Skeleton Crew

  Gramma is--

  --is--

  (oh she is)

  Gramma is laying chilly.

  Gooseflesh again, painful and marbling. His eyes fixed on the Pyrex teakettle on the stove, the cup on the counter with the herbal tea bag in it. No more tea for Gramma. Not ever.

  (laying so chilly)

  George shuddered.

  He stuttered his finger up and down on the Princess phone's cutoff button, but the phone was dead. Just as dead as--

  (just as chilly as)

  He slammed the handset down hard and the bell tinged faintly inside and he picked it up in a hurry to see if that meant it had magically gone right again. But there was nothing, and this time he put it back slowly.

  His heart was thudding harder again.

  I'm alone in this house with her dead body.

  He crossed the kitchen slowly, stood by the table for a minute, and then turned on the light. It was getting dark in the house. Soon the sun would be gone; night would be here.

  Wait. That's all I got to do. Just wait until Mom gets back. This is better, really. If the phone went out, it's better that she just died instead of maybe having a fit or something, foaming at the mouth, maybe falling out of bed--

  Ah, that was bad. He could have done very nicely without that horse-pucky.

  Like being alone in the dark and thinking of dead things that were still lively--seeing shapes in the shadows on the walls and thinking of death, thinking of the dead, those things, the way they would stink and the way they would move toward you in the black: thinking this: thinking that: thinking of bugs turning in flesh: burrowing in flesh: eyes that moved in the dark. Yeah. That most of all. Thinking of eyes that moved in the dark and the creak of floorboards as something came across the room through the zebra-stripes of shadows from the light outside. Yeah.

  In the dark your thoughts had a perfect circularity, and no matter what you tried to think of--flowers or Jesus or baseball or winning the gold in the 440 at the Olympics--it somehow led back to the form in the shadows with the claws and the unblinking eyes.

  "Shittabrick!" he hissed, and suddenly slapped his own face. And hard. He was giving himself the whimwhams, it was time to stop it. He wasn't six anymore. She was dead, that was all, dead. There was no more thought inside her now than there was in a marble or a floorboard or a doorknob or a radio dial or--

  And a strong alien unprepared-for voice, perhaps only the unforgiving unbidden voice of simple survival, inside him cried: Shut up Georgie and get about your goddam business!

  Yeah, okay. Okay, but--

  He went back to the door of her bedroom to make sure.

  There lay Gramma, one hand out of bed and touching the floor, her mouth hinged agape. Gramma was part of the furniture now. You could put her hand back in bed or pull her hair or pop a water glass into her mouth or put earphones on her head and play Chuck Berry into them full-tilt boogie and it would be all the same to her. Gramma was, as Buddy sometimes said, out of it. Gramma had had the course.

  A sudden low and rhythmic thudding noise began, not far to George's left, and he started, a little yipping cry escaping him. It was the storm door, which Buddy had put on just last week. Just the storm door, unlatched and thudding back and forth in the freshening breeze.

  George opened the inside door, leaned out, and caught the storm door as it swung back. The wind--it wasn't a breeze but a wind--caught his hair and riffled it. He latched the door firmly and wondered where the wind had come from all of a sudden. When Mom left it had been almost dead calm. But when Mom had left it had been bright daylight and now it was dusk.

  George glanced in at Gramma again and then went back and tried the phone again. Still dead. He sat down, got up, and began to walk back and forth through the kitchen, pacing, trying to think.

  An hour later it was full dark.

  The phone was still out. George supposed the wind, which had now risen to a near-gale, had knocked down some of the lines, probably out by the Beaver Bog, where the trees grew everywhere in a helter-skelter of deadfalls and swampwater. The phone dinged occasionally, ghostly and far, but the line remained blank. Outside the wind moaned along the eaves of the small house and George reckoned he would have a story to tell at the next Boy Scout Camporee, all right... just sitting in the house alone with his dead Gramma and the phone out and the wind pushing rafts of clouds fast across the sky, clouds that were black on top and the color of dead tallow, the color of Gramma's claw-hands, underneath.

  It was, as Buddy also sometimes said, a Classic.

  He wished he was telling it now, with the actuality of the thing safely behind him. He sat at the kitchen table, his history book open in front of him, jumping at every sound ... and now that the wind was up, there were a lot of sounds as the house creaked in all its unoiled secret forgotten joints.

  She'll be home pretty quick. She'll be home and then everything will be okay. Everything

  (you never covered her)

  will be all r

  (never covered her face)

  George jerked as if someone had spoken aloud and stared wide-eyed across the kitchen at the useless telephone. You were supposed to pull the sheet up over the dead person's face. It was in all the movies.

  Hell with that! I'm not going in there!

  No! And no reason why he should! Mom could cover her face when she got home! Or Dr. Arlinder when he came! Or the undertaker!

  Someone, anyone, but him.

  No reason why he should.

  It was nothing to him, and nothing to Gramma.

  Buddy's voice in his head:

  If you weren't scared, how come you didn't dare to cover her face?

  It was nothing to me.

  Fraidycat!

  Nothing to Gramma, either.

  CHICKENGUTS fraidycat!

  Sitting at the table in front of his unread history book, considering it, George began to see that if he didn't pull the counterpane up over Gramma's face, he couldn't claim to have done everything right, and thus Buddy would have a leg (no matter how shaky) to stand on.

  Now he saw himself telling the spooky story of Gramma's death at the Camporee fire before taps, just getting to the comforting conclusion where Mom's headlights swept into the driveway--the reappearance of the grown-up, both reestablishing and reconfirming the concept of Order--and suddenly, from the shadows, a dark figure arises, and a pine-knot in the fire explodes and George can see it's Buddy there in the shadows, saying: If you was so brave, chickenguts, how come you didn't dare to cover up HER FACE?

  George stood up, reminding himself that Gramma was out of it, that Gramma was wasted, that Gramma was laying chilly. He could put her hand back in bed, stuff a tea bag up her nose, put on earphones playing Chuck Berry full blast, etc., etc., and none of it would put a buzz under Gramma, because that was what being dead was about, nobody could put a buzz under a dead person, a dead person was the ultimate laid-back cool, and the rest of it was just dreams, ineluctable and apocalyptic and feverish dreams about closet doors swinging open in the dead mouth of midnight, just dreams about moonlight skating a delirious blue on the bones of disinterred skeletons, just--

  He whispered, "Stop it, can't you? Stop being so--"

  (gross)

  He steeled himself. He was going to go in there and pull the coverlet up over her face, and take away Buddy's last leg to stand on. He would administer the few simple rituals of Gramma's death perfectly. He would cover her face and then--his face lit at the symbolism of this--he would put away her unused tea bag and her unused cup. Yes.

  He went in, each step a conscious act. Gramma's room was dark, her body a vague hump in the bed, and he fumbled madly for the light switch, not finding it for what seemed to be an eternity. At last it clicked up, flooding the room with low yellow light from the cut-glass fixture overhead.

  Gramma lay there, hand dangling, mouth open. George regarded her, dimly aware that little pearls of sweat now clung to his forehead, and wondered if his responsibil
ity in the matter could possibly extend to picking up that cooling hand and putting it back in bed with the rest of Gramma. He decided it did not. Her hand could have fallen out of bed any old time. That was too much. He couldn't touch her. Everything else, but not that.

  Slowly, as if moving through some thick fluid instead of air, George approached Gramma. He stood over her, looking down. Gramma was yellow. Part of it was the light, filtered through the old fixture, but not all.

  Breathing through his mouth, his breath rasping audibly, George grasped the coverlet and pulled it up over Gramma's face. He let go of it and it slipped just a little, revealing her hairline and the yellow creased parchment of her brow. Steeling himself, he grasped it again, keeping his hands far to one side and the other of her head so he wouldn't have to touch her, even through the cloth, and pulled it up again. This time it stayed. It was satisfactory. Some of the fear went out of George. He had buried her. Yes, that was why you covered the dead person up, and why it was right: it was like burying them. It was a statement.

  He looked at the hand dangling down, unburied, and discovered now that he could touch it, he could tuck it under and bury it with the rest of Gramma.

  He bent, grasped the cool hand, and lifted it.

  The hand twisted in his and clutched his wrist.

  George screamed. He staggered backward, screaming in the empty house, screaming against the sound of the wind reaving the eaves, screaming against the sound of the house's creaking joints. He backed away, pulling Gramma's body askew under the coverlet, and the hand thudded back down, twisting, turning, snatching at the air ... and then relaxing to limpness again.

  I'm all right, it was nothing, it was nothing but a reflex.

  George nodded in perfect understanding, and then he remembered again how her hand had turned, clutching his, and he shrieked. His eyes bulged in their sockets. His hair stood out, perfectly on end, in a cone. His heart was a runaway stamping-press in his chest. The world tilted crazily, came back to the level, and then just went on moving until it was tilted the other way. Every time rational thought started to come back, panic goosed him again. He whirled, wanting only to get out of the room to some other room--or even three or four miles down the road, if that was what it took--where he could get all of this under control. So he whirled and ran full tilt into the wall, missing the open doorway by a good two feet.

  He rebounded and fell to the floor, his head singing with a sharp, cutting pain that sliced keenly through the panic. He touched his nose and his hand came back bloody. Fresh drops spotted his shirt. He scrambled to his feet and looked around wildly.

  The hand dangled against the floor as it had before, but Gramma's body was not askew; it also was as it had been.

  He had imagined the whole thing. He had come into the room, and all the rest of it had been no more than a mind-movie.

  No.

  But the pain had cleared his head. Dead people didn't grab your wrist. Dead was dead. When you were dead they could use you for a hat rack or stuff you in a tractor tire and roll you downhill or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When you were dead you might be acted upon (by, say, little boys trying to put dead dangling hands back into bed), but your days of acting upon--so to speak--were over.

  Unless you're a witch. Unless you pick your time to die when no one's around but one little kid, because it's best that way, you can ... can ...

  Can what?

  Nothing. It was stupid. He had imagined the whole thing because he had been scared and that was all there was to it. He wiped his nose with his forearm and winced at the pain. There was a bloody smear on the skin of his inner forearm.

  He wasn't going to go near her again, that was all. Reality or hallucination, he wasn't going to mess with Gramma. The bright flare of panic was gone, but he was still miserably scared, near tears, shaky at the sight of his own blood, only wanting his mother to come home and take charge.

  George backed out of the room, through the entry, and into the kitchen. He drew a long, shuddery breath and let it out. He wanted a wet rag for his nose, and suddenly he felt like he was going to vomit. He went over to the sink and ran cold water. He bent and got a rag from the basin under the sink--a piece of one of Gramma's old diapers--and ran it under the cold tap, snuffling up blood as he did so. He soaked the old soft cotton diaper-square until his hand was numb, then turned off the tap and wrung it out.

  He was putting it to his nose when her voice spoke from the other room.

  "Come here, boy," Gramma called in a dead buzzing voice. "Come in here--Gramma wants to hug you."

  George tried to scream and no sound came out. No sound at all. But there were sounds in the other room. Sounds that he heard when Mom was in there, giving Gramma her bed-bath, lifting her bulk, dropping it, turning it, dropping it again.

  Only those sounds now seemed to have a slightly different and yet utterly specific meaning--it sounded as though Gramma was trying to ... to get out of bed.

  "Boy! Come in here, boy! Right NOW! Step to it!"

  With horror he saw that his feet were answering that command. He told them to stop and they just went on, left foot, right foot, hay foot, straw foot, over the linoleum; his brain was a terrified prisoner inside his body--a hostage in a tower.

  She IS a witch, she's a witch and she's having one of her "bad spells," oh yeah, it's a "spell" all right, and it's bad, it's REALLY bad, oh God oh Jesus help me help me help me--

  George walked across the kitchen and through the entryway and into Gramma's room and yes, she hadn't just tried to get out of bed, she was out, she was sitting in the white vinyl chair where she hadn't sat for four years, since she got too heavy to walk and too senile to know where she was, anyway.

  But Gramma didn't look senile now.

  Her face was sagging and doughy, but the senility was gone--if it had ever really been there at all, and not just a mask she wore to lull small boys and tired husbandless women. Now Gramma's face gleamed with fell intelligence--it gleamed like an old, stinking wax candle. Her eyes drooped in her face, lackluster and dead. Her chest was not moving. Her nightie had pulled up, exposing elephantine thighs. The coverlet of her deathbed was thrown back.

  Gramma held her huge arms out to him.

  "I want to hug you, Georgie," that flat and buzzing deadvoice said. "Don't be a scared old crybaby. Let your Gramma hug you."

  George cringed back, trying to resist that almost insurmountable pull. Outside, the wind shrieked and roared. George's face was long and twisted with the extremity of his fright; the face of a woodcut caught and shut up in an ancient book.

  George began to walk toward her. He couldn't help himself. Step by dragging step toward those outstretched arms. He would show Buddy that he wasn't scared of Gramma, either. He would go to Gramma and be hugged because he wasn't a crybaby fraidycat. He would go to Gramma now.

  He was almost within the circle of her arms when the window to his left crashed inward and suddenly a wind-blown branch was in the room with them, autumn leaves still clinging to it. The river of wind flooded the room, blowing over Gramma's pictures, whipping her nightgown and her hair.

  Now George could scream. He stumbled backward out of her grip and Gramma made a cheated hissing sound, her lips pulling back over smooth old gums; her thick, wrinkled hands clapped uselessly together on moving air.

  George's feet tangled together and he fell down. Gramma began to rise from the white vinyl chair, a tottering pile of flesh; she began to stagger toward him. George found he couldn't get up; the strength had deserted his legs. He began to crawl backward, whimpering. Gramma came on, slowly but relentlessly, dead and yet alive, and suddenly George understood what the hug would mean; the puzzle was complete in his mind and somehow he found his feet just as Gramma's hand closed on his shirt. It ripped up the side, and for one moment he felt her cold flesh against his skin before fleeing into the kitchen again.

  He would run into the night. Anything other than being hugged by the witch, his Gramma. Because whe
n his mother came back she would find Gramma dead and George alive, oh yes ... but George would have developed a sudden taste for herbal tea.

  He looked back over his shoulder and saw Gramma's grotesque, misshapen shadow rising on the wall as she came through the entryway.

  And at that moment the telephone rang, shrilly and stridently.

  George seized it without even thinking and screamed into it; screamed for someone to come, to please come. He screamed these things silently; not a sound escaped his locked throat.

  Gramma tottered into the kitchen in her pink nightie. Her whitish-yellow hair blew wildly around her face, and one of her horn combs hung askew against her wrinkled neck.

  Gramma was grinning.

  "Ruth?" It was Aunt Flo's voice, almost lost in the whistling windtunnel of a bad long-distance connection. "Ruth, are you there?" It was Aunt Flo in Minnesota, over two thousand miles away.

  "Help me!" George screamed into the phone, and what came out was a tiny, hissing whistle, as if he had blown into a harmonica full of dead reeds.

  Gramma tottered across the linoleum, holding her arms out for him. Her hands snapped shut and then open and then shut again. Gramma wanted her hug; she had been waiting for that hug for five years.

  "Ruth, can you hear me? It's been storming here, it just started, and I ... I got scared. Ruth, I can't hear you--"

  "Gramma," George moaned into the telephone. Now she was almost upon him.

  "George?" Aunt Flo's voice suddenly sharpened; became almost a shriek. "George, is that you?"

  He began to back away from Gramma, and suddenly realized that he had stupidly backed away from the door and into the comer formed by the kitchen cabinets and the sink. The horror was complete. As her shadow fell over him, the paralysis broke and he screamed into the phone, screamed it over and over again: "Gramma! Gramma! Gramma!"

  Gramma's cold hands touched his throat. Her muddy, ancient eyes locked on his, draining his will.

  Faintly, dimly, as if across many years as well as many miles, he heard Aunt Flo say: "Tell her to lie down, George, tell her to lie down and be still. Tell her she must do it in your name and the name of her father. The name of her taken father is Hastur. His name is power in her ear, George--tell her Lie down in the Name of Hastur--tell her--"