rarely did they call and Una could not blame them. Why call a mummy at a museum? Why remind it of its slow dissolution in its glass case greasy with the fingerprints of the living things that watched it decay?
No, all of it was gone and she’d been pretending for far too long.
She sat up in bed, the minty odors of liniment and camphor rising up around her. She began to shake and gasp, clinging to the damp sheets beneath her. Oh dear Christ, what have I been doing? Why did I allow this to happen? Oh, you silly, deluded, crazy old hag! Forcing yourself into their lives, making Phyllis take you in when you had nowhere else to go! You’re nothing but a great sucking parasite that bleeds them of their life and vitality…don’t you see that? Oh, you should be out at the town cemetery, right next to Charles, going to earth and feeding the worms and making the grass sprout green under those big, wind-creaky elms! That’s what, that’s what!
At least you’d be accomplishing something!
Una, tears streaming down her face, age threading through her like cracks in the foundation of an ancient house, made herself stand. She did not know why she thought these things, but it was amazing she had never thought them before. The truth was a mirror that did not lie. Not about age or circumstance or exactly what you had become or let yourself become.
She stepped over to the window and saw Greenlawn laid out before her…the rooftops and spreading trees, flagpoles and church spires. Yes, all of it built and compacted into this space. It was designed for living things, not mummified old broomstick-limbed hags like her. She caught a reflection of herself in the glass and it was like a ghost hovering over the town itself. She could feel the creeping dryness of age, the dampness of the grave knitting her bones. And the horror of what she was and would never be again.
She stumbled over to the doorway.
She could smell things cooking downstairs, hear Phyllis humming and the kids chattering and laughing. Real, rich, living sounds. Those were not her sounds. Her sounds were rain on concrete vaults and autumn leaves blown over crypt doors, spiders spinning silent webs in night-black tombs, dead flowers and black soil and nitrous boxes held tight in the rotting belly of the good earth.
Una moved down the hallway to the stairs, standing there, feeling a silence within her that would never be disturbed by noise again. It was all she had, that coveting and enclosing silence, windy and longing and hollow. The sound of graveyards and empty places, listening churchyards.
Down the steps, then, one, two, three, four…
She could smell supper.
She’d always had a good appetite, but now that was gone. Skeletons were never hungry and scarecrows needed no bread. She could feel the aches and pains and stiffness of a life that had long since ceased to be productive.
She made it downstairs and suddenly, the children were quiet and Phyllis stopped humming. They were holding their breath, waiting, playing games on an old woman who had no more sunshine in her heart for games.
Una moved through the living room towards the kitchen. The smells from the kitchen were meaty and thick and spicy.
Still, no sounds.
No sounds at all.
She came into the kitchen, saw them sitting in the dining room beyond.
Phyllis. Stevie. Melody.
They were all naked of all things.
And bald.
They had shaven their heads. All of them were grinning, their chins shiny with grease. A strand of meat hung from Melody’s mouth and she sucked it in. On the table was what they were eating, what Phyliss had been cooking. What she had chopped and sliced, stewed and boiled and baked and the smell of it was sickening. And the sight of it… no, no, no, you old woman, you’ve lost your mind, you can’t be seeing this! You can’t be looking at this!
“Sit down, Auntie,” Phyllis said.
“And eat,” said Melody.
“It’s yummy,” said little Stevie, jabbing something pale on his plate with a fork.
Una shook her head from side to side as a scream loosed itself from her throat. What was left of Benny Shore was spread over the table. The provider of this household who was even now providing. His limbs had been roasted and his viscera stewed, his blood was a soup and his entrails stuffed with jelly. And there on the platter, surrounded by browned potatoes and carrots, garnished with dill, was his head, glazed like a ham, his screaming mouth stuffed with an apple.
“Sit…down,” Phyllis said, drool running from her mouth, her eyes glistening stones, staring with a fixed madness.
Una, screaming and mad, sat down.
Then the children were there, pressing themselves in, stuffing fat and pale meat into her mouth, pushing it down her throat with their greasy hands, filling her with the flesh and blood of their father while Phyllis held her. They emptied tureens and platters and serving dishes, dumping them all over Una, ladling soup over her head and shoving undercooked meat into her mouth until she could not breathe, not swallow, not do anything but fall from her seat, retching and retching, as they stood above her, grinning.
Then they fell on her with knives and teeth…
39
The boy’s meat was sweet and rich.
The thing that had once been known as Maddie Sinclair slept off her repast of boy, bloated, gassy, and satisfied. She snored. Her limbs trembled. Naked and crusted with dried blood, fat, and marrow, she lay in a corner of the cellar where she had scooped an earthen nest out of the dirt floor, filling it with dry leaves. A section of the boy’s entrails, half-gnawed, encircled her like garland. She lay there with her arms around her eldest daughter, Kylie, who nestled to her mother’s pendulant breasts as she had done as an infant. They slept on, bathed in their rising stench, happily as any animals fattened from the kill.
The air was smoky, ripe with an odor of meat, blood, and urine.
Maddie’s limbs shuddered as a dream ran through her simple mind. A primordial dream of the chase, the hunt, bringing down shaggy beasts with spears and arrows, bathing in the blood of immense carcasses.
She chattered her teeth, winced as gas rumbled from her backside, and went back to sleep.
The cellar was dim, moist, and smelled of black earth. Rather like a cave. It was this more than anything that had drawn Maddie here. Guided by untold ages of racial memory and primate instinct, she selected her lair as her ancestors had. The gutted remains of her husband were scattered across the floor along with some of his picked bones and drying flesh, garbage from several plastic bags. A wiry, muscular man, he had not been good eating. That’s why the trap was laid that snared in Matt Hack.
He had been most delicious.
A pit had been dug in the center of the floor and a low fire burned, smoke rising and filling the cellar with a dirty haze. The limbs of the boy, carefully dressed-out and salted, were hanging from the cobwebby beams above on ropes fashioned from his tendons and gut. Over the fire, suspended by a tripod was the boy’s stomach. It had been stuffed with organ meats and fat, sewn-up and now slowly smoked. His torso was dumped in the corner along with his head which had been broken open, brains scooped out.
Maddie’s youngest daughter, Elissa, was still awake.
She squatted by the boy’s head, running fingers along the inside of his skull, getting the last bits of buttery- soft gray matter that had been missed. Staring at what smoked over the fire with vacant eyes, she sucked her fingers clean. Like her sister, she was naked, streaked with grime and filth from head to toe, her flesh intricately cicatrized in patterns of welts and rising scars. Maddie was now similarly decorated. Elissa belched, ran dirty fingers through her fat-greased hair, dug a hole with her fingers and, squatting, shit into it. When she was done, she wiped her ass with a handful of leaves, then crouched down to sniff what she had produced. Satisfied, she buried it, flinging dirt over it like a cat.
