“Too much, it was all too much, as you can well understand. Genevieve buried her son, then her husband, and finally her daughter and this within an ugly four-year stretch. She went soft in the head and who could blame her? Who could honesty blame her? People kept clear of her and her place, out on Wedeck Road, which is now just called County Road 707. She was just the crazy woman and you kept away like maybe what she had was catchy. Well, about three months or so after they buried Pearl, strange things began to happen. Stories began to circulate and they were damned unusual.”
Kenney looked at him, almost afraid to ask. “What sort of stories?”
Godfrey swallowed, then swallowed again. “Well, people were saying that they’d seen Pearl… seen her walking around out in the woods.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah, bad stuff, it was. But you got to remember the way this county was and still is… cut off. Nothing but a lot of small towns and farms with a lot of dark woods and thickets inbetween. People liked to talk, people liked to make up crazy stories. A lot of adults in Haymarket had heard the tales, did what they could to keep it from us kids… but we found out. What we heard was that Pearl’s ghost was walking around out there, haunting the back roads. Close enough, I guess.
“Now, I should preface this by saying that my old man was on the county board and my uncle Tommy was a deputy sheriff—lived next door to us—so there wasn’t much that happened around here they didn’t know about. Well, one moonlit night, I was laying in my bed and it was warm so I had my window open. Just laying there, not sleeping, listening to my old man and my uncle Tommy drinking beers and laughing out at the picnic table in the backyard. It was after midnight, I remember that much, when this car comes swinging into our drive, horn blaring. Somebody climbs out, ranting and raving and it took both my old man and my uncle Tommy to settle him down.
“Who it was, was Alan Kresky and he was drunk. Drunk and rambling, just scared out of his wits. Through my bedroom window above, I heard it all. Alan said he’d been coming back from Luanne Shields’ place out on Cricker Road, over towards French Village. He said he saw something, something that scared him white. It took him some time to say exactly what. Well, Alan was an old barfly and had been since he got back from World War II and nobody had to ask what he’d been doing out on Cricker at that hour, because both my old man and my uncle knew—just as the whole damn town knew—he was out there putting it to Luanne and had been for some time. Everyone knew that. Even we kids knew that. Old Luanne played it free and easy and the only one who didn’t know that was her husband, Bobby, who was out on the ore boats eight months of the year. Shit, as boys, we would hike out to Luanne’s after dark and watch her doing it through the window… sometimes with some guy and sometimes by herself.
“Anyway, Alan was out in the backyard and he was just blind… hell, I could smell the rye on his breath from my second-story window. I knew that smell of booze just fine, thank you very much, because the summer before, me and my pal Johnny Proctor got into his dad’s homemade chokecherry wine and spent the night vomiting out in a pasture. So, Alan was pissed, but what he’d seen out on Cricker had scared him so bad that he’d drove drunk right to the deputy sheriff’s door.”
“What did he see?” Kenney asked.
Godfrey sighed, studying the battalions of tombstones around them. “Said he saw Pearl Crossen walking up the side of Cricker Road easy as you please. You would’ve thought that my uncle and old man would have laughed at him and tossed him in the drunk tank, but they didn’t. Maybe it was how he looked—I couldn’t see from my window, of course, but his voice was bad, like somebody had pulled out his soul, spit on it and shoved it back in—and maybe it was because they’d heard that story too many times by then and were starting to wonder themselves. And maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with Genevieve herself. How she was crazy and haunted, made people real uneasy by then… like the ghosts of her family were slinking around her like hungry cats. She’d come into Haymarket now and again, just out of her head. See people on the streets, ask them if they’d seen Randy around or how she had to get to the tailor’s and get Pearl’s dress ready for her birthday party, but she had to run on account Henry was coming home and she had to get his supper on.
“At any rate, I heard my old man and uncle telling Alan he was drunk and was probably seeing things. But Alan said he wasn’t, he’d seen Pearl, she’d come back just like folks were saying. So Uncle Tommy said, all right, all right, maybe you saw some girl walking out there, but it wasn’t Pearl. But Alan said it was her, all right. And how did he know? Simple… the dress. It was the dress, he said, that fancy silk and lace dress, bright blue. Well, that carried some weight because little Pearl, as I said, was always prettied up by Genevieve like a china doll. Shit, when they pulled her from the quarry, it looked like she was ready for Easter dinner or her first confirmation.
“Alan insisted it was Pearl. She had been walking funny, kind of limping or something, and she was carrying some animal by the tail… a dead cat. You can just imagine what it was like for him out there on that moonlit road at the witching hour, seeing a dead girl shambling about with a roadkilled cat. Jesus. Now, I don’t honestly believe that my old man or uncle really believed that Pearl Crossen had kicked her way out of her casket, but something weird was going on and it had gotten to the point that they couldn’t ignore it anymore.
“See, lots of people were telling that same story and lots of people were getting scared. Too many nasty tales were circulating about Pearl Crossen. People had seen her walking the back roads at night same as Alan Kresky, funny look about her, hunched over and kind of hopping rather than walking. They’d seen her outside the gates of this very cemetery, crouching in drainage ditches, you name it. Mort Strombly said… I’ll never forget this… that he’d come upon her out on Cricker at three in the morning. That she’d been chewing on a dead dog at the side of the road when he saw her and he’d almost put his truck in the ditch. That when his headlights hit her, she looked up at him, her face all smeared with something black and filthy, and her eyes had been yellow. Shining yellow. And her face… well, Mort said it was all wrong, sort of crooked, jutting forth like the skull beneath was trying to chew its way out. Barney Hoke, this older kid we knew, said he’d been out parking with Leslie Strong and Pearl had come right up to the car. Said she looked like something out of a horror movie… like a living skull with greasy hair tangled full of sticks and burrs and dirt spattered over her face and lots of mangled-up teeth. Barney said that both he and Leslie started screaming, couldn’t help themselves. Pearl put her hands against the window—it was raining, so the windows were up, thank God—and Barney said those hands were swollen, white and sticky, looked like toadstools. He said they couldn’t see her clearly through the raindrops on the window, but whatever that thing was, it wasn’t Pearl.”
24
“Well, as you can imagine, we kids were getting pretty randy at the idea of this monster in our midst. We wanted to see it. We just had to see it.”