GRAVEWORM (15 page)

But that didn’t stop her mouth. “Discipline is what you and Elise needed, a firm and sure hand. That would have straightened you two out. Discipline.”

Yes, the old hag was always liking that, now wasn’t she?

He could see her standing there with the strap in her birdclaw hands, snapping it, loving the sound as it echoed through the old house. Aunt Lily was there, too, watching, pretending to be offended by it all when she was secretly pleased and secretly excited by the strap lashing against young flesh.

Elise was sobbing because Mother Rose had her wrists tied to a chair. She was bent over it, naked, and the strap came down, biting into her white skin and leaving a bright red stripe down her back.

“
Count with me, Henry,” Mother Rose said, impervious to Elise’s whimpering.

“
One,” Henry said, knowing he had to.

“
WHAT?” Mother Rose asked him. “WHAT DID YOU SAY? I COULDN’T HEAR YOU! LOUDER! LOUDER!”

The strap came down again, cutting into Elise’s back and making a few scarlet drops of blood run.

“
TWO!” Henry cried out.

“
Oh, the poor child,” Aunt Lily said, dabbing at beads of sweat on her brow, her breath coming fast and almost orgasmic. “The poor, poor thing.”

“
SHUT UP!” Mother Rose commanded her. “SHUT UP OR YOU’LL BE NEXT! YOU’LL TASTE THE LASH!”

Aunt Lily visibly shuddered at the idea as if it were something she had tasted before and hoped to taste of again.

“
WHORE! HARLOT! SLUT!” Mother Rose called out as she brought the strap down again. “LAYING WITH YOUR OWN BROTHER! OH, OF ALL THE VILE BLACK SINS!”

“
THREE!” Henry said, his voice cracking.

“
YES, THREE! THREE FOR THE BUTCHER AND THREE FOR THE BAKER AND THREE FOR HIS BROTHER, THE UNDERTAKER!” Mother Rose shouted out. “NOW, YOUNG MISS WHORE! NOW WE’LL SEE HOW IT FEELS ON YOUR FRONT, EH? LET’S SEE IF YOU LIKE THE LASH SUCKLING YOUR TITTIES AS MUCH AS YOU DO YOUR BROTHER!”

Elise fought weakly, but Mother Rose soon had her tied with her wrists behind her. Tears streaked down Elise’s face. She was trying to say something but with her sobbing it was completely unintelligible. Mother Rose lashed her until her breasts were striped purple and blue.

“
HOW’S THAT, WHORE?”

“
FOUR!” Henry said.

And Aunt Lily, breath gasping from her lungs, her face wet with a dew of sweat, had her hand between her legs, working herself into a frenzy.

“
Give her more!” she shrieked. “Give her more!”

So Mother Rose did.

Henry raged at the memory. He had a mad desire to unzip himself and piss all over the old hag.

Uncle Alden laughed again. It sounded like the bark of a mad dog. “Oh, fine way to treat your mother, Mister Henry Higgins! Fine way for a man to act! You and your dirty secrets!”

Henry brought the knife back. “You shut up or I’ll cut your fucking head off, you miserable piece of shit!”

Aunt Lily did not speak now.

On the floor, Mother Rose giggled.

(the baby henry what did you name the baby)

(tell us the baby’s name that was conceived in a grave)

Uncle Alden just sat there, jaw sprung like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Cut my head off, he says! Well, I hear you’re pretty good at that! Wouldn’t be the first time, now would it?”

Henry slapped him in the head and Uncle Alden went over, face-first. Still, mouth on the table, he continued to mumble. And on the floor, mother kept giggling and giggling in a shrill squeak like a naughty little girl who knew a terrible, terrible secret.

Then they were both laughing.

And Lily stared off into space.

The laughter got so loud that Henry stabbed the carving knife into the table and fled from the room, their incessant childish giggling piercing his brain and echoing and scraping through his skull.

He ran to the cellar door and stumbled down the stairs into the darkness.

(oh you can’t escape you pathetic little worm)

(you’ll never escape)

(you’ll never get away from ME)

The furnace room. It was so dark in there. So quiet. So ordered and still. He crawled behind the furnace into the little cramped alcove for the piping. With the furnace running and vents ticking and the cloying darkness enclosing him, yes, it was just like being in the womb again. So sweet and so comforting.

Curling up, he hid from the world.

28

When Steve went up the stairs to her porch, he was really loving that Tara Coombes like crazy. All day long he’d been feeling funny about their conversation last night, but now that he was going to see her he was feeling a lot better. Because he loved her in a big, happy, mindless sort of way like the moon loved the sky and the grass loved the earth. He loved her like his bones and muscles loved the skin that covered them. His kind of love for her was almost goofy and puppy dog in its devotion. He loved her so much right then he wished he had roses to give her. He wished he’d written her a romantic poem. He wanted to swim in the deep blue of her eyes and race through her bloodstream like a corpuscle.

Man, he loved that girl something fierce.

And you could see it on his face… the giddy nervous grin of a kid going to visit his high school crush. He couldn’t have washed that grin off with acid, it was etched too damn deep.

But then the door opened.

And Tara was standing there.

That smile drooped to a frown and the light was stolen from his eyes because, for a second there, he’d thought he had come to the wrong house. Standing there, peering through the partially opened door like a mole sensing ugly sunshine, was some lady who was tall and thin with a face that had been drained white of blood, two blue eyes that gleamed like wet chrome, and a crooked down-turned mouth that was surely not a frown but not a smile either.

Is this her?
he thought then.
Is this the girl I love?

And it was, only it looked like some terrible change had overtaken her and replaced the brightness within with something low and almost defiled. There were lines at her mouth and sallow brown shadows under her eyes, giving them a Bela Lugosi sort of intensity that made his legs
go weak.

“
Tara?” he said. “Tara?”

She stared at him for a full thirty seconds while he kept repeating her name like a magic spell that might snap her out of it. Only once did she blink her eyes.

“Steve,” she said.

“Are you all right?”

She blinked again and it looked like it took effort. “I got a bug or something and I feel like shit.”

“You look like shit.”

“I bet I do.”

It was a joke with them, an old joke.
How do I look? You look like shit. That bad? Well, you look like shit, but you look like MY kind of shit.
Only she wasn’t getting it at all. It flew right over her head like it had wings.

Steve knew that her explanation was perfectly valid… but why wasn’t he believing it? “Tara… sweetheart, can I come in? I’m worried about you.”

She cocked her head like a confused dog and then shrugged. “Why not?”

Soon as he stepped in there, he was almost knocked on his ass by the smell: pine cleaners. Pine cleaner overdose. Like the house had been mainlining Pine-Sol cut with Mr. Clean Pine Action. It smelled like an evergreen forest in there, all right, but one that had been dipped in a bucket of ammonia. His eyes nearly watered.

“
Wow… quite a fragrance,” he said.

She wheeled around like she wanted to throttle him. “Fragrance? Does it smell bad? What do you smell? Tell me what you’re smelling, Steve. I wanna know what you smell.”

Okay. Now Tara was a passionate, headstrong type of woman with an intensity about her that could make your knees go weak when she turned up the volume. But this was worse than that. Whatever it was, it was goddamned stark and goddamned overwhelming. Steve wasn’t so sure it wasn’t a little frightening as well.

“
I smell pine cleaners, Tara. Real strong.” He waved his hand before his face. “I mean, hell, now I know what it feels like to be Janitor in a Drum.”

Tara just looked at him for a moment, then she burst out laughing and it was not a good sort of laughter but something staccato like machine gun fire. And as she did so, he saw that her entire body was minutely trembling like she was trying really hard to hold something in that wanted to come blowing out of every pore. “Same old Steve. Same old Steve.”

“
What have you been doing here? Cleaning the whole house and then cleaning it again? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“
You know me, Steve. I’m anal. I’m OCD. I overcompensate. Isn’t that what you always say? Some people give fifty percent and others give a hundred and then there’s me?”

“
Sure, but…”

“
Come in the kitchen. Have some coffee.” She bounded off without him and her stride was almost jerky and frenetic like she’d had some cocaine with her Maxwell House. “Lisa’s out of town until the weekend. Did I tell you that? I’m sick as a dog but I’m not letting this chance escape me. I’m getting this place cleaned up before she comes back. I want things right.”

He took a chair at the kitchen table and the stench of pine cleaners was worse in there. “Want things right for what?”

“For everything.”

She poured him a cup and set it down before him, her hand shaking so badly that a great deal of it slopped over the rim. Before he could even reach for a napkin from the holder, she charged in with a rag and wiped up the spill. And again, with frenetic motion.

He noticed then that the tips of all her fingers were covered in Band-Aids.

Curious.

“
Tara,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“
Can’t. Gotta stay on my feet. Get this done with. Then I’m going to bed and I’m going to stay there.”

“
Listen, baby, I love you like everything and you know it, but…”

“
How much?” she asked him.

He smiled. Another old gag between them. “I’d love you with a mustache, an anchor tattooed on your forearm, and a bulge in your pants...but…”

“But what?”

“
But honestly, Tara, you look like hell. You’re running yourself right down. Sit down before you fall down.”

She shook her head, sipped her coffee.

Sighing, he did the same. Good Christ. The coffee was strong enough to curl the hair on your chest. Maybe two scoops would do it, but Tara must have decided five did it better. Steve sipped his coffee, but did not enjoy it. With the reek of cleaners up his nose and down his throat it was like drinking coffee brewed in a wash bucket.

Tara lit a cigarette. Pulled hard off it.

Steve hated cigarettes, hated the stink of them, but even burning tobacco beat the hell out of that Lysol-smell. But that was funny, too. Tara never smoked around him because she knew he didn’t approve.

Today, however, she was liberated.

Cigarette hanging from her lip, she emptied a bottle of Pine-Sol into a purple plastic pail and filled the rest with hot water from the sink. Then she started to clean. Eyes wide and staring, lower lip trembling, smoke rolling from her nostrils, she cleaned and cleaned and then cleaned again. There was so much about her that was troubling him, he didn’t know where to begin. What was worse? Her corpse-like pallor? The deadly fixation to her eyes? Or all that oddball, hyperactivity in her every motion, gesture, and nuance?

As he watched, she scrubbed the sink.

“
Why don’t you go lay down?” he said. “I can do that.”

“No, not yet.”

Scrub, scrub, scrub.

The goddamn sink was gleaming and she was still at it with a sponge, going over the whole thing again and again like she was trying to scrub the chrome finish off. Her energy level was almost shocking. But what was really shocking was her compulsion to wash and wash and re-wash the same spot.

“Think you got that sink now,” he said.

“Yes.”

Next, she moved to the counters with equal zeal. And, again, the disturbing thing was that the counters were absolutely spotless.

“What did you do to your fingers?”

“My fingers?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Your fingers. Case you haven’t noticed, there’s Band-Aids on ‘em.”

“
Oh… my cuticles. Whenever I clean like this, I put Band-Aids on my fingertips. The cleaners irritate them, otherwise.”