Midnight Grinding (4 page)

Deanna sat between her parents, gently holding little Timothy’s hand, as the old Indian ranted and raved about things long since past. She couldn’t understand a lot of what he seemed to be so indignant about…something concerning the desecration of sacred land and Indian burial mounds. Soon, Sheriff Harding and his deputy arrived and tried to talk Old Redhawk into leaving peacefully. The drunken man took a wild swing at the constable and, suddenly, they had him face down on the ground, not more than six feet from where the Hudson family sat.

The seven-year-old watched, appalled, as they handcuffed the old Indian and pulled him roughly to his feet. For a second, the Indian’s eyes met Deanna’s. Those bloodshot eyes seemed to hold a dark message just for her.

Better watch where you sit, little girl,
they seemed to warn her.
There are things buried beneath you that you could never hope to imagine. Arrowheads and pottery and the dusty bones of many a brave warrior. And, on top of that, despite the protests of the tribe, others were buried. Innocent children whose foolish parents interred them in sacred ground. There are nights at certain times of the year when the magic of the great Elders raise those tiny
bodies from their earthen slumber and return them to the world of the living. Never mind what that comforting inscription atop the cemetery gate might promise. Whatever crawl this hallowed earth in the dead of night
…
they are far from being angels.

“Come on, you crazy old coot!” growled the sheriff as he herded Old Redhawk off to the patrol car. “Let’s see if a week or two in the county jail will teach you to leave decent folks alone.”

Mom handed Deanna a hot dog. “Just try to forget him, dear,” she said, stroking her long blond hair. “People do and say crazy things when they are all liquored up like that.”

The girl absently took the food, her eyes glued on the tiny stones that jutted along the hillside—or was it burial mound?—on the other side of the fence.

***

That night Deanna had the most frightening nightmare of her young life. She dreamt that she stood alone in the half-acre cemetery in the dead of night. A full moon was out, highlighting the tiny stones, making them look like bleached teeth sprouting from earthen gums.

She stood atop the small hill beneath the thick foliage of the magnolia tree, barefoot, her pink nightgown fluttering in a cool breeze. She watched as the iron gate opened and a tall figure stepped within. It was Old Redhawk, but not the same drunken old man that she had seen earlier that day. He was now a proud Cherokee chief with a feathered headdress and streaks of warpaint smeared across his ancient face and arms. Behind him filed a silent gathering of braves and squaws. Old Redhawk began to chant, lifting his hands skyward. The clouds boiled like the depths of a dark cauldron. Lightning jabbed downward like gaunt fingers of blue fire upon the horizon.

Before she could flee through the backwoods to her house, the ground beneath her began to buckle and heave. Clods of grass erupted, yielding a harvest of pale-fleshed heads. Soon, they had clawed the smothering confinement of dank earth away and were there before her, some toddling off balance, others crawling on all fours. The maddening noise of old rattles and squeaky toys pressed against her ears. Her screams drew their attention and, with an infantile mewing, they started up the hill toward her. The only source of escape was the tree. Limb by limb, she ascended the magnolia, glimpsing the pale little forms between the clusters of thick leaves.

When she finally reached the top, she thought herself to be safe. But she was not. Hearing a faint stirring in the leaves above her, she looked up and saw her baby brother, Timothy…his chubby face ashen…his Winnie the Pooh pajamas soiled and dank with fresh earth. And, as he reached for her, she recoiled from his cold little hands…and fell.

Deanna awoke, drenched in sweat, and her mouth was cotton dry. Trembling, she turned on the hall light and crept downstairs to the kitchen for a drink of water. She was filling a glass under the tap, when she heard a noise on the other side of the back door. It was a dry sound, the sound of tiny beads clattering within a plastic shell. A sound much like dry bones rattling within a casket. Small bones inside a small casket.

Don’t look outside,
she told herself.
Just go back upstairs and crawl into bed and forget all about it.

But that annoying little voice—Miss Curiosity—whispered insistently in her mind’s ear.
It could just be an old newspaper blown against the screen door, maybe a jackrabbit scratching against the concrete steps, wanting a carrot from the fridge.
She walked slowly to the door and unlocked it. For a second, she simply stood there.
Remember what you saw the last time you looked
, she told herself. But she opened the door anyway.

Nothing was on the backdoor stoop. No crumbled newspaper. No bunny rabbit. Nothing but…a single pink bootie lying in the center of the newly-cast concrete.

Cautiously, she picked up the knitted article of baby footwear and examined it. It was old…very old. Its cotton threads were rotten and reeked of soil, like the peat moss Daddy had spread around the shrubs last Saturday. And there was something else…something alive. She tossed the bootie away with a cry of disgust.

There had been squirmy white things crawling between the interlacing fibers. Maggots.

Then, as she was about to step back inside, she heard the faint rustling of the high weeds at the far end of the house. It was pitch dark that night, no moon at all. She strained her eyes until she actually began to see them. Tiny, pale splotches against the deep shadows of the pine grove. Not emerging from the thicket, but retreating.

“Deanna,” someone whispered behind her.

She nearly screamed, but recognized her mother’s voice before she could. She ran to her, quivering in the warm comfort of her arms. “What’s the matter, darling?” Mom asked, bewildered. “Were you sleepwalking again?”

Deanna said nothing. She just continued to cling with all her might.

Mom had come down to fix Timothy’s three o’clock bottle. When the milk had been warmed and tested on the inside of Mom’s forearm, the two mounted the steps to the upstairs hallway.

The nursery was strangely quiet as they stepped inside. Mom felt along the wall for the light switch. “Surely he didn’t fall back to sleep,” she told her daughter. “He was screaming like a little banshee only a few minutes ago.”

A click and the light came on. The nursery was revealed: lacy blue curtains, dancing clowns painted upon the walls, and in the crib, beneath a dangling mobile of Sesame Street characters, lay…

Mom screamed.

The baby bottle slipped from her hand and rolled along the hardwood floor.

Deanna could only stand there and stare…and think about the magnolia tree.

***

The Milburne pediatrician said it was something called “crib death.” Deanna didn’t know exactly what that was…only that it happened every now and then in Glover County. Her baby brother’s passing had been disturbing for the girl, as had his funeral— baby blue casket and all. But the most devastating thing was the place they had buried him. Deanna had screamed and cried when she found out, but the grownups had ignored her and buried Timothy there anyway. On the half-acre hill of stones…beneath that blossoming magnolia tree.

After that, Deanna found it hard to sleep at night. Her parents worried that the strain of her brother’s death caused her bouts of insomnia. But it was not. It was something much more sinister.

What drove the comfort of slumber from young Deanna’s mind were the nightly visits.

Visits by a single tiny shadow outside her bedroom window and the low cooing sounds that drifted from beyond the sash. She would lie with her back to the window, her thin body shivering and her eyes screwed tightly shut, until the first rays of dawn chased that awful presence from her midst. For she knew that if she listened to her little voice and turned to look, she would see his pale and bloodless face pressed against the panes. She would see those dark, liquid eyes, glazed and unseeing, burning in at her with some strange light…some unholy motivation torn between the restlessness of the living and the moldering of the dead.

And, the following morning, there would be another toy missing from the cool sheets of Timothy’s abandoned crib.

YEA, THOUGH

I DRIVE

Surprisingly, the practice of hitchhiking is still prevalent, even after years of well-deserved paranoia and tragic news reports about the perils of trusting strangers who travel the roads with their thumbs stuck in the air. Whenever I see a driver slam on the brakes to pick up someone holding a cardboard destination sign, I want to honk my horn and yell, “Hey, maybe you ought to give it a little thought first. Doesn’t this guy look familiar? Jeffery Dahmer’s second cousin, maybe?”

This tale of hitchhikers on a stormy Tennessee night takes place on the fictitious stretch of Interstate 53, where a grisly fellow by the name of the Roadside Butcher has been pretty danged busy lately…

There was a massacre in progress on I-53.

The interstate system stretched from Atlanta, Georgia, across Tennessee and Kentucky, clear to Cincinnati, Ohio. Until the autumn of that year, it was known mainly for its scenic beauty and the Southern hospitality exhibited at the restaurants and motels that served as overnight havens between the long miles of rural solitude.

Then the killings began.

In three short months, the “Roadside Butcher” had murdered seventeen travelers along Interstate 53, each one varying in degree of brutality and mutilation. Some drivers were found sitting in their cars or eighteen wheelers with their throats neatly slashed from ear to ear. Others were found lying at the side of the road, sliced open from gullet to groin, gutted like a deer at hunting season. And then there were the more grisly of the Butcher’s victims…those who had been hacked to death, dismembered, or decapitated. The strange thing about the whole ordeal was that there was no definite pattern. The victims had been hitchhikers and drifters, as well as vacationing travelers and burly truckers who regularly frequented the five hundred mile stretch of southern interstate.

The Highway Patrol was out in full force, as were the FBI, but the increase in law enforcement did not seem to deter the Butcher from performing his fiendish whims. It got so that veteran travelers of the road began to carry pistols and sawed-off shotguns, secretly stashed in glove compartments and sleeper cabs. Most of the truckstops began to sell a rather popular bumper sticker which read “YEA, THOUGH I DRIVE ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH, I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, FOR I AM THE MEANEST S.O.B. ON I-53!” However, at least a couple of those fearless motorists were found lying across their front seats with their throats cut down to the neckbone or their entrails dangling from the rearview mirror like strands of Christmas garland.

The sudden increase in freeway paranoia did not help Mark Casey’s situation any. He had been a drifter for years, possessing a nagging desire for wandering and the freedom of the open road. Before the chaos on I-53, the long hair and beard had not hampered his ability to catch a ride, either from one exit to the next, or straight through to his intended destination. But these days, hitchhiking was becoming one big pain in the ass. Whenever he hung out at a truckstop or stood at the roadside with his thumb in the air, he felt the eyes of potential rides appraising him negatively and noticing his uncanny resemblance to Charles Manson. Never mind that the wild eyes and swastika carved on the forehead was absent; the motorist would still see all that hair and the baggy field jacket that could easily conceal any number of sharp implements. They would see all that in one fleeting glance, shake their heads “fat chance,” and drive on, leaving Mark frustrated, sore-footed, and cold.

If it hadn’t been for his sudden pairing with Clifford Lee Gates, Mark was sure he would have ended up walking clear from Florida to Ohio that week in mid-December. Clifford Lee was a lanky boy of eighteen from Cloverfield, Georgia, a farming community that boasted a gas station, a general store, and a whopping census of one hundred and eighty-two citizens. Clifford Lee had high aspirations of becoming a country music singer. His constantly good-natured grin and overabundance of optimism were signs that he actually believed that he would make it big in Nashville, armed only with a beat-up Fender acoustic and his rural charm, despite his obvious lack of money and connections. Mark knew at once, upon meeting him at a greasy spoon called Lou’s Place, that he should watch out for this wide-eyed innocent. The boy would be easy pickings with a psychopath like the Butcher on the loose.

Anyway, it was Clifford Lee’s infectious charm that netted them a ride north with an overweight copier salesman by the name of A.J. Rudman. Rudman was returning home to Louisville from a Xerox convention held in Daytona Beach the previous week. They had overheard him talking to the truckstop waitress and, when he was paying his check at the register, Clifford Lee approached him with a big ole’ country-bumpkin grin. The middle-aged salesman was apprehensive at first, eyeing the young man’s bearded friend with immediate suspicion. But soon, the boy’s benevolence won over the man’s worries and he told them he would give them a lift that stormy winter night.

The long drive started out in silence, a silence born of tension and uneasiness. Mark sat in the front, while Clifford Lee took the backseat, upon Rudman’s insistence. Obviously, the Kentucky salesman wanted the more suspicious of the two where he could keep an eye on him.

Mark suffered the blatant mistrust quietly, just thankful that he and the Georgia farmboy were inside a warm, dry car and not humping the dark countryside in the pouring rain.

By the time they crossed the Tennessee state line, the mood had lightened somewhat. Idle conversation had echoed between the three and Clifford had even picked some country tunes on his guitar. The hillbilly twang in Gates’ voice grated on Mark’s nerves, but he settled into the Lincoln’s plush velour seat and tried to enjoy it anyway. A.J. Rudman seemed to be having digestive problems. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other tucked into the mid-section of his tan raincoat over his prominent beer belly.
Probably has a bad peptic ulcer,
thought Mark, not without a flare of mean-spirited satisfaction.
I guess that’s what you get when you’re a part of the corporate rat race these days, right, Pops?

“Where are you boys bound for?” Rudman asked out of pure boredom. His nervousness seemed to be gradually increasing for some reason. He was popping Rolaids like they were jelly beans.

“Well, I’m heading for Dayton,” Mark replied, trying to inject a friendly tone in hopes of dispelling the man’s distrust in him. “I’m going home to my parents’ place for Christmas. Mom always has a big spread laid out: turkey, candied yams, the works.”

“How about you, son?” the salesman asked over his shoulder.

Clifford Lee had been softly singing a medley of Dwight Yoakam songs. He looked up and grinned sheepishly. “I’m off to Nashville, Tennessee, to be a big country star. I grew up on country and western music. Me and my pa, we’d listen to the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night. I got to singing and picking on the guitar here and the folks said ‘Why, you’re as good as any of ’em, Clifford Lee! You oughta head on up to Music City and try your luck.’ So that’s what I aim to do.”

During the farmboy’s longwinded explanation, Mark noticed his hand squeeze past the guitar strings and disappear into the hole of the Fender’s hourglass body. He grinned. Surely Clifford Lee didn’t have a secret stash hidden inside his guitar. Mark had been around enough potheads to know a few who hid their grass in strange places, including musical instruments. But, no, Clifford Lee Gates was no more a smoker of marijuana than Jesse Jackson was the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Still, the thought of a good smoke, straight or otherwise, brought out that craving for nicotine in Mark Casey. Since Rudman seemed to be a smoker himself, Mark absently reached into an inside pocket of his olive drab coat for a pack of Marlboros, figuring the guy wouldn’t mind if he indulged. Suddenly, the big Lincoln Continental was whipping back and forth across the double lanes of the northbound stretch of I-53, shooting onto the paved shoulder on the far side and braking to such a sharp and screeching halt that the bearded hitchhiker would have butted his head against the windshield if his seatbelt hadn’t been buckled.

A breathless silence hung within the car for a long moment. The pattering of steady rainfall on the roof was the only sound to be heard. Then Mark turned and regarded the pale-faced businessman. “What the hell did you do that for?” he yelled. “Are you trying to kill us or something?”

A.J. Rudman swallowed dryly, his right hand still pressed against his gastric woes. “What were
you
doing?“ he croaked back. “What were you reaching for…inside your coat?”

“My smokes, man, that’s all!” Mark pulled the cigarettes from his pocket and slammed them down on the dashboard. He stared at the businessman incredulously. “You thought I was going for a knife, didn’t you? You thought that I was the freaking Roadside Butcher! That I was gonna pull a big knife outta my coat and carve your sonofabitching head clean off. That’s exactly what you thought, wasn’t it?” He snorted and shook his head in disgust. “Well, I ain’t the damned Butcher…you got that? I may look like some drug-crazed devil worshiper to you, but I’m just a regular guy trying to get from point A to B and, believe it or not, I’m just as jumpy as you are where that butchering crazy is concerned.”

“Well, I thought…” began Rudman in embarrassment. “It’s just that you reached into your pocket without any warning and…”

“Yeah…yeah, I know, man. Just a big misunderstanding. Why don’t you just loosen up and put us back on the road again, okay?”

The salesman nodded. He was about to shift back into drive, when Clifford Lee chuckled from the backseat. “Shucks, Mr. Rudman, ol’ Mark ain’t the killer. Shoot fire, he’s one of the nicest fellas I’ve ever met,” he said with a grin. “Heck, naw, he ain’t the Roadside Butcher. But, you want to know something kinda funny? I
am!”
And, with that, the farmboy reached around the padded headrest and laid a pearl-handled straight razor against A.J. Rudman’s flabby throat.

“What are you doing, man?” Mark asked. He looked at the goofy Georgian with the cowlicked crop of reddish blond hair and the slightly bucked teeth. Suddenly, as he stared into that freckled face, he realized that what he had initially interpreted as down-home naiveté had actually been a dark, underlying madness all along.

“What do you think I’m a-doing?” giggled Clifford Lee. The honed edge of the shaving razor glinted sinisterly in the pale glow of the dashboard light. “I’m fixing to kill this nice gentleman. Now, don’t go looking so danged surprised, Mark. And don’t worry…I ain’t gonna hurt you none. You’re my friend.”

Mark Casey watched in numb disbelief as Clifford Lee made his victim shut off the engine, unbuckle his seat belt and, ever so carefully, climb out into the stormy night. As if in a trance, Mark left the car also, walking around the rear bumper to watch the inevitable bloodletting. Clifford had Rudman’s head pulled back by the hair, the straight razor positioned at a deadly angle above the man’s carotid artery.

“But
why
, man?” asked Mark, his stomach sinking at the dread of having to stand there and watch a crimson gorge open beneath Rudman’s double chin. “Why are you doing this?”

Clifford Lee Gates gave his roadmate a toothy grin and shrugged. “Why not?”

Then something very strange happened. Something that neither Mark nor Clifford anticipated. A.J. Rudman still had his hand tucked inside his raincoat. It had been there all during the tedious transition from dry car to wet pavement. Mark had just figured the poor guy’s ulcer was about to explode. But he saw now that hadn’t been the case.

Rudman slowly withdrew his hand and—clutched in his pudgy fingers—was the biggest damned Bowie knife that Mark Casey had ever seen in his life.

He didn’t know exactly why he did it, but he yelled “Look out, Clifford!” The razor-wielding musician leaped back just as Rudman turned and slashed in a broad arc that would have taken out most of the boy’s abdomen if he had been standing in the same spot. The twelve-inch blade sliced through the cold misty air with a loud
swoosh
.

Rudman laughed. “The Butcher, like hell! You’re nothing but a damned copycat… and not a very good one at that. Oh, slitting throats is just fine and dandy, but it shows a great lack of creativity.” The middle-aged salesman passed the heavy knife teasingly from one hand to the other. “Come on, farmboy, let me show you how I express myself.”

Mark could only stand and watch as the two men squared off in the twin beams of the Lincoln’s headlights. The guitar-picker stood poised and ready, the joint of the razor’s blade and handle gripped between thumb and forefinger. The salesman crouched in a classic fighter’s stance, the big Bowie held, long and perfectly balanced, in one chubby hand. Like a couple of duelists, they circled one another, appraising strengths and weaknesses, then came together in a violent fury of flashing steel and spurting blood.