Charnel House (5 page)

Old Jeremiah Barlowe, still watching over his charnel house.

He became aware that the beam from the Mag had drifted up with his imagination, and now pointed at the subfloor. The weak beam twitched with his shaking hand. On the dreadful movie screen in his head, the spot in the room above glowed as if a spotlight shone beneath it, spraying light up through the gaps in the ancient flooring in shards of white that slashed the ceiling like the claws of some great beast. Garraty slid his thumb over to the button on the flashlight and pressed it, this time welcoming the darkness. Praying the thin light hadn’t been seen by the nightmare above.

Something banged to the floor directly over his head and he bit the heel of his hand to keep from screaming. A sprinkling of dust fell across the back of his neck, soft as gossamer. Another thud, and he knew—
knew—
the slumped thing lay prone on the floor now, pallid face pressed to the rotting pine only a foot above him. Searching for him. If he turned the Mag on and looked up, what would he see looking back at him through the gapped wood?

The temperature in the crawlspace seemed to have dropped ten degrees. Silence felt like a weight pressing down on him as he waited for the thing above him to do something.
Anything.
Nothing could be that still. Nothing alive, anyway. It was as if the thing had simply laid down and died.

Or had already been dead.

Or it was never there.

Oh, it was there alright. He remembered the tingle of its footsteps through the joists against his shoulders, the tickle of dust on his neck.

Just like you remember hearing something say your name, and the thing you thought you saw in the flashlight beam. Neither of those was real, and neither is this.

Silence filled the crawlspace. He felt his heart slowing. If something were there it would have moved by now. The sounds coming through the floor had been amplified earlier, almost deafening. He’d hear the slightest movement.

But you won’t hear anything because there’s nothing there.

Garraty pressed his hands to the ground and raised himself slowly into the knell between the joists, thankful there was no light to show him any creepy-crawlies that remained up there. The nail that had torn the fabrics of his shirt and his body scraped at his shoulder again as he inched upward. Still there was no sound from the floor above. Thick spiderwebs crackled around his head and draped his face. His ear touched rough wood and he froze for a moment, then pressed it against the subfloor. Acrid dust tickled his throat as he drew in a breath and held it, and he sensed rather than saw the closeness of the joist brushing the tip of his nose.

He heard nothing from the house.

Cool fingers snaked around his right wrist then, and the scream Garraty had bitten back earlier now rushed out of him in a high, warbling rush. He jerked his arm away from the edge of the grave and that chilly grasp, and dropped to the powdery earth, the presence—or figment of his imagination—above forgotten. His breath came in great ragged gasps, like he’d been climbing a mountain. Scuttling backwards across the crawlspace, he didn’t stop until his ass fetched up against the bowed beam behind him.

He couldn’t shake an image in his head: the kid, pulling himself out of his grave like something from a George Romero movie, then dragging himself through the darkness toward him, his one clawed hand clutching for purchase in the loose soil because his legs didn’t work, the splintered bones of his other arm digging a furrow in the dirt like the walk-behind planter his father used for corn and green bean seeds every spring in the back yard garden when Garraty was a boy. Blackening lips stretched wide in a feral grin. A
hungry
grin, just like the one Jeremiah Barlowe must have shown his pint-sized—scratch that, his
snack
-sized—victims in 1943.

Place is fucking with me
, he thought. Had the fingers on his wrist been real? There was no way the boy could have reached up from the bottom of the hole to touch him. Hell, Garraty had needed to hang over the edge just to be able to check the kid’s pockets, and his arms were close to a foot longer. It simply wasn’t possible. The kid would’ve had to sit up, and he was in no shape to do that. Never mind the split that cleaved his skull, what about that awful twist to his back, and the breaks in both arms? To top it off, he was laying on a Mylar blanket that made enough noise to wake the dead, no pun intended, ha ha ha, and Garraty hadn’t heard a sound before he felt the hand on his arm.

Before he
thought
he felt the hand on his arm.

Maybe the beer hadn’t been such a good idea after all. He didn’t
feel
drunk, but hell, maybe the adrenaline rush of being in this foul place had him fooled. Made him think he was sober when he wasn’t. A lot of beer mixed with a little imagination and suddenly he was a screaming ninny, like a teenaged girl in the haunted house the Jaycees set up in downtown Decatur every October. All it took was a little suggestion by his subconscious, and a distant blast from a train’s airhorn became squealing hinges, or a cave cricket on his wrist became the grip of a dead boy, or a raccoon lumbering across the room above became a ghostly Jeremiah Barlowe coming to check up on him. Hadn’t thought the same thing of a rat before?

Garraty realized he’d left the light by the hole in his haste to get away. Jesus. He was more like a
pre
teen girl in the Jaycees haunted house. He crept forward in the perfect blackness, hands running back and forth on the dirt in search of the metallic tube. Going slowly, taking his time. If he knocked the light into the grave with the dead boy and had to go in after it, feeling his way around the corpse, well, that might be the thing that sent him over the edge into loony land. No matter what his rational mind said.

His fingers brushed the Maglite and he seized it. For a moment he wanted to kiss the damn thing, to rub it on his face like a purring kitten, reveling in its power to keep the demons at bay. When he pressed the button the flickery beam of pale light seemed as bright as the sun, and he nearly wept with relief. Garraty crept to the edge of the grave and shined the light down on the corpse.

The boy stared back at him through half-lidded eyes.

“Toomey,” he whispered.

Garraty screamed again and before he could stop himself he snatched the ice scraper from the edge of the hole, raised it as high as he could overhead in the cramped area, and brought it down blade-first into the gaping maw atop the boy’s head. It made a wet, squelching sound as it sank in all the way to the handle. The faint cheesy smell he’d noticed earlier when he picked the boy up billowed up at him. Garraty yanked the scraper loose—pulling with it a large pinkish chunk of brain matter that flew off the chipped blade and vanished into the darkness behind him,
hey hey Jeremiah, have a taste of Toomey
—and drove it home savagely a second time, then a third, the Mylar blanket beneath the boy crackling merrily as the body shucked and jived from the impacts. The solid utensil struck bone on the final blow, deep in the kid’s head.
Scraped the bottom of the barrel with that one, Garraty my man
, he thought in a kind of detached wonder.

“Oh Jesus fuck,” he moaned, and jerked his hand away from the ice scraper. The handle jutted out of the dead boy’s head like an exclamation point punctuating his last thought. His breath came in great jagged gasps. “Take me down to Bryce and lock me up with the crazies.”

Or down to Holman to be locked up on death row until they put me down like a rabid dog.

What the fuck was wrong with him?
Elementary, my dear Watson.
It didn’t take one of the rocket scientists from NASA over in Huntsville to answer that one. The house had gotten into him. Or Jeremiah Barlowe.

Or maybe this is the kind of person you
really
are.

Garraty shook his head. The place was fucking with him, of that he was sure. Was the voice in his head even his own? He wasn’t completely sure anymore. But what he
was
sure is that what was done was done, and he couldn’t change that. He just had to live with himself, and hope that in time he could put all this behind him. Get going on that fresh start he’d been promising himself.

He leaned the Mag against the nearby pier, then reached out and dragged a mound of dirt into the hole. He followed it with another, and another after that. The boy never made a sound, though the Mylar blanket had plenty to say as the dirt piled higher. He worked at a fever pitch, forcing his mind to stay elsewhere—anywhere other than on the task at hand, and what he’d done with the scraper. Despite the effort his forehead stayed dry. The temperature had dropped even more and now the crawlspace felt as cold as, well, as a grave. The thought raised the ghost of a smile on his lips.

The hole filled quickly, and soon fresh dirt rose in a lone hump where it had been. His nails were ragged and bleeding, and dust and dirt seemed to coat every part of him. But the deed was done and it didn’t matter now if young Mr. Toomey had been alive or if Garraty imagined it all.

And that’s that
.

He shone the light around the area, looking for any evidence of his presence. Nothing but the tire iron and freshly mounded dirt, which would settle and sink soon enough as the boy... diminished. Good. Garraty wriggled his way back to the bowed beam and slunk under it, turning around as soon as he could. This time it was less about seeing the exit and more about
not
seeing the new swell in the earth behind him and everything it signified. He began to crawl toward the indigo rectangle.

              The sheet of corrugated tin slipped in Garraty’s hands when he picked it up, and one sharp edge sliced across his left palm, parting the flesh neatly. The pain was immediate and blinding, a hot burn as exquisite as if he’d dragged his hand across a spinning saw blade. He hissed and dropped the piece of metal with a clatter, blood pouring from the wound in a scalding sheet.
Job didn’t have it this bad.

Jesus, it was deep. He tried to make a fist and found that he couldn’t. Not completely. His fingers curled in about three quarters of the way and then just stopped, like they thought they were done clenching. Fuck. Were there any tendons in the palm? Garraty let his hand relax and the fingers straightened, much more than they usually did when he was at rest. That didn’t seem like a good thing. Maybe he was going to end up in the emergency room tonight after all.
Sure it’s bad, doc, but you should see the other guy.

Before he did anything else he needed to deal with the bleeding. God only knew how much evidence he was leaving for the ever-inquisitive CSI boys to find, should someone discover his handiwork under the house in the near future. He rocked back onto his butt, trying to keep his hand raised higher than his heart to ease the flow, and leaned back against the smooth siding. Blood ran in rivulets toward his armpit, nearly black in the wan light from the Mag. Garraty kicked his shoes off and then grabbed the toe of one navy dress sock so he could pull his foot out. The thin cotton was damp.
Blood and sweat. A few tears and we’ll have a half-decent house band.
There’d be plenty of tears in prison if he didn’t get this shit under control, that was for sure.

Holding the dry end of the sock between his teeth, he wrapped it around his injured hand tightly and tied it in a single knot to hold it in place. Not great, but it should stanch the flow of blood. Next, he peeled off his other sock and used it to wipe down the piece of corrugated roofing, removing droplets of blood and fingerprints pressed in the dust that were so pristine it was like he had left a big flashing sign that said
THIS WAY TO HOLMAN CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
. With all those years managing the General Electric plant floor, they’d just
love
having him do the same kind of work in the license plate plant for a quarter an hour. Unless he held it together and cleaned up after himself.

Garraty inspected the section of metal again and found a few spots he’d missed. Once it was as clean as he thought it was going to get, he pulled the sock over his good hand and stood the sheet on its long side. As he shuffle-crawled toward the opening with it, he thought once more about how much the rectangle looked like a mouth. He didn’t care for the yawning depth of the crawlspace, and the way the blackness swallowed the glow from the Mag. The way it
hid
everything from his sight. Something in there could be looking out at him right now, and he’d have no idea. Maybe the thing he thought he saw earlier, with its pale smudge of a face and hollowed eyes. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. A spill of yellow light fell through the opening and lit the first few feet of the tight space, but whatever he sensed in there lurked beyond it, in the void. He thought it might be grinning, the same way a young mother might grin as she pressed a pillow over her infant’s face because the goddamn thing wouldn’t stop crying all the time.

A sound floated from that terrible darkness, low and scraping, and he knew with all certainty that the thing was no longer watching him, that it was racing toward the doorway through the viscous black on all fours, scuttling like a giant insect under the beams and joists. Knew it just as surely as he knew his own name. Knew it in the flutter of fear in his belly, and in the jitters of his hands. Coming for him to deliver swift retribution for what he’d done to the boy.
I know your sins, Joe Garraty
, it would say, its mouth stretching impossibly wide as it reached for him.

Garraty lurched forward to get the piece of roofing over the opening, fingerprints and blood smears be damned, and as it blocked the dim light shining under the house he caught a glimpse of that pallid face with the big dark eyes rushing at him, its wide mouth pulled into a knowing grin that showed sharp black teeth.

The tin slammed over the rectangular doorway an instant before something smashed into it from the other side. Garraty tipped back as the thing surged forward, fighting to get through the hole, and for a long moment he thought he was going to go ass over teakettle and let the thing out into the under-porch with him to do whatever it was going to do, but then the pressure from the other side simply
stopped
and he got his balance back and clapped the sheet of tin into place. He leaned into the metal, pressing so hard against it his muscles cried out from the strain, the pain in his palm forgotten for the moment. Where had the thing gone? Was there another way out?

In that terrible movie screen that lurked deep in his mind, Garraty saw the slumped shape scrambling out from under the house through a rotted section of the siding he hadn’t noticed when he was in the crawlspace. Saw it loping around the outside of the house on spidery limbs, its mottled slate skin turned blue by the moonlight. Coming up behind him right now, just about to rip through the undergrowth thicket with hands that no longer felt pain so it could feed on him, the way Jeremiah Barlowe had fed on those children in 1943.

Garraty reversed his position and leaned back into the metal. One of the v-shaped crimps bit into his lower back and he gritted his teeth to keep from crying out. Nothing was coming toward him. He felt exposed sitting there in the beam of the Maglite. Maybe the thing was just watching him from out in the yard now, because he was so easy-peasy to see in the light.

Or maybe it was never there at all.

Bullshit. Something had hit the piece of metal hard enough to almost knock him over. That wasn’t imagination. Christ. Whatever it was had been under the house with him the whole time he was in there with the boy. He reached over and picked up the tire iron, pleased with its comforting weight. Thank God the metal had cut his left hand.

Garraty leaned to one side—making sure to keep his back firmly against the tin sheet—and used the tire iron to roll the flashlight close enough for him to grab with his left hand. He turned it outward and bathed the rotting steps and dense green curtain of growth in its weakening beam. He saw nothing, but the hedge was so thick something could have been halfway through it and still been invisible to him. But if that were the case, he would have heard the rustle of leaves and the brittle snap of old dead twigs.

Because there’s nothing out there, just like there was nothing in the crawlspace. You’re letting this place get to you. Too many stories, Garraty my man.

Unless the thing on the other side of the metal was still there, biding its time in the darkness. Calculating. Waiting for him to let his guard down, like any predator. The minute he took pressure off the piece of roof, it would come for him, grinning that cold dead grin as it reached out to take him in its pale gray arms.

So we’re at an impasse,
amigo
. A Mexican standoff.

But how long could he hold out? His bladder was already full again, and he needed to get the cut on his hand cleaned up before an infection set in. If he sat here much longer the ground was going to start to get uncomfortable. Already his tailbone was gearing up to file a complaint with management.

Garraty thought back to his initial look under the house, when the Maglite was strong and cut through the lightless space the same way the tin had his hand. He’d seen every bit of the crawlspace then, except for some of the knells between the joists, and there was no way for something to be there unless it could disobey gravity and cling to the subfloor like a vampire in a bad horror movie. The place had been empty. But then he’d heard the voice whisper his name, and when he looked again hadn’t he seen—if only for the briefest instant—something peering back at him?

You saw a rat.

Yes... eventually. What he saw at first was much larger than a rat, despite the way it slumped. Barlowe-sized, you might say.

Imagination. No such thing as ghoulies, ghosties, or long-leggity beasties, except the ones present between your ears. Killing a kid will do that to a man, haunted house or no.

He could go on like this all night. Problem was, he didn’t think there was a whole lot of night left. The phone was in his left pocket, but trying to get it out with his injured hand while simultaneously keeping the metal pressed firmly over the doorway would be more than he could handle, he thought. And if he was going to let the roofing go, it would be on
his
terms, not because he was trying to do something stupid like check the time. The exact hour didn’t matter. What
did
matter was that it was going to be daylight soon and while that might be comforting to his overworked imagination, it dramatically increased the odds of a car passing by as he left the house in the Prius.
Hello, sheriff? I saw the strangest thing on the way to work this morning. Some wild-eyed man in a dented and blood-spattered car was pulling out of the woods by the old Barlowe place. Had a guilty look about him. Maybe you should check it out.
The way his luck had been going, the sheriff’s office wouldn’t write the call off but actually send someone up here to discover his handiwork, and his good friends the CSI guys would be close behind, ready to identify him in a matter of hours.

How about a little paranoia to go with those hallucinations, Joe?

Garraty took a deep breath, checked his grip on the tire iron, then launched himself away from the sheet of tin covering the entrance to the crawlspace. He burst from beneath the front porch and spun, bringing the weapon up like a club, ready to swing if something was coming for him—even though the part of his brain that had manufactured the slumped thing with hollow eyes whispered that if something
did
come for him, he wouldn’t be able to kill it with the tire iron because it was already dead. He pointed the Maglite under the porch.

The piece of roofing leaned against the ancient siding, unmoved.

Garraty stood crouched in a defensive position for several moments watching the section of metal, which did nothing but shine without luster in the dim glow. Pain throbbed in his left hand with every beat of his racing heart. Gradually his breathing slowed, and his heart rate approached something close to normal. Nothing came through the doorway to the crawlspace. Not that he had expected it to. Well, not the rational part of him, anyway.

He played the light around in the cavity one last time, checking for obvious signs of his visit, and found none. Tucking the flashlight under his arm, he patted his pants for his phone and keys, then touched his back pocket to make sure his wallet was still there. Too many people were done in by silly little things like that. There were stories about dumb criminals—and that’s what Joe Garraty was now, yes indeed—on the news almost every night. Hell, there’d just been one on channel 48 a couple of weeks ago about some idiot in Huntsville who tried to rob a credit union with a deposit slip he’d filled out with his real name and account number.

Stars twinkled merrily overhead, and it looked like the sky might be a little lighter than when he went in. Dawn would be here before too long, he thought. Garraty was beginning to feel a little foolish now that he was no longer confined under the porch. Monsters never seemed as real when you were out of the place that gave them their power. Probably by the time he got to the trailer this would seem like a bad dream. And if it didn’t, well, he had a whole case of something to help dull his memories of tonight.

He started along the side of the house toward the opening in the growth where he’d come in with the dead boy. The circle of yellow bounced in front of him as he walked, showing him the way to avoid the jutting roots and clutching brambles. As he passed the window he’d looked through a lifetime ago he thought of the sounds he’d heard from the room above when he was in the crawlspace.
Thump, scrape. Thump, scrape.
Something hobbling across the floor, then lying down on the floor just inches over him. An icy finger drifted down his spine, and the little part of him that had never forgotten the story of Jeremiah Barlowe and the three dead children awakened.
He’s still in his charnel house
, it told him in a singsong voice.
Gonna come for you!

Garraty brought the light up and pointed it through the window frame. The room was as empty as it had been before. Nothing lay on the floor, one pale ear pressed to the pine planks, and nothing crouched beneath the sill, waiting to spring out at him. The little voice in his head could go fuck itself, he decided, and turned away from the window.

From the direction of the front porch he heard the warbling clatter of sheet metal on brick as the section of tin roofing fell away from the entrance to the crawlspace.

As something
knocked
it away, his mind insisted.

Garraty spun and plunged into the thicket, the gap down the way all but forgotten. The gap would take him further from the car, and he’d be fucked if he was going to do
that
. Briars plucked at his clothes as he fought his way forward mindlessly, and thin branches clutched at him. Swinging the tire iron like a machete, he beat at the growth, forging a path through it. A thorn raked across his face, setting it alight in a thin burning strip. Still he drove forward, thinking about nothing but escaping whatever horror must surely be breathing down his neck by now, reaching for him with a desiccated gray—