And, of course, there was also the sound of Lyon screaming.
An hour later the police were all over Lyon’s house, snapping pictures and taking measurements, asking questions and getting few answers. But mostly just pulling their peaked caps off and rubbing their eyes, trying to get the sight of what they’d seen out of their heads.
Specks pushed past the big cop at the door and Weams followed right behind him, right into the slaughterhouse. It was bad. It was more than bad. Besides the shattered glass on the floor and the ragged curtains billowing in, there was a lot of blood. Looked like someone had butchered a steer in there. But what both Specks and Weams saw was the form on the couch with the bloody sheet thrown over it. The sheet had slipped off Lyon’s face and it was marble-white, eyes staring up at something nobody else could see.
The bad thing was the sheet ended right where Lyon’s legs should have been.
“Where… where are they?” Specks said in an empty voice.
“Can’t find ’em,” one of the detectives admitted.
Specks looked around—through the debris and drying pools of blood, the clods of black earth on the floor—like maybe he might catch a glimpse of them. Shoved under the couch or tucked behind a chair.
The cops started hammering them with questions and Specks said he was just a friend, didn’t know anything more about it. Weams told them about the phone call. About Lyon saying something was scratching outside the door. But that’s all he said. He wasn’t about to go farther. Not then. Not yet.
The cops seemed to believe them, but they studied the two men, gave them some funny looks. Maybe they saw how pale they were, how they shook, the way they fumbled their words and started at the slightest sound like they were expecting something. But Specks and Weams had just lost a friend and that’s all it was, that’s all it could be.
Outside, Weams had to fight not to get sick. That metallic, sour stench of blood was all over him, he couldn’t seem to get it out of his head.
“You know, you know what this means—”
“Shut up,” Specks warned him. “Just shut the hell up.”
The coroner’s people were examining the broken window in depth by flashlight. With forceps, they were pulling strands of something from the shards of glass still in the frame. Looked like strands of tissue.
An old lady was standing under a tree with a cop. She was a slight thing with a wrinkle for every year. Looked like a good wind would send her sailing over rooftops and trees like a sheet blown from a line.
“I saw something,” she was saying. “I don’t know how you’d exactly describe it.”
“Do your best,” the cop said.
“A big white monkey,” she said.
The cop just looked at her. “Ma’am?”
“Yes, sir. That’s what I thought. It was hopping down the walk like a monkey, like one of those apes in a circus, you see? Using its hands to push it along, swinging its body and slapping along with its hands… but it was white… funny…”
“How so?” the cop said and you could see he thought it was all a waste of time. Christ, pink elephants next.
She hugged herself against the night breeze. “Well, sir, it didn’t seem to have a head nor legs, just those long arms and a big, fat body.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, I believe it had a tattoo on its chest.”
On the way out to the shack in Specks’ Buick, Weams spilled it, said those words, hated the taste of them on his tongue: “We didn’t do it, Lyon and me. We didn’t cut Zaber’s arms off, we just threw him in the pit. That’s what we did. That’s exactly what we did.”
“Should’ve known better than to trust you idiots.”
“Yes,” Weams agreed, “you should’ve.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Weams chose his words carefully… carefully as he could. “Me and Lyon were amateurs, Specks. You knew that. You damn well knew that. Not like you.”
“Oh, you think I do that shit all the time?”
“No, but we saw you. You were experienced. You knew exactly what to do.”
Specks sighed, lit a cigarette. “Maybe I did. Maybe I spent too much of my youth with the wrong people. What of it? I’m not a fucking psychopath. What I did, I did for us all. You boys agreed. You’re as deep in this shit as I am, Weams. Don’t you dare forget that.”
Weams didn’t think he ever would.
Specks pulled the Buick off the highway, onto a gravel road that turned into a rutted dirt track a few miles down the line. Weams didn’t say a thing, he just remembered it all, watched the headlights limning those big twisted trees that hung out over the road. He didn’t say a word, but he thought plenty.
“All right,” Specks said when they reached the field. “This is it.”
Weams stuck tight to him as they followed that meandering trail through the dark, brooding forest. There was terror in him, hot and white and knotted, but not for what they might find, but for what mind find them.
The shack was still there, still waiting.
Then the lantern was lit and Specks and he began yanking up the boards. They didn’t bother being careful this time, they went at it all-out, splitting the boards and tossing them aside until there was a circular, rough-hewn hole through the plank floor. Weams held the lantern down there, his blood gone to a cool, gray sludge. The dirt of the grave was undisturbed. Or so it seemed.
“Keep that lantern steady,” Specks said, taking a shovel and giving his 9mm to Weams.
He began pawing through that moist, rank soil, flinging shovelfuls aside wildly, not caring if he sank the blade into Zaber’s corpse, not caring much about anything but proving to Weams how very wrong he was.
Four feet down there was nothing.
“We didn’t go any deeper than that,” Weams told him.
“You must have,” Specks said, sweat streaking down his dirty face. Weams felt something happening, something that made him instinctively cringe away from that hole as if a snake was going to show itself or a tiger was going to come vaulting out with gnashing teeth. “Specks, dear Christ, get out of there, get—”
Too late.
Specks looked down into the pit where his feet were, saw they were slowly sinking into the bottom of the grave. He couldn’t seem to work them loose. He let out a shriek, thrashing and fighting and finally falling over. And by then he had sunk to his knees in that rippling, bubbling soil. And he was still going down, like a man drawn into quicksand.
“Help me!” he cried. “Help me, Weams!”
Weams took hold of one of his hands, then let go.
“What’re you doing, Weams?” Specks whined, tears running down his face, drool flying from his contorted mouth. “Help me, for godsake! Help me! Help me! Get me outta here! Something’s got me, something’s pulling me down—”
Weams’ eyes were huge and wet. “Tell me, Specks. Tell me about you and Lila. Tell me about what you have with my wife.”
But Specks was beyond simple conversation. He had sunk to the waist now, screaming and moaning and gibbering and all that did was sink him farther. Sink him until two bloated white arms rose from the muddy earth, pudgy fingers taking hold of him and dragging him down and down. But before his mouth was filled with soil, Weams heard what he said.
Heard it very well.
Zaber, he’d said. It was Zaber, not me.
Lila came slinking home an hour before dawn.
Sneaking, stealing lightly, her high-heels in hand, she slipped through the front door and Weams was waiting for her. He had Specks’ 9mm and he pointed it straight at her.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.