I had never really been afraid before. I thought I had. When I was bit by a snake when I was seven. The night I got sideswiped by a semi coming home from college and had to wait until the fire department could cut me out of my ruined car. The first time I realized Sandra didn’t love me any more.
Those were all frightening, but they were mainly a mixture of pain and surprise—my body’s adrenaline and my mind’s expectations being thrown into chaos. A moment of peril that time and distance would turn into forgotten trauma or an interesting story. A scar or a monument not to the danger, but to my surviving it.
When the thing that had once been Rick Jarvis slammed me against the doors of the emergency room at Richland County Hospital, my vision blurred as tears of pain and terror flooded my eyes. The parking lot beyond was dark, but in the distance I could see the lights of a gas station at the nearest intersection. It could have been on the moon and not felt farther away. A hand pressed my forehead against the glass painfully even as his body pinned me against the release bar of the door.
I heard myself let out some kind of short animal squeal as I tried to wriggle free, but I didn’t struggle for long. For one thing, I could tell he was far stronger than me. For another, I could feel the first touches of true fear as its cold fingers caressed my heart.
True fear isn’t about being hurt. It isn’t about losing your belongings or even your life. True fear is about losing yourself. What you are, what you were, what you love. It’s the feeling of a beast hungrily roaming the rooms of your heart, a nameless despair that has finished eating your hope and has moved on to your soul.
As I felt the thing I’d come to know as the Gravekeeper breathing hot, fetid breath into my ear, I understood being afraid. As he chuckled, digging his fingers into my ribs, lightly at first and then hard enough that I felt wet, hot pain on my right side, I could sympathize with my brain’s flight into sheer animal terror. When I realized how excited and happy he was, how aroused and joyous my pain and fear made him as he pressed himself tight and began digging into me, I felt myself sliding towards a slavering abyss.
You need to understand that I was crying and slobbering during all of this, begging to be let go. We were in a vacuum of fear and pain—dignity and pride had no chance of survival in such harsh conditions. In the moment I felt like I would have done anything just to get his burning hands off of me, his probing fingers out of my side. But there was something more than that, worse than that, occurring at the same time. In the still darkness of my inner self, there was a moment of contact and recoil. Like a field mouse scenting a snake in its burrow, my spirit, delicate and shuddering, somehow recognized the rotten thing that hid in that poor man’s meat. And in that moment, I think my soul glimpsed its eventual doom.
“So are ya scared enough now, Sully? Starting to understand? Are ya ready to quit running and get down to bibs and bobs, my boy?” A new wash of rotting breath hit me and I found myself wondering absently if the man pinning me to the door was already dead. I almost answered automatically. As I said, I’d already been begging, but this was the first time he had asked me a direct question in the eternity since he had first found me in the dark.
DO NOT ANSWER THE GRAVEKEEPER
The words blazed across my mind and I kept silent. Several seconds passed and then I was suddenly free. I let out a gasp as though coming up for air before turning around. I had no idea of fighting back or even trying to defend myself. But I did want to see him for some reason, as though it would bring some kind of understanding. I was disappointed at first, his face and form lost in shadow beyond a dim outline. The security lights in the room were behind him and so weak that the light did little but make him a more tangible bit of darkness.
Then his face was lit by alternating blossoms of white and blue light. I sucked in an involuntary breath at the sight of him. His skin seemed impossibly dry and hard, as though it was made from some kind of malleable resin or polished stone. His eyes…where his eyes should be…were raw red pits of ruined flesh riddled with…I wasn’t sure. It reminded me of a picture I had seen once of a cave lined with jagged quartz—sharp crystals growing towards each other, digging through the meat of the earth to form something new in the void. But where the picture had been strangely beautiful, this was the opposite. It was some kind of unnatural decay.
“Step back from the fucking door, Sullivan!”
Turning, I realized that Deputy Ellison had been trying to get through the door for several seconds. I took several steps back and he slammed a collapsible baton into the glass sharply. Glancing at the Jarvis-thing, I saw he was just standing there passively, as though he was waiting for something. A second strike and the glass was spiderwebbed. A third and it went cloudy before tumbling free of the frame.
“Both of you get down on the ground! Now!”
I went to obey but hesitated. I didn’t want to get on the ground with that monster so close by. To my surprise, he was already getting down on his hands and knees, a small smile crawling onto his rigid lips, causing them to crack and bleed as it widened. He whispered across the distance to me in a tone that seemed on the edge of laughter.
“Don’t you worry, Sully. We’ll be together again real soon.”
“Three more people, Mr. Sullivan. Two nurses and a doctor. Dead. Killed by that maniac Jarvis, despite him having…whatever he has wrong with him. On top of that, another twenty staff and patients that were unconscious for nearly two hours with no memory of what happened. So today, in a town that considers it something if we have two murders a year, we’ve got ten people dead in one day. Because, before I forget, we had to kill the second worker who spontaneously decided his entire family needed to die today.” I could see Ellison was struggling to maintain his composure, trying to do his job of interrogating me while being far out of his depth and understanding. I sympathized, but I didn’t have any answers either. At least not yet.
I sighed. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on any more than you…”
“Bullshit!” he yelled, throwing down a plastic evidence bag that contained what I recognized as the pages of the letter. In my panic at the hospital I had forgotten them in the waiting room, and by the time I had remembered it was too late. “I don’t know what this shit is, but I can tell from glancing at it that it’s old and strange. Just like that coffin you had those men digging up today.” My eyes widened and he smiled bitterly. “Oh yeah, we know about that now too. I sent a unit back to your house and they found where you had hidden it. Could see the fresh dirt on it and put two and two together. We’re a small department, but we’re not idiots. And you need to stop treating us like we are.”
I sat back in my chair and sighed. “Listen, I don’t think you’re stupid. I just don’t know what’s going on and I’m trying to figure it out. But you need to hear what I’m saying. That thing you arrested…it’s not Jarvis. It’s some kind of monster. You need to kill it or bury it somewhere deep if it won’t die.”
The deputy sat down across the table from me. The interview room was well-lit, and I could see the exhaustion and fear on his face, but his voice was steady when he spoke. “You don’t have to convince me that something abnormal is going on, or that the fucker is a monster. But we don’t execute people, even if they deserve it. He’s locked up tight, and aside from getting him checked out medically in the morning, his ass won’t leave that cell until he’s before a judge on Monday. You have my word.”
I shook my head. “That won’t work. He’s strong and he can affect people. Make them do things. I don’t know what he is, but we aren’t safe here.”
Ellison was going to respond further when he got a call on his cell phone. “ I’m in the middle of…What? That’s not…Who was down there with him?” The color was draining from his face as he spoke, and he was already heading toward the door as he talked. Almost as an afterthought he turned to me and pointed. “Keep your ass in here. I’ll be right back.”
I felt my stomach knotting as I waited. I considered leaving, but I didn’t know that running would help anything. Shifting in my chair, I felt a flare of fresh pain in my side and grunted. They had cleaned the wound and put a bandage on it, but they asked me to hold off taking any pain meds until my interview was done. I’d agreed at the time, but now I was starting to regret it.
I jumped when the door suddenly swung open. I was expecting either Ellison or the monster, but it was a younger female deputy instead. She smiled as she came in and gave me a can of ginger ale. “Sorry this is taking so long. Very chaotic at the moment.”
I smiled weakly at her. “What’s going on? Deputy Ellison just went running out of here a few minutes ago like there was an emergency.”
The girl looked down and then glanced at the camera mounted in the corner of the room. “I really shouldn’t say anything.”
“Please. I’m really freaking out in here. Anything you can tell me.”
She nodded and sat down across from me. “Well, the guy they brought in with you, the murder suspect? They were keeping him in a holding cell downstairs. Locked tight, camera in the cell, the whole nine yards. And now he’s gone. Escaped somehow, but no one knows how. The only thing they found was some kind of weird rock sitting on the bench in the cell.”
I stood up suddenly, knocking my chair over as I backed to the wall. “Fuck. Fuck! I told him! I…we have to get out of here, we’re not safe, we have to…”
The deputy was wide-eyed as she stood and retreated to the door. “Look, I shouldn’t have said anything. Just calm down. We’re safer here than anywhere. Trust me, if that guy was still in the station, we would know it. Just stay here and I’ll get Ellison for you.” She paused and then added. “Just please don’t tell them what I told you. I need my job.”
I took a deep breath and tried to get control of myself. “Yeah. Yeah, your secret is safe with me. I’m sorry. I just…I hope you find him soon. He’s very dangerous.”
She nodded, her face solemn. “I believe you. We’ll probably be calling in the state police on this one anyway.” She opened the door but stopped halfway through, turning back to me. “Hey, you want any ice with that drink?”
I waved my hand. “No, no this is fine. Thank you.”
The girl’s face hardened as her lips peeled away from her teeth in a mockery of a smile. The voice that came from her was rough and unnatural, but I recognized it right away.
“That’s two, Sully.” A thin line of drool began to drip out of the corner of the girl’s mouth as it spoke. “I’m crawling towards you, my boy. Going to crawl right up inside you to stay, I think.” The thing wiped the drool away absently as it looked at me with her unblinking hazel eyes. “Yes…I think right up inside you to stay.”
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Credits
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