“As I said, it was awful dark in there and it just stank bad like spoiled pork and wet earth. I heard a dragging, metallic sound and I realized it was the sound of chains. And then that giggling again… girlish, yet profane, obscene. I knew whatever was up there was even then slinking out of the shadows to meet us. Just as I knew we were going to see something that would turn our hair white, something that had crawled out of a grave, black and stinking and wormy. If it was Pearl… then death and resurrection had yanked her mind out by its dirty roots. That’s when it spoke to us. And I can’t be really sure if I actually heard it or it was in my mind, but I can remember what it said: “C’mon, Johnny… c’mon, Matty… I’ve got something I want you to see, something I want you to touch, to feel…”
“And then? Well, she stepped out of the shadows, got as close as she could with that chain around her ankle. I’m pretty sure I screamed. She stood there, hunched over and dwarfish, like a living skeleton in a fancy dress that was just filthy and flyblown. And that face… leering and wicked, like something sunk in a pond, worked by leeches and tunneled by worms, white and puckered with a gray, grinning mouth full of narrow, overlapping teeth that were brown and black like she’d been chewing tobacco and graveyard soil. She held her arms out to us and the flesh hung off her fingers in loops. And when she spoke, her voice was clotted with earth, “There’s a place for you below, a nice place for good little boys…”
“Well, we ran. We fell down the stairs or maybe we didn’t, all I know is that suddenly we were in that hallway below and I was certain she would come drifting down at us in a patch of fog like a vampire in an old movie. But she didn’t. We could hear her up there, pulling on her chain, grunting and shrieking and laughing. But that was all we heard. We ran out of there and I don’t think we stopped running until we made Haymarket.”
Godfrey was real quiet after that, panting and mopping sweat from his brow with a hankie, just staring out the window of his cruiser, off through the headstones maybe to where Pearl Crossen was buried. After a time, he said, “I can’t be sure even now how much of that really happened. I was scared, Lou. God, I’ve never been that scared since. We never told a soul about that, at least I didn’t. Johnny’s family moved down to Chicago not a year later and I’ve never seen him since.”
Kenney let himself breathe. It was quite a story. “Okay, but that’s not all. Something… I mean, something had to be done about that situation.”
Godfrey nodded. “There’s not much else, but I’ll tell you. This is what my uncle Tommy told me two years before he died. My old man refused to ever speak of those days. He took them to his grave with him. About a month later, everyone had had enough. Uncle Tommy, my old man, and two other deputies went out to the Crossen place. Tommy said it smelled out there, just as I remembered. The long grass in the front yard, he said, was full of bones… not human, mind you, but animal—dogs and woodchucks, skunks and weasels and bobcats. It was horrible. All that roadkill Pearl had been dragging home, I guess. Genevieve saw them out there and came out onto the porch with her husband’s old .30-30 and put it right on the trespassers in her yard. They told her to lower that goddamn rifle and she said she would do no such thing, but they had better get off her property before she ventilated their asses for ’em. Tommy said Genevieve looked like hell, dirty and stinking, hair all wild and eyes wide and bloodshot. Tommy claimed he saw something peeking through the shuttered attic window.
“‘What you got up there, Mrs. Crossen?’ he says to her. ‘What you got inside that house?’
“‘Wouldn’t you like to know, Tommy Godfrey,’ she says back at him. ‘What I got I ain’t sharing with nobody. You get your own.’
“Now it was my old man’s turn: ‘You got Pearl in there, Genevieve?’
“‘You never goddamn mind!’
“‘Dammit, Genevieve,’ my old man says, ‘Pearl’s dead, you gotta know she’s dead.’
“At that, Genevieve just laughed. ‘So you say, so you say. But you don’t know, you don’t know anything. I knew’d it were my baby when she wandered into the yard. And since she come back… it’s never been so good.’
“Tommy said he knew then, as maybe he’d been suspecting all along, that Genevieve didn’t really have Pearl in there. You see, what it was was one of them things from the ruined village, one of them from below. A young one, a female. It wandered into the yard as Genevieve said and Genevieve, just plain out of her head, adopted the thing. Cared for that little horror. Loved it and dressed it up like Pearl. But, dear God, it wasn’t Pearl, it wasn’t even human.”
“What did they do?” Kenney asked.
“Nothing they could do. They left. Maybe they could have gotten a warrant, said Genevieve was crazy or something. She surely was. Regardless, they just got the hell out of there, weren’t sure what to do. But then something happened that brought it all to a head.”
“What’s that?”
“A child disappeared. A kid named Ralph Blodden. I knew him. His old man ran the Exxon station in Haymarket. Ralph disappeared one night and the facts are pretty tangled up, but I’m guessing he wandered out after dark and went missing. Two days later he still hadn’t shown. What I tell you now is from my uncle Tommy. He got it from Willy Chalmers, who used to run an apple orchard outside Haymarket. Willy told my uncle this story when he was dying of cancer, figured he had nothing to lose. Nothing at all. Wanted it off his soul, I guess.
“What happened was, people were pretty much up at arms about the Blodden kid gone missing and it didn’t take much of a leap on their part to tie it up with Genevieve and Pearl. So they went out there one night with guns and cans of gas and dogs. I think you know what happened next. They found the Blodden kid in a shed behind the house, just hanging there, seasoning up, I guess. Willy said he was getting pretty ripe… whether Pearl killed the kid or Genevieve did, figuring she had to provide for that ghoul she thought was her daughter, nobody knew and nobody gave a shit.”
No, Kenney figured, I bet they didn’t. I’ll just bet they didn’t.
Not that he blamed them for what he knew was coming next. Something had to be done and the law was pretty much useless, so Willy Chalmers and the boys—probably liquored up to give themselves the sort of steel that would be needed—did the job themselves. A small town and its horrendous secrets. You just never knew, never suspected the sort of things crawling under its surface. And most towns had secrets, Kenney knew, dark, awful truths kept buried so the townsfolk themselves could sleep at night.
Godfrey sighed. “Genevieve came out on the porch and Pearl came with her. Willy didn’t describe exactly how the girl looked, only to say that she was full of worms, crawling with bugs and her eyes… that’s what had stayed with him all those years… eyes shining yellow and behind them, something terrible. Genevieve told the child to get inside. The men were crazy and she knew it. Guns started going off. Willy said he didn’t know who fired first, but Pearl took two or three rounds and Genevieve took a few more. A shotgun blast tore her belly open. Pearl… that thing… dragged her mother into the house and the men started dousing the house with gasoline. It was an old place and it went up pretty quick. Willy told Tommy that his last sight of Pearl and Genevieve was when the house was engulfed by flames. Through the blazing doorway, Pearl was holding Genevieve’s corpse, screaming and cackling and shouting out awful things and then the roof came down on them and that was it. They burned up with the house.”