Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

Abruptly she thinks of a line from another one of Veda's board books,Big Red Barn, one line in particular that always struck her as a little sinister somehow.

And that is where the children play. But in this story the children are away. Only the animals are here today.

"Who are you?" she whispers into the phone.

But in this story the children are away.

The rustling sounds stop. Sue snaps her head around, breathing fast and hard. Blood pounds in her throat. It's almost painful.

Only the animals are here today.

The flesh up and down her back feels like it's going to leap right off her shoulders and run away.

And the voice on the phone says, "Start digging."

Sue makes her way over to the crooked wooden post. She stares at it. She says, "I don't have a shovel."

It's impossible to tell if the voice on the other end is still there or not.

"I didn't bring the shovel," she says a bit more forcefully. "I'm sorry. I left it-"

"Well then, you better do what you can with your hands," the voice cuts in. "Your little girl has less than ten hours to live. Do you understand that?"

Sue sets down the flashlight, props it up between two big stones so it's aimed at the post, and drops the phone in her pocket. It is time to get down to business. Dropping to a squat she sinks down to her knees, feels the moisture soak straight through the fabric of her pants to her skin, and leans forward.

She's almost forgotten that she's been wearing gloves this whole time, and as soon as she takes them off she starts to realize how bad, how truly awful, this is going to be. Her fingertips and knuckle joints immediately start throbbing with the cold. Still, she digs with her bare fingers into the slimy, clayey surface, prying up great slabs and clots of stinking, half-frozen muck and tossing it aside by the handful.

And she digs.

Time disappears. The only thing she has to compare it to is the three and a half hours she spent in labor with Veda, the epidural wearing off, the pain that could not get any worse, the hours that could not stretch any longer but somehow did. Phillip was there with her the whole time, Phillip who would be gone soon enough but for the time being was next to her bedside trying to help until she ordered him to stop telling her how to breathe.

And she digs on. Fingers long since numb, scraped so raw that when she finally does find it, it is the sound of the thing rattling against her hands, rather than the feel of it, that makes her realize she's dug it up.

The unmistakable synthetically slick surface of a familiar garbage bag, dirt-smeared and tattered, sits visibly in the cone of the flashlight beam. Several garbage bags, actually, taped in layers with packaging tape. And she remembers. Just the way they left him.

Tape it good, Sue,she hears Phillip saying, across the gulf of years.He's got plenty of tape in here so just keep going.

Sue sits upward, gulping air, and jerks erect so sharply that her backbone gives a sharp zing of pain. The world beneath the bridge reels in her peripheral vision. She is enduring equal portions of nausea, horror, and pain. But the thing she's unearthed, oblong and bulky, shrouded in garbage bags and bound up in packaging tape, tips the scale further toward horror-and the smell of it is beyond description. She vomits convulsively, twice, into the pile of earth she's pulled up.

Coughing, she wipes her lips and crawls back from it, not wanting to be any closer to the thing than she absolutely must be, for any longer than is absolutely required of her.

In her pocket the phone rings. She hitsTALK.

"Are you finished digging?" he asks. "Did you find what I asked you to?"

"It's right here."

"Pick it up."

At first she can't believe she's hearing him right. "What?"

"You heard me."

"Why?"

"You're taking it back to the car."

"I can't. Do that."

He says nothing.

"I mean, I don't…why do you want me to take it to the car?" The feeling is creeping back into her fingers and byfeeling she means pain, bright neon pain as if someone is crushing each fingertip between red-hot pliers. Faintly Sue is aware that at least one of her fingernails has torn almost completely off and there is blood trickling down between the webs of her fingers, the wound stinging with a crust of salty filth from the hole she dug. "I mean, haven't I done everything else you wanted up till now? I haven't called the police and I never tried to do anything except what you said." She waits, needing this to be acknowledged even as she knows that it won't be. "Can't you just let me have Veda back?"

Still no answer. Except this time Sue knows, somehow, that he is still there, listening, waiting. She can practically smell him through the cell phone, his breath not unlike the stench rolling off the thing in the garbage bags.

"I'll give her to you in the morning," he says with soft finality. "I'll give her to you in a little basket. And in another little basket I'll give you her heart. And another for her liver. And her kidneys. And two very small baskets for her pretty bright eyes. All wrapped up in ribbons. Wouldthat be all right?"

"Stop. I'll do it. Whatever you want."

Now the slowness in his voice is the weariness of patience wearing thin. "I already told you that I'm a big believer in second chances, Susan. But I've given you enough of them already. We've got a long night ahead of us still and it's not even midnight yet. I'm starting to feel like you're taking advantage of my generosity." Now comes the other version of the voice, the one that hooks and peels back the layer of mock civility like a serrated knife, and Sue feels herself tensing against its edge. "I'm going to have to punish you, do you understand that?"

"Please just don't hurt Veda."

"I'm going to have to punish you," he repeats even more meticulously. "Now you do what I told you, pick it up and take it back to the car, or it's going to be even worse."

He hangs up, and Sue gives herself a second, literally, to try to pull herself together. Taking more time than that isn't going to do her any more good.

Hauling in a deep breath she drops down on her haunches in front of the thing wrapped up in garbage bags and forces herself to find some kind of grip on the shape within.

Something inside crackles and pulls loose with a sickening snap and a pop and she has to fight back the urge to throw up again. But she tugs once, twice, and again, and the thing comes loose from the sucking maw of the earth so abruptly that Sue falls backward. She has time to think,This isn't going to happen, and then it does, the thing in the bags falls on top of her, its unevenly distributed weight holding her down, seeming actually to almost grope for her, like it's trying to feel her up. A whiff of putrid air pours out of the bags and up into her nose.

Sue screams. She kicks and twists sideways, contorting her body to propel the thing off of her with a great uncoiling shudder. She wants to keep kicking it, shrieking at it, but already a degree of rationality has come back to her-again this is what she does, what she in factis, an individual with the learned ability to find equilibrium in the most unlikely circumstances.

Sue takes another deep breath, bends down, and starts to drag the garbage-bag-enshrouded thing upward. It is lighter now, or feels lighter, no doubt because she is prepared for it. Rounded edges and jagged shapes press up against her chest and she is still distantly, unavoidably aware of the smell but a new kind of numbness has begun to take over for which she is nothing but grateful, grateful, grateful. In small, incrementally paced baby steps she drags the thing back up from underneath the bridge where she and Phillip buried it. Three-quarters of the way up she realizes that she left the flashlight down there and that she is now moving in almost total darkness, and this does not seem to matter to her much anymore either.