When the shuttle still hadn't come at 11:25, she began to run. Her heels were low but still high enough to cause her problems. One of her ankles buckled painfully, and she paused long enough to take off the shoes. Then she ran on in her pantyhose, past Allegheny and Eastern Airlines, breathing hard now, getting the begininngs of a stitch in her side.
Her breath was hot in her throat, that tuck in her side deeper and more painful. Now she was running past the international terminal, and there, up ahead, was Delta's triangular sign. She burst in through the doors, almost dropped one shoe, juggled it, caught it. It was 11:37.
One of the two clerks on duty glanced up at her.
"Flight 104," she panted. "The Portland flight. Has it left?"
The clerk glanced behind him at the monitor. "Still at the gate it says here," he said, "but they called for final boarding five minutes ago. I'll call ahead. Bags to check?"
"No," Rachel gasped, and brushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes. Her heart was galloping in her chest.
"Then don't wait for me to call. I will--but I advise you to run very fast."
Rachel didn't run very fast--she was no longer able. But she did as well as she could. The escalator had been turned off for the night, and she pounded up the stairs, tasting copper shavings in her mouth. She reached the security checkpoint and almost threw the tote bag at the startled female guard, then waited for it to come through on the conveyor belt, her hands clenching and unclenching. It was barely out of the X-ray chamber before she had snatched it by the strap and ran again, the bag flying out behind her and then banging her on the hip.
She looked up at one of the monitors as she ran.
FLIGHT 104 PORTLAND SCHED 11:25P GATE 31 BOARDING.
Gate 31 was at the far end of the concourse--and even as she snatched her glance at the monitor, BOARDING in steady letters changed to DEPARTING, blinking rapidly.
A frustrated cry burst from her. She ran into the gate area just in time to see the gate attendant removing the strips which read: FLIGHT 104 BOSTON-PORTLAND 11:25.
"It's gone?" she asked incredulously. "It's really gone?"
The attendant looked at her sympathetically. "It rolled out of the jetway at 11:40. I'm sorry, ma'am. You made a helluva good try, if that's any consolation." He pointed out the wide glass windows. Rachel could see a big 727 with Delta markings, its running lights Christmas-tree bright, starting its takeoff roll.
"Christ, didn't anyone tell you I was coming?" Rachel cried.
"When they called up here from downstairs, 104 was on an active taxiway. If I'd called her back, she would have gotten caught in the parade going out to Runway 30, and that pilot would have had my bee-hind on a platter. Not to mention the hundred or so passengers on board. I'm very sorry. If you'd been even four minutes sooner--"
She walked away, not listening to the rest. She was halfway back to the security checkpoint when waves of faintness rode over her. She stumbled into another gate area and sat down until the darkness had passed. Then she slipped her shoes back on, picking a squashed Lark cigarette butt off the tattered sole of one stocking first. My feet are dirty and I don't give a fuck, she thought disconsolately.
She walked back toward the terminal.
The security guard eyed her sympathetically. "Missed it?"
"I missed it, all right," Rachel said.
"Where were you headed?"
"Portland. Then Bangor."
"Well, why don't you rent a car? If you really have to be there, that is? Ordinarily I'd advise a hotel close to the airport, but if I ever saw a lady who looked like she really had to be there, you are that lady."
"I'm that lady, all right," Rachel said. She thought about it. "Yes, I suppose I could do that, couldn't I? If any of the agencies has a car."
The security guard laughed. "Oh, they'll have cars. Only time they don't have cars at Logan is when the airport's fogged in. Which is a lot of the time."
Rachel barely heard her. In her mind she was already trying to calculate it.
She couldn't get to Portland in time to catch her Bangor flight even if she bulleted up the turnpike at a suicidal pace. So figure driving straight through. How long? That depended on how far. Two hundred and fifty miles, that was the figure which came to mind. Something Jud had said maybe. It was going to be at least a quarter past twelve before she got going, probably closer to 12:30 A.M. It was all turnpike. She thought that her chances of going the whole distance at sixty-five without getting hauled down for speeding were reasonably good. She ran the figures quickly in her head, dividing sixty-five into two hundred and fifty. Not quite four hours. Well . . . say four even. She would have to stop once and go to the bathroom. And although sleep seemed impossibly distant now, she knew her own resources well enough to believe she would also have to stop for a great big black coffee. Still, she could be back in Ludlow before first light.
Mulling all this over, she started for the stairs--the car rental desks were one level down from the concourses.
"Good luck, honey," the security guard called. "Take care."
"Thanks," Rachel said. She felt that she deserved some good luck.
51
The smell hit him first, and Louis recoiled, gagging. He hung on the edge of the grave, breathing hard, and just when he thought he had his gorge under control, his entire big, tasteless meal came up in a spurt. He threw up on the far side of the grave and then put his head against the ground, panting. At last the nausea passed. Teeth clamped together, he took the flashlight out of his armpit and shone it down into the open coffin.
A deep horror that was very nearly awe stole over him--it was the sort of feeling usually reserved for the worst nightmares, the ones you can barely remember upon awakening.
Gage's head was gone.
Louis's hands were trembling so badly he had to hold the flashlight with both hands, gripping it the way a policeman is taught to grip his service revolver on the target range. Still the beam jittered back and forth and it was a moment before he could train the pencil-thin beam back into the grave.
It's impossible, he told himself, just remember that what you thought you saw is impossible.
He slowly moved the narrow beam up Gage's three-foot length, from the new shoes to the suit pants, the little coat (ah, Christ, no two-year-old was ever meant to wear a suit), to the open collar, to--
His breath caught in a harsh sound that was too outraged to be a gasp, and all his fury at Gage's death came back in a rush, drowning fears of the supernatural, the paranatural, his growing certainty that he had crossed over into the country of the mad.
Louis scrabbled in his back pocket for his handkerchief and pulled it out. Holding the light in one hand, he leaned into the grave again, almost past the point of balance. If one of the segments of grave liner had fallen now, it would have surely broken his neck. Gently he used his handkerchief to wipe away the damp moss that was growing on Gage's skin--moss so dark that he had been momentarily fooled into thinking Gage's whole head was gone.
The moss was damp but no more than a scum. He should have expected it; there had been rain, and a grave liner was not watertight. Flashing the light to either side, Louis saw that the coffin was lying in a thin puddle. Beneath the light slime of growth, he saw his son. The mortician, aware that the coffin could not be opened after such a terrible accident, had nonetheless done the best he could--morticians almost always did. Looking at his son was like looking at a badly made doll. Gage's head bulged in strange directions. His eyes had sunken deep behind closed lids. Something white protruded from his mouth like an albino tongue, and Louis thought at first that they had, perhaps, used too much embalming fluid. It was tricky stuff at best, and with a child it was next to impossible to tell how much was enough . . . or too much.
Then he realized it was only cotton. He reached in and plucked it out of the boy's mouth. Gage's lips, oddly lax and seeming somehow too dark and too wide, closed with a faint but audible plip! He threw the cotton into the grave where it flo
ated in the shallow puddle and gleamed a loathsome white. Now one of Gage's cheeks had a hollow old-man's look.
"Gage," he whispered, "going to take you out now, okay?"
He prayed no one would come along now, a caretaker making a 12:30 swing through the cemetery, something like that. But it was no longer a matter of not being caught; if someone else's flashlight beam speared him as he stood here in the grave going about his grim work, he would seize the bent, scarred spade and put it through the intruder's skull.
He worked his arms under Gage. The body lolled bonelessly from side to side, and a sudden, awful certainty came over him: when he lifted Gage, Gage's body would break apart and he would be left with the pieces. He would be left standing with his feet on the sides of the grave liner with the pieces, screaming. And that was how they would find him.
Go on, you chicken, go on and do it!
He got Gage under the arms, aware of the fetid dampness, and lifted him that way, as he had lifted him so often from his evening tub. Gage's head lolled all the way to the middle of his back. Louis saw the grinning circlet of stitches which held Gage's head onto his shoulders.
Somehow, panting, his stomach spasming from the smell and from the boneless loose feel of his son's miserably smashed body, Louis wrestled the body out of the coffin. At last he sat on the verge of the grave with the body in his lap, his feet dangling in the hole, his face a horrible livid color, his eyes black holes, his mouth drawn down in a trembling bow of horror and pity and sorrow.
"Gage," he said and began to rock the boy in his arms. Gage's hair lay against Louis's wrist, as lifeless as wire. "Gage, it will be all right, I swear, Gage, it will be all right, this will end, this is just the night, please, Gage, I love you, Daddy loves you."
Louis rocked his son.
*
By quarter of two, Louis was ready to leave the cemetery. Actually handling the body had been the worst of it--that was the point at which that interior astronaut, his mind, seemed to float the farthest into the void. And yet now, resting, his back a throbbing hurt in which exhausted muscles jumped and twitched, he felt it might be possible to get back. All the way back.
He put Gage's body on the tarpaulin and wrapped it up. He cinched it with long strips of strapping tape, then cut the length of rope in two and tied off the ends neatly. Once more he might have had a rolled-up rug, no more. He closed the coffin, then after a moment's thought, he reopened it and put the bent spade in. Let Pleasantview have that relic; it would not have his son. He closed the coffin and then lowered half of the cement grave-liner top. He considered simply dropping the other half but was afraid it would shatter. After a moment's consideration, he threaded his belt through the iron rings and used it to lower the cement square gently into place. Then he used the shovel to fill in the hole. There was not enough dirt to bring it up even with the ground again. The grave's swaybacked look might be noticed. It might not. It might be noticed and disregarded. He would not allow himself to think about it, or worry about it tonight--too much still lay ahead of him. More wild work. And he was very tired.
Hey-ho, let's go.
"Indeed," Louis muttered.
The wind rose, shrieking briefly through the trees and making him look around uneasily. He laid the shovel, the pick he had yet had to use, the gloves, and the flashlight beside the bundle. Using the light was a temptation, but he resisted it. Leaving the body and the tools, Louis walked back the way he had come and arrived at the high wrought-iron fence about five minutes later. There, across the street, was his Civic, parked neatly at the curb. So near and yet so far.
Louis looked at it for a moment and then struck off in a different direction.
This time he moved away from the gate, walking along the wrought-iron fence until it turned away from Mason Street at a neat right angle. There was a drainage ditch here, and Louis looked into it. What he saw made him shudder. There were masses of rotting flowers here, layer upon layer of them, washed down by seasons of rain and snow.
Christ.
No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel's sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery.
Louis stared down into the ditch as if hypnotized. At last he dragged his gaze away with a little gasp--the gasp of one who has come to, or who has been called from a mesmerist's trance by the final number in a count of ten.
He went on. He hadn't walked far before he found what he was looking for, and he suspected that his mind had neatly stored this bit of information on the day of Gage's burial.
Here, looming in the windy dark, was the cemetery's crypt.
Coffins were stored there in the winter when it was too cold for even the payloaders to dig in the frozen earth. It was also used when there was a rush of business.
There were such rushes of "cold custom" from time to time, Louis knew; in any given population there were times when, for no reason anyone could understand, lots of people died.
"It all balances out," Uncle Carl told him. "If I have a two-week period in May when nobody dies, Lou, I can count on a two-week period in November when I'll have ten funerals. Only it's rarely November, and it's never around Christmas, although people always think that's when a lot of people die. That stuff about Christmas depression is just a load of bullshit. Just ask any funeral director. Most people are really happy around Christmas, and they want to live. So they do live. It's usually February when we get a big bulge. The flu gets the old people and there's pneumonia, of course--but that's not all. There'll be people who've been battling cancer like mad bastards for a year, sixteen months. Then bad old February comes around and it seems as if they get tired and the cancer just rolls them up like a rug. On January 31 they're in remission, and they feel as if they're in the pink. Come February 24 they're planted. People have heart attacks in February, strokes in February, renal failure in February. It's a bad month. People get tired in February. We're used to it, in the business. But then, for no reason, the same thing will happen in June or in October. Never in August. August's a slow month. Unless a gas main explodes or a city bus goes off a bridge, you never fill up a cemetery crypt in August. But there have been Februarys when we've had caskets stacked up three deep, hoping like hell for a thaw so we can plant some of them before we have to rent a frigging apartment."
Uncle Carl had laughed. And Louis, feeling a party to something not even his instructors in med school knew, had laughed too.
The crypt's double doors were set into a grassy rise of hill, a shape as natural and attractive as the swell of a woman's breast. This hill (which Louis suspected was landscaped rather than natural) crested only a foot or two below the decorative arrow tips of the wrought-iron fence, which remained even at the top rather than rising with the contour.
Louis glanced around, then scrambled up the slope. On the other side was an empty square of ground, perhaps two acres in all. No . . . not quite empty. There was a single outbuilding, like a disconnected shed. Probably belongs to the cemetery, Louis thought. That would be where they kept their grounds equipment.
The streetlights shone through the moving leaves of a belt of trees--old elms and maples--that screened this area from Mason Street. Louis saw no other movement.
He slid back down on his butt, afraid of falling and reinjuring his knee, and returned to his son's grave. He almost stumbled over the roll of the tarpaulin. He saw he would have to make two trips, one with the body and another for the tools. He bent, grimacing at his back's protest, and got the stiff canvas roll in his arms. He could feel the shift of Gage's body within and steadfastly ignored that part of his mind which whispered constantly that he had gone mad.
He carried the body over to the hill which housed Pleasantview's crypt with its two steel sliding doors (the doors made it look queerly like a two-car
garage). He saw what would have to be done if he were going to get his forty-pound bundle up that steep slope now that his rope was gone and prepared to do it. He backed up and then ran at the slope, leaning forward, letting his forward motion carry him as far as it would. He got almost to the top before his feet skidded out from under him on the short, slick grass, and he tossed the canvas roll as far as he could as he came down. It landed almost at the crest of the hill. He scrambled the rest of the way up, looked around again, saw no one, and laid the rolled-up tarp against the fence. Then he went back for the rest of his things.
He gained the top of the hill again, put the gloves on, piled the flashlight, pick, and shovel next to the tarp. Then he rested, back against the staves of the fence, hands propped on his knees. The new digital watch Rachel had given him for Christmas informed him that it was now 2:01.
He gave himself five minutes to regroup and then toss the shovel over the fence. He heard it thud in the grass. He tried to stuff the flashlight into his pants, but it just wouldn't go. He slipped it through two of the iron staves and listened to it roll down the hill, hoping it would not hit a stone and break. He wished he had worn a packsack.
He removed his dispenser of strapping tape from the pocket of his jacket and bound the business-end of the pick to the canvas roll, going around and around, drawing the tape tight over the pick's metal arms and tight under the canvas. He did this until the tape was gone and then tucked the empty dispenser back in his pocket. He lifted the bundle and hoisted it over the fence (his back screamed in protest; he would pay for this night all the following week, he suspected) and then let it drop, wincing at the soft thud.
Now he swung one leg over the fence, grasped two of the decorative arrow points, and swung his other leg over. He skidded down, digging in at the earth between the staves of the fence with the toes of his shoes, and dropped to the ground.
He made his way down the far side of the hill and felt through the grass. He found the shovel right away--muted as the glow from the streetlights was through the trees, it reflected a faint gleam from the blade. He had a couple of bad moments when he was unable to find the flashlight--how far could it have rolled in this grass? He got down on his hands and knees and felt through the thick plush, his breath and heartbeat loud in his own ears.