Charnel House (4 page)

Dust coated the rusty piece of roofing, deepest on the v-shaped bends stamped into the metal to strengthen it lengthwise. Good. That told Garraty it had been standing there for more than a few days. When he tipped it away from the opening, cobwebs stretched and broke, enough of them that he heard the faint crackle as they snapped. Better. No one had been under here for a long time. He set the piece of tin to one side and stuck his head through the opening to have a look.

The air under the old house was even cooler than the night, and carried the faint odors of mildew and rot. God knew how many small animals had lived and died under here. Pretending he didn’t remember all the stories about Jeremiah Barlowe and how he’d been found in the cramped, dank space with his face buried in—

Garraty slammed a lid down on the memory of the old legend. Probably bullshit anyway, stuff kids tell each other to have a good scare. Even if it was true, it happened seventy years ago and everyone involved was long dead and gone. He
crawled through the tight opening, trying not to think about ghouls and ghosts and monsters, those figments of imagination we think we’ve outgrown until the right set of circumstances arises and they’re suddenly right there with us again, pulling up a chair and whispering
hello, old friend
in a voice as creaky as an ancient casket lid. He played the light around the crawlspace, looking for a good burial spot.

Brick piers rose from the sandy soil in an evenly spaced grid, tiny towers that had once provided solid footing for the beams forming the base of the house. Now several had crumbled and others leaned this way and that, and the floor of the structure above him bowed and sagged crazily. Garraty suddenly felt the immense size and weight of the house bearing down on him, making it hard to take a breath. He wanted to scuttle backwards out of the opening and reconsider the dry well. He didn’t know if he could stay in here long enough to do what needed doing.
Take a powder, princess. This place is only as bad as you make it out to be.

“Right,” he said, and resumed his examination of the crawlspace with the Mag.

The more he saw, the more he thought it was perfect, despite the niggle of fear tickling the hairs at the nape of his neck. A few more beers would help with that. The dirt in here was loose and powdery, except for a few muddy spots where leaks from above had let the rainwater through. Should be easy enough to dig in, especially if he could find something to augment his bare hands. A slight incline ran from the front of the house to the back corner, where the kitchen was. A little tight, especially beyond one bowed beam that sagged to within a foot and a half of the ground due to a collapsed pier, but he thought he could manage. The corner was as far from the opening as possible, and the squeeze just helped ensure no one would ever try going back there. Eventually the beam would snap and drop the house onto the grave, making it even more inaccessible. He backed out of the crawlspace.

“
Joey.
”

The word floated out of the darkness under the house, so soft he thought at first he imagined it. He froze, listening. Nothing. Even the leaves above had stopped rustling.

He aimed the Maglite into the hole and for an instant thought he saw a pale moon of face in that distant corner looking back at him through great hollow eyes, its wide black gash of a mouth curved into a sickle of grin, but when he blinked it was gone. His heart stutter-fluttered in his chest, threatening to break into a full gallop.

Garraty knelt there for several seconds, watching, the beam from the Mag aimed at the back corner. Waiting for something to move or speak. Thinking,
get thee hence, dumbass.
If his mind was already playing tricks on him now, before he’d even started the
really
bad work, what was it going to be like when he was in there with a dead kid?

Under the house with a dead kid... just like Jeremiah Barlowe.

A rat trundled across the spill of light, its eyes shining red in the beam. Garraty followed it with the Maglite until it reached one of the brick support piers and climbed it, vanishing into the darkness between two joists.

The crawlspace was empty.

Of course it was, because the last time anything of substance happened here America had just gotten herself involved in World War II. Jeremiah Barlowe wasn’t still under the house, nor was anyone else for that matter. Besides, what he thought he heard was
Joey
and no one had called him that since his dad died. It made a certain kind of sense, he realized. The last time he’d been here he was a boy. If he were going to imagine a voice speaking his name, wouldn’t it be that one? The subconscious was a grand mind-fucker, that was for sure. It liked to play games with you.

He didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he let it out in a whooshing rush. The light twitched in his hand as the adrenaline rush ended.
You can do this, but you can’t let your imagination get the best of you.

Garraty backed out from under the rickety porch, keeping the Maglite trained on the tenebrous opening. Not that he expected a revenant Jeremiah Barlowe to come scrabbling out after him, skittering across the loose earth like a skeletal spider with his bony arms extended, ready to snatch Garraty back and do to him what he had done to those three children so long ago... but it didn’t hurt to be safe, now, did it? Grinning wildly at his own skittishness, he stood and retraced his steps back to the gap in the hedge thicket.

After a pause to unzip and water one of the hickory trees, he crossed the front yard to the Prius, where he fetched the case of Pabst from the front seat and set it on the hood. It would’ve been nice to kick back in the car for this, but the smell seemed to be clinging to the vehicle like, well, like stink on shit. Garraty chuckled and pulled a beer from the box and pretended there wasn’t a dead kid in the trunk slowly assuming the night’s temperature.

He popped the top and drained it as quickly as he could, then followed it with a second. The sky had cleared completely, and the gibbous moon painted the world in shades of blue and silver. He wished he had something stronger than beer. The Pabst could get him where he wanted to be—eventually—but he’d have to drink so much he’d need to piss every fifteen minutes. It would take too goddamn long to wriggle across the dirt to go outside, and trying to take a leak in the coffin-close area was the last thing he wanted to do. Better to save the beer for later, when he had a comfortable couch and a toilet just a few feet away. He took one last can from the carton—
might as well make it an even six-pack—
then set the box back in the Prius, holding his breath against the stench. He was going to have to visit the car wash in Decatur after this was all over for some of that godawful cherry-smelling shit to get rid of the stink.

The third beer disappeared as quickly as the first two had.
Time to get this show on the road.
While he thought the chances of someone coming up to the house were virtually nil, dillydallying was simply inviting trouble. Briefly, he considered driving the car around to the gap in the hedge—there was a can of Fix-a-Flat in the emergency bag he’d seen when he was looking for the light—but then he remembered the random pieces of rusty metal that lay like land mines around the yard. Tire sealant wouldn’t help with much more than a nail, and he didn’t want to have to rely on the shitty little spare unless he absolutely had to. Too many things had already gone wrong tonight. The kid wasn’t that big, anyway.

He went around to the back of the Prius and raised the lift gate, taking care not to look into the boy’s watchful eyes. Bending into the trunk to scoop his arms under the kid and blanket, his face in the thick of the stink, Garraty thought he was going to upchuck the three beers all over the dead boy, but he managed to keep it down. The body flopped bonelessly in his arms when he lifted it, and threatened to slip free the same way it had when he was loading it. This time he held tight, pulling the boy close against him. The head swiveled and rolled into his shoulder, and Garraty thought he felt the dead boy’s eyelashes on the skin of his neck.
Kid’s looking right at me.
For an instant he caught a whiff of something faintly cheesy—
that’s his brain, right as rain, ain’t life insane!
the voice in his head chirped—and then the malodor returned, washing over him like rising floodwaters.

Garraty lowered the dead boy to the earth.
Before he dealt with the corpse he needed a couple of things. He lifted the cover off the spare tire well and popped the tire iron out of its holder. This he placed on the Mylar blanket next to the boy. Next, he walked around to the passenger side of the Prius. When Tina packed the emergency kit for him, she’d included a heavy duty ice scraper, not that he’d needed it yet in the warm Alabama winters. He dug it out now and tucked it into his back pocket with the Maglite, beginning to feel a little like that cat he’d seen in cartoons as a boy, the one with the magical bag of tricks.
Really need to call Tina and thank her when this is all over.
The ice scraper and tire iron would make pretty shitty tools for digging, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and they’d be better than nothing.

The emergency blanket folded nicely around the body.
One dead kid burrito, coming right up
,
señor
.
Garraty hefted the dead boy into his arms and made the journey across the yard to the opening in the thicket, then stepped in. He carried the body along the perimeter of the house, tripping and stumbling over tangles of roots he would have sworn weren’t there before. The kid’s feet bumped and scraped down the siding and scared the shit out of him every time they did. Finally, he reached the porch and set the boy down, hot breath whistling in his nose. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and he felt a trickle run down his side from one armpit. The little fucker wasn’t that heavy, but after two hundred feet or more anybody would be winded, Garraty thought. He reached into the blanket and got the tire iron and tossed it under the porch. It hit the siding with a hollow bong and thumped to the dirt.

Garraty set the Maglite on one of the crazily slanted steps and aimed it beneath the wooden flooring, pointing it at the black rectangle in the back wall. He crawled under the rotting structure, then took the kid by the feet and dragged him under with him. The Mylar blanket crunched and crackled as the body slid over twigs and pebbles and pieces of the porch. It felt greasy in his sweaty palms. The light reflected off the silver sheet and made shimmering spots all around him, like he’d traveled back in time to the days of disco, when he was last up here with Tanner Frank and his cousin. He worked his way over to the crawlspace opening, pulling the dead boy as he went. Trying not to think about hungry open mouths and pale faces with hollow eyes, ignoring the fecal stench that swirled up from inside the thin plastic skin.

He left the boy next to the opening and retrieved his flashlight. The kid was staying out here for now, that was for sure. He smelled too goddamn bad to be in that tight space and above ground any longer than he had to. Resisting the urge to play the light over the wrapped body—certain that if he did, the kid’s face would be visible and he’d find him looking out through those creepy half-opened eyes—Garraty ducked into the crawlspace opening, thinking
be back in a bit kid, don’t run out on me.

The tongue-and-groove subfloor above Garraty teemed with cave crickets that scuttled out of the light when it fell on them. He crept toward the far corner of the crawlspace, the Maglite in one hand and the tire iron in the other, trying to pretend the rustling insects weren’t there. At one point not too far from the rectangular doorway, he saw a black widow the size of a ping-pong ball huddled in a corner formed where beam, joist, and floor met, its obsidian body glossy in the wash from the Mag. Hundreds of baby spiders clung to the web around it, tiny specks of crimson and black that glittered like malignant jewels. Garraty crawled past the thing, tensing for the light tickle of legs on the back of his neck as it plopped down on him and skittered across his skin, but it never came. He stopped shining the light up into the crannies after that, hoping that what he didn’t see wouldn’t hurt him.

As he moved further in, the gradual incline brought the overhead structure—and all the things that called it home—closer and closer. About two thirds of the way back, he reached the sagging beam he’d spotted from the opening. Chunks of brick and ancient mortar lay in a spray where a pier had succumbed to the immense weight bearing down on it and collapsed. Garraty slithered underneath the beam, sharp pieces of debris poking his chest through the flimsy shirt, acutely aware of the house above him. The rough wood plucked at his clothes like skeletal fingers. It seemed to take him a lifetime to get all the way under it.

On the far side of the beam, the joists were just a few inches above his head, tight and looming. Garraty could hear the rustle of the bugs moving in the shadowed knells.
If I was claustrophobic I’d be fucked right now.
He continued to move forward until he’d have to wedge his shoulders between two joists to go any further. This was a good spot. The ground was still loose and powdery, at least on the surface. That would make digging easier. He didn’t have to go too deep, anyway. Just enough to cover the kid good and hold the smell down. He propped the Mag against one of the crumbling brick piers and pulled the ice scraper from his back pocket. Holding it at an angle, he drove the corner of the blade into the soft ground and began to dig.

Garraty worked on his makeshift grave for an hour, the only sounds in the crawlspace his grunts and the occasional sharp clatter of tool on rock. A foot down, the powdery topsoil had given way to an ashen clay and the work got a lot harder. From time to time he stopped to rest, wiping away the sweat stinging his eyes with the collar of his shirt and propping his head on his hand until he got his breath under control. In those periods of quiet reflection, he tried not to think of the dead boy waiting for him in the niche beneath the porch, the blood in his eyes drying to a maroon crust.

Slowly the hole took shape, then depth, and the piles of earth around Garraty grew. When he’d made it three feet down he stopped. That was deep enough to cover the inevitable smell when the kid started to decompose, he thought, and deep enough to discourage any scavengers. Possums and raccoons were as thick as burrs on a hound out here in the boonies. If anyone ever bulldozed the house to rebuild on the site, they’d probably uncover the kid, but by then he’d be nothing but disintegrating bones. As long as the house had already been sitting vacant and forgotten, chances were damn good Garraty himself would be a moldered skeleton before anyone found the remains.

The ice scraper was ruined, nicked and dinged so the blade was no longer straight and true. He’d need to get a new one before winter came. Leaving it next to the grave along with the tire iron, Garraty took the flashlight and began to wriggle backwards toward the opening. He didn’t like not seeing where he was going. Didn’t like it at all.
Shoulda thought this one through a little better, kemosabe.
Once he’d made it under the low beam there was enough room to turn around. God, the way out looked so tiny from here! Slowly, like a grunt working his way through a barbed wire obstacle course in basic training, he crept on his elbows back to the opening and the body that waited there for him. He crawled past the dead boy into the moonlight without looking at him and stood, relishing the crackles and pops in his bones. Goddamn, it had been tight under there.

The three beers had migrated from his belly to his bladder while he was in the crawlspace, so he moved away from the porch and further down the exterior wall a little, then urinated into the thick growth. This would all be over soon and he could go home to the trailer and get more acquainted with the rest of that case of Pabst. Maybe it would help him forget this night ever happened. But first, he had one last thing to do.

The crackle of the Mylar blanket seemed as loud as fireworks in the cramped confines of the crawlspace as Garraty dragged the dead boy toward his final resting place. It was slow going, especially as the ground drew closer to the skeletal frame of the house. Every time Garraty advanced a foot or two, he had to awkwardly turn and hitch the body forward the same distance. By the time he’d reached the makeshift grave, his arms and back sang from the effort and a stitch in his side made it hurt to take a deep breath.
Add a few trips to the gym to that life makeover list, my man.

Motes of dirt and dust billowed into the Maglite’s beam when Garraty rolled the wrapped corpse into the hole. The boy tumbled limply over the edge, landing on his side atop the blanket with his misshapen split head twisted around like he wanted to catch one last bit of weak light on his upturned face. Looking up at Garraty still with those half-lidded eyes. Those goddamn blood-filled eyes.

“Who are you, kid?” he asked, and the sound of his own voice coming out in that shuddery whoosh of breath caused him to start nervously. As if the boy would answer.
Why were you out so late by yourself?

He took a deep breath, then slithered forward so that he could reach down to the body. He checked each pocket for identification—mindful of the gift in the back that was beginning to soak through the denim of the boy’s jeans—but found only a ten dollar bill, which he tucked into his own pocket.
Kid doesn’t need money where he is. I do.
Ten bucks is enough for a new ice scraper.
He felt the dead eyes on him, cold and still on his heated flesh. On his
face
. He couldn’t finish this with the little bastard watching him. He swiped his hand across the kid’s lids to shut them once and for all. To stop the
judgment
. He wasn’t a bad guy; he’d just had a shitty run of luck. First the wife, then the job, now this. The last thing he needed was some dead kid staring at him with this kind of mute awareness that said
I think you
are
a bad guy, buddy, and it’s high time you stop lying about it to yourself
. He didn’t need that shit.

Goddamn right I don’t.
What he needed was to get out of this hellhole before he drove himself crazy.

Garraty reached across the hole and pulled one of the piles of dirt toward him, raking in with his hands and trying to ignore the sound of it pattering like a gentle rain on the dead boy’s clothes and Mylar blanket. God, he could use a drink. Whatever buzz he’d had while he was digging—
okay, let’s not kid ourselves here, my friend, it was maybe a little more than a buzz
—was gone now and he was left alone in the crawlspace with his black thoughts and the boy he’d killed. It was time to get himself cleaned up, to ditch the booze and start over fresh. Take a little responsibility and go out Monday to look for—

“Toomey,” the kid said in a thin, reedy voice that was more wheeze than words.

Garraty froze. A world away, the faint discordant blast from a train horn rose in the night like the cry of a prehistoric beast.

Imagined it, just like I thought I heard my name. Who wouldn’t be imagining things in my situation?

The thought of exactly
what
his situation was right now hit him funny and he barked out a sharp peal of hysterical laughter that was a little bit like a shriek, high and feminine. The sound struck him as even more funny than his original thought had and he laughed harder, this time closer to normal, without the scrim of terror around the edges. The kid was dead alright, no one could survive those injuries.

But what if he
had
spoken? What if he was still alive, trying to communicate? Maybe Toomey was his last name.

The laughter withered in his throat, and silence ruled the cramped space. Garraty reached over and picked up the Maglite and shined it down into the hole.

The boy’s eyes were half-open and filled with blood.

“Oh Jesus,” Garraty said. He didn’t like the way his voice wavered. “Oh my fucking Christ in heaven.”

The Maglite winked out and perfect darkness fell on them.

Before he could stop himself, Garraty jerked up and away from the opening, certain that the boy was clambering out of the hole with his misshapen head and shit-filled pants. Coming for him. A nail sticking out of one of the joists raked across his left shoulder, tearing his shirt and digging a fiery furrow in his flesh, and he yelped. His head banged on the subfloor above and a shower of crawling things fell on him, skittering and skating on his skin and clothing in a frenzied race to get away from his flailing hands. A spider darted across his ear and onto his face, the tickle of its legs maddening in the inky blackness, and he slapped it away.

Garraty bit back the scream trying to build in his chest, thumbing frantically at the button on the Mag. His heart thundered in his ears, and gooseflesh prickled his arms.
Don’t lose it
, he told himself.
He’s dead, and you’re letting this shit get to you. Hold it together. Bugs aren’t going to hurt you.
He blinked furiously in the darkness, trying in vain to see something.
Anything.
The blackness was complete. He shook the flashlight and tried the button again, his breath coming in short harsh gasps that sounded like barks. Nothing. It was as dead as the boy in the hole before him.

The Mylar blanket crackled in the grave.

Garraty moaned in a low voice and felt sudden warmth spreading in his crotch.
Bugs. Gotta be the bugs.
He shook the flashlight again, then gave it a solid whack into his open palm and when the light came back on, weak and flickery, and he nearly burst into tears. Cave crickets crept on the floor around him, leggy and spider-like. He ignored them and shined the light into the hole. The boy hadn’t moved, of that he was certain. He still lay on his side, head twisted at that awkward angle.

Garraty exhaled in a shuddering whoosh. He resisted the urge to keep the light trained on the boy, daring him to move, and instead turned it on his shoulder, which burned like a motherfucker. The nail had plowed a row deep enough to plant corn in, he thought. Hot blood oozed from the gash and ran in a trickle down the back of his arm. A square steel head, black with age, jutted out from the joist on his left, shreds of skin hanging from it.
Calgon, take me away
, he thought, and his old friend the giggles came back, threatening to take him away for real.

He didn’t think he’d like where he ended up.

Toomey.

Had the boy really spoken? Garraty wasn’t sure. Even if he had, the kid was past saving. They both knew that, right? The boy was dying—if he was even still alive—and all he needed from Garraty was a little nudge in the right direction. When you thought about it, it would almost be an act of mercy. The pain must be something awful. Trying to save the kid—Toomey—would mean pulling him out of the hole, dragging him back to the opening in the far wall, loading him into the back of the Prius, and driving him down to the hospital in town. Agony upon agony for him.

And then the questions would begin, whether the kid lived or died.
Why weren’t you watching the road, Mr. Garraty? Why were you out so late up there in the hills? Why were you driving so fast? Why didn’t you call 911? Why are you so dirt-caked and sweaty? Why does your breath smell like a brewery?

Sure, he could come up with some good answers, maybe even some great ones, but the questions would keep coming, why,
why
,
WHY?
It would never end. Eventually, he had no doubt that they’d wear him down. That’s what the cops did. They badgered and badgered, just like your shrew of a wife did, until you couldn’t take it anymore and finally broke down and—

Garraty heard the protesting squeal of old hinges as a door opened somewhere in the house above him. Then heavy footfalls as someone—some
thing—
approached.
Who’s that trip-trapping over my bridge?
The gait was odd. Off somehow.
Thump. Scrape. Thump. Scrape.
Unbidden, he heard the girlish voice of Tanner Frank in his head, full of malicious glee.
Old Jeremiah Barlowe and his bum leg. Shot to shit in the first World War!
God, he had loved to tell that story, how the man who returned from Europe a wounded hero died a jabbering cannibal in this very crawlspace.

The sound boomed in the tight space as the footsteps drew nearer. With each step, vibrations thrummed in his shoulders where they pressed against the low joists. Blood roared in his ears. In his mind’s eye, Garraty saw a sallow slumped shape shambling across the room with the bloodied wall he’d seen through the window earlier, dragging one twisted leg behind it. Its moon face was just a pale smudge against the still dark night, with dark hollows where eyes should have been. It moved with purpose, straight toward a spot in the center of the room where something on the floor had caught its attention.