Dizziness swarmed him and the kitchen tilted. His briny breakfast made a leap for the back of his throat, but he gritted his teeth and breathed through his nose until it settled back in place. Fresh blood leaked from the makeshift bandage around his palm from gripping the counter so hard. He’d need to dress it properly. But first he had other things to do.
On the way out the kitchen door, he paused at the junk drawer and sifted through the contents. In the very back was a small tape measure with a maximum length of twenty feet. He held it for thirty seconds before replacing it and slamming the drawer shut and heading outside.
The day was cool despite its clarity. Quinn hugged the sweatshirt closer to him as he limped around the side of the house, waiting for the moment the solarium and the thing lying outside of it would come into view. It won’t be there. It will have regenerated somehow and dragged itself off. It’s watching you right now. The thoughts were enough to make him halt and bring the gun up from his side. He turned in a slow circle. Birds spoke somewhere in the woods, unseen in the branches. In the distance, waves crashed against rocks. When he managed to shuffle forward, the ends of pale fingers, upturned to the sky, came into view.
It lay where it had fallen; it hadn’t moved overnight.
Quinn approached it, going around its side to where he’d sat the night before. He’d lost track of time after seeing the earing hanging from its distended lobe and only come to when lightning struck a tree a hundred yards from the house, showering the ground with sparks that winked out like falling stars. He knelt, steadying himself with one hand on the ground as he took in the sight.
It was even taller and skinnier than he’d thought. Its legs were long, twice the length of his own. One was drawn up as if attempting to curl into a fetal position while the other was straight, locked in a line at the bulbous knee. Its arms were equally long and would easily reach its knees while standing upright. The hands. They looked bigger in the light of day than the night before. They reminded him of enormous, pale sea-crabs. The digits were a foot in length, except for the missing left index finger that ended in a gored stump. Its torso was emaciated, that of a starving animal, ribs pronounced like xylophone bars. The bones beneath the skin resembled bamboo, its skin almost translucent and drawn tight over them like a circus tent wrapped over poles. His gaze traveled up its unreal size and stopped on its face.
The features were nearly unrecognizable. The .45 caliber bullet had destroyed an area of its upper nose and forehead the size of a silver dollar, yet even before that its countenance hadn’t looked entirely human. Its head was oblong and slanted, the face stretched and uneven like a person’s visage reflected in a funhouse mirror. The mouth hung open revealing tombstone teeth, chipped and sitting at varying degrees within gray gums.
But its eyes. Its eyes were Graham’s.
They were half-lidded and bloodshot, but there was no mistaking them. How many times had those eyes smiled at him while slipping him a treat prior to dinner that his father had forbade? How many times had they studied a glistening sauce, seeking the exact moment to remove it from the heat? Even in death they hadn’t lost their character, their Nordic blue.
Quinn sat back from the corpse, letting the unreality wash over him. The wind coasted across the grounds, picking at his clothes. After a long time, he gathered himself and stood, then walked to the big pine tree where the shovel lay in the grass.
~
He spent the rest of the morning burying the body. He dug a long trench beside Teresa’s grave and pulled the thing that Graham had become into it. Dragging the corpse across the grass was like moving a pallid marionette; rigor mortis hadn’t set into the muscles and joints, and its head flopped on a limp neck. It was much heavier than he’d expected. When he’d covered the last of it, he began to speak. But no words would come, so he settled for cutting three rough crosses from a stand of slender willow. When the crosses stood at the head of each grave, he waited for the tears. The crosses were so fragile and sad. But he couldn’t cry. After the wind had chilled his face to the point of burning, he turned away.