Charnel House (22 page)

He leaned forward, his eyes sparkling in the faint light.

“But not before they cut off his balls and stuffed them in his mouth.”

The air in the niche seemed thin, making it hard to draw a good breath. Pressure squeezed Bobby’s head, the same way it had the time he jumped off the ten-meter platform into the Olympic Pool at Point Mallard on a dare and touched the bottom of the sixteen-foot deep end with his feet. Horrific images cavorted behind his eyes.
Lynching. That’s what they called that
. There were pictures of black men dangling from trees in his Social Studies book; that was one part of class he most definitely had
not
slept through. He remembered the way their heads crooked to one side, and the awful
stretched
look of their necks. Another shiver wracked his body, but this time neither of the other boys had a jab.

“How come nobody stopped them?” he asked. “If Barlowe wasn’t around, weren’t some deputies? There are always cops working!”

“Things were different then,” Tanner said. “Hell, there was probably a deputy helping them tie the noose.”

“They killed an innocent guy,” Joey murmured. “Just... damn.”

“They found that out Saturday morning, when another little girl disappeared, this time from her very own front yard.
There one minute and gone the next, like the ground just opened up and swallered her
, Hink said. The mayor of Belleville called an emergency town meeting at the high school that afternoon to declare a curfew and demand some answers from the sheriff, and most everybody showed up—except Jeremiah Barlowe. There was a deputy there to represent the office and all, but people were plenty pissed that Jeremiah himself didn’t come, especially since he flipping
lived
here.”

The steel beam against his back seemed colder to Bobby, and it felt like it was leaching his body heat away little by little. He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. A little bit of sunshine would have been nice right then, he thought.

“After the meeting, the mayor—Ed Hargrove—drove up to Jeremiah’s old house, ready to give him some hell and remind him that the good people of Morgan County had elected him to do a job, even if it meant working on Saturday. Turns out instead of
giving
hell, he got some.”

“This is the good part,” Joey said. Bobby heard the grin in his voice.

“It was still daylight when the mayor got to the house. He knew something was wrong right away. Jeremiah had been working on that house for a
year
and it didn’t look like he’d done a damn thing to it. It was just as rundown as it had been when he bought it. There wasn’t even any electricity!”

“But there was blood,” Joey said.

“There was blood, alright. Lots of it,” Tanner agreed. “The curtains were open and he could see right into the house. There was a bloody handprint on one of the walls. A
fresh
bloody handprint. I think he damn near pissed his pants.”

Bobby could find no fault in this reaction. “Did he turn around and go back to town? Tell me he did.”

“He went up the steps onto the front porch and knocked on the door.”

Bobby felt like he might pee his own pants. “He’s an idiot. Why didn’t he go for the police?”

“Jeremiah
was
the police, numbnuts,” Joey said. “Besides, not everybody is a pussy.”

The heat rose in Bobby’s cheeks again. “Takes one to know one.”

“Knock it off,” Tanner said, and Bobby wasn’t sure which one of them he was talking to. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Want to.”

“Then zip it. I think he stayed because he was worried. He didn’t know who that bloody handprint belonged to. Everybody loved Jeremiah, even if he’d been acting a little weird lately. Remember, some of the most upstanding men in Belleville had just murdered a nigger because someone said he was looking at a little boy. Who’s to say they hadn’t come looking for the sheriff because they felt like he wasn’t doing enough?”

Several motorcycles thundered overhead, the choppy blat of their engines echoing across the water. To Bobby, they sounded like the Harleys the Hell’s Angels rode, big and loud with impossibly high handlebars, carrying leather-clad men and women with lots of tattoos and long greasy hair. Sometimes they cruised around Decatur like they were searching for something. Trouble, maybe. Tanner picked up a handful of gravel and let it trickle through his fingers, waiting for the sound to die down. When it was quiet, he continued.

“Nobody answered the door, so he tried the knob. It was unlocked, and he went inside to see if everyone was okay. He found Jeremiah’s wife first, sprawled out on the floor underneath that handprint in a pool of blood. Someone had gotten after her with a claw hammer. Hink said there wasn’t hardly nothing left of her head, just a flat gooey pancake of brains and bones and skin.”

Bobby felt his stomach clench up. Even Starsky and Hutch, as cool as they were, would have a hard time seeing something like that.

“The little girls—Myra and Mary—were in their bedroom,” Tanner said. “They were dead, too.”

“From the hammer?” Bobby asked. His voice sounded far off to him, like it was floating up from the bottom of a very deep hole. There was a whispery hiss in his ears, the sort of sound a radio made when it wasn’t tuned to a station. A steel belt seemed clamped around his chest.

Tanner shook his head slowly. “Jeremiah might have been half-crippled because of his leg, but he was plenty strong in his arms. He’d taken his babies apart with his hands, the way you might pull a wing or drumstick off a fat roasted chicken at Sunday dinner. Hink said their bedroom looked like a big sack of blood and guts had exploded.”

“‘Hink said’, ‘Hink said’,” Joey mocked. “How the hell does
he
know so much? Are you sure he wasn’t just shitting you? Old farts know how to make up a good story, you know.”

“He knows so much because he
lived
it,” Tanner said. The grin crept back onto his face, the one that held no humor. “Half the town went up to see, when it was all over, and Hink was one of them. They called it the charnel house. That’s a place where they store dead bodies, he told me.”

“God
damn,
” Joey whispered.

Bobby could not disagree with the sentiment, blasphemy or not, and if it bothered God enough to drop the bridge on them, well, at least it would be a quick death.

“The mayor was standing the doorway to those little girls’ room, blubbering like a baby, when he heard something,” Tanner said.

“What?” Bobby asked. He was bound up in the story as securely as a fly in a spiderweb, powerless to resist what he knew was coming.

“A little kid, screaming. But quiet, like it was in a closet or something.”

“Muffled,” Joey said.

“Yeah. He ran through the house, throwing open doors right and left, looking for that kid. But he didn’t find shit, not until he got to the kitchen, anyway. That’s when the kid screamed again, only this time it was a shriek that made his blood run cold.”

Bobby saw the man in his mind’s eye, dressed in a suit and tie and jaunty hat the way all the men in old black and white movies seemed to, racing from room to room in a blind panic to save a child that was still alive. Saw him draw up short in the kitchen when the second cry came, the jaunty hat sailing off his head and rolling across the floor.

“Then something thumped the floor under his feet hard enough for him to feel it through his shoes,” Tanner said, “and he realized the kid was under the house.”

Bobby’s mouth had gone dry, and he sucked at his cheeks feverishly, trying to rustle up a little spit. In his pants, his scrotum had shrunk to a hard little walnut shell. He knew the mayor was going to go under the house, knew it as surely as he knew the date of his own birthday and that he would be a detective when he grew up. No self-respecting grownup could run off and leave a child screaming like that. “But he had a gun, right?
Something.
The hammer, at least?”

His cousin slowly shook his head. “I don’t think it ever crossed his mind. All he could think about was that scream.”

“Just goes to show you politicians are as dumb as my daddy always says,” Joey said.

Tanner ignored him. “You have to go under the front porch to get to the crawlspace. The mayor got down on his hands and knees, and saw a faint, flickery light in there, way in the back.”

Joey chuckled. “Where else?”

Bobby nodded agreement.

“He called out,
Jeremiah, is that you in there?
” Tanner turned to look directly at Bobby. “But nobody answered him. And then the kid screamed again, only this time it sounded choked and... and gurgly. But it was definitely under there.”

Something splashed out in the water. A fish, perhaps, or maybe some trash tossed from the window of a passing car. Bobby’s foot jerked spasmodically, the shoe scraping harshly on the dirt floor. The sound seemed as loud as a belch in church. Joey opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again.

“He went as fast as he could, crawling under the old house like a crab, crying out
What have you done, Jeremiah? My, God, what have you
done
?
Didn’t matter. Jeremiah didn’t even look up. Not at first,” Tanner said. “By the time the mayor got back there she was dead. Jeremiah had killed her. But that’s not the worst part.”

Joey giggled and rubbed his hands together with sick delight. “Oh, if you could see your face right now,” he told Bobby.

“Jeremiah Barlowe was eating that little girl,” Tanner said. “Had been chowing down on her all along—while she was still alive.”

Joey raised his hand to his mouth like he was holding a turkey leg and mimed taking a big bite.

Bobby’s stomach rolled over greasily, and he found himself wishing he’d skipped the candy bar and kept the toy car.
Just a story.
Wasn’t it?

“He was gathered back in the corner like a giant spider, fresh bones and body parts scattered all over the dirt around him,” Tanner said. “He had his face buried in her chest—getting at the best stuff, I guess—and never noticed the mayor coming toward him until the mayor picked up one of the bricks and brained him with it.”

“Lot of good that did that little girl,” Joey said. “She was already dead.”

“Jeremiah fell away from the body, then looked up at him and just grinned through a mouthful of blood and skin and guts, and do you know what he said?”

Bobby leaned further forward. “What?”

“He said
bringing ’em down here was the only way I could make it stop, Ed.”

“Make
what
stop?”

“Nobody knows,” Tanner said. “That was the last thing he ever said.”

“What? Why?” Bobby’s words came out more sharply than he’d intended. “Did the mayor kill him?”

Tanner shook his head. “Nah, man. Jeremiah picked up one of the bones—Hink said it was splintered, like he had cracked it open to suck the marrow out—and jammed it up through the roof his mouth, trying to get it into his brain. He hit an artery or something and bled out instead.”

“Slowly,” Joey added.

Bobby slumped back against the girder, unable to speak. Dark thoughts whirled in his head like rabid bats. He could barely wrap his mind around the hurricane of insanity that was Jeremiah Barlowe.

If the story is even true, that is. How come you’ve never heard of Jeremiah Barlowe? Belleville isn’t
that
far from Decatur.

“They say that you can still see the bloody handprint on the wall. That Jeremiah is still up there in his old house on Hickory Hill,” Joey said, leaning in close. He spoke softly, like his mind was in a far off place. Bobby had to strain to hear him. “And that he still has a taste for little kids. Every few years, one goes missing. They don’t ever get found, because old Jeremiah doesn’t
leave
anything to be found.”

Bobby swallowed hard. “Oh yeah?”

Tanner chuckled. “Know what’s funny? Hink said the mayor swore until the day he died that when Jeremiah Barlowe first raised his head and looked at him, it wasn’t Jeremiah at all. Like his face had been wiped clean and there were just big black holes where he should have had eyes. Then he blinked and it was gone. Crazy, huh?”

Bobby didn’t think it sounded crazy at all. He thought it sounded like something Brother Peavey talked about on Sunday mornings sometimes.
Possession
. That was when the devil took over you and made you one of his minions. Mayor Ed was seeing the
real
face of whatever inhabited Jeremiah. That’s the only thing that could explain all the horrible things the man did. Bobby could see it in his head, the monster in human skin crouched over the dead body of that little girl, his features smeared with blood not his own. Flickering shadows danced on his face, making it look like his skin was moving—

“GOTCHA!” Joey shrieked, and grabbed Bobby’s arm with sudden ferocity.

Bobby cried out and recoiled against the beam, scrabbling in the dirt in place to get away from the evil he imagined was clutching at him. His heart galloped in his chest, making his pulse pound in his ears like native drums in an old Tarzan movie. A shot of urine spurted into his underwear, hot and wet. He farted explosively, a barrage of pops that sounded remarkably like a comic-book machine gun:
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!