Dig

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Skeletons and death

  Kirsten answered her phone with her New Jersey, “Yeah?”

  The voice on the other end was not the one she wanted to hear. “Kirsten? This is Larry.”

  She sighed. He was the bartender and shift supervisor from The Admiral. Larry only called when he needed her for an extra shift and she hadn’t had a day off in over a week. Being reliable and unable to say no were character traits she regretted having more and more. She switched her phone from one ear to the other with a flip of her hair.

  “What’s up, Larry?”

  Tell me I left my purse or my paycheck or something.

  “Have you heard from Sue?” he asked.

  She hadn’t heard from Sue. But Sue never called in. Only those three days a while back. Suddenly, she felt the need to help, the nagging feeling that always made her say sure, I’ll come in and work. I’ll come save you from the peril of being busier than normal. I’ll take up someone else’s slack. It wasn’t slack.

  Sue would do it for me. Sue is good people.

  “No,” she said and looked at the clock. It was 8:25 pm. Sue’s shift would’ve started at 6:00. She would’ve called. It wasn’t like her to not show up and even less like her not to call. Something must have happened. That bastard Travis came to mind. Creepy stalker.

  How does a tubby thing like Sue end up with a stalker anyway?

  “She hasn’t called in,” Larry said.

  The nagging feeling came again and before Kirsten could stop her mouth from speaking, the words came out. “Do you need me to come in?” She only lived a few blocks away. Her apartment was on North Atlantic which spanned the distance between Leonard and Bay.

  Please say no. Please say no. Please say no.

  “It’s not that busy right now, but the high school reunion will start breaking up in an hour or so. They’ll be looking for someplace to drink. Maybe some food. We’re the largest spot with a bar that’s close by.”

  Maybe isn’t yes. Stand up for yourself, girl. It’s bath, wine and movie night. It’s paint my toenails night. Tell him you’re already drunk and can’t drive. Tell him you’re on your period. Tell him you’ve got explosive diarrhea. Tell him you just finished your workout, haven’t showered and it would take you at least an hour to get ready and walk over there.

  “Have you tried calling her sister?”

  “Not yet,” Larry said.

  “You should probably call her.”

  “Okay,” Larry said. “I thought I’d try you first.”

  “Sue and I aren’t exactly friends,” Kirsten said. “I mean, she’s a sweetie, but we don’t really talk outside of work.”

  “Hell,” Larry said. “I thought all you ladies stuck together. Girl talk and all that. I thought maybe she was fed up and just quit.”

  “If she did, I haven’t heard anything about it. I’d call her sister, or maybe Robyn knows something and forgot to tell you?”

  “I ain’t callin the boss. She’s at that reunion. Ha! She all but threatened me not to bother her.”

  “Then give Sue’s sister a call. Patty is her name, I think.”

  “I will. She’s listed as Sue’s emergency contact. I just wanted to keep it among the staff at first. I mean, it’s not my job to track y’all down. It’s my job to run my shift.”

  Larry sounded stressed, almost angry. “I know, hon,” Kirsten said.

  “I know you know,” he said. “I mean you show for your shifts. You come in and fill in for other folks. That’s why I call you. I wish there were…”

  His speech went on for a long time and Kirsten tuned him out. That was a character trait she was proud of and it kept her from clawing people’s eyes out. She’d learned at an early age to tune out useless information and catch the highlights. Larry was known for his long rants. Very rarely did anything worth hearing come out of them. Once you’d heard one or two, you got the idea.

  Kirsten tapped her fingers and looked at them in the glow of her overhead kitchen light. Chipped polish. She needed to do her fingers and her toes. She opened the refrigerator and pulled out the chilled bottle of white wine. A local muscadine that was sweet like candy. When Larry’s speech paused, she said “Mm hmm.” Then he started again.

  As she set the bottle down and slid a wine glass out of the rack over the counter, Kirsten caught a hint of movement behind her in the glass’s reflection. There was a tapping noise coming from the sliding glass doors behind her. Not like someone was knocking, but a faint clicking. She looked behind her and saw nothing.

  “You hear about Top Kepler? I heard that his wife…” Larry droned on.

  Kirsten poured the glass of wine. Not a measured glass, like at The Admiral. She filled it. She couldn’t go to work if she was drinking, could she? Even if it was walking distance, slurring and smelling like a wino couldn’t be good for business, even if Larry was shorthanded and all of the customers were trashed.

  “It’s just getting mean around here,” Larry said.

  “Mm hmm,” she said, not hearing a word.

  There was another click at the back door. She saw something dark move out there. Then more tapping, like pebbles being tossed against the glass. Larry’s speech continued.

  “You missed a three car wreck out here this afternoon. How in the hell do three cars pile up when the speed limit is fifteen…”

  “Mm hmm,” Kirsten said and set her wine glass down on the counter. Walking slowly toward the glass doors, she expected a bird to be clawing at the window, flapping madly at the bird it saw in its reflection. She’d spent a summer listening to a sparrow that wouldn’t leave her windows alone and had to cover the glass with wax paper until it moved on to the next shiny object. Whatever moved outside her back door was much larger than a sparrow.

  The sun was low enough that the back of her house was in deep shadow. Most of Kirsten’s house was covered in shadows in the evening. It made it nice to sit on her back porch during hot afternoons. When she wanted sunshine, the front porch was the best place.

  CLICK CLICK…CLICK CLICK again on the window.

  “Kirsten?” Larry said. “Kirsten, are you there?”

  She didn’t hear him. She hadn’t heard him for a few seconds and his speech had finished back when she set down her wine glass. She was three feet from the sliding glass doors looking out with an incredulous look on her face. The thing staring back at her didn’t register. It was something out of a bad film. Something from a comic book.

  The thing Kirsten was looking at was grinning back at her and tapping its bony fingertips on the glass like a child looking into a fish tank. A skeleton, browned with age, splotched with flakes of mummified skin and dripping with the earth it had crawled out of was looking at her. At least its face was turned toward her as there were no eyes in the sockets.

  Kirsten wanted to scream. Her hand with the phone in it was at her side and all she needed to do was raise it to her ear and ask Larry for help. No explanation necessary. He would’ve sent for help. He would have called the police or maybe even come himself, but she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move. All she could do was stare at that smiling face, not an actual smile—not happiness—a smile where its face used to be. A smile that couldn’t be helped. She didn’t know or care whose skeleton it was or where it had come from. She just stared in slack-jawed amazement.

  “Kirsten? Are you still there?” Larry said. She didn’t hear him.

  The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. That’s what it reminds me of. Was that the one with the baboon prince? Or was that Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger?

  She couldn’t remember. She just remembered the swashbuckling between Sinbad and the skeletons. They were some of her favorite movies as a kid and always seemed to pop up on television on rainy afternoons. Those skeletons were tiny armatures with clay on them. Those were creations by Harryhausen. This one was six feet tall, a thousand times more menacing and it was standing outside her door.

  When the glass broke and f
antasy turned to reality, she screamed and dropped her phone. Kirsten backpedaled, her feet tangling with one of the chairs at her small dining table. She spun and her forehead knocked against the countertop. A red line bloomed on her brow and started to drip. She saw lights dancing in front of her. First, she fell to her knees and then onto her side. The phone was close enough she could hear Larry calling to her.

  “Kirsten? What happened? I heard a crash. Are you all right?”

  “It’s…a skeleton,” she said, dazed and sounding drunk.

  “A Skeleton? What are you talking about? Are you all right?”

  Larry’s voice faded in and out. Her vision swam and cleared and swam again. All she heard was the clicking and scraping of bones.

  “Skeleton,” she said again.

  But there wasn’t just one skeleton. There were four. No, seven. Wait, ten. It was hard for her to tell in her state. One ribcage looked like another and they were everywhere. Ever moving. Clack and scrape. Scrape and clack. Teeth chattering. Otherwise quiet. They piled into the small house, surrounding her with their unbreathing, unspeaking silence. The only human sound was her breathing and Larry’s concerned voice on the phone. “Kirsten? Kirsten?”

  This time Kirsten did scream, but it was cut off as bony fingers went into her mouth and jerked her lower jaw loose from its frame. There was too much shock for there to be any pain, at least for the moment. Those fingers tasted like sand and dirt and rot. They smelled like sewage and death. Then she tasted blood. Skeletons didn’t bleed. Her scream became a gag and then a gurgling moan.

  Larry’s questions came rapid fire, more and more frantic. Then one of the dead things stepped down hard, crushing the device. All sounds were drowned out by the sounds of rattling bones, chewing and tearing. Pain darkened the doorway and watched, proud of his battalion of bones.

  “She is coming,” it said. “She will be so pleased.”

  ***

  The Old Smithville Burial Ground was empty, graves splintered open like the burrows of carpenter bees in old lumber. Its inhabitants were no longer at rest, but walking through the yaupons and scrub oaks and pines. The dead burst into each home between the burial ground and the Gates house, destroying the living and leaving the newly dead with no hope of salvation.