David Morrell - Black Evening

You force your way out of the car. You struggle around its hood, ignore the mud, confront the stinging wind and rain, and help June waver from the passenger seat. The bullet-dark clouds roil above the meadow.

"Was it here?" you demand. "Tell me! Is this the place?"

"Yes! Can't you hear them wail? Can't you hear them suffer ?"

"June! In the name of God" – rain stings your face – "tell me!"

"Tell me, June!"

"Can't you sense ? Can't you feel the horror?"

"Yes, June." You sink to your knees. You caress the grass. "I can."

"How many, June?" You lean forward, your face almost touching the grass.

"Two hundred. Maybe more. All those years. So many babies." June weeps behind you. "I finally couldn't count anymore."

"But why ?" You raise your head toward the angry rain. "Why did they have to die?"

"Some were sickly. Some were deformed. If the Gunthers decided they couldn't sell them…"

"They murdered them? Smothered them? Strangled them?"

"Let them starve to death. The wails." June cringes. "Those poor, hungry, suffering babies. Some took as long as three days to die. In my nightmares, I heard them wailing. I still hear them wailing." June hobbles toward you. "At first, the Gunthers took the bodies in a boat and dumped them at sea. But one of the corpses washed up on the beach, and if it hadn't been for the chief of police they bribed…" June's voice breaks. "So the Gunthers decided they needed a safer way to dispose of the bodies. They brought them here and buried them in paper bags or potato sacks or butter boxes."

"Butter boxes?"

"Some of the babies were born prematurely." June sinks beside you, weeping. "They were small, so terribly small."

" Two hundred ?" The frenzied wind thrusts your words down your throat. With a shudder, you realize that if your mother was Mary Duncan, Scot , the Gunthers might have decided that you looked too obviously gentile. They might have buried you here with…

Your brother or your sister? Your twin? Is your counterpart under the grass you clutch?

You shriek, "Two hundred!"

Despite the howl of the storm, you hear a car, its engine roaring, its tires spinning, fighting for traction in the mud. You see a police car crest the rain-shrouded hill and skid to a stop.

Chief Kitrick shoves his door open, stalking toward you through the raging gloom. "God damn it, I told you to leave the past alone."

You rise from the grass, draw back a fist, and strike his mouth so hard he drops to the mushy ground. "You knew! You son of a bitch, you knew all along!"

The chief wipes blood from his mangled lips. In a fury, he fumbles to draw his gun.

"That's right! Go ahead, kill me!" You spread out your arms, lashed by the rain. "But June'll be a witness, and you'll have to kill her as well! So what, though, huh? Two murders won't matter, will they? Not compared to a couple of hundred children!"

"I had nothing to do with – "

"Killing these babies? No, but your father did!"

"He wasn't involved!"

"He let it happen! He took the Gunther's money and turned his back! That makes him involved! He's as much to blame as the Gunthers! The whole fucking town was involved!" You pivot toward the ridge, buffeted by the full strength of the storm. In the blinding gale, you can't see the town, but you scream at it nonetheless. "You sons of bitches! You knew! You all let it happen! You did nothing to stop it! That's why your town fell apart! God cursed you! Bastards!"

Abruptly you realize the terrible irony of your words. Bastards? All of these murdered children were bastards. You spin toward the grass, the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Falling, you hug the rain-soaked earth, the drenched lush leaves of grass. "Poor babies!"

"You can't prove a thing," Chief Kitrick growls. "All you've got are suppositions. After fifty years, there won't be anything left of those babies. They've long since rotted and turned into – "

"Grass," you moan, tears scalding your face. "The beautiful grass."

"The doctor who delivered the babies is dead. The Gunthers – my father kept track of them – died as well. In agony, if that satisfies your need for justice. Orval got stomach cancer. Eve died from alcoholism."

"And now they burn in hell," June murmurs.

"I was raised to be… I'm a Jew ," you moan and suddenly understand the significance of your pronouncement. No matter the circumstances of your birth, you are a Jew, totally, completely. "I don't believe in hell. But I wish… Oh, God, how I wish…"

"The only proof you have," Chief Kitrick says, "is this old woman, a Catholic who goes every afternoon to pray in a ruined synagogue. She's nuts. You're a lawyer. You know her testimony wouldn't be accepted in court. It's over, Weinberg. It ended fifty years ago."

"No! It never ended! The grass keeps growing!" You feel the chill wet earth. You try to embrace your brother or your sister and quiver with the understanding that all of these children are your brothers and sisters. "God have mercy on them!"

What do you think has become of the children?

They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

"Luckier?" You embrace the grass. " Luckier ?"

Through the rain-soaked earth, you think you hear babies crying and raise your face toward the furious storm. Swallowing rain, tasting the salt of your tears, you recite the kaddish prayers. You mourn Mary Duncan, Simon and Esther Weinberg, your brother or your sister, all these children.

And yourself.

"Deliver us from evil," June Engle murmurs. "Pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death."

Back in 1970, just after I finished graduate school at Penn State, I took a weekend off and drove with a close friend to his home near Pittsburgh. On an August afternoon, we went to a compound that some friends of his father had built in the mountains. It had a swimming hole, a barbecue pit, a bunk house, and… I still see it vividly: a shrine. Its contents haunted me until finally, twenty-two years later, I had to write about it. Again the theme is grief, a subject I returned to often after Mart's death. "The Shrine" was nominated by the Horror Writers Association as the best novella of 1992.

Grady was in the mausoleum when the beep from his pager disrupted his sobbing.

The mausoleum was spacious and bright, with shiny marble slabs that concealed the niches into which coffins had been placed. In an alcove near the tall, wide windows that flanked the main entrance, glinting squares of glass permitted mourners to stare within much smaller niches and view the bronze urns that contained the ashes of their loved ones. Plastic, bronze-colored letters and numbers that formed the names of the deceased as well as their birth and death dates were glued upon the squares of glass, and it was toward two of those panes, toward the urns behind them, that Grady directed his attention, although his vision was blurred by tears.