GRAVEWORM Read online

  Is this her? he thought then. Is this the girl I love?

  And it was, only it looked like some terrible change had overtaken her and replaced the brightness within with something low and almost defiled. There were lines at her mouth and sallow brown shadows under her eyes, giving them a Bela Lugosi sort of intensity that made his legs go weak.

  “Tara?” he said. “Tara?”

  She stared at him for a full thirty seconds while he kept repeating her name like a magic spell that might snap her out of it. Only once did she blink her eyes.

  “Steve,” she said.

  “Are you all right?”

  She blinked again and it looked like it took effort. “I got a bug or something and I feel like shit.”

  “You look like shit.”

  “I bet I do.”

  It was a joke with them, an old joke. How do I look? You look like shit. That bad? Well, you look like shit, but you look like MY kind of shit. Only she wasn’t getting it at all. It flew right over her head like it had wings.

  Steve knew that her explanation was perfectly valid… but why wasn’t he believing it? “Tara… sweetheart, can I come in? I’m worried about you.”

  She cocked her head like a confused dog and then shrugged. “Why not?”

  Soon as he stepped in there, he was almost knocked on his ass by the smell: pine cleaners. Pine cleaner overdose. Like the house had been mainlining Pine-Sol cut with Mr. Clean Pine Action. It smelled like an evergreen forest in there, all right, but one that had been dipped in a bucket of ammonia. His eyes nearly watered.

  “Wow… quite a fragrance,” he said.

  She wheeled around like she wanted to throttle him. “Fragrance? Does it smell bad? What do you smell? Tell me what you’re smelling, Steve. I wanna know what you smell.”

  Okay. Now Tara was a passionate, headstrong type of woman with an intensity about her that could make your knees go weak when she turned up the volume. But this was worse than that. Whatever it was, it was goddamned stark and goddamned overwhelming. Steve wasn’t so sure it wasn’t a little frightening as well.

  “I smell pine cleaners, Tara. Real strong.” He waved his hand before his face. “I mean, hell, now I know what it feels like to be Janitor in a Drum.”

  Tara just looked at him for a moment, then she burst out laughing and it was not a good sort of laughter but something staccato like machine gun fire. And as she did so, he saw that her entire body was minutely trembling like she was trying really hard to hold something in that wanted to come blowing out of every pore. “Same old Steve. Same old Steve.”

  “What have you been doing here? Cleaning the whole house and then cleaning it again? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  “You know me, Steve. I’m anal. I’m OCD. I overcompensate. Isn’t that what you always say? Some people give fifty percent and others give a hundred and then there’s me?”

  “Sure, but…”

  “Come in the kitchen. Have some coffee.” She bounded off without him and her stride was almost jerky and frenetic like she’d had some cocaine with her Maxwell House. “Lisa’s out of town until the weekend. Did I tell you that? I’m sick as a dog but I’m not letting this chance escape me. I’m getting this place cleaned up before she comes back. I want things right.”

  He took a chair at the kitchen table and the stench of pine cleaners was worse in there. “Want things right for what?”

  “For everything.”

  She poured him a cup and set it down before him, her hand shaking so badly that a great deal of it slopped over the rim. Before he could even reach for a napkin from the holder, she charged in with a rag and wiped up the spill. And again, with frenetic motion.

  He noticed then that the tips of all her fingers were covered in Band-Aids.

  Curious.

  “Tara,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “Can’t. Gotta stay on my feet. Get this done with. Then I’m going to bed and I’m going to stay there.”

  “Listen, baby, I love you like everything and you know it, but…”

  “How much?” she asked him.

  He smiled. Another old gag between them. “I’d love you with a mustache, an anchor tattooed on your forearm, and a bulge in your pants...but…”

  “But what?”

  “But honestly, Tara, you look like hell. You’re running yourself right down. Sit down before you fall down.”

  She shook her head, sipped her coffee.

  Sighing, he did the same. Good Christ. The coffee was strong enough to curl the hair on your chest. Maybe two scoops would do it, but Tara must have decided five did it better. Steve sipped his coffee, but did not enjoy it. With the reek of cleaners up his nose and down his throat it was like drinking coffee brewed in a wash bucket.

  Tara lit a cigarette. Pulled hard off it.

  Steve hated cigarettes, hated the stink of them, but even burning tobacco beat the hell out of that Lysol-smell. But that was funny, too. Tara never smoked around him because she knew he didn’t approve.

  Today, however, she was liberated.

  Cigarette hanging from her lip, she emptied a bottle of Pine-Sol into a purple plastic pail and filled the rest with hot water from the sink. Then she started to clean. Eyes wide and staring, lower lip trembling, smoke rolling from her nostrils, she cleaned and cleaned and then cleaned again. There was so much about her that was troubling him, he didn’t know where to begin. What was worse? Her corpse-like pallor? The deadly fixation to her eyes? Or all that oddball, hyperactivity in her every motion, gesture, and nuance?

  As he watched, she scrubbed the sink.

  “Why don’t you go lay down?” he said. “I can do that.”

  “No, not yet.”

  Scrub, scrub, scrub.

  The goddamn sink was gleaming and she was still at it with a sponge, going over the whole thing again and again like she was trying to scrub the chrome finish off. Her energy level was almost shocking. But what was really shocking was her compulsion to wash and wash and re-wash the same spot.

  “Think you got that sink now,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Next, she moved to the counters with equal zeal. And, again, the disturbing thing was that the counters were absolutely spotless.

  “What did you do to your fingers?”

  “My fingers?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Your fingers. Case you haven’t noticed, there’s Band-Aids on ‘em.”

  “Oh… my cuticles. Whenever I clean like this, I put Band-Aids on my fingertips. The cleaners irritate them, otherwise.”

  “How about some of those Platex gloves?”

  “Fresh out.”

  God, this was not only surreal, it was absurd. She was obviously lying. Her answers to everything were short, flippant, almost annoyed. She did not meet his eyes and when she did, he almost wished she’d look away. But why would she lie about her fingertips? What could that be about? Steve would have been the first to admit he knew nothing about psychology… but wasn’t this obsessive cleaning indicative of a compulsion? The sort of compulsion that masked inner turmoil?

  “Tara. You’re getting on my nerves. Sit down. Stop scrubbing. It’s getting a little weird.”

  But she didn’t stop. If anything, she cleaned harder.

  “There’s nothing weird about it, Steve. I’m getting this house in order. That’s all I’m doing.”

  Enough. It was enough. “Jesus Christ, Tara. Slow down. You’re freaking me out here.”

  She still did not look at him. Her world was the sponge, the bucket, the counters. Absolute tunnel vision. “I can’t slow down, Steve. You see, I have to put things right. I have to stay on top of things. There’s no time to slow down. My mom and dad are dead. I’m raising a teenage sister like she’s my own daughter. I can’t afford to let my guard down for a moment because there’s things that need my attention like they’ve never needed it before. There’s a big mean, hungry world out there, Steve, waiting to gobble you up the moment you turn your
back and the way I see it, I’m the only thing standing between it and us. So, no, I will not slow down. I’ll fight to the fucking end and you just watch me.”

  It was getting frightening.

  Yet, she was calm about it.

  Too calm.

  Tara was an emotional being when she was passionate about something (her kid sister, for example). But she was not like this… not so eerily calm, almost like the face she wore was a Halloween mask she had strapped on. And beneath it there was something indescribably ugly, something tensed and coiled and waiting; ready to strike.

  “I’m only saying you need to take it easy,” he said then. “You’re sick and you need to rest. That’s all I’m saying.”

  She stopped scrubbing. She looked over at him, put her eyes on him full-bore and there was something savage about them that made his stomach roll over. There was a seething violence in those eyes just waiting to happen.

  “Relax. Sure. Good. But you know what the problem is with that, Steve?”

  “No.”

  “The problem is that, out there, out in the world, there are things that wait for you to relax. That’s when they come creeping out at you and steal away all that you know and all that you love. Monsters, Steve. Fucking monsters. When the lights go out, that’s when the monsters come. And not the police, God, or the President of the fucking United States can stop them. They’re out there, right now. Watching and waiting. You turn your back and they’ll get you. Not only do they want to steal from you, they want to make you like them. They want to get their fangs in you and suck away your life and your light and replace it with death and darkness. And when they do that, when they make you a monster, too, then they’re happy. Because you’re just like them, just a night-thing, a monster that stalks the shadows looking for victims.”

  Steve swallowed. Maybe he swallowed two or three times until there was no spit left in his mouth. “Sweetie,” he said. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the real world and the things that call it home.”

  There was no doubt now that she was very near to complete mental collapse. Being obsessive and driven was one thing, but this was something else. He had the most alarming feeling that there was something absolutely horrible going on with her, that he had just gotten a true glimpse of the pain inside her.

  “I’m just tired, Steve. I’m not making sense.”

  Covering. But too late.

  He’d seen what was in her eyes, he’d even caught a quick glimpse of the torment beyond those eyes.

  “Why won’t you let me help you, Tara?”

  “Nobody can help me, Steve. This is the jungle. And it’s dark.”

  “Tara, goddammit, you’re talking crazy.”

  She put those eyes on him again. They were still scary, but there was a vulnerability in them calling out to him. She quickly blinked it away. “You better leave, Steve.”

  “I suppose I better.”

  And it was wrong, all so wrong, the way she was and the way he was about it. She needed him and he knew it, yet he rushed out of there as fast as he could. When he got in his car he had all he could do not to open the door and throw up. He drove away fast, afraid that what was in Tara might infect him, too.

  29

  Although he did not know why, Frank Duvall found himself on Cross Street.

  He never came to Cross Street anymore because that’s where Tara Coombes lived and he avoided going there because he knew the memories of it all would get the best of him and take him to a place he did not want to go. Two years ago Tara had been his girlfriend and then Steve Crews showed up, stole her away. Crews wasn’t even from Bitter Lake. He was an accountant. Didn’t even work for a living, not in Frank’s eyes. He was from Madison or Milwaukee or one of those places: cool, easy, urbane. He came and stole Tara away and that was the end of the story, save for a lot of grapes that were so sour they’d sting your eyes.

  Maybe it’s time to face the facts, Frank.

  Steve is around her age. You’ve got almost seventeen years on her.

  There were no promises. No exchange of rings.

  Frank knew it, too. Knew he really never had a claim on her and that hurt more than just about anything. Sure, Crews was her age, made a shitload of money, had plenty to offer. He wasn’t like Frank, a building contractor, who was finding it harder and harder to rub two nickels together with the housing slump.

  And he was younger.

  Unlike Frank who was on the long side of forty-something leaning hard toward fifty.

  And maybe that hurt too. His age. Back then, when Tara was with him, he’d tried badly to pretend that it was like in one of those movies where the hot young thing digs the older guy. Opposites attract and all that. But he’d had his doubts. Wondering sometimes if Tara was with him because she needed some kind of older, calm hand after her dad and mom died in the accident. Maybe a father figure and if that was the case, well, it would only last so long and he knew it.

  When Tara broke it off and took up with Crews, Frank wanted to go and punch the guy’s face out the back of his head. Which seemed a perfectly reasonable course of action when you were eighteen, but when you were in your forties… well, it stopped sounding so reasonable. There was something infinitely embarrassing about being thrown in jail for punching some guy at that age. And Bitter Lake was a small town. Eight thousand people last census. And in a small town, people knew people. When your name was in the paper for assault, you tended to get branded as a hot head and who wanted to hire a contractor who was a hot head?

  Oh, but Jesus, he had thought about it.

  He’d run across Crews more than once.

  And more than once he’d wanted to pound his head in.

  Thing was, he knew Tara. He knew how headstrong she was. After she took up with Crews, Frank started asking questions. And the answers he got were not the ones he wanted, but the ones he’d expected. He very much wanted to think that Steve Crews was some slick pussy-hound from the big city, but what he heard was that Tara had pursued him, not the other way around. That’s the way she was, though. She wanted something, she went after it.

  And the truth of the situation only hurt that much more.

  Tara’s doing.

  Not Steve Crews’.

  Yet, it still hurt. Because Tara was special. She was beautiful. She was unique. Frank dated other women since but it never worked out, there was no true fire, no passion. Nobody carried themselves the way Tara did. Nobody walked like she did or had eyes like her. Nobody was that cool or that steamy, nobody smoldered with sexuality the way she did and absolutely no one had her energy or that glow. Yes, Tara was special. A man hated losing any woman to another man, but it was worse when they were special, when they were pretty and sexy, then it was like a knife in you cutting deep.

  It was crazy thinking that way and he knew it.

  But he supposed all men thought that way down deep, that once they got their hands on a pretty girl that she was theirs and theirs alone. Like some rare butterfly they had collected that no one had better ever touch.

  He knew it was wrong reducing a woman to those terms, but yet it was there and he could not pretend otherwise.

  They always said the sea was full of fish, but after Tara the rest of them were just… fish and it was hard to bait your hook and cast your line when you knew, ultimately, that you’d already lost your trophy.

  Jesus, Frank. Thinking this way and at your age.

  He cruised up Cross Street.

  Wasn’t even sure why.

  Just up ahead was Tara’s house. In the distance, through the trees, he could see Tara’s little Dodge in the driveway. His heart began to pound. And… shit… there was Steve fucking Crews’ SUV pulling out of the driveway. Not just pulling out, but whipping out fast. Suddenly, Frank felt positively embarrassed driving by. Like some kind of stalker.

  The SUV passed him.

  Steve did not even look at him.

  In fact, Steve looke
d like he was staring into another world.

  Frank slowed his pickup, badly wanting to pull into the driveway to stop and see Tara. The pull was almost unbearable. He sped up and drove past, something tightening inside him. He didn’t know what it was… maybe the way Steve left in a big hurry and that look in his eyes… but Frank had the strangest sensation that something was terribly wrong.

  Lover’s spat.

  That’s all.

  And it wasn’t his place to get involved in that. Not now or ever again. What they’d had was history, yellowing by the day. So he drove away, moving faster, desperate to get away from Tara’s house and the feelings unwinding inside him.

  30

  “Are you ready to play the game, Tara?”

  She felt something suck into itself inside her… then a calmness. A calmness that was cool and detached. She pictured a river clogged with spring thaw ice chunks winding its way out to the sea. That was her. Her veins were filled with Freon.

  “Yes,” she said.

  And maybe it was the way she said it, because the boogeyman went quiet a moment like he’d been taken aback. “Your not emotional tonight, Tara. Why is that?”

  “Because we have to play the game. We have business. And I need to keep my head. I want my sister back.”

  “You do what you’re told, you’ll get her back.”

  “Yes, I will. I’ll keep my part of the bargain,” she said, “you had better keep yours.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Just remember what I said, Mr. Boogeyman. Anything happens to her, they’re won’t be a fucking hole deep enough for you to hide in.”

  He was silent for a moment, breathing. “Don’t you dare—”

  Tara said, “Tell me what to do.” Not a question; a direct order.

  That silence again, then the low evil voice like that of a child molester: “I’m glad we see things the same way, Tara. I like that. Because I don’t like all that shouting shit. Shouting makes me feel funny inside. Your housekeeper… what was that cunt’s name?”

  “Margaret.”

  “Margaret?”