The Devil's Graveyard (24 page)

A rumbling noise
. The sound of earth being disturbed, as if hundreds of moles were burrowing up from under the ground. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement near the dead security guard behind Elvis. The ground started to erupt with small mounds of dirt and sand, spitting dust and small stones into the air. Sanchez felt a clod of loose earth land on his shoe. It had come from within the grave that he and Elvis had been digging. He turned round and leaned over the shallow hole to get a closer look at where it had come from. The rumbling noises seemed to be coming from all around, but the nearest sounds were definitely coming from the grave. Specks of dirt were flying up into the air from it. Something was coming up through the ground.

‘The fuck is it?’ Angus called over to them. He could plainly hear the noise, which seemed to be growing louder by the second.

Still looking down into the grave, Sanchez stared hard at the small stones and specks of dirt flying up. With only the intermittent light of the moon to see by, he wasn’t sure if his eyes were deceiving him or not. Then something pale punched its way out through the soil.

A hand
.

An old, decayed hand with dirt wedged beneath its short, broken fingernails. Its fingers were moving, reaching out for something to grab hold of, a hand fighting its way out of the ground. Sanchez looked back up at Angus, who was pointing his pistol at him.

‘It’s a fuckin’ hand!’ he shouted.

‘What?’

It had taken him a lot longer than it should have, but Sanchez had finally realized exactly what it was that Elvis had been trying to warn them about. Something
was
happening, right enough. Yet another thing the Mystic fuckin’ Lady had failed to predict, he thought inconsequentially.

‘Oh my God! Behind you!’ he suddenly yelled. He was staring at the ground behind Angus, and he really
had
seen something. And this was more than just a hand. What Sanchez saw was a decaying corpse in the process of dragging itself out of the sand and dirt. The upper half of its body was already above the surface and one of its arms was outstretched, reaching for the calf of Angus’s left leg. Its face was a vile mess of torn and decaying flesh. Its body was still covered by rags of clothing that hid no more than half of its skeletal torso. The creature still had hair (albeit grey and full of dirt), eyes and teeth, but any fat its body might once have had appeared to have been used up during its underground hibernation. Its black, rabid eyes revealed an insane hunger. A hunger for human flesh.

That was just the start of it. As Angus finally woke up to the fact that something really was going on and turned to take a look, two more patches of dirt erupted within a few feet of each other on either side of him. Bodies were rising up from shallow graves in the desert. Bodies of all the dead people who had been buried there over the last hundred years.

The real
Back From the Dead
show was just beginning, an annual killfest for the undead. And the first course looked likely to be Sanchez, Elvis and Invincible Angus. These grossly deformed, flesh-eating members of the undead had been in hibernation for a whole year.

And they looked damned hungry.

By the time the last performer hit the stage for his audition, most of the other contestants had become incredibly anxious. Every one of them wanted to know if he or she had made it through to the final. For those who had performed early, the wait was unbearable. Many of them had sought refuge in one of the hotel’s bars for a drink to calm their nerves before the finalists were announced. Others had returned to their rooms to try to snatch some rest. An unlucky few had been killed, and one other, Elvis, had been taken for a ride out in the desert.

One of the few who had decided to watch the last guy perform was Emily. She was not as anxious as most of the other entrants because she knew that her place in the final was guaranteed. She’d known for months that all she would have to do was to turn up and not make a mess of the audition. Having successfully overcome that hurdle she had since been offering support to the other contestants who she knew had no chance of making it into the final. Her support was genuinely well meant. She supposed that it made her feel a little better about it all, the whole sham.

The guy onstage dressed as one of the Blues Brothers – well, his upper half, anyway – didn’t look like he’d be too much of a threat, and he also seemed a touch nervous. Remembering how nerve-racked she had been when she had performed, Emily’s heart went out to him. He hadn’t done much to help himself by wearing red leather pants, either.
Poor guy
. She watched from the wings as he nervously twiddled with a harmonica while Nina Forina asked him a few questions. Emily had been lucky enough not to be grilled by the presenter before she sang. Generally, if Nina asked a contestant to tell the audience a bit about themselves, it meant the contestant was either some kind of a freak, or had a sob story to tell.

‘So, Jacko, are you nervous?’ Nina asked, placing a perfectly manicured orange hand on his shoulder.

‘Yeah, a little bit,’ he mumbled quietly.

‘Do you have any friends or family in the audience?’

‘Uh – no. My only friend was my wife Sally, but she died recently.’

The audience let out a concerted and sympathetic ‘Aaah’.

‘I am so sorry,’ said Nina, offering a look that might have been sympathetic had Botox not intervened. ‘How did she die?’

‘Huh?’

‘Your wife. Sally. What was the cause of her tragic death? Or is it too painful to talk about?’

To Emily, Jacko seemed uneasy with the questioning, almost as though he didn’t know the answers. ‘Uh, yeah – I mean, yes, it was painful. She was eaten by a leopard.’

‘What?’

‘A leopard.’

The audience gasped as one. Recognizing at once that the interview had gone on long enough, Nina turned back to the audience and boomed into her microphone. ‘Okay, that’s a sad, sad story. But on that note, ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for…
the Blues Brother
!’

Emily watched as the Blues Brother stood rooted to the spot, not moving, just taking deep breaths.
Oh dear
, she thought,
he’s dried
. The applause had ended and nearly twenty seconds of eerie silence passed before Jacko finally began to sing. His song of choice was ‘Mustang Sally’, though he struggled to get the first line past his lips.

‘Mustang Sally,

Someone better slow your Mustang down.’

If he hadn’t had a microphone in front of him, the judges (who were no more than thirty feet away) would barely have heard him. Which was just as well because, if the second line was anything to go by, he seemed to be getting most of the words wrong. Like someone singing along to a tune on their car stereo, he appeared to be mumbling a little whenever he was unsure of the words.

Emily tiptoed to the edge of the stage to get a closer look, keeping herself hidden behind the gigantic red curtain that was drawn back to the side of the stage. She thought she was alone, until she noticed someone else watching from the wings. He was standing a yard or so to her left, against a wall that had been painted a deep black. She hadn’t seen him until she was up close, for, like a chameleon, he blended into the dark wall.

She recognized him as the strange man she had seen earlier in the day, just before she had gone onstage. He was still wearing the black leather jacket with the dark hood hanging round his shoulders. This truly was a man who could slip in and out of shadows virtually undetected. Yet, although she found him unsettling, Emily seized on this second opportunity to talk to the strange individual.

‘Did you lend him your shades?’ she asked, nodding over at the Blues Brother on the stage.

The man had been so engrossed in watching Jacko perform that he hadn’t noticed her arrival next to him. His initial glare implied that he didn’t welcome her approach, but his look softened a little when he recognized her.

‘Yeah. Needs all the help he can get.’

‘The first few lines are the worst. Then you get your confidence.’

‘Right.’ There was deep scepticism in the gravelly voice.

Emily
was
right, however. Despite starting hesitantly, Jacko improved with each line, becoming a little louder and more confident with every word he sang. And when he came to the harmonica parts, he shone. The boy could play. Suddenly the audience began to perk up and clap along.

‘Told you,’ said Emily. ‘Doing okay now, isn’t he?’

‘He’s better than you, that’s for sure.’

Emily was taken aback as much by the uncalled-for aggression of the remark as by its brutality. ‘Excuse me?’ she bridled.

‘You were shit. Why don’t you go home? You ain’t going to win.’

‘I’ve as much right to be here as anyone else.’ Despite herself she was becoming angry, and a light flush spread across her cheeks.

‘Your audition was a phoney,’ the dark stranger added.

Emily felt her cheeks turn a gentle crimson colour as the flush spread. It wasn’t pleasant to hear someone point out, rather loudly, that her path to the final had been preordained. For a second, it made her doubt her own talent.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she stammered, looking for a way to escape the conversation.

‘The final is rigged. And in case you ain’t noticed, three of the original line-up for the final have disappeared. Seems someone doesn’t like the idea of people cheating. Why don’t you just do everyone a favour and get the fuck back to Kansas?’ He looked hard at her, his eyes even more unnerving than sunglasses. She didn’t believe that three of her fellow finalists had disappeared – he was just saying it to upset her.

He was succeeding, too. Emily swallowed hard to hold back the onrush of a flood of tears. It wasn’t pleasant at all to be spoken to in such a manner. What was this guy’s problem? She’d never done him any harm. Onstage, Jacko was now in his element, scorching through a harmonica solo that had the entire audience on its feet.

‘You’re very rude,’ she blurted out before turning away from the dark-clad stranger and moving to her right, until she was actually treading on the bottom of the dark red curtain. She decided that she would ignore him. Instead, she would concentrate on what the judges had to say about the Blues Brother.

After an ovation from the crowd that lasted a good minute, the panel of three judges gave their opinions. The first two, Lucinda Brown and Candy Perez, offered politely positive comments that drew cheers from the audience. Finally it came to the turn of the judge in the middle in the loud white suit, Nigel Powell, the judge whose opinion counted most. He looked a great deal more irritated than he had earlier, when Emily had performed. He was no doubt eager to take a break, too.

‘Well, what can I say, Jacko?’ he started. ‘Your singing was mediocre at best.’ The crowd booed and he leaned back and half-turned to look at them. ‘Well it was!’ he protested. ‘However, your harmonica playing was excellent.’ The audience stopped booing and began cheering. When the noise died down sufficiently, Powell carried on. ‘But the point of this show is proving that you can sing, and for me that didn’t really sound like the Blues Brothers. Without the harmonica, that was probably not even average.’

There were more boos from the crowd, and out of the corner of her eye Emily noted a touch of agitation on the face of the man standing next to her. In fact, he looked about ready to kill someone, so in the interests of self-preservation she slipped away and headed back to the safety of the dressing room on the eighth floor. At least there, she figured, she would be among friends like Johnny Cash, Otis Redding, Kurt Cobain and James Brown.