Chain Letter (41 page)

“Is it loaded, Joany?” Sasha asked.

Joan swallowed. “I know you,” she said.

“You’re going to know me better,” Sasha said. “You’ve done what you were supposed
to do.”

Joan trembled. She stammered. “I didn’t hurt anybody.”

Sasha laughed. “You just keep telling yourself that. Get out of here, worm. I’ll come
for you later.” Sasha shut the door in her face. She turned to Tony. “Open the bag.”

Tony searched inside the bag. If he hadn’t just thrown up, he would have done so then.
Joan had brought her dad’s gun, all right. It could even have been loaded—he hadn’t
checked. Joan had brought it over with the trigger pulled back.

With a bloody severed finger.

“Brenda,” Tony breathed. The gun fell from his hand onto the floor. It was fortunate
it didn’t go off. The finger bounced loose. Sasha reached down and retrieved them
both. She pocketed the finger and flipped open the revolver chamber. It was fully
loaded.

“It’s hers,” Sasha cackled. “Oh, Tony, we are going to have fun tonight. Hurry, read
your small service. I’m going to help you perform it.”

Tony reached into the bag again and withdrew a crumpled purple paper. He read in the
shaft of white moonlight that shone through the window beside the front door. He didn’t
have to decode it.

Blow Alison’s brains out.

He dropped the note in horror. “I can’t do that.”

Sasha was amused. “Why not? Do you know what your dear Alison is doing right now?
She’s on her way with her new boyfriend to dig up Neil’s body. She’s going to turn
it over to the police. She’s going to put you in jail, Tony.”

Tony put his hands to his ears. “Stop it! She wouldn’t do that to me!”

“She’s doing it as we speak.” Sasha pulled his hands down and placed the revolver
back in his palm. “You’re going to have to kill her. If you don’t kill her, she’ll
destroy you.”

“But Ali—”

“Is a whore,” Sasha said, sweeping in closer so that she was practically whispering
in his ear. But the funny thing—he wasn’t sure if she was speaking at all. It seemed
as if her thoughts were simply inside his head. That they were the same as his thoughts.
Yes, that was the way of it.

“She’s a whore, and she’s spent the night screwing her new boyfriend and laughing
about what an asshole you are. Now she’s digging up Neil’s body so that she can put
you in jail so that she
can screw anybody she wants while you rot away.”

“Is this true?” Tony whispered, standing frozen in shock. This new voice was a revelation
to him. It knew so many secret things. It had been there for months, he suddenly realized.
Ever since Neil had died. It was funny how long it had taken for him to hear it clearly.

Sasha kissed his ear, briefly sticking her tongue inside, and said, “It’s all true,
my love.”

“I would have to see it for myself,” he heard himself say.

“You will see it. I promise you. We will go there now.”

“You will see your whore digging in the mud, and you will take the gun and put a hole
in her brain and bury her in the mud, and then you will be my love. We will make love
on her grave, and it will be like heaven.”

He turned his head toward her and felt her tongue slide over the side of his face.
Her eyes stared at him only inches away—twin mirrors hung in a featureless box. Her
smell was overpowering—the stink of the morgue.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“The Caretaker. The one who takes care of you.”

Sasha smiled. Her mouth did. But her eyes didn’t change. They never did. They just
watched. She was the Observer, the Recorder. She was also the Punisher. He had to
listen closely. The time had come for his punishment. She brushed her hand through
his hair. “I’m your greatest admirer,” she said.

A
lison found the spot without having to search. Even with the passage of time and the
dark, there were still visible signs: tire tracks on the road that the winter’s worst
had failed to obliterate, scraped rubber on the asphalt that would probably be there
at the turn of the century. But had there been no evidence, she would still have recognized
the place where Tony had lost control of the car. For her, as well as for Tony, it
was haunted, and her ghost, as well as the man’s, often walked there at night. Alison
and Eric parked their car, grabbed their shovels, and climbed outside.

“How far off the road did you bury him?” Eric asked. They wouldn’t need flashlights.
The moon shone in the sky like a cold sun.

“Fifty paces, straight out,” Alison said. “Come on.”

“What are we expecting to find?” Eric asked, following beside her as they strode through
the sticky tumbleweeds. Alison remembered the night it all began—the howling wind,
the dust in their eyes. That night the area was bathed in serenity—but it was as false
a peace as that achieved by suicide. They had given themselves a death sentence that
night a year ago when they had tried to pretend to the world they hadn’t killed anybody.
The irony of it all was that they hadn’t. The man had already been dead. If only they
had known!

“An empty grave,” Alison said.

“But if we don’t find anything, how can we be sure we weren’t digging in the wrong
spot?” Eric asked.

“I’ll know.”

“But what will the empty grave prove?” he persisted.

Alison stopped. “I tell you I met Neil up in the mountains.”

“But you said he had terminal cancer. Even if Tony lied about him dying, he would
have died shortly after.”

“He’s alive,” she said. “He died and he came back.”

“Alison, people don’t come back to life. It’s just fantasy.”

She raised her eyes to the big round moon. She thought of the enchanting love of the
stranger. She remembered the knives that had stabbed outward from the girl’s eyes.

“Maybe they come back as something other than people,” she said.

A minute later they entered a small clearing in the field of tumbleweeds and cacti.
The latter stood around them like
frozen sentinels. They had counted fifty paces, and here the soil was grossly uneven.
It should have been. Tony had buried Neil only two months earlier.

“This is the spot,” she said. “Neil’s body should be right beneath us.”

“I have to tell you I’m not looking forward to this,” Eric said.

“It doesn’t matter. You’re already in this too deep.” She pulled off her coat. The
evening was cool, but she knew that soon she’d be sweating. “Let’s get to work.”

They had bought their shovels at an all-night grocery store and were lucky that the
place had any shovels at all. But the quality of the shovels matched the quality of
drugstore jewelry. A couple of feet into the ground and the wooden handles were coming
loose from the metal spades. Eric muttered something about coming back later with
better equipment, but Alison tossed a shovelful on his pants. Keep digging, brother.

The soil was a mixture of dirt and sand. It was not tightly packed—another sign that
they had found the right spot. Working together they were down to five and a half
feet in a hurry. Eric raised his shovel for another deep plunge. Despite his complaints,
he was a hard worker, stronger than he looked. His spade stabbed into the earth, and
it made a squishing sound.

As if it had plunged into something that had once been alive.

“Oh, Christ,” he muttered. He was afraid to pull the shovel back out. He looked over
at Alison, who had suddenly frozen
in the moonlight at the sick sound. The two of them were standing head deep in the
grave.

Neil’s body is still here. He didn’t rise from the dead.

Was she wrong about Jane Clemens as well?

An arm swung out of the night above them.

It struck Eric hard across the head, and he crumpled at Alison’s feet.

She screamed, then all at once her scream choked in her throat.

Tony Hunt, her dearest love, accompanied by Jane Clemens, witch from hell, appeared
above her at the edge of the grave. Tony was carrying a baseball bat, and a black
revolver stuck out of his belt. He peered down at her with eyes cold as Arctic frost.
The girl beside him giggled.

“We won’t have to do any digging,” she said. “We’ll just cover her over. Both of them.”
She turned to Tony. “Do you believe me now?”

“It’s true,” he said softly, his voice void of any inflection.

The girl raised her arms above her head, stretching. “Kill her now, Tony. It’ll give
us that much longer to roll in the mud above her corpse.”

Tony dropped the bat and pulled the revolver out of his belt.

“Wait!” Alison cried. “Tony, listen to me. This girl has lied to you. She’s not who
she says she is.”

Tony aimed the gun at Alison. “I know that. But you aren’t who you say you are. You
lied to me. You’re a whore.”

“No!” Alison pleaded. “I never cheated on you. I just gave
Eric a quick hug and kiss good night. I would have done it right in front of you,
and you’d never have minded. Tony! Don’t kill me!”

“You did do it right in front of me,” Tony said grimly. He cocked the revolver. “Say
goodbye to life, Ali.”

“Say goodbye to life, Ali.”

The thought floated into Alison’s mind like an echo from a shout in a canyon. But
it wasn’t her own thought. It came from the outside. She recognized that fact immediately
because there was a harshness to it that pained her. She glanced up at Jane Clemens,
who was posed above the grave as if she were being photographed for a men’s magazine.
Jane had Tony under some kind of mental control. Alison said the first thing that
came to her mind, that belonged to her alone.

“Tony,” Alison said. “She made Neil do things the same way she is making you do things.
She’s the Caretaker.”

Tony’s aim wavered. The mention of Neil threw him for a second. He blinked and looked
around, seeming to discover for the first time where he was.

“Neil was the Caretaker,” Tony said, confused.

“No,” Alison said. “Neil was a pawn of the Caretaker. We’ve all been pawns. The girl
standing beside you is the Caretaker. Look at her. Does she look human?”

Tony glanced at the girl. She ignored him at first. She stopped posing and moved around
to the far side of the grave. She appeared unconcerned about Tony hesitating. Arrogance
dripped from her every pore.

“You can climb out of the hole if you want, Ali,” the girl said. “I won’t kick dirt
in your face.”

Alison boosted herself out of the hole with difficulty. She brushed the dirt off her
pants and stood upright. She was at the head of the grave, with the girl on her left
and Tony on her right. Tony looked as if his plug had been pulled. For the moment
the girl was not feeding him any evil thoughts. But Alison knew that moment wouldn’t
last.

Her shovel handle stood just below Alison’s right foot. She must have set her shovel
upright when Tony clobbered Eric.

“What’s your plan, Jane?” Alison asked the girl.

The girl chuckled at the question. “I am not Jane. Jane is in the box. Jane will be
staying in the box.”

“Is that what you’ve planned for all of us?” Alison asked.

The girl gestured to Eric—almost invisible at the bottom of the hole—and at her. “You
two are just props,” she said. “You’ll go no farther than this grave.”

“But Tony?” Alison asked.

The girl sighed with exaggerated pleasure. “Ah, Tony. He’s mine, all of him.” She
kicked a clod of dirt into the hole. “I’ll take his body to places he’s never imagined.”

Alison shuddered. “Will he still be inside it?”

The girl nodded her approval. “Very good, Alison. You see the greater goal. Another
Caretaker will come, and then another. An endless chain of them, you might say. There
are so many of us who want to come out and play.”

“And the chain letters?” Alison asked.

“An initiation process,” the girl said. “It prepares people to welcome us into their
hearts.”

“By damning their souls,” Alison said bitterly.

“Gee. That sounds impressive,” the girl said, mocking.

“And if they don’t get ready, they die?” Alison said.

The girl giggled. “There are worse things.”

“The box,” Alison said.

“You think you know about that,” the girl said, and now the tone of her voice became
serious, almost sad. “But you don’t. None of you know.” She was silent for a second,
introspective, then she shook herself and laughed lightly. She gestured to Tony. “Kill
her now, my love. Kill her slowly.”

“Kill her so that she suffers. Blow off bits of her at a time. I want to see her squirm
like a wounded animal.”

Tony raised his gun as if he were a stringed puppet. The barrel of the revolver shone
in the silver light of the moon. “Kill my love,” Tony mumbled. Once more he cocked
the hammer.

Then the girl let out a shout of surprise.

Alison twisted toward her to watch her topple into the hole.

Eric had grabbed the witch by the leg!

Tony’s aim wavered. The dull, confused expression returned to his face as he watched
his master fall into the grave. “Sasha?” he said.

Alison took advantage of the confusion. Bending down, she grabbed the top of the shovel
handle and snapped it into
her hands. Tony was just beginning to turn back to her when she let fly with a wide
sweeping arc. The spade caught the tip of his revolver and sent it flying into the
tumbleweed. Stunned, Tony turned to retrieve it. He must have been totally out of
it. He didn’t even see the blow coming that Alison delivered to the back of his skull.
It sent him to the ground.

In the grave the girl was wrestling with Eric. She was winning. Eric let out a howl
of pain as the girl stood up to climb out of the hole. Alison brought the shovel down
on the top of her head, too. The girl grunted and fell backward.

Now what?

Alison realized she had done as well as she was going to do with one shovel. Both
she and Eric had already lost the element of surprise. Tony was stunned, but recovering
swiftly. She could whack him again, but she was afraid of doing him serious damage.
The witch was already getting back up. Alison considered searching for the gun, but
it would take her at least a minute to find it in the weeds. She glanced down at Eric.
Whatever the girl had done to him, he wasn’t going to be of any help in the next ten
seconds. She had no choice, and she hated it. She had to take care of herself. She
had to make a run for it.