by Glenn Rolfe
She gazed off to her right, arms crossed over her chest, tight-lipped and simmering.
There was nothing he could say. She deserved better, and sorry seemed insulting and pathetic. After a few more seconds, he muttered it anyway.
“Sarah, I’m so sorry.”
She turned her hurt gaze upon him, and the daggers pierced his heart.
Sarah shook her head and shoved past him.
He stayed in place, his head slung low, on an island designated for bastards. He could save the world from total annihilation right now and it would mean fuck all.
Sarah burst out the door with her Samsonite suitcase. Tossing it in the backseat, she turned to him.
His world stopped.
“I’ll be at my mother’s. I need….” Her lip quivered. “I need to think…fuck, John.” As she started to cry, he stepped to her, but she held him at bay with her hand.
She took a deep, shuddery breath and got behind the wheel.
“I’ll call you when I can…when I can talk.”
The engine purred to life. He saw more tears slipping down her cheeks as she backed out of the driveway.
His knees weak, John returned to the steps and clutched the porch rail for support. A life preserver in an ocean of starved swells. A warm wind swept across the humidity clinging to his flesh. It should have offered some relief, but he was too damn numb. He wasn’t sure if he would ever move again.
A rustling around the corner of the house roused him from his despair.
The sound of someone or something rummaging around out back. He followed the sounds. A tall figure dressed in black slipped out of sight behind his little garbage shed.
“Hey,” he said.
August?
Say it. Call out to him.
You look for me.
“August?”
As John circled the shed, a vehicle zoomed past his driveway. He barely gave it a thought as he approached the shed door. What would he do if August was in there?
Listen to yourself. You sound like a fucking crazy person.
He’s a dream. There is no August. August is your fucked-up history.
He pulled the door open and was slammed by the scent of spoiled meat and writhing, gluttonous maggots in a hell of heat and detritus.
John gagged and slammed the door closed.
As he stumbled away, the urge and sudden compulsion to flee overtook him. John’s trot turned to a jog, and then to a run. His staycation had gone from a much-needed breath to a crumbling pit of a broken man who thought he’d left behind the feelings of abandonment and self-destruction. Yet, it was all still here within him. Every heartbreak, every scar. Each and every living moment of the scared little boy exiled to fend for himself. Too smart to fall into the trappings of corruption that plagued many of the street kids growing up around him in the disillusioned nineties, he marched through another day toward a tomorrow that was never promised to him. Rather than bury his hurt, confusion, and anger in drugs and alcohol or bad relationships, John clung to a few good friends who wouldn’t allow him to get completely lost. He worked and focused on surviving. In his dreams back then, he wanted to get out. A tramp ready to run, ready to explode, but real life’s vise grip wasn’t so free and easy. One girlfriend’s lack of ambition led to another and he eventually became the rat in the cage until he was too tired to try. His friend Greg got him his first social worker job at Safeway Care Givers of Central Maine. And in that job, John found something to care about. Helping others was great, but it was the way it made him feel that soon had him pouring every ounce of energy into this new career. He’d found something self-serving that managed to give back. He discovered his purpose and was happy for the first time since his parents’ divorce.
By the time he met Sarah, he was content with staying in Spears Corner.
His legs ached from six straight days of running, including a couple hours earlier today, but he didn’t want to stop. He couldn’t. Not yet. The sun blazed down upon him as John ran faster, pushing toward danger. He could feel it. He hadn’t had enough water to be out here in this heat right now, but he wouldn’t stop. He thought of the monks or priests who flogged themselves. This was his penance. The pain and exhaustion paled compared to what he’d done.
I told the truth.
Yeah, how’s that treating you?
Honesty above all.
Dumb shit, some things are better left unsaid.
He was closing in on Fairbanks Cemetery, his mouth hanging open, his chest tight, his throat sore, when his vision blurred, and he stumbled. Lightheaded, his stomach quickly turning on him, John dropped to the grassy ditch before the graveyard. Crashing here would keep him out of the road, so he wouldn’t get run over.
There were no cars on the road, for which he was grateful. He’d rather die of dehydration and ignorance than have people watch him throw his guts up in a ditch in front of the cemetery. He hoped the dead would forgive him this trespass.
When he fished retching, he turned onto his back and closed his eyes.
He wished he hadn’t.
Chapter Thirty
“Tsk, tsk, Johnny,” August said.
As Johnny raised his head, he saw the shape of August’s skull eclipse the sun. The effect was disorienting.
“Where are we?” Johnny asked, trying to see August’s face more clearly.
“Right where we should be.”
He didn’t like that answer.
“You’ve had a pretty rough day, huh, Johnny?”
Johnny couldn’t recall it ever being this damn bright in Graveyard Land. There was no fog, no crickets, no other kids….
“It’s just you and me, Johnny.”
“August,” he said, trying to sit up, but not feeling well enough to do so without barfing again (again?).
“Yes?” August said.
“Who lives…who is it that lives in that house…over there?” Johnny managed to raise his finger and point toward the old farmhouse.
“No one you want to know, Johnny, but….”
“But what?”
“We all make our acquaintance with the Ghoul. That’s just…inevitable.”
One Eye appeared from behind August. “Hey.”
When the taller kid stepped aside, the sun pierced Johnny’s gaze like a laser.
“Leave him alone, August.”
Johnny saw the darkness creep over August’s features. There was always something sinister hiding beneath the kid’s odd exterior; now it was seeping through like oil spilling out under a midnight moon.
And the coldness was aimed at One Eye.
“Go, Johnny. Get up, get outta here and don’t look back!” One Eye shouted.
Johnny tried to move but he was so sore. Every muscle felt weak, his head too heavy, his mind floating in mid-air like when he had the flu the day after Thanksgiving. There was something in One Eye’s tone that made Johnny rise to his feet anyway. Plus, the look August was giving the kid was like pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel. The blackness in it was alive.
Johnny got the sense that something major had changed here. It was no longer just a creepy esthetic – Graveyard Land’s true face was surfacing, and he didn’t want to be here when it directed its leer his way.
“Run!” One Eye said.
Before he made a break for it, Johnny glanced once more in August’s direction. They were pouring out of him, the spiders. His pets. He stood there still as death while hundreds of pitch-black arachnids scrambled over one another, exiting his vacant eye sockets and his open mouth.
Johnny screamed on the inside, his soul grazing the frozen depths of the presence before him. He hurried away, looking over his shoulder to see if August was following him.
“You can run, Johnny,” August said as he spat out the last of the spiders. “But you’ll be back when you find
out she’s—”
“Run, Johnny,” One Eye cried out again.
Find out she’s….
Johnny stopped and turned as One Eye tried to tackle August.
What had he been about to say?
August side-stepped his much shorter attacker and shoved him to the ground.
One Eye screamed as August’s spiders moved in a solid wave toward him.
Johnny knew he should go back and help his friend, but he was paralyzed. The grotesque, arachnid smile crawled onto August’s face.
“Run, Johnny,” August said, his smile falling like a nuclear winter. “Run.”
* * *
John opened his eyes, dazed and blinded by the white-hot sun.
“Sarah…” he muttered, his voice cracked and desiccated.
“Help you up?” the voice said as a shadow eclipsed the daylight.
Wincing, John saw the shape before him.
“Looks like ya passed out. Heat stroke, I reckon. Runnin’ in this kind of heat ain’t the smartest thing to be doin’. Here,” the voice said.
John took the man’s hand and let him pull him back to a sitting position. His head swam in the fluid nightmares resonating, clutching for survival in John’s reality.
“Upsy-daisy,” Caswell said, helping him to his feet.
The odd man’s familiar leer was gone, at least for the moment, replaced by a look of genuine concern.
“Thanks,” John said. The numbness in his limbs slowly faded as the feeling in them returned to normal.
“Sure, sure,” Caswell said, producing the bandana from his back pocket and wiping the sweat from his forehead. “You okay? Not every day I find a live one lying around here.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I guess I just pushed myself a little too hard.”
The man eyed him for a moment.
Something was in his eye, a sort of putrid twinkle.
“Why don’t you come on up to the house for a minute, get you a glass of water?”
“Oh, I don’t know…. I think—”
Caswell began to walk, gesturing for John to follow. “Nonsense. You need some fluids ’fore ya end up back on your ass. C’mon.”
The thought of Pat’s experience earlier with this man rushed in. Pat had said Caswell seemed okay at first before flipping his lid and shouting like a madman. Still, he could use some water. He didn’t want to end up in the hospital because he was….
What? Afraid?
John reminded himself that he didn’t need to go into the guy’s house. He’d just wait out front, maybe scope the guy out.
He fell in line behind Caswell and followed him up the dirt driveway.
The farmhouse was a beaten and weathered two-story structure. While the yard was unkempt, it wasn’t the nightmare he’d seen in some of the properties around town with their lawns being swallowed up by what could also pass as a junkyard. This place had an order to it. A little schlubby but each thing in its place.
“You can come in if you’d like,” Caswell said when he reached the porch steps.
“That’s okay. I wouldn’t want to impose any more than I already am.”
The man gazed back over his shoulder and licked his lips before delivering one of his uncomfortable grins. “Suit yourself.”
As soon as Caswell was inside, John glanced around. He saw the swing, half broken but functioning, as Pat had mentioned. An upside-down milk crate held two beer cans. To the right of the house he saw an empty steel clothesline like the one his mom used to have in the backyard of their trailer. He stepped toward the area and saw two push mowers and a wheelbarrow side by side by side, with a selection of shovels and a long-handled axe lined up next to them. Beyond the far edge of the house stood the corrugated metal shed he’d seen from the cemetery. The door stood out like a clown’s greasepaint face in a pool of blood. While the rusted shed looked nearly as old as the house, the door looked brand new. The sun glinted off a large padlock guaranteed to keep out any possible thieves.
“I got ya water.”
Caswell’s voice startled him. John realized he’d ventured nearly to the shed.
“Thanks,” John called back, trying to sound far more casual than he felt. He turned, his gaze taking a quick swipe to the other side of the house, and he froze in place.
The vehicle parked behind a garage he hadn’t noticed had nearly run him down in his nightmares. The same one that he and Pat had seen around town…the green Dodge van.
“She’s vintage,” Caswell said.
John started again as Caswell handed him the glass of water.
“It’s a 1976 Dodge Street Van. I wish I could get her to run, but I never been much of a mechanic.”
John eyed the flattened grass behind the vehicle. Two perfect tire tracks leading right to the van’s tires. He saw the license plate.
MIBOYZ
He tried to keep the tremors in his hands still as he held the perspiring glass.
“She’s a hand-me-down from my cousin. Hasn’t started in over a decade now. I got myself a newer Econoline ’round the other side for work. But she’s the real gem ’round here.”
John took a few gulps of water. It had a tinny taste, but not poisonous, so far as he could tell. Caswell was lying to him. He thought of Pat’s story about how quickly the man shifted from calm and creepy to downright frightening. Unnerved as he was, and smart move or not, John decided to prod the man. “Say, you take care of the cemeteries around town, right?”
“Mmm hmm,” he said, “Best co-workers in the world. They don’t complain or bitch.” The man broke out into a high-pitched cackle at his bad joke.
John gave a half-hearted laugh and finished his drink. He couldn’t stop stealing glances at the old Dodge.
“I have a friend, a kid from town that’s starting up his own lawn care service. I know he was talking to me about the graveyards here.”
Caswell’s face dropped slightly. The prideful smile in his eyes darkened.
John pushed on. “Well, I’d kick myself if I didn’t ask someone as in the know as yourself, how would he go about getting in on the graveyard game around Spears Corner?”
“He a tall, good-lookin’ kid that dresses a little funny?”
“Yeah, he’s got sort of a punk rock look to him, but he’s really a great kid.”
“He was actually up here this mornin’. Asked if I’d let him do one of my jobs.”
“Oh?” John said, playing it like he wasn’t already privy to their interaction. “What did you tell him? I know he’s really serious about this.”
“I told him I didn’t have anything for him. He seemed nice and all, but I just couldn’t stand to part with any of my work.” A forced smile appeared. It looked as real on Caswell’s mug as the ones you see in kids’ school portraits, especially the kids who you know don’t have any friends and aren’t used to having things to smile about.
“Oh, well, I know he’ll keep trying. He’s a go-getter.”
“I don’t think he’ll be back.”
John was going to ask why not, even though he knew, but Caswell plucked the glass from his hand, and said, “Well, I’m glad to see the water helped ya out. I’d offer you a ride, but I gotta head out of town for a few days. Supposed to leave this mornin’ in fact, but I had some unexpected errands to run.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I think the water did the trick. I really don’t live too far.”
They started back around to the front of the house. John tried to take one last glimpse of the van.
“Something wrong?”
John looked to Caswell and saw that he was standing next to the axe.
“No, I…I just…. I should get going before my wife wonders where I disappeared to.”
“I don’t think she’s looking for you,” Caswell said.
John suddenly fou
nd it hard to swallow.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Caswell turned and walked away.
What the fuck is with this guy?
When John reached the driveway, Caswell stood behind his screen door, partly obscured by the shadows within.
John gave him a wave.
“Better get runnin’ home, Johnny.”
The door closed before John could reply.
Movement to the left of the porch, the side that led to the garage (and the van) caught his attention.
John edged in that direction, keeping one eye on the front door of the house and the other trained on the shadow dancing on the side of the garage.
A blue Ford Econoline sat parked in front of the left side of the garage, but it was the shadow on the side of the building that sent chills down his spine. Someone was standing out back, just out of sight, but the person’s shadow stood tall and stick thin against the light gray of the garage. John halted when the shadow raised a claw-like hand. He watched as it appeared to go to the person’s face. A much smaller shadow floated down beside it and dropped to the ground. The shadow repeated the movements; more shapes fluttered to the ground.
He hardly had time to notice when an army of arachnids rounded the corner, standing out like a swarm of black across the dusty dirt drive.
Spiders. Hundreds of them.
John’s guts filled with writhing worms at the sight.
They were coming straight for him, too many to count.
He broke into a run and didn’t look back.
Run, Johnny…. Run.
And he did.
Chapter Thirty-One
August stepped from the shadows as Alvin Caswell turned to him.
“Let’s go get the wife,” August said.
Caswell smiled. “About fuckin’ time.”
They pulled onto the road in the Dodge van and headed right.
August knew Sarah was everything to John. If there was one thing that would get through to him, make him come to Graveyard Land with no choice but to pick his grave and complete the circle, it was the woman he loved. There was a weakness there, like a soft spot atop a baby’s head, and it was almost too damn easy to dig your thumbs right in.