Yes, the eyes were open. That’s why he felt watched. Carl hadn’t used enough gum on them and they had flown up just like window shades and the Glick kid was staring at him. Something ought to be done about it.
Shovel out the dirt. That was the ticket. Shovel it out and break the lock with the shovel and open the coffin and close those awful staring eyes. He had no mortician’s gum, but he had two quarters in his pocket. That would do as well. Silver. Yes, silver was what the boy needed.
The sun was above the roof of the Marsten House now, and only touched the highest and oldest spruces to the west of town. Even with the shutters closed the house seemed to stare at him.
Mike Ryerson suddenly leaped into the grave and began to shovel madly, throwing dirt up and out in brown explosions. At last the blade of the shovel struck wood and he began to scrape the last of the dirt over the sides and then he was kneeling on the coffin striking at the brass lip of the lock again and again and again.
The frogs down by the brook had begun to thump, a night jar was singing in the shadows, and somewhere close by a number of whippoorwills had begun to lift their shrilling call.
What am I doing? he asked himself. What in God’s name am I doing?
He knelt there on top of the coffin and tried to think about it… but something on the underside of his mind was urging him to hurry, hurry, the sun was going down -
He lifted the spade over his shoulder, brought it down on the lock once more, and there was a snapping sound. It was broken.
He looked up for a moment, in a last glimmering of sanity, his face streaked and circled with dirt and sweat, the eyes staring from it in bulging white circles.
Venus glowed against the breast of the sky.
Panting, he pulled himself out of the grave, lay down full length, and fumbled for the catches on the coffin lid. He found them and pulled. The lid swung upward, gritting on its hinges just as he had imagined it would, showing at first only pink satin, and then one dark-clad arm (Danny Glick had been buried in his communion suit), then… then the face.
Mike’s breath clogged and stopped in his throat.
The eyes were open. Just as he had known they would be. Wide open and hardly glazed at all. They seemed to sparkle with hideous life in the last, dying light of day. There was no death pallor in that face; the cheeks seemed rosy, almost juicy with vitality.
He tried to drag his eyes away from that glittering, frozen stare and was unable.
He muttered: ‘Jesus-’
The sun’s diminishing arc passed below the horizon.
5
Mark Petrie was working on a model of Frankenstein’s monster in his room and listening to his parents down in the living room. His room was on the second floor of the farmhouse they had bought on South Jointner Avenue, and although the house was heated by a modern oil furnace now, the old second-floor grates were still there. Originally, when the house had been heated by a central kitchen stove, the warm-air grates had kept the second floor from becoming too cold - although the woman who had originally lived in this house with her dour Baptist husband from 1873 to 1896 had still taken a hot brick wrapped in flannel to bed with her-but now the grates served another purpose. They conducted sound excellently.
Although his parents were down in the living room, they might as well have been discussing him right outside the door.
Once, when his father had caught him listening at the door in their old house-Mark had only been six then his father had told him an old English proverb: Never listen at a knothole lest you be vexed. That meant, his father said, that you may hear something about yourself that you don’t like.
Well, there was another one, too. Forewarned is forearmed.
At age twelve, Mark Petrie was a little smaller than the average and slightly delicate-looking. Yet he moved with a grace and litheness that is not the common lot of boys his age, who seem mostly made up of knees and elbows and scabs. His complexion was fair, almost milky, and his features, which would be considered aquiline later in life, now seemed a trifle feminine. It had caused him some trouble even before the Richie Boddin incident in the schoolyard, and he had determined to handle it himself. He had made an analysis of the problem. Most bullies, he had decided, were big and ugly and clumsy. They scared people by being able to hurt them. They fought dirty. Therefore, if you were not afraid of being hurt a little, and if you were willing to fight dirty, a bully might be bested. Richie Boddin had been the first full vindication of his theory. He and the bully at the Kittery Elementary School had come off even (which had been a victory of a kind; the Kittery bully, bloody but unbowed, had proclaimed to the schoolyard community at large that he and Mark Petrie were pals. Mark, who thought the Kittery bully was a dumb piece of shit, did not contradict him. He understood discretion.). Talk did no good with bullies. Hurting was the only language that the Richie Boddins of the world seemed to understand, and Mark supposed that was why the world always had such a hard time getting along. He had been sent from school that day, and his father had been very angry until Mark, resigned to his ritual whipping with a rolled-up magazine, told him that Hitler had just been a Richie Boddin at heart. That had made his father laugh like hell, and even his mother snickered. The whipping had been averted.
Now June Petrie was saying: ‘Do you think it’s affected him, Henry?’
