With the pipe gone his sense of smell began sharper with each breath, and now the dead-sweet smell was much stronger. Not distant at all and…not a dead scent, really. More like sick-sweet. Earthy and rotting and somehow—he fished for the word—vital.
“Balls,” he said, and decided that he’d had enough of moonlit strolls. He had walked the fenceline for half a mile and it ringed his property, but if he cut across the fallow field he could be home in just a couple of minutes. He looked due east to where the lighted windows of his home gave the house its own definition against the utter blackness of the fields and forest beyond. Those yellow rectangles had always looked homey to him, warm and inviting and—even he had to admit it—safe, but now those tiny dots of light seemed dwarfed by the immense darkness and as he looked at them he thought he had never seen anything look as lonely.
Carby started out across the field, looking down as he went to pick a path through the shadows on the ground. It wasn’t until he was a third of the way across that he saw the mound, and it stopped him in his tracks. The hump of dirt wasn’t big, no more than three feet high at the crest, but it was there and he sure as hell hadn’t made it. He hadn’t done any digging in this field all year.
“What the hell is this shit?” There was a small flashlight on his keychain for finding key slots on the fence locks, and he fished in his jeans for his keys and then flicked it on. It was so dark out that the tiny flash threw a pretty good beam and Carby played it over the mound. It was maybe eight feet long, but only a yard high in the middle and tapering off pretty quickly toward each end. The dirt was rough and chunky like it had been hand dug, not clean packed the way a shovel would have done. He shone the beam all along it and then swept the area around the mound. He saw two things that caused gooseflesh to pebble him from feet to hairline. All around the mound were footprints. Clear prints that went this way and that, sometimes standing alone, sometimes overlapping. City shoes with smooth soles, the complex tread-pattern of sneakers, and the rippled ridges of work boots. He counted five separate pairs. That was the first thing, and it froze him to the spot.
The second thing he saw made his pores open and burst with cold sweat. Just beyond the mound, maybe ten feet farther on into the darkness, was a second mound. He moved the light around and saw a third. And a fourth. All of them were about the same length, the same height. All made up of hand-churned clods of dirt. Then he saw the fifth mound. It was not as high as the others, nor as rounded on top. In fact the top of this mound was ragged and the sides had caved back from the crest. Carby swallowed a lump the size of a corncob. His flash beam played over the uneven dirt and even without drawing any closer to it he could see that this mound was open.
Open was a strange thought, and Carby took a step closer, examining the mound, trying to understand them all, but trying to understand this one more because this one bothered him more. This one looked even more like a…
Grave?
He didn’t even want to think that word, but there it was. The thing looked like a grave. “Oh, shit,” he said, and a thousand thoughts flew around in his head like hysterical crows in a lightning-struck tree. Christ! What if Boyd had killed someone else and had come out here to the ass-end of town to hide the body? No, bodies! Terror had him by the throat. What if Boyd had been killing folks all day and had buried them here on the farm. On his farm! Mary, Mother of God, that would be the end of things. No one would ever buy crops from a farm where bodies had been buried. This was the end of the farm, sure as cows shit brown. This was the end of him. Blinking sweat out of his eyes, Carby took a step closer, and then another, crouching to see along the beam of the flashlight, expecting to see a dead hand sticking up out of the earth like a stand of asparagus, hoping he wouldn’t see that and yet weirdly fascinated. He was bent at the waist, head bowed, peering at the mound from four feet away when the earth moved.
Carby froze as if sprayed with liquid nitrogen, his eyes bugging wide. The shotgun was something stupid and forgotten in his hands as he stared at the movement, still locked in the awful fascination and at the same time not really understanding what he was seeing. The mound of dirt trembled—and Carby had the fleeting thought that it was loose fill stirred by the wind—but then the farmer in him realized that the wind was blowing the wrong way for dirt to fall toward him. He watched, wide-mouthed, as the dirt fluttered down, running in dry rivulets as the whole mound began to shudder. A large clod broke off and fell right by his toe. He picked it up. It was ordinary dirt, of course, loosely packed and cool. Another clod fell out of the mound, and another. Then one large clump, right near the top, seemed to lift. Carby stared at it, still unable to explain or understand what he was seeing. The heavier clump rose, standing almost on edge, and then broke under its own weight and the individual pieces toppled off in all directions.
Carby straightened and leaned over to try and see what had disturbed the dirt. Was it a gopher in there? A rabbit? He truly could not understand it. He leaned close and shined the flashlight into the hole created by the large clod. The weak yellow light of the flash illuminated the hole with a splash of light, glimmering on small pieces of smooth stone in the soil, glinting off a fragment of an old Coke bottle, reflected redly off the eyes of the face in the mound.
Carby let out a cry and jumped back. He backpedaled and fell down. It had been a face in there! The thought horrified him. Had someone…buried a body out here? The thought made him gag. Was that it? Boyd had murdered someone and carted their body out here, burying it in his fallow field. He looked around wildly and saw the other mounds.
“My God…” he whispered. Five of them. That cop-killing son of a bitch had come out here and buried five bodies in his field. “Jesus God Almighty.” He reached for the fallen flashlight and wiped the dirt off the lens, then swung the beam back to the mound, and all thinking abruptly stopped. His heart nearly stopped as well. He was aware only of sensation: the constriction in his chest, another hard lump in his throat, an iciness sweeping down his legs. His skin crawled. Carby had always heard that expression, but until that moment he had never actually experienced the grisly sensation of the muscles under his skin knotting and writhing as his body chemistry misfired. His glands discharged microfluids into his system, his nerve endings sent out signals triggered by shock, and the adrenaline discharge made the hair on his scalp ripple like wheat in a cold wind.
The dead body in the mound was struggling to sit up. It pushed dirt away from its mouth, pushed at the heavy clods, clawed at the soft soil for purchase until it sat erect. Then it turned a dirt-smeared white face at Carby and smiled. Carby screamed once, a shrill, tearing scream of absolute horror, and ran.
He had no idea when he got up, or how. He had no thought at all. He just ran, the shotgun in his hands as forgotten and useless as the flashlight that now lay in the dirt behind him. A quarter of a mile away the lights of his house beckoned with welcome and safety. In the house there were door locks and a telephone. Inside the house were his son and daughter. Inside his house was his wife, Lily. They were all farm people, they all knew how to handle guns and every gun in the house was loaded. In the house was one big, mean sonovabitching German shepherd. In the yard beside the house there was a car. The walls of the house, even in shadows, looked tall and strong and safe. If he could only get there, get inside. Gaither Carby ran as fast as his thick legs could carry him. He never once looked back; he never paused, never slowed, even when his bladder released and warm piss ran down his legs. He ran until that seized-up heart in his chest began to hammer again and he ran until lights burst in his eyes like fireworks. He ran as if his life depended on it.