Burial (15 page)

She called, ‘Mommy! Mommy! It's Wanda!'

But her mother was gradually being dragged away, one arm lolling, one cheek lacerated by asphalt. Her jeans were torn at the knee and her yellow-checkered shirt was splattered with brown dried blood.

She can't be dead. She can't be. She's my mother
.

Wanda shouted to Joey, ‘Wait here! Cling on tight!'

‘Where are you going?' Joey screamed at her. ‘You can't leave me! You can't leave me!'

‘Wait here!' Wanda insisted.

She pulled herself out of the doorway and took three staggering steps across the verandah. It was only then that she realized how strongly everything in Pritchard was being
dragged towards the west. She managed to catch the verandah-rail, but all the same she could hardly stay upright. Lightning spat all around her; garbage and newspapers blew in the wind. She turned back to Joey and shouted, ‘Stay there! Stay there! I'm going to rescue Mommy!'

‘You can't!' screamed Joey. ‘You can't save her, you can't!'

‘Just stay where you are!' Wanda yelled at him.

She stood up as tall as she dared. Her mother's body was moving slowly but unceasingly away from her. If Wanda allowed herself to be dragged away too, then perhaps she could catch up with her; and find a place for them both to cling on to; a house or a shed or even just a fence; at least until this storm had blown itself out.

‘Mom!' she shouted. ‘Mom, it's Wanda! I'm coming to save you!'

Her mother's body rose and dipped in the tide of garbage. For a moment, Wanda lost sight of her. But then another crackle of lightning caught the yellow plaid of her bloodied shirt; and Wanda could see that she had already been carried away as far as Waldo's Food Mart, on Main and Comanche.

Joey screamed at her, ‘Don't! Don't leave me alone!'

Wanda turned. ‘Joey, I have to! Somebody has to!'

‘
Don't leave me alone! Don't leave me alone
!'

‘Joey—'

‘
Noooo
!'

At that instant, with a sharp ripping noise, the nails were tugged out of the verandah rail, and flew towards the west. The rail collapsed, with a barking, planklike echo, and Wanda was thrown head-over-heels into the dusty yard. She rolled over, rolled over again, thought:
this isn't so bad
. But then she found herself rolling over and over again, and again, and hitting a fence-post, and tumbling over grit and shingle, and tumbling again, and hitting a hitching-rail, and — winded — colliding with boxes and reels of cable and bedding-pots and cans of paint.

She caught hold of the hitching-rail and pulled herself onto her feet. She took a deep breath, and then tried to walk towards her mother.

She managed three or four tottering steps, but then she couldn't stop herself. The ground was level but she had to run. She felt as if she were bounding down a steep hill, faster and faster, until her legs were whirling so fast that she couldn't keep up with the pull of gravity. She tripped, stumbled and fell — only fifty or sixty feet away from her mother. She was showered in cans and papers and garbage and broken bottles. She scraped both knees, and they stung like fire. She was almost drowned in rubbish. A cat jumped past her, end over end, an acrobat cat, even though its eyes were yellow and staring, and its legs were rigid with
rigor mortis
. She screamed, helpless, scrabbling against the tarmac with lacerated hands, trying anything to prevent herself from falling any further.

‘Mommy! Mommy!' she cried. ‘
Mommy
!'

She got up on her knees; fell; got up again; fell. Lightning snapped and exploded all around her, cans and papers pirouetted with static. She opened her mouth to scream but her lips crackled with living electricity.

She fell, waded, fell again. But she had nearly reached her mother. ‘Mommy!' she shouted, but stumbled. Trash poured over her like a surging tide. A supermarket trolley struck her on the side of the head. ‘
Mommy, it's me! Please, Mommy, it's me
!'

She was dragged at last into her mother's arms. But her mother's arms were lifeless; lolling and loose.

Through a blizzard of styrofoam cups and ripped-up
Time
magazines, Wanda could see without doubt that her mother was dead; smiling but dead; nothing but a heavy jiggling body in a yellow-checked shirt, grinning, sightless, and blissfully ignorant of Wanda's fear. She wasn't Mommy any more; she was a lifesize imitation made of dead meat;
horribly flawed; horribly carefree. Wanda screamed and pummelled at her mother's arm. Her mother vanished under showers of torn-up plastic bags and rubbish; then reappeared ten or fifteen feet further away, still smiling, a woman happily swimming in the sea of oblivion, all responsibilities forgotten.

Wanda screamed, ‘Mommy! Mommy!' But she knew that her Mommy had already left her. The smiling woman in the yellow-checked shirt was nothing but a mockery of Mommy. Her real Mommy was in heaven; or someplace else, where Wanda could never find her; and Wanda had been left to survive on her own.

She climbed to her feet again, stumbled, and toppled. All around her houses were moving like ships that had dragged their anchors. Chimneys dipping; balconies swaying. Even the Exxon gas station had collapsed, and its roof was being pulled westward like the black triangular fin of a killer whale. She looked up, and saw that the sky to the west of Pritchard was black as night; black as sin; and that even the clouds seemed to be drawn towards it

She saw a house grinding past her; a mustard-painted house; and recognized the Allisons' place from almost a half-a-mile east. She struggled upright, ran and fell; but ran again; and managed to clamber up onto the Allisons' porch. The house was moving beneath her feet, and slowly turning as it moved, but at least she wasn't being pulled along the highway.

She circled the Allison house, clinging tightly to the verandah posts to keep herself from being pulled off. It was two-storey, clapboard, a typical Pritchard house. Some of the folks who moved away from Pritchard took their houses along with them, on the back of a flatbed trailer. Almost all of the downstairs windows were broken and the door was hanging off its hinges. Wanda struggled into the hallway, snagging her hand on a broken hinge. She sucked blood,
and wrapped her handkerchief around it. Then bracing herself against the wall, she shouted out, ‘Hallo! Is anybody home? Hallo!'

There was no reply. The house whistled with wind and echoed with banging doors. The wallpaper in the hall was yellow and brown, like French and American mustard all mixed up; but most of the pictures had dropped off the wall and all of the furniture had slid right through to the drawing room, so that the hall was oddly bare for a town where people habitually over-furnished. In Pritchard, furniture meant affluence, the same as it had when the town was first established, back in 1865. Big colour TVs and coffee-tables and couches and display cabinets crowded with crystal and china, they all stood for solidity, and community pride, and success.

Wanda's feet crunched on broken picture-glass. ‘Hallo?' she called again. ‘Is anybody there?'

She was just about to make her way through to the kitchen when she heard a thin, distorted cry from upstairs. She froze, her hand on the banister post, and swallowed hard. She heard the cry again.
Aaaoooooohhhhhh
, with a chilling echo to it. She couldn't make up her mind if it were an animal or a human.

‘Is anyone there?' she shouted; her voice tight and piping. ‘Hallo? Is there anyone up there?'

She heard the cry once again, and this time it sounded distinctly like ‘
Help me
.'

She hesitated for a moment, listening to the wind and the dreadful banging of trucks and automobiles, and then she mounted the stairs. She had to grasp each banister rail tightly to prevent herself from being dragged away. It was more like scaling a steeply-tilted ladder than climbing upstairs. She whimpered as she went, partly out of grief, partly out of fear. But she was desperate to find somebody alive, somebody who could help her, somebody who could tell her what to do.

‘
Aaaaaoooohhhhhhh,
' came the cry; lower this time, and somehow more frightening than it had been before.

Wanda pushed open a bedroom door. The four-poster bed had slid across to one side of the room, along with the nightstand and the dressing-table and tangled heaps ofclothes. A dressmaking dummy lay tilted against the wall, stiff and dowdy and headless. It was wearing a half-finished summer frock with bright splashy poppies on it — a frock which now would never be finished.

‘
Aaaaoooohhhhhh,
' the voice wailed again.

Wanda called, ‘I'm here, I'm coming! Where are you?'

‘
Aaathrroom,
' the voice called back.

‘What?' asked Wanda.

‘
Baaatthhhrooommm. I'm in the baaatthhrooommm
.'

Shaking with delayed shock Wanda made her way along the landing until she reached the very last door, which was the only door which was closed. There was a clutter of broken pictures up against it, as well as a bentwood chair and a small semi-circular table and a shattered glass lamp. One of the pictures was an amateurish oil-painting of Pritchard in pioneer days, when it had been nothing much more than a general store and a post office and a haphazard collection of farms.

‘
Oh, God, please help me,
' the voice begged, from beyond the door.

Wanda turned the handle, and the door opened. Immediately, all of the debris that had been piled up against it tumbled eagerly into the bathroom, and collided with the bathtub.

The bathroom window had fallen inwards, and the wind was blowing the flowery curtains into rags. Even though the glass was gone, however, the sky had grown so bloody and dark that it was difficult for Wanda to see what had happened. She could make out a big white bathtub, and a cork-topped seat lying on its side, and heaps of shattered
glass. But at first sight of the bathroom appeared to be empty.

‘Where are you?' she called, uncertainly. ‘I can hear you but I can't see you.'

‘
Bath,
' the voice echoed. ‘
Please help me
.'

Wanda half-slid, half-crawled across the floor, until she clumsily fell against the side of the high old-fashioned tub. It felt icy-cold, and it made a dull booming noise when she banged it.

‘
Please God help me
,' the voice repeated.

Wanda climbed up on the side of the bath. Inside, the entire tub was awash with blood. A naked girl of about sixteen or seventeen was lying in it, her skin so white that it looked like ivory soap, one hand clinging to the handgrip, the other pressed hard against the tiles. Her hair was soaked in blood, so that it was impossible for Wanda to see what colour it might have been. Her breasts and shoulders were streaked and mottled with blood, both fresh and dried. Her bloody handprints had stencilled Rorschach prints all over the tiles, nightmares in living colour.

Wanda said, ‘Maggie, is that you?
Maggie
!

She could scarcely recognize this bloodied mermaid as the second-eldest Allison daughter, the girl who used to babysit her when she was small. The last time Wanda had seen her, Maggie Allison had been sitting side-saddle on the back of Rick Merrick's motorcycle, brightly laughing, her head thrown back so that her long cornsilk-coloured hair had flowed and whipped in the slipstream.

‘Maggie, what happened?' said Wanda. ‘You're all over blood.'

Maggie looked up at her and her face was grotesquely smeared, as if she had been taking part in some terrible tribal initiation. Her eyes glistened in the gloom; the bloody water thickly lapped against the sides of the bath, and made a gurgling noise.

‘Window … the window broke. The glass fell into the bath. I tried to get it out but I cut my legs and the back of my ankle. Sliced right through. I just can't move, and I can't stop bleeding, and there's so much blood. Oh, Wanda, I think I'm going to die. I think I'm going to bleed to death.'

‘Is your mom here?' asked Wanda. What was she going to do? Even if she were strong enough to lift Maggie out of the bath, how could she stop her from bleeding?

Maggie said,'I called and ‘I called but nobody came. Mom was in the yard when the storm blew up … I didn't hear her after that.'

‘It's not just a storm,' said Wanda. ‘It's something else.'

‘Oh Wanda, get me out of here,' Maggie pleaded.

Wanda hesitated for a moment, then tugged at the waste-lever. There was a sharp clonking noise but that was all.

‘Doesn't it empty?' asked Wanda.

Maggie coughed a bloody bubble. ‘It's broke … we always used to pull out the plug by hand — but don't! There's too much glass. You'll cut your fingers off.'

‘Maybe I can lift you up,' Wanda suggested.

‘You could try, but don't drag me. There's a huge piece of glass and it's sticking in my side.'

Wanda looked around the bathroom in desperation. All the while, Maggie continued to cling to the hand-grip, her breathing thin and unsteady, the blood in her hair congealing into a hideous fright wig.

The house trembled all around them, and they heard a sharp clattering landslide of shingles falling off the roof above their heads. The main support beams groaned, tiles cracked like castanets, and nails began to pop out of the flooring. As the house slowly swivelled, the blood-red light from the window slowly moved around the bathroom.

Wanda said, ‘I know what I'll do … I'll fill the bath with towels, push them underneath you. That way, I can get you out without you cutting yourself.'

Maggie said nothing, but coughed, and coughed again.

Wanda fought her way across the floor, straining against the unnatural gravity that had dragged away her mother, and was threatening to drag away everything — people, cars, houses, maybe the sky itself. She clawed her way to the linen-cupboard, opened the catch, and was immediately caught on the forehead by the door swinging open, and then half-buried under an avalanche of Sears bath-towels.