ready for a nice cold one. Juan grinned over at Phil and said, “Bironga fria!” Apparently The Wino knew what this meant, for he said, “Yes, my amigo! Mucho!” When Raul took off in the cart again, leaving his two minions there at the shop, Tanner concluded the pair would spend the rest of their day right there in the garage AC, doing nothing at all productive.

  Cowboy Rick had sent him and the kid, however, off into separate directions to finish their respective days: the city would send a different Parks & Recreation goon back over in the van to pick them all up at five.

  Just after 4:20 Tanner set off on his Great Trashcan Voyage, the always nostalgic scent of newly cut grass filling his nose. He walked the route slowly, frequently glancing down at his wristwatch. He headed for A-1, the section of cemetery encompassing the main North Gate, where the van had brought them in through the arches. The trashcans were, for the most part, empty, but for three or four filled with great bouquets of withered flowers, presumably stuck there by dedicated loved ones who’d replaced them with fresher specimens. Whatever else he found in the bins, he took out and placed inside his sack. He picked a few empty plastic bottles off the grass and sidewalks here and there, a few discarded food wrappers.

  The cemetery was quiet, and mostly abandoned. It was the heat, Tanner figured, that kept the crowds away on a day like this. But there were always a couple:

  A tall elderly woman draped by a long black dress, a matching veil hanging over her face from a camelia widebrim, a stark white flower poised at the center, walked alone, all dressed up as if whoever’s funeral had just been held that day; perhaps, Tanner thought, it had been, if only in her mind. She carried a dozen red roses, clutched to her breast.

  Out at the northernmost edge of the cemetery, the side fronting 63rd Street and its slow-motion traffic, a burly man with a long, messy beard and thick braid of hair running straight down the back of a black Bandidos vest, sat hunched over in a pink fold-out chair in front of a miniature headstone. His large torso shuddered as he wept quietly, an oversized Bud Light bottle clasped between wide thighs. Laid out by his feet were several more of the bottles, bottles some other lucky Volunteer would probably be filling a trashbag with tomorrow. Tanner walked carefully, in a wide arc behind him, not wishing to disturb the man’s grieving process—nor awake the anger that embarrassment might cause.

  By 4:40 Tanner had cut right, and had casually begun crossing through the center of section C-5, back toward the snaking concrete path he would follow all the way back to the Maintenance and Administration buildings, where the van would soon be arriving to haul them back downtown where his Chevy was parked. He reached the sidewalk, and walked alongside it in the grass, where he wouldn’t wear a hole in the trashbag (which had become a good deal heavier) as he dragged it behind him. He stopped for a moment, letting go of the bag to wipe a palm across his sweating face and to get himself one final cigarette for the home stretch; he’d light the next one inside his own air conditioned vehicle. He pulled the menthol from the green box and slid it between his lips. He was just bringing the silver Zippo’s flame to bear on the tip when he heard the distant wailing of sirens. It grew louder. From where he stood, 63rd was still visible through the trees and the wrought iron fence in front of it. One cop car sped along the shoulder of the road, bypassing the rush hour travellers. It went down a ways, then turned into the North entrance of Lugar De La Paz, its rooftop lights flashing patriotically red, white, blue. Then came another. And another.

  Tanner puffed rapidly on the cigarette and pocketed the Zippo. He walked quickly toward where the lit-up cars appeared to be headed: the Maintenance parking lot.

  * * * *

  By the time he arrived at the buildings, his trashbag was nearly empty from the hole he’d inadvertently worn through it, and the kid was handcuffed in the backseat of a brown and white squad car, dark eyes looking straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the police officers talking to one another—and on hand-held radios—on the other side of his door. The three cars’ emergency lights were still revolving colorfully, but the sirens had been silenced. Five police officers were huddled together in discussion, their voices an earful of inaudible and secretive murmurings. Two of them turned and cast suspicious glances at Tanner, then turned back to their fellows. Three other Parks & Rec employees were watching quietly from the Maintenance garage. “What the hell’s going on,” Tanner asked Rick Helmsley as he approached.

  Rick was shaking his head, holding his hand up over his cheek. “The bastard scratched me. That’s what.”

  “Who scratched you, Cowboy? What’s going on?”

  “Passo,” he said, taking his hand off his face to point at the rear of the cop car. Running from his high left cheekbone all the way down to the curve of his bottom lip were four bright red cut marks. Still seeping, blood glistened in the heat of the sun.

  “My God. The kid? What happened?”

  Rick’s trademark winning smile had gone off into the cemetery to bury itself someplace beside the other dead things. “I’m awful sorry, Dodd.”

  “Sorry? I’m sorry. Why you saying sorry to
me? What the hell happened?”

  “Well, I think I should be saying I’m sorry, at least. Look, pilgrim,” he said, placing a firm grip on Tanner’s shoulder. “Let me ask ya a question, Dodd: is your daddy, by any chance, buried here?”

  Tanner was dumbstruck. He felt the word yes just sort of flow through his lips; he’d made no effort to even place it on his tongue.

  “I figured,” Rick said. “How many Dodd Tanners can there be in a city? Well, he went screwin around with his grave.” He sighed. “Come on. Let me show you what he did. You’ve got to see this yourself. It’s only right. Then we’ll come back. Cops’ll probably wanna talk to you, too.” Rick Helmsley led a bewildered Dodd Tanner across the parking lot toward the Go-Buggy. Halfway there Raul called out, “Rick! Hold up!” They turned around. Raul came toward them, a First-Aid kit hanging down from his hand. “Let’s disinfect that face before you do anything else.”

  “Nah,” Rick said, making a shooing gesture. “In a few minutes, R.J. I’ve got to take care of this first,” he motioned at Tanner with his eyes. Raul nodded. “We’ll be back.” Rick turned and went the rest of the way to the cart. “You comin, Dodd?”

  Tanner was staring over at the police cruiser, at the kid. Through the window the kid was staring at him, too; he thought he was, at least—his long-distance vision wasn’t what it once had been. From across the dusty parking lot, Tanner could only imagine: those dark eyeballs, studying him like a lab rat, just beneath that furrowed brow. “Yeah. I’m coming,” he said. Before he turned around, he saw the shape of the kid’s face change. He was grinning. Tanner thought he was, anyway. Maybe it was just the godamm heat.

  * * * *

  It was surreal.

  The topless Go-Buggy buzzed quietly up the narrow sidewalk toward the unbridled sun, toward the southernmost tip of the cemetery’s land; it was a side of Lugar De La Paz Tanner had not been to during either of his previous two trips there. Eyes shaded beneath his white hat and black sunglasses, Cowboy Rick began to explain:

  Hoping for a break in a string of unsolved crimes, Rick had been tagged by the PD—through Rick’s higher-ups, of course—to follow the kid around all that day, to observe him in the cemetery. The offense Rody Passo had been placed on three years of probation for, it turned out, was vandalism of a human grave. It was at Murray Wilson Cemetery, on the far east side. It really hadn’t been anything too major. He’d simply been caught in the dark of night by a groundskeeper, marking strange symbols—gang signs, they’d at first figured—onto an old headstone with a can of red spraypaint. The man called the police when he’d seen the kid’s flashlight shining in the distance, the cops had come, and they’d caught him in the act. Offensive and disrespectful, but no huge deal, just typical juvenile graffiti stuff. But much more disturbing things were to happen at Wilson in the following months.

  After Passo had agreed to plea no contest to the vandalism, they’d ordered him to a pre-sentencing investigation, standard procedure, wherein an interview with a court officer took place (Tanner was quite familiar with the process, having endured it more than once himself); during those long interviews the assigned officer would ask detailed questions about background, prior history of drug and alcohol abuse, the current state of familial relations and living arrangements, etcetera, as a way to determine what kind of rehabilitation and/or psychological counseling, if any, was suitable for the offender. The kid had apparently spoken freely—too freely—during the course of the interview, and that’s how suspicion had fallen upon him months later, once the other crimes, the “depraved acts,” as Helmsley called them, began occurring at Wilson; not to mention the obvious, that Wilson is where they’d caught him “tagging.”

  “So what happened at Wilson that was so depraved?” Tanner said, gripping the metal grab bar to keep from tumbling out as Rick took a sharp curve of sidewalk without slowing.

  “Well, somebody’s been diggin up corpses, man. Not stealin em either. Not even robbin em, like you’d expect. There’s been three of em there, and all since Passo got caught vandalizing. I don’t know if you read the paper, but they been talkin about it in the news.”

  “It seems like I might’ve heard something.”

  “Yeah, well this last one, number three, even made the national news, about two weeks ago. It was some old retired college professor who’d once marched with MLK in Washington. Name was Hollins. The media jumped all over it, tried to call it a hate crime, being who he was and all. Someone dug all the way down to the pinebox, opened it up and pulled the old man’s corpse out. They sat him up and leaned him back against his own big marble monument. Don’t ask me how they ever bent him into that position. Once that rigormortis takes over…I’ll just say it’d take one hell of a concentrated effort to do a thing like that.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. And what made it worse was somehow pictures of the damned thing got put out on the Internet. Real grisly shit. They said it was police photos that were leaked, probably some dumbass cop who thought it was cute. I saw em myself at my sister’s house, before they took em off the Web.” Rick glanced at Tanner and grimaced. “Anyway, you don’t wanna know.”

  “Tell me.”

  The cart zoomed along the path, up through a shaded tunnel of cypress trees, the hot sun’s influence momentarily minimized. “Well, the old fella was just sitting there in his best pinstripe suit, big black holes for eyeballs, face all leathery and wilted, fingerbones half showing where the skin had rotted off. He was still wearing his wedding ring, too. Big solitaire diamond. Eighteen karat. And what’s even worse was the face, the mouth. Mouth of that old corpse seemed to be grinnin. A big old Texas shit-eatin grin, ya know, like he just won the fuckin lottery. According to the police, the other two bodies was like that, too. Happy campers. And the thing is, see, all three of them memorials had them damned strange drawings on em. Awful similar to the stuff they caught Passo putting on that headstone to begin with. Just like all those freaky tattoos he’s got. Symbols and shit, some other language or somethin. Said they never could get a translation on none of it. He, of course, was the obvious suspect, but they couldn’t prove nothin. All circumstantial.”

  “So if the kid didn’t steal anything off the bodies, why the hell would he dig them up? They have some idea about that?”

  “Course. Officer Sheckle said that during the course of that pre-sentencing interview, they asked him what gang he belonged to. They keep a gang profile on all them youngsters. They figured he was a Latin King, or a Puro Ocho or something—alot of them around here—although they didn’t see any of the regular tats them guys usually have. He said he wasn’t in no street gang. Said he was in a tribe, an actual one. Said all his tats had em a spiritual meaning. Said it was part of his tribal religion, that he’d got em all from the time he was a boy. Said all his uncles and cousins back in Latin America had the same exact marks. Called em the Booboos or the Booboo Tribe, or some weird shit like that. I can’t remember. From some little village down in Bolivia, Columbia someplace.”

  “El Salvador,” Tanner muttered.

  Rick hadn’t heard him. “After that first corpse got dug up some months back—some woman who’d got killed by her ex-husband back in the ’90s—they looked into Passo, went over his file, just as a matter of standard procedure, since he got busted at Wilson and all. Well, it raised quite a few eyebrows. So they Googled up them BooBoos on the computer, and they found some pretty weird shit in this article, Sheckle said. It said the BooBoos are real superstitious people, ya know? Said when one of their people dies, they don’t bury em right away. Said before they do, everybody they ever knew who still has a grievance with em has to come and make their peace. Talk it all out. Sounds like a pretty one-sided conversation if ya ask me. Crazy. But you know the kind of hooga booga bullshit they believe in them little Third World armpits. They claim if a person gets buried before they’re at peace with God’s whole big happy planet, then that person don’t move on to the afterlife. Nah, they just stay
right there in the coffin, trapped under the lid. In the dark and the heat, forever. Like being stuck in an elevator til the Rapture. Anyway, what I caught him trying on your father’s grave don’t prove he dug up them others, but at least it’ll get him off the streets for quite a good while for violating his probation. And who knows? Maybe they can get the poor guy some help.”

  “Yeah,” Tanner said softly. He swallowed hard. “I sure hope so.”

  * * * *

  Finally Rick eased off the gas pedal and the golf cart coasted to a squeaky halt beside a steel post supporting a wooden sign that read K-8. He leaned down and switched the key to the OFF position. Inside his stomach, Tanner felt two hands twisting and turning his guts, tying big bandanna knots in them. “Come on,” Rick said, getting out of the cart. He walked around the front and started off the pavement, going carefully down the dry mudbank of a rock-filled creek bed, leading to where a gathering of knee-high headstones stood at attention like ancient concrete army men. The section was about thirty yards wide and five rows deep. When he got to the flat ground, he turned back and said, “You comin?”

  Tanner stepped out of the cart and followed Rick down, his legs numb beneath him, injected with Novocaine. When he reached Rick, Rick said, “Look, Dodd. We didn’t plan on this happening, not to you, anyway. They shoulda never even brought him here, really. It’s kinda like locking a drunk in a liquor store overnight and telling him not to touch any of the bottles.” Tanner nodded. “But when he dug up that old civil rights fella, they had to go after him, catch him, keep him from doing it again, if only for a couple years. This was the only way, they said. Put him out here in this situation, see what he’d do.”

  “What did he do, Rick? What the hell did he go and do?”

  “Shit. Nothing, at first. Hell, by late afternoon I was starting to think the boy wasn’t gonna do a damn thing after all, that maybe the dang cops had him figured wrong. Me and Raul been watching him all day long. Binoculars. Saw him emptying that damn Coke can into that grave y’all was filling, but that ain’t exactly a capital offense, ya know? Then, snap. He went and did it, just like that. I don’t know what in hell you and him were discussing beforehand, or how he found out about your father—it damn sure wasn’t any coincidence—but something set him off. Right about 4:20 or 4:30, whenever I sent y’all off to do the trashcan routes after your break, is when he snuck off and went around to the front of the Admin building, to the visitor’s center. I was watchin him from over in B-12. I’d pulled the cart back in behind a thick bunch of bushes. Raul was on standby. Walkie-Talkies. Passo thought he was being real sly, I could tell, kept lookin around like he was gettin away with somethin. He went straight up to the electronic plot locating machine. You type in the first and last name of your loved one, and that little puppy’ll tell ya what section it’s in, what row and number. Hell, it’ll even print ya out a little map as to how to get there. Which is exactly what he did. I didn’t, of course, know exactly what he was up to, but knowing what I knew, I damn sure figured it wasn’t any good. Anyway, I followed him all the way over here, with Raul on the radio the whole time. He was runnin, real fast. I almost lost him. Would have if I hadn’t seen him just as he disappeared into the other side of that thicket over there. I knew exactly where he’d come out at. Right here.” He pointed to a narrow opening in a cypress cluster. I just wish I hadn’t had to drive all the way around to meet up with him. I woulda got to him quicker, before he dug any. But then again, I guess there wouldn’t be no proof of tampering if I had.”