Charnel House Read online

  Misty wraiths drifted from the asphalt and danced in the headlights as he traveled through the slumbering town, and by the time he thumped over the railroad tracks on the western edge a thin fog had risen. A few minutes later, crossing the causeway into Decatur, visibility was reduced to almost nothing. Of the warehouses and shipping facilities that lined the shores of the Tennessee River there was but the faintest pink glow in the soupy night. The black water lay still and flat as if held down by the weight of the white blanket, and the occasional cars that passed were indistinct, glowing domes of luminescence. The isolation was nice after the boisterous atmosphere of the strip bar.

  The fluorescents in the grocery store hurt Garraty’s eyes, they were so bright. And of course the beer was all the way in the back, so he had to walk the entire expanse of housewife heaven squinting like a goddamn vampire in the sun. At the cooler he picked up a case of Pabst, thought about it, then put the case back and took a thirty-pack instead. What the hell, it was only a couple of bucks more. If you’re gonna tie one on you might as well tie one on.

  He made his way to the checkout and got in line behind an old man who was buying ten cans of store-brand cat food and a loaf of bread and paying for it with loose change. The guy smelled like body odor and greasy hair and moldy cheese, and his Goodwill clothes hung loose on his stooped frame. Wet sores covered his lips, and there was something awful going on with his nose, which looked like something had been gnawing on it. Cancer, maybe. Garraty found himself wondering if the cat food was actually for a cat. There but for the grace of God. He resolved to start looking for a job in earnest just as soon as the beer tucked under his arm ran out and he got sobered up. Maybe on Monday. Three days ought to be plenty of time to drown his sorrows.

  The old guy finished and left with his bag. Garraty plunked the beer down on the conveyor and rubbed his temples. His head was starting to hurt like a motherfucker. Probably something residual from the awful music at the club. A beer would take the edge off the pain, he thought. Two would take it away completely. When the checker dragged the carton across the scanner, the high-pitched beep made him wince. He wanted to ask her to just go ahead and pop one out of the box for him so he could slurp it down right there at the register, but kept his mouth shut.

  Back in the Prius he slapped the keys on the dash and tore into the cardboard packaging. The headache seemed to back off a bit with the sound of the first top popping. Anticipation, maybe. He drained the can in one long pull, chugging it in gulps so large they sounded like effects from the cartoons he used to watch on Saturday mornings a couple of lifetimes ago. He set the empty can in the passenger seat and pulled a second beer from the box. It suffered the same fate as the first. Satisfied the headache was under control—or would be in a couple of minutes when the beers really started to work—he picked up the keys and started the car.

  The back of the Piggly Wiggly lay shrouded in darkness, the only light a sallow cone from a single lamp atop a pole mounted in the lot next to the dumpster. Garraty pulled up alongside the metal container and hooked the two empties out his window and into the open top. Four points. He belched several times with gusto, and before he made it out of the parking lot to go home, he’d plucked out a third beer and nearly emptied it.

  The grocery store receded into the fog. He turned on the radio but the classic rock station—all the way down in Birmingham and far superior to the closer one in Huntsville—was staticky and kept cutting out because of the cloud cover. Too bad, because the song playing was Boston’s More Than a Feeling, perfect for a night drive and a couple of beers. He took a swig of Pabst and decided that what he needed was a little old-time country music. The kind Earl had played softly on the transistor when Garraty was a boy and they went fishing, guiding their flat-bottom boat through the little inlets and coves that surrounded Belleville as they hunted bass, catfish, and crappie. Johnny Cash or Loretta Lynn or Ronnie Milsap. Good stuff, not that shit they called country these days. He punched the scan button, listening for the twang of a steel guitar or banjo.

  The Prius left the city behind and began the mile-long trek across the causeway over the river. The radio skipped along, pausing long enough to play a snippet at each station it found: pop, hard rock, lots of Jesus music and preaching, one hip-hop, a classical, news, and plenty of modern country. Nothing he was looking for. He glanced down at the console and found the AM button. Maybe the old country had never made the transition over to—

  The tires sang a mournful braaaaaaaaaahmp as the Prius drifted over the line on the right and hit the rumble strip. Garraty jerked the wheel to the left before the car continued on over into the guard rail put in place to keep idiots like him from driving right off the road and into the water. Beer foamed over his hand and splattered on his pants.

  Jesus.

  His heart was pounding now, the quest for honkytonk music forgotten. Eyes on the road, dipshit. He cocked his head to one side and finished off the Pabst, crooking his neck to watch the road so he could honor his new commitment to safe driving. Lowering the window, he pitched the empty out. No more beer until I get back to the trailer. He turned the radio off. Better concentration that way, less chance of another incident.

  The causeway became the highway again and the dark waters of the river were swallowed by the fog. Almost back to Belleville. Lights flashed up ahead, a pair of muted red eyes winking at him through the mist, growing brighter by the second. Even as he realized what he was seeing, the blast of an airhorn from the approaching train pierced the night. The sound woke his headache.

  There was a car waiting at the railroad crossing, a silver Crown Vic with a navy trunk lid. On the side, a blue emblem in the shape of the state on the door and on the roof, a set of bar lights. Lettering across the back of the trunk spelled STATE TROOPER in gold, not that Garraty needed to read the words to know what the car was. Fuck. He could see the trooper’s head through the rear window, painted red with each flash of the crossing lights, and imagined pulling up next to him and having to sit there waiting for the train to pass. Would the trooper even look over at him? Garraty thought the answer to this question was a resounding YES. That’s what cops did. They looked at you, sniffing around, hoping to find a reason to hassle you or better, a reason to pop you one in the noggin with a baton. Maybe offer you a ride down to Electric Avenue with the TASER if they decided you were giving them attitude or resisting. Oh yeah, the cop would look right the fuck over and what would he see? A nicely buzzed man—and wasn’t that word just a little bit of an understatement after those last three beers—doing everything he could to look sober as a judge... and failing spectacularly.

  Fuck that.

  There was a road that paralleled the tracks, Garraty remembered. It followed the rail for a ways before winding up and over Hickory Hill and coming back into town on the south side. A little out of the way, but worth it in this instance. He looked for the reflective green sign marking the road, but there wasn’t one. For a long moment as he pulled alongside the trooper he worried that he’d mis-remembered in his current state, that the road was on the other side of the tracks and he was well and truly screwed, but then he saw the thin black strip of pavement snaking out of sight on the right. He put on his turn signal.

  3

  The train thrummed alongside him, traveling to destinations north while he headed south, and soon enough it had passed, leaving him alone with the whirring of the crickets outside, so loud he could hear them through the closed windows. He clicked the lights on bright, but the fog was still too heavy and everything whited out. Christ, it was dark out here. County services were sparse when it came to things like streetlights in the boonies. Not many people lived along the road. He’d only seen a couple of mailboxes since he left the highway.

  The road began to climb and curve. Jesus, he hadn’t been out here in what, thirty-five years? Not since he was barely a teenager. He’d come with his best friend at the time, a towheaded kid named Tanner Frank who lived two doors down from hi
m, and some relative of his from Decatur that Garraty had never met before that day. A cousin maybe. Tanner was Catholic—or at least his mom was, and she dragged him to church from time to time—and had about a hundred aunts and uncles, and it seemed like he was always showing up with a different cousin in tow. Garraty didn’t know that he’d ever met any of them twice.

  They had gone down to Crossen’s Crossing, the ancient general store that sold a little bit of everything before Walmart took over the world, for some candy. At some point—time and beer had made his memory hazy—Tanner told the cousin the legend of Jeremiah Barlowe, and the three ended up on Hickory Hill to see the house, long rumored to be haunted, though all the ghostly sightings always seemed to be by friends of friends and never anyone anybody knew. The three had crept up the overgrown driveway toward the slumbering monstrosity, keeping a watchful eye out for ghosts despite it being high noon on a sunny day. One could never be too careful.

  After they’d had a peek through the broken windows of the lower floor, looking—from a safe distance, mind you—for the bloody handprint supposedly visible on the interior walls but not finding it, the cousin was begging to get closer, to actually go inside the dilapidated thing and show he wasn’t scared. He was a skinny little kid with an attitude, a banty rooster running around the chicken yard trying to make a name for himself with the bigger birds. Today someone would probably say he had short man syndrome, but in the late 70s he was just a braggart.

  Tanner had finally told the kid to go on inside if he really wanted to, but not to come crying to them if he got scared. Garraty remembered the way the boy had marched up the steps and across the porch, then sauntered through the front door like he owned the goddamn place. He came out a couple of minutes later, calm and cool, claiming he’d touched the renowned bloody handprint, and that if the two of them weren’t such pussies they could come back inside with him and touch it too.

  Exasperated with the cousin’s antics, Tanner had pointed at the rectangle of midnight in the exterior wall beneath the sagging front porch, saying if you’re so brave, shithead, go in there where they found Jeremiah Barlowe. Daring the cousin to enter the crawlspace—a place neither Tanner himself nor Garraty was willing to go for a million, no, a billion dollars—and bring some kind of souvenir back out. Maybe you’ll find a bone from one of his victims, Garraty had crowed. Wonder of wonders, the cousin trotted over to the porch, dropped to his hands and knees, and crawled into the dark opening.

  As Garraty recalled, the little fucker had blasted out of that same dark opening like a load of buckshot roughly two seconds after he disappeared into the blackness, wide-eyed and screaming that Jeremiah Barlowe had risen from the dead and was coming for him. Crazy shit. They’d had to chase him down the hill for a quarter mile before they caught up with him. Of course by then he was Mr. Calm-and-Cool again, claiming that he had seen a rattlesnake and been spooked. The story sounded like grade-A bullshit, but he’d stuck with it. It was pretty obvious the kid had just spooked himself.

  But could you really blame him? He’d visited a place of nightmares.

  A couple of days after they’d gone to the Barlowe house, his dad had come to his bedroom holding a copy of The Decatur Daily with the cousin’s face on the front page. He was bruised and covered with blood in the picture, but even then his smile managed to look smug and cocky. Like an asshole. BOY STOPS CHILD PREDATOR, the headline blared, but damned if Garraty could remember the story or what had happened.

  You know this kid? his father had asked. He looks familiar.

  You saw him on Saturday, Garraty told him. He came by with Tanner.

  They’re calling him a hero. Earl Garraty had glanced down at the picture again, and snorted derisively. For doing what any normal guy would do.

  Less than a week later, Tanner had gotten his stupid ass in trouble for throwing lighted matches at sixth-graders in the lunchroom. One of the matches had gone down a girl’s shirt and briefly set it on fire because the ninny ran around screaming instead of simply slapping it out or stopping, dropping, and rolling the way they’d all been taught. Tanner was expelled—probably would have been charged with attempted murder and terrorism in these enlightened zero-tolerance times, he thought now—and shipped off to Chattanooga to live with a relative so he could finish out the school year up there and not be held back. As Garraty recalled, his father had whaled him so badly with the metal yardstick he kept in his shop before he left the poor kid could barely walk.

  By the time he returned to Belleville the following June, Earl Garraty had gotten himself fired from the Wolverine plant for insubordination (read: drunk and getting lippy with the boss) and they’d had to move over by niggertown. Garraty was moving in different circles by then. He saw Tanner in school after that, of course, but they were never really friends again. We had some good times back in the day, old buddy.

  Was the house even still there? The thing had been ancient in the 70s, bowed and bent, with ragged holes in the rusted tin roof where storms had ripped away sheets of metal. Surely it had collapsed. Nature was a cruel mistress when no one was there to repair the damage after her assaults, or keep her encroaching growth at bay. The house was probably nothing more than a crumbling chimney jutting from a mound of kudzu or poison ivy by now. Probably not such a bad thing.

  The lane veered to the left, following the natural contour of the hill as it rose. The fog was thinner up here. Good. Lights shone below through the trees, softly glowing bubbles of yellow and pink and orange in the sea of gray. Belleville slumbering. Garraty wondered if he could see anything of the house from the road. If anything was left of it to see, that was. The driveway was somewhere around here, wasn’t it? He didn’t want to risk turning off the road to shine the lights up for a look-see in case the slow, soaking rain had turned the ancient gravel path to mush, but he wouldn’t mind getting a glimpse for old times’ sake if he could.

  Garraty craned his neck and risked a quick look up into the gray shrouding the hillside. Nada. All he could see were dim tree shapes, billowing black clouds in the mist. Oh, well. He hadn’t really expected to see anything anyway. What he should do was wait until a nice sunny day and take a drive up here to see what was left of the place. God knew his daytime calendar was open right now.

  Movement flashed in the headlights then, but before it even registered in the beer-soaked reflex center in his brain, the Prius hit something with a sickening bang and the passenger side bumped up and down as the car passed over it. Garraty heard it thumping on the undercarriage as the vehicle traveled forward, and then there was a second up and down babump as the rear tire went over whatever he’d hit.

  He stomped on the brakes hard enough to engage the anti-lock system, and the Prius ground to a stuttering, juddering halt in the road. His heart thumped in his chest the way it had during the overloud song in Titsville, and it felt like he might have shot a squirt of piss into his tighty whities. Wispy phantoms chased one another in the headlight beams. Garraty held the wheel in a death-grip, fingers locked so tightly around it they would ache the next morning, concentrating on his breathing and not the snapshot of a thin face and shock of brown hair he’d seen in that instant before the impact, the eyes that widened in mute surprise or the hands held up in impotent defense against the blue beast rushing out of the fog.

  He’d hit a boy of maybe eleven or twelve, certainly no more than thirteen.

  For a moment Garraty considered stepping on it, just putting the pedal to the metal and getting the fuck out of Dodge. But what if they could figure out who hit the kid? He’d seen enough TV shows to know enterprising lab technicians could work all sorts of miracles with the tiniest bit of evidence. Yes, your honor, we were able to identify the Prius owned by the defendant from this single flake of blue paint found in the victim’s hair. Hit and run was a big fucking deal. The kind of thing they’d lock you up and throw away the key for. Garraty shut the engine off.

  For a moment he sat in the darkness with his eyes closed, wai
ting for his heart to slow down. Hoping the mess wasn’t too bad. Hoping that maybe the kid was okay, that he was sitting back there on the side of the road with a big shit-eater of a grin on his face for being such a dumbass and running out in front of a car without looking. What the hell was a kid doing out at this time of night, anyway? Nothing good, that was for goddamn sure. Garraty had been a kid once. His mother always said nothing good happens after midnight, and wasn’t this the fucking pickle on the shit sandwich that proved it? The little bastard practically asked to be run down. Maybe he’d learn a lesson from this.

  Garraty reached over the seat and felt around in the back for the emergency car kit. Tina had assembled it for him two years ago after he’d had a blowout during a rare Alabama winter storm and got caught completely flat-footed. He’d ended up changing the tire on the side of the highway outside Huntsville while snow and sleet fell from leaden skies and the cars passing by slung gray slush on him in freezing sheets. Tina clucked and called him poor baby and went on the internet, where she found some message board run by doomsday preppers with all kinds of emergency planning information. Garraty had laughed when she handed him the red nylon bag, but right now he was pretty goddamn thankful.

  His fingers touched the slick fabric and he located the canvas handle. The bag clanked when he set it on the seat next to the beer and unzipped it. He rooted around in it until he found the Maglite, then opened the door and stepped out of the Prius. As he walked along the side of the road, the circle of light jittered on the asphalt before him. Rain dripped from soggy branches of the trees, and something scurried furtively through the undergrowth on the uphill side. Snapdragon was in bloom somewhere near. The air was thick with the heady scent of the funereal flowers. He could see the kid ahead, a crumpled heap half on, half off the road. Not moving. He resisted the urge to shine the flash on the boy—on the body, his mind whispered insistently—as he approached.