Unbury Carol(70)

Once, three years back, at six in the morning, Lucas had thought the grass covering one of the graves to be out of sorts (I knew it wasn’t no job me or Hank did, boss) and Manders gave him the okay to dig. By six thirty he and Hank had uncovered a plot full of old clothing. The body? Manders didn’t know. Lucas and Hank sure didn’t know. And Manders believed the family didn’t really need to, either. Of course Opal was told and Opal put a little time into it, but the truth was it wasn’t an easy thing to do, locating the sort of person who would do that. Why do you think they buried the old clothing? Hank asked then. I don’t know, Hank, maybe they found better clothes on the body.

As funeral director, Manders heard all sorts of stories. The director in Kellytown woke to find the corpses of four children piled on his roof. The man from Griggsville had eight robberies in one evening, all right out from under his watchman’s nose. Manders understood it was part of the trade. Things could get uneasy in any line of work. When yours was death and dying, uneasy could look downright deranged.

Lurkers in trees. A hundred thousand worms. Voices in the dressing room.

But the delivery…the delivery put Manders’s mind at ease.

He was doing the paperwork for Winifred Jones’s funeral when he spotted Donald Herricks’s boy wheeling something big up the front steps. Manders pulled the drapes aside but couldn’t make out what it was. He met the Herricks boy at the front door and the young man told him he’d been sent this way with this box and that’s all he knew. Who is it from? Manders asked. I really don’t know. Nobody told you? Nobody, sir. All right, Manders said, holding open the door, wheel it on in. Once Herricks had the thing in the main lobby Manders pulled off the blanket and was surprised to find a Bellafonte. A gorgeous Bellafonte, Manders would say, the oak painted a rich yellow and a fine orange, and the longer he looked at it the more he felt it might actually be the nicest casket he’d ever seen in his career. Young man, he said, not looking at the delivery boy, are you positive no letter was attached? The kid Herricks reached into his pockets and pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it over to Manders. I’m sorry, he said, slipped my mind. I thought so, Manders said. Something this nice doesn’t come from nowhere.

But after reading the letter it turned out it had. Three words, FOR CAROL EVERS, was all the paper boasted. No sender. No signer. No condolences and no words of explanation.

Manders asked if maybe there wasn’t another piece of paper and the boy checked his pockets and said, no, I remember now, that really was the only piece. Manders found the arrival of this Bellafonte just about the most curious thing he’d ever encountered. But as he ran his fingers along the wonderfully smooth edges, the beautifully finished wood, he realized the casket made him happy. Happy because it lent the first bit of class to Carol Evers’s funeral since he’d found out she’d died. It was nice to see someone was giving the ceremony some thought. Could it have been sent by Dwight? Manders didn’t think so. In fact, the question survived less time in his musings than whether the staff outhouse needed a lock.

He circled the massive casket, looking at it from all angles. Hank and Lucas came in covered in grass and Lucas asked if that wasn’t a Bellafonte. Manders smiled and said it sure was and that it was for Carol Evers. Lucas said them things are built to last. Manders said it’d take a mother draft horse robbed of her baby to break free of that thing. Hank said they might need some extra hands carrying it and Manders said he was happy the Manders Funeral Home would no longer be responsible for putting a lady like Carol Evers into the ground in a Benson.





She saw her fingers lift. In the glass. Saw them move. The real her. Not the her that, until today, could do nothing in Howltown, never could. It was the other her, the physical her that Hattie so longed to assist, the her that, had Hattie seen her fingers move, would’ve leapt out of her skin, considering it the single most important breakthrough in either of their lives.

Yes, the sleeping Carol, the one the town would bury, that Carol moved her fingers in the glass. And after that, with the incredible enthusiasm of having broken through, even at all, Carol focused her attention on her head.

And as her head turned slowly toward the glass, as the woman reflected did the same, Carol heard the hoarse wheezing, the monster who had lit her coma, the monster who wanted, no doubt, for her to see all that came her way. She heard it approaching fast, as though upon horseback, a sickly wheezing that did not necessarily indicate poor lungs, but spoke rather of no lungs at all; a thing beyond life and death.

A thing called Rot.

And by the time Rot arrived at the carriage, Carol heard no hooves, and she knew the creature had flown, soared, floated to where she lay, trying so hard to conquer Howltown.

When Rot opened the coach door, Carol’s head was not facing the mirror. She was looking up, as she had been on the stone slab in the cellar. And the look upon the fiend’s face, the one she could barely see, suggested he knew something unacceptable was afoot in the coach. The one thing he simply could not allow.

Progress.

He stared long at the glass Dwight had put in the coach.

Then, with the same cold palm that had rolled her over, Rot touched Carol once more. And out of the corner of her eye, in the glass, she saw the same hand emerging from the shadows of the coach, settling upon her flesh. Somehow the reflection was worse. It was one thing—a nightmare—to be touched in the coma, but the horror of knowing it was happening in a world in which she could not wake was leviathan.