Highway 24 (5 page)

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Paul left his car on a side street two blocks from the cemetery. His skin tingled; his muscles twitched. He felt strangely invigorated to be on a mission. He carried the shoe in a plastic grocery bag along with a flashlight and shiny new hacksaw. The rain had stopped hours ago and the clouds departed, leaving the air cold and damp. A white sliver of moon glowed in the night sky. With his senses hyped, his footsteps on the sidewalk resounded like kettle drums. He switched to walking on the damp grass and wet leaves, fearful someone would report a prowler.

A rusted chain and padlock secured the main gate, but the fence did not fully enclose the cemetery. Paul slunk along the chain link barrier toward the brick building with the yellow windows. He crawled in the shadows below the caretaker’s hovel, expecting a face to darken a window or the door to open. Once he rounded the fence, he doubled back through the graves and stone monuments that loomed darkly in his path. When he reached the road, he treaded softly, conscious of the rocks grinding underfoot. He looked back toward the yellow windows but saw no movement, no bearded face peering through the grime. Following the lane, he hastened toward the darkest reaches of the graveyard.

His rattled nerves shook at the sense of a formless presence, rising from the row after row of graves he passed. A few days ago he would have dismissed the sensation as a hyperactive imagination, but he no longer doubted the supernatural—how could he—and lurched into a puddle at the crack of a twig. He was trespassing on hallowed ground, preparing to commit a desecration. He was either a crazy vandal or a saint ushering a lost soul to the afterlife.

The tomb glowed in the moonlight, visible from the end of the lane, out of place among the rows of squat stones around it. He quickened his pace to a trot, eager to put an end to the whole business. The cold seeped into his bones, and his fingernails cut his palm from gripping the plastic bag. His breath came in shallow bursts. He stared at the crypt entrance, imagining what might lay behind the door: an animated Amanda, her skin pale from death and eyes ablaze, waiting, a crouching spider at the corner of a web. He resisted the temptation to drop the shoe and bolt for the gate.

“You’re not a quitter,” he told himself. “You’re not going to run. That’s what the old man would do.”

He dropped the bag and knelt beside it in the damp grass to tear the hacksaw from its cardboard wrapping. The moisture soaked through to his knees. He turned the flashlight on the mausoleum.

From the corner of his eye, he spied a pant leg and spun around to face his stalker.

“What the hell! What are you doing here?” Paul shone the light in the preacher’s face, but the man did not blink.

“I thought you might need my help. I know a thing or two about locks.” He nodded toward the padlock that secured the door.

“Did you follow me?”

“No, I’ve been waiting for you.”

Paul thought through the preacher’s statement. “Who are you?”

“I am who I am. Who are you?”

Paul closed his eyes and shook his head to clear the illusion, but the preacher remained as real as ever.

“Come along,” the preacher said. “We don’t have much time. The caretaker is already suspicious.”

Paul grabbed the bag and followed the preacher onto the porch. “How do you know the caretaker is suspicious?”

“I know many things about many people.”

The preacher’s answers troubled rather than reassured him. The man had a nebulous quality, something not human, which set Paul on edge and defied explanation. The preacher didn’t exude malevolence, but Paul feared him all the same, a natural mistrust of the unknown or uncanny. He motioned toward the lock. “I brought a hacksaw to cut that.”

“I don’t think we’ll need it.” The preacher pulled two thin sticks of metal from his pocket. “These old padlocks aren’t much of a challenge. Cutting will take too long and you’ll destroy the chain. We aren’t here to destroy.”

Paul illuminated the lock while the preacher set to work on the mechanism, poking the lock’s innards and turning the metal sticks until the lock clicked in surrender. The preacher dropped the lock and chain in a pile on the porch. The door screeched and squealed when the preacher pulled it open. Paul cringed, certain the sound would echo across the town and bring its collective vengeance crashing down on him. An owl hooted.

Not once did the preacher smile or flaunt any sense of self-satisfaction. He stepped aside, motioning Paul to enter the dark chamber. Paul hesitated, his mind reeling, wondering if he could trust him, wondering if the preacher would slam the door and secure it. A just punishment indeed and a likely reason for preserving the lock. The preacher and Amanda acted in league, he speculated, and the shoe served as bait in an elaborate scheme of spectral retribution.

“Where did you learn to pick a lock?”

“If you know the laws of nature, nothing is too difficult.”

Paul struggled for another line of questions to delay entering Amanda’s home.

“I believe this is something you must do yourself,” said the preacher.

Paul shone his light into the tomb, across the concrete floor. The interior stirred memories of his family’s unfinished cellar with its dank smells and legions of spiders.

“Are you afraid?” asked the preacher.

“Not if we go in together.” Paul hoped this bargain would keep him safe.

“Very well.”

The preacher passed the threshold first with Paul close behind. He kept himself between the preacher and the door as he shone his light around the interior walls of gray plaster. Cracks spread out from the corners and widened to gouges where chips had fallen. A musty smell hung in the air like fog on a still morning. On the floor, their shoes left wet tracks in a layer of dust. No one had disturbed this place for more than a decade. At one time this building had been new, but now it moldered, repaired only as long as the memory of its occupants persisted.

Paul pointed his light at the facing wall, a matrix of rectangular receptacles to be filled and plugged for eternity or whatever that meant in the context of human life. All but three, the ones in the right-hand corner, contained a link in the ancestral line with a brass plate on the stone cover to commemorate the occupant.

“There she is.” Paul illuminated the brass plate listing her particulars—name, birth, and death. He recalled her obituary. Those inconsequential bare facts said nothing about her person. The tomb’s narrow confines encroached from all directions, awakening his latent claustrophobia and a sudden urge to flee. “Should I leave the shoe here? In one of the empty ones?” He strove to control his trembling voice.

The preacher shook his head. “You’ve come this far.”

“It’s sealed.”

“Not completely.” The preacher retrieved a pen knife from his pocket and scratched the seam around the cover’s perimeter, delving deeper with each pass until he pushed the blade through and his knuckles met the stone.

“You’ve broken into a tomb before, have you?”

The preacher chuckled as he pressed with his fingers on alternate sides of the cover. “The masterful trick is to break out of a tomb.”

Break out? Was that a grave robber’s idea of a joke?
The cover loosened and pivoted. Stone scraped against stone. The gritty sound of grinding, like two millstones working, filled the tomb.

Or perhaps, Paul thought, the preacher meant to prepare him for finding an empty grave.
No.
She’s there.
She has to be
. He couldn’t decide which would be worse, finding her or not finding her.

The preacher placed the cover on the floor. The light from Paul’s torch reflected off a head of chestnut hair. She lay on a wooden pallet with a lip that enclosed her form, much as the chalk outline on the black road had done seventeen years before.

“Are you ready?”

Paul nodded. To see a body in decay, misshapen and pocked from the work of worms and beetles would have turned his stomach, but to see her body clean and unblemished, glowing in his spotlight, horrified him.

“Help me pull her out. There is nothing to fear, my friend. Nothing at all.”

Paul followed the preacher’s lead. The pallet slid without resistance. Paul focused on the plaque covering the receptacle above Amanda’s. Though his eyes read and reread the name and dates, he had no idea what it said. As her body emerged from its tomb, he noted the changes in color out of the corner of his eye, from chestnut hair to pale skin to bright pink. “They buried her in that dress,” he said. “They picked her off the pavement and entombed her, like cutting down a cherry tree in bloom.”

As her feet emerged, Paul shuddered. Only one foot was shod. Why the sight of that bare foot unnerved him, he could not fathom. He had expected a missing shoe, a bare foot, the one peeking out beneath her dress on the road. Seeing her foot brought the horrific reality of this whole nightmare to the forefront in a series of mental images as sharp as his own memories. He saw Amanda’s father scouring the fields and ditches at the accident scene to find the shoe, his eyes tearing in the wind. Amanda’s mother remained at home in a rocking chair in front of a gray-green television screen. Too weighed down with sorrow to act, she was already sliding toward her own death from despair and broken dreams. He saw his father pull out a box containing the shoe, look at it, loath to touch it, before shoving the box back into its dark grave.

Why his father kept it, Paul could not imagine. Maybe the old man harbored some sick masochistic desire to fan his guilt, some type of mental self-flagellation. Why did he see all this? Paul looked at the preacher, who nodded. A shiver scurried up Paul’s back. Had he authored these memories or had the preacher given them to him? The preacher scared him more than Amanda’s ghost. She appeared and vanished and screamed. The preacher seemed to enter his head.

With all the care one would give a sleeping child, they placed the pallet on the floor. Paul’s gaze traveled up her body. He remembered the angry face in his backseat, the terrified girl caught in his headlights, and the battered head soaking in a pool of blood. None of those images matched the peaceful, gaudy beauty lying at his feet.

Paul looked to the preacher. “Do I?”

The preacher nodded.

Paul retrieved the white pump from the plastic bag and knelt at her feet. Desiccation had drawn back her skin, leaving strips of bare toenail peeking above the roots of her crimson-colored nails. The bare foot pointed at him. Like the prince from a fairytale, he possessed the missing shoe, but unlike the prince, he loathed to reunite them, to unlock some door, to reanimate something that should remain still. With a trembling hand, he slid the end of the shoe over her toes, hoping to wedge the shoe on her foot without touching the body. The pallet’s lip blocked the heel. He looked to the preacher who again nodded.

His fingers recoiled from the cold, dry skin of her ankle. By an act of will he grasped her leg and lifted it just enough to press the shoe onto her foot. He released his grip as soon as the shoe slipped into place. He expected her eyelids to fly open or a tremor to shake her body. Her lips remained placid and silent. They had pulled apart over the years as her body desiccated. Black dots of thread marked the line where a mortician had sewn them together.

“Is that it?” he asked the preacher.

“Yes, let’s put her back.”

Together, they slid the body back into its grave. The preacher reset the cover with a bit of putty he retrieved from his pocket. Outside, Paul held the chain in place while the preacher snapped the padlock.

He touched Paul’s shoulder. “I’ll pray for you, brother. I think you’ll be okay.”

Paul mumbled a thank you. “What did we just do?”

“Righted a wrong, as much as any wrong can be righted.”

“Her shoe wasn’t the real issue.”

“No,” said the preacher. “You’re right. It was a life that was stolen. And now you know and will do with that knowledge what you will.”

They stepped off the porch. Paul moved toward the road, but the preacher descended the slope toward the back of the cemetery.

“Where are you going?”

“Across the creek and onto the highway.”

“At night? I can give you a ride.”

“No. But I appreciate your kindness.” The preacher strode down the hill at a rapid pace. “May peace come your way,” he called.

“And also to you.” From where that automatic response came, Paul had no idea. He shone his light in the preacher’s direction but saw nothing. He felt utterly alone.

He followed the gravel track, trudging through the night with an ever more chilly breeze nipping at his neck. His thoughts wandered to the girl in the crypt and the return of her shoe, an act that seemed to have accomplished nothing other than ridding himself of it. Surely some spectral display of appreciation was in order. He hoped not. He gave little attention to the path, feeling giddy and distracted. When he noticed a light approaching, bobbing with the rhythm of walking, the preacher’s admonition struck him. The caretaker was suspicious.

Paul ducked into the shadows among the stones. On hands and knees he crawled through the damp grass, away from the road but toward the approaching light. Moisture soaked through the knees of his pants. Behind a thick stone monument standing four feet tall, he crouched with his back against the granite and listened. The wind whistled through nearby shrubs and sent a leaf skidding across a marker.

The caretaker stopped and passed his light over the monuments.
The bag. Shit. And the hacksaw.

Paul tucked his legs tighter as the beam of light crawled over stones and vegetation. The green grass took on a grayish hue in the light that passed around him on either side of the monument. A clean line separated detection from concealment. He remained still until the caretaker’s steps on the gravel road faded to silence. Paul flipped on his light and fled, running toward the caretaker’s house, weaving through the graves toward the end of the fence. He ran all the way to his car, stopping once to lean against a tree to catch his breath.

* * * *

Paul sped along Highway 24, heading west toward home and coming ever closer to Wailing Creek. He saw the marker as before, a green and white announcement. The guardrails came into view followed by the barren trees. No pink this time. His rejoicing was short-lived. A luminous swatch of pink danced behind the branches. He slowed as he crossed the bridge. She appeared as before, running along the gravel shoulder. Like watching a movie again and again, he knew precisely what she would do next. On cue, she leapt onto the road in his path and waved her arms. He stopped with yards to spare. He expected her to vanish, to disintegrate before his eyes, to return to wherever her soul resided.