The Creeping

I don’t know how we go from the charged moment where I’m afraid of Daniel, to tearing through the mud and spitting rain toward the screams. One second he’s clutching my arm to keep me from running, a captive to his sadness, and the next he’s holding me up as I slip and slide over the eroding sludge the ground has become. We turn in unison, both of us instantly filled with dread that a body might mean something intimate to us. It could be decomposed Jeanie. It could be grown and killed Jeanie. It doesn’t matter which; all that matters is that we are both running because of Jeanie.

Daniel’s fingers lace tightly with mine, but it doesn’t feel like holding hands. It’s more like being handcuffed to him. A confusion of colors and shapes spirals around us as a dizzying crowd surges toward the cries for help. Water splashes from the ground and the sky as though we’re underwater, and I wonder for a second if we should be swimming rather than running. We’re in slow motion, wading through the mud to reach the cemetery. All the while the screams find us on the current of the wind.

As I reach to tap the heart on the iron gate, my tennis shoe snags the uneven rocks lining the path. I stumble forward, my hand missing the heart. Daniel’s arm wraps around my waist, his left hand clings to my right, and he hoists me to my feet.

My stomach churns as we draw closer, the girl’s cries getting louder as we move toward the edge of the cemetery nearest to the lake. The candles are still lit, powered by batteries like the lanterns. Their wash of light makes it possible to see Tara Boden, a sophomore who shouldn’t even be here, hunched over an uprooted gravestone. Her voice is worn and ragged now, barely more than a hoarse whimper. Her shirt is unbuttoned, revealing her yellow lace bra. A junior boy is shirtless and rubbing a wide circle with his palm on her back.

Only a handful of my classmates have reached the site, teetering unsteadily on the disrupted soil. All hang back and gawk at where Tara’s quivering hand points. The pelting rain washed away a ten-or fifteen-foot segment of the wrough-iron fence that separates the cemetery from the shore. Where there used to be a gradual slope down to the pebbled bank, it looks as though a giant monster took a bite.

All the things that should stay hidden at cemeteries are unearthed by the mudslide. Coffins exposed, either swept downhill by the slide or jutting at sharp angles from the ground like compound bone fractures piercing skin. Jaundiced partial skeletons litter the soil. Relief swells in me as I hope that we’re only seeing the remnants of those who died a hundred years ago. Tara Boden is a drama whore; of course she’d seize the opportunity for attention. I squirm out of Daniel’s grasp. On unsteady legs I inch forward, toes of my sneakers narrowly missing ancient bones as I work my way into the shallow crater the slide left. Daniel doesn’t follow. I drag my arm over my top lip, wiping off water and snot from the run.

I go from hobbling to crouching when I reach the bottom. I squint at the sludge in front of me, the votives’ pallor hardly enough to see by. Gnarled tree roots. Crumbled graves. A fractured Virgin Mary statue that rests headless on its side. The clouds drift away, and the moon’s light penetrates the gloom around me. A flash of yellow cloth sticking up from the mud. A nest of brown lichen or matted hair. A rubber-soled sneaker. Fuchsia-painted fingernails. Bits and pieces of a body visible in the weak light. She rests diagonally on the lid of a coffin at the bottom of the crater. Before the storm she might have been righted, hands folded and crossed on her chest, sleeping deeply on the top of an ancient grave with the look of a princess waiting to be awakened by a kiss. I suck in my breath, afraid to exhale.

I must look like I’ve lost my mind as I sink down to my hands and knees. The slimy soil squishes and bubbles under me. I crawl carefully, so the earth doesn’t swallow me up. I choke back vomit as my hand brushes what I know is a human skull. Bones. Decomposed flesh. Eyeballs. Brain matter. Maggots. All the gross things that are likely in this soil seep into my hands and knees. But I have to get to that body. I have to make sure that it is a body and that I’m not seeing things. That I haven’t lost every last ounce of sanity I had.