Gage's head was gone.
Louis's hands were trembling so badly he had to hold the flashlight with both hands, gripping it the way a policeman is taught to grip his service revolver on the target range. Still the beam jittered back and forth and it was a moment before he could train the pencil-thin beam back into the grave.
it's impossible, he told himself, just remember that what you thought you saw is impossible.
He slowly moved the narrow beam up Gage's three-foot length, from the new shoes to the suit pants, the little coat (ah, Christ, no two-year-old was ever meant to wear a suit), to the open collar, to-His breath caught in a harsh sound that was too outraged to be a gasp, and all his fury at Gage's death came back in a rush, drowning fears of the supernatural, the paranatural, his growing certainty that he had crossed over into' the country of the mad.
Louis scrabbled in his back pocket for his handkerchief and pulled it out.
Holding the light in one hand, he leaned into the grave again, almost past the point of balance. If one of the segments of grave liner had fallen now, it would have surely broken his neck. Gently he used his handkerchief to wipe away the damp moss that was growing on Gage's skin-moss so dark that he had been momentarily fooled into thinking Gage's whole head was gone.
The moss was damp but no more than a scum. He should have expected it; there had been rain, and a grave liner was not watertight. Flashing his light to either side, Louis saw that the coffin was lying in a thin puddle. Beneath the light slime of growth, he saw his son. The mortician, aware that the coffin could not be opened after such a terrible accident, had nonetheless done the best he could-morticians almost always did. Looking at his son was like looking at a badly made doll. Gage's head bulged in strange directions. His eyes had sunken deep behind closed lids. Something white protruded from his mouth like an albino tongue, and Louis thought at first that they had, perhaps, used too much embalming fluid. It was tricky stuff at best, and with a child it was next to impossible to tell how much was enough or too much.
Then he realized it was only cotton. He reached in and plucked it out of the boy's mouth. Gage's lips, oddly lax and seeming somehow too dark and too wide, closed with a faint but audible plip! He threw the cotton into the grave where it floated in the shallow puddle and gleamed a loathsome white. Now one of Gage's cheeks had a hollow old-man's look.
"Gage," he whispered, "going to take you out now, okay?"
He prayed no one would come along now, a caretaker making a 12:30 swing through the cemetery, something like that. But it was no longer a matter of not being caught; if someone else's flashlight beam speared him as he stood here in the grave going about his grim work, he would seize the bent, scarred spade and put it through the intruder's skull.
He worked his arms under Gage. The body lolled bonelessly from side to side, and a sudden, awful certainty came over him: when he lifted Gage, Gage's body would break apart and he would be left with the pieces. He would be left standing with his feet on the sides of the grave liner with the pieces, screaming. And that was how they would find him.
Go on, you chicken, go on and do it!
He got Gage under the arms, aware of the fetid dampness, and lifted him that way, as he had lifted him so often from his evening tub. Gage's head lolled all the way to the middle of his back. Louis saw the grinning circlet of stitches which held Gage's head onto his shoulders.
Somehow, panting, his stomach spasming from the smell and from the boneless loose feel of his son's miserably smashed body, Louis wrestled the body out of the coffin. At last he sat on the verge of the grave with the body in his lap, his feet dangling in the hole, his face a horrible livid color, his eyes black holes, his mouth drawn down in a trembling bow of horror and pity and sorrow.
"Gage," he said and began to rock the boy in his arms. Gage's hair lay against Louis's wrist, as lifeless as wire. "Gage, It will be all right, I swear, Gage, it will be all right, this will end, this is just the night, please, Gage, I love you, Daddy loves you."
Louis rocked his son.
By quarter of two, Louis was ready to leave the cemetery. Actually handling the body had been the worst of it-that was the point at which that interior astronaut, his mind, seemed to float the farthest into the void. And yet now, resting, his back a throbbing hurt in which exhausted muscles jumped and twitched, he felt it might be possible to get back. All the way back.