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FIFTY-ONE

The smell hit him first, and Louis recoiled, gagging. He hung on the edge of the grave, breathing hard, and just when he thought he had his gorge under control, his entire big, tasteless meal came up in a grotesque spurt. He threw up on the far side of the grave and then put his head against the ground, panting. At last the nausea passed. Teeth clamped together, he took the flashlight out of his armpit and shone it down into the open coffin.

A deep horror that was very nearly awe stole over him – it was the sort of feeling usually reserved for the worst night-mares, the ones you can barely remember upon awakening.

Gage’s head was gone.

Louis’s hands were trembling so badly he had to hold the flashlight with both hands, gripping it the way a policeman is taught to grip his service revolver on the target range. Still the beam jittered back and forth and it was a moment before he could train the pencil-thin beam back into the grave.

It’s impossible, he told himself, just remember that what you thought you saw is impossible.

He slowly moved the narrow beam up Gage’s three foot length, from the new shoes to the suit pants, the little coat (ah, Christ, no two-year-old was ever meant to wear a suit), to the open collar, to— His breath caught in a harsh sound that was too outraged to be a gasp, and all his fury at Gage’s death came back in a rush, drowning fears of the supernatural, the paranatural, and his growing certainty that he had crossed over into the country of the mad.

Louis scrabbled in his back pocket for his handkerchief and pulled it out. Holding the light in one hand, he leaned into the grave again, almost past the point of balance. If one of the segments of grave-liner had fallen now, it would have surely broken his neck. Gently, he used his handkerchief to wipe away the damp moss that was growing on Gage’s skin – moss so dark that he had been momentarily fooled into thinking Gage’s whole head was gone.

The moss was damp but no more than a scum. He should have expected it; there had been rain, and a grave-liner was not water-tight. Flashing his light to either side, Louis saw that the coffin was lying in a thin puddle. Beneath the light slime of growth he saw his son. The mortician, aware that the coffin could not be opened after such a terrible accident, had nonetheless done the best he could – morticians almost always did. Looking at his son was like looking at a badly made doll. Gage’s head bulged in strange directions. His eyes had sunken deep behind closed lids. Something white protruded from his mouth like an albino tongue, and Louis thought at first it might be some kind of fluid extrusion. They had, perhaps, used too much embalming fluid. It was tricky stuff at best, and with a child it was next to impossible to tell how much was enough … or too much.

Then he realized it was only cotton. He reached in and plucked it out of the boy’s mouth. Gage’s lips, oddly lax and seeming somehow too dark and too wide, closed with a faint but audible plip! He threw it into the grave where it floated in the shallow puddle and gleamed a loathsome white. Now one of Gage’s cheeks had a hollow old man’s look.

‘Gage,’ he whispered. ‘Going to take you out now, okay?’

He prayed no one would come along now, a caretaker making a 12:30 swing through the cemetery, something like that. But it was no longer a matter of not being caught; if someone else’s flashlight beam speared him as he stood here in the grave going about his grim work, he would seize the bent, scarred spade and put it through the intruder’s skull.

He worked his arms under Gage. The body lolled bonelessly from side to side and a sudden, awful certainty came over him: when he lifted Gage, his body would break apart and he would be left with the pieces. He would be left standing with his feet on the sides of the grave-liner with the pieces, screaming. And that was how they would find him.

Go on, you chicken, go on and do it!

He got Gage under the arms, aware of the fetid dampness, and lifted him that way, as he had lifted him so often from his evening tub. Gage’s head lolled backwards all the way to the middle of his back, and Louis gagged again as he saw the grinning circlet of stitches which held Gage’s head on to his shoulders.

Somehow, panting, his stomach spasming from the smell and from the boneless loose feel of his son’s miserably smashed body, Louis wrestled the body out of the coffin, then out of the grave. At last he sat on the verge of the grave with the body in his lap, his feet dangling in the hole, his face a horrible livid color, his eyes black holes, his mouth drawn down in a trembling bow of horror and pity and sorrow.

‘Gage,’ he said, and began to rock the boy in his arms. Gage’s hair lay against Louis’s wrist, as lifeless as wire. ‘Gage, it will be all right, I swear, Gage, it will be all right, this will end, this is just the night, please, Gage, I love you, Daddy loves you.’ Louis rocked his son.

By quarter of two, Louis was ready to leave the cemetery. Actually handling the body had been the worst of it – that was the point at which that interior astronaut, his mind, seemed to float the furthest into the void. And yet now, resting, his back a throbbing hurt in which exhausted muscles jumped and twitched, he felt it might be possible to get back. All the way back.

He put Gage’s body on the tarpaulin and wrapped it up. He cinched it with long strips of strapping tape, then cut the length of rope in two and tied off the ends neatly. Once more he might have had a rolled-up rug, no more. He closed the coffin, then after a moment’s thought, he reopened it and put the bent spade in. Let Pleasantview have that relic; it would not have his son. He closed the coffin and then lowered half of the cement grave-liner top. He considered simply dropping the other half, but was afraid it would shatter. After a moment’s consideration he threaded his belt through the iron rings and used it to lower the cement square gently into place. Then he used the shovel to fill in the hole. There was not enough dirt to bring it up even with the ground again. There never was. The grave’s sway-backed look might be noticed. It might not. It might be noticed and disregarded. He would not allow himself to think about it, or worry about it tonight – too much still lay ahead of him. More wild work. And he was very tired.

Hey-ho, let’s go.

‘Indeed,’ Louis muttered. The wind rose, shrieking briefly through the trees and making him look around uneasily. He laid the shovel, the pick he had yet to use, the gloves, and the flashlight beside the bundle. Using the light was a temptation, but he resisted it. Leaving the body and the tools, Louis walked back the way he had come and arrived at the high wrought-iron fence about five minutes later. There, across the street, was his Civic, parked neatly at the curb. So near and yet so far.

Louis looked at it for a moment and then struck off in a different direction.

This time he moved away from the gate, walking along the wrought-iron fence until it turned away from Mason Street at a neat right angle. There was a drainage ditch here, and Louis looked into it. What he saw made him shudder. There were masses of rotting flowers here, layer upon layer of them, washed down by seasons of rain and snow.

Christ.

No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think. Oz, the Gweat and Tewwible. God of dead things left in the ground to rot. God of the Mystery.

Louis stared down into the drainage ditch as if hypnotized. At last he dragged his gaze away with a little gasp – the gasp of one who has come to, or who has been called from a mesmerist’s trance by the final number in a count of ten.

He went on. He hadn’t walked far before he found what he was looking for, and he suspected that his mind had neatly stored this bit of information on the day of Gage’s burial.

Here, looming in the windy dark, was the cemetery’s crypt.

Coffins were stored there in the winter when it was too cold for even the payloaders to dig in the frozen earth. It was also used when there was a rush of business – a kind of cold-storage for people.

There were such rushes of what Uncle Carl had sometimes called ‘cold custom’ from time to time, Louis knew; in any given population there were times when, for no reason anyone could understand, lots of people died.

‘It all balances out,’ Uncle Carl told him. ‘If I have a two-week period in May when nobody dies, Lou, I can count on a two-week period in November when I’ll have ten funerals. Only it’s rarely November, and it’s never around Christmas, although people always think that’s when a lot of people die. That stuff about Christmas depression is just a load of bullshit. Just ask any funeral director. Most people are real happy around Christmas, and they want to live. So they do live. It’s usually February when we get a big bulge. The flu gets the old people, and pneumonia, of course – but that’s not all. There’ll be people who’ve been battling cancer like mad bastards for a year, sixteen months. Then bad old February comes around and it seems like they get tired and the cancer just rolls them up like a rug. January 31st they’re in remission, and they feel like they’re in the pink. February 24th, they’re planted. People have heart attacks in February, strokes in February, renal failure in February. It’s a bad month. People get tired in February. We’re used to it, in the business. But then, for no reason, the same thing will happen in June, or in October. Never in August. August’s a slow month. Unless a gas main explodes or a city bus goes off a bridge, you never fill up the cemetery crypt in August. But there have been Februarys when we’ve had caskets stacked up three deep, hoping like hell for a thaw so we can plant some of them before we have to rent a frigging apartment.’ Uncle Carl had laughed. And Louis, feeling a party to a secret that not even his instructors in med school knew, had laughed, too.

The crypt’s double doors were set into a grassy rise of hill, a shape as natural and as attractive as the swell of a woman’s breast. This hill (which Louis suspected was landscaped rather than natural – that evenness was simply too suggestive) crested only a foot or two below the decorative arrow-tips of the wrought-iron fence, which remained even at the top rather than rising.

Louis glanced around, then scrambled up the slope. On the other side was an empty square of ground, perhaps two acres in all. No … not quite empty. There was a single outbuilding, like a disconnected shed. Probably belongs to the cemetery, Louis thought. That would be where they kept their grounds equipment.

The street lights shone through the moving leaves of a belt of trees – old elms and maples – that screened this area from Mason Street. Louis saw no other movement.

He slid back down on his butt, afraid of falling and reinjuring his knee, and returned to his son’s grave. He almost stumbled over the roll of the tarpaulin. He saw he would have to make two trips, one with the body and another for the tools. He bent, grimacing at his back’s protest, and got the stiff canvas roll in his arms. He could feel the shift of Gage’s body within, and steadfastly ignored that part of his mind which whispered constantly that he had gone mad.

He carried the body over to the hill which housed Pleasantview’s crypt with its two steel sliding doors (they made it look queerly like a two-car garage). He saw what would have to be done if he were going to get his forty-pound bundle up that steep slope now that his rope was gone (he wished he had left it whole a while longer, but wish in one hand and spit in the other) and prepared to do it. He backed up and then ran at the slope, leaning forward, letting his forward motion carry him as far as it would. He got almost to the top before his feet skidded out from under him on the short, slick grass, and he tossed the canvas roll as far as he could as he came down. It landed almost at the crest of the hill. He scrambled the rest of the way up, looked around again, saw no one, and laid the rolled-up tarp against the fence. Then he went back for the rest of his things.

He gained the top of the hill again, put the gloves on, and piled the flashlight, pick and shovel next to the tarp. Then he rested, back against the staves of the fence, hands propped on his knees. The new digital watch Rachel had given him for Christmas informed him that it was now 2:01.

He gave himself five minutes to regroup and then tossed the shovel over the fence. He heard it thud in the grass. He tried to stuff the flashlight into his pants, but it just wouldn’t go. He slipped it through two of the iron staves and listened to it roll down the hill, hoping it would not hit a stone and break. He wished he had worn a packsack.

Now he removed his dispenser of strapping tape from the pocket of his jacket and bound the business-end of the pick to the canvas roll, going around and around, drawing the tape tight over the pick’s metal arms and tight under the canvas. He did this until the tape was gone, and then tucked the empty dispenser back in his pocket. He lifted the bundle and hoisted it over the fence (his back screamed in protest; he would pay for this night all the following week; he suspected) and then let it drop, wincing at the soft thud.

Now he swung one leg over the fence, grasped two of the decorative arrow-points, and swung his other leg over. He skidded down, digging in at the earth between the staves of the fence with the toes of his shoes, and dropped to the ground.

He made his way down the far side of the hill and felt through the grass. He found the shovel right away – muted as the glow from the street lights was through the trees, it reflected a faint gleam from the blade. He had a bad couple of moments when he was unable to find the flashlight – how far could it have rolled in this grass? He got down on his hands and knees and felt through the thick plush, his breath and heartbeat loud in his own ears.

At last he spotted it, a thin black shadow some five feet from where he had guessed it would be; like the hill masking the cemetery crypt, the regularity of its shape gave it away. He grabbed it, cupped a hand over its felted lens, and pushed the little rubber nipple on top that hid the switch. His palm lit up briefly, and Louis switched it off. The flashlight was okay.

He used his pocketknife to cut the pick free from the canvas roll, and took the tools through the grass to the trees. He stood behind the biggest, looking both ways along Mason Street. It was utterly deserted now. He saw only one light on the entire street – a square of yellow-gold in an upstairs room. An insomniac, perhaps, or an invalid.

Moving quickly but not running, Louis stepped out on to the sidewalk. After the dimness of the cemetery, he felt horribly exposed under the street lights; here he stood, only yards away from Bangor’s second-largest boneyard, a pick, shovel and flashlight cradled in his arms. If someone saw him now, the inference would be too clear to miss.

He crossed the street rapidly, heels clicking. There was his Civic, only fifty yards down the street. To Louis, it looked like five miles. Sweating, he walked down to it, alert for the sound of an approaching car engine, footfalls other than his own, perhaps the rasp of a window going up.

He got to his Honda, leaned the pick and shovel against the side, and fumbled for his keys – they weren’t there, not in either pocket, and fresh sweat began to break on his face. His heart began to run again, and his teeth were clenched together against the panic that wanted to leap free.

He had lost them, most likely when he had dropped from the tree-limb, hit the grave-marker with his knee, and rolled over. His keys were lying somewhere in the grass, and if he had had trouble finding his flashlight, how could he hope to recover his keys? It was over. One piece of bad luck and it was over.

Now wait, wait just a goddam minute. Go through your pockets again. Your change is there – and if your change didn’t fall out, your keys didn’t fall out, either.

This time he went through his pockets more slowly, removing the change, even turning the pockets themselves inside out.

No keys.

Louis leaned against the car, wondering what to do next. He would have to climb back in, he supposed. Leave his son where he was, take the flashlight, climb back in, and spend the rest of the night in a fruitless hunt for— Light suddenly broke in his tired mind.

He bent down and stared into the Civic. There were his keys dangling from the ignition switch.

A soft grunt escaped him, and then he ran around to the driver’s side, snatched the door open, and took the keys out. In his mind he suddenly heard the authoritative voice of that grim father-figure Karl Malden, he of the potato-nose and the archaic snap-brim hat: Lock your car. Take your keys. Don’t help a good boy go bad.

He went around to the rear of the Civic and opened the hatchback. He put in the pick, shovel and flashlight, then slammed it. He had gotten twenty or thirty feet down the sidewalk when he remembered his keys. This time he had left them in the hatchback lock.

Stupid! He railed at himself. If you’re going to be so goddam stupid, you better forget the whole thing!

He went back and got his keys.

∗

He had gotten Gage in his arms and was most of the way back to Mason Street when a dog began to bark somewhere. No – it didn’t just begin to bark. It began to howl, its gruff voice filling the street. Auggggh-ROOOO! Auggggh-ROOOOOO!

He stood behind one of the trees, wondering what could possibly happen next, wondering what to do next. He stood there expecting lights to start going on all up and down the street.

In fact, only one light did go on, at the side of a house just opposite where Louis stood in the shadows. A moment later a hoarse voice cried, ‘Shut up, Fred!’ Auggggh-ROOOOOO! Fred responded.

‘Shut him up, Scanlon, or I’m calling the police!’ Someone yelled from the side of the street Louis was on, making him jump, making him realize just how false the illusion of emptiness and desertion was. There were people all around him, hundreds of eyes, and that dog was attacking sleep, his only friend. Goddam you, Fred, he thought. Oh, goddam you.

Fred began another chorus; he got well into the Auggggh, but before he could do more than get started on a good solid ROOOOOOO, there was a hard whacking sound followed by a series of low whimpers and yips.

Silence followed by the faint slam of a door. The light at the side of Fred’s house stayed on for a moment, then clicked off.

Louis felt strongly inclined to stay in the shadows, to wait; surely it would be better to wait until the rumpus had died down. But time was getting away from him.

‘Let’s go,’ he muttered, and went.

He crossed the street with his bundle and walked back down to the Civic, seeing no one at all. Fred held his peace. He clutched his bundle in one hand, got his keys, opened the hatchback.

Gage would not fit.

Louis tried the bundle vertically, then horizontally, then diagonally. The Civic’s back compartment was too small. He could have bent and crushed the bundle in there – Gage would not have minded – but Louis could simply not bring himself to do it.

Come on, come on, come on, let’s get out of here, let’s not push it any further.

But he stood, nonplussed, out of ideas, the bundle containing his son’s corpse in his arms. Then he heard the sound of an approaching car, and without really thinking at all, he took the bundle around to the passenger side, opened the door, and slipped the bundle into the seat, bending it at the places where he believed Gage’s knees and waist to be.

He shut the door, ran around to the rear of the Civic, and slammed the hatchback. The car went right through the intersection, and Louis heard the whoop of drunken voices. He got behind the wheel, started his car, and was reaching for the headlight switch when a horrible thought struck him. What if Gage were facing backwards, sitting there with those joints at knee and hip bending the wrong way, his sunken eyes looking toward the rear window instead of out through the windshield?

It doesn’t matter, his mind responded with a shrill fury born of exhaustion. Will you get that through your head? It just doesn’t matter!

But it does. It does matter. It’s Gage in there, not a bundle of towels!

He reached over and gently began to press his hands against the canvas tarpaulin, feeling for the contours underneath. He looked rather like a blind man trying to determine what a specific object might be. At last he came upon a protuberance that could only be Gage’s nose – facing in the right direction.

Only then could he bring himself to put the Civic in gear and start the twenty-five-minute drive back to Ludlow.