The Creeping

Out of the voices behind me I hear Zoey arguing. Demanding that the cops be called. Barking orders in a way only Zoey can get away with. A few more feet to go. I still hold my breath. I try to let it out very gently and to draw it back in without the dead noticing. I don’t want to breathe them in either.

I can see her now. Hair, hands, torso. For a second I’m grateful the body isn’t dismembered, but that fades once I note the size of the features. Small and doll-like. A little girl. Ivory skin taut over her bones; hair is matted on her forehead. It’s impossible, but my tongue presses to the roof of my mouth to say Jeanie’s name. Of course it’s not her. I haven’t taken anatomy yet, but who doesn’t know enough about decomposing corpses from watching CSI reruns to know that someone buried eleven years ago wouldn’t be in this condition? But still. She looks young. She looks six.

I reach for her—I don’t know why, since the last thing I want is to actually touch her. My hand splayed wide, fingers stretching against the joints. Three inches. Two. In the instant before I make contact, the sludge shifts and bubbles under me and I’m knocked forward against the coffin lid. The jolt rocks her head to the side, but the red hair and the flap of skin that is her scalp stay put. “Naked” is the word my brain vomits. Her head is hairless. Skinned. Scalped. The membrane that she should be wearing as a crown is disconnected, limp in the mud, only placed near so it might look as though she’s in one piece.

“Zoey.” I must say her name a hundred times in the minute it takes her to crawl, drunk and in her bikini, through the demolished graves. She reaches me, hands fumble to pull me away.

It takes twenty minutes for the police to arrive. During that time I’m a nonverbal animal completely consumed with watching and listening to those around me. Zoey torpedoes Tara Boden with insults until she leaves and returns with a blanket from her date’s car. It smells of mildew, but I let her wrap it around me anyway. As we huddle together in the dark, her arm pressed against mine, I close my eyes and wish away the scene unfolding in front of me.

Daniel stands where I left him. His shoes have sunk into the mud like quicksand swallowing him up. I don’t think he’d mind. He’s completely still: no flinching, no twitching, no wailing. His eyes never leave the matted hair sticking up from the upturned earth, spindly as a grubby little shrub climbing toward the light, lonely away from its head.

Michaela and Cole aren’t here. Probably taking cover from the rain in my car. It isn’t pouring from the sky like the heavens have burst open on our heads, but it sprinkles. Yes, that’s it. Jeanie went to heaven eleven years ago, and tonight they spit her back to earth. Thank God I can’t form a sentence, because Zoey would have me committed.

I’ve come full circle since she dragged me from the mud pit of corpses. And she had to drag me, looping her arms under mine and guiding me away. The body’s tiny hand, outstretched and decorated with peeling nail polish, momentarily rotted my sense. I was certain she was connected to Jeanie. It felt too cosmic that on this day of all days a corpse would show up. How could there even be another hurt little girl? The frosting on the cake, albeit a twisted cake made from guts and demon horns, was that Daniel and I were both here to witness it. There’s no way this is not some bigger-than-all-of-us reckoning. But the farther away Zoey hauled me from the body, the bossier the voice of reason in my head got. What was I thinking? Did I have gruel for brains all of a sudden? What happened to the reasonable girl who grew up in the shadow of hysteria and learned that the color of madness wasn’t for her?

By the time Zoey plastered a perma-smile on her face and created a cocoon out of the blanket for us, I’d talked my inner psycho off the ledge. This was a coincidence. Ridiculous happenstance. Maybe I even imagined that the body looked fresher than it was? Maybe some fluke global-warming voodoo preserved the body for the last hundred years until she was freed from her coffin during the storm? Maybe it only looked like she’d been lying on top rather than inside the tomb? Maybe her hair detached from the skull because that’s what happens when bodies decompose? All the explanations in the world won’t banish the nagging in my stomach that this can’t be, won’t be, the case. Sure there is the whole inconvenient fact that they probably didn’t have hot-pink nail polish a hundred years ago. But also, there is this writhing inside me, like I’ve been infected by a tapeworm of doom. As the police sirens sing louder, I feel the parasite nibbling away my reason to make room for fear.