GRAVEWORM (36 page)

The phone rang.

She breathed in and breathed out.

She picked up the phone. “I’m here.”

“
Did you get it?” the boogeyman said. “Did you get the things I need?”

“
Yes.”

His breathing increased. “Tonight’s a special night.”

“
Yes, it is.”

More breathing. “I want you to bring those things to me. Right to my door, Tara. Do you understand?”

“
I don’t know where you live.”

“
I’ll tell you. But you better come alone or you’ll never see your sister again. Do you understand? No police. No anybody. Just Tara. Only Tara and no one else. Do we understand each other?” he said. “Keep in mind, darling, that you’re a murderer.”

“
Yes, I understand,” Tara said, trying to keep the excitement from her voice.

Then, without further ado, in a voice that was nearly breathless with excitement, he told her exactly where to find him.

72

Something.

Something behind him.

Something following him.

Bud Stapleton was having trouble controlling his breathing. Perspiration that was cool and slick lay over his face in a web. His mouth was hot and dry and sweet. In his chest, his heart was running. He breathed in and out, knowing he had to calm himself just as he knew at that precise moment that he was an old man who had no business playing cop.

He stood up, his back crying out, and went to the window.

There was nothing outside. Absolutely nothing. Just the yard. The sidewalk. The street. A few parked cars. His truck. The pool of light thrown by the streetlamp just up the way. He had been home for over five minutes and had looked out the window half a dozen times and saw the exact same nondescript picture every time.

But something had been following him.

He was certain of it.

There was nothing behind you but your imagination playing hide-n-seek with you, you old fool.

And he wanted desperately to believe that… but the fear was still on him. It covered him like a particularly worm-eaten shroud and he could not get free of it. It made his breath come fast and his heart rumble with a papery rustling.

He sat back down and his back was grateful and his knees quit paining him almost immediately. Better. He wiped sweat from his face with a hankie, took a sip of water, and sighed. Just nerves. That’s all. The old got that way sometimes, he knew. Nervous. Frightened. Plain old scared. Just like little kids. With the very young it was the fear of the unknown and the great black night-world opening up around them each day at bedtime. With the very old it was the unpleasant, unnerving knowledge of physical fragility. They were a house of cards and it didn’t take much of a wind to scatter them.

Bud clicked on the TV.

Talk shows. Reality crap. Infomercials. Christ, TV had surely gone to the dogs. He watched a few minutes of a
Law and Order
repeat, a few more minutes of some old Claudette Colbert movie, then settled for the Weather Channel as most people his age invariably did.

He began to relax.

The only thing that made his nerves jump a bit was when he looked down at the pad of paper on the end table next to him. It had bothered him a great deal earlier when he could not remember the name of the man he saw lurking outside Tara Coombes’ house, but when he’d gotten home and into his chair, it had come to him quite easily.

A Borden.

That man was a
Borden.
There was no mistaking the drawn, cadaverous features. And on his pad of paper Bud wrote the one name he knew it had to be: HENRY BORDEN. Why he was hanging around outside Tara’s house, Bud did not know. But in the morning he was giving Wilkes a call. It was probably absolutely nothing… then again, who could say? The Bordens had a particularly dark past and were without a doubt one of the many skeletons rattling in the closet of Bitter Lake. Bud knew little but rumor of the family before his days on the force, but during his tenure as a cop he had had his fill of them. Back in the ‘80’s, maybe ’83 or ’84, the old man had died. Charles was his name. He was some kind of caretaker out at Hillside Cemetery. He died natural enough, but after that things got weird. He was survived by a boy, Henry, a daughter… Ellen? Elissa? Bud couldn’t be sure. But what he was sure of was that just before Henry returned from the first Gulf War—apparently after studying mortuary science without much success—his mother, Rose (a right mean old snatch by all accounts) and his Uncle Arlen and Aunt Lily had been involved in a suicide pact. It was a particularly ugly, grisly crime scene and Bud remembered it quite well.

But it was so much more than a crime scene and he knew it. If there was a true rattling skeleton in the closet of the town then this was it. The girl had called them. The daughter. The sister of Henry Borden. She had called it in and that was one of the most gruesome aspects of that gruesome little story. The bodies had been lying—sitting, actually—in state for several days during the hot, rank dog days of late summer. The girl had no real explanation for why she had not called it in earlier or how it was she was not aware that there were three corpses in the house with her.

Bud had been one of the cops that had gone in there, into the parlor, his stomach in his throat. When they opened the door a hot wave of corpse gas blew out at them and it nearly put him to his knees. Inside that room—very old fashioned from the high-backed red leather Turkish armchairs to the gas fittings and the floral flocked wallpaper—was an envelope of putrescence that had been simmering in the heat for days. The air was thick with flies. The bodies of Rose Borden, her sister Lily and Lily’s husband Arlen were discovered sitting in their respective chairs so bloated from gas that their shirts (or dresses, in the case of the ladies) had burst open, buttons launched clear across the room (one of them, from Rose’s bosom, had been ejected with such velocity it lodged in the wall and had to be pried loose with a penknife).

The three had sat down to a nice little tea party apparently. The teapot was there, as were crackers and teacups on little doilies. A hand of Hearts was dealt but never played. All three had died with horrible contortions that was obvious by the position of the limbs, yet they had remained sitting up in their chairs, faces puffed and lividly blue, mouths yawning open with dried foam down their chins and necks. The tea contained rat poison—strychnine—and that was very ironic, it turned out. For the house, they later learned, was infested with rats. Droppings were found under the furniture. The wainscoting had been chewed. The crackers nibbled on the plates.

But the most ironic and telling thing was what was found lodged in Arlen’s throat: a dead rat.

The tail was hanging from his lips and the coroner later figured that Arlen had drank his strychnine-laced tea, then munched a few crackers. He had died with them in his esophagus. Apparently, the rat went after the crackers and then either died from the poison or was trapped in Arlen’s gullet and could not work itself free.

Regardless, it was a ghastly discovery.

After that, Henry returned and he and the sister lived in the family house out on Summer Lane. And still did to this day, as far as Bud knew. That was all there was to it, save the fact that there was a particularly dark rumor floating around that Henry, who had taken over as caretaker at Hillside, had been discovered violating a corpse and had been duly canned by Spears, the director.

Which gave Bud a sudden turn because now Spears had been murdered.

Maybe there was a thread there and maybe not.

He would sleep on it.

Enough thinking for one day. Bud picked up the remote and clicked off the TV and it was then that he heard something like slow shuffling footsteps coming from the kitchen. Maybe it was his imagination again but he did not think so.

Gripped by terror, he thought of his service revolver in the upstairs closet.

He knew he’d never make it.

He got up and walked toward the hallway that led to the kitchen, pausing. His hand brushed over the light switch but he knew it was pointless to flick it: the light was burned out. Margaret had been after him to change it for weeks but like a great many things he had simply not gotten around to it.
It’ll be my death or yours,
she had said,
one of these nights if we stumble in the dark.
The wisdom of her words came back to him, haunting him.

You could call 911. Get a car over here. That might be a wise and practical thing to do.

But no, it was probably nothing and he was not about to be pegged as some crazy old bird who called every time a branch scraped at a window.

He took one step into the hallway, thinking it was an awfully long way. In the dark. Funny, but there was a chill coming from the kitchen and he knew no windows were open which meant it was the door. There was no other explanation. The air was cool and crisp, but hardly clean. There was a stink on it that was black and fusty like something had crawled under the back porch and rotted to worms.

He took another faltering step.

If something or someone did come in, they’re waiting for you down there. You’ll never get the kitchen light on and dig in the silverware drawer for a knife before they get the jump on you.

He took a few more steps forward.

The kitchen was a vault of shifting shadows. The chill air went up his spine and made his joints feel stiff. The stink it brought was stronger, gassy, almost green with decay.

That ain’t right. That smell… putrefacted. Nothing alive could smell like that.

Which brought to his mind a fresh slate of grim possibilities of the sort he thought he’d left back in grade school with his pirate costume, his wax teeth, and his Halloween treat bag. He swallowed. Whatever was in there was no dead thing, surely. It was no sheeted ghost dragging its moldering shroud or some hollow-eyed ghoul come for a midnight snack. He was too old to believe in fairy tales like that.

Whatever was waiting for him was perfectly alive.

Alive with the stench of open graves and freshly-chewed carrion.

“
Well, why don’t you show yourself?” he said, trying to disguise the terror that was thick as tar beneath his words. “Come out where I can see you.”

Giggling

A nasty, almost deranged sort of laughter. Like some hideous cloven-hoofed night-haunter imitating a young girl. Though his heart was skipping in his chest and his throat felt as if it had constricted down to a pinhole, Bud took another step forward. To do anything less would have been a victory for whatever had come into his house.

“
Show yourself,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

There was a flurry of motion and he stumbled backwards, trying to avoid the forward momentum of what came at him. But his knee locked again and one foot got tangled around the other and down he went, sprawled in the archway leading into the living room. There was a shooting pain that followed his spine to his neck. His left leg went numb.

And the thing was upon him.

He saw it coming and it was an abomination. It looked something like a teenage girl, but filthy and pitted with scabs and open sores. There were leaves and sticks in its hair. Its grinning mouth was filled with long teeth, dark crud packed between them.

Then he knew it was a girl: one that was deranged, primeval, and degenerate. A night-crawler in ghostface.

“
Jesus,” he managed.

“
I’ve got something for you,”
she said.

“
Get away from me!” he shouted at her. “FILTH! GODDAMN FILTH!”

He let out a cry that was more of a strangled wheezing than anything else as she hopped on him, bringing a foul stench of tombs, of feces and urine and vomit and sickness.
“I’ve got something for you, bad man, and now you can have it!”
Her greening nails clawed at his face but it was the other hand—the one that held the blood-crusted hatchet—that did the real damage. It came down on his forearm, slicing into the bone.
“Here it is!”
she wailed as the hatchet severed three fingers from his right hand. He screamed, gyrating madly beneath her, and the sound of that seemed to invigorate and excite her. She let out a high, piercing shriek and tore at his eyes, raking them with her nails, and brought the hatchet down again and again.
“And here! And here! And here!”
she said, splitting his septum, nearly bisecting his face. Bud screamed out bile and teeth, trembling and going still as his heart imploded in a pocket of blood. The hatchet kept coming down with thudding, meaty sounds until his face was an unrecognizable mass of red stringy tissue. His skull burst apart, spilling a gushing lava of blood and brain matter.