GRAVEWORM (37 page)

The girl stopped chopping.

Her naked body slicked in a red soup, she jumped up and down on him again and again, each time fluids spurting from him and his tongue jutting out obscenely with a slick of dark bile.

She kept at it for some time, amused and giggling.

73

This was the house, here at the end of the misnamed Summer Lane, a somewhat dreary tract of rotting old houses. Tara drove past it on purpose, parking some distance away within spitting distance of the gates of Hillside Cemetery.

Quietly, stalking yet knowing she was expected, she opened the trunk and then shut it.
No. He won’t have the remains, not until I have my sister.
Sliding the boogeyman’s gun out from inside her coat, she cut across a grassy vacant lot toward the house which was dark and sullen, a tall and narrow thing, boxy. It reminded her of an upended casket.

Here I come.

When she was in the shadow thrown by the house, she took out a small penlight but did not turn it on. Her mind was suddenly filled with images of her sister playing in the backyard as a child, making mud pies in the sandbox and dancing through the yard with a stick, claiming she was casting spells.
Lisa.
Good God, Lisa. But no. Tara would not allow herself to weaken now.

She moved around the side of the house.

She gripped the gun.

She moved up the steps knowing she was going into a trap, but knowing that there really was no other way.

74

As it turned out, Steve and Frank did not go directly to Tara’s to wait for her. Instead, they drove around, grabbed some black coffee from a convenience store. And as they drank it, they talked. They tried to wrap their brains around what they knew and somehow link it with those things they felt which were nearly indefinable.

It was no easy bit, of course.

Frank had no problem by that point believing that Tara Coombes, his long lost love, was now a maniac in need of four padded walls. But for Steve it was different. His gut-sense told him that, yes, she was dangerous, she was unbalanced, desperately in need of some kind of professional intervention. But at the same time… admitting the same was almost like violating some trust between them. Yet, to not admit it was to violate his friendship with Frank. Unless Frank was a really, really good actor, Tara had attacked him like some kind of beast.

“
Well, let’s go pay the piper,” Frank said as Steve turned onto Tara’s street.

The headlights of the SUV splashed over sleeping houses and parked cars… at the end of the block there was a police car parked. No, Steve saw two of them. It made something rise up the back of his throat.

“
Not at Tara’s house anyway,” Frank said.

Steve pulled up to the curb. “That’s Bud Stapleton’s house.”

“
Guy whose wife wandered off?”

“
Yes. She used to keep an eye on Lisa when Tara was working.”

Frank thought that over for a time, staring up at the darkened hulk of the Coombes’ house. “Funny how everything seems to lead back to Tara these days.” The innuendo in that statement was thick, but he did not elaborate and he did not need to.

“
I suppose it’s none of our business,” Steve said.

“
I guess not. Let’s go see if she’s back yet.”

Together, they walked up to the house and they were like two kids approaching a notoriously haunted house on a dead-end street: nervous, expectant, filled with an unexplainable chill.

Steve knocked on the door. He waited a minute or two and knocked again. “I guess we go in,” he said.

75

When Tara entered the house she felt a stark, relentless fear take hold of her because, in her mind, she was entering the ogre’s cave, she was traipsing into the lair of the boogeyman, the pale-faced, ghost-fleshed, ruby-eyed nightstalker that had seized not only her sister but her very life… gripped it in grave-cold hands and squeezed the purity, decency, and optimism out, expunging it like tepid water from a sponge.

You’re scared. You’re fucking terrified. It’s okay to be that way. Use it. Make it part of yourself.

Yes, she knew she had to do that. But as she stood just inside the door, breathing, waiting, gathering what was inside her, sharpening her wrath like a blade on a grinding stone, there was uncertainty… and clarity. She saw life in its most utilitarian and pessimistic state: as a series of bondages that held you, interlinked, tightening, never truly letting go. Your first shackles were your parents and once you had broken free of them—if you ever truly did—then there were more chains—jobs, relationships, marriages, children, love, hate, guilt, want, recrimination—winding around you, shackling you, holding you, never really allowing you to breathe free for one moment. Somebody always owned you in one way or another. And at the end of each chain there was some vindictive, power-hungry weasel pulling on them, dragging you in the direction they saw fit, making you dance, writhe, laugh, cry…
something.
And at that moment, with her clarity of vision, she saw the boogeyman as the epitome of all her keepers and overlords.

There was no more hesitation then.

She walked through an entry into a hall. With moonlight filtering in through a window she saw an old-fashioned but unkempt house, stairs rising to the second floor, boxes and bags and stacks of newspapers heaped about. The smell was musty, disused, a wormy library smell… things rotting beneath the weight of their own age.

She took another step and heard something shift in the gloom. Maybe a loose board. But maybe something far worse. An instinctive, incapacitating fear leaped into her belly and throat that was almost suffocating. The darkness spreading out around her was inhabited. There could be no doubt of that. A million-million generations of ancestral memory assured her of this.

I am not alone. He is waiting.

She felt almost compelled to avoid the stairs and, instead, turned down a short shadow-haunted hallway that opened into a room. The stink in here was the chemical stink of the embalmed and something even worse than that: a seeping charnel blackness.

She clicked on her penlight.

A dining room. The walls were hung with heavy velour drapes of the sort that might shroud windows at a mausoleum. And that was pretty apt—seated at the dining room table were shapes and forms, gape-jawed, hollow-socketed mummies dressed in formal accoutrements, elongated faces like melting wax and crumbling plaster, worm-holed and insect-ravaged, lips shriveled and rolled back like window shades revealing teeth jutting from puckered gums, desiccated hands like withered spiders and curling bird’s claws folded over bosoms or splayed on the table, going to powder. And all of them strung together in a thick netting of cobweb that ran from the eight-armed chandelier above to the mummies to the table itself, running from ruined marble faces and strung from eye sockets and death-contorted mouths to marble hands and dust-caked silverware and service and the molding linen tablecloth. A winding sheet of crypt filigree like a million-billion spiders had devoured yards upon yards of cerements, recycling them in the finest spun coffinsilk grave threads, webbing the guests at this table and holding them upright.

The beam of Tara’s penlight took it all in and a week ago she would have screamed at this horror… but now it induced more sadness and pity in her than anything else. The corpses were old, exhumed things save for the one without a head and the other that her beam now found… a humped-over shape covered in a white sheet.

The boogeyman.

Waiting for her.

There was no hesitation. She raised the gun. “Show me your face,” she said.

“
I wouldn’t shoot that one,” a voice said, drifting out at her from the shadows… the same dry, scraping voice she knew so well by that point. “It wouldn’t be very pretty if you did.”

He rose up from behind the chair and here was Tara’s first glimpse of the parasite that had turned her world upside-down and inside-out, eviscerating it and spilling its blood in shiny red loops. He was a tall thin man dressed in a dark coat. His face was pale and sunless like that of something that lived by night, something that crawled in cellars and slithered in graveyard ditches. An angular, hollow-cheeked, thin-lipped sort of face, eyes large and glossy black like those of an owl, but filmed with a glaze of dementia and paranoia as they stared out from swollen red sockets.

Tara stared at him.

He stared at Tara.

“
I want my sister,” she said with a cruel, bitter edge to her voice. “And I want her now.”

“
Well, Tara, who are you to make demands?”

Filthy fucking slime-crawling piece of shit motherfucking leech.

“
The person who is about to kill you, graveworm,” she said.

“
Don’t you call me that!’

“
My sister. Now.”

The boogeyman reached out and pulled the sheet from the slumped form and for a moment, one blessed moment of sanity, Tara did not know who she was looking at. Just another corpse… only very fleshy, recent. It was tied to the chair, head slumped forward, face very sallow, its lips grotesquely stitched shut like that of a shrunken head.

Then she saw the blonde hair.

No… no…

The cast of the face, the lips.

No, no, no, no, it cannot be…

And knew,
knew,
she was looking at the corpse of her sister.

But he wouldn’t… he promised… he wouldn’t hurt her… he wouldn’t do THIS… the dirty filthy motherfucking animal he would not do SOMETHING LIKE THIS—

The graveworm grinned at her.

Tara screamed with a shrill, deafening sound that made even him take a faltering step backward. She was aware in some distant corner of her mind that there was movement near her, that a stink of hot corruption had welled up quite near her like a draft from a mass grave.

But she didn’t care.

She raised the gun and fired point-blank.

The graveworm cried out and stumbled backwards, crashing into a china cabinet and hitting the floor, making a high, broken, whining sort of sound.

And then he shrieked:
“WORM! WORM!”

Tara turned and something leaped out at her, a night-black shape with a pallid blur of a face and she jerked the trigger right as something collided with her head and she felt herself going down, crashing into one of things in the chair that shattered on impact like delicate crockery.

Then she was on the floor.

And that foul, grave-stinking larval form was on her, hands around her neck, thumping her head against the floor until everything went dark.

76

Detective-Sergeant Wilkes spent some time looking at the thing sprawled on the floor of Bud Stapleton’s living room. He knew from experience that tragedy follows tragedy and never had it been so true as it was now. The walls were splashed with blood, the carpeting drenched with a coagulating pool of it. And center of that pool, was the hacked remains of Bud Stapleton. His left arm was hacked off. His head was nearly decapitated. His skull had been smashed in and what was inside had been splattered against the walls. His chest and belly had been opened, the organs yanked out and tossed around the room.

Turning away, far beyond simple physical revulsion, Wilkes stepped out of the living room and studied the bloody footprints leading to the backdoor and out into the night.

The prints of a child.

A teenager maybe.

And as hideous as that possibility was, it made a certain amount of warped sense. Wilkes had been in on his share of murder scenes and after a time it got to be almost effortless to put it all together, sans motive (though that always came in time). But this was… it was a slaughter and it was incomprehensible until you took in those footprints and the childlike, almost naughty glee in which Stapleton’s remains had been strewn about. There was something almost precocious about it, wicked, but precocious.

He stepped out onto the porch.

Fingerman was coming up the walk. There was a uniform cop behind him leading two men.

“
Tara Coombes is not in her house,” Fingerman said. “But we found these two over there. I think, maybe, we better have a chat with them.”

Wilkes had a sudden ugly feeling that they better do just that.

77

When Tara came to she was being dragged down a set of cold cellar steps by a naked girl. She was hogtied, ankles and wrists bound together behind her back with some kind of cord. A rope was tied off to it and the girl was dragging her by it, bouncing her down the steps, making no attempt to be gentle… if such a thing were possible.