Resurrection (20 page)

Now Dave was talking sense. For what else could they really do? Marcus was going to tell his interim partner just that, but when he looked over at him, he saw something outside the window. Not some
thing
, really, but some
body.
Just a glimpse of face looking in at them. But the effect was immediate. He gasped and almost fell over.

“Jesus Christ, Pat…you okay?”

Marcus licked his lips. “Yeah…I just saw somebody.”

Rose swung around. He peered out the window. Not only peered out, but pressed his face up against the rain
-
spattered pane and looked long and hard. Marcus felt his throat narrow to a pinhole. He wanted to tell Rose not to do that, not to get so goddamn close. That’s how thick the paranoia in him was. Like maybe he thought something might reach through the glass and take hold of him.

“Don’t see anybody,” Rose said. He shrugged and walked over to the door.

“What’re you doing?” Marcus asked him.

“I’m seeing if I can catch our caretaker,” he said. “Why? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

But Marcus just shook his head. That image…glimpsed for the briefest of moments…turned something inside him. Made his stomach tighten and a chill run down his spine. “It…I don’t think it was the caretaker.”

Rose stopped as he was reaching for the doorknob. He looked at Marcus, not sure what any of this was about. “You’re kind of freaking me out here, Pat.”

“Sorry. I guess that face startled me.”

“Why?”

He swallowed.
Why, indeed?
How was he suppose to answer that in any way that made sense? Was he supposed to tell Rose that that face was not right somehow? That it was too pale? Too skullish? The grin too crooked? That it was just wrong in every way imaginable?

In the end, he said nothing.

Rose just stared at him and at that precise moment when he was probably going to call Marcus a nut, there was a loud pounding on the door that made him retract his outstretched hand as if the door had suddenly gotten too hot.

“This is bullshit,” Rose said.

He took hold of the knob, opened it and threw the door open.

21

Marcus felt his heart skip a beat. He didn’t know what he was expecting out there, but there was nothing. Just the rain falling from the roof overhang, a few wisps of that mist. The graveyard beyond. Nothing else.

“You sure you saw somebody?” Rose said.

“I thought I did.”

They both went out the door and Marcus steeled himself, pumped up something inside him so he wouldn’t get the heebie-jeebies. He walked out the door feeling like the big tough cop of ten years he in fact was.

“Hey!” Rose said. “Somebody out here?”

Together, they circled the shack and looked in the pick-up truck. But there was no one and Marcus was beginning to think there never had been.

“This is just some day,” Rose said. “You know? Just some kind of day.”

“Tell me about it.”

They went back to the patrol car. Rose got in and Marcus circled around to the driver’s side. He was going to get in, too, but he suddenly felt a tingling along the back of his throat and had the oddest feeling that a hand was poised to touch him there. He swung around. Nobody, nothing.

Rose got back out. “Hey, look over there.”

Someone was standing in the road just up from the shack. The rain started up again, falling in a gray sheet, but they both saw someone there. Rose in the lead, they started in that direction. They could see it was a girl of all things. Maybe eight or ten, dressed in a little green plaid skirt and white knee socks.

“Hey, kid!” Rose said. “C’mere.”

The girl just stood there and the closer they got, the more certain Marcus became that hers was the face that had peeked in at him. She was just a little thing. Dead leaves were stuck to her dress. She had red pigtails. There was a crest sewn to the breast of her white shirt.

“Pat,” Rose said. “That’s a school uniform. That’s one of the missing girls from Holy Covenant.”

Yes, it had to be.

They were maybe twenty feet from her, close enough to see that her face was positively anemic. Just white. Her lips were black and there were gray circles under her eyes.

“Hey, little girl,” Rose said.

She smiled and turned away from them, taking off amongst the headstones.

“Hey!” Rose said. “Come back!”

And Marcus wanted to say,
just let her go,
but his voice didn’t want to come. He was smelling a rank, stagnant odor like something that might come from a drainage pipe. It was the girl’s smell.

At the perimeter of headstones they lost her. She was out there, they knew that much. Perhaps crouched behind a marker or hiding behind a tree.

Rose took off his hat and shook the rain from it. “This just keeps getting better. First fucking Eddie disappears, now I’m playing hide
-
and
-
go
-
seek with a Catholic schoolgirl. You see her face, Eddie? She looks sick or something. White like that.”

Or dead.

“Piss on it,” Marcus said, feeling like a bag of conflicting nerves. “We’ll call it in. I’m not chasing her in this downpour.”

“I hear you.”

It sounded good in theory, but Marcus knew it would not work. The girl wanted them to follow her. That was what this was about. She was one of those missing girls and she wanted to show them where the others were and he honestly did not want to know where that was. And, as if on cue, the girl’s head popped up from behind a headboard
-
shaped marker. She was smiling, rain rolling down her ghastly white face.

“Fuck,” Rose said. “All right, little girl, you wanna play, we’ll play.”

Marcus cut off to the left and Rose went to the right. They would circle around her, flush her out like a rabbit in a hedge, and catch her. See what this was all about.

You know what it’s about,
Marcus thought.
You know exactly what this is about. You can pretend otherwise all you want, Pat, but you know the shit happening in this city. Those girls disappeared because something got to them. Something you don’t want to think about. And now they’re back.

Here.

In this cemetery.

Where else would things like them go?

Marcus heard Rose on his walkie-talkie as he threaded through the monuments and stripped trees. He was telling Dispatch that there was no one at the Hope Street Cemetery location, but that they had sited a juvenile. Might have been one of the missing kids from Holy Covenant. The little girl was staying put, looking positively obscene as she hugged that marker, her pale hands encircling it and that pale face grinning lifelessly like a doll’s. Her eyes were black and deep. They did not blink.

Marcus looked over towards where Rose was and saw him pass behind a tree and that’s when he knew they’d made a terrible mistake. What they were doing was simply procedure. It’s what cops did. The powers that be were hot to find out what happened to those girls. Yet, even with that in mind and the knowledge that they were doing the right thing, he knew down deep that the right thing was not always the smartest thing. Because this was a trap. This girl was bait and she was drawing them in, perhaps as she had drawn the caretaker in.

Marcus could not see Rose now.

He’d disappeared behind some hedges. Too many stones out there and thick tree trunks.

And that’s when Rose screamed.

It was a quick, almost economical sort of scream that died away almost as soon as he’d heard it. The girl giggled and when he looked back at her, she was gone.

“Dave!” he cried out. “Dave! Where the hell are you?”

But there was no answer, of course.

Marcus went running through the stones in the direction of that scream. He vaulted hedgerows and slabs, circled around trees, the rain and the ground mist obscuring everything. He wiped water from his eyes and then skidded to a stop over a collection of wet leaves.

There was an open grave before him.

Perfectly squared off, it reached down and down into the black earth. He could smell the dankness of it. There had to have been three or four feet of standing water in it, leaves floating on the surface.

“Dave?” he said.
“Dave?”

This could have been what happened. Rose could have fallen, maybe hit his head, was lying down in there drowning right now. Marcus stood on the edge, looking down. He had never felt so helpless in his life. If Dave was down there…what then?

You’re not really thinking of jumping in, are you?

But, no, he wasn’t thinking that. That water was black and oily, full of leaves and God only knew what.

He pulled his walkie-talkie off his belt. “Dispatch? This is Fifteen! Officer needs assistance! Repeat! Officer needs assistance! Hope Street Cemetery location…”

There was nothing but a garbled static coming from the walkie
-
talkie.

Marcus thumbed it. “Dispatch! Dispatch!”

More static, rising and falling, then the voices of several little girls:
“Eenie, meanie, miny, moe

”

Marcus felt suddenly hot and cold inside. His heart raced, his hand shook. “Clear this channel! Clear this channel!”

“EENIE, MEANIE, MINY, MOE!”
came the voices, loud, chanting.
“CATCH A NIGGER BY THE TOE! IF HE HOLLERS, LET HIM GO—”

“Clear this channel! Clear this fucking channel!”

“MY MOTHER SAYS TO PICK THE VERY BEST ONE AND YOU—”

“STOP IT!” Marcus shouted. “DO YOU HEAR ME? STOP IT!”

“—ARE NOT IT!”

Then more static and he could not get the radio to obey. Standing there, trembling and filled with a sharp, cutting silence, he knew that it was all in his head. It had to be in his head. He was hallucinating. He looked down into the grave and was not really surprised when he saw another white face emerge from the water, leaves clinging to it. Another little girl. This one blonde with eyes so black and liquid you could have drowned in them.

Marcus turned away.

That little girl was saying something, but he did not want to know what.

There was only one thing to do and that was to head back to the patrol car and get the hell out of here, come back with reinforcements. That’s what had to be done. And although his mind was cluttered with crawling, nightmare things, he saw the truth of this and knew there was no other way. He ran around the hedges and almost fell into a pack of girls.

Three of them, actually.

All dressed in their Holy Covenant uniforms and all white
-
faced with leering eyes of translucent blackness. No pupils, no whites, just that solid blackness. They were all grinning at him, leaves and sticks stuck to them, streaks of dirt on their faces.

“Dave said you should come with us, Pat,” they said in unison. “Dave said you should come so we can play a game together.”

Marcus drew his 9mm pistol. “I know what you are,” he said, trying to get some breath into his lungs. “I know what all of you are. You better get out of my way. If you don’t think I’ll shoot things like you, you’re wrong.”

The girls giggled.

“Get out of my way!”

“We want to play a game with you,” they said.

Behind him, another voice said, “Pssst!”

Marcus wheeled around. Another girl was peering at him from behind a tree. “You’re it!” she said.

Then she disappeared.

Marcus felt the madness open up inside him like a sucking pit that wanted to drown him, body and soul.
You’re it?
Sure, why not? Of course he was it. It was all a very fucked-up little kid’s game and he was
it.
Yes, yes, yes.

The walkie-talkie in his left hand crackled and he jumped. “Dispatch!” he said into it, just waiting for those eerie little girl voices to come echoing out of it.

But this time it was someone else:
“Pat! Pat! Jesus Christ, help me! Help me!”

In the distance, he heard Rose crying out.

Then Marcus was running. He could hear the girls chasing behind him, wanting to tag him and do other things that his mind would not let him think about. He came out on the road just up from the caretaker’s shack. He saw a couple other girls dragging Rose’s body towards the yawning mouth of a tomb.