Free GRAVEWORM by Tim Curran Page B

discipline)
    “ Henry… when can I be buried in the box? I like to be buried in the box.”
    “ Soon, Worm. Soon.”
    “ Okay, Henry.”
    With that, she closed her dark eyes and dreamed of entombment, of narrow boxes and rotting satin and crawling, feeding things far, far below.
     
    20
    Sometime later… the phone rang.
    Tara opened her eyes and went into panic mode right away. She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She was sprawled on the floor before the front door and the house smelled like Pine-Sol and was gagging it was so strong. She’d been having a nightmare. Lisa. Margaret. Graves. Burying things. Evil moon-faced boogeymen calling on the phone. Then it came rushing back into her head and she felt the dirt on her fingers, her aching muscles, and knew the things she had done and the things she would yet do.
    She did not scream.
    She did not even cry.
    She held it all deep down inside of her, nailing it shut in a box as black laughter echoed in her brain and wracked sobbing choked in her throat. But she shut it off. She shut it all off because there were things that had to be done and she had to put on the proper face in order to do them.
    You are not who you were, Tara told herself. You are someone else that just looks like Tara Coombes and you have to remember that. You have to get Lisa back and it will mean doing terrible things, but you will do them. I will help you. But the world, the world must not suspect. You must look like Tara Coombes. Even if you’re somebody else.
    Even if you’re somebody else.
    The phone kept ringing.
    Nobody would call this late. Nobody but a drooling, evil thing that kidnapped teenage girls, a night-haunter that was frightened of the rising sun as all such things were. It could not go back into its coffin yet, not until it filled its belly with the bitter brine of suffering, not until it leeched itself to Tara’s soft white throat one more time and drank its fill.
    Tara walked into the kitchen and the smell of cleaners reamed her nose out and made her head spin. Her eyes watered. She reached out for the phone in the darkness, picturing the monster on the other end: a bloated, leggy spider whose web she was caught in. Cocooned with silk, the spider liked to unwrap her from time to time to sip from her throat, to suckle her last throbbing artery.
    In her mind, she heard a crunching and squishing sound as a boot crushed the spider flat, reduced it to a mush. And she knew whose boot that was: her own.
    Shutting everything down inside herself, she picked up the cordless. “Hello?”
    “ Tara? Tara? Tara, is that you?”
    “ Yes… who is this?” It wasn’t the boogeyman. She vaguely recognized the voice. An old man. A neighbor.
    “ It’s Bud Stapleton, honey. I thought you were Lisa for a minute… you girls sound alike.”
    He paused and she could hear the tension in his voice. Serious tension. Bud was kind-hearted, but tough and old-school. An ex-cop who was damn proud of every one of the thirty-five years he’d put in on the Bitter Lake force, even if about ninety-percent of it was bullshit, as he liked to say. Now he was prattling. A guy who rarely said more than “yup” or “nope” on the phone.
    This all passed through Tara’s mind at the same time the reason for his very late, or very early, phone call did: Margaret had not come home. Bud, according to Margaret, was given to drinking beers on the couch before the TV where he very often fell asleep. He must have woken and found that his wife had not returned from the Coombes’ house.
    This was trouble.
    This was an angle that Tara had not considered with all the rest of it coming from every conceivable direction and knocking her flat. Margaret. Margaret was missing. It would mean the police. An investigation. And if all that wasn’t trouble enough, the sort of trouble that put Lisa in worse jeopardy than she already was, Bud was no fool. He was an ex-cop. He knew how to find out things. Even if the