“You mother fucker!”
He grabbed the man by the shoulders and heaved him back until he was off Josh completely. With one final, straining motion, he shoved the man until the body sat awkwardly but upright against the wall of the grave. Josh’s father rested his hands on his knees and breathed heavily and painfully as he looked down at his only son. He grunted with anger and turned his attention to the man, and my mother could see the rage disappear from his eyes as something else replaced it. He staggered back a step. And then another.
“Oh God… Oh God. No. No, please God. Please God no! No! No!”
In a struggling but powerful movement, he lifted and pushed the corpse of the man completely out of the ground, and as he did this, there was the distinct sound of glass first hitting and then rolling against wood. It was a bottle. He picked it up and absently handed it to my mother.
It was ether.
“Oh, Josh.” He sobbed as he cradled his son. “My boy…my baby boy. Why is there so much blood? What did he do to you?!”
As my mother looked at the man who now lay facing upwards, a chill came over her as she realized that she was facing, for the first time, the person who had haunted our lives for over a decade. Everything about our lives had changed since this person had entered it, and she had lost so much sleep thinking about this man. When she pictured him, whether in waking life or a dream, he was always evil and always terrifying; the cries of Josh’s father seemed to confirm her worst fears. But as she stared at his face, she thought that this didn’t look like who she imagined at all — this was just… a man.
As she looked upon his frozen expression, it actually looked serene. The corners of his lips were turned up only slightly; she saw that he was smiling. This wasn’t the expected smile of a maniac from a film or horror story; it wasn’t the smile of a demon, or the smile of a fiend. This was the smile of contentment or satisfaction. It was a smile of bliss.
It was a smile of love.
When she looked down from his face, she saw a tremendous wound on his neck from where the skin had been ripped out; she realized that this wound must have been the source of the blood that stained Josh’s face and the wood upon which his head rested. Initially, she was relieved by the realization that the blood had not been Josh’s. Perhaps he had suffered less, and in a strange way, this small comfort amidst the madness set her slightly at ease. She looked to Josh’s father who sat in the coffin, still holding his son to his chest, and wondered if she should tell him; she wondered if this tiny consolation was worth distracting him from his own thoughts, whatever they might be.
She drew her eyes away for a moment to think, and they lingered on the scraps of wood that lay scattered to one side of the hole — many of them still connected to a large, brown blanket. She recognized that these pieces of wood must have been the top of the box that Josh’s father had torn away before calling her. Her drifting eyes and wandering thoughts both suddenly focused on what she saw in the debris, and she realized that she had been wrong to hope for any comfort now, in this place. Her mind raced to make excuses for this object’s existence, but she was too tired to listen to anything but the truth anymore. She stared at the metal handle that was screwed into one of the boards of wood. She brought a hand up to her mouth and whispered, almost as if she was afraid to remind the world of what had happened.
“They were alive.”
Josh must have bitten the man’s neck in a desperate attempt to get free, and although the man had died, Josh wasn’t strong enough to move him. When my mother realized this, she began to cry at the thought of how long he might have laid there and how he must have felt. She shuddered at the thought that he wouldn’t have even been able to see in that dark place.
She crouched down beside the man and looked through his pockets for some kind of identification, but she only found a piece of paper. On it was a stick figure drawing of a man holding hands with a small boy, and next to the boy were initials.
She told me that the initials were mine. She asked me if I understood what it might mean, and I lied to her and said that I did not.
As Josh’s father carried his son out of the grave, my mom slid the piece of paper into her pocket and stood up. He was muttering that his son’s hair had been dyed, but he wasn’t talking to my mother; it seemed almost as if he had forgotten that she was there. When she looked at Josh, she understood what his father was saying — Josh’s hair was now dark brown, though it looked almost black as it clung to itself, cemented by blood.
Josh’s dad delicately laid his boy on the soft dirt and began gently pressing his hands against his son’s pants to feel his pockets. My mother noticed that Josh was oddly dressed; his clothes were all far too small for a boy his size. As the father applied pressure to his son’s left pocket, there was a crinkle. Carefully, he retrieved a folded piece of paper from Josh’s pocket and slowly unfolded it, not knowing what it might be. As he was returning the paper to its original shape, a small key fell from its folds and onto the dirt. He picked it up and looked at it as if he expected it to say something to him. After a moment, he pushed it into his front pocket before returning his attention to the paper.
He studied it but was vexed. With no immediately meaningful information to be gained from it, he handed the piece of paper to my mother. She nervously accepted it, but she didn’t recognize it either.
When I asked her what it was, she told me that it was a map, and I felt my heart shatter. Josh was finishing the map — that must have been his idea for my birthday present. He had resumed the expedition on his own. That was our first great adventure, and he had decided to finish it, for me…for us. Tears began streaming out of my eyes as I learned this, and I found myself desperately hoping that he hadn’t been taken while working on it. Despite everything that had happened, he had kept the map in his pocket for almost three years.
She heard Josh’s father grunt angrily and looked to see him pushing the man’s body back into the ground. As he walked back toward the machine that had found this spot for him, he put his hand on a canister of gasoline and paused with his back toward my mother.
“You should go.”
“I’m so sorry… Is there anything I can do?”
“It’s not your fault… It was me… I did this.”
“You can’t think like that. There was nothi—”
“I did this!” he roared.
There was silence for a long time. He seemed to be searching for the right words, or maybe he was just searching for a decision about whether he wanted to say them at all. Finally, he continued, his voice flat with almost no emotion at all.
“About a month ago, I was cleaning up the site on the new development, a block over, when a guy approached me. He asked if I wanted to make some extra money. Well, with my wife not working, I’d take just about any job, so I asked him about it. He said that some kids had dug a bunch of holes on his property, and he offered me $100 to fill them in. I told him that was no problem; just tell me where and when. He said that he wanted to take some pictures for the insurance company first, but if I came back after 8:00 P.M. the next day, that would be fine; he said I’d have no problem finding the holes.