GRAVEWORM (18 page)

(make her feel it)

“
There!”
Uncle Alden said, pounding the table with his fist and kicking up dust that spun in the overhead lamp. “Do you see what he just did? Did you see that? That disgusting awful thing he just did?”

Mother Rose made a raw cackling sound. “He’s trying to make Lily feel better.” More cackling, but whispering and hissing as it came through clenched teeth.
“See… see… see how she likes that…”

“
I won’t have it!” Alden shouted. “Not with my wife!”

“
Henry!” Mother Rose said. “Put your uncle up in his room and lock that door! Shut him away! Shut him away! Shut him away, I say!”

Henry set down the brush and went over to him. Silly dried-up old fool. He couldn’t hide. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t get away. He could only twist his gnarled old face into a sneer. “Get away from me, ghoul! Pervert! Get the fuck away from me—”

But Henry clamped a hand over his mouth. With his other arm he scooped up Uncle Alden, the shivering bag of old bones. He was as light as if he were stuffed with straw. He squirmed a bit too much and a strip of skin peeled off his arm. Henry tore it free and let it drop to the floor.

(that’s it, henry! shut him away! then you can touch us! touch us again and again! that’s it that’s a good boy doing what his mother says! always listen to your mother!)

Aunt Lily was grinning now, a happy skull-faced grin. Mother Rose was chattering her teeth. Together, they were chanting:
“Shut him away! Shut him away! Shut him away!”

(HA HA HA HA HA HA HA)

Henry carried his uncle up the stairs, pulling his hand from his mouth only once to steady himself on the stairs as that bundle of sticks tried to wriggle free.
“You dirty stinking little shit!”
Uncle Alden cried.
“Slimy dirty fucking body-snatching motherfucking deviant! If they ever come, I’ll tell them! You hear me? I’ll tell them all about you! I’ll tell them what you did to us! I’ll tell them what’s buried in the cellar and what you keep upstairs! I’ll tell them what you dance with in the attic! I’LL TELL THEM WHAT YOU DID TO YOUR MOTHER’S CORPSE! I’LL—”

Quickly, he clamped his hand back over the old man’s seamed mouth. Uncle Alden was old and his mind was going. He did not know what he was saying anymore.

From the dining room, Mother Rose called:
“Hurry back, Henry! Come down here and touch us the way we like to be touched!”

Henry brought Uncle Alden to his room and dumped the old man on the bed. He didn’t listen to the nonsense that spewed from his mouth. It no longer interested him. What interested him, made his heart pound and his blood run hot, was waiting down in the dining room. He quickly shut the door and locked it with the skeleton key.

(hurry hurry HURRY)

And from the other side of the door, Alden’s voice came… sobbing, pathetic… worn thin as a thread by the long yellow years. “Please, Henry! Don’t lock me away in the dark! I’ll be a good, boy! I won’t tell! I won’t never tell what you do!”

“Yes, you will,” Henry said.

The voice, weaker now:
“But I won’t! I swear I won’t! Just… let… me… watch…”

But Henry was moving down the hallway, a hunger breaking open inside him like blood splashed against a sharp blade. “If you ever tell, you old fuck, I’ll put you back where I found you…”

(AH-HA-HA-HA)

From the dining room, he could hear Mother Rose and Aunt Lily—now liberated by Alden’s absence—discussing how they liked the feel of a man’s hands upon them, what a dark and sinful joy there was in it.

(the face, henry, the face)

When he got back down there, he pulled off Mother Rose’s face which was nothing but a leathery dead skin mask with scalp attached. Without it, she was a grinning, hollow-socketed mummy, jaws sprung open as if in a scream.

Pulling the mask on, he said in his mother’s voice, “Now… where were we?”

33

Two shots and three beers into it, Steve Crews was beginning to feel the pain and uncertainty peeling off in layers like ice. He was over at the Jolly Roger Saloon on Elm, almost breathless after the Tigers made a sweep of the Cardinals, Verlander pitching another no-hitter. Comerica Park was sold out and he hadn’t seen much of that in recent years since the glory days of 1984 at Tiger Stadium. It was looking like Detroit just might make it this year, that the hopes and prayers of the fans just might be answered and with Cabrera on board, it just might happen at that.

Here was reason to celebrate.

And although Steve was secretly pleased and the alcohol had greased the skids of that pleasure, his mind was still fixed on Tara. Who she was. What she was. And maybe, what she was
becoming.

This is why he came to the Jolly Roger.

Escapism.

And there was no purer form of escapism than beer and baseball. The bar crowd was a little light and save for a few rowdy Tiger fans that had gotten off work earlier that day and came right to the bar for pizza, baseball, and a good drunk, it was pretty quiet. Which was okay with Steve. Whenever there was something on his mind, his mouth didn’t work so good and the lost art of conversation was truly lost. Just him at the end of the bar, the rowdies in the back room. A few sprinkled in-between. Chuck Finchley tending bar. And good old Finch, he didn’t say much at all, which made him one hell of a bartender.

Now that the game was over, there wasn’t much to do
but
think.

Which was exactly what Steve had come to the Jolly Roger to avoid.

Here he was, thirty-three years old, doing pretty good with his career. Nice car. Nice toys. Money in the bank. He figured he had a lot to offer for a guy that had shown up in town six years before in a rusty Toyota without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. He’d landed the job at Northern Financial, cemented his position with sweat and determination and now he was a partner. Things were good. And up until today he was pretty certain that he was in love with a great girl and she was in love with him and, given time, they’d get married and set up housekeeping and everyone would live happily ever after. Oh, he was still in love with her, all right, but he had no fucking idea what she was feeling or even thinking and he was starting to second-guess his plans on the little pink house with the white picket fence and all the accessories that came with it.

Because, honestly, he didn’t know who Tara was anymore.

And part of him was thinking it did not want to know.

Some crazy, half-assed survival mechanism was kicking in, wanting him to pull his business out before it got burned. It was sensing trouble, danger, what have you, and it was trying to point him away from it all, trying to make him recall a life when baseball, beer, and pizza were enough. But a world also that had long ago been flooded-over, scrubbed clean by the rising waters of emotion and attachment.

“
I’m not walking away,” he said then, feeling his voice right down into his chest. “I’m not going anywhere. Not after this long.”

So much work he’d put into this relationship with Tara. The tightwire he had to walk around her sometimes, the mood swings and stubborn tenacity when it came to raising her kid sister up right. Steve had put up with it all, knowing that sooner or later Lisa was going to fade from the scene and go off to college or get a job somewhere and then it would be just the two of them. That was worth the bullshit, he figured. Because he wasn’t the sort of guy who fell in love easy, but when he fell, look out. Tara had come after him originally and with a determination that had scared him more than a little bit. But when the dust settled, he figured he was damn lucky to have her.

Though still, even now, that sort of attachment frankly scared him.

Maybe it was Megan’s fault.

Because before he came scurrying into Bitter Lake with his tail between his legs, there had been a girl named Megan in Milwaukee. She was the polar opposite of Tara: small, petite, blonde. You had to kick her pretty hard to get her to say boo… unlike Tara, who was seething with a dozen conflicting emotions just under the surface on an hourly basis. Megan was wound tight. So tightly that you couldn’t even get a peek at what was going on inside. Then one day, seemingly without rhyme or reason, Megan seized up. She hit the floor of a convenience store and had to be removed by two paramedics. There was nothing physically wrong with her. She just had the mother of all panic attacks and lost it. After that, she couldn’t stand crowds. Then she refused to go outside. Then she refused to step foot outside her own bedroom. Somewhere along the line, she quit eating and bathing and had a complete nervous breakdown.

Steve hung in there through it all.

For a year he hung in there.

But Megan never recovered. Not really. All the secret terrors and anxieties she’d worked so hard all her life to keep under lid had come bursting out. And never, ever would they go back in again. The last Steve saw of her, she was shuttled off to a private mental health facility in Illinois by her father.

And sitting there at the Jolly Roger, Steve could still see that look in her eyes. Like she had peered directly into the inner, violent turmoil of her own soul, saw her true face, and in seeing it would never be the same again.

What really scared him was that Tara had a look like that in her eyes when he’d visited her today.

And what exactly did he think about that? He didn’t know, not for sure, only that it reminded him too much of the Megan situation and the idea of that insanity happening to Tara was a screw slowly turning in his belly. He didn’t think he could go through something like that again. And what were the odds that he’d fall in love with two separate women and they’d both lose their minds? Chances seemed to be wholly against it. Yet, he had the awful, inescapable feeling that it
was
happening.

And judging from Tara, it might be worse this time.

Megan had just lost it, become completely nonfunctional in every sense of the word. But with Tara it was a slightly different flavor. She seemed functional, perhaps too functional, too driven, too fixated. Like there was something out there she was setting her sights on and nothing in this world or out of it could stop her from reaching it.

Jesus.

But you could see it in her eyes, Steve knew, that deadly intensity. She might look at you but she wasn’t seeing you. She was looking right through you, right through walls and furniture and the world at large… looking at something out there. Something she did not dare turn her back on, if that nonsense she was spewing could be believed.

She had said some things that not only made no sense but were downright disturbing. There were things out there, she claimed, that were waiting for you to relax so they could creep up and get you, take you unaware. You could not relax your vigilance. She had seemed almost militant about this.

Monsters, she said.

What the hell did that mean? Was it some kind of symbolic or metaphorical thing, a representation of life’s bullshit? Monsters?

Monsters, Steve. Fucking monsters. When the lights go out, that’s when the monsters come.

Good God.

Steve swallowed down his beer in one drink, never having felt so utterly helpless in his life. Even the Megan thing had not hit him like this. Because, honestly, that had come from
inside
Megan, but this thing with Tara… he could not be sure that it wasn’t as much of an external influence as an internal one.

He felt desperate.

Edgy.

A blind man fumbling about in the darkness. He wanted to help Tara, get her through this, but where could you even start? He needed something. A point of reference and he didn’t even have that.

Nobody can help me, Steve. This is the jungle. And it’s dark.

“Hey, Finch,” he said.

“
Yeah?”

“
Another beer down here. And another one after that.”

“Okay.”

When in doubt, Steve figured, get good and fucked up.

34

The phone booth.

Tara stood there waiting, a chill breeze coming off Bitter Lake and rustling fallen leaves around the beach house. She checked her watch. She was on time. He had said 9:30. No doubt he would make her wait, twist the knife in her a little because that’s how he enjoyed himself.

Ring,
she thought.

The beach house sat on a tree-lined lick of land that jutted out into the lake. There was nothing out there but the beach, the house, the cold water lapping at the sand. She could not have imagined a more desolate spot than this. In the summer, it was crowded, but once fall pinched a blush into the foliage it was deserted. Dead.