green shamrocks.
In the next room, the kitchen, there was a black, dust-covered wood stove with white porcelain facing, and a long table shoved up against the wall. The table was weather faded but sound, with thick carved legs that terminated in lion’s feet. Above the table, on the wall, the wallpaper – sick beige with no pattern – had water- stained itself in an interesting manner. The stain was dark and shaped like a face and there were darker dots on the face, like splash marks, and the shape of the face was familiar.
Leonard said, “The Wallpaper of Turin, or rather, of LaBorde, Texas.”
“I read once about this Mexican gal saw Jesus’s face on a tortilla,” I said, “but I think we got her beat here.”
“I don’t know,” Leonard said, “get tired of it, you can’t eat it.”
We went over to the table for a closer look. Leonard stepped back and glanced down, said, “Check out the floor.”
I saw what he meant immediately. A large section of the floor we were standing on was newer wood. It was dark, as if weathered, but it was, in fact, treated lumber. About the size of a Ping-Pong table. You looked close enough, you could see it was all of one piece. You might not have noticed it, you weren’t looking for something suspicious.
I got out the floor plan I had drawn from memory. I said, “According to this, if I recreated it right, and the basic design certainly fits this house, there are no graves at this spot.”
“Yeah, but I think, good friend, we have just found the doorway to hell.”
We got off the square of flooring, and Leonard worked the tip of the shovel into a corner of it and lifted. The square of wood creaked up. When it was high enough, I grabbed hold of it and helped raise it. It wasn’t too heavy.
We pulled the section back and looked down. It was about three feet to the ground. You could smell the dampness of the earth. The ground was packed down there, as if it were well traveled.
I lay down on the floor, leaned over the edge of the gap, and looked underneath the flooring with my flashlight. There had been a lot of new wood put under there for support. About three feet to my left there was a metal container about the size of a personal safe, pushed back against the rotten wood skirting that went around the house. I flashed the light in the hole some more, looking for snakes. I didn’t see any.
I climbed down there and got the metal box and handed it to Leonard. The box was made of tin. It was like an oversized breadbox. It rattled when I moved it. There was nothing but a slap-and-snap latch to keep you out of it.
I climbed out of the hole and watched Leonard open the box. Inside was a large Bowie knife, a small hacksaw, about a dozen child pornography magazines, a purple tablecloth, two candlesticks, and two new white candles.
I noted something was sticking out of one of the pornography magazines, an undersized page that didn’t seem to belong. I pulled it out. It was a page from the Bible. The Psalms. I checked the other magazines. Each contained a page from the Psalms.
“I’ll be damn,” Leonard said. “Read a little Psalms, whack off to kiddie porn, read a little Psalms. That’s some combination.”
I unwrapped the purple tablecloth. It was stained in the center with something crusty, and at either end there were white stains that were obviously candle wax.
“Let’s slide the lid back on the floor,” I said.
“Aren’t we going to look down there?” Leonard asked.
“Humor me. I need it to stand on.”
We put the flooring back. We stood on it, and I ran a finger through the dust on the table. I said, “The dust here is a lot thinner than the dust everywhere else. Now, watch this. I think.”
I pulled out the purple tablecloth and spread it on the table. It fit nicely. I took off my shirt and used it to pick up the candlesticks at their bases so as not to leave prints. I put one at either end of the table where the cloth had remnants of wax staining it. I shoved the candles into the sticks, tossed the porno magazines on the table for the hell of it.
I said, “Is a picture starting to form?”
Leonard let it cook a moment. “It’s like an altar. And if that crusty stuff in the middle of the cloth is what I think it is, could be what we have here are sacrifices to a water stain of Jesus?”
“A water stain to some is but the face of God to others,” I said. “Remember those idiots and the tortilla?”
“Well, it ain’t a ritual we done much at our Baptist church.”
“Not my church either, though I might have missed a couple of Sundays.”
I put my shirt on, and Leonard shoveled the flooring up again. We pulled the section back, and I got down in the hole on my hands and knees with my flashlight and waved it around. I saw a number of termite mounds. I unfolded the floor plan and studied it with the flashlight. I felt certain I was close in memory to Uncle Chester’s floor plan, if not dead on. When I thought I had the plan in my head, I folded it up and put it away. I stood up in the hole and said, “Give me the shovel and just hang tight a minute.”
I took the shovel and started crawling toward what I remembered as a rectangle on the map. It was dark under there, but the trim around the house was rotten in spots and pencils of light came through like laser beams.
I got to about where I thought the map indicated a rectangle, and looked around. There wasn’t a mound there, but there was a slight depression about two feet wide and four feet long. Water had run up under the house and filled it and the water had partially evaporated.
I put the light on the ground at an angle where it would shine in the depression, and got to work. It was so low I had a hard time managing the shovel, but I lay on my stomach and poked it in the depression and sort of rolled the handle in my hands and flipped mud and dirt to the side.
About the fourth time I flipped the dirt, a smell came out of there that filled my head and made me choke. It was so potent, I crawled back from it. I must have called out too, because Leonard said, “You all right?”
“Come down here.”
A moment later Leonard crawled up beside me. “Shit, that’s stout. It’s something dead.”
“Yeah.”
We worked our shirts off and tied them over our faces, and while Leonard held the light, I crawled up to the depression and went back to work. I rolled a couple of shovelfuls out of there and came up with something. Leonard put the light on it. It was stuck to the tip of the shovel and I couldn’t move it out of the hole.
Leonard’s voice was muffled behind his shirt. “Chicken wire.”
I edged the shovel beneath the wire and worked along the edge of the depression and picked up another shovelful and came up with more dirt-plugged wire.
Leonard said, “If I buried something and didn’t want animals digging it out, I might put a little chicken wire over or around it.. .. Jesus, Hap. I don’t think I can stand this stink for long.”
It was strong, shirts over our noses or not. I was beginning to feel dizzy and ill. Another shovelful turned up some cloth, and the cloth ripped and snapped on the end of the shovel, and I pulled the shovel over closer and looked at the fragment. It was caked with mud and what I figured was lime. The lime had faded the cloth, and I couldn’t tell much about it.
When I stuck the shovel in again and worked it back, I had a fragment of bone. It might have been a piece of a rib. There was something clinging to it. It looked like lardy chunks of flesh and cloth twisted up together. The smell from it was so intense I thought I was going to pass out.
“Maybe it’s an animal bone?” I said.
“Yeah, and my dick’s a water snake.”
I dug around some more, and after a while I came up with what I knew I would. A hard round ball of mud. Except the mud came off the ball, and it wasn’t a ball at all. It was the top part of a small, dirt-colored skull.
“Sonofabitch,” I said.
I used the shovel to push all I had found back in the hole, then shoveled all the dirt back on top of it.
“We better look around some more,” Leonard said.
We moved back a few paces, away from the smell, and I got my map out and Leonard held the light on it. We
