Richard Laymon: The Stake

He turned away from the door. He walked slowly across the lobby floor. Glancing back, he saw Jean and Barbara step outside.

He felt abandoned.

I don’t have to be here, he thought. I could be out there with them.

He did not want to see a damn corpse.

But his weak legs kept moving him away from the sunlight.

Alongside the staircase a wide section of paneling had been ripped loose and gaped open a couple of feet. The glow of Pete’s flashlight showed through the space. Larry turned sideways and stepped into the enclosure.

“Thought you were going to chicken out on me,” Pete said.

“Can’t miss a chance like this.”

He found Pete standing on a couple of boards that had fallen from the landing. He looked frozen there, back rigid, his right arm straight out, aiming the flashlight almost as if it were a pistol. Aiming it at the coffin that was jammed headfirst against the underside of a low stair.

The body was covered, at least to the neck, by an old brown blanket. The blanket was rumpled as if it had been tossed into the coffin by someone who didn’t care to straighten it.

The corpse had long yellow hair. The skin of its face looked tight and leathery. Larry saw sunken eyelids, hollow cheeks, lips that were stretched back in a mad grin that exposed teeth and gums.

“You believe this?” Pete whispered.

Larry shook his head. “Maybe it isn’t real.”

“My ass. I know a stiff when I see one.”

“Looks almost mummified.”

“Yeah. Guess we oughta check it out, huh?”

Shoulder to shoulder, they moved slowly forward. Pete kept his light on the corpse.

Hideous, Larry thought. He’d never seen such a thing. His experience with bodies was limited to three open-casket funerals. Those people had looked almost good enough to sit up and shake hands with you.

This one looked as if it might want to sit up and take a bite out of you.

Don’t think that stuff , Larry told himself.

The underside of the stairway slanted down in front of them. They had to duck as they stepped to the foot of the coffin. Pete sank into a squat and waddled in farther. Larry started in, crouching. But after one step a sense of suffocation stopped him. The stairs seemed to be pressing down on him, wanting to shove him lower, to rub his face in the corpse. He dropped to his knees and reached out, ready to brace himself on the wooden edge of the coffin. Just before he touched it, he realized what he was about to do. He jerked his hands back and clutched his thighs.

The blanket piled on top of the corpse didn’t cover its ankles and feet. They were bare, the color of stained wood, and bones showed through the tight skin. The nails were so long that they curled over the tops of the toes. Larry recalled that hair and nails supposedly continued to grow after death. But he’d heard that that was just a myth; they only appeared to grow because the skin sank in around them.

“Bet it’s been here a long time,” Pete whispered. He reached over the side of the coffin. With his index finger he brushed the corpse’s forehead.

Larry moaned.

“What’s wrong?”

“How can you touch it?”

“No big deal. Try it. Feels like shoe leather.” He drew his finger across a blond eyebrow.

Larry imagined Pete’s finger sliding down the ridge of the eye socket, touching the lid, denting it, sinking in to the second knuckle.

“Go on and touch it,” Pete urged him. “How you going to write about this stuff if you don’t experience it?”

“Thanks, anyway. I’ll rely on my imagi...”

“We changed our minds.”

He flinched at the sound of Barbara’s voice. So did Pete. Pete’s head slammed the underside of a stair. He cried, “Ah!” ducked down close to the face of the corpse and grabbed the back of his head. “Shit! Damn it, Barb!”

“Sorry.”

Larry looked over his shoulder at the women and smiled. Though his startled heart was drumming, he was glad they were here.

He felt as if some of the real world had come back.

“Guess you weren’t kidding,” Barbara whispered. “Jesus, look at that thing.”

“Yuck,” was all Jean said.

Barbara crouched over the end of the coffin. Jean stayed behind her and peered over her head.

“Didn’t want us to have all the fun?” Larry asked.

“That’s about the size of it,” Jean said, her voice hushed.

“Curiosity got the best of us,” Barbara added. Then she reached into the coffin and touched the foot of the corpse.

She’s just like Pete, Larry thought. Whatever their differences, they’re sure a set.

“I think I’m bleeding,” Pete muttered.

“That makes two of us,” Barbara said, still rubbing the dead foot. “It’s like the skin on a salami.”

“Salami’s oily,” Pete told her. “This is more like leather.”

“Okay, we’ve seen it,” Jean said. “Everyone ready to go?”

“Yeah, just about.” Pete stopped rubbing his head, reached one arm down over the covered torso and snatched off the blanket. Larry lurched backward on his knees, wishing to God he’d known this was coming. He’d already seen too much.

Now the corpse was stretched in front of his face.

It was naked.

It was female.

It had a wooden stake in its chest.

“Holy shit,” Barbara whispered.

“Let’s get out of here!” Jean gasped in a high, tight voice. She didn’t wait for a consensus. She bolted.

Pete threw the blanket down. It landed in a pile, covering the blunt top of the stake, the corpse’s flat breasts and the slats of its ribs. Barbara leaned forward, grabbed a bit of the blanket and jerked it down to cover the groin.

Blond pubic hair.

Larry groaned.

Then he was scurrying after Barbara. The white seat of her shorts was still smudged with yellow from the rock where she’d rested in the creek bed.

Seemed like a century ago.

Why did we do this?

Larry followed her through the open section of paneling. Jean was still in the lobby. Her fists were clenched at her sides and she was prancing as if she had to pee. “Let’s go, let’s go!” she gasped.

Larry waited for Pete.

Together they pushed the slab of wood into place.

Shutting the door of the tomb.

Pete backed away as if afraid to take his eyes off it.

In the beam of his flashlight the crucified body of Jesus gleamed.

Pete floored it out of Sagebrush Flat, and Barbara didn’t say a word about the speed.

Nobody said a word about anything.

Larry slouched in the passenger seat, feeling dazed and exhausted. Though he stared out the windshield at the sun-bright road and desert, he kept seeing the corpse. And the stake in its chest. And the crucifix.

It’s behind us now, he told himself. We got away. We’re all right.

His body felt leaden. There was a shaky tightness in his chest and throat that seemed like a peculiar mix of terror — subsiding terror — and elation. He remembered experiencing similar sensations a few years earlier. On a flight to New York the 747 had hit an air pocket and dropped straight down for a couple of seconds. Some of the passengers struck the ceiling. He and Jean and Lane, strapped in their seats, had been unharmed. But he’d felt this way afterward.

Probably shock, he thought. Shock, combined with great relief.

He sensed that if he didn’t keep tight control of himself, he might start weeping or giggling.

This must be where they get the expression “scared silly.”

“How’s everybody doing?” Pete asked, breaking the long silence.

“I want a drink,” Barbara said.

“There’s more beer in the ice chest.”

“Not beer, a drink .”