Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

After some preliminary byplay and chitchat, Craignotti beered himself to within spitting distance of having a point. “So, you was a teacher at the junior high?”

“Ex-teacher. Nothing bad. I just decided I had to relocate.”

“Ain’t what I heard.” Every time Craignotti drank, his swallows were half-glass capacity. One glassful, two swallows, rinse and repeat. “I heard you porked one of your students. That little slut Sheila Morgan.”

“Not true.”

Craignotti poured Doug a glass of beer to balance out the Black Jack he was consuming, one slow finger at a time. “Naah, it ain’t what you think. I ain’t like that. Those little fucking whores are outta control anyway. They’re fucking in goddamned grade school, if they’re not all crackheads by then.”

“The benefits of our educational system.” Doug toasted the air. If you drank enough, you could see lost dreams and hopes, swirling there before your nose, demanding sacrifice and tribute.

“Anyhow, point is that you’re not working, am I right?”

“That is a true fact.” Doug tasted the beer. It chased smooth.

“You know Coggins, the undertaker here?”

“Yeah.” Doug had to summon the image. Bald guy, ran the Triple Pines funeral home and maintained the Hollymount Cemetery on the outskirts of town. Walked around with his hands in front of him like a preying mantis.

“Well, I know something a lotta people around here don’t know yet. Have you heard of the Marlboro Reservoir?” It was the local project that would not die. It had last been mentioned in the Pine Grove Messenger over a year previously.

“I didn’t think that plan ever cleared channels.”

“Yeah, well, it ain’t for you or me to know. But they’re gonna build it. And there’s gonna be a lotta work. Maybe bring this shithole town back to life.”

“But I’m leaving this shithole town,” said Doug. “Soon. So you’re telling me this because—?”

“Because you look like a guy can keep his trap shut. Here’s the deal: this guy Coggins comes over and asks me to be a foreman. For what, I say. And he says – now get this – in order to build the reservoir, for some reason I don’t know about, they’re gonna have to move the cemetery to the other side of Pine Grove – six fucking miles . So he needs guys to dig up all the folks buried in the cemetery, and catalogue ’em, and bury ’em again on the other side of the valley. Starts next Monday. The pay is pretty damned good for the work, and almost nobody needs to know about it. I ain’t about to hire these fucking deadbeats around here, these dicks with the muscle cars, ‘cept for Jacky Tynan, ‘cos he’s a good worker and don’t ask questions. So I thought, I gotta find me a few more guys that are, like, responsible, and since you’re leaving anyhow . . .”

Long story short, that’s how Doug wound up manning a shovel. The money was decent and frankly, he needed the bank. “Answer me one question, though,” he said to Craignotti. “Where did you get all that shit about Sheila Morgan, I mean, why did you use that to approach me?”

“Oh, that,” said Craignotti. “She told me. Was trying to trade some tight little puddy for a ride outta town.” Craignotti had actually said puddy , like Sylvester the Cat. I tot I taw . . . “I laughed in her face; I said, what, d’you think I’m some kinda baby-raper? I woulda split her in half. She threw a fit and went off and fucked a bunch of guys who were less discriminating. Typical small-time town-pump scheiss . She musta lost her cherry when she was twelve. So I figured you and me had something in common – we’re probably the only two men in town who haven’t plumbed that hole. Shit, we’re so fucking honest, folks around here will think we’re queer.”

Honor and ethics, thought Doug. Wonderful concepts, those were.

There were more than a thousand graves in Hollymount Cemetery, dating back to the turn of the 19th century. Stones so old that names had weathered to vague indentations in granite. Plots with no markers. Minor vandalism. The erosion of time and climate. Cog-gins, the undertaker, had collated a master name sheet and stapled it to a gridded map of the cemetery, presenting the crew picked by Craignotti with a problem rather akin to solving a huge crossword puzzle made out of dead people. Doug paged through the list until he found Michelle Farrier’s name. He had attended her funeral, and sure enough – she was still here.

After his divorce from Marianne (the inevitable ex-wife), he had taken to the road, but had read enough Kerouac to know that the road held nothing for him. A stint as a blackjack dealer in Vegas. A teaching credential from LA; he was able to put that in his pocket and take it anywhere. Four months after his arrival in Triple Pines, he attended the funeral of the only friend he had sought to develop locally – Michelle Farrier, a runner just like him.

In the afterblast of an abusive and ill-advised marriage, Michelle had come equipped with a six-year-old daughter named Rochelle. Doug could easily see the face of the mother in the child, the younger face that had taken risks and sought adventure and brightened at the prospect of sleeping with rogues. Michelle had touched down in Triple Pines two months away from learning she was terminally ill. Doug had met them during a seriocomic bout of bathroom-sharing at Mrs Ives’ rooming house, shortly before he had rented a two-bedroom that had come cheap because there were few people in town actively seeking better lodgings, and fewer who could afford to move up. Michelle remained game, as leery as Doug of getting involved, and their gradually kindling passion filled their evenings with a delicious promise. In her kiss lurked a hungry romantic on a short tether, and Doug was working up the nerve to invite her and Rochelle to share his new home when the first talk of doctor visits flattened all other concerns to secondary status. He watched her die. He tried his best to explain it to Rochelle. And Rochelle was removed, to grandparents somewhere in the Bay area. She wept when she said goodbye to Doug. So had Michelle.

Any grave but that one , thought Doug. Don’t make me dig that one up. Make that someone else’s task .

He knew enough about mortuary tradition to know it was unusual for an undertaker like Coggins to also be in charge of the cemetery. However, small, remote towns tend not to view such a monopoly on the death industry as a negative thing. Coggins was a single stranger for the populace to trust, instead of several. Closer to civilisation, the particulars of chemical supply, casket sales, and the mortician’s craft congregated beneath the same few conglomerate umbrellas, bringing what had been correctly termed a “Tru-Value hardware” approach to what was being called the “death industry” by the early 1990s. Deceased Americans had become a cash crop at several billion dollars per annum . . . not counting the flower arrangements. Triple Pines still believed in the mom-and-pop market, the corner tavern, the one-trade-fits-all handyman.

Doug had been so appalled at Michelle’s perfunctory service that he did a bit of investigative reading-up. He discovered that most of the traditional accoutrements of the modern funeral were aimed at one objective above all – keeping morticians and undertakers in business. Not, as most people supposed, because of obscure health imperatives, or a misplaced need for ceremony, or even that old favorite, religious ritual. It turned out to be one of the three or four most expensive costs a normal citizen could incur during the span of an average, conventional life – another reason weddings and funerals seemed bizarrely similar. It was amusing to think how simply the two could be confused. Michelle would have been amused, at least. She had rated one of each, neither very satisfying.