Cemetery Club (2 page)

Up ahead, lights reflected off the cement walls, lights that bobbed and moved.

Someone had found the burial pit.

Pushing Hilary to the side, Lillian turned and started back the way they’d come.

More lights were heading towards them from that direction as well.

It didn’t take him long to consider his options. Being caught with the files and the bodies would be an automatic death sentence.

Why give them the satisfaction?

He drew his pistol and shot Hillary White in the back of the head.

Hot metal burned his tongue as he placed the barrel in his mouth.

What a waste. All because people cared what happened to a bunch of drooling idiots. No wonder science never advances.

He pulled the trigger.

*  *  *

Rocky Point, NY, 20 years ago

“It has to be me,” Todd Randolph said, clutching the bag to his skinny chest as the rain continued to drench the cemetery. Muddy streams cascaded alongside the blacktopped paths and cut miniature canyons between graves “I started it. I have to finish it.”

Cory Miles shook his head. “We can do it together. We
should
do it together. All of us. The Cemetery Club.”

John Boyd and Marisol Flores voiced their agreement. The four of them were huddled under the overhang of a mausoleum that was so old the date on the plaque couldn't even be read through the crust of dirt and corrosion. The door stood open, exposing cobweb-covered cement casket boxes to the dim light of the stormy afternoon. In the center of the floor, a ragged hole several feet wide showed black against the gray cement. A fetid odor rose up from the darkness, death, mold and wet soil all entwined into a palpable stench that seemed bent on forcing their stomachs to turn somersaults.

“No. I’m the only one who can stop it.” Todd lowered himself into the pit, his rail-thin body disappearing from view almost immediately.

“What do we do?” Marisol asked. Her dark brown hair hung in long, dripping strands. Her bra was visible beneath the pink Duran Duran t-shirt that clung to the curves she’d started developing over the summer.

Cory knew that image of her would stay with him the rest of his life, just as he knew he was more in love with her now than he’d ever been. “I don’t know.” He took a step towards the hole and stopped.

John frowned. “We can’t let him go down there by himself. The aliens...”

Cory shook his head, sending water droplets cascading in all directions. “John, they’re not aliens. There's no such thing...”

“Fine. Aliens, demons, it doesn't matter. They're all fucking impossible. But we can’t let Todd...not alone.”

“I know. But...”

“But what?”

“Maybe it’s better if we split up. That way if anything...happens, there’s still two of us to try something else.”

“Like what?” said John. “Go to the police? They’ll think we’re crazy.”

“Well, we can’t just stand here. We—”

A terrible scream rose up from the hole, the high-pitched wail reverberating off the stone walls until it sounded like a thousand people were crying out in pain. As abruptly as it started, the cry of distress cut off, leaving nothing but a mental echo in everyone’s head.

“Shit! We have to help him.” John glanced from Marisol to Cory. Even in the near-dark, the pleading look in John’s eyes was too powerful for Cory to ignore.

“Let’s go.” Cory walked to the hole and stepped into the black depths, which seemed to swallow his legs as they vanished into the darkness.

When Cory’s head dipped below the edge it was as if someone had turned off all the lights in a room. He held out his hands to either side for balance and cold, damp earth met his palms. Rocks and old tree roots made the footing tricky, forcing him to walk with a shuffle-step motion so he wouldn’t trip. Scuffling sounds behind him told him his two friends were doing the same thing.

“Cory? Can you see anything?”

Marisol’s voice came from a few feet back. Her words sounded strangely flat, as if the hard-packed dirt of the tunnel had drained all the life from them.

“No. Just keep walking slow.”

Cory followed his own advice, advancing one deliberate step at a time as the tunnel gradually sloped downward at a gentle angle. The pounding of his heart grew worse, until it felt like it was inside his head instead of his chest. He found himself breathing in rapid, shallow bursts, and he tried to force his lungs to draw in slow, deep breaths. The fear built inside him until it was an almost physical being, a creature lodged in his guts, pressing against his stomach and bladder. Never in his life had he felt so scared, not even back in June when he’d ridden the Category Six roller coaster at the amusement park.

Something brushed against his foot and he stopped, praying it wasn’t a hand - or a tentacle - ready to pull him down to Hell. Behind him, Marisol let out a short scream.

“It was a rat.” John responded, his voice sounding close and far away at the same time, thanks to the impenetrable darkness that clouded all sense of distance.

Without warning, bright light exploded from further down the tunnel, so intense it blinded him as effectively as the darkness had. At the same time a terrible BANG echoed in his ears. Cory had time to yell “M80!” and then the ground started to shake and dance all around them.

“What’s happening?” Marisol shouted, as the rumbling in the earth grew stronger.

“I don’t know!” Dirt and stone cascaded down on them. “Hang on to something!” Cory dug his fingers into the tunnel wall, groping for a root or anything solid. Something wrapped around him and he let out a terrified shout until he realized it was only Marisol, clutching at him from behind. He felt her breasts pressing against his back and her hair falling on his neck like a wet mop.

The earth shifted again and Cory fell to his knees. Marisol landed on top of him and another body fell across them. He hoped it was John but his mind provided a different picture: a rotting corpse, its eyes glowing with putrid light, its mouth ready to sink decayed brown teeth into soft human flesh.

Cory opened his mouth to scream, and then the ceiling collapsed on them in a rain of dirt and stone.

Something hard struck his head and the world disappeared
.

Rocky Point, present day

Todd Randolph looked at the door to his mother’s house and sighed. The weight of the suitcase hanging from his bony hand was nothing compared the emotional baggage he carried inside him, a burden he knew he’d never be free of.

Even though he’d never been inside the home - there’d been a fire in the old place not long after his hospitalization and his parents had moved instead of rebuilding - there was a strong sense of familiarity to the modest structure, thanks to the pictures his mother had sent him over the years. The old house had sat behind the Rocky Point Episcopalian Church, overlooking the Gates of Heaven Cemetery like a sentinel straddling the line between life and death. Todd got the same feeling looking at the current house, as it occupied one of the streets that divided the upper middle class neighborhoods to the east and the problem areas to the west.

During the twenty years he’d been incarcerated in Wood Hill Sanitarium, he’d kept up with the events at home through his mother’s sporadic letters. A new appliance for the kitchen. New wallpaper for their bedroom. Always with pictures, until she’d written of his father’s passing four years ago. In that letter she’d mentioned how the few remaining friends and relatives had gathered in the living room and Uncle Ron had spilled coffee on the rug.

For some reason the mental image of that spot had occupied a great deal of Todd’s thoughts, even after Uncle Ron had joined Father in the great beyond, leaving only a set of cousins on the West Coast as Todd’s last living relatives.

Except for Mother of course. And according to the doctors she didn’t have long to go either. Her emphysema required her to use an oxygen tank at all times and she spent a good portion of her day lying in bed because too much walking robbed her of her ability to breathe. Luckily, Father’s insurance plan had been a good one, which paid for a private care nurse to come out each day and help Mother with her daily living tasks such as bathing, getting dressed and making breakfast and lunch. Todd’s only contributions as the newest member of the household would be to clean, make dinner and do the shopping.

Seeing as how he was terminally unemployable, he figured he could handle those tasks. And it would leave him plenty of time to continue his research.

In a way, it wouldn’t be all that different from his prolonged stay at the sanitarium, the only difference being he could actually take a crap in private.

He wondered what would happen to all the other patients of Wood Hill, especially the ones not eligible for release into the real world. The closing of the area’s largest mental health facility was bound to have serious repercussions on the surrounding towns; ever since he’d found out about his impending release, he’d thanked the heavens the doctors hadn’t decided to place him in one of the many group homes that would no doubt be springing up in Rocky Point.

A curtain moved in one of the front windows, a dark face peering out for just a moment before the gauzy material fell back in place. That would be Mrs. Clinton, the home health aide. She’d come to Wood Hill the previous day to introduce herself and give Todd a key.

She knows I’m here. Might as well go inside
. He realized he’d been unconsciously putting off seeing his mother.

Your first face-to-face with her in almost seven years. Of course there’s bound to be trepidation. The best thing to do is just get it over with and start down the road to renewing your relationship with her. Before it’s too late.
Doctor Sloan’s advice, delivered in their last session.

He’s right. Time to start my new life.

With a heavy sigh, Todd started up the steps.

*  *  *

Doctor Eli Sloan stared out the window of his office and wondered at the irony of it all. Past the perfectly-manicured back lawn of Wood Hill Sanitarium lay the Gates of Heaven cemetery, the largest and oldest cemetery in Rocky Point. A strip of woods separated the sanitarium’s property from the back of the graveyard, the section where the oldest graves - some dating back well over a hundred years - looked down a rolling hill at their younger neighbors.

All they had to do was spend a little money. The cemetery probably would have cut them a deal. But no. Instead, they’d buried their dead in secret and covered up the whole mess just like the administration before them.

The news was all over the papers. It was the reason the sanitarium was closing.
Gruesome discovery beneath insane asylum!

Over a hundred bodies buried in the ground under one of the old hospital buildings, one that hadn’t been used since the seventies. Patients without relatives or friends.

They should have cremated them. Then there’d have been no evidence.

Instead, the whole mess had been uncovered by two teenagers who’d snuck into the building and down into the basement with a digital camcorder, hoping to film a scene for a home-made horror movie they were making.

They’d gotten all the horror they imagined and much more.

Sloan was fairly sure he couldn’t be tied to the scandal, even though a good portion of the patients had been part of his special treatment group. He’d kept all his notes on the clinical trials at his home rather than in the office, just in case the sanitarium ever got audited. Running human trials without permission was a federal offense; he’d taken great care to make sure the nurses at the sanitarium never knew he’d been injecting certain patients with his various formulas for two decades. Most of his secret test subjects had responded surprisingly well.

Only a small percentage had suffered any side effects.

But those side effects had been pretty bad: convulsions, agonizing joint pain and death from seizure were the three most common. One out of twenty had responded adversely to the last version of the medication. Not nearly as bad as his first trial, twenty years earlier, but still bad enough that he knew he’d never get federal approval for human trials. So as far as anyone at the clinic knew, his testing was still being done on rats and mice, which unfortunately, were showing similar side effect ratios.

The problem was rats and mice weren't humans. It was conceivable he could come up with a formula that didn't work in rodents but meshed well with human physiologies. Certainly the opposite was true when it came to clinical trials. And when you worked with compounds intended to affect psychological function rather than a disease state, well, the only true test was how the drug worked in people.

His thoughts returned to the irony of the situation. He’d caused more than sixty deaths since coming to Wood Hill but no one suspected his patients – many of whom suffered physical as well as mental ailments - had died from anything but natural causes. And yet he was still losing his job, because the state was shutting down the facility for illegal burial practices.

At least I can honestly say I had no idea what they were doing with the bodies after I signed the death certificates.
He’d been as shocked as anyone when the news broke. He’d assumed the corpses ended up in cheap wooden caskets at the ass-end of the cemetery, a step up from a Potter’s Field burial.

Assholes.

Sloan turned away from the window and finished packing his desk. He’d signed the release for his last patient yesterday, Todd Randolph. Now there was a true success story, one he could write about someday:
How I cured Rocky Point’s Reverend of Death.

The boy had come in at the age of sixteen, only a month after Sloan’s near catastrophe with his first trial of his drug. Thirteen patients, thirteen dead. If he hadn’t thought quick and set the wing on fire, making sure all the bodies were in one of the group therapy rooms, he’d have spent the last twenty years locked away, just like Todd Randolph.