GRAVEWORM Read online

Steve realized then that one thing that connected a lot of this was Lisa and he had left Lisa pretty much out of the equation. And why was that? Was that on accident or on purpose? Lisa had never been around during all this, but then Lisa was as busy as any teenager and he very rarely saw her. What he kept thinking about was when Frank and he searched the house. Everything spic and span to the point of compulsion, but Lisa’s room remained cluttered and disordered. Even then, it had been saying something to him but he could never make sense of it. Now, it was beginning to take on a certain sort of convoluted logic.

  Wilkes said, “I’ve had a search warrant for the Coombes’ house for days. I didn’t execute it because, honestly, I just wasn’t sure.”

  “But now you are?” Frank said. “You went in there and you found nothing.”

  “Yes.”

  “If either of you know where she is, now’s the time to tell us,” Fingerman said.

  “We don’t know where she is,” Frank told him. “We were waiting for her.”

  “And what made you think she’d come back?”

  Steve started talking then and before he was done he spilled what he knew: Tara’s strange behavior, the phone call, the warning not to be there when she returned, and his funny feeling about Lisa’s cluttered room.

  Wilkes didn’t say anything for a time. Finally: “Let’s put it together then… if we can. Margaret is supposed to watch Lisa. Margaret disappears. Lisa is not seen. She has not been in school for days. I checked. Tara is acting very, very edgy. Almost like a woman who’s on the verge of a mental collapse. You were with her earlier tonight. You hear her on the phone and she says… ?”

  Steve cleared his throat. “I can’t remember all of it, just bits and pieces.”

  “Start with those,” Fingerman said.

  So Steve repeated what he thought he had heard and by that point he couldn’t really be sure himself. You’ll get what you want as long as I get what belongs to me. That was the part that truly haunted him. What did that mean? But he had a pretty good idea what it could mean with Lisa being gone.

  “And she said what you thought was something like her husband’s been nosing around? Poking around? He was a cop?” Wilkes said. “Can you be sure of that?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Pretty sure isn’t good enough,” Fingerman told him.

  “Well, that’s all you get.”

  Wilkes held a hand up. “Well, I suppose the logical conclusion is that this unknown third party has some hold over Tara and what better hold than her kid sister?”

  Steve felt his heart drop. To hear someone else say what he was thinking was devastating.

  “That would be kidnapping,” Fingerman said. “A federal matter.”

  “Well, we have to have cause first to bring in the FBI,” Wilkes said. “And I’m not sure we have that.”

  Fingerman went about asking them the same questions over and over. Frank said nothing about Tara attacking him. Steve wasn’t about to bring it up. As they sat there in the shadows and chill air, Fingerman kept hammering away at them like a chisel trying to wear them away and reveal something beneath.

  Wilkes, Steve noticed, was not paying attention. He was staring out into the night. Finally, he said, “In the Stapleton house, we found a sheet of paper that Bud was apparently doing some figuring on. He wrote a name down. In fact, he underlined it several times.”

  Steve and Frank were looking at him.

  “Either of you boys ever hear of a man name of Henry Borden?”

  To Steve it meant nothing, but to Frank, a Bitter Lake native, it carried the worst possible connotations. “I’ve heard about the Bordens,” he said. “In fact, I could tell you a few things that people whisper about in this town.”

  As he spoke, Wilkes listened.

  And Steve became increasingly sick to his stomach.

  79

  Blood ran freely from his scalp in cherry rivers as Henry Borden worked diligently on the corpse, on the remains he had retrieved from Tara’s trunk: an offering, a lamb, a plump and fattened calf.

  (oh my love my fairest one)

  (lay it at my feet celebrate the depth of our union)

  He had to concentrate on what he was doing because his mind was a free-wheeling, erratic memory machine choking on its own accumulated waste products. His eyes kept closing, shades drawing down on a dark and grim room. It took real effort to keep them open and he kept imagining one of those cartoons from childhood where sleepy eyes were held open with toothpicks. If he let them shut… oh, peaceful and dark, but not all sweetness and light, he would see ghosts leaping from yawning graves and moody skies filled with black-winged carrion crows and ashes blown from crematory ovens and great funeral sprays rotting to a sickening gut-smelling juice that would make him think of his mother—

  (spectral face of gaseous corruption, slack-jawed scream of hate/hunger/lust, impale the bitch see how she gasps)

  —and that was something he did not want to see or know or feel in the concrete depths of his funneling mind.

  Stitch and sew, Henry.

  Stitch… and sew.

  Yes, feel the cold meat beneath your hands. This meat once had a name and to pronounce it aloud is to summon it (Margaret) and you must not allow that to happen. Too many ghosts, too many ghosts ever-circling, ever-chanting, casting their fairy dust of mortuary spices. But the meat… yes, the cold meat, handle it, touch it, fondle it, make it your own. Yes, yes. Squeeze those wormy goodies back in the belly, cold and gut-feeling, moist and crawling and sap-dripping. There. Stitch now, stitch, stitch, stitch. This grinning head, see how it fits so nicely, how the catgut holds it, binds it, keeps it from falling off.

  He held the corpse in his arms, bathing in its stink and necrotic filth, his mind a blazing yellow hothouse. The candle-guttering room seemed to flow and run like wax, the walls breathing and the ceiling sighing, the guests at the table grinning with a feral intensity. But he had to concentrate. He brushed crawling things off the backs of his hands, breathing out dust-clouds of dead flies, turning a deaf ear to the obscenities whispered by Mother Rose, by Aunt Lily and Uncle Arlen and—

  (elise dear sweet elise)

  —all the rest. He stitched away and saw Mother Rose looking at him, hating and despising oh wicked, wicked thing, boneless wriggling worm-mother pressing pendulous breasts into his face, her lips against his own, her tongue like spongecake in his mouth, exploring her gums, tasting the self-devouring meat/bone/blood taste of soured motherhood.

  (don’t let her in your mind don’t let her have what she wants don’t let her control you even now dancing puppet do you want to touch mommy here here where its dark and moist and secret)

  Henry stood up, his head reeling.

  He wiped blood from his eyes and set the cold meat in a chair, propping her there, and moving toward the cellar, stumbling through the shattered husk remains of Uncle Arlen that Tara had knocked to the floor (hey kid you ain’t gonna leave me like this now are you? put me back together or i’ll tell i’ll tell everyone what you and rose did what you and elise did). He found the wedding dress. He moved down the stairs to the cellar with it.

  (do it right, henry, make no mistakes, do you hear me?)

  “Yes, mother.”

  (and when it’s done, when it’s done you can come to me, i’ll open my legs for you as i did when you were born)

  (i’ll let you crawl inside)

  Soon now.

  Before daylight.

  There would be a wedding.

  Oh, my bride.

  My delight.

  Everything in motion, blood seeping into his eyes, he moved down the steps into the sepulchral darkness below.

  80

  Tara slowly emerged from her self-imposed fugue, sensation returning to her limbs, neural pathworks reconnecting, eyes fluttering open. She could feel the cool earth beneath her and hands—cold, slimy hands—touching her, unbuttoning her shirt. What was this? Who was touching her?

  The girl: “The
re’s going to be a wedding and you have to be pretty in your pretty dress.”

  That voice. Like the squawk of a buzzard.

  Fully awake and aware and understanding and filled with a blind demonic rage for what the boogeyman and this… this girl had done to her and to Lisa, Tara made ready as those scabby fingers unbuttoned her blouse, touching her breasts, that fetid grave-breath blowing down on her hot and cold.

  Bide your time.

  It ends soon and you know it.

  The girl—so simple, an animal pawing in the dirt—thought Tara was dead so she had untied her to put the dress on her. Tara could see it: a wedding dress. In the candlelight it was yellow, speckled with mildew, an ancient shift, a shroud liberated from a corpse.

  “Pretty, pretty, oh you will be so pretty.”

  It was sickening beyond belief but Tara did not let herself think this. No, things like revulsion and horror and shock were submerged now. There was only animal instinct. There was survival. There was the hunting and stalking. Setting the trap and just waiting, waiting to spring.

  You’re untied. You can kill her now.

  But no… not yet. The trap was not baited properly. The girl thought she was dead and she would remain dead. Lifeless. Cool. Limp. She slowed her breathing. She let her mind funnel into darkness as the girl undressed her, stripping off her shoes and pants. Now she was putting the dress on her, pulling it up and over her legs, forcing arms in, buttoning up the back. Tara could smell it… the dirty, dusty, coffin stink of ancient cerements.

  Dressing you.

  Like a fucking doll.

  You’re nothing but a fucking doll to her.

  It took the girl some time but she finally squeezed Tara into the rotting dress that kept tearing, the worn seams bursting. It was a ragged, gray thing.

  “Oh, how beautiful you are!” the girl squealed. “A beautiful, beautiful bride!”

  Now something else.

  The girl lifted Tara’s head up.

  Get ready.

  Tara felt the blood invigorating her muscles. Her nerve endings were tingling. The anger, the hate, the frustration… it was all bubbling to the surface.

  “Now a pretty, pretty face,” the girl said.

  She was pulling a mask over Tara’s face. A leathery stinking mask that Tara knew instinctively was not rubber or plastic, but hide, tanned human hide. It stank like oily pelts.

  “There,” the girl said, sighing with satisfaction. “Now you wear the Mother Face. Henry wants to marry you with the Mother Face.”

  It didn’t take much figuring to understand it all, particularly with what she’d seen upstairs… the embalmed corpses. The mask was in place and Tara looked out through eyeholes that had been widened with a knife.

  Now. Do it.

  Tara came alive and shoved the girl away and there was shock in the girl’s eyes for a moment, then anger and ferocity, a scream of wild animal panic in her voice.

  “NO! NO! NO! YOU MUST DO AS I SAY!”

  The girl jumped at her, fingers going for her eyes, missing, scraping over the mask and Tara, filled with a manic ancestral blood-rage, punched her in the face. The blow knocked the girl flat. She came up and Tara was on her feet. As the girl moved, off-balance from the blow that had smashed her lips against her teeth in a flowing blood-rose, Tara kicked her with everything she had and felt something give in her side… ribs, maybe the grave-slug she carried in her belly.

  But the girl was not to be denied.

  Her mouth peeled open from blood-stained teeth: “YOU MUST OBEY! YOU MUST DO WHAT THE MOTHER SAYS OR YOU WILL BE PUNISHED, BAD BABY!”

  She came on again with amazing speed, slamming into Tara and throwing her up against the wall. Tara’s legs nearly buckled but it could not be allowed. Those hot and sickening hands went for her throat, gripping, seizing, squeezing with a deranged strength.

  Tara tried pulling her hair, even kneeing her in that swollen obscene mound at her belly, but it was no good. The girl had her and would not let go so Tara jabbed both of her thumbs into the girl’s eyes, her ragged nails digging deep into soft ocular tissue.

  The girl screamed and released her, rubbing her eyes like a tired child.

  Tara pulled herself up and the girl hit her again, burying her teeth in her shoulder until Tara herself screamed as she felt the skin break and blood course down her arm, soaking into the moldering wedding dress. She did the only thing she could think of doing: she seized the girl’s throat in her hands and put every bit of strength she had behind it, squeezing her windpipe shut.

  The girl fell back, whining, gasping and spitting.

  Now, Tara. You have her. Put her down.

  “BITCH!” Tara shrieked at her. “DIRTY LITTLE CUNT!” The tone of her voice was akin to a guttural growl as she reached out and took the girl by the hair. She knotted those greasy locks in her fingers, smelling the slime and blood and drainage of the girl’s foul secretions. The girl was still screaming and sobbing and whimpering like a kicked dog.

  Tara pivoted and swung the girl by her hair until her head struck the concrete wall with a satisfying thud. She fought, but Tara swung her into the wall again and again and again. Each impact was hollow-sounding and each one took more fight out of the girl until she was loose and limp in Tara’s hands. But it wasn’t enough. Tara brought her back and then swung her into the wall again with more force than she thought possible. Not just a hollow knocking this time, but a wet meaty thud, the skull beneath the hair going loose and slopping like it was filled with jelly. Tara smashed the girl’s head into the wall one last time and there was a bright red blot there like a spill of ink.

  The girl slid to the floor in a boneless heap.

  She did not move.

  But Tara did.

  She went to the stairs.

  Henry was there, slumped against the wall. “Mother?” he said.

  Remember. The mask.

  You wear the Mother Face.

  Tara wanted to kill him, to snap his neck and flay him and thumb out his eyes and slit his throat and pound his skull to sauce, but she didn’t. Breathing hard, she said, “Yes, Henry. It’s Mother.”

  81

  Steve and Frank were with Wilkes and Fingerman and two uniformed officers when they entered the Borden house on Summer Lane. The first thing that struck them was the smell, of course. Steve did not know what sort of place this was and what awful things might have happened here, but that rising thick stink of plundered graves told him all he needed to know about Henry Borden.

  Wilkes stuffed the search warrant into his pocket as he and Fingerman searched the walls for light switches. When they found them, they did not work.

  “Probably no electricity,” one of the uniforms said, scanning the house with his flashlight.

  Steve said nothing. Nor did Frank. They were both feeling a formless sort of fear at what sort of place this was and what they might find. Wilkes tried to talk them into waiting in the car. In fact, he could have enforced it, but by that point it just wasn’t in him any longer.

  Wilkes, flashlight in one hand and gun in the other, led on and the others bunched-up behind him like kids in a carnival spookshow. There was a collective terror being shared by them and they were all wired into it, fingers like hot fuses on flashlights and guns, bellies filled with smoldering wires, brains sparking like transformers. They stayed close, not daring to break that circuit almost like the electricity of it all held them together.

  When they entered the dining room, stepping beneath the archway and all thinking, well, it’s a dining room… how bad can a dining room be? They all stopped cold and just stood there, to a man, feeling like something necessary had just evaporated in them.

  “Jesus,” Wilkes finally said.

  Nobody commented on the mummies around the table or the headless corpse down at the end. The bodies were frightening and disturbing, but they’d been dead a long time and the scary thing was the man that had exhumed them and dressed them up, propping them in chairs by candlel
ight, perhaps humming as he did so while night pressed up against the old house. Because, chances were, he was here somewhere.

  One of the corpses had fallen to the floor and broke apart and though it was the remains of a human being. It almost looked fake, Steve thought.

  Lights panned those faces but concentrated on the one by the headless corpse. There was a sheet over it and whatever was under there, they knew it was going to be bad. Fingerman walked over to it like there was not a shred of fear in him.

  He took hold of the sheet and pulled it free.

  It was roped to the chair: young, female, blond hair swept over the face.

  And Steve knew right away. “Oh… no… that’s Lisa.”

  Fingerman brushed the hair away from the face and they could see that the lips had been crudely stitched shut. Steve pressed a hand to his mouth to suppress maybe a scream and maybe a gag reflex. His head began to pound and his heart hammered in his chest.

  “Goddamn fucking animal,” Frank said.

  Steve went over there because he felt he had to. He reached over and touched Lisa, feeling the chill coming off her, knowing that Tara would never survive this, there was just no possible way.

  And then Lisa opened her eyes.

  82

  Once Henry had opened the grave where he had buried Lisa alive, exposing the coffin he kept there and used for what perverted, sick games Tara did not want to know, she looked down at him, the flashlight in his face.

  This is your tormentor? she thought then. This pathetic stickman, this crawling little graveworm? This is the BOOGEYMAN?

  She almost started laughing.

  Henry stood there uneasily, his face masked with dried blood from the scalp wound where Tara’s bullet had creased his skull. He had lost a lot of blood and was dangerously pale, his eyes bloodshot to a frightening degree like two ripe cherry tomatoes.

  Graveworm.

  Nothing but a graveworm.

  A parasite.

  He pulled himself up out of the grave, a mindless automaton, a zombie awaiting its master’s orders. So Tara gave him what he needed: “Hand mother the shovel, Henry.”