Билл Пронзини - The Cemetery Man and Other Darkside Tales

I didn’t argue with him. I wanted to, it was my car, dammit, but I didn’t. There was something about the way he was sitting there, so damn big and Sphinx silent, those massive hands bulked together in his lap.

The miles piled up, fifteen or so. Dusk had settled; I switched the headlights on. How many more miles to L.A. and Karen? Only about eight-fifty now. And maybe another hundred closer before I called it a day. I could be with her sometime tomorrow night if I got an early start in the morning and drove straight through. I was even more eager to see her now. And it wasn’t just sex. It was her... her smile, her voice, the way she laughed, everything about her. I’d been in love before, but never the way I was in love with Karen...

Twilight was rapidly fading into darkness, the shadows long and clotted on the empty desert landscape. Night came down fast out here. It’d be full dark in another few minutes.

Another mile clicked off on the odometer. And then Breakbone put an end to the silence. “That exit up there, Jack,” he said. “Take it.”

I peered ahead. The exit, according to the sign, was to a secondary road that led to a couple of far-off towns I’d never heard of. There were no services there, just the offramp and sign and a crossroad stretching both ways across the desert flats.

“What for?”

“Take it.”

“Now listen—”

His big hairy paw dropped on my knee again, the stone-hard fingers digging in. Not with any pressure, not yet. “Take it.”

I slowed and took it.

“What’s going on?” Rob said from the back seat. He sounded sleepy; he must have been dozing.

“Turn right,” Breakbone said.

Don’t do it, I thought. But I didn’t even hesitate at the stop sign, just swung onto the secondary road heading east. “Where is it you want to go?”

“Keep driving.”

A mile, two miles. Full dark now, no moon, the black sky pricked with stars that seemed paler and more remote than usual. Up ahead, the headlights picked out the opening to a side road that branched off to the left. We’d almost reached it when Breakbone said, “Turn in that road.”

I still couldn’t make myself defy him. We rattled over a cattle guard. The narrow track was unpaved, dusty, rutted — some sort of backcountry ranch road. We bounced along at less than twenty through a grove of yucca trees. I didn’t dare go any faster.

“Hey,” Rob said, “what’s the idea?” He sounded scared, as scared as I was now. “You guys thinking of robbing me or what? You won’t get much, I’m only carrying a few dollars...”

“Shut up.”

The kid shut up.

Pretty soon Breakbone said, “Far enough, Jack. Stop the car.”

I stopped.

“Shut off the engine.”

As soon as I did that, he reached over and yanked the keys out of the ignition.

“Now the headlights.”

Everything went black when I clicked the switch, the yucca trees blotting out all but a faint glimmer of starshine. It gave me a sudden feeling of suffocation, as if I’d been trapped inside a box. I heard Rob making moaning noises and fumbling at the door handle, trying to get away. Then the dome light came on, but not because the kid had gotten his door open; it was Breakbone climbing out through the passenger door. He yanked the back one open, hauled the kid out with one of his huge paws. Rob fought him, yelling, but he couldn’t break loose. It was like a small animal trying to fight a behemoth.

Breakbone picked him up under one arm as if he weighed nothing at all, grabbed the backpack with his other hand. “Stay here, Jack,” he said to me. “Don’t go nowhere.” Then he kicked both doors shut, closing me into the black box again, and went stomping off into the darkness outside.

I just sat there, numb. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what was going on. Things like this didn’t happen in my world, they just didn’t happen—

Then it got worse, much worse.

Then the screaming started.

Horrible screams like nothing I’d ever heard before, shrill with pain and terror, so loud that they penetrated and echoed inside the box. On and on, on and on, as if the night itself was being ripped apart. I jammed the heels of my hands over my ears, but I could still hear them. They were like knifepoints jabbed into my eardrums.

I couldn’t stand it in there, surrounded by the noise; couldn’t breathe. I flung myself out of the car and stumbled around and away from it, trying to escape the screams. But I lost my bearings among the yuccas and went the wrong way, toward them instead — far enough to hear the other sounds that came before each of the shrieks. Meaty thwacking sounds. Crunching, snapping sounds.

I swung around, staggered back to the car. I knew I ought to run, hide, but my legs wouldn’t work anymore. All I could do was lean against the front fender with my hands back over my ears.

It was a long time before the screaming stopped. And then I heard him coming back, shuffling over the parched ground — alone. He was just a giant looming shape until he reached the car and opened the passenger door and the dome light came on again. Then I saw the blood. It was smeared on his hands and on his pantlegs where he’d wiped them, spattered on forearms and across the front of his shirt. Even more terrible was the way he was grinning. Like a death’s head mask. Like a skull.

I turned aside and puked up my dinner. When the convulsions stopped I sagged against the fender again, weak, shaking, my knees like pudding. He was watching me. Not grinning any more, his face without expression of any kind.

“You killed him.” Somebody else’s voice, not mine.

“Yeah. Busted all his bones.”

“A kid, a stranger. Why?”

“I like it. It’s fun.”

Fun. Jesus!

“Tell you a secret,” he said. “Nobody give me my nickname, like I told you before. I give it to myself after the first time I done it.”

I couldn’t look any more at those hands, the scars and gnarled joints that hadn’t come from manual labor, the blood glistening like black worms in the spill from the dome light. I said to the darkness, “You going to kill me now?”

“Kill you? Naw, I wouldn’t do that. I like you, Jack, you been real nice to me. We’re friends. I never had a friend before.”

Friends...

“You got a blanket or something in the car?”

“What?”

“So I don’t get blood all over the seat.”

“Trunk.”

He went back there, rummaged around, came back with the picnic blanket Karen had bought for us. “Okay,” he said then. “Let’s go.”

I groped around to the driver’s side. He squeezed in next to me, the blanket wrapped around him, and let me have the keys, but it was a little while before I was steady enough to drive. I still couldn’t think, didn’t want to think. Finally I started the engine, turned the car around, headed back down the road with the headlights boring holes in the night.

When we neared the intersection with the county road, I heard myself say, “What now?”

“Find some place I can wash up, change clothes.”

“Then what?”

“Keep on going. Drive all night, maybe. Get us another car, bigger one, then go wherever we feel like. Big country. Ain’t hardly seen much of it yet.”

It took a few seconds for his meaning to sink in. “No! No! My girl, my job...”

“They don’t matter no more. Just you and me, Jack, from now on.”

Bloodstained fingers snaked out of the blanket, closed around my knee again. The feel of them made my flesh crawl.

“We’ll have fun together,” he said. “Lots of fun.”