Cemetery Club (3 page)

Instead, he’d ended up as the psychiatrist in charge of one of the most sensational criminals in the town’s history. The local preacher’s son, accused of murdering dozens of people, found in his secret lair surrounded by the corpses of his victims and clutching a Bible, Holy water and a cross all stolen from his father’s church.

In their first session together, Todd had admitted his guilt, claiming he’d “raised a demon” and the demon had killed everyone.

It had taken Sloan fourteen years to rid the Randolph boy of his delusions and another six to convince the state he was no danger to society. That decision had only come about when the closing of the sanitarium seemed imminent, leading Sloan to believe they’d finally agreed to release Todd because it was easier than relocating him to a new facility.

Sloan was confident Randolph would live out the rest of his life in relative normalcy. All his issues had stemmed from his relationship with his over-bearing, ultra-conservative religious father. Now that the dad was dead, there was nothing for the adult son to rebel against.

That would be a good theme for the book,
he thought, as he closed his office door and headed for the exit.
Modern psychiatry, wiping away the sins of the past.

*  *  *

Todd Randolph walked past the front desk of the Rocky Point Library, pretending he didn’t notice the cold stares cast in his direction by the two old women behind the counter. Their animosity didn’t surprise him. He’d received the same glares everywhere in town, from the post office to supermarket, and even at the Chinese takeout place. He’d only been home three days but he was already Number One on everyone’s most-hated list.

Twenty years and no one’s forgotten.
Of course, he hadn’t expected they would. People tended to remember mass murderers.

Let them stare. I have work to do.

Locating an unoccupied cubicle with a PC, he sat down and initiated his first Google search of the day.

“demons+underground”

A few minutes later, the feeling of being watched and judged went away as the library’s patrons returned to their own tasks.

But Todd’s guilt and self-loathing remained as strong as ever.

*  *  *

Pete Webster scooped another shovelful of dirt and tossed it into the wheelbarrow. The hot, muggy June day had evolved into an even hotter, muggier June evening. He felt like he’d sweated out a gallon of water from all the shoveling and planting he’d been doing.

What the hell does the cemetery need more plants for?
he thought, pausing to wipe his arm across his forehead. The dirt and grime on his forearm were like sandpaper across his face.
Damn place has more bushes than hippie porn.

Of course, these bushes were different. They were being planted around an old mausoleum in an effort to hide the cracked stone exterior. Someone in management had decided the whole damn cemetery needed sprucing up and it was a lot cheaper to have the groundskeepers plant flowers and shrubs than to actually fix the physical structures.

Next to him, Frank Adams, his shift partner for the past five years, leaned his shovel against the mausoleum and took his gloves off. “Christ, it’s fuckin’ hot as an oven. Why’d they pick summer to do this shit?”

Pete gave a sarcastic laugh that caused drops of sweat to fly off his face. “’Cause their brains are in their asses. But just think how good the beer’ll taste later.”

“Fuck later; I need something right now, before I pass out.”

“There’s still a couple of Cokes left,” Pete said.

“Good. You want one?”

“Naw, I’m saving mine for when we’re done.”

“Suit yourself.” Frank walked over to the cooler that sat next to the old green pickup truck and opened a can of soda.

Pete leaned on his shovel and tried to catch his breath, no easy task when there seemed to be as much moisture in the air as on his skin. As he inhaled, he caught a whiff of something nasty, a stink that reminded him of the beer bottles they’d sometimes find after kids partied in the cemetery. Every now and then a mouse would crawl inside of one and drown in the leftover beer, producing a sickly-sweet rotten smell.

Turning around, Pete sniffed at the air, trying to determine where the odor came from. Something that strong had to be bigger than a mouse. If there was a dead animal in the cemetery they’d have to get rid of it before morning. People preferred to visit graves without actually being reminded what death looked and smelled like.

The odor seemed strongest near the mausoleum. Pete grabbed his shovel and headed for the back of the building, intent on finding the woodchuck or cat that was stinking up the place. As he rounded the corner, a strange feeling enveloped him, icy fingers tickling his back while at the same time a giant centipede ran circles in his stomach. The last time he’d felt something similar was when the ice started crackling beneath him as he crossed Jensen Pond on a snowy winter afternoon. He’d been terrified the ice would give way and send him to his death in the frigid waters.

A dark figure rose up from behind a nearby headstone and Pete jumped. His first thought was that a child was playing a joke on him.

Then he saw the face.

Pete opened his mouth to scream but before any sounds came out, the
thing
shot through the air, its stubby arms outstretched as it raced towards him like a black cat. It latched onto his face with icy-cold hands. Pete tried to grab it but his fingers passed right through as if he was trying to catch smoke. It pressed itself against his flesh and forced its head into his mouth. He fell to the ground, clutching at his neck as it clawed its way down his throat.

Frank Adams put down his soda and headed back to the mausoleum. He’d seen Pete go around to the other side of the old building. “Hey, Pete? Whatcha doin’?”

When there was no answer, he walked around the corner. As he did, he noticed a rotten meat smell. He was about to call for Pete again when a flash of movement caught his eye. There was no time to raise his arms as he realized it was a shovel coming at his head. Cold metal struck him across his cheek and temple and his whole world turned into a jumbled kaleidoscope of images as he stumbled backwards. It took a moment for the pain to register, but when it did, it was like someone had lit his face on fire and then put it out by dropping cement blocks on it.

Frank staggered like a drunken man attempting a waltz and then tripped over one of the bushes waiting for planting. His vision tripled and he fought to focus as someone came into view.

The man’s arms rose up, the shovel silhouetted against the afternoon sky for a moment before it started its downward arc. In that brief instant Frank’s heart skipped a beat. He recognized his attacker.

The shovel came down, flattening Frank’s nose and knocking out all his front teeth. Pain exploded in his face, a thousand times worse than the first blow. He tried to shout but only a raspy, choking cough came out, accompanied by a mouthful of blood and teeth. More blood streamed down from his ruined nose, mixing with the tears flowing from his eyes.

He never saw the shovel blade come down the third time but he felt its edge bite into his neck, cutting through skin and muscle and gristle until it scraped against bone.

The last thing he saw was a heavy work-boot hovering in the air over his ruined face.

Pete Webster watched Frank’s head roll away, the stump of the man’s fat neck still dribbling blood. He stared at his friend’s corpse for a moment, his head tilted as if listening to a distant sound. Then he went to the truck and retrieved the heavy pickaxe, which he used to break the lock on the mausoleum door. Inside, he raised the pick and attacked an irregularly shaped patch of cement that was a different color than the rest of the floor. It took a dozen blows before a large section collapsed, exposing a night-black hole in the earth.

Pete tossed the pick aside and went back for Frank's body. He dragged it into the crypt and tore into it with his teeth, ripping mouthfuls of flesh and swallowing them whole. Only after he’d sated his dark hunger did he drop the remains of the corpse into the dark depths of the pit. Then he closed the door, wedged the pick against it and climbed into the hole.

Frank’s head lay undisturbed for less than a minute before a crow landed near it. The bird approached carefully, ready to take flight at the first sign of movement. When the head remained still, the crow jumped onto Frank’s face and drove its beak into a soft, juicy eye.

*  *  *

A hundred yards away, lying in the shade of a large elm tree, John Boyd shivered, whimpering as he chugged Old Granddad straight from the bottle. Although he’d witnessed Pete Webster attack Frank Adams with the shovel and then disappear into the old mausoleum, it wasn’t the murder that had him terrified.

It was what he’d seen
before
Pete attacked Frank.

The thing that had entered Pete’s body.

One of them. It was one of them!

Eyes squeezed shut, John took another mouthful, hoping the rotgut whiskey would erase his memories of the past ten minutes. Hoping it had only been a hallucination. It was possible. More than once since climbing off the sobriety wagon, he’d seen things that weren’t really there.

But it had seemed so real! The grayish-black body, shorter than a man, more like a child’s shadow against a wall. The egg-shaped head, with the round, black mouth that was like a hole in the fabric of reality.

And the eyes - ovals of red fire set at angles in the flat face, with elliptical black pupils in their centers.

It couldn’t be one of them. We killed them all.
Todd
killed them all.

Didn’t he?

In that instant John knew he had to get away before the grays got him too. He stood up, chugged the last few inches of bourbon and staggered down the path that led to the main gate on Hickory Street. From there it was only a few blocks to the shelter he’d been staying at lately.

“Not again, not again, not again,” he mumbled as he stumbled down the cracked, broken sidewalks lining both sides of the once-prosperous street. “The Grays are back. The Grays are back.”

Inside the shelter he let his body fall onto the first unoccupied bunk he found. By the time his face hit the stained pillow, his mind had already gone blank.

The next morning, the events of the cemetery were no more than a dim nightmare, no worse than any of the others he’d suffered for the past five years.

Todd Randolph registered the howls of multiple police sirens just as the first squad car skidded around the corner at the end of the street. He paused in the act of getting the newspaper out of the mailbox to watch, curious as to what could be the cause of such a commotion at just after eight in the morning.

He was still standing by the sidewalk, paper in hand, when the police cars stopped in front of his house and a loud voice ordered him to lay on the ground with his hands behind his head.

“What?” Todd looked at the officers approaching him, their guns drawn, angry expressions on their faces.

“Get down, now!” one of them shouted.

“Me? What’s going on?”

Something hard struck him between the shoulder and neck, driving him to his knees. Through the colored lights swirling in his vision, he saw a burly man with a mustache raise his baton for another blow.

Todd ducked as the baton came down and the hard plastic caught him across the back instead of on the head. He cried out and fell to the ground, the sting of stones and cement grit against his face, barely noticeable against the pounding agony in his neck and shoulders.

Someone screamed -
Mother? Is she watching this?
- but the words were lost to Todd as a foot pressed against the side of his head, covering one ear and crushing the other one into the concrete. For a moment he thought the cop might be getting ready to snap his neck. Then someone yanked his arms roughly behind his back and he felt something cut painfully into his skin, pressing his wrists together.

The foot disappeared and hands lifted him up, held him there as the world swam around and his knees buckled. He tried to speak but only succeeded in moaning. Sharp fragmented grains covered his tongue and lips. He spat some of it out. Someone grabbed his neck and shook his head, setting off new fireworks in his brain. This time there were answering flares in his stomach as the dizziness brought on a bout of nausea.

“Watch where you spit fuckface,” a voice said near his ear. Todd opened his mouth again to defend himself. Before he could say anything, someone slapped the back of his head and his teeth closed against his tongue. Immediately, his mouth filled with the metallic tang of blood but he stopped himself from spitting it out, wary of the officer’s warning. Instead, he let it dribble over his swelling lips.

A large black and white shape appeared in front of him and he realized the cops were leading him to a police car. He caught a glimpse of himself in a window before his escort opened the door for him. Smudges of dust and dirt stained his face, gunpowder dark against his pale skin. Thick, bloody strands of drool hung from his open mouth, lending him the appearance of a rabid dog.

It came to him then that they were arresting him and he had no idea why. He started to ask and someone -
probably the same piece of shit who slapped me
- grabbed his neck and shoved him down and forward towards the open back door of the cruiser.

“Better duck dipshit,” someone said with a laugh.

Then his forehead struck the metal frame and the world went dark.

The first thing Todd noticed when he woke was the smell. A combination of stale body odor, piss and industrial cleaner, topped off with a healthy dose of alcohol and a hint of marijuana. The last two he remembered from high school. The other odors were just as familiar though, because they’d been staples at Wood Hill. Since the sanitarium was no longer in operation, there was only one place he could be.