The Dark Half (7 page)

June spruce-up wasn't anywhere near as bad, but it was important. Come late June the summer people would start arriving in their accustomed droves, and with them would come old residents (and their children) who had moved away to wanner or more profitable parts of the country but who still held property in town. These were the people Digger regarded as the real ass-aches, the ones who would raise the roof if one blade was off the old waterwheel down at the sawmill or if Uncle Reginald's gravestone had tumbled over on its inscription.

Well, winter's coming, he thought. It was what he used to comfort himself with in all seasons, including this one, when winter seemed as distant as a dream.

Homeland was the biggest and prettiest of the town boneyards. Its central lane was almost as wide as a regular road, and it was crossed by four narrower lanes, little more than wheel-tracks with neatly mown grass growing up between them. Digger drove up the central avenue through Homeland, crossed the first and second intersections, reached the third . . . and slammed on the brakes.

“Oh piss in the shithouse!” he exclaimed, turning off the pick-up's engine and getting out. He walked down the lane toward a ragged hole in the grass some fifty feet down and to the right of the cross-lane Brown dumps and piles of dirt lay around the hole like shrapnel around a grenade explosion. “Gawdam kids!”

He stood by the hole, big callused hands planted on the hips of his faded green work-pants. This was a mess. On more than one occasion be and his co-workers had had to clean up after a bunch of kids who had either talked or drunk themselves into a little midnight grave-digging—it was usually an initiation stunt or just a handful of teenage dimbulbs, randy with the moonlight and kicking up their heels. To Digger Holt's knowledge, none of them had actually dug up a coffin or, God forbid, disinterred one of the paying customers—no matter how drunk these happy assholes happened to be, they usually didn't do more than dig a hole two or three feet deep before getting tired of the game and leaving off. And, although digging holes in one of the local boneatoriums was in bad taste (unless you happened to be a fellow like Digger, who was paid and duly empowered to plant the customers, that was), the mess wasn't too bad. Usually.

This, however, wasn't a case of usually.

The hole had no definition; it was just a blob. It surely didn't look like a
grave,
with neatly squared corners and a rectangular shape. It was deeper than the drunks and high-school kids usually managed, but its depth was not uniform; it tapered to a kind of cone, and when Digger realized what the hole
did
look like he felt a nasty chill race up his spine.

It looked the way a grave would look if someone had been buried before he was dead, come to, and dug his way out of the ground with nothing but his bare hands.

“Oh, cut it out,” he muttered. “Fucking prank. Fucking
kids. ”

Had to be. There was no coffin down there and no tumbled headstone up here, and that made perfect sense because there was no
body
buried here. He didn't have to go back to the toolshed, where a detailed map of the graveyard was tacked up on the wall, to know
that.
This was part of the six-plot segment owned by the town's First Selectman, Danforth “Buster” Keeton. And the only plots actually occupied by customers held the bodies of Buster's father and uncle. They were off to the right, their headstones standing straight and unmolested.

Digger remembered this particular plot well for another reason. This was where those New York people had set up their fake gravestone when they were doing their story on Thad Beaumont. Beaumont and his wife had a summer home here in town, on Castle Lake. Dave Phillips caretook their place, and Digger himself had helped Dave tarring the driveway last fall, before the leaves fell and things got busy again. Then this spring, Beaumont had asked him in kind of an embarrassed way if some photographer could set up a fake tombstone in the cemetery for what he called “a trick shot. ”

“If it's not okay, just say so,” Beaumont had told him, sounding more embarrassed than ever. “It's really not a big deal. ”

“You go right ahead,” Digger had answered kindly.
“People
magazine, did you say?”

Thad nodded.

“Well, say! That's something, isn't it? Somebody from town in
People
magazine! I'll have to get that issue for sure!”

“I'm not sure
I
will,” Beaumont said. “Thanks, Mr. Holt. ”

Digger liked Beaumont, even if he was a writer. Digger had only gone as far as the eighth grade himself—and had to try twice before be could get through that one—and it wasn't everybody in town called him “Mister. ”

“Darn magazine folk'd prob'ly like to take your pitcher stark naked with your old hog-leg stuck up a Great Dane's poop-chute if they could get it that way, wouldn't they?”

Beaumont went off into a rare gale of laughter. “Yeah, that's just what they
would
like, I think,” he had said, and clapped Digger on the shoulder.

The photographer had turned out to be a woman of the sort Digger called A High-Class Cunt from the City. The city in this case was, of course, New York. She walked as if she had a spindle up her box and another one tucked up her butt and both of them turning just as brisk as you please. She'd gotten a station wagon from one of the car-rental places at the Portland Jetport, and it was stuffed so full of photo equipment it was a wonder there was room for her and her assistant inside. If the car got
too
full and it came to a choice between getting rid of her assistant or some of that photo equipment, Digger reckoned there would be one pansy from the Big Apple trying to hitch him a ride back to the airport.

The Beaumonts, who followed in their own car and parked it behind the station wagon, had looked both embarrassed and amused. Since they seemed to be with the High-Class Cunt from the City of their own free will, Digger guessed that amusement still held the upper hand with them. Still, he had leaned in to make sure, ignoring the High-Class Cunt's snooty look. “Everything fine, Mr. B. ?” he had asked.

“Christ, no, but I guess it'll do,” he had replied, and dropped Digger a wink. Digger dropped him one right back.

Once he had it clear in his mind that the Beaumonts intended to go through with the thing, Digger had settled back to watch—he had as much appreciation for a free show as the next man. The woman had a big fake gravestone tucked in amidst the rest of her travelling goods, the old-fashioned kind that was round on top. It looked more like the ones Charles Addams drew in his cartoons than any of the real ones Digger had set up just lately. She fussed around it, getting her assistant to set it up again and again. Digger had stepped in once to ask if he could help, but she just said no thank you in her snotty New York way, so Digger had retreated again.

Finally she had it the way she wanted it, and got the assistant to work dicking around with the lights. That used up another half-hour or so. And all the time Mr. Beaumont had stood there and watched, sometimes rubbing the small white scar on his forehead in that odd, characteristic way he had. His eyes fascinated Digger.

Man's takin his own photographs,
he thought.
Probably better than hers, and apt to last a lot longer, to boot. He's storin her up to put in a book someday and she don't even know it.

At last the woman had been ready to take a few pictures. She had the Beaumonts shake hands over that gravestone a dozen times if she had them do it once, and it was pretty gawdam raw that day, too. Ordered them around just like she did that squeaky, mincing assistant of hers. Between her braying New York voice and the repeated orders to do it over again because the light wasn't right or their faces weren't right or maybe her own damned asshole wasn't right, Digger had kept expecting Mr. Beaumont—not exactly the longest-tempered of men according to the gossip he'd heard—to explode all over her. But Mr. Beaumont—and his wife, too—seemed more amused than pissed off, and they just kept on doing what the High-Class Cunt from the City told them to do, even though it had been right nippy that day. Digger believed that, if it had been
him, he
would have gotten a dight pissed off at the lady after awhile. like in about fifteen seconds.

And it was here, right where this stupid gawdam hole was, that they had planted that fake grave-marker. Why, if he needed any further proof, there were still round marks in the sod, marks which had been left by that High-Class Cunt's heels. She had been from New York, all right; only a New York woman would show up in high heels at the end of slop season and then goose-step around a cemetery in them, taking pitchers. If that wasn't—

His thoughts broke off, and that feeling of coldness reasserted itself in his flesh again. He had been looking at the fading tattoos left by the photographer's high heels, and as he looked at
those
marks, his eye happened on other, fresher marks.

Tracks?
Were those
tracks?

Except that wasn't all, and Digger Holt
knew
it wasn't. Before he could even get to the first blotch of dirt on the green grass, he saw the deep impression of a shoe in the pile of dirt closest to the hole.

There are people in the world who are quite good at lying to themselves, but Digger Holt wasn't one of them. That nervous, scoffing voice in his mind could not change what his eyes saw. He had tracked and hunted wild things all his life, and this sign was just too easy to read. He wished to Christ it wasn't.

Here in this pile of dirt close to the grave was not only a footprint, but a circular depression almost the size of a dinner dish. This dimple was to the left of the footprint. And on either side of the circular print and the foot-mart, but farther back, were grooves in the dirt that were clearly the marks of fingers, fingers which had slipped a little before catching hold.

He looked beyond the first footprint and saw another. Beyond that, on the grass, was half of a third, formed when some of the dirt on the shoe which stepped there fell off in a clump. It had fallen off, but remained moist enough to hold the impression . . . and that's what the three or four others which had originally caught his eye had done. If he hadn't come so cussed early in the morning, while the grass was still wet, the sun would have dried the earth and it would have fallen apart in loose little crumbles that meant nothing.

He wished he
had
come later, that he had gone out to Grace Cemetery first, as he had set out to do when he left home.

But he hadn't, and that was all.

The fragments of footprints petered out less than twelve feet from the

hole in the ground. Digger suspected the dewy grass farther on might still hold impressions, though, and he supposed he would check on that, although he didn't much want to. For the time being, however, he re-directed his gaze to the clearest marks, the ones in the little pile of dirt close to the hole.

Grooves which had been drawn by fingers; a round impression slightly ahead of them; a footprint beside the round mark. What story did that configuration tell?

Digger hardly had to ask himself before the answer dropped into his mind like the secret woid on that old Groucho Marx show,
You Bet Your Life.
He saw it as clearly as if he had been here when it happened, and that was precisely why he didn't want any more to do with this at all. Gawdam creepy was what it was.

Because look: here's a man standing in a new-dug hole in the ground.

Yes, but how'd he get down there?

Yes, but did he make the hole, or did someone else do it?

Yes, but how come the little roots look twisted and frayed and torn, as if the sods were pulled apart with bare hands instead of sheared cleanly apart with a spade?

Never mind the buts. Never mind them at all. It was better, maybe, not to think of them. Just stick with the man standing in the hole, a hole that is a little too deep to just jump out of. So what does he do? He puts his palms in the closest pile of dirt and
boosts
himself out. No particular trick to do that, if it was a full-grown man, that was, and not a kid. Digger looked at the few clear and complete tracks he could see and thought,
If it was a kid, he had awful damn big feet. Those have got to be size twelves, at least
.

Hands out. Boost the body up. During the boost, the hands slip a little bit in the loose dirt, so you dig in with your fingers, leaving those short grooves. Then you're out, and you balance your weight on one knee, creating that round depression. You put one foot down next to the knee you're balanced on, shift your weight from the knee to the foot, get up, and walk away. Simple as knitting kitten-britches.

“Gawdammit, it ain't a
grave,
it's a friggin
hole
in the ground!” he said aloud, and then jumped a little as a sparrow scolded him.

Yes, nothing but a hole in the ground—hadn't he said so himself? But how come he couldn't see any marks of the sort he associated with spadework? How come there was just that one set of footprints going away from the hole and none around it, none pointing toward it, the way there would be if a fellow had been digging and stepping in his own dirt every now and then, as fellows digging holes tended to do?