The End of Never (8 page)

“A skull!” he exclaimed, his body hovering over the fractured bone while his fingers clawed at the soil. With torn and bleeding hands, he ripped the bone free from the earth, and he collapsed backward into the pit.

The skull landed gently in his lap on the tops of his thighs, its hollow eyes staring impenetrably at Callahan's confused face. The shovel had left an ugly, ragged gouge in the middle of the skull's forehead. As Callahan gently raised the skeletal head from his lap, he heard a rattle behind the empty eye sockets.

Bone fragments
, he surmised, pushing his long fingers into the gaping hole in the forehead. Rooting inside the brain cavity, his fingers searched the smooth, hollow shell.

“What?” he shouted, his fingers recoiling from inside the skull.

A gold chain fell loose from his grasp and dripped through the hole in the forehead. The skull grinned mockingly at Callahan's shock. Scratching the dark whiskers on his chin, Callahan slipped the necklace delicately from the skull.
Thick as a rope
, he thought,
and heavy enough to be genuine
. The shape of a cross dangled from the chain and his brow furrowed as he held the pendant in his upturned palm.
This is Spanish gold, quite old
, he decided. He glanced down at the skull, which was resting quietly on a pile of dirt by the hole.

“How did you end up with this treasure, my friend?” he asked the skull, as he reached for the lifeless head. With the skull wedged between his arm and his hip, Callahan rushed into the house. As the back door snapped shut, it cracked loudly against its frame, echoing through the shabby mansion.

One dem here
, the shapeshifter realized happily. Cyrus stirred his aching bones restlessly against the bare floor, his nose twitching as Callahan's scent, ripe with sweat and frenzy, wafted up the stairs and under the attic door. Cyrus's bruised muscles constricted. Muscular pain rippled through his arms and across his chest to his legs. A tingle journeyed down his thigh to the gnarled, yellow tips of his toenails. This spasm of pain and delight prickled in his feet.

Three stories below the shapeshifter, a trail of red dirt and grass blades betrayed Callahan's hurried path with the skull to the white-tiled kitchen counter. Gently resting the skull down on the tile, he laid out the long, gold chain.

Blasted necklace is thick enough to choke a man
, he thought, his mouth agape.
Poor bloke—maybe it choked you?
His eyes studied the skull while the tips of his fingers brushed specks of loose soil from the cracked teeth clinging to the jaw.
What madness ate the rest of you?

Leaning over the tiled counter, his body trembling, Callahan stared into the skull's deep eye sockets. Snatching the skull from the countertop, he wrapped the head in his bare arms, cradling the bone against his chest tightly, as if swaddling a cranky infant.

Slumping to the peeling, gray-speckled linoleum floor, Callahan tensed while a fire raged from the tips of his fingers. The heat spread down his arms until it pooled in the center of his chest. Beads of sticky sweat broke out across his skin. He tucked the skull in his lap and braced for his propulsion into the eyes—into the spirit—of the dead soul resting on his legs.

“Show me,” Callahan asked in a whisper, his head lolling limply atop his neck. “What do you want me to know?” His fingertips rubbed the jagged eye sockets.

Callahan envisioned a full moon, shining bright and fat in the middle of a cloudless night sky. In a spot of moonlight that kissed the ground, Callahan could see a pair of hands clawing at a low mound of dirt. A palpable, frantic mania tugged at the edges of Callahan's lucid mind. The hands were buried too far inside the soil for Callahan to see the fingers, but he knew that the fingers were digging relentlessly deeper into the earth.
A grave
, Callahan thought.

The crack of a rifle rang in his ears and the hands pulled their bloody, ragged fingers from the dirt, a gold chain dangling in the calloused, upturned palms. Whoops and cries echoed through the trees, which stood as a silent witness to his violation of the burial. “Mary. Mary. We will find you, Mary.” The shouted name
Mary
clung to the air as the enraged shouts of a distant group clamored closer.

Thump
. The sound battered Callahan's vision into a fog.
Thump
. The noise echoed from the foyer and then down a narrow hallway into the kitchen.
Bang. Bang.

Callahan gasped, his eyes popping open as a bolt of raging heat rippled through his chest and down his forearms to his shaking fingertips. “Bloody hell,” he muttered. “No rest for the wicked, eh?” He had to stop his journey into the skull's memories in order to answer the door.

Cradling the skull against his left hipbone, Callahan grasped the edge of the tile countertop and yanked himself up from the speckled floor.

In the attic, Cyrus rolled over onto his hands and knees, a snarl escaping his dry throat.
Bang. Bang.
He growled through his sharp, dingy teeth, a low howl oozing from his aching lungs.

“I'm coming,” Callahan shouted at the locked and bolted front door.
The necklace
, he remembered and he hesitated in the hallway.
One cannot be too careful around here
, he thought, his eyes rolling to the ceiling as he returned to the kitchen.

Yanking the treasure from the countertop, he draped the chain around his neck. With the solid gold cross swaying from side to side across his bare chest, he stalked back down the hallway toward the foyer. The perky doorbell chimed in his ears.

On the other side of the door, a chubby dimpled fist pounded harder on the weathered wood. Chips of faded red paint fluttered to the porch with each determined knock. In the driveway behind Callahan's visitor, a champagne-colored Jaguar purred softly, patiently waiting for Collinsworth's headmaster to return.

He must have gotten a hell of a deal on the rent
, thought Dr. Sullivan as he surveyed the front of Callahan's house. Sullivan shook his shiny bald head at the peeling paint. Overgrown ivy crawled up and over the porch banister at Fifteen Mockingbird Lane.
I do have the correct house
, he thought, glancing down at an address scribbled on a yellow sticky note. He stuffed the note back in the front right pocket of his coffee-stained khaki pants.

Resting on top of a low, stacked-stone wall across the street, a black crow cawed. This sound drew Dr. Sullivan's attention and he watched as the bird dropped half of an earthworm from its sharp beak. Beyond the wall was an area that looked familiar. “Collinsworth's cemetery,” the headmaster muttered to himself when he recognized the wooded graveyard. He knew the area because it stretched the back boundary of his campus.

How did Callahan manage to find this dump?
Dr. Sullivan wondered as shards of broken glass cracked under the heels of his Italian leather loafers. To the right of the front door, a double window was missing panes of glass. The hole had been shoddily sealed with silver duct tape and brown cardboard boxes branded with red logos of beer breweries.

“Forget it,” the headmaster sighed, unable to get anyone to answer his persistent knocking. He backed away from the door, the sagging wooden porch creaking painfully under his heavy steps.

Suddenly, the front door swung open. “Good day to you, sir!” Callahan boomed.

Whipping his head around, Dr. Sullivan stumbled across the top porch step. But the toes of his loafers caught in the wide cracks between the floor planks. With his arms flailing, the headmaster gripped the shaking wooden railing and gasped at the sight of his newly hired history teacher.

The teacher's presentation was not very academic at the moment. With his bare chest heaving under the heavy gold necklace, Sean Callahan grinned daftly at the rattled headmaster.

“Ouch,” Dr. Sullivan said, wincing and licking at a spot of blood on his right thumb. “Splinter,” the headmaster mumbled, his eyes focusing on the skull that nestled against Callahan's left hip. “I didn't mean to interrupt,” he sputtered, while Callahan shifted the skull to his right hip.

The headmaster blanched.
Mercy!
he thought. Beads of sweat dampened his stiff collar.

Callahan stepped from the doorway and heartily slapped Dr. Sullivan's beefy shoulder. “This is a fine surprise,” he grinned at his employer. “To what do I owe the honor?”

The headmaster's bulging eyes raked across the shirtless man standing in front of him. Dr. Sullivan made a mental list of Callahan's failings:
Dirt stains are rubbed into his knees. He has filthy fingernails. What kind of pants are those, anyway? No shoes. Bare chest. Disheveled hair. Needs a shave. Sports a gold chain that he must have stolen from a rapper. And last, but not least, he's carrying a human skull—to be precise, a cracked human skull.

Dr. Sullivan cleared the tight, dry ball of bewilderment clinging to the walls of his throat. “I took a chance stopping by, Callahan,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at the Jaguar idling in the driveway. “Something has happened on campus. I was hoping to show you,” he confessed.

From Dr. Sullivan's splinter wound, a few drops of blood dripped down the thumb of his right hand to the porch.
Splat. Gurgle. Splotch
. A red bubble exploded on the wooden planks and splashed against the toes of his leather loafers.

Sniff. Sniff.
A pair of nostrils flared in the dark attic above the headmaster's balding head.
Me think dat's blood!
the shapeshifter thought, excited. The wounded old man craned his cricked neck toward the locked door and sucked the room's air greedily into his nose.
Dat's blood fer sure
, he hoped wildly, licking his dry, parched lips. His bones creaked as he rolled over to his belly. His ankles strained to loosen their binds until blood oozed from his flesh. Tearing apart the dry rope, he wriggled his feet free and bit at the braid around his wrists. Gnawing, slobbering, he chewed away the knot and whimpered with delight when his unbound hands swiped at the spit on his chin. Carefully, he lifted his weight to his wobbling knees. Slowly, painfully, he crawled toward the door, his knees scraping against the rough beams of the floor.

Shoving his face into the crack between the threshold and the door, he sucked the sweet scent of fresh blood into his chest. His tongue wagged across his sharp, yellowed teeth. Along his bony spine, patches of short, brown fur broke through his thin, sagging skin.

Three stories below on the front porch, Dr. Sullivan stared at his wound, dismayed.

“Bit of a nasty prick there, lad,” Callahan said to the headmaster. “Let me have a look.”

“I'll be fine,” his employer retorted. Shoving his fists into his khaki pockets, Dr. Sullivan tapped his left foot impatiently, his eyes trying to avoid the shirtless mess standing in front of him.

“Would you care for some tea?” Callahan asked, remembering his manners. “Or a dab of whiskey?” he offered, appreciating the bewildered look etched on headmaster's round, perspiring face.

Dr. Sullivan shook his head no and pointed to the skull. “May I ask where you found that?”

Instantly aware of his filthy, half-naked appearance, Callahan smirked shyly. “You may not believe this, but I fancy myself a bit of a gardener and decided to have a go at planting bulbs in the backyard this morning. Poor soul,” he said, raising the skull's hollow eyes to meet his own icy-blue irises. “He was already planted there.”

“Fancy that,” the headmaster said, nodding his chin. “I also found a body this morning.”

“Yes, fancy that,” Callahan said in agreement.
The body count is rising
, he thought to himself and cocked his ears backward to the wide open front door. But he heard only silence.
The beast still sleeps
, he assured himself.

A spot of blood seeped through the front right pocket of Dr. Sullivan's pleated khaki trousers. From above the men's heads, a low howl echoed down the staircase of the empty rental house and stirred the muggy, midday air. The headmaster's bushy eyebrows raised in shock.

Quickly, as a distraction, Callahan shouted to Dr. Sullivan, “Show me what you found!” Callahan nudged the man hastily down the porch steps. Callahan glanced up at the dusty attic window.

“I'll be right back,” he called to Dr. Sullivan.

The headmaster retreated to his air-conditioned Jaguar and prudently locked himself inside to wait.

Rushing inside the foyer, Callahan skipped to the kitchen and placed the cracked skull on the counter. When he removed the chain from his bare chest, he blushed, a flush of heat quaking through his body. He placed the treasure on the counter next to the skull.

He knew that he must check the attic door. He bolted up the staircase to his bedroom on the second story. Rustling through an unpacked suitcase that was sitting open on the hardwood floor, he found a faded Oxford University t-shirt. He wrestled it over his wild, black hair as he ascended the attic steps.

There was a door at the top of the narrow staircase. His hand, calloused and sore from grave-digging in the backyard, reached for the knob. Leaning his body against the smooth wood of the door, he listened quietly. He held his breath so as not to stir the air.

On the other side of the door, Cyrus tensed, his body frozen as he balanced on his hands and knees. His twitching nose plainly told him that a man waited on the other side.
Not yet
, the shapeshifter thought. Then he heard heavy footsteps descend the attic staircase. “Soon,” he muttered softly, crawling away from the door into the long shadows of his high prison.

8
Daydream

June's fragile body, more than eighty years old, pushed the rocking chair back and forth on her front porch. Whoosh. Crick. Whoosh. Crick. Her thoughts moved rhythmically with the chair:
Alex. Sweet Alex. Innocent Alex. Pain. Alex, forgive me.

She was shrinking as she aged. At least four inches had vaporized since she was Alexandra's age, her seventeen-year-old granddaughter. Now only the tips of her bare toes could stretch down and graze the beams of the wide, white-washed pine planks with each swish of the rocker, each passing morning hour deepening the grooves beneath the chair.