“Emma,” he whispered. “I should have believed.”
Then he felt something new through the blanket. A tremor.
Movement.
In the light Apollo saw, deep inside the little form, something moving. He watched the face, or the place where the face should’ve been. There were two concave grooves, like eye sockets smoothed into soft clay. Below that a thin line ran, a mouth.
A mouth.
And below that, where the chest would be, deeper inside, Apollo saw a small mass, a lump. A heart? Faintly, it beat.
He watched in quiet terror. He wished to unsee this. He shivered and felt his legs going weak. And then, to make it worse, the heart did more than beat—it moved. The lump shuttled, faintly, higher. And then again. It was climbing, wriggling like a maggot. It reached the thin line of the mouth, and then the mouth parted. There was no other way to say it; the thing bucked, one grand exhalation, as if unearthing it finally allowed it to breathe.
But it hadn’t been a heart he’d seen inside the little body. Instead that inhuman mouth spewed a mass of water bugs, at least a dozen, each one as big as a silver dollar. They wiggled across the blanket and reached Apollo’s arms. They crawled up his arms, scrambling toward his neck, his face.
Apollo howled. The sound of an animal, not a man. He dropped the body. The blue blanket floated to the far end of the grave, draped back over the casket. He slapped at the roaches on his arms. One made it to his neck. He felt its bristled legs skitter as it reached his cheek. He nearly tore his own skin away just to get it off.
Meanwhile the body, the baby, landed at an angle. It seemed to be sitting up, watching him. He still felt the bug on his skin. Overwhelming disgust filled him with the instinct to destroy. Apollo found the mattock and brought it down on the casket. It sounded like he was chopping wood.
In minutes he’d destroyed the casket and turned the rest of the sectional liner to dust. At a quarter past five in the morning, an early sun rose in an especially clear morning sky. Birds chirped. The night had fallen away, and down in the grave Apollo raised the mattock one last time, aiming for the creature.
But something about its posture was so unsettling to him. Or to be more precise, so familiar. At this angle it might’ve been a child strapped into a booster seat and pulled up to the kitchen table. In fact, it had been that child, and Apollo had fed him—fed it—spoonful after spoonful of applesauce or yogurt or sweet potatoes he’d roasted and pureed.
He set the mattock back down. Despite the revulsion he felt, he picked the thing up again. Without the blanket, the rough surface of the body threatened to cut him again so he was forced to hold it tenderly.
He focused on its face, the sunken suggestion of its eyes, the thin line of the mouth that hadn’t quite closed again. This gave it the suggestion of a sleeping child, and Apollo couldn’t stop himself from wanting to soothe it. Not a conscious reaction but something primal. He cradled the figure with one forearm and gently held the back of the head with his right hand. With his left, he touched the spot where the eyebrows would’ve been.
He traced his finger down. Once he had seen his son’s face here. He tapped the place where the nose would’ve been, where it had been. A nose he’d loved. How many times had he kissed it? A thousand times a week. He brought his finger to the mouth. He used to tap Brian’s lips trying to predict when the teeth would appear. He rested his fingers there.
And the body moved again. The mouth. The maw. It opened and closed, opened and closed stiffly, like a puppet’s jaw. Then he heard a straining sound, like an empty Styrofoam cup being squeezed and released, the hinges of the dry jaw creaking. Apollo feared more roaches would stream out, but that didn’t happen, so he held on to the body. The mouth stretched and shut. Not hard to see what it was doing. It was trying to feed.
Drops of his blood quivered on those inhuman lips, the blood from his cut finger.
Nothing else about the body suggested life. Only the mouth became animated. Not really alive, but impossible to think of it as truly dead. An automaton. Fueled by blood and belief.
As it suckled blood from his finger, the creaking sound came in a rhythm, squeeze and release, squeeze and release. Apollo pulled his finger from the mouth, and in an instant the jaw stopped working. It lay as still as before.
“Something made you and then left you behind,” he whispered.
Patrice’s voice came to him from outside the grave. “This is way past late, Apollo. We have to go.”
Apollo crouched and found the blue blanket. He wrapped the body in it again. He’d done a lot of damage to the casket, but—best he could—he returned the body to its resting place. Once it was in the shattered remains of the casket, once it had been returned to the shadows of the grave, its glamour returned. It appeared to be a child again. His child again. In the dark it became Brian Kagwa.
He checked to see if the red string had been cut loose by the thorns, but its knot held.
“You deserved better than you got,” Apollo said. “I’m sorry if you felt any pain.”
Apollo closed the lid of the coffin as best it would go. He tossed the mattock out of the grave, then the flat head shovel. Patrice extended a hand, and Apollo took it. Apollo climbed out of the grave. He went into a pocket and gave the Zipcar card to Patrice. He told Patrice to go on and get the minivan, he’d be out soon.
Apollo used the shovel to throw dirt down onto the casket. He couldn’t fill the grave—he didn’t have the time, and his body didn’t have the power—but he wouldn’t leave the grave with the body exposed.
After that Apollo took up the mattock and moved to the brass grave marker. He brought the adze down into the dirt, and it sank deep with the first blow. He used the handle like a lever and pulled back until the grave marker buckled. He moved six inches and did the same again. When he wrenched back, this time the top half of the grave marker lifted from the dirt.