Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

He ended two doors from the abandoned house where Noel was found. There was nobody home at 786, the place next door, and he came down the sidewalk and stood in front of 788. It was shabby, long since abandoned. Someone had hammered plywood over all of the downstairs windows and most of the upstairs. The yellow police tape that had surrounded the porch after the discovery of Noel’s body had fallen to the ground.

You could just step over it. Sully thought about it and looked up and down the street. It was empty. He went fast. A half dozen steps covered the weed-choked walkway and he was up the steps and onto the porch. There was another yellow sticker on the door emblazoned with large letters reading DO NOT ENTER-CRIME SCENE. He tapped on the front door, tried the handle, and pushed.

It opened.

A tingle went up his back. His spine straightened and he instinctively spread his feet to the width of his shoulders, balancing himself. He put his hand in his pocket, feeling the weight of the pistol, but did not pull it out.

Using a knuckle, he pushed the door, hinges creaking, and it went back until it bounced lightly off the interior wall. It was dark inside. He could see the stairwell and peeling wallpaper. When he leaned to the side he could see a tangle of furniture, a couch and some chairs and upended buckets in one of the side rooms.

He glanced behind him and stepped inside, easing the door shut behind him. “Hello! This is the Metropolitan Police Department! We are securing this property! Come forward now!”

The words bounced up the stairwell, nothing stirring. Dust motes floated in front of his face. He looked up. The roof had been leaking, the ceiling was pitted and rotting. He waited some more. Outside, he could hear the cars and trucks on Georgia, the hum of passing traffic. He reached in his backpack and found a small vinyl pouch. There was a tiny LED flashlight inside, one of the things that came on a keychain. He clicked it on and took three more steps forward.

“Hey, asshole, this is MPD! Identify yourself at once! You are trespassing on a police crime scene!”

Weak light from the end of the day streamed in from upstairs, where there was nothing over several broken windows. Slips of light leaked in from the plywood that had been nailed up over the downstairs windows. He stood perfectly still, scarcely breathing. He counted to twenty. When there was still no sound, no rustle, he let out his breath and moved forward. If there were crack addicts inside, they would have stirred, they would have run for it. The door to the basement was just ahead, in the narrow hallway that ran beside the stairs leading to the second floor. He set his backpack down behind the front door. He didn’t want it slowing him down, giving someone something to grab, if a crack zombie materialized.

He went up the stairs, intent on making sure no one came down behind him to cut him off from the front door. He put his feet at the far outside of each step, the wood gone dark with rotting and water stains, to prevent them from collapsing under his weight. He made the upstairs landing.

The bathroom was filthy, rat and pigeon droppings in the tub, the shower rail rusting, the mirror broken and pieces of glass and chipped tile on the floor. The light fixtures had been stripped out long ago, exposed wires dangling from the ceiling. Puddles of water stained the floor. There was a bed frame, with springs but no mattress, in the back bedroom. Roaches scurried in front of him.

The windows in the front bedroom had sheets of plywood nailed across them. It was dark and dank and the room was empty, save for trash in the corner, beer cans and cigarette butts and empty bags of potato chips and the unmistakable smell of urine and defecation. It was hard to believe that people had lived, slept, dreamed, and made love in this space, that there had been voices spoken and plans made, a sense of the future. There was nothing now, just squalor and decay. He turned and went back down the steps, looking into the kitchen and then pulling open the door to the basement.

A dank, fetid smell greeted him, earth and rot and a stale exhaust, the breath of a corpse. He coughed. It was black without relent. He shone the light on the landing to the steps downward. There were footprints and long, clean marks, as if something had been dragged, visible in the dust, the detritus of the police and investigators and crime scene techs. He tried to picture the night-he figured it would be night-when someone had carried Noel down into this space.

The woman he had seen in the photographs, the beautiful skin, the perfect hips, the dangling earrings, the hair spilling to the left-she was racy, she was sexy. She wasn’t some down-market crackhead. Nothing but desperation would lead anyone down these steps, and he’d seen nothing to suggest Noel had been desperate. She wasn’t living when she was brought into the house, he was sure of that now.

He stepped into the void and put his feet squarely on the landing, squatting down and shining the flashlight to the bottom of the steps.

The beam sliced a narrow tunnel in the darkness. There was a heap of chairs and trash bags and an old car seat and shoes and a mop and what looked to be mounds of clothes and an ancient television, turned on its side in the corner. He could see the gaping maw of the shattered plywood flooring. He took a deep breath and walked quickly to the bottom of the steps, swinging the flashlight in a ragged circle as he went. His foot caught on something and he staggered forward, catching himself at the bottom, cursing under his breath, sweat puddling in the small of his back now.

When he stood upright, he swung the light onto the grave, a few feet to his left. The flooring had been linoleum slapped down over plywood planks, as John had said. The planks had been pulled up and stacked against the brick exterior wall, and there were old metal folding chairs and part of a washing machine and ripped-open bags of garbage. Shards of it lay everywhere. Brown dirt was stacked in a heap toward the back of the room, clods of it scattered about. The hole was maybe two feet deep, no doubt dug deeper by the crime techs than the original burial. The smell of wet dirt and rot was choking. Worms moved in the dirt. The hole seemed to waver and move, a thing hungry to regain its decomposing meal of flesh and blood and viscous rot. It was open and raw and as filthy as a mass grave he’d seen once in the Bosnian war, a filled-in ditch that gave up its dead in a watery muck.

He extended the light over the hole, stepping around it, going to the jumble of material at the wall that had been moved out of the way. The chairs, the washing machine, empty cans of chili, shoes, shirts, pants, women’s blouses, empty containers of canned vegetables, cigarette butts, two, three crumpled packs of Marlboros, like his old man smoked, an old metal rack for bread or something… He went back to the grave, following the beam in the pitch-blackness.

Kneeling down, peering at the dirt, reaching into it, letting his hands get the feel of it. The earth at the bottom was molding, crumbling, soaking.

“Noel,” he said softly. This is where she had wound up, where someone had placed her. Someone working the dirt in the darkness-did they hurry?

Upstairs, the front door swung open. Footsteps directly above him. The door slammed shut.

A sparkle of fear lit at the base of his spine, sending flares up and out and now there was someone above him, someone who had him pinned down here, in the dark, in the muck. He shut off the light and worked the pistol out of the jacket pocket, thumbing the safety off.

The footsteps moved, heavy, contemplative. They went to the right, then around to the kitchen. Sully looked up the stairwell. He’d left the door to the basement open and the backpack behind the front door.