He put Gage's body on the tarpaulin and wrapped it up. He cinched it with long strips of strapping tape, then cut the length of rope in two and tied off the ends neatly. Once more he might have had a rolled-up rug, no more. He closed the coffin, then after a moment's thought, he reopened it and put the bent spade in.
Let Pleasantview have that relic; it would not have his son. He closed the coffin and then lowered half of the cement grave-liner top. He considered simply dropping the other half but was afraid it would shatter. After a moment's consideration, he threaded his belt through the iron rings and used it to lower the cement square gently into place. Then he used the shovel to fill in the hole. There was not enough dirt to bring it up even with the ground again. The grave's swaybacked look might be noticed. It might not. It might be noticed and disregarded. He would not allow himself to think about it, or worry about it tonight-too much still lay ahead of him. More wild work. And he was very tired.
Hey-ho, let's go.
"Indeed," Louis muttered.
The wind rose, shrieking briefly through the trees and making him look around uneasily. He laid the shovel, the pick he had yet had to use, the gloves, and the flashlight beside the bundle. Using the light was a temptation, but he resisted it. Leaving the body and the tools, Louis walked back the way he had come and arrived at the high wrought-iron fence about five minutes later. There, across the street, was his Civic, parked neatly at the curb. So near and yet so far.
Louis looked at it for a moment and then struck off in a different direction.
This time he moved away from the gate, walking along the wrought-iron fence until it turned away from Mason Street at a neat right angle. There was a drainage ditch here, and Louis looked into it. What he saw made him shudder.
There were masses of rotting flowers here, layer upon layer of them, washed down by seasons of rain and snow.
Christ.
No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, hut Rachel's sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery.
Louis stared down into the ditch as if hypnotized. At last he dragged his gaze away with a little gasp-the gasp of one who has come to, or who has been called from a mesmerist's trance by the final number in a count of ten.
He went on. He hadn't walked far before he found what he was looking for, and he suspected that his mind had neatly stored this bit of information on the day of Gage's burial.
Here, looming in the windy dark, was the cemetery's crypt.
Coffins were stored there in the winter when it was too cold for even the payloaders to dig in the frozen earth. It was also used when there was a rush of business.
There were such rushes of "cold custom" from time to time, Louis knew; in any given population there were times when, for no reason anyone could understand, lots of people died.
"It all balances out," Uncle Carl told him. "If I have a two-week period in May when nobody dies, Lou, I can count on a two-week period in November when I'll have ten funerals. Only it's rarely November, and it's never around Christmas, although people always think that's when a lot of people die. That stuff about Christmas depression is just a load of bullshit. Just ask any funeral director.
Most people are real happy around Christmas, and they want to live. So they do live. It's usually February when we get a big bulge. The flu gets the old people and there's pneumonia, of course-but that's not all. There'll be people who've been battling cancer like mad bastards for a year, sixteen months. Then bad old February comes around and it seems as if they get tired and the cancer just rolls them up like a rug. On January 31 they're in remission, and they feel as if they're in the pink. Come February 24 they're planted. People have heart attacks in February, strokes in February, renal failure in February. It's a bad month. People get tired in February. We're used to it, in the business. But then, for no reason, the same thing will happen in June or in October. Never in August. August's a slow month. Unless a gas main explodes or a city bus goes off a bridge, you never fill up a cemetery crypt in August. But there have been Februarys when we've had caskets stacked up three deep, hoping like hell for a thaw so we can plant some of them before we have to rent a figging apartment."
Uncle Carl had laughed. And Louis, feeling a party to something not even his instructors in med school knew, had laughed too.