The Creeping (6 page)

“What? You thought I wouldn't come back to see
you
? To see how you ended up?” There's mock flattery in his tone. “You think I wouldn't check on the bitch who survived instead of my sister?” He tightens his grip, and his expression darkens. “I watched you and your perfect friends playing in the water today, and all I could think was that even if Jeanie were alive, she wouldn't be there with you. She wouldn't have been good enough for you. Or hot enough. Or skinny enough.” There's only malice dripping from his words. Does he know I've thought that before, that Jeanie would have grown up to be average? “Do you deny it?” His hand pulses
around my arm. “You telling me you would have kept her around?”

The rain hammers down on us, its sheets of water making me blind to everything more than five feet away, everything except Daniel. He came looking for me like he always does, and instead of me scared in the parking lot like the last time, I was with a group of girls the age Jeanie would have been. He probably watched Michaela catch air before she splashed into the water. He saw how alive we looked; how unlike Jeanie. I want to swear to him that it isn't true; that Jeanie would have been there with us. But Daniel's right. “You aren't supposed to be talking to me.” I try to yank my arm free, but he holds me still. “You shouldn't even be near me,” I say louder.

Daniel's mouth is right at my eye level. “I kept saying, ‘See, Jeanie? See, Jeanie? See? Look what you were spared. Those girls can't hurt you.' ”

I lock my sagging knees and resist the urge to cover my face. As we fled the cove, Daniel was whispering to his dead sister. I know that he doesn't really mean that Jeanie's better off dead; this is the endless grief talking, the sorrow that inspires conversations with ghosts.

“Daniel, why would you come home
today
?” I already know the answer. My eyes dart upward. We're unwittingly standing under a dummy corpse. Its clothes are saturated with rain, and rivulets run from its boots. Staring at it, tears well in my eyes. I doubt he notices because my face is already slick with water. “You're here for this.” I motion with my free hand. Vaguely, I register screaming coming from behind us. Not the celebratory yips about the storm or the manic laughing of the drunk dancers, but something shrill and full of alarm.

The fine lines on his lips stretch and vanish as he opens his mouth to speak. Of course he's here to see how his sister is being remembered or forgotten, how I turned out, how his parents are doing across town. He's here today for the same reason I had trouble sleeping last night; for the same reason I asked Shane for the case file. Who knows? Maybe Daniel has come back every anniversary with no one other than his parents the wiser. Before he can rumble all this at me, a sharp cry like a siren carried on the wind reaches us: “There's a body! A body!”

I
don't know how we go from the charged moment where I'm afraid of Daniel, to tearing through the mud and spitting rain toward the screams. One second he's clutching my arm to keep me from running, a captive to his sadness, and the next he's holding me up as I slip and slide over the eroding sludge the ground has become. We turn in unison, both of us instantly filled with dread that a body might mean something intimate to us. It could be decomposed Jeanie. It could be grown and killed Jeanie. It doesn't matter which; all that matters is that we are both running because of Jeanie.

Daniel's fingers lace tightly with mine, but it doesn't feel like holding hands. It's more like being handcuffed to him. A confusion of colors and shapes spirals around us as a dizzying crowd surges toward the cries for help. Water splashes from the ground and the sky as though we're underwater, and I wonder for a second if we should be swimming rather than running. We're in slow motion, wading through the mud to reach the cemetery. All
the while the screams find us on the current of the wind.

As I reach to tap the heart on the iron gate, my tennis shoe snags the uneven rocks lining the path. I stumble forward, my hand missing the heart. Daniel's arm wraps around my waist, his left hand clings to my right, and he hoists me to my feet.

My stomach churns as we draw closer, the girl's cries getting louder as we move toward the edge of the cemetery nearest to the lake. The candles are still lit, powered by batteries like the lanterns. Their wash of light makes it possible to see Tara Boden, a sophomore who shouldn't even be here, hunched over an uprooted gravestone. Her voice is worn and ragged now, barely more than a hoarse whimper. Her shirt is unbuttoned, revealing her yellow lace bra. A junior boy is shirtless and rubbing a wide circle with his palm on her back.

Only a handful of my classmates have reached the site, teetering unsteadily on the disrupted soil. All hang back and gawk at where Tara's quivering hand points. The pelting rain washed away a ten-or fifteen-foot segment of the wrough-iron fence that separates the cemetery from the shore. Where there used to be a gradual slope down to the pebbled bank, it looks as though a giant monster took a bite.

All the things that should stay hidden at cemeteries are unearthed by the mudslide. Coffins exposed, either swept downhill by the slide or jutting at sharp angles from the ground like compound bone fractures piercing skin. Jaundiced partial skeletons litter the soil. Relief swells in me as I hope that we're only seeing the remnants of those who died a hundred years ago. Tara Boden is a drama whore; of course she'd
seize the opportunity for attention. I squirm out of Daniel's grasp. On unsteady legs I inch forward, toes of my sneakers narrowly missing ancient bones as I work my way into the shallow crater the slide left. Daniel doesn't follow. I drag my arm over my top lip, wiping off water and snot from the run.

I go from hobbling to crouching when I reach the bottom. I squint at the sludge in front of me, the votives' pallor hardly enough to see by. Gnarled tree roots. Crumbled graves. A fractured Virgin Mary statue that rests headless on its side. The clouds drift away, and the moon's light penetrates the gloom around me. A flash of yellow cloth sticking up from the mud. A nest of brown lichen or matted hair. A rubber-soled sneaker. Fuchsia-painted fingernails. Bits and pieces of a body visible in the weak light. She rests diagonally on the lid of a coffin at the bottom of the crater. Before the storm she might have been righted, hands folded and crossed on her chest, sleeping deeply on the top of an ancient grave with the look of a princess waiting to be awakened by a kiss. I suck in my breath, afraid to exhale.

I must look like I've lost my mind as I sink down to my hands and knees. The slimy soil squishes and bubbles under me. I crawl carefully, so the earth doesn't swallow me up. I choke back vomit as my hand brushes what I know is a human skull. Bones. Decomposed flesh. Eyeballs. Brain matter. Maggots. All the gross things that are likely in this soil seep into my hands and knees. But I have to get to that body. I have to make sure that it is a body and that I'm not seeing things. That I haven't lost every last ounce of sanity I had.

Out of the voices behind me I hear Zoey arguing. Demanding
that the cops be called. Barking orders in a way only Zoey can get away with. A few more feet to go. I still hold my breath. I try to let it out very gently and to draw it back in without the dead noticing. I don't want to breathe them in either.

I can see her now. Hair, hands, torso. For a second I'm grateful the body isn't dismembered, but that fades once I note the size of the features. Small and doll-like.
A little girl
. Ivory skin taut over her bones; hair is matted on her forehead. It's impossible, but my tongue presses to the roof of my mouth to say Jeanie's name. Of course it's not her. I haven't taken anatomy yet, but who doesn't know enough about decomposing corpses from watching
CSI
reruns to know that someone buried eleven years ago wouldn't be in this condition? But still. She looks young. She looks six.

I reach for her—I don't know why, since the last thing I want is to actually touch her. My hand splayed wide, fingers stretching against the joints. Three inches. Two. In the instant before I make contact, the sludge shifts and bubbles under me and I'm knocked forward against the coffin lid. The jolt rocks her head to the side, but the red hair and the flap of skin that is her scalp stay put. “Naked” is the word my brain vomits. Her head is hairless. Skinned.
Scalped
. The membrane that she should be wearing as a crown is disconnected, limp in the mud, only placed near so it might look as though she's in one piece.

“Zoey.” I must say her name a hundred times in the minute it takes her to crawl, drunk and in her bikini, through the demolished graves. She reaches me, hands fumble to pull me away.

It takes twenty minutes for the police to arrive. During that time I'm a nonverbal animal completely consumed with watching and listening to those around me. Zoey torpedoes Tara Boden with insults until she leaves and returns with a blanket from her date's car. It smells of mildew, but I let her wrap it around me anyway. As we huddle together in the dark, her arm pressed against mine, I close my eyes and wish away the scene unfolding in front of me.

Daniel stands where I left him. His shoes have sunk into the mud like quicksand swallowing him up. I don't think he'd mind. He's completely still: no flinching, no twitching, no wailing. His eyes never leave the matted hair sticking up from the upturned earth, spindly as a grubby little shrub climbing toward the light, lonely away from its head.

Michaela and Cole aren't here. Probably taking cover from the rain in my car. It isn't pouring from the sky like the heavens have burst open on our heads, but it sprinkles. Yes, that's it. Jeanie went to heaven eleven years ago, and tonight they spit her back to earth. Thank God I can't form a sentence, because Zoey would have me committed.

I've come full circle since she dragged me from the mud pit of corpses. And she had to
drag
me, looping her arms under mine and guiding me away. The body's tiny hand, outstretched and decorated with peeling nail polish, momentarily rotted my sense. I was certain she was connected to Jeanie. It felt too cosmic that on this day of all days a corpse would show up. How could there even be another hurt little girl? The frosting on the cake, albeit a twisted cake made from
guts and demon horns, was that Daniel and I were both here to witness it. There's no way this is not some bigger-than-all-of-us reckoning. But the farther away Zoey hauled me from the body, the bossier the voice of reason in my head got. What was I thinking? Did I have gruel for brains all of a sudden? What happened to the reasonable girl who grew up in the shadow of hysteria and learned that the color of madness wasn't for her?

By the time Zoey plastered a perma-smile on her face and created a cocoon out of the blanket for us, I'd talked my inner psycho off the ledge. This was a coincidence. Ridiculous happenstance. Maybe I even imagined that the body looked fresher than it was? Maybe some fluke global-warming voodoo preserved the body for the last hundred years until she was freed from her coffin during the storm? Maybe it only looked like she'd been lying on top rather than inside the tomb? Maybe her hair detached from the skull because that's what happens when bodies decompose? All the explanations in the world won't banish the nagging in my stomach that this can't be, won't be, the case. Sure there is the whole inconvenient fact that they probably didn't have hot-pink nail polish a hundred years ago. But also, there is this writhing inside me, like I've been infected by a tapeworm of doom. As the police sirens sing louder, I feel the parasite nibbling away my reason to make room for fear.

The blue-and-red lights of cop cars reflect on the surfaces around us like glittering disco balls. Zoey leaves my side, cradling my face in her hands and brushing her lips to my forehead. She mumbles a few words and then is gone. My classmates leave too, drawn toward the
flashing lights or away from them, depending on how drunk they are. I crane my neck to watch the stream of police descend on the cemetery. Detective Shane shoves through the uniforms and angles to where I sit.

“Stella!” he shouts above the commotion. I rise on jittery knees. Zoey is hot on his tail. She went in search of someone who'd be familiar to me. Of course she did. My best friend who crawled through corpses for me. The concern scrunches up Shane's face, and offhandedly I think he looks like a shar-pei. The comparison makes me guilty. He's a youngish older guy, and it's probably my unsolved case—unsolved because of my screwed-up memory—that's made him look more ancient than he is. Either that or he's a chain smoker. “Are you hurt?” he asks. I must look like I've been run into the mud by a bulldozer. Then Zoey comes to stand by my side, and we look like we climbed out of the bowels of the planet.

“No. There's a body of a little girl. It's Jeanie,” I blurt out before I can stop myself. Zoey shoots me a worried glance and throws her arm over my shoulders. Shane chews the inside of his cheek for a moment before turning and surveying the mudslide in front of us. Uniforms are setting up giant fluorescent lights to illuminate the ground.

“Why don't we get Stella back to her car, and I'll come out to the lot as soon as I can. I don't think she needs to see this,” he says to Zoey. His expression and tone are loaded. Zoey nods knowingly. They think I've lost it. They're probably right. I don't resist as Zoey tows me through the pandemonium of uniforms, equipment, radio
chatter, and sopping-wet teenagers. I wonder halfheartedly where Daniel disappeared to.

“Did Sam come back?” I murmur. Zoey smiles sadly at me. She must think I'm delirious and asking for my old friend. “He was here earlier,” I squeeze out, but I don't have the energy to explain. Once at the gravel lot, we duck under police tape. Michaela rushes away from where she was in the throes of an argument with a cop. Cole's close at her heels with her cell out.