back that it was a man, and he could tell that his jeans were of a very high quality, because he had a special sense for things like that, and could tell a good pair of jeans from across the street, or in the dark, or by the touch of his hand against somebody’s bottom.
“Take him and bury him inside the Catholic church at Pine Hills, or, if you cannot bury him there, in behind the Salty Pig sausage factory in Windermere if there is no room for him at the church, and if all else fails then take him to the Green Swamp near Orlo Vista and lay him to rest in the bog.”
“Oh, all right,” Teague said, sitting and then standing up slowly. “Is that all you want me to do?”
“Nothing more and nothing less.”
“Okay, then,” Teague said. “But first there’s something you should know.”
“What’s that, Teague O’Kane?” she asked, smiling at him in a very unfriendly way.
“Just. this!” Teague said, and cast the orange he had picked up at her face. He didn’t wait to see if it hit her or not, but turned to run again, leaping nimbly over the corpse and sprinting for home. But he hadn’t been running for ten seconds before he was tackled from behind, and all those ugly old people were swarming all over him, their terrible moth-ball breath in his face and their starchy sprayed-up hair brushing his cheek and neck. It felt like they were all sitting on him — for a moment he could hardly breathe — and then the pressure let up, but there was still a great weight on him. They jumped back and away from him.
“There now!” said the woman. “Now you are ready!” Teague lay on his belly, slowly understanding that they had put the corpse on his back, and that the dead man’s arms were crossed over his shoulders.
“What did you do?” he said. “Get it off of me!”
“We certainly won’t,” said the lady. “You alone will do that. Now take him to be buried and be quick about it. If the sun rises on you before it is done, you will regret it!”
“Get it off of me!” Teague said again, and now he was crying, and struggling on the ground, flopping around to throw the thing off, but the dead man held him fast.
“You do it,” said the woman. “And remember what I said to you. Dark tears of the great poodle of sadness! Acid in your heart! Burning forever! Get you gone, Teague O’Kane. You have chosen not to dance with us, and the night is running out!”
“Get it off,” Teague said again, but no one answered. When he looked up they were all gone, and if not for the weight on his back, he would have thought he had imagined them. He got slowly to his knees, and then he stood, the corpse very heavy on his back. When he looked around there was no sign of the crowd of ugly people, but they had left him a message on the ground, words spelled from torn rinds of orange. “We will be watching you,” it said.
“Help!” he shouted. “Help, somebody!” His voice sounded very loud in his ears, but he had the sense that it wasn’t carrying very far, and among the trees he could see none of the lights of his home, and he wasn’t sure which way he should go for help. “And I don’t even know where Orlo Vista is,” he said sadly. At that a hand rose up before him pointing, and it took him a moment to realize who it belonged to. With a shout he started to run again, trying to get away from the corpse on his back, but he only fell again, and he lay there weeping again for a moment.
“Crying won’t get me buried,” the corpse said behind him then. “Get up, idiot.”
Teague cried out again, and tried to crawl away, saying, “You can’t talk to me! It’s bad enough as it is but you’re not allowed to talk.”
“The dead do as they please,” the thing said, but then it was silent. Teague lay panting with his face in the ground, and then he did get up, and started to walk in the direction that the corpse had pointed. It was very slow going at first. The corpse was heavy, and the night was dark, and he didn’t know where he was, for all that he could not have been very far from his own house. But the trees looked strange, even when he left them behind he walked for what felt like an hour without encountering a highway, only a narrow dirt road that looked more fit for horses than cars, but was easier to walk on than the soft ground. If he had seen a car, he would have flagged it down to ask for help, though he wondered if anyone would have stopped for him, a man with a corpse on his back, no matter how handsome and alluring he might be. It occurred to him, as he trudged slowly down that road, half-fearing that the corpse would speak again, but half-hoping that it would as well, because he was feeling very lonely and afraid, that the night would have been much easier if he had agreed to dance with either the man or the woman, that he must be dreaming, and the changeless quality of the road made it seem this must be so, and he started to feel like he had been going along on it forever. “I’ll just keep walking,” he said, “until I wake up, and if later tonight I see any ugly people on the dance floor, I’ll run away from them right away.” He closed his eyes a moment — the road was so unchanging he suddenly decided there was no need even to watch where he was going. Then he was jolted by a sharp pain — the corpse had reached into his shirt and pinched him on the nipple! “What was that for?” Teague demanded, though of course he knew what it was for. He stopped a moment on the road, feeling very frightened and very awake.
Not long after that he saw the church, sitting all alone at the top of a hill, lit up by a single street lamp. The road led right to the door, and passed through a parking lot that was full of cars. It was hard going up the hill: when he got to the top he just wanted to lie down on the hood of one of the cars and rest for a long time. He went to the door of the church and paused there. “Are you supposed to knock on the door of a church before you go in?” he wondered aloud. He had never been in a church before.
“Not necessary,” said the corpse.
Teague pushed the door open and went inside. The church was lit with candles, and the gentle flickering light made the faces of the many statues seem particularly alert and alive. It wouldn’t have surprised him at all if they all started talking to him, insulting him or asking him the time or scolding him for not dancing with them. But they stayed silent. As he stared at them, though, he thought he recognized the light that had fallen so strangely on all those ugly old people: their faces looked like the statues, as if the light that shone on them came from invisible candles.
“We’re here for a reason,” the corpse said.
“You don’t have to remind me,” Teague said. He started to walk around the church, up and down the aisles, and peeked down the lines of pews, looking for a place to bury someone. People belonged in graveyards; it made no sense at all to him that somebody should be buried inside a church, even one that was carpeted, like this one was, in tacky indoor/outdoor carpeting. That was typical of Florida, he thought, a place where extremes of bad taste flourished.
“Dig!” said the corpse, when Teague had been looking for a while here and there for a place.
“With what? My hands?”
“Until they bleed and your bones poke through the skin!” it said harshly. But then it pointed Teague toward a closet, where, among tall stacks of kitty litter and ammonia and paper towels, a shovel was waiting. Teague took it and picked a spot near the altar. “Do it!” the corpse told him when he hesitated. He raised up the shovel in both hands and stabbed it down, thinking he was going to have to break through cement underneath the carpet to get to the ground. He gave a yell as he brought the shovel down, the loudest noise he had ever made, the angriest noise and also the saddest noise. He was sure the shovel was just going to bounce off the concrete, and that the wooden handle would split, and that his hand would break from the shock of it. He didn’t care if it did.
But it was just soft ground underneath the carpet. The blade sank in completely, and he had to put his whole weight on it to pull up the earth and carpet. A smell rose up — an odor of fresh loamy earth that made Teague think of rainy days and earthworms. The corpse took a deep breath of it behind him, but didn’t let it out. “I am about to get rid of you,” Teague told it, but it didn’t respond. He got to work, driving the blade of the shovel into the carpet again and again, and marking out a rectangle long enough to fit the corpse. He said it again and again, speaking a word every time he made a blow with the shovel: “I. am. going. to. get. rid. of. you!”
The corpse didn’t talk back, and he was just starting to convince himself that he wouldn’t hear from it again when a hideous shriek sounded in the air. “What?” he shouted, dropping the shovel and jumping back. “What did I do? Why are you screaming?”
“Wasn’t me,” said the corpse, and there was another cry, much softer but still angry. Someone was obviously very upset. Teague walked to the edge of the grave he was digging — it was only a couple of feet deep — and looked in. There was movement in the dirt. Something was trembling underneath the soil. A sinkhole opened up in the dirt, just mouth-sized. The dirt fell in, and then was spat out again in another scream, and then suddenly, horribly, a dead woman sat up out of the shallow grave that Teague had been uncovering.
“Oh, oh, oh!” she cried. “What are you doing to me?”
“Nothing!” said Teague, which was patently untrue, but the first thing he thought of to say.
