Something was happening.
He could pretend otherwise, but something was building around them like heat lightning and they could both feel it. But they were men. Grown men with a job to do and it had to be done.
From the box there was a thump, then a rustling.
“ Boy,” Goode said, his breath not coming real easy, “take a look back there for the love of Christ…what the hell am I hearing?”
Hyden felt a white-hot terror in his belly, felt it feeding up into his chest. He leaned over the seat, shotgun in one hand, lantern in the other. His skin was crawling in undulating waves. He was cold to the bone…but it was not from the clammy April night. He looked at the box, the lantern casting tongues of light over its lid. The brass hasps were still fitted into place. All them those-Jesus, had to be a hundred of them-still pounded into the lid. Only…only, didn’t it almost look like five or six of them were sticking up now? Like maybe something inside was pushing them through? Hyden felt a grim weight settle over him, crushing him down like a granite graveyard slab. He felt weak, paralyzed even. The atmosphere around him was blanched, soured, thick with something that just ripped the heart straight out of his chest.
As he watched, two of the nails slid out of the lid with a groaning sound. They popped free and clattered into the hold.
“ What in the Christ?” Goode said, his voice sounding choked and dry. The moon came back out and his face was discolored and sickly. “Mind me, boy! What was that?”
“ Nails…” Hyden tried to say, but there was no air in his lungs. Just something blowing and drifting like desert sand. “Them nails…they’re starting to pop free…”
“ Yer imagining shit!” Goode said. “Or…or maybe that body’s bloating. Known ‘em to burst a box right open…happens sometimes.”
But Hyden just shook his head. Things like that didn’t happen in cold weather.
Then they both heard it. A noise from inside that box-a scraping, scratching sound like fingernails on wood. There was horror in both men’s eyes. A huge, relentless horror that spilled out like tears and into the night, surrounding them, enclosing them, wrapping them tight in a shroud. The darkness slithered and whispered.
Then: thump, thump, thump. Pounding fists.
Goode drew in a sharp breath: “Get up! Get up!” he cried to the horses, his whip cracking like thunder. “Get- up you sonsofbitches! Get-up!”
Hyden just kept watching the box, wondering maybe if his scattergun would be of any use against what tried to climb out of it. Whatever was happening in there, it wasn’t good. Wasn’t natural. There were arcane mysteries fermenting in there, dark alchemies brewing, spectral truths rattling their teeth. In the black, noisome darkness, something was breathing and aware. And that something was worse than anything Hyden could imagine.
The wagon was really rolling then, down a bend that cut through the hills and over a creaking wooden bridge that spanned a rushing, icy creek.
“ Only a few miles now!” Goode cried out, the wagon thundering towards its destination, the horses pounding forward like the devil himself was chasing them…and maybe he was. Goode kept looking over at Hyden apprehensively, then back at the box. “Just hang tight! I can…yeah, I can see the lights below!”
Hyden took his word for it.
He did not turn and look.
He could not turn and look.
His eyes were wide and staring, that frosty wind buffeting him mercilessly. But he did not feel it. Did not feel his numb fingers on that wooden stock. Did not feel that icy mortuary chill that crept through his bones and locked them tight and hard as iron in a deep freeze. All he knew was the box. It was the center of his universe. It was a dark star and he was a speck of dust caught in its malefic orbit. All he could do was watch those nails twist up and pop free, one after the other.
And in the box, a flurry of scratching and pawing and thudding.
Something in Hyden suddenly snapped. A wild, shrieking terror ripped through him and he began to shout: “I’m getting out of here! I’m jumping out of here! This is crazy-“
But Goode forced him back down and told him to shut up, shut up, goddamn it, it was all in his head, all in his head. But the idea of being alone in that wagon with that box in the back and what it contained…Goode knew he couldn’t do it by himself. Just couldn’t. And Whisper Lake was right before him now. To either side were the derricks and mainframes and hunched shacks of the outlying mining camps.
Something back there made a loud, snapping sound and Goode didn’t need to turn to see that one of the brass bands had broken open and the other wouldn’t be far behind and then…and then…
Hyden’s breath was coming in sharp, hurtful gasps. He was shaking so badly he could not hold the shotgun. It clattered uselessly to his feet.
And then they were in town and whatever was in the box seemed to sense that, for it settled back down into its cold berth and waited things out. Goode and Hyden let out a collective sigh, but did not relax until they found the undertaker’s and got rid of the damnable thing.
3
Hiram Callister was who they found.
Rotund, greasy Hiram Callister, undertaker and cabinetmaker. He prepared the bodies and fashioned the boxes they were tucked carefully into. Cheap pine affairs or sometimes imported black mahogany shipped in by rail for rich miners or railroad men. Hiram preferred to work by lamplight just as his younger brother Caleb-and co- owner of Callister Brothers Mortuary-preferred the light of day. And when Hiram was not handling wood and deadwood, he secreted himself into his chambers above and poured over his collection of pornographic pictures, most of which were sent to him by a friend in New Orleans where such things were readily available to the connoisseur…for a price.
Hiram had never been very good with women.
With people in general.
At least, not living ones. He had been a plump, bookish child and had become a heavy, unsightly man with a bevy of quivering chins that herded about his lower jaw and neckline like pink hogs at a trough. He was fond of cakes and candies. Had an abnormal condition of the sebaceous glands which caused him to sweat profusely. His hands were oddly cold and he was given to stuttering in civilized company. Children often pointed to him on the streets. He could be found by night, chewing taffy and chocolates and French cremes amongst the sheeted forms in the mortuary, dabbing continually at his moist face and brow with a handkerchief. For this was his world, a world of caskets and chemicals, corpses and silver gleaming instruments. A world that was close and dim and smelled of iodine and alcohol and less pleasant things.
But it was Hiram’s world and he coveted it.
Let Caleb have the daylight. For Caleb was something that belonged in the daylight-handsome and charming and sure. He spent his days consoling widows and his evenings in gambling dens and brothels telling off-color stories of the dead. People called him friend and lover just as they called Hiram ghoul and deviant, telling nasty stories about him.
Hiram did not care.
In the end-man, woman and child-they were always his.
He fancied the women. Particularly the young ones. Not the upstanding wives and sisters-if there were such things in a seething mining town like Whisper Lake-but the prostitutes. They had been touched and fondled in life, so Hiram figured it was no sin to do the same with them in death. But only the prostitutes. Never anyone else. Regardless of what people whispered about him, he did have standards, professional ethics.
When the two men with the casket showed up, Hiram had the body of a young whore stretched out before him like a cedar plank. She’d slit her wrists. Hiram was touching her, sweating and breathing heavily…then those two banged on the door. One was some old grizzled desert rat, the other a kid with freckles on his cheeks. But both had wide, unblinking eyes and hands that shook. They looked like they’d seen their own ghosts threading at them in the darkness.
