GRAVEWORM Page 9

  So Lisa waited there, in chains.

  The cellar was dark, dank-smelling. The floor was dirt and the only light there was came in through a dusty window set in the far wall. It only gave minimal illumination in the large cellar and she could not be sure just how large or even where she was in it now.

  She waited there, her dirty face streaked with tears.

  It was very cool and damp down there and she shivered.

  She kept telling herself all that had transpired was real. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t some fevered nightmare she would wake from at three in the morning. This was real. She had been kidnapped by a man who claimed his name was John Shears, but she no longer believed that. The man was a ghoul. A psycho. Lisa had seen her share of true crime documentaries on TV. She knew that things like this happened. She knew that sometimes monsters like her keeper abducted girls and kept them chained up in dark cellars for years. The girls were raped. Tortured. Brutalized. And when they were rescued, if ever, they were usually insane after what they had been through.

  And right then, she knew that madness was close.

  She could feel it scratching in her brain like something locked in a moldering trunk that wanted to be let out. First, there had been panic and horror. Then despair and sheer terror, claustrophobia and shock. And now… now there was madness. A madness like a black, sucking pool opening beneath her. And if she gave into it, if she relaxed even a moment, then she would sink into the darkness of insanity for an eternity.

  Are they looking for me? she wondered. Are the police even now going house to house to house? Was Tara out of her mind? Was it in the newspapers? Oh dear God, how could any of it be happening and how long would she be here? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Oh God, not that, not that, anything but—

  Listen.

  A sound.

  Something.

  Was it the man? Was it that fucking ghoul and that creature Worm who was little better than an animal? I’m going to keep you down here, Lisa. Go ahead and scream if you want. I like girls who scream. And I like them even better when they’re still, when they’re quiet. You might want to remember that.

  It was at this point that Lisa realized that what she was hearing was… breathing. Yes, a subtle yet raspy respiration coming to her out of the darkness. Drawing her legs up, she tried to make herself as invisible as possible, listening and peering into the gloom. There was a wall in the distance and next to it… a shadowy shape. It could have been a crate or an overturned chair, but Lisa did not think so. The more she looked, the more saw something else.

  Two glistening things.

  Eyes.

  Eyes watching her.

  Eyes that had probably been watching her for some time now.

  Like glass eyes, like the eyes of a wind-up monkey or a puppet: shining and dead but maybe not as dead as they should be. It’s her and you know it. It’s that girl. Worm. That stupid, mindless, maggoty little girl who maybe is nothing more than an animal but maybe she’s not as dumb as you think because YOU’RE the one chained to the wall, missy. You’re the stupid bitch that got into a stranger’s car and spun the wheel of fucking chance and this after you’d been warned your entire life not to take candy from strangers. So who’s the STUPID one now? You let this happen. You were seduced effortlessly. YOU put your head on the block. YOU got into that car. You might as well have screamed MOLEST ME, RAPE ME, DESTROY ME because, in a way, that’s exactly what you did say. And now you’re here. You’re chained in a dirty stinking cellar with a graveworm for company and ain’t that just special? The same crawling horror that chopped up Margaret with a hatchet. You stupid bitch… who’s your daddy now?

  Swallowing down fear and paranoia and an entire catalog of sorrows, she said, “Who is that? Is someone there?”

  A smacking sound like parting lips.

  A rustle of cloth.

  “Who is that?”

  There was a quick furtive shuffling and then something came bounding out of the darkness with an obscene hopping. She thought it was some huge, pale, hairless spider because it skittered much like one, but it was only Worm. She hopped over near Lisa and just sat there, rocking back and forth on her haunches. Her black hair hung in her face. Her arms and legs were streaked with dirt. Her feet were filthy. She wore a long white T-shirt with a Barbie emblem on it. A stink of urine and moist soil came off her.

  She came no closer.

  Lisa wanted to scream now. She did not know what Worm was and some purely superstitious sliver of terror told her that she was not even a girl but some malefic thing from a grave. But she knew she couldn’t think things like that, couldn’t let her imagination run wild. She had to use her head, had to be calm even though she was shivering now, within and without.

  “Worm,” she said. “Can you let me go?”

  Worm shook her head. Her breathing got louder as she did so. It sounded phlegmy and congested like she was sick.

  “Worm—”

  The girl peered at her through her long and stringy hair. There was a bubble of snot in her left nostril. It popped as she breathed. She licked her lips and smiled. Her teeth were very yellow and crooked. “Do you think I’m pretty?” she said in a mocking, childish voice even though she had to have been at least fourteen or fifteen. “Do you think I’m a pretty little girl? Do you want to play with me?”

  Lisa nearly did scream this time.

  Her gag had been removed, but her ankles were tied together and her wrists were bound in an iron hasp that appeared to be handmade and secured with chain, dog-chain, to the wall behind her. If Worm decided to attack her, there would be very little she could do about it.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice cracking. “You’re very pretty. I would play with you, but I’m tied-up. If you untied me, I’d play with you.”

  Worm shook her head. “No. He wouldn’t like that. I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Sleeping. He sleeps during the day.”

  That didn’t come as much of a surprise to Lisa. Of course he slept during the day. He probably slept in a coffin and drank blood, too. “Can you untie one hand for me?”

  “No!”

  “Then we can’t play.”

  Worm cackled with a dry sound that reminded Lisa of the creak of rusty hinges on vault doors. “There are other games. I have played games with others in chains. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we don’t.”

  The realization of what she’d just said punched into Lisa. I have played games with others in chains. God. Then she wasn’t the first. That fucking monster had taken other girls down here. But where were they? And what had he done to them?

  Worm crept in closer. She brushed up against Lisa and the feel of her flesh was cool and dank and corpselike, yet her hands were hot and feverish and as they caressed her, Lisa thought: If she doesn’t stop touching me I’m going to go fucking insane, I’m going to start screaming and I will never stop, oh please get away from me, please get those moist stinking hands off me—

  “I have a doll,” Worm told her, pawing hair from her face. Her eyes were impossibly dark and translucent like liquid night. There were scabs on her face, a tracery of old scars. A few fresh cuts. One was still bleeding.

  “I have a doll,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  Worm made the cackling sound again. “Her name is Dirdree. She’s very pretty.”

  Lisa decided to work this. “Where is she?”

  Worm jabbed one long white finger behind her back. “She’s there. In the room. I keep all my friends in the room. We have tea parties. Dirdree likes to be in the dirt. They all like to be in the dirt. Dirdree likes to be buried in the dirt. Did you like to be buried in the dirt?”

  “No, I didn’t like it.” Lisa was nearly hyperventilating now, her mind summoning up all kinds of gruesome examples of this “doll” the girl kept in the dirt. She couldn’t stop shaking. Her teeth were chattering.

  Worm crawled closer. “You’re cold. Lisa is cold. Po
or pretty Lisa. I will keep you warm.”

  Worm pulled her shirt over her head and Lisa gasped at the sight of her pallid flesh, the perky immature breasts, the heaving white mound of her belly. She crept closer and closer until Lisa could feel the chill dankness of the girl’s flesh, the bony limbs and icy fingers, the stench of body odor and piss that hung on her like perfume. Her breath smelled of tombs.

  Oh dear God, please not this.

  “Warm, warm, warm,” she said in a hissing/whispering voice like some evil child-eating thing from a cave in a fairy tale.

  Lisa knew she mustn’t scream.

  Knew she mustn’t cry out or flinch or pull away despite the fact that she was revolted by this… girl on every conceivable level. Worm looked up at her with the flat black glistening eyes of a snake, making a most loathsome purring sound. “Warm, warm,” she said. “Keep you warm.”

  Lisa had to act like she enjoyed Worm’s company even though the sheer oily, cold, almost reptilian feel of her made her want to vomit. But she didn’t scream. Not even when Worm’s dirty fingers dug inside her shirt, tearing her bra away violently. Not even when Worm began to fondle her, squeezing her breasts roughly and cooing dementedly and breathing her hot, foul breath upon them. She didn’t even scream when Worm began to first nip at her breasts with sharp little teeth and then started licking her nipples with a darting, greasy tongue.

  No, Lisa did not scream despite the fact that she was filled with a horror and a loathing that was physical like warm waves of nausea. She didn’t start screaming until Worm’s crusty, drooling mouth fixed itself to her right breast and began to suckle it like an infant.

  And once she started screaming, she couldn’t seem to stop.

  26

  We’re going to play a game, Tara.

  Upstairs, Tara sat on the floor in the hallway.

  She sat outside the door to Lisa’s room with the cordless in her hand waiting for the boogeyman to call. She knew he would because that’s how the game worked. The idea of speaking with him was repulsive and thrilling. Repulsive because the sound of his voice made something crawl in her belly and thrilling because he was her only connection to her sister, unpleasant as that certainly was. But she needed him to call so they could get this done with. Whatever it is he wanted.

  A special game I thought of.

  I want you to do exactly what I tell you.

  Yes, that is what he had said. And Tara had done it. She had bagged up Margaret’s remains and buried them. But she knew it wouldn’t end with that. There would be other things and she had a feeling they would get progressively worse. It was hard to imagine something worse than what she’d been through last night, but there were worse things. And the boogeyman would think of them. In fact, he probably already had. He probably had a long list of atrocities that Tara would have to perform.

  Your sister doesn’t have much time left.

  I’ve buried your sister alive.

  And that was the clincher, wasn’t it? Because as some very human and ethical and moral part of herself flinched from what she had done and what she would yet do, another part of her was ready to commit almost any act to get Lisa back. And the boogeyman knew this. He had Lisa, he held her life in his hands, and because of this he owned Tara. He had a noose around her throat and he would tighten it as he saw fit.

  Pretty noose.

  I’ll hang you out to dry.

  A leash.

  It was a leash and she was his dog—roll over, play dead, sit up and beg, you miserable cunt, good dog, bad dog, I own you and you know it and don’t you dare bite the hand that feeds or I will bring you to heel and what I will do to your sister will be horrible beyond imagining, you silly self-righteous bitch.

  I want you to do exactly what I tell you.

  Tara did not like to think of what that might be. The idea of it made her want to slit her own wrists because she knew what he was and she knew he would make her do awful things. That she would crawl through the lowest sewers of hell and stuff herself with raw evil until her own fleeting humanity was laid bare as macerated bone before he was done with her.

  As she sat there, thinking these things, her lips parted and a voice, a lonely and far-away voice full of sorrow and grief, said, “You will do what you have to do, Tara and you will do it out of love and what more reason do you need?”

  Yes.

  That was how the game was played.

  This was the blood that filled her veins and the food that staved off the hunger in her belly and the electricity that energized her mind, kept it clear and sharp, never diverging, never straying from the path, but only looking down that dank and stygian tunnel for the elusive and dirty light at the end.

  She had not been in Lisa’s room since the call last night.

  She could not go in there now.

  She had tried several times and several times she had stopped dead at the doorway as if a hand had held her back. Her head spun, her guts blanched, bile kicked up the back of her throat and filled her mouth with a bitter and sour acid that threatened to dissolve her to a greasy black marrow. Each and every time she’d gone to her knees, shaking and sweating and sickened by the taste of her own insides, suffocating on her own stale air, swooning with toxic fevers.

  That was as far as she could go.

  Close enough to smell her sister in there, the ghost memory of Lisa… perfume and body wash and hand lotion clinging to the sheets on her bed and the clothes in her closet. The fragrance of her candles and incense. All the minute chemical odors that made Lisa into Lisa.

  And it was these fragrances that stopped her, gored her, laid her raw and hurting with guilt and remorse and pain, so many things and all of them immense and crushing. The weight of them pushed her to her knees and it was all she could do not to scream out what was left of her mind as she thought that somehow, some way she was to blame for all this. And that, above all else, was the acid that was eating her guts out bite by bite.

  I want you to do exactly what I tell you.

  I will! I will! Just name it!

  Your sister doesn’t have much time left.

  I’ve buried your sister alive.

  Please don’t hurt her, Mr. Boogeyman. I’ll lie and rob and cheat and steal for you. I’ll bury bodies and bring blood and offer burnt flesh unto you if that’s what you want.

  Just bring my sister back to me.

  Good God, why didn’t the phone ring? Why didn’t he call so the game could begin? Tara wanted to play the game. It was the boogeyman’s game and only he knew the rules, but there was something very cunning inside of her that had a few ideas of its own. It very badly wanted to play. There were things even the boogeyman didn’t know about his own game and that something inside of Tara wanted to teach him all about that. But first he had to call. He had to make the first move.

  Tara knew this and waited with a lopsided grin on her face as she chewed her fingernails right up to the cuticles, gnawing at them until they bled and she marveled at how sweet the blood tasted.

  And in her mind a voice of reason was speaking. The same one that told her constantly how unbelievably she’d fucked up this entire thing by not going to the police. But now it was saying how she must get control over her emotions, her spiraling thoughts, the madness and atavism that were slowly owning her. But the slavery of madness was overpowering and she could not think straight or reasonably or even logically.

  “He’ll call and the game will begin. He’ll call and we’ll put things to right.”

  We’ll put things to right.

  We’ll put things to right.

  We’ll put things to right.

  To right.

  To right.

  We’re going to play a game, Tara.

  Part Two:

  The Entombed

  27

  When Henry opened his eyes, it was dark.

  Of course it was dark because he kept heavy purple drapes over the windows so not a lick of sunlight could get in. It was how he preferred
it: dark and quiet. Like the grave. Like a tomb. A quiet, sullen, and intimate place. For that was Henry Borden through and through: something that existed by night, suckled by shadow, spawned of a thousand stillborn midnights. He was nocturnal by temperament, by desire, and by need. A pale graveworm that burrowed into the fetid and fatty depths of his own carrion existence.

  “You should check on the girl,” a voice next to him said.

  Elise.

  She slept beside him as she had always slept beside him, cheek to cheek and thigh to thigh. He could feel the cool easy pressure of her so invitingly close and if there had been nothing else in this dire lifetime, there had been Elise. Elise who was so smart, so patient, always watchful and concerned about Henry. Elise always had advice and most of it was quite good.

  She taught him his first games in the cemetery and later he taught her others that they both knew were wrong, but in their wrongness was their seduction.

  Beneath the pale light of the moon there are dark gnarled trees and shining marble headstones and a solitary form on hands and knees digging into the earth. It is a man in a long burgundy clawhammer coat and tall-shafted tophat. He’s like something described in the blacks and whites of an old horror movie: reed-thin, shadowy, his pallid face hooked into a grin of pure delight or a grimace of absolute dread.

  The sod turned back, he is digging.

  Like a dog, pawing deeper and deeper, searching for a meaty bone to gnaw and chew and bury in some secret lonely place.

  The soil is black and rich and moist. It takes his breath away, makes his heart beat with a new and delicious rhythm, fills his brain with a steadily rising subliminal erotic thrill. In the back of his mind there are voices, some old and some new, but all overwhelmed by another that is dominant, loud, overwhelming.

  (dig her up dig the little whore up)