Bentley Little - The Burning

The policeman's powerful beam shone into the darkness.

And they saw the bodies.

One by one, they walked into the tunnel. The corpses were farther down, not near the entrance but a few yards in, beneath the street rather than below the hotel. Even from her vantage point near the end of the line, Angela could see them, however, and she wished she'd turned around with the other girl and waited outside. It seemed suddenly hard to breathe, and her hand on the flashlight was sticky with sweat.

The bodies were unmoved; the police had left them exactly as they had been found, huddled along the sides of the tunnel, crammed into impossible positions, shoved against each other. Sunken eye sockets were granted life by moving flashlights, and though these weren't mummies, they looked like they were. Clothes had rotted into colorless rags and the skin beneath was horribly wrinkled, stuck fast to bone, all trace of fat and muscle long gone. Every one of them, no matter the pose or placement, appeared to be smiling, that familiar skull's rictus grinning into the passing beams.

Angela didn't want to be here. She was not claustrophobic-or had not been until now-but she was filled suddenly with a desire to escape from this passage. It was more powerful than an urge or impulse, more like an increasingly desperate need, and with each step she took into the tunnel it grew stronger until finally she stopped, unable to go any farther. Behind her, Brenda said, "What's wrong?" Ahead, at the front of the line, Dr. Welkes was speculating about the identity of these dead people.

And a hand reached out to grab her.

A corpse hand.

Then she was screaming, and then everyone was screaming. The bodies were alive, moving, and people were scrambling over each other, pushing each other aside to rush back out of the tunnel the way they'd come. Angela heard the professor's cry of surprise and the policeman's roar of bewilderment behind her as the beam of her flashlight hit an undersized corpse that was rocking back and forth on its haunches, bobbing its insanely grinning head at her. She tried to leap over it but was pushed by someone in back of her. She stumbled over the rocking body and went sprawling, landing atop another skeletal form making its

way grimly across the floor toward the open doorway. She felt skin the texture of sandpaper, smelled the scent of foul dust in her nostrils. For a brief second, her lips touched hair-dead brittle hair-then she jumped up, .knocking into another student before finally reaching the open area near the tunnel's entrance and bolting put into the janitor's closet.

Like the others in front of her, she did not stop there but dashed into the basement and up the stairs to the lobby. Instinct was telling her to continue outside, onto the street, but the others had stopped near the door, and she immediately understood why. Embarrassment. Here in the dark dismantled lobby, the horror of what they'd experienced was still fresh, real, but on the other side of those doors, they would have to explain their fear and panic, would have to notify anonymous passersby that there were mummies or zombies under the street, that the dead bodies that had been discovered were alive.

And none of them were willing to do that.

Besides, who was to say whether it had really happened or whether they'd simply scared themselves and imagined it all?

She was. She could still feel the sharp pressure on the skin of her arm where the corpse's bony fingers had grabbed her.

Brenda was sobbing, as were several of the other students, both male and female. Dr. Welkes and the police officer had finally run up, so everyone was accounted for; everyone had made it out alive.

"Jesus!" the policeman kept shouting, his voice too loud in the empty lobby. "Jesus!"

He was the one Angela felt sorry for. He was going to have to write this up, put it in a report, explain what had happened to a group of skeptical cops, who would then have to release the information to the newspaper and the public. And she had no doubt that the bodies in the tunnel would be still once again, that whatever team came out to investigate would find nothing unusual or out of the ordinary, no sign of animation amongst the decaying corpses. That was the way these things always worked.

They stood there in various states of denial or emotional recovery, looking at each other. Angela expected someone to take charge, thought the policeman or the professor would tell them what to do, but both men seemed lost in their own thoughts as they repeated, "Jesus! Jesus!" and muttered incoherent words, respectively.

So they didn't talk about what had happened, didn't try and find another cop or fireman or public-safety worker to verify what was down there, made no effort even to get together later and discuss what they'd seen. They simply ended up wandering aimlessly out the front doors onto the sidewalk where the fortunate girl from the advanced class waited for them, completely unaware of the horror that had transpired beneath her feet.

Angela drove Brenda and the other two students who'd carpooled with her back to school, none of them speaking, then drove immediately home-where she told everyone in Babbitt House what had happened. Randy wasn't in, but the others were, and Angela gathered them in the first-floor foyer, in front of Winston and Brock's apartment, and described in detail what she'd seen. The cone of silence that had existed with her fellow anthropology students had shattered, and now she couldn't seem to stop talking, telling and retelling specific scenes over and over again as her friends and roommate plied her with questions. None of them seemed to doubt her, and she found that surprising. If she'd heard such a story from one of them, she would not have believed a word of it.

Of course, they'd all heard the ghost the other night, too.

Come to think of it, maybe she would have believed it.

It was Chrissie who finally put a stop to the show and dragged her upstairs to their apartment. Angela didn't realize until they were behind closed doors, until she gratefully sank into the couch, how bone tired she was. It was as if all of a sudden everything caught up with her, and her body, which had been running on adrenaline, finally succumbed to the stress of the day and collapsed in on itself. She stared numbly at the television while Chrissie turned it on.

"Do you think it'll be on the news?" her roommate asked.

"I don't know," Angela admitted. "It just happened. And I didn't see any news cameras there. But maybe word's leaked out by now."

Chrissie, too, accepted without question that what Angela said had actually occurred, and she thought that for someone who claimed not to believe in "ghosts or gods or anything supernatural," Chrissie seemed oddly uncritical. She wondered if her friend was changing her mind.

Angela was so exhausted and stressed-out she could have sat there for the rest of the evening, unmoving, unthinking, but she felt dirty-soiled and contaminated by her contact with those carcasses-and what she wanted more than anything else was a hot shower to wash off whatever freakish germs had attached themselves to her, to scrub her skin totally clean. She'd sat down only a few moments before, but she got up again, quickly, as though staying on the couch even a second longer might infect it with some incurable disease. "I'm going to take a shower," she announced. "Could you burn my clothes in the incinerator for me?"

"We don't have-" Chrissie began, then laughed. "Oh. Joking."

She was joking-but not really. She honestly didn't care whether she saw the clothes she was wearing ever again, and she knew it would be a long time and a lot of hard washes before she put any of them on.

Angela went into the bathroom, turned on the water to warm it up, then took off her clothes, dumping them on the floor rather than in the hamper. There was a black spot on her skin where the corpse had first grabbed her. It was not a bruise but looked more like mold or rot. She saw it first in the mirror, then examined it more closely by sitting on the toilet and holding that section of arm as close to her eyes as possible. The mark was not in the shape of fingers or a hand, as might be expected, but was instead an amorphous blob that resembled an amoeba. She touched it, picked at it with a fingernail, but, though the spot somewhat resembled paint or ink, she could not scrape any of it off her skin. In the shower, she used a loofah and Comet cleanser, scrubbing as hard as she could, but again was unable to remove the stain or even lighten the blackness. The skin around it grew red and raw, but the mark remained.