Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (44 page)

As he worked, Merit kept expecting to turn up some part or another of Lydia’s body. Certainly parts of her—especially the bones—must be here in the heap somewhere. There was no way he could tell if any of her body pieces were still out behind the barn, but he braced himself, telling himself to be ready for that first glimpse of a hand or a foot or something.

But shovelful after shovelful turned up nothing but rich-smelling, composted soil that was literally crawling with worms and grubs. Even though that couldn’t account for how the compost pile had gotten here from behind the barn, it certainly explained the seething motion he had seen from the living room window that created the illusion that the compost heap was moving.

He wheeled the first load back out behind the barn, dumped it, and then went back for more. He was curious why he didn’t see even the tiniest trace of his dead wife in the black soil, and he guessed that either her skin had already turned black from rot and was lost to his sight in the night or else—maybe, thank God—she had already decomposed in the heat generated by the compost. She was rotten enough in life, that’s for sure. Any way he looked at it, though, the only problem was getting the damned thing back out behind the barn so he could forget about it.

It took him more than an hour, and five more barrow’s full, but—finally—exhausted and sweating, he was finished with the job. The compost was piled up and rounded off nice and neat, back where it should be. Merit put his tools back into the barn and then dragged himself upstairs to his bed. He had to be to work at the paper mill in the morning, and he was already wondering how in the hell he was going to make it through the workday with so little sleep.

* * *

Morning light filled the bedroom and woke Merit up earlier than usual. He chuckled when he realized that—as always—he had slept on “his” side of the bed, which was approximately one-quarter of the whole queen-sized mattress. As he sat up and looked at his dirt-blackened sheets, the events of last night came back to him, and his chuckle turned into a full-bellied laugh.

No more sleeping on the edge of the bed. No more listening to Lydia’s bitching and moaning. No more cringing at the irritating way she always called him “Honeybun” … like she really meant it. No more putting up and shutting up. A few dirty sheets were a small price to pay for the peace and quiet. He danced a little jig as he started down the hallway to the bathroom for a quick shave and shower before work.

In the kitchen, he fried up half a pound of bacon—
real
bacon, not that vegetarian non-meat shit Lydia’d been buying—and he did three eggs, sunny-side up, the way he liked ‘em, Lydia’s constant nagging about his cholesterol level be dammed. Along with orange juice, coffee, and toast, he had a rip-snorting breakfast. He even picked up his plate and licked it clean just because he knew how much it used to irritate her when he did that. He couldn’t help but smirk when he didn’t hear the sharp reprimand to “mind his table manners.” As if manners mattered anymore.

Oh, sure. He still had a ball-busting job at the I.P.P. Paper mill, and there was never enough money, really, to make ends meet. But at least—praise be to God—he wasn’t ever going to hear that shrill voice, nagging him to do this and not do that. Those days were gone … dead and buried out behind the barn.

After breakfast, he piled his dirty dishes into the sink, intending to wash them along with the supper dishes this evening. With his second cup of coffee in hand, he sat back down and considered what he should do about explaining to people around town where Lydia was. She certainly didn’t have many—if any—friends who would miss her, but Hilton was a small town. After a while, people were going to notice that she had stopped coming to the supermarket or whatever. And then people might start asking questions. And if the questions got serious enough, they might catch the attention of the police.

As he sipped his coffee, Merit mulled over several options. For one thing, he could call the police and tell them his wife had gone out last night and not come back. He could tell them he thinks she ran off to God-knows-where. What were the chances they would go snooping around the compost heap?

On the other hand, he could simply let the whole thing slide. If—and that was a huge
if
—anyone asked him where Lydia was, he could say she’d gone to visit her sister in upstate New York who was sick with “the cancer.” Finally, though, Merit decided that mentioning anything about Lydia to anyone would raise suspicion, so he opted to let it rest … for now, anyway. At least until she was good and rotted away behind the barn. He’d handle whatever came up when and if it came up.

So with that decision firmly in mind, Merit slapped together a sandwich for lunch, threw it along with an apple and soda into his lunch pail, and grabbed his truck keys from the counter. He was halfway to the back door when something—he wasn’t sure what—struck him as odd. He paused in the hallway and shook his head, unable to put his finger on exactly what it was, but something was wrong. The instant he swung open the back door, he saw the problem. The window curtain on the back door had been too dark, and as the door swung open and he looked outside onto the porch, he saw why.

The compost heap was piled up on the front steps and halfway across the porch to the door, blocking the morning sunlight that usually came in through the back door window.

“Mary Mother of Christ!” Merit shouted.

He took a couple of staggering steps backwards, stopping only when he bumped into the opened hall closet door. He hit the edge of the door so hard he dropped his lunch, and it spilled out onto the floor. The apple bounced as it rolled away, but Merit barely noticed. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

It was … impossible.

How could the compost have gotten there overnight?

More precisely,
who
had put it there?

If this was someone’s idea of a practical joke, he failed to see the humor. Even as he stared in amazement at the compost heap, he could see that it was moving … shifting forward. The thick, rich soil heaved and seethed with a churning action that made loud, wet sucking sounds. A stench as strong as an open cesspool rose from the compost heap and wafted into the house on the morning breeze, making Merit’s stomach churn. The muck steamed in the morning sun. The air around it was buzzing with hundreds of flies.

“No damned way! … This can’t be happening!”

Merit took a few hesitant steps forward, leaning close to inspect the shifting pile. It was bigger than he expected, so big it was framed by the doorway, but Merit figured it looked so much bigger because he wasn’t used to seeing it on the porch.

But how had it gotten here, up on the porch?

That was a serious question, and even more seriously—what was he going to do about it?

Merit groaned as he ran his hand over his mouth, vaguely aware that his freshly-shaved upper lip was slick with sweat. If he left for work right now, he’d get there just about on time. But he couldn’t go to work yet. He had to deal with this … monstrosity. There was no way he could leave it here on the porch all day, rotting away.

“Christ on a rubber crutch,” he muttered as he eyed the heaving mound of black dirt and decay.

He stared at it for a long time … several minutes … fascinated by the squirming, wiggling stuff as it seethed in the shade of the porch. He couldn’t stop wondering what had happened—what
was
happening
right now
to the chopped-up pieces of his wife that were buried in there.

He shook his head when he remembered that he had to get to the mill. Tearing his gaze away, he rushed back into the living room, grabbed the phone, and hurriedly dialed the number for the mill. When he got the switchboard, he asked to speak to his foreman, Bo Hoskins. Fighting to control a rush of nerves, he told his boss that he was having trouble getting his truck started, and that he’d be a little late. Hoskins offered to send someone out to pick him up, but Merit insisted it was just a bad spark plug, and that he could have it changed in no time and be at work within the hour. Once he had Hoskins’ permission to be late, Merit hung up and went back out onto the porch.

Even in the short time he’d been on the phone, the compost heap had shifted closer to the door. Black strands of mulch seeped out across the floorboards like slowly melting ice cream. Merit studied them for a moment, trying to figure out how the thing was moving. If it had gotten this far, what would stop it from coming further inside?

“Well, by Jesus. I’ll take care of you once and for all, you sum-bitch,” he whispered harshly.

Being careful to stay as far away from it as he could, he edged over to the back steps. Once he was clear of the compost heap, he jumped down to the lawn and ran over to the barn. He was out of breath by the time he grabbed the shovel and wheelbarrow from inside the doorway. A sharp stab of pain slid between his ribs on the left side of his chest, but he ignored it as he pushed the barrow over to the porch and began shoveling the rich compost into it. He grumbled to himself, sputtering with anger as he carted the first load back out behind the barn.

It wasn’t long before he broke a sweat, and the pain in his chest intensified, but he told himself he had to work fast. He had less than an hour. Still, he couldn’t help but pause every now and then, and inspect the compost, wondering with morbid curiosity if, now that it was daylight, he might be able to see a piece or two of his wife mixed in with the muck. All he saw, though, was rich, black compost, crawling with worms and other creepy, crawly things.

It took him nine trips with the wheelbarrow to get it all back out behind the barn. He recalled that it had taken only six trips last night, and he wondered why there was so much more to haul.

Is the damned thing growing somehow?

Hell, compost was supposed to be the best thing to make gardens grow, but Merit had never heard of compost itself growing.

He worked fast, and by the time he’d dumped the last barrowful out back, his clothes were filthy and saturated with sweat. The pain in his side hadn’t gone away, either, but it was definitely lessening.

Flooded with relief, Merit put the tools back into the barn and went back into the house to shower and change before heading off to work. He was an hour and a half late when he got there, but Hoskins never said a thing about it. Merit didn’t give it another thought. He had plenty of other things weighing on his mind … like how, when he was driving out of the driveway, he had glanced into the rearview mirror and was positive he had seen a small strip of the black compost reaching out from behind the barn.

* * *

By the time he left work and headed home that evening, Merit was a physical and emotional wreck. Working as hard as he had last night and then again this morning had taken its toll on him. Hell, he wasn’t twenty-five anymore … he wasn’t even fifty-five anymore. All that shoveling and lugging on top of his usual shift at the mill had taken all he had and then some. The pain in his side had never gone away all day, and he was sure it was going to get worse tonight unless he took some pain reliever when he got home. He’d make sure to stop at the liquor store on the way home and buy some “pain reliever.”

But the mental strain was much worse than any physical exhaustion. No matter what angle he thought about it from, he simply couldn’t come up with a rational explanation for how the Christ that compost heap had ended up on the back porch.

Was it moving on its own power?

Or was someone moving it—someone who had seen what he’d done to
Lydia and was tormenting him, trying to drive him insane so he’d confess?

An even more frightening thought occurred to him that maybe he felt some deep-seated, subconscious guilt about what he had done and, without being consciously aware of it, was carting the compost out into the open where it couldn’t remain hidden … as if his guilty conscience
wanted
him to get caught.

That struck him as close to impossible because he felt no guilt for what he’d done. And if that was the case, then he must have moved the heap
four
times, not two. After giving that thought a bit of consideration, he rejected it and decided it didn’t matter—none of it mattered. He was simply going to have to deal with this problem no matter what was causing it. Somehow, the compost heap had gotten there, and all he had to do was make sure it—
and Lydia
—stayed out behind the barn where they belonged.

Anxious to get home, he forgot all about stopping off at the liquor store. When he turned into his driveway, his truck rattling in the ruts, Merit realized he was so tense he consciously had to ease up his grip on the steering wheel. He pulled to a stop in front of the barn, killed the engine, and got out of the truck cab. He’d been holding his breath so long his side ached worse than before. He knew he had been expecting to see the compost heap back on the porch. When he saw that the porch was clear and there wasn’t a trace of compost anywhere, he let the air out of his lungs in a long, slow sigh. Shaking his head and rotating his left arm, which had stiffened up something awful at work, he started up the weed-choked walkway to the door. Halfway there, he stopped and looked, amazed, at the door.

It was open, and small piles of black soil littered the carpet in the entryway.

He was positive he had locked the door on his way out, but maybe not … Maybe he had been too shaken to do it this morning. Regardless, he kept moving forward, slower now, toward the steps.