Where Darkness Dwells (20 page)

She tossed the pillow aside and considered the sketch. The shading
was
too dark. While she had accurately rendered his boundless smile, and the scale of his limbs and torso was as close as she could master, the contrasting made Junior look cadaverous. The harsh detail of his arm muscles made him look skinless. Frozen in an anguish beyond recourse.

She couldn't tear the page out quickly enough. She crumpled it and threw it under her bed, out of eyesight. She shivered again, shivered so long it felt like she would never stop.

She kneeled on the floor, took one last look at the sketch pad, then banished it under the bed as well. She might never again toy with the idea of designing. Never dream of escape. Not as long as she couldn't hold a pencil steady.

Or perhaps her pencil revealed the truth. Junior wasn't damaged in any physical way, but he might as well be. The image she had drawn was of Junior on the cusp of an indelible emotional wounding. Below the surface of his skin, flowing through him like lifeblood itself--the last moment of his innocence. She had captured that instant, first in her memory, and just now in her sketch. Having been a party to the destruction of her brother's innocence, she abided the deception following in its wake. She couldn't cast aside her subconscious while tapping into her creative reservoirs. It wasn't possible. Sketching would often reveal what she least wanted to face.

Alone with the familiarity of his steady snoring, she could easily start to cry. But she didn't. She wouldn't let herself. What sense were tears now?

She held on to the only thoughts that seemed any comfort:
He's alive. I'll see him again. When I do, he won't be sick. He'll laugh without coughing himself into a fit.

He's alive.

Repeating the phrase made it real, made it true.

Daddy's alive.

But she still felt like crying. Because her father wasn't the only person she missed. In a way, Junior and her father distracted from other matters.

She couldn't wish George alive and make it so.

She remembered earlier this summer, how nervous he had been standing on the river shore, dripping wet after climbing free of the clouded water. His shoulder sported a welted raspberry from crashing into the shallow river bottom after jumping from a rope strung from an overhanging tree branch.

She'd heard the rumors for weeks--since before school let out for summer--and had hoped the rumors were true.

Then it was finally happening.

Sitting, waiting, expectant, Betty closed her sketch pad before looking down from her perch on a high boulder.

"Hi, Betty." His voice cracked. His nervousness was charming.

Her heartbeat quickened, and she couldn't help laughing, both at his stupid stunt, and with the thrill of reaching the point of actual verbal communication.

George thought she had been laughing at him. He looked toward the other guys from class for a possible escape route, then wiped a droplet of water dangling from the tip of his nose.

Before he could run away, she spoke the first coherent thought to come to mind, "You're all wet."

"Yeah, well, what can I say?" he said, letting out a pent-up breath. "You should come in. It's nice."

"I'm not really dressed for it."

He looked disappointed. Practically devastated.

"Maybe tomorrow?" she offered.

"Okay. Tomorrow." His lips slanted into a grin, looking like he would say something else, something witty. Instead, he scampered off, bare feet slapping the rocky shore, right up to the swinging rope. Grabbing it in full stride, he flung himself into the air, letting out a whoop of joy. He splashed down, then jumped up with the spraying water. When George joined his friends wading in the shallow, Jimmy Fowler glanced her way before giving him a clap on the back.

She remembered the sun warming her skin and the familiar smoothness of the sketch pad under her fingertips, and not wanting anyone to see what she was working on. Before George had approached her, she'd been drawing the rocky shore. It had only been an excuse. Everyone knew she was artistic and wouldn't question her taking in the river's detail. The absence of certain details would be more telling than those she chose to include. To keep her longing private, George wasn't in the drawing. The landscape was a mere backdrop to consider at a later time, when she could add the detail of her memory. His squinty smile, his tan shoulders.

Their first interaction had been so simple, so flighty, yet when she got home that night, while trying to sleep, she considered the possibilities: Betty Harris Banyon,Betty-Mae Banyon. It had been all so silly. So naïve. Naïve, but still somehow genuine. And tomorrow, an event as genuine as life had to offer. A funeral. George Banyon's funeral. At that moment, it seemed like the worst thing in the world was that she never donned her swimsuit, never went splashing through the river at his side.

She wiped a single falling tear from her cheek and her memory drifted away like a dream. She noticed Junior had flipped again to his stomach. His snoring had quieted.

A new sound filled the void. Muffled voices. Coming from outside. Raspy, but ordered, like the chorus of a strange form of sentient insect.

Daddy's come home,
she thought immediately.
No, that's wrong,
she corrected herself.
Would never be right. Daddy's never coming home.

In her daydreaming her leg had fallen asleep. She rubbed life back into it, and then stood, warily looking out the window.

The moon was two days shy of full, hovering along the treeline like a glowing white face. The craters could be a crude mouth, a mere smudge of frown below hollow, downcast eyes--eyes that saw, just a second before Betty, people gathered at the family graveyard.

Junior was still asleep. Setting aside the distractions of Junior and her father and her fruitless longing for George Banyon, she stepped into her houseshoes. She opened the bedroom door as quietly as possible. The house was still. Her mom wouldn't be in her bedroom. She knew where she would find her.

The screen door screeched as she pulled it open, too loud. A chilling mist swept against her legs as she descended the stairs. The ground felt damp underfoot.

The mist carried the distant voices to her, amplifying the lowest tones of speech. She couldn't make out any words, just the weight of their mournful sadness.

Her every step drained her confidence. Still, her curiosity compelled her to keep moving. A steady breeze pressed the bare skin of her arms and legs like a firm hand. Goosebumps traced her spine and she wrapped her arms in front of her. Despite the unknown ahead, the darkness, the simple fact she could no longer be certain of anything that went on in this town, she hurried on through the mist.

She crouched the last twenty yards until she reached the property's edge. The voices separated, became distinct. The moon's luminescence touched the skin of the three people gathered around the newest grave.

A scream caught in her throat like a clenched fist. She wanted to cry out, but couldn't.

Her mother was weeping on Magee's shoulder, who in turn, looked terribly uncomfortable as he patted her back. Doctor Thompson held a closed book--possibly a bible--between his elbow and ribs. He was speaking over the open pit of her father's empty grave, his tone that of a preacher. A cheap pinewood casket sat next to the empty hole. Mismatched mounds filled the open casket--she could see just the crests of them--and in the moonlight they shimmered as if coated in wet paint or mud.

Thompson yelled into the grave, "We don't have all night." Hearing his tired, frail voice, Betty realized just how close she was to the grave, a grave she assumed was empty until now.

A mere twenty feet away. Her close proximity and the affect of the whitewashing moon left everyone in stark contrast to the dark backdrop of her Aunt Paulette's cornfield. Her mom looked wrung through and heartbroken as she continued to sob.

Dirt rained up from the hole, collecting on an already substantial pile. "I'm nearly done, just gimme a minute."

A minute went by, then another. Dirt flew from the deepening hole at alarming speed. It soon stopped and a shovel came flying out, clinking against a rock.

Fingers gripped the lip of the hole. The person grunted, pulling himself up and free. Betty uttered a noise like a strangled bird, unable to gain control of herself. She slapped a hand over her mouth, but it was too late.

Eyes darted her way. Her mom's. Dr. Thompson's. Magee's. The gravedigger's horrid black pustules set deeply in his gray-skinned death mask.

The man was rot and decay. Festering wounds seeped along his face, neck and naked shoulders. Pus and maggots fell in clumps like ladled stew from the cavernous hole in his cheeks. Something else twisted in the unnatural cavity. Black and sinuous. Creeping from between his ragged lips. A vile tongue lapping at his own ooze.

"Betty!" her mom cried, pulling free from Magee.

When Betty met her gaze she verged on fainting, but instead, she fell to her hands and knees, vomiting deeply, repeatedly, painfully.

Mom's involved in this? Something so horrible. How could she?

"Oh, my God, Betty! Why can't you just… stay out of it?" Her mom came to her side and rubbed her back with soothing circles as she would a flu-ridden child. "My poor girl." Tears made her voice watery.

But Betty wasn't soothed. Not one bit. "What," she gasped as the retching trailed off. She spit to clear the taste from her mouth. "What… what's going on?"

She looked from the pine coffin to the rotting man. Shock flashed across her face as if she were seeing him for the first time, as if it were possible to forget such a hideous sight. She fell to her rump and began pushing away with her feet. "No. Nonono! This isn't right. This isn't happening. This just isn't happening!"

The rotting man shambled toward her, leaving behind a slime trail of himself like a snail's path.

"Leave her alone, Scully! Don't you touch my daughter!"

"She's seen," the thing said.

"I've told her the truth."

"She knew that's her Daddy in a bunch'a pieces in that box?"

Betty gained her feet, and she couldn't help herself. Looking again at the coffin, she saw a denim work shirt that should've been pale blue from dozens of washings. But torn a dozen times over, now stained with gore that looked like spreading pitch in the moonlight. Shreds of fabric holding together shredded human meat.

She was going to be sick again, but swallowed hard. Swallowed right past the lump gathered in her throat.

"You don't need to put it so," her mom scolded the rotting man.

Betty had to get away, as far away from this place as possible. She no longer cared about her dreams of escaping to the high class fashion world, of champagne toasts with big band music ushering in the dawn. She no longer cared because she no longer harbored such hopes. She just needed to get away. Now.

Heading back toward the house, the shoe flew from her left foot in a comical arc. She didn't give it a second glance, and didn't turn around, even as her mom's cries became shrill, so shrill her voice cracked and she began to sob once again.

Her bare foot slapped the damp ground. She sprinted up the rise, into the shadows, fear straining her body to its limits. The noise from the graveyard drifted away with distance. The moon climbed out from behind a passing cloud. The pathway became visible.

In two split seconds birthed one after the other, Betty's eyes first acknowledged the animated carcass blocking her way, then a blade's cold bite piercing the skin low on her belly. It carved through muscle, violating her internal organs. Searing pain raced up her abdomen, spreading upward like the pressure of a pulled zipper. She heard the rush of fluids hitting the grass.

Her belly was split from pubic bone to sternum, her flesh rent by a foot-long blade, the warmth of her blood and organs splashing her legs and feet.She fell to her knees in her own filth, and the world seemed to shift on its axis, shifting as if to meet her falling head and lessen the impact of her collapse.

"Ethan! My girl. No, you can't, not my Betty…"

Her mom was somewhere far away, but her voice became louder as she ran up the path, closing in. Betty's senses beat a hasty retreat. For a brief instant she could smell the tang of her own blood, but then thankfully, it was gone.