The Stake

Barbara went straight to the hotel door and threw it open. Daylight flooded in. She stopped in the doorway and turned sideways. She was squinting. Her teeth were bared. Though Larry was several feet away, he could see her trembling. Her hands shook as she pinched the edges of her blouse and spread its front wide. She gazed down at the raw band of skin across her belly.

Her breasts looked very white through the open patterns of her bra. Larry glimpsed the darker skin of her nipples. She was too hurt and dazed for modesty, and Larry felt like a cheap voyeur taking advantage of her carelessness. In spite of the guilt, he didn’t want to look away. There was a dead body under the stairs. Somehow, the sight of Barbara’s skin through the black lace bra eased his sick dread.

But he forced his eyes lower. The right leg of her shorts was rucked up higher than the left. Both thighs were scraped, her shins bleeding. The right was worse than the left, but both legs had been abraded in the fall.

Jean went to her. “You really didget wracked up.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Where is everyone?” Pete called. His voice sounded muffled.

“Barbara’s really banged up,” Larry answered. “Come on out of there and let’s go home.”

“You’ve gotta see this! It’ll just take a minute.”

I don’t want to see it.

“Man, your wife is hurt.”

“What’s one more minute or two? We’ve got a dead bodyhere. You’re a writer, for godsake. A horrorwriter. I’m telling you, this isn’t something you want to miss. Come on.”

“Go ahead if you want,” Jean told him. “We’ll start on over for the van.”

Larry wrinkled his nose.

Barbara nodded, still grimacing and shaking. Her face and chest were shiny with sweat. Larry found himself looking again at her breasts. “Go on,” she said. “It’ll make him happy.”

“You gals don’t want to see it?”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Jean said.

“Just make it quick,” Barbara told him.

He turned away from the door. He walked slowly across the lobby floor. Glancing back, he saw Jean and Barbara step outside.

He felt abandoned.

I don’t have to be here, he thought. I could be out there with them.

He did not want to see a damn corpse.

But his weak legs kept moving him away from the sunlight.

Alongside the staircase a wide section of paneling had been ripped loose and gaped open a couple of feet. The glow of Pete’s flashlight showed through the space. Larry turned sideways and stepped into the enclosure.

“Thought you were going to chicken out on me,” Pete said.

“Can’t miss a chance like this.”

He found Pete standing on a couple of boards that had fallen from the landing. He looked frozen there, back rigid, his right arm straight out, aiming the flashlight almost as if it were a pistol. Aiming it at the coffin that was jammed headfirst against the underside of a low stair.

The body was covered, at least to the neck, by an old brown blanket. The blanket was rumpled as if it had been tossed into the coffin by someone who didn’t care to straighten it.

The corpse had long yellow hair. The skin of its face looked tight and leathery. Larry saw sunken eyelids, hollow cheeks, lips that were stretched back in a mad grin that exposed teeth and gums.

“You believe this?” Pete whispered.

Larry shook his head. “Maybe it isn’t real.”

“My ass. I know a stiff when I see one.”

“Looks almost mummified.”

“Yeah. Guess we oughta check it out, huh?”

Shoulder to shoulder, they moved slowly forward. Pete kept his light on the corpse.

Hideous, Larry thought. He’d never seen such a thing. His experience with bodies was limited to three open-casket funerals. Those people had looked almost good enough to sit up and shake hands with you.

This one looked as if it might want to sit up and take a bite out of you.

Don’t think that stuff, Larry told himself.

The underside of the stairway slanted down in front of them. They had to duck as they stepped to the foot of the coffin. Pete sank into a squat and waddled in farther. Larry started in, crouching. But after one step a sense of suffocation stopped him. The stairs seemed to be pressing down on him, wanting to shove him lower, to rub his face in the corpse. He dropped to his knees and reached out, ready to brace himself on the wooden edge of the coffin. Just before he touched it, he realized what he was about to do. He jerked his hands back and clutched his thighs.

The blanket piled on top of the corpse didn’t cover its ankles and feet. They were bare, the color of stained wood, and bones showed through the tight skin. The nails were so long that they curled over the tops of the toes. Larry recalled that hair and nails supposedly continued to grow after death. But he’d heard that that was just a myth; they only appearedto grow because the skin sank in around them.

“Bet it’s been here a long time,” Pete whispered. He reached over the side of the coffin. With his index finger he brushed the corpse’s forehead.

Larry moaned.

“What’s wrong?”

“How can you touchit?”

“No big deal. Try it. Feels like shoe leather.” He drew his finger across a blond eyebrow.

Larry imagined Pete’s finger sliding down the ridge of the eye socket, touching the lid, denting it, sinking in to the second knuckle.

“Go on and touch it,” Pete urged him. “How you going to write about this stuff if you don’t experience it?”

“Thanks, anyway. I’ll rely on my imagi...”

“We changed our minds.”

He flinched at the sound of Barbara’s voice. So did Pete. Pete’s head slammed the underside of a stair. He cried, “Ah!” ducked down close to the face of the corpse and grabbed the back of his head. “Shit! Damn it, Barb!”

“Sorry.”

Larry looked over his shoulder at the women and smiled. Though his startled heart was drumming, he was gladthey were here.

He felt as if some of the real world had come back.

“Guess you weren’t kidding,” Barbara whispered. “Jesus, look at that thing.”

“Yuck,” was all Jean said.

Barbara crouched over the end of the coffin. Jean stayed behind her and peered over her head.

“Didn’t want us to have all the fun?” Larry asked.

“That’s about the size of it,” Jean said, her voice hushed.

“Curiosity got the best of us,” Barbara added. Then she reached into the coffin and touched the foot of the corpse.

She’s just like Pete, Larry thought. Whatever their differences, they’re sure a set.

“I think I’m bleeding,” Pete muttered.

“That makes two of us,” Barbara said, still rubbing the dead foot. “It’s like the skin on a salami.”

“Salami’s oily,” Pete told her. “This is more like leather.”

“Okay, we’ve seen it,” Jean said. “Everyone ready to go?”