Supernatural Noir (23 page)

——

I didn’t park down from the place this time. I drove through the horseshoe opening and drove down as close as I could get to the grave. I got out and looked around, hoping I wouldn’t see the man in the long coat, and hoping in another way I would.

I got my gun from my pocket and held it down by my side, and walked over to the grave. It was covered up, patted down. The air still held that stench from before. Less of it, but it still lingered, and I had this odd feeling it wasn’t the stink of Susan’s body after all. It was that man. It was his stink. I felt sure of it, but there was no reasoning as to why I thought that. Call it instinct. I looked down at the grave. It was closed up.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up like I had been shot with a quiverful of little arrows.

Looking every which way as I went, I made it back to the car and got inside and locked all the doors and started it up, and drove back to town and over to Cathy’s place.

——

We were in her little front room sitting on the couch. There was coffee in cups on saucers sitting on the coffee table. I sipped mine and tried to do it so my hand didn’t shake.

“So now you believe me,” she said.

“But I don’t know anyone else will. We tell the cops this, we’ll both be in the booby hatch.”

“He took her body?”

I nodded.

“Weren’t you supposed to stop him?”

“I actually didn’t think that was going to come up. But I couldn’t stop him. He didn’t look like much, but he was fast, and to leap like that, he had to be strong. He carried your sister’s body like it was nothing.”

“My heavens, what could he want with her?”

I had an idea, considering she only had on a slip. That meant he’d been there before, undressed her, and put her back without her burial clothes. But Cathy, she was on the same page.

“Now someone has her body,” she said, “and they’re doing who knows what to her . . . Oh, Jesus. This is like a nightmare. Listen, you’ve got to take me out there.”

“You don’t want to do that,” I said.

“Yes I do, Mr. Taylor. That’s exactly what I want to do. And if you won’t do it, I’ll go anyway.”

She started to cry and leaned into me. I held her. I figured part of it was real and part of it was like the way she showed me her legs; she’d had practice getting her way with men.

——

I drove her over there.

It was just about daybreak when we arrived. I drove through the gate and parked near the grave again. I saw that fellow, even if he was carrying two dead blonds on his shoulders, I was going to take a shot at him. Maybe two. That didn’t work, I was going to try and run over him with my car.

Cathy stood over the grave. There was still a faint aroma of the stink from before.

Cathy said, “So he came back and filled it in while you were at your office, doing—what did you say—having a drink?”

“Two, actually.”

“If you hadn’t done that, he would have come back and you would have seen him.”

“No reason for me to think he’d come back. I just came to look again to make sure I wasn’t crazy.”

As the sun came up, we walked across the cemetery, me tracing the path the man had taken as he ran. When I got to the fence, I looked to see if there was anything he could have jumped up on or used as a springboard to get over. There wasn’t.

We went back to the car and I drove us around on the right side near the back of the cemetery. I had to park well before we got to the creek. It was muddy back there where the creek rose, and there were boot prints in the mud from the flooding. The flood had made everything a bog.

I looked at the fence. Six feet tall, and he had landed some ten feet from the fence on this side. That wasn’t possible, but I had seen him do it, and now I was looking at what had to be his boot tracks.

I followed the prints down to the creek, where he had jumped across. It was all I could do to stay on my feet, as it was such a slick path to follow, but he had gone over it as sure-footedly as a goat.

Cathy came with me. I told her to go back, but she wouldn’t listen. We walked along the edge of the creek until we found a narrow spot, and I helped her cross over. The tracks played out when the mud played out. As we went up a little rise, the trees thickened even more and the land became drier. Finally we came to a nearly open clearing. There were a few trees growing there, and they were growing up close to an old sawmill. One side of it had fallen down, and there was an ancient pile of blackened sawdust mounded up on the other where it had been dumped from the mill and rotted by the weather.

We went inside. The floorboards creaked, and the whole place, large as it was, shifted as we walked.

“Come on,” I said. “Before we fall all the way to hell.”

On the way back, as we crossed the creek, I saw something snagged on a little limb. I bent over and looked at it. It stank of that smell I had smelled in the graveyard. I got out my handkerchief and folded the handkerchief around it and put it in my pocket.

Back in the car, driving to town, Cathy said, “It isn’t just some kook, is it?”

“Some kook couldn’t have jumped a fence like that, especially with a body thrown over its shoulder. It couldn’t have gone across that mud and over that creek like it did. It has to be something else.”

“What does ‘something else’ mean?” Cathy said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

We parked out near the edge of town, and I took the handkerchief out and unfolded it. The smell was intense.

“Throw it away,” Cathy said.

“I will, but first, you tell me what it is.”

She leaned over, wrinkled her pretty nose. “It’s a piece of cloth with meat on it.”

“Rotting flesh,” I said. “The cloth goes with the man’s jacket, the man I saw with Susan’s body. Nobody has flesh like this if they’re alive.”

“Could it be from Susan?” she asked.

“Anything is possible, but this is stuck to the inside of the cloth. I think it came off him.”

——

In town, I bought a shovel at the hardware store, and then we drove back to the cemetery. I parked so that I thought the car might block what I was doing a little, and I told Cathy to keep watch. It was broad daylight, and I hoped I looked like a gravedigger and not a grave robber.

She said, “You’re going to dig up the grave?”

“Dang tootin’,” I said, and I went at it.

Cathy didn’t like it much, but she didn’t stop me. She was as curious as I was. It didn’t take long because the dirt was soft, the digging was easy. I got down to the coffin, scraped the dirt off, and opened it with the tip of the shovel. It was a heavy lid, and it was hard to do. It made me think of how easily the man in the coat had lifted it.

Susan was in there. She looked very fresh and she didn’t smell. There was only that musty smell you get from slightly damp earth. She had on the slip, and the rest of her clothes were folded under her head. Her shoes were arranged at her feet.

“Jesus,” Cathy said. “She looks so alive. So fair. I understand why someone would dig her up, but why would they bring her back?”

“I’m not sure, but I think the best thing to do is go see my mother.”

——

My mother is the town librarian. She’s one of those that believe in astrology, ESP, little green men from Mars, ghosts, a balanced budget, you name it. And she knows about that stuff. I grew up with it, and it never appealed to me. Like my dad, I was a hardheaded realist. And at some point, my mother had been too much for him. They separated. He lives in Hoboken with a showgirl, far from East Texas. He’s been there so long he might as well be a Yankee himself.

The library was nearly empty, and as always, quiet as God’s own secrets. My mother ran a tight ship. She saw me when I came in and frowned. She’s no bigger than a minute, with overdyed hair and an expression on her face like she’s just eaten a sour persimmon.

I waved at her, and she waved me to follow her to the back, where her office was.

In the back, she made Cathy sit at a table near the religious literature.

“What am I supposed to do?” Cathy asked.

Mother looked around the room at all the books. “You do know how to read, don’t you, dear?”

Cathy gave Mother a hard look. “Until my lips get tired.”

“Know anything about the Hindu religion?”

“Yeah. They don’t eat cows.”

“There, you’re already off to a good start.”

“Here,” Mother said, and gave her a booklet on the Hindu religion, then guided me into her office, which was only a little larger than a janitor’s closet, and closed the door. She sat behind her cluttered desk, and I sat in front of it.

“So, you must need money,” she said.

“When have I asked you for any?”

“Never, but since I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays, and you live across town, I figured it had to be money. If it’s for that floozy out there, to buy her something—forget it. She looks cheap.”

“I don’t even know her that well,” I said.

She gave me a narrow-eyed look.

“No. It’s not like that. She’s a client.”

“I bet she is.”

“Listen, Mom, I’m going to jump right in. I have a situation. It has to do with the kind of things you know about.”

“That would be a long list.”

I nodded. “But this one is a very specialized thing.” And then I told her the story.

She sat silent for a while, processing the information.

“Cauldwell Hogson,” she said.

“Beg pardon?”

“The old graveyard, behind the fence. The one they don’t use anymore. He was buried there. Fact is, he was hanged in the graveyard from a tree limb. About where the old sawmill is now.”

“There are graves there?” I asked.

“Well, there were. The flood washed up a bunch of them. Hogson was one of the ones buried there, in an unmarked grave. Here—it’s in one of the books about the growth of the city, written in 1940.”

She got up and pulled a dusty-looking book off one of her shelves. The walls were lined with them. These were her personal collection. She put the book on her desk, sat back down, and started thumbing through the volume, then paused.

“Oh, what the heck. I know it by heart.” She closed the book, sat back down in her chair, and said, “Cauldwell Hogson was a grave robber. He stole bodies.”

“To sell to science?”

“No. To have . . . well, you know.”

“No. I don’t know.”

“He had relations with the bodies.”

“That’s nasty,” I said.

“I’ll say. He would take them and put them in his house and pose them and sketch them. Young women. Old women. Just as long as they were women.”

“Why?”

“Before daybreak, he would put them back. It was a kind of ritual. But he got caught and he got hung, right there in the graveyard. Preacher cursed him. Later they found his notebooks in his house, and his drawings of the dead women. Mostly nudes.”

“But Mom, I think I saw him. Or someone like him.”

“It could be him,” she said.

“You really think so?”

“I do. You used to laugh at my knowledge, thought I was a fool. What do you think now?”

“I think I’m confused. How could he come out of his grave after all these many years and start doing the things he did before? Could it be someone else? Someone imitating him?”

“Unlikely.”

“But he’s dead.”

“What we’re talking about here, it’s a different kind of dead. He’s a ghoul. Not in the normal use of the term—he’s a real ghoul. Back when he was caught, and that would be during the Great Depression, no one questioned that sort of thing. This town was settled by people from the old lands. They knew about ghouls. Ghouls are mentioned as far back as
The Thousand and One Nights
. And that’s just their first known mention. They love the dead. They gain power from the dead.”

“How can you gain power from something that’s dead?”

“Some experts believe we die in stages, and that when we are dead to this world, the brain is still functioning on a plane somewhere between life and death. There’s a gradual release of the soul.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Books. Try them sometime. The brain dies slowly, and a ghoul takes that slow dying, that gradual release of soul, and feasts on it.”

“He eats their flesh?”

“There are different kinds of ghouls. Some eat flesh. Some only attack men, and some are like Hogson. The corpses of women are his prey.”

“But how did he become a ghoul?”

“Anyone who has an unholy interest in the dead—no matter what religion, no matter if they have no religion—if they are killed violently, they may well become a ghoul. Hogson was certainly a prime candidate. He stole women’s bodies and sketched them, and he did other things. We’re talking about, you know—”

“Sex?”

“If you can call it that, with dead bodies. By this method he thought he could gain their souls and their youth. Being an old man, he wanted to live forever. Course, there were some spells involved, and some horrible stuff he had to drink, made from herbs and body parts. Sex with the bodies causes the remains of their souls to rise to the surface, and he absorbs them through his own body. That’s why he keeps coming back to a body until it’s drained. It all came out when he was caught replacing the body of Mary Lawrence in her grave. I went to school with her, so I remember all this very well. Anyway, when they caught him, he told them everything, and then there were his notebooks and sketches. He was quite proud of what he had done.”

“But why put the bodies back? And Susan, she looked like she was just sleeping. She looked fresh.”

“He returned the bodies before morning because for the black magic to work, they must lie at night in the resting place made for them by their loved ones. Once a ghoul begins to take the soul from a body, it will stay fresh until he’s finished, as long as he returns it to its grave before morning. When he drains the last of its soul, the body decays. What he gets out of all this, besides immortality, are powers he didn’t have as a man.”

“Like being strong and able to jump a six-foot fence flat footed,” I said.

“Things like that, yes.”

“But they hung the old man,” I said. “How in hell could he be around now?”