Long black coffin, p.27
Long Black Coffin, page 27
The Coffin did a half-donut, bringing its back end around for me. The tires ate concrete, and it came at me again and with more frenzy than before. Again, I barely avoided it. It went past me and hit the wall with a thundering impact. I felt the garage actually move. I ran over towards Ma, helping her up. We were getting the fuck out of there and that was it. But fate intervened. The GTO had reversed into the wall with everything it had and with such incredible force that it buried itself. It was stuck in the wall at a cant, only its passenger side tires touching the floor. The engine gunned and flames shot out of its exhaust pipes, its right rear tire spinning and throwing out clouds of black, pungent smoke.
“GOT YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!” Ma shouted against the rising enraged clamor of the engine.
She moved fast which was good because I was nearly stunned into inaction. Dark gathering outside, shadows filling the garage and cut now only by a single murky smoke-filled beam of light from the Goat itself, Ma lit up both the lanterns she’d brought. She grabbed a five gallon pail and filled it with gas from the jerry can. Then she went right over to The Coffin and emptied it inside.
I grabbed a flare.
Now it was time to cook that sonofabitch because it wasn’t going anywhere.
But it wasn’t done trying. Far from it. It was roaring its engine higher and higher, peeling the treads from the right rear tire, becoming some voracious, slavering beast that hungered for our flesh and starved for our souls, existing only to shatter our skulls in its ensanguined jaws. The smell pouring from it and filling the garage was nauseating—melted rubber, fused wiring, and blood spilling hot from severed arteries.
Outside, it was beaten, dented, torn and bleeding.
But inside…deep in the scorching blackness of its core, it was alive, deliriously, feverishly alive, a seething nest of incubating evil and blind mindless instinct coming to term, a gestating furnace of hate.
58
In my memory, things are crowded and overlapping, but I think it was then that Stella let go with a sort of yelping sound and jumped to her feet. Each lick of damage we had done to the car, she had felt as if it was her body we were abusing. She was tethered to it physically, emotionally, and psychically. She wasn’t about to let us torch The Coffin. Whether it was survival instinct or Bridey compelling her, I don’t know, but she went right at Ma.
She would have killed her. I know it.
I saw her make her move and made a running dive at her. When she was within three feet of Ma, I collided with her and both of us went careening into the bay door, coming down in a central heap. She was out of her mind. Completely out of her mind. She moved like a snake beneath me, a boneless gyrating expanse of muscle. Before I knew it, she was hovering over me, drool hanging from her mouth, her eyes blazing like hot black coals. She let out a guttural cry when I called her name, going right at my face with her nails. She laid one cheek open, and slashed my forehead, just barely missing my eye, and then I had her by the wrists. The strength thrumming through her was incredible. I could barely hang on.
“Get your hands off him!” Ma shouted and came up behind Stella, kicking her in the back of the head.
It should have put her lights out, but it didn’t.
But I felt the strength in her slacken enough so that I could toss her aside. Ma helped me up and Stella charged again, knocking Ma to the concrete floor and directly in the path of the Goat as she broke free. Then Stella went for me. She came at me looking like some rabid animal with her white frothing mouth and red-rimmed eyes, the crooked, contorted mouth. I had no choice. She wanted to kill me. When she got in close, I hit her in the face with a bunched right two, then three times. Her head snapped back on her neck and her legs almost went out beneath her, but other than a split-lip and bloody nose, she was far from done in. When her hooked fingers came at my face, I didn’t hold back. I hit her with everything I had. She tumbled back against the garage door, then vaulted right at me like a Jack-in-the-Box.
She hit me hard and we went down.
Stella went wild. With her broken, shard-like nails, she went for my eyes, she clawed at my face, trying to lay my throat open. When I took hold of her wrists, her head seemed to dart snakelike at my throat as if she wanted to bite my jugular open. I felt her teeth graze my throat. I bashed my head into her face, trying to knock her senseless. But she was powered by something other than rage and human madness, something that smoldered black inside of her. She writhed. She hissed in my face. Ribbons of drool exploded from her mouth. Her face was twisted-up like a gruesome fright mask, her eyes like welling bloodspots.
“BURN THAT CAR, MA!” I shouted as I wrestled with Stella. “I GOT HER! GET THE CAR! THE CAR!”
By then Stella had her hands around my throat and was pounding my head against the floor and I heard a voice speaking, somehow over the thunder of the Goat’s engine, I clearly heard a voice say—
59
“—are you awake? Ellen, are you awake? It’s me. It’s Ray. Honey, are you awake? Look at me. Please look at me.”
The woman on the bed is trembling, her mouth opening and closing as if there are words she needs to speak but her lips cannot form them anymore than her brain can frame them into anything other than hysterical gibberish, which is the sound of her brain in shock and her mind humming with the high, strident squealing of madness. The man holds her hand and it’s cold in his grip, not just cold but damp, sodden, almost slimy. Her whole body is like that as if she’s covered in a fine membrane of afterbirth.
“Please,” he says. “Please tell me what happened. Let me help you.”
The woman looks up at him through cloudy, unfocused eyes. Eyes that seem to swim in the pale pink hollows of the sockets themselves. A fine trickle of blood exudes from her left nostril. Her body is sore and bruised, scratched by pickers and gouged by thorns. There are leaves and twigs in her hair. Streaks of dirt band her face which is of a ghostly, sickly pallor. The sweat that beads from her pores smells sharp and unpleasant, the acrid juice of fear. There is blood on her. On her belly and legs, crusting at her thighs.
“Tell me,” the man says. “I’ll get you to the doctor…but first you have to tell me. Tell me something. Tell me anything.”
Her mouth opens as if she is about to speak, but she doesn’t speak, she gags. She coughs out rancid bits of soil and then what looks like the curled, stomach-moistened carapace of a ground beetle.
“Jesus,” the man says.
“The woods,” she tells him, her breathing labored as if speaking takes great effort. “I was led into the woods. I was lost in the woods.”
“The Sagwas?” he asks.
She neither shakes her head nor nods. “The woods. Led into the woods, drawn into the woods, lost in the woods. Through the tunnel and across the grove where the shadows wait, and the baneberry grows and the hemlock thickens. There. It was there. The voices told me. They mated me with earth and sky, trees and soil and the Other.”
The man licks his lips. He needs to ask a question, but he fears it. “Were…were you raped? Were you raped in the woods.”
“Raped, raped, raped by the Old man of the Forest, the last Dark One, mated to him…”
The man feels the pain of it: his wife violated and degraded by some animal in the woods, those fucking Sagwas that have been a curse on his bloodline for what seems ages. “He followed you in there, this man…he followed you.”
“Not a man,” she says, coughing out more dirt.
He ignores that; she is irrational, she is in shock. “You were in the woods and he followed you. He walked up on you,” he says, crafting a version that makes sense.
She shakes her head violently side to side. “No, no, no…he doesn’t walk, he never walks…he crawls…he crawls in the treetops…”
60
Ma stormed in, giving Stella another kick to the head while my panicked brain jumped in and out of reality, maybe from the here and now into the psychic plane. I don’t know. But I was seeing things, so many things, and none of them were dreams.
Stella rolled away then climbed to her feet.
She took three, maybe four steps in our direction and then simply folded-up.
Ma helped me up and pulled me back. “Something’s happening…something is happening,” I heard her say.
The car was not dying.
It was revving higher and higher, the engine screaming with metal fatigue, bearings shattering and pistons seizing and oil boiling to steam. It accelerated higher and then still higher yet. I could smell the burning belts, see gouts of yellow-brown steam rising from beneath the wrecked hood which covered the engine compartment like an askew tomb lid.
Ma had a flare in her hand. “I think we got it, I really think we got it,” she said directly into my ear because the engine was getting louder and louder and louder, becoming not a roaring but a whining that rose to a screeching, braying sort of noise.
I didn’t think we had it at all. Quite the contrary, I think it had us.
I could feel a chill moving over my bones. My knees felt weak and my stomach was convulsing. Hot rivers of sweat poured down my face. Ma and I gripped one another, not daring to let go, knowing that we had to toss that flare and let the Goat burn, or, at the very least, run through the door before there was no possible chance of escape.
Inside the car and from beneath the hood, I saw a weird vermilion glow begin to pulsate, a glazed pink light shooting out from holes and rents in the ruptured body. The entire garage was vibrating as if there was some weird magnetic vibration sweeping around us, some invisible and irresistible cosmic influence. Sparks were flying from beneath the hood…at least, I thought they were sparks. But with the engine running faster and faster, bolts and washers and rivets began to pop free. Burning yellow-red, they popped one by one. I could feel the air growing thick and electrical around me like it does right before a thunderstorm. It smelled like blood and hot ozone and seared flesh.
The entire shell of The Coffin was lit from within and, it must have been my imagination, but I saw it as living tissue threaded with blue-black arteries and veins and capillaries, sucking oil and nutrients and dispersing them through the body of the beast. I saw it only for a second and maybe I didn’t see it at all.
There was an eruption of blue light that blinded us, making us cover our eyes as the noise of the engine increased until it was unbearable…and it still went faster and faster, putting out the sort of RPMs that were physically impossible. Steam and smoke rose from The Coffin in great misting clouds that spun like dust devils, the stink of burning rubber, liquefied plastic, and melting steel pungent and sharp and blistering.
“Watch it,” Ma said, her mouth pressed to my ear. “Something’s happening…it’s changing…it’s doing something…”
And it was.
But before it did, I was going to do something, too. I broke free of Ma and grabbed the road flare I had dropped. I struck it and hurled it at the car, tossing it right through the missing windshield into that ethereal glow. There was an eruption of fire and shooting flames, followed by a shock wave of force that threw me five feet, right into Ma.
The car was mutating, changing, trying to become something else, a molten flow of hot metal transfiguring itself into a rising nebulous demonic shape as it pulled itself free of the wall. Boards splintered and snapped, bricks were pulverized. Arcs of electricity shot from the Goat, burning fluids gushed from its underbelly, something like a black steaming saw-toothed mouth seemed to open in the middle of its burning/sizzling/arcing supercharged mass.
One flaming wheel broke loose and spun across the floor, bouncing off the wall and coming to rest. A quarter panel blew free. The hood made a tortured groaning sound of twisting metal and blew off the engine, striking the rafters above and clanging at our feet in a shower of sparks.
Stella was standing up, right in its path, right in the waves of cremating heat that blew off of it. I could smell her burning hair; see the smoke rising from her scalp. It was roasting her, scalding her, but she didn’t seem to notice. The stink of her charring flesh was revolting. It filled the garage, fighting against the other smells…and then whatever the car was trying to become, it failed. It fell into itself, striking the floor, thudding on melted wheels, burning panels and doors fell off, the engine collapsing into itself, flames and smoke churning from its carcass.
I thought: Thank God, thank God, we’ve won, we killed the beast…
Then a smell rose from it that had nothing to do with the car itself, but everything to do with the thing that inhabited it. This was an overpowering dank fetor like wet rugs and rank bloody pelts allowed to mildew in black cellars. The stench of corpse gas and swamp water, lake mud and flesh gone to carrion. The car split open like a blackened egg and a rushing wind filled the garage. It was hot and dry and spinning with ashes. It picked up parts of the car, nails, screws, joints of wood, bits of glass, grabbing them and stirring them up into a whipping cyclonic storm of dust and debris.
Its epicenter was the corpse of the car.
I saw something rising from it like a column of fluctuating gray gas that took shape, solidified, becoming skeletal, narrow, and reedy like a wind-bent sapling whose vaguely female form resembled a graying shroud that had been slit and torn and ripped into ghostly streamers. Some of it was the sheet Vic had wrapped her in, but much of it was what remained of Bridey Borden.
This was the entity.
Ma had said we had to force her to show herself. She had to be smoked out…and now she had been.
Her flesh billowed and flapped with currents of wind that filled her like a bag, howling through her yellowed bones with a sound like air blown over the top of a beer bottle. It puffed her out like a balloon and shriveled her into a drifting wraith of squirming rags. It hissed out through numerous gaping black holes in her hide, what had once been her ass, cunt, eyes, mouth, and the chewed tunnel where her left breast had been. They puckered in the wind, blowing out and sucking back in. The plastic bag that covered her head had melted away now, her red locks streaming in the wind like undulant vipers, her face a puffy, grotesque sack with the greasy texture of bulbous pale mushrooms. It seemed to be constantly melting, cooling, and reconfiguring itself in the worst possible ways.
Though she had no pupils as such, I could feel her noxious gaze crawling over my skin.
This was it, this was the horror, this was the haunter.
Bridey Borden.
I felt riveted to the floor with terror as she hovered there, connected to the burning car by an umbilical of ectoplasm. I thought she would come for me. I was certain that Ma and I could not stand against her.
But she didn’t want me.
She didn’t want me at all.
She was fixated on Stella and no other. She stared down at her from the center of the revolving, pulsating chaos she had created. Her eyeholes expanded into black pestiferous pits, then closed up like the bulbs of flowers as did the furrowed blowhole of her mouth with a sharp sucking noise. All those holes in her were opening and closing, too, as if each was breathing, greedy to suck in air and life.
Stella stepped forward, her hair lighting up and blazing with flames. She did not seem to notice. She got to the outer edge of that mad, churning whirlwind put out by Bridey and was drawn right into it, pulled off her feet into the vortex. I heard her scream as she was assimilated into the mass of the entity, sucked into the fluctuating, gaseous envelope of rotting lake weeds and sluicing black mud, water worms and flapping rags and steaming entrails. She communed with it, melted into it, and I heard a crunching, grinding sort of noise that sounded like an ice cube being chomped by teeth as it embraced her.
Then Bridey sank away into the wreckage of the car like a star collapsing into its own gravitational sink and the GTO, still burning and popping, blazed up in a superhot conflagration that lit the walls of the garage on fire. The rafters overhead went up like struck matchsticks. The car became an oxidizing junkyard, melted tires blowing off, axles snapping, panels bubbling and hitting the floor, rubber oozing and oil blazing and fluids steaming as the gas tank went up…then there was just the frame, it glowed white-hot like a rod yanked from a nuclear reactor, blazing brighter and brighter like a sun going supernova.
Ma had dragged me outside by then.
We tried to run, but the explosion of the garage coming apart threw us into the cool grass. The garage was obliterated, blasted up into the air in flaming wreckage that came back down as fiery debris. It hit the trees and the house, lighting them both up and creating a weird and violent firestorm that was content on merely reducing the Tamerlyn’s property to ash but spreading no farther.
Ma and I piled into my Cutlass which was dented and smashed, the paint bubbled and blistered. I prayed she’d turn over and she did. We rolled down the alley, my front tires throwing off smoke and bits of burnt rubber. We got the hell out of there as the sound of approaching sirens grew louder in the night.
“Drive, Little Breed,” Ma said to me. “Drive us back to the world.”
Epilogue
A month later, I was downtown with Opium.
By then, it was all over with. It had been a real mess and I imagine people would be talking about it for some time to come. They would speculate and create rumors and indulge in what small town Midwesterners did best: when the facts were lacking, indulge in some good old-fashioned tale-telling. No matter. There were only two people living who knew and Ma Lake and I weren’t talking. Sometimes to each other, but never to those who would never and could never understand.
The fire had been a good one. It burned the Tamerlyn house to cinders, torched the trees on the property, and completely razed the garage. But that’s as far as it had gone. It lit Mrs. Canning’s fence on fire and the heat had wilted her flowers and peeled the paint off the side of her house, but that was about it for collateral damage. I heard word that the fire inspector was still scratching his head over the burn pattern. The remains of Stella were found in the blackened husk of the GTO which was no longer a coffin in just name and, I suppose, never had been. The only thing that surprised me was that no other remains were found. I thought they’d find some in the coal bin where I’d seen those two dead girls, but nothing was recovered. Maybe that had just been some kind of psychic trip. My guess was that Bridey took her victims down into the tangled weeds at the bottom of the lake.
