GRAVEWORM (34 page)

“
Don’t scream,” Henry grunted as he pushed into her harder and harder. “Don’t scream or I’ll bite you… I’ll sink my teeth into you…”

Elise started to scream.

Henry bit into her throat, tearing at the flesh until it filled his mouth and he tasted the gray dust of her, the dry meat breaking apart in his mouth.

“
Yes… .oooohhhhh… yes…”

He finished and rolled off her, breathing hard. “Now they’ll know. They listen to us, you know.”

Elise giggled with a sound like a scraping fork. “Let them listen. But the girl…”

“Yes?”

“You should let her go.”

“
No…”

“
Release her. Release her.”

But Henry shook his head. He was remembering things, too damn many things.

“
Yes, get the sister instead. She’s the one you want. She’s the one we
both
want.”

Standing up, Henry told her he’d do it if that’s what she wanted. Brushing fragments of Elise off of him, he dressed quietly and thought about Tara. Yes, Tara was like Mother Rose. Tara was mean. Tara would make him do awful things just like Mother Rose and Elise had and he would do them, God yes, he would gladly do them.

66

Steve woke to the sound of a voice; a flat, dead sort of voice droning in the night. It was Tara’s voice and he knew it… but the very quality of it made him question the fact as he lay there, his brain still confused from sleep. It had a very wooden, hollow sound to it like a puppet whispering from the dark of a closet. It made a chill run down the backs of his bare arms.

That’s not her. That can’t be her. It’s someone imitating her voice.

He pulled himself out of bed and walked silently to the door.

Tara was just down the hallway by the sound of it. Perhaps right outside Lisa’s room. He stood there. The door was slightly ajar. He listened. “If you do bad things you’ll have to be punished,” Tara was saying in that flat mechanical tone. “You know I won’t have a choice.” There was a pause. A scraping sound like she was dragging her fingers over the wall. “I’ll do what you want. But remember our agreement.” Another pause. “You’ll get what you want as long as I get what belongs to me. Do you understand? I’m asking you if you understand.” Another pause and he thought she made a horrid dry giggling deep in her throat. “Then it ends tonight and that’s our agreement.” He heard her sighing. “Yes, her husband’s been nosing around. He was a cop. It’s in his blood. He won’t interfere, though. He’s old.”

He went back to bed.

Who or what was she talking about?

Tara was whispering in the hallway but he couldn’t be sure what she was saying. He was almost certain she was no longer on the phone—if she had been in the first place—maybe just talking to herself now. The thing that scared him the worst was the idea that she really
was
mad. That her mind had gone. The evidence was mounting day by day. He brushed his fingertips over the bite marks on his shoulder.
Who was it you laid with you last night, Steve?
a voice asked him.
What mounted you and bit you? It wasn’t Tara. You can’t believe it was her.

It was another.

The door opened and Tara stood there. “You’re awake,” she said, certain of the fact like she could see perfectly in the darkness. “I have something I have to go do.”

“At this hour?”

“Yes.”

“
Tara, please come to bed. Please talk to me.”

She stood there for a moment and he had the strangest feeling that she was about to do just that… then he heard her pulling on her clothes. “You need to leave, Steve. I’ll talk to you about everything tomorrow. Then it will all make sense to you and you’ll understand why I did what I had to do. Until then you’ll have to trust me.”

“
Tara…”

That voice again, but now with an edge sharp enough to slit a throat: “Do you trust me?”

No, no I don’t trust you at all because you’ve been acting like a fucking crazy woman and we’re all scared half to death for you. You’re behavior is irrational. You’re thinking is skewed. Even the words that come out of your mouth are warped and incomprehensible.
But what he said was, “Yes.” His heart winning out again, his escalating love for the woman suppressing natural instinctive fears. “Of course I do.”

“
Good. I knew I could trust you. You’ve always been my rock.”

She came over to the bed and held onto him, kissing him.

“You should go now,” she said.

“Tomorrow?”

“
You’ll know everything.” She stood there, waiting for him to get dressed. “Hurry, Steve. You won’t want to be here when I get back.”

67

The house was a sculpture of time and silence, the subtle drift of dust and the whisper of the woodworm within the walls. Here in the dining room, beneath the wrought-iron eight-arm chandelier where cobwebs were strung as thick as bridal lace, the table was layered with a patina of settled grime. Plates were heaped upon plates, glasses overturned, crockery shattered, silverware scattered like bones, bits of rotting food abundant with plump bluebottle flies. Those seated there in cerements of mold-speckled velour dresses, support hose, buckled shoes and square-shouldered Sunday suits were like antiquities stored in trunks and glass museum cases, withered and wanting things, mannequin-eyed and puppet-grinned, all silent, all expectant, dusty finger to dusty lip, eyes sunken into dark varnished orbits.

Then the stillness was broken by a wizened voice like a quill pen scraping parchment: “Plenty of red on the cheeks! That’s it, kid! Your mother always was a clown so now you’re bringing out the real her!” Uncle Alden was completely in his element now that Henry was making fools of Mother Rose and Aunt Lily. “Ha! Ha! Ha! This kid’s a riot! An absolute riot!”

Mother Rose sat there, candlelight throwing deep-hewn shadows over her grim disapproving face. While Uncle Arlen slapped the table and raised a cloud of dust, she watched him, a derisive and hateful gleam in her eye.
Just you wait,
she seemed to be thinking at him.
Just you wait because your turn is coming, you can be certain of that.

Elise had joined the throng and sat stiffly, a ghastly smile of stretched rubber at her lips. She hummed a distant, lonely, muted dirge that was high-pitched and resonant like the plucked string of a lyre.

Under the table, looking for scraps, Worm crawled on all fours amongst the pipestems of legs, nuzzling them. Her teeth were chattering with delight.

“
Henry, get this crawling vermin away from me,” Uncle Arlen said. “It smells like she’s been rolling in something again.”

Beneath a silken hankie well-gnawed by mice, Aunt Lily whispered, “And I’m sure that we can all guess what
that
might be.”

Henry painted large red rouged circles on Mother Rose’s cheeks that gave her the look of a garish and somewhat ghoulish circus clown. “There,” he said. “You’re looking better already.” He stepped back to admire his work, strands of glossy black hair hanging over his oily eyes like clumped wireworms. “Tonight, we must present ourselves. Tonight we’ll have a visitor.”

Aunt Lily sat motionlessly like a wax mannequin, waiting, wondering, not knowing and it was killing her. She had to know who was coming. She just
had
to know. For who was the biggest gossip in that room and who was the purveyor of least kept secrets? Who had been the one, when Henry had fallen into that glum spiritual depravity following his father’s death, that dragged him by the ear out into the cemetery?
Your father is dead and you must know that and accept it.
And Henry, oh poor Henry, delver of darkness and digger of tomb-scraps, who could not comprehend that death was an end and not a beginning of mystic sepulchral joy, had turned away, throwing himself at the foot of a leaning centuried monument, fingers brushing flecks of lichen from a worn epitaph, tracing the green-furred cracks in the stone with an almost tender and erotic joy.
I wish to lie in state,
he said, pressing his face to the blades of grass and breathing in deeply of the dark soil beneath.
Dead, you hear me? He’s dead, dead, dead,
Aunt Lily told him
.
But Henry had refused to accept that. Aunt Lily had tried, certainly she had tried to straighten out his head.

And now… more secrets: dark secrets of pure velvet. Oh, to know them, to clutch them to your bosom like precious jewels and know—
know,
mind you—that they were yours and yours alone!

Her fingers were wiry umbilicals threading the broach at her throat. They shuddered, they drummed, they floated up and descended like butterflies: busy, inquisitive, curious beyond decency.
Who? Who? Who could it be?
She just had to know. Something built in her throat, filled her mouth, slid off her tongue: “Who is it, Henry? Dear boy, tell me who it can be!”

Henry laughed. “Soon you’ll know.”

“
I demand to know now!” Mother Rose said very firmly, looking positively obscene with her rouged cheeks and the scarlet smear of lipstick on her mouth. With her pale and seamed complexion, she looked much like a vampire that had just enjoyed a midnight orgy of blood.

“
He’ll tell when he’s ready, won’t you, boy?” Uncle Arlen said, his lips pulled back from a gap-toothed grin. “He’s always been one for surprises, Rose, hasn’t he? Remember that night not long after Charles went to his just rewards that you found him in his room petting the thing in the box? You knew something was amiss, didn’t you? You could tell by the smell that something just wasn’t right… but when you saw him holding it there, petting its long hair and talking to it like it still had a body! Ha! What a hoot! This kid and his secrets!”

“
Boys will be boys,” Aunt Lily said.

Mother Rose scowled. “He was never a boy. I was never certain
what
he was. Always lurking in the shadows, always playing out amongst the tombs. Unhealthy, unwholesome, but he could not be discouraged.”

“
Boys will be boys,” Aunt Lily said again, feeling she should say
something.

Uncle Arlen laughed, ignorant of the spider that webbed his watch chain. “Well, you tried, Rose. God knows you did your very best. Taking him into your room and schooling him. Teaching him how a man is supposed to touch a woman. You tried. You certainly tried.”

Henry ignored them because nothing could sour his mood this night. He painted up Aunt Lily’s tissue-paper face very brightly and never did he once touch her in ways that were unacceptable… though she wanted him to. She certainly wanted him to cup her withered breasts and whisper filthy things in her ear. But he did not. Instead, his breath rushing from his lungs, he scooped up Elise from her place at the table and swung her around like a pale bird, her dress swirling like sallow lilac wings as she crumpled against him, dancing, dipping, cheek to cheek and breast to breast. They danced like marionettes held by jerking, jumping hands. Elise’s spidery fingers clutched at him, her petrified face leaning into his throat as if for a midnight kiss or midnight sup. Together they moved to a low morose humming that came from Henry’s lips. Forward, backward, pirouetting just so with graceful motions that brought great applause from Worm who squatted in a cobwebbed corner, clutching Lazy Baby to her, protectively.

She was chewing on something. Something she found under the table.

“
Worm!” Henry said. “You have an appointment. Go keep it!”

She scrambled away on all fours, leaving Lazy Baby alone in the corner with only white and squirming things for company.

Once all were painted and prettied, Henry dashed from the room. Down the stairs he went into the charnel gloom, whistling uncontrollably, a high and piercing whistle that sounded much like the steady uneasy reedy screeching that played ceaselessly within his own brain. He returned a few minutes later, breaking the silence like a web from four walls to ceiling to floor, and presented a full length bridal gown of beaded ivory satin, the chapel train dragging in the dust.

He sat it at the table, draping it over an empty seat, among much applause and hooting from Uncle Arlen, a blushing acceptance from Aunt Lily, and a sinister disapproval from Mother Rose. “You’ll not marry one of your tramps in my house! And not in my gown! You will not defame my vows! I will not allow such a thing! Do you hear me, Mister Henry Borden?
Do you damn well hear me? Not in MY gown! Not in MY house! That’s… that’s SACRILEGE! THAT’S BLASPHEMY AND YOU, SIR, YOU CRAWLING LITTLE MAGGOT, YOU SIR ARE A BLASPHEEEEEMER!
”