A voice on the end said, “Liz? Liz? Liz, are you there?”
It was a voice that Emily had not heard in a long time. A very sweet, patient voice that belonged to Grandma Reese, Mother’s mother. Emily had always liked grandma whenever she came to town which was only a few times a year. Usually at Christmas and sometimes in the summer. She would always bring Emily gifts.
Emily liked to hear her voice, yet that emptiness inside herself would not let her feel happy or sad, just coldly indifferent.
“Liz? Liz, are you there?”
“Hello, Grandma,” Emily said.
And on the other end there was a gasping and a great commotion as the phone was dropped and grandma began to wail in a high, unnerving voice.
Emily hung up.
She did not like those kind of sounds.
Afterwards, Emily went back to playing dress up. She put on a white sparkling lace gown that looked very much like her burial dress. She wore a floppy straw hat with a big flower on it like rich ladies sometimes did at Kentucky Derby. Pearls and bracelets and long white gloves. In the mirror, she thought she looked very nice even though she was all swollen-up and blackening, worms crawling under her skin and flies covering her face. Her left eye had fallen out of the socket the day before and she could not find it. A great flap of skin hung from cheek now and you could see the skull beneath. When she grinned, her smile was all yellow teeth and gray gums, her lips shriveled away.
It was Saturday and on Saturday afternoons, Emily and Missy Johnson used to go play in the vacant lot across the alley. There were stands of trees to every side and it was like their very own kingdom. They liked to play very dramatic games as all little girls did. Usually, they would pretend they were sisters and their parents had died in a plane crash and they were hiding from the bad people who wanted to kill them. Or they would pretend one of them was dying from an incurable disease and the other was a doctor or a nurse trying to save them. But in the end, the sick one always died. And that was funny, because now one of them had really died.
Out the window, Emily saw Missy riding her bike down the alley. She had her plastic Barbie case with her. You opened it up and it was a little salon with mirrors and a wardrobe, lots of little dresses and shoes. She was going over to the vacant lot.
Mother had warned Emily that she was never to leave the house, but since she was all dressed up, she decided it would be okay. She went out into the backyard and right away Mr. Miller’s beagle down the alley began to howl. Emily walked over towards the vacant lot, her high heels clicking on the concrete. She saw Missy there. Missy had her back to her. She had her Barbie case open and was singing as she dressed Skipper and Stacey.
Emily came up behind her like she always had. “Boo,” she said.
Missy turned and screamed like Emily had never heard her scream before. She scrawled away on all fours and ran, screaming the whole while. Emily called out to her, but she wouldn’t stop.
Emily went back home.
On the way, Mr. Miller drove down the alley in his car and she waved to him. He just kept staring… staring so much, in fact, that he drove his car right through his own fence.
The neighborhood was busy after that.
Cars drove up and down the street and a lot of them were police cars. Lots of people gathered outside the house with Mr. Miller. Missy’s mom and dad were there, too. By the time Mother came home, there were people everywhere and lots of policemen in uniforms. They tried to stop Mother, but she ran from them and came inside.
“What did you do?” she said to Emily. “What did you do?”
“I went outside,” Emily said.
Mother locked the doors as fists pounded on them, wanting to be let in. There was a lot of shouting and yelling as night came.
“We have to get out of here,” Mother said. “We have to go somewhere safe.”
“The cemetery,” Emily said.
“Yes, that’s where we’ll go.”
But then there was more pounding at the door and finally something kept ramming it until it came off its hinges. Then the police came charging in and Mother ran right at them, screaming and fighting.
“Run, Emily!” she called out. “Run!”
So Emily did.
She ran out the back way and almost made it to the vacant lot when she heard the barking of big dogs. Men were running through the neighborhood with flashlights. Emily went into the vacant lot and hid in the grass. She dug up Mrs. Lee’s baby where she had hidden it in the dirt under the big rock, brushed the crawly things off it. Then the men came and put flashlights on her, blinding her.
“Dear God in heaven,” one of the policemen said.
Emily shook her headless baby at them and hissed, showing her long teeth.
The dogs that were with them were howling and baying and snapping at their handlers. The men let them go. The dogs came right at Emily, sinking their teeth into her, tearing open her dress-up clothes and biting free flaps of flesh and crunching bones. Lots of people cried out, but they didn’t come any closer. The dogs chewed and rent and split Emily, yanking off her limbs which kicked and clawed in the grass, fingers looking for something to grab. The dogs did not stop. They were mad and frothing and snapping and biting.
Emily kept screaming until there was nothing left to scream with.
Then there was just silence and the growling of dogs and people whimpering.
So fifteen days after Emily came out of her grave, what was left of her was shoveled back in there again.
DIS-JOINTED
It was raining when they murdered Pauly Zaber.
And it was coming down in buckets and pails when they dragged his corpse from the trunk of Specks’ Buick. Zaber had been a big man and he made a big corpse. Wrapped in sackcloth, a lot of it, he was roped up like a steer. Getting him in the trunk was tough business and getting him out was something else again.
“Just grab hold,” Specks said. “He’s dead for godsake, he won’t bite you.”
But maybe Weams and Lyon didn’t quite believe that. Sure, they’d helped Specks murder Zaber and their hands were just as red as his, but now handling the body after it had been cooling an hour… there was just something obscene about that.
Lyon reached in there, taking hold of the ropes, started yanking along with Specks, drawing the dead man up. “I’m doing my bit,” he said, raindrops beading on his face. “Tell Weams to do his.”
Weams was going to tell him to go to hell, maybe tell both of them that, but instead he reached into the blackness of the trunk, started pulling, feeling that awful weight shifting under the tarp. He kept his lips pressed in a white line and he wasn’t sure if that was because of what he might say or to keep himself from screaming.
Because that was a real possibility.
“On the count of three, girls,” Specks said. “Up… and… out…”
It was nasty work.
The rain hammering down, the ground gone to sluicing gray mud. The trees rising up around them black and gnarled, ribboned with crawling shadows that were viscid and horribly alive.
Weams kept imagining that maybe Zaber was still alive, that three rounds from a 9mm hadn’t been enough to put that pig down dead. That under the tarp, maybe he was awake. Maybe he was thinking things.
Zaber made a big corpse, all right. A huge, porcine man whose idea of eating light had been a porterhouse smothered in clam linguine. He tipped the scales at 400 pounds. A big, meaty fellow with eyes just as black as coal dust and a vicious temper. People said he once ate a guy that didn’t pay up on a loan… but you couldn’t believe everything you heard. There was only one thing for sure about Pauly Zaber: he was a loanshark and if you didn’t make your payments, he would hurt you.