When he struck wood, found that fine gumwood coffin with the iron bands, he brushed dirt from it, whispering something under his breath just as he was certain something inside was whispering to him.
Was that…was that the sound of ragged fingers scraping from within? A thudding and a shifting like a child announcing itself from its mother’s belly? No, not yet, not yet.
As Strand reached for the catches on the coffin lid, his hands pulled back and some dread voice in his mind demanded to know what he thought he was doing, in this place, down in this claustrophobic darkness.
And that stayed him for a moment or two, long enough for him to hear the chortle of frogs from the ravine and the sing-song shrilling of whippoorwills and the droning of night things. But then his fingers were at those catches, undoing them, curling along the seam of that lid as an earthworm coiled fatly beneath his hand.
It’s time, mama, he thought with a buzzing sibilance in his head. It’s time to wake and rise up and Then the lid was swung open and there was a rush of moist putrescence and fetid gas that made Strand gag. Mama Lucille was laying there in her silk burial gown, gray hands folded neatly at her bosom. Her face was pallid and drawn, the skin there thin and tight as if the skull beneath was trying to push its way through. Blackened lips pulled back from narrow teeth in a livid corpse-grin.
She was dead, she was not alive…yet, there was almost a repellent and lewd vitality to her that did not belong. There was a sentience, an awareness that was practically obscene. Like seeing a wooden window dummy smile and wink at you. Life did not belong in those remains, yet it was there.
This was when Strand truly realized he had made an awful mistake.
Then Mama Lucille’s eyes flickered open, luminous yellow sacrificial moons.
She grinned and those withered fingers reached up, skeletal twigs scratching at an October window.
Strand started screaming.
*
It was a week later when he stumbled into town, gibbering and mad, his eyes wide and reflective like wax pennies. He made it to Sheriff Bolan’s office and collapsed into a chair, his face grimy, leaves and sticks braided into his hair. When he tried to speak, all that would come out was a dry gibbering. And when he tried to make Bolan understand with just his hands, those fingers shook with violent quakes.
No, Bolan did not know what had happened to him, not then, but he knew it was bad. Luke Strand was thin and wasted, drooling and delusional. Whatever had taken hold of him it had done so with claws and teeth and appetite. Chewing up the man and shitting what was left out the other side. You could smell the fear and the insanity running from him in a sharp juice. He was like some demented ghost haunting the bones of his life.
“ Okay, Luke,” Bolan finally said. “We’ll do it my way then.”
Bolan was a big man, hard and wiry with sure hands and a cool head. And if there was one thing he believed in, it was whiskey. It was the only medicine he used and the greatest curative in God’s creation. No greasy, slick-talking Yankee snakeoil salesman could touch good Kentucky whiskey and that was the plain truth. So he got out his bottle and he started pouring it into Luke Strand along with hot black coffee that was so strong it could’ve made a blind man see or a seeing man blind.
After a time, incrementally, Strand relaxed. All those compressed springs and taut wires loosened slowly, slowly, and he began to speak. He was still out of his head. So far out that try as he might, he could not find the way back in again. But he was lucid. And that was something.
“ Eileen’s dead,” was the first thing he said. “She was murdered.”
Bolan sat down, nodded, rolled himself a cigarette and gave it some fire. “Did you do the killing, son?”
But Strand shook his head so violently it looked like it might fall right off. “No, sir! It weren’t me…it was, it was… my mama.”
Bolan pulled off his cigarette, his eyes narrowed to razor cuts. He knew that Strand was not pulling his leg; he could see the sincerity in his eyes and it didn’t sit well with him. There were certain things that could be and others that could not. “Your mama’s dead, Luke. I saw her put in the ground.”
Strand’s eyes were glassy and staring like those of a stuffed elk. “She was in the ground, sheriff, then I dug her back up and I took her…took her to Missy Crow…”
Bolan grimaced and a slight tremor passed through his hand. An understanding passed through his eyes, a recognition as if he knew this dark path all too well and where it led. He sat there silently, smoking, looking as if what he had chewed for lunch was chewing on him now. “I told you to leave that goddamned hag out of this.”
But, as Strand explained, he could not.
He told Bolan what it was like with Mama Lucille being gone, how it had all pulled out his guts, emptied him, the grief stuffing something else back in there that was poisoned and foul. He told Bolan how he had gone to the straw-witch and paid her and all the rest.
“ Then I dug her up and she was dead…but she was alive,” Strand said.
But not really alive, he admitted. She was animate, but not human anymore. After she had woken up down in that grave, he climbed out of there, his mind just gone to sauce. He ran home and hid in the farmhouse and Mama Lucille followed him.
Strand was running his hands through his hair roughly like he wanted to yank it out by the roots. “She…she wasn’t mama, she was something else. Like a living scarecrow, something that should not walk but did. Not human, not like me and you. Not warm and feeling, just a cold shell… walking, breathing meat.”
She would not speak, Strand said.
She made funny hissing sounds and grunting noises like a hog rooting in soil, but that was about it. She did not sleep. She walked around the house, flies nesting in her hair and mouth and she did not seem to care. She would stand in the hallway for hours staring into space or in the corner just looking at the wall. At night, she would pace back and forth, that black flyblown stink hanging on her. Once, she got outside and laid down in the turnip patch. By the time Strand found her, there were beetles and ants tunneling in her.
“ I…I tried to pretend she were really mama, sheriff, I know it’s blasphemy and I’m going to rot in the bowels of hell, but I just weren’t thinking right,” he said in a squeaking, childish voice. “I wanted her to be mama, I needed her to be mama. I tried to get her to eat. I gave her soup and bread and taters with no salt just like Missy Crow said, but mama wouldn’t touch it. Then…then two days ago, I dug a grave out in the field and I made her lay in it. I buried her down near five feet. She was dead, she was walking carrion, stinking and rotting and always chattering her teeth like she were hungry. But she was dead so I buried her.
“ I thought that would be the end of things. That she was dead and she would stay dead. Eileen had left me, she never saw none of it. When I went to dig up mama she just left, went back to her people, I reckon. I was thinking that the madness had passed and things could be sane again. But that night…that night I was lying in my bed and I heard Rafe Short’s old hound begin to howl down the road a piece and I knew what was going to happen, I just knew it. Then I heard the creaking of those loose boards out on the porch and the door opening. Then those slow, heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. I think…I think I screamed when the door opened. Mama stood there in the moonlight coming in through the window and I smelled her long before that and heard all them flies buzzing on her. She stood there, just dirty and moldering and wormy, clods of earth falling off of her. She was holding out her hands to me like she wanted something, chattering her teeth, just chattering and chattering those teeth…but I knew what she wanted, God help me, but I knew what she wanted.”
Bolan looked a little sick himself by that point. He crushed out his cigarette under his boot. “And what was that? Tell me, boy.”