CHAPTER 44
When the shovel blade hit the dirt, it made an eerie scraping sound. Still, it slid easily enough into the loose-packed soil and went right up to the handle. I pulled out my first scoopful of richly dark earth and tossed it to my left, partially covering the pile of stones that had been used to mark the spot with an X. Ruby drove her shovel into the ground as well, but with a little less force. She applied pressure to the footrest to bury the blade and afterward pulled out a shovel full of dirt to add to the growing pile. It took ten scoopfuls of dirt to put sweat on my brow. Four more and I needed to wipe the sweat away with the back of my hand.
“John, I hate that we’re doing this,” Ruby said, extracting another shovelful of soil. “What’s buried down here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to keep digging.”
And so we dug. Our blades sinking into the earth the way a knife might vanish inside flesh. We moved shovelful after shovelful of dirt. After a while we’d dug a wide, round hole in the ground at least a foot deep. Thick earthworms moved about in our growing mound of excavated soil, waving for our attention. Our hands swatted away a persistent horde of black flies. The sun, still visible overhead, cast a weak light that barely scraped its way through the canopy of trees.
Ruby slouched to the ground, her breathing uneven and tired. She wiped clear some sweat, leaving behind a belt of dirt that traveled across one flushed cheek to the other. She sat while I dug. Scrape. Lift. Toss. Scrape. Lift. Toss. Two feet down now, still nothing but dirt.
“Maybe he’s just toying with us,” Ruby suggested. “You said he likes to do that. Maybe there’s nothing down here.”
My shovel sunk up to the handle with another thrusting plunge of the blade.
“There are no roots, no rocks,” I said, breathing heavily from exertion. “This ground has been dug up before. The soil is still loose, not at all compacted. He wants us to keep digging until we can’t dig anymore, or we find whatever he’s buried down here.”
“He didn’t tell us we had to dig,” Ruby reminded me. “His text just said to go there and see for ourselves. Not dig. We don’t have to dig.”
“I want to see,” I said. “I have to see.”
“Why?”
I had to think about this. Why was I digging? What was I after?
“Because I have to finish what he started,” I said.
“This isn’t one of your climbs, John,” Ruby said.
My shovel went back into the earth. I tossed the dirt aside as the mound to my right grew to the size of a mini-mountain. Two feet down soon became three. Before I knew it, I was waist deep inside a four-foot hole. Ruby couldn’t help out anymore, but only because there wasn’t enough room in the hole for both of us to dig. I worked alone, pulling the shovel back to ready for the strike, driving the blade into the ground, time and time again. Each thrust I expected more of the same—easy entry, easy exit, more dirt to move. But that didn’t happen this last time. No, this last time my shovel blade hit something hard. It made a clanging sound, as though I’d struck a rock.
I pushed the shovel in once again, looking for the edge of the hidden object, and eventually found it. I slid the blade underneath the blockage and lifted the shovel, using the handle for leverage to dislodge the item. Up came the side of a green plastic garbage bag with something inside. Something I hit. Something that made a clanging sound.
A horror-stricken look came over Ruby as I pulled the bag out of the hole. It was light to lift, easy to move. Brown rivulets of dirt slid down the sides of the bag after I tossed it out of the hole. I climbed out myself and brushed away dirt that had caked up on my blistered hands. For a quiet moment, Ruby and I stared wide-eyed at the plastic bag. Almost immediately, I noticed a change in the air—a scent, a smell, that I didn’t like one bit.
“What are you going to do?” Ruby asked.
“I’m going to open it,” I said.
“John—”
I wasn’t listening. I was too busy untying the bag.
The instant the top came apart just a little bit, I recoiled at the stench. My nostrils burned with the putrid smell of death and decay. Ruby gagged several times before turning her head away in disgust. I gagged, too, retching as I clumsily turned the bag upside down, spilling the contents onto the ground by my feet. I buried my nose in my arm to help block out the smell. At first I couldn’t register what had fallen out with a thump—no, make that two thumps. Slowly, as the initial shock gave way, my brain began to connect the dots and I understood what I was looking at.
Two severed heads had fallen out of the bag.
Ruby’s screams pierced the quiet woods loud enough to send resting birds scattering in flight. I didn’t scream, but I think I was moaning as though wounded. The heads didn’t look real. Rather, they looked to be made of wax, or maybe even beaten-up mannequin heads. But the flies that began to swarm around them said they were real. The stench that forced me to cover my nose and mouth did the same.
One of the heads—the one that rolled a few feet to my right—had long brown hair that was matted down and stringy. I could see molted blue skin on the nape of the neck. The neck itself appeared to have been severed from the body with near-surgical precision. That head had come to a stop facedown, so I couldn’t see the eyes or mouth, but I could see that duct tape had been used to secure two objects to where the ears should have been. Without closer inspection, I couldn’t make out what they were.
My eyes shifted to the other head, which hadn’t rolled as far. This head belonged to a man. The skin was tight to the skull, but a lot of tissue remained. Like the other head, the hair was matted down, but the color was dark. The skin around the man’s ample nose had browned and peeled at the tip, revealing a pinkish layer underneath. But that was just the start of the horror. The man’s lips were mostly gone, so his teeth looked to be protruding from his mouth in a twisted, wicked grin.
I could see on this head what I couldn’t see on the other, which was how I lost the voice to scream. My mouth formed the shape of a scream, but the only sound to come out was a whisper of air. I studied the head absently, vacantly, as though all my senses had been overloaded by a profoundly sickening horror. Affixed to the head, with several judicious applications of duct tape, were severed fingers: two planted on the eyes, two dangling down from the ears like decaying earrings, and two adhered to those protruding teeth.
See no evil.
Hear no evil.
Speak no evil.