Unbury Carol(102)

Moxie stopped because the entire graveyard, the whole expanse of lumped earth, was moving.

The stones trembled as if shaken by hidden men. The dirt between every marker, the marble walls of the mausoleums, and the very gates themselves…the ground breathed…like the folds of the face of the fiend…



* * *



—

…No more light in Howltown. Whether the veil between the coma and the real world had been stripped entirely or not, there was no light because, Carol knew, there is no light in a box that is already closed.

And yet…she was not alone.

Her heart beat ten, fifteen times a minute, and the hoarse breathing of a second person inside the casket led to words from lips she could not see.

“Wake,” it said. “Feel this moment…wake…”

Her heart beat twenty, twenty-five beats per minute.

She was waking, yes, just as the monster wanted her to. Waking in a buried box.

Carol tried to scream, tried to push him away, but there was no room, no space between them. She felt something wet upon her ear; his lips perhaps, his breath, the tip of one of his many noses, or wholly him, all of him, attempting to slip within her.

Or maybe it’s the wet decay of your own ear, Carol thought, unable to cry, unable to cry out. Maybe this is the beginning of rot…



* * *



—

…The earth split near the horse’s hooves and worms poured forth like foam.

Moxie kicked the steed and rode him hard over the uneven ground as it rose, swollen, then dipped six feet deeper than it’d been. Moxie, focused on the scorched earth ahead, the site of Carol’s burial, was not prepared for the sudden stop as the horse he rode sank into the earth mid-stride, its front legs stuck at once.

Moxie rolled from the horse and stumbled toward Carol’s grave. On foot, wounded, with broken bones he did not yet know he had, Moxie crossed hills of rotting grass. The markers came at him, the scares in a traveling carnival’s house of horrors, so many tombstones, it seemed, sprouting from the earth. More than one cut him and blood flowed, forming dark paths in the soot from Smoke’s fire.

Ahead, Carol’s grave rose and fell with the waves.

Rot, Moxie knew, trying to stop him still.

A wooden cross came at him and Moxie ducked, fell to the ground, and felt the worms suddenly upon him, so many fingertips, the infinite hands of Rot.

As the graveyard bucked, as the worms blinded him, Moxie crawled to Carol’s grave.

He felt the fresh dirt beneath his fingers.

In the delirium of effort, hope, and hopelessness, too, Moxie understood clearly that this time he had not turned his back on her.

“Carol!” he cried.

He thrust his blackened hands farther into the dirt.

And the earth split easy.

Beneath him, at his knees, the worms spilled forth. Moxie crushed handfuls at once, Rot’s many faces showing between the small bodies, like eyes flashing between the flames of a campfire. When he saw the lid of the casket, so clean beneath the dirt and worms, Moxie brought his fists down against the wood.

There was no give.

New worms gushed upon the casket from the walls of the fresh grave. Moxie lowered himself into the hole, on his knees on the lid, and pounded with black fists made of guilt, made of rage.

Someone was near, the voice of a woman above, but Moxie did not hear her.

Moxie’s fist broke the wood. Then a chip became a break. And the break, a hole.

A figure blocked out the sun above, a woman’s voice again, and Moxie fired his gun without looking and the figure disappeared.

Magic, Rinaldo called it. The way things disappear and then appear again.

Moxie tore at the wood and became, there, the legend he was said to be. A man capable of killing with no gun, a man capable of destroying a Bellafonte with his bare hands alone.

He cracked the wood apart even more, tearing open a hole big enough for his arm. He reached into the box and felt for her, for Carol.

But felt no body.

Instead…gears…a crank…rope.

The entire graveyard seemed to rise and then flatten at once, as Moxie saw into the box…saw the open black space…the upholstery…the craftsmanship…Moxie saw…

Saw that the box was empty.

No Carol within.

A woman’s voice again and Moxie closed his eyes.

No Carol.

The graveyard stopped moving.

The worms (It was a good trick! It was a great one, Moxie! Magic!) had vanished. And the legendary outlaw was upon his knees on a broken casket in an ordinary grave, under an uncaring sky of blue.

The sun was high in Harrows.

A dirtied hand clasped Moxie’s shoulder and he turned quick, insane, to see a face he hadn’t seen in twenty years looking back, looking into his own deranged eyes.

“James Moxie,” she said. “You’re as unhinged as the box beneath you. Come…fast.”

And Moxie understood that yes, he himself was James Moxie, the mythic outlaw, the legend of the Trail, the man who had performed the Trick at Abberstown.

He was James Moxie.

Only this time, he hadn’t run away.





When Carol was five years old her mother, Hattie, pointed to a mess in the corner of the playroom and told Carol to climb in. Carol, looking at all the toys Mother had just dumped onto the ground, wasn’t sure which toy Hattie was talking about.