GRAVEWORM Read online

  She moved around the side of the house.

  She gripped the gun.

  She moved up the steps knowing she was going into a trap, but knowing that there really was no other way.

  74

  As it turned out, Steve and Frank did not go directly to Tara’s to wait for her. Instead, they drove around, grabbed some black coffee from a convenience store. And as they drank it, they talked. They tried to wrap their brains around what they knew and somehow link it with those things they felt which were nearly indefinable.

  It was no easy bit, of course.

  Frank had no problem by that point believing that Tara Coombes, his long lost love, was now a maniac in need of four padded walls. But for Steve it was different. His gut-sense told him that, yes, she was dangerous, she was unbalanced, desperately in need of some kind of professional intervention. But at the same time… admitting the same was almost like violating some trust between them. Yet, to not admit it was to violate his friendship with Frank. Unless Frank was a really, really good actor, Tara had attacked him like some kind of beast.

  “Well, let’s go pay the piper,” Frank said as Steve turned onto Tara’s street.

  The headlights of the SUV splashed over sleeping houses and parked cars… at the end of the block there was a police car parked. No, Steve saw two of them. It made something rise up the back of his throat.

  “Not at Tara’s house anyway,” Frank said.

  Steve pulled up to the curb. “That’s Bud Stapleton’s house.”

  “Guy whose wife wandered off?”

  “Yes. She used to keep an eye on Lisa when Tara was working.”

  Frank thought that over for a time, staring up at the darkened hulk of the Coombes’ house. “Funny how everything seems to lead back to Tara these days.” The innuendo in that statement was thick, but he did not elaborate and he did not need to.

  “I suppose it’s none of our business,” Steve said.

  “I guess not. Let’s go see if she’s back yet.”

  Together, they walked up to the house and they were like two kids approaching a notoriously haunted house on a dead-end street: nervous, expectant, filled with an unexplainable chill.

  Steve knocked on the door. He waited a minute or two and knocked again. “I guess we go in,” he said.

  75

  When Tara entered the house she felt a stark, relentless fear take hold of her because, in her mind, she was entering the ogre’s cave, she was traipsing into the lair of the boogeyman, the pale-faced, ghost-fleshed, ruby-eyed nightstalker that had seized not only her sister but her very life… gripped it in grave-cold hands and squeezed the purity, decency, and optimism out, expunging it like tepid water from a sponge.

  You’re scared. You’re fucking terrified. It’s okay to be that way. Use it. Make it part of yourself.

  Yes, she knew she had to do that. But as she stood just inside the door, breathing, waiting, gathering what was inside her, sharpening her wrath like a blade on a grinding stone, there was uncertainty… and clarity. She saw life in its most utilitarian and pessimistic state: as a series of bondages that held you, interlinked, tightening, never truly letting go. Your first shackles were your parents and once you had broken free of them—if you ever truly did—then there were more chains—jobs, relationships, marriages, children, love, hate, guilt, want, recrimination—winding around you, shackling you, holding you, never really allowing you to breathe free for one moment. Somebody always owned you in one way or another. And at the end of each chain there was some vindictive, power-hungry weasel pulling on them, dragging you in the direction they saw fit, making you dance, writhe, laugh, cry… something. And at that moment, with her clarity of vision, she saw the boogeyman as the epitome of all her keepers and overlords.

  There was no more hesitation then.

  She walked through an entry into a hall. With moonlight filtering in through a window she saw an old-fashioned but unkempt house, stairs rising to the second floor, boxes and bags and stacks of newspapers heaped about. The smell was musty, disused, a wormy library smell… things rotting beneath the weight of their own age.

  She took another step and heard something shift in the gloom. Maybe a loose board. But maybe something far worse. An instinctive, incapacitating fear leaped into her belly and throat that was almost suffocating. The darkness spreading out around her was inhabited. There could be no doubt of that. A million-million generations of ancestral memory assured her of this.

  I am not alone. He is waiting.

  She felt almost compelled to avoid the stairs and, instead, turned down a short shadow-haunted hallway that opened into a room. The stink in here was the chemical stink of the embalmed and something even worse than that: a seeping charnel blackness.

  She clicked on her penlight.

  A dining room. The walls were hung with heavy velour drapes of the sort that might shroud windows at a mausoleum. And that was pretty apt—seated at the dining room table were shapes and forms, gape-jawed, hollow-socketed mummies dressed in formal accoutrements, elongated faces like melting wax and crumbling plaster, worm-holed and insect-ravaged, lips shriveled and rolled back like window shades revealing teeth jutting from puckered gums, desiccated hands like withered spiders and curling bird’s claws folded over bosoms or splayed on the table, going to powder. And all of them strung together in a thick netting of cobweb that ran from the eight-armed chandelier above to the mummies to the table itself, running from ruined marble faces and strung from eye sockets and death-contorted mouths to marble hands and dust-caked silverware and service and the molding linen tablecloth. A winding sheet of crypt filigree like a million-billion spiders had devoured yards upon yards of cerements, recycling them in the finest spun coffinsilk grave threads, webbing the guests at this table and holding them upright.

  The beam of Tara’s penlight took it all in and a week ago she would have screamed at this horror… but now it induced more sadness and pity in her than anything else. The corpses were old, exhumed things save for the one without a head and the other that her beam now found… a humped-over shape covered in a white sheet.

  The boogeyman.

  Waiting for her.

  There was no hesitation. She raised the gun. “Show me your face,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t shoot that one,” a voice said, drifting out at her from the shadows… the same dry, scraping voice she knew so well by that point. “It wouldn’t be very pretty if you did.”

  He rose up from behind the chair and here was Tara’s first glimpse of the parasite that had turned her world upside-down and inside-out, eviscerating it and spilling its blood in shiny red loops. He was a tall thin man dressed in a dark coat. His face was pale and sunless like that of something that lived by night, something that crawled in cellars and slithered in graveyard ditches. An angular, hollow-cheeked, thin-lipped sort of face, eyes large and glossy black like those of an owl, but filmed with a glaze of dementia and paranoia as they stared out from swollen red sockets.

  Tara stared at him.

  He stared at Tara.

  “I want my sister,” she said with a cruel, bitter edge to her voice. “And I want her now.”

  “Well, Tara, who are you to make demands?”

  Filthy fucking slime-crawling piece of shit motherfucking leech.

  “The person who is about to kill you, graveworm,” she said.

  “Don’t you call me that!’

  “My sister. Now.”

  The boogeyman reached out and pulled the sheet from the slumped form and for a moment, one blessed moment of sanity, Tara did not know who she was looking at. Just another corpse… only very fleshy, recent. It was tied to the chair, head slumped forward, face very sallow, its lips grotesquely stitched shut like that of a shrunken head.

  Then she saw the blonde hair.

  No… no…

  The cast of the face, the lips.

  No, no, no, no, it cannot be…

  And knew, knew, she was looking at the corpse of her
sister.

  But he wouldn’t… he promised… he wouldn’t hurt her… he wouldn’t do THIS… the dirty filthy motherfucking animal he would not do SOMETHING LIKE THIS—

  The graveworm grinned at her.

  Tara screamed with a shrill, deafening sound that made even him take a faltering step backward. She was aware in some distant corner of her mind that there was movement near her, that a stink of hot corruption had welled up quite near her like a draft from a mass grave.

  But she didn’t care.

  She raised the gun and fired point-blank.

  The graveworm cried out and stumbled backwards, crashing into a china cabinet and hitting the floor, making a high, broken, whining sort of sound.

  And then he shrieked: “WORM! WORM!”

  Tara turned and something leaped out at her, a night-black shape with a pallid blur of a face and she jerked the trigger right as something collided with her head and she felt herself going down, crashing into one of things in the chair that shattered on impact like delicate crockery.

  Then she was on the floor.

  And that foul, grave-stinking larval form was on her, hands around her neck, thumping her head against the floor until everything went dark.

  76

  Detective-Sergeant Wilkes spent some time looking at the thing sprawled on the floor of Bud Stapleton’s living room. He knew from experience that tragedy follows tragedy and never had it been so true as it was now. The walls were splashed with blood, the carpeting drenched with a coagulating pool of it. And center of that pool, was the hacked remains of Bud Stapleton. His left arm was hacked off. His head was nearly decapitated. His skull had been smashed in and what was inside had been splattered against the walls. His chest and belly had been opened, the organs yanked out and tossed around the room.

  Turning away, far beyond simple physical revulsion, Wilkes stepped out of the living room and studied the bloody footprints leading to the backdoor and out into the night.

  The prints of a child.

  A teenager maybe.

  And as hideous as that possibility was, it made a certain amount of warped sense. Wilkes had been in on his share of murder scenes and after a time it got to be almost effortless to put it all together, sans motive (though that always came in time). But this was… it was a slaughter and it was incomprehensible until you took in those footprints and the childlike, almost naughty glee in which Stapleton’s remains had been strewn about. There was something almost precocious about it, wicked, but precocious.

  He stepped out onto the porch.

  Fingerman was coming up the walk. There was a uniform cop behind him leading two men.

  “Tara Coombes is not in her house,” Fingerman said. “But we found these two over there. I think, maybe, we better have a chat with them.”

  Wilkes had a sudden ugly feeling that they better do just that.

  77

  When Tara came to she was being dragged down a set of cold cellar steps by a naked girl. She was hogtied, ankles and wrists bound together behind her back with some kind of cord. A rope was tied off to it and the girl was dragging her by it, bouncing her down the steps, making no attempt to be gentle… if such a thing were possible.

  Tara did not fight.

  She did not call out.

  The cellar was long and murky, dirt-floored, lit by a few sparse guttering candles. It stank much like the girl herself. But as horrible as the odor was, Tara did not so much as flinch or wrinkle her nose.

  The girl dragged her over toward a stone wall and dumped her there.

  Taking up a candle the girl—if girl it was—crawled over in her direction and that’s when Tara got a good look at her. The sight was hideous, of course. A girl… maybe thirteen, certainly no older than fourteen… or perhaps a girl-shaped sculpture of filth. Her hair was long and stringy, her body the most curious and shocking shade of white, all the contusions, scrapes, and cuts, dirt and accumulated grime standing out like garish splashes of warpaint against that smooth porcelain pallor. Her nails were long and splintered, soil packed beneath them. Eyes huge and dark like those of a nocturnal hunter, yet beady, somehow distant and unfocused like the mind behind them. She glistened with a slime of grease and sweat, a noisome and pestilent stink of fusty graves fuming from her.

  But the most perfectly appalling thing seemed to be that she was pregnant, if the round ball of her belly was any indication.

  Tara kept staring at her.

  And in her mind: These are the things that killed your sister. These are the crawling, lying, squirming maggots that have taken from you and now you have to take from them. Play the game. Do not give the game away. Wait for your moment.

  Wait…

  The girl apparently did not like being stared at anymore than a mad dog did. Tara could almost see it coming over her. She went from stupid, bovine, and almost confused to a sneering, drooling, wild thing with hair flying and eyes blazing as she dove forward, bearing her teeth. Again, Tara did not even flinch. What was controlling her mind now seemed to understand things she did not. It knew what this girl was, somehow, someway, and it knew exactly how to elicit certain reactions from her.

  Watch now, Tara, it seemed to be saying. Watch how easy it is.

  The girl shrieked with a raw, distraught sort of cry and landed on her, tearing at Tara with her fingers, slapping and hitting and scratching. And when that got no reaction—what held Tara would not let her move, it almost had her paralyzed—the girl went into a feral rage. She bit Tara’s arms, her throat, her shoulders, her hands, she just kept biting and biting and the pain was intense and unbelievable, moving through Tara in sharp waves. The girl drew blood and it still got no reaction so she jumped away and crawled in a circle, then she fell down, hugging herself in a fetal position, rocking there in the dirt.

  And her voice, no longer that of an animal, but pathetic and whiny like that of a little girl who knew she was in trouble said, “Are… are you dead? Are you dead?” She began to sob. “Henry won’t like it if you’re dead. He won’t want you to be dead.”

  Tara just laid there.

  She closed her eyes.

  Henry. That is the name I wanted. Henry. Now that we have his name, Tara. We have the power.

  “Oh, please don’t be dead,” the girl wailed. “Please.”

  And it was then that Tara smelled the stink of hot urine: the girl was pissing herself out of fear, out of terror, perhaps knowing that she would be punished now.

  Henry, Henry.

  The girl was sobbing louder. Tara did not look at her. She kept her eyes closed and what was inside her told her this was how the game was played. For playing dead was not just some clichéd little maxim from a child’s game, it was a body politic of survival. Something ancient and effective. Nothing took away the power of the predator or the tormentor quicker than thinking his/her/its victim had expired.

  What was controlling her mind had forced her body into what biologists called tonic immobility, an anti-predator threat adaptation. In the animal world, it was both a reflexive action and a defense mechanism. And what had long been forgotten in humans, was now reactivated in Tara with her rising atavism. Her mind seemed separated from her physical body by leagues, the connections were tenuous. She was in a state of thanatosis, a true neurological paralysis.

  She could not move.

  She could not feel.

  She was disconnected, what remained of her attachment to her nerve endings completely numbed by massive amounts of endorphins.

  The girl continued to sob.

  Tara waited.

  The game would be played soon.

  Her game.

  Her breathing was shallow, her heartbeat nearly nonexistent. She was now in a state very much like hibernation, one not so dissimilar to the voluntary trances that Indian Fakirs put themselves into when allowing themselves to be buried alive.

  And somewhere, echoing in the depths of her mind, a voice called from the deep: Now we’ll see who fucks with who.


  78

  They sat out on the porch of the Stapleton’s house and right from the get-go, Steve knew it would not be good and it wasn’t. Once Wilkes and Fingerman identified themselves and told them that Bud Stapleton had been murdered and both Steve and Frank were thoroughly interrogated as to who they were and what they were doing in Tara Coombes’ house, Wilkes said, “Margaret Stapleton disappeared. Her husband was murdered. I really don’t like to tie any of this together with Tara Coombes, but everything seems to lead back to her.”

  Right then, Steve wanted to rise up and tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about… but it just wasn’t in him to do so. There were too many things about Tara he did not know and felt he could never know. Nobody was as confused as he was.

  “Now, I don’t think that Tara killed Bud Stapleton,” Wilkes said. “We found footprints… bloody footprints… that appear to be those of a child.”

  Frank and Steve looked at each other. A child? What the hell was that about? Instead of getting clearer, it all became more murky by the hour.

  “The thing is,” Wilkes said in his easy way, “is that we don’t know what’s going on, but Tara is involved somehow. She claimed Margaret never came over that night to watch her sister. That sounded reasonable at first. At first. But I found her very evasive. She claimed her sister was staying in Milwaukee with an aunt and an uncle . Okay. Reasonable. Then Milwaukee Metro did some checking for us and discovered that the aunt and uncle—Joseph and Claire Coombes—are currently in Belgium visiting friends. No passport was ever issued to Lisa Coombes so we’re pretty certain she did not go with them.”

  “And that brings us back to Tara Coombes,” Fingerman said. “Why is she lying? What is she hiding? Why the evasion?”

  Wilkes stared out into the darkened streets. “Better than that: where the hell is Tara’s kid sister?”