Charnel House (7 page)

He returned the basket to the shelf, then shambled down the hall to his still-dark bedroom and shucked off his clothes before climbing into the creaky double bed. The Tylenol was starting to work, and the pain in his hand and knee had diminished a little. The bed wasn’t very comfortable, and certainly not one he would have bought if he were out shopping, but when the price is right for a furnished place—and you don’t really have a choice because it’s all you can afford anyway—you suck it up and learn to live with it. Roughly thirty seconds after he got the covers pulled up to ward off the chill that seemed to have crept into his bones during his time under the Barlowe house, he was out.

When Garraty woke hours later, bright sunlight streaming through the blinds crossed him in thin white stripes. He lay in a spot of wetness so big at first he thought he’d pissed the bed. Sweat. The room felt like a goddamn oven. Whatever cold front had pushed through last night had been burned away by the light of day. It couldn’t be all that hot outside, not in May. Probably not much over seventy, but with the window units off the trailer had heated up like a locked car in summer. He kicked the covers off and blinked blearily at the clock radio. Almost three. Jesus. His head felt thick, cotton-packed, but at least it wasn’t hurting. Yet. His hand throbbed and his knee pounded. A dull crimson line across the makeshift bandage told him the cut had been leaking while he slept.

He scooted across the bed and sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The spot where the rock had jobbed his knee when he fell was puffy and purpling, the leg stiff. His shoulders ached from carrying the boy’s body and digging his grave, and his lower back sang a song of agony. Maybe he should start working out as part of the new leaf he was turning over, so shit like this didn’t practically incapacitate him.
Shit like this.
As if he had the need to bury dead kids under the local haunted house regularly. Garraty grimaced as he stood, and pressed his good hand into the small of his back.
Nothing like growing old gracefully
.

Before he crossed the hall to the bathroom he turned on the air conditioning unit mounted in one of the two windows in the back wall. He set the thermostat a little high. Utilities weren’t part of the rent—already more than it should have been because Garraty opted to go month-to-month instead of signing a lease, just in case Tina wanted him to come back—and he couldn’t afford to run it down as far as he’d like. Opening some windows would help, at least for a few weeks. July and August were going to be brutal unless he found work. He might have to spend his days hanging out on the concrete pad in front of the trailer, exchanging glares with the crone across the way.

In the bathroom, Garraty turned the crank on the frosted roll-out window while he peed. Get a little air flowing. He peered through the narrow gaps between the slats of glass, looking at the trailer opposite his. She was out there on the stoop again—or still—rocking slowly in the white chair, a tumbler of iced tea on the small plastic table beside her and a paperback in one spotted hand. For once, she wasn’t looking his way.

Standing on the ground next to her stoop right in the middle of a patch of purple and yellow pansies was the dead boy, and he
was
looking Garraty’s way, staring across the lane at him with those half-lidded eyes full of crusted blood. His arms hung limp and broken by his sides, splintered bone glistening wetly in the afternoon sun. The lower half of his body still had that strange skew to it, like the Prius had twisted him the way Garraty twisted the boiled crawdads they sometimes served down at Titsville on Friday nights. He was so close to the old woman she could have reached down and taken hold of the ice scraper handle, which poked jauntily out of the split crown of his head. Garraty jerked and the stream of urine danced out of the toilet and spattered across the cheap linoleum. To his racing mind it sounded like dirt falling on a Mylar blanket. The boy’s lips were moving, and though he made no sound Garraty could hear it was easy to see what he was saying.

Toomey. Toomey. Toomey.

Over and over, like a goddamn metronome. Garraty closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them, the boy was still there. Still repeating his mantra. The old woman was completely unaware of his presence. Garraty wondered if he’d be able to hear the kid if he were standing closer. He suspected he would. He tucked his penis back into his underwear and watched the boy, considering. It was one thing for his imagination to have run wild when he was under the house with the dead boy, but this was something else entirely. This was the middle of the goddamn day. He let his gaze drift up to his neighbor, still lost in her paperback. Maybe she was deaf. Wouldn’t Luis have said something if she was, though? Besides, she should be able to smell him. He was still wearing the same clothes, and had to reek. His last load had been stewing in his jeans for hours now, and she was well within the circle of stench.

But the kid was
dead
, asshole, and you know it. If the car didn’t kill him, the ice scraper sure as fuck did.

And yet there he stood in the bright sunshine, looking just as solid as the trailer behind him. No wispy haints or transparent phantoms here, no sir. The first finger of fear flicked at Garraty’s heart.
What if the kid was alive and dug himself out and followed me here?
He knew the question was absurd. No one could have survived the injuries the boy had—not to mention the amateur lobotomy with the ice scraper—much less dug himself out of the makeshift grave and traveled six miles to the trailer park. But the kid was there, plain as day, and he didn’t look much like a figment of Garraty’s imagination.

Toomey. Toomey. Toomey.

The old woman casually set her paperback aside and picked up a pack of cigarettes from the little table. She flipped the box top open and withdrew one, which she tucked between her thin lips and lit with a shaky hand, cupping the flame to keep the wind from blowing it out. Settling back into the rocker, she let her eyes drift toward Garraty’s trailer. If she knew the boy was next to her, she was doing a hell of a job ignoring him. Likewise, the kid didn’t acknowledge her at all, just kept looking at Garraty cowering behind the thin slats of frosted glass through those awful blood-filled eyes. Mouthing that goddamn word.

“Why are you staring at me so, Joe Garraty?” the woman suddenly called, and Garraty jumped like he’d been goosed. She leaned forward in her chair and glared over the top of her reading glasses at him.
Good Christ, who has vision that good?
This thought was followed closely by
how the hell does she even know my name?
Luis. It had to be. Garraty hadn’t shared more than ten words—most of them
hi
or
hello
from him, and at the most a grunt in response from her
—
with her in the time he’d lived here. He wondered what else Luis had said about him. The woman plucked the cigarette from her mouth and tapped ashes over the side of the stoop. They fell like snow on the head of the dead boy. He seemed not to notice. “I can feel your eyes crawling all over me like fingers. Are you over there doing something
perverse
to yourself?”

Garraty flushed. Damned old biddy sure knew how to get under his skin. Like someone would ever want to spank it while looking at
her
wrinkled old ass. Instead of responding—God knew that’s what she wanted—he grabbed hold of the crank in the window frame and closed the window.
Fuck her
. Luis was right. She was one mean bitch. He heard her raspy, wheezing cackle through the glass. If she could see the dead boy beside her, with his cleaved head and shattered arms, the laugh would wither and die on those livered lips, Garraty thought. He could look out at the boy from the living room. Lift a slat a little bit and watch as long as he wanted.
Let’s see her spot
that
.

On the way to the living room, Garraty detoured into the kitchen. The beer waited on the counter, warm as the piss he’d just squirted all over the floor in the bathroom. He could see the remaining cans in the box, stacked like cordwood. Inviting him to take one, just one. A beer
would
take the edge off the frisson of fear he still felt. Probably clear some of that cotton out of his head, too. Help him think clearly, maybe figure out what the fuck was going on with the dead kid watching him from across the street.

Knock it off, Garraty my man. You’re turning over a new leaf, remember?

But the can of Pabst already seemed to be in his hand. He didn’t know how it had gotten there; he’d only been
looking
. A little warm, a lot comforting. It really would help. Besides, it was only one beer. He popped the tab and chugged until the can was empty, then he crushed it in his fist and slammed it into the trash.
Two points
. His eyes watered and his throat burned and he felt a massive belch building in his stomach, but the beer already seemed to have doused the candle-flame of worry. He plucked another from the case and went into the living room.

The old woman had returned to her book, the cigarette dangling from her mouth. A thin streamer of smoke curled up and around the halo of her wild gray hair. The boy was still there. He looked exactly the same, except he had turned a little so that he was now facing the window near the door of Garraty’s trailer, where Garraty stood peering through a half-inch gap. It was like the kid had some kind of freaky x-ray vision and had watched Garraty make his way through the trailer to the room where he was now.

Or like he’s not really there, and you’re imagining every bit of this, the same way you imagined all those things last night.

He took a pull from the can and considered this.

The boy mouthed
Toomey
at Garraty, and watched him through half-lidded eyes caked with dried blood.

The woman turned a page in her book.

Garraty finished the beer in one big gulp and let the blind fall into place.
Fuck it.
He knew the kid wasn’t really there, knew he
couldn’t
be there, but if his mind was going to insist on playing tricks on him he was going to prove it once and for all. Put the dead back to rest, so to speak. The deadbolt snickered back when he twisted the knob, and he pulled the door open and stepped out onto his homemade steps. The kid hadn’t gone anywhere. Out here, Garraty could hear the soft mutter as he chanted his one-word soliloquy, but the more he thought about it the more the words seemed to be coming from inside his head rather than across the way.

Toomey. Toomey. Toomey.

Even more evidence that it was his mind fucking with him. Garraty tossed the empty beer can back into the trailer—he didn’t want to give the old bat over there any ammunition—and descended the stairs and started toward the boy. The concrete pad was warm under his bare feet. Honeysuckle was in bloom somewhere nearby, and the sweet scent filled the air. He felt the weight of the boy’s flat dead gaze on him. For a figment of his imagination, he sure looked—

“Joe Garraty, you get some clothes on or I’m calling Sheriff Langston!” the old woman shrieked, and Garraty blinked stupidly over at her. He understood the individual words just fine, but their collective meaning was having a little trouble penetrating the thick layers of cotton batting that still seemed to be so tightly wound around his head. She was launching herself from the rocker now, the paperback tumbling forgotten through the air. “This ain’t that kind of neighborhood, there’s nice people here! Keep away from me, you
pervert!
”

Understanding coalesced in the cool fog of his mind as the gist of her words came together, and his eyes dropped to look down at himself in a dreamy kind of slow motion. He wore nothing but yesterday’s tighty whities, only they weren’t really so tight or white anymore. The front was yellowed from last night’s pissapalooza when he hit the kid with the car, and the briefs were so old there was plenty of sag in the elastic. His balls were practically hanging out, jangling around against his legs like a couple of kiwis in an old sock as he crossed the lane.
Who needs nightmares about forgetting to get dressed when you can to it for real?
he thought in stuporous wonder. What a sight he must be, lurching toward her trailer in his skivvies, one hand wrapped in bloody paper towels and duct tape!

He looked up at the gray-haired woman, thinking
I’m no pervert, lady, this ain’t what it looks like,
but before he could even open his mouth to say anything red flowers bloomed in his vision and bright agony exploded in his right temple as an atomic bomb went off on the side of his head. He staggered back a step, and then he was falling with the word
stroke
ping-ponging around inside his skull, bouncing off the walls of his brainpan. He hit the pavement ass-first, teeth clacking together like castanets. Instinct brought his hands down to keep him from falling all the way over and
really
cracking his skull, and when his left palm smacked into the asphalt it felt like he’d plunged his arm into a hornet’s nest, all the way to the elbow. He threw his head back and shrieked in raw bestial agony. Over the roar of blood in his ears he heard the tinkle of glass breaking and then the world went fuzzy for a while as Garraty and his consciousness fought to stay married.

Something was running down his face. He raised a hand that seemed disconnected, like it was tethered to a helium balloon that lifted it from the road to his temple, and cautiously pressed it to the side of his head. Even that soft touch brought a wave of pain so strong his stomach clenched and he thought for a moment he was going to upchuck warm beer all over his pale, flabby legs. Each beat of his heart delivered a throb that began in his head and ended in his knee by way of the palm of his left hand, only to him the normal
lubDUB lubDUB lubDUB
the rhythm sounded like
tooMEY tooMEY tooMEY
. When he lowered his hand to look, whatever was on his fingers was clear. Not blood. Cold.