Cemetery of Angels (18 page)

He wasn’t sure what he would find, but he knew that he wanted to know. He held his torchlight on the coffin and lifted the lid until it was up about a foot.

He felt that he was defiling something sacred. And perhaps he was. But he had already been drawn into this vortex of sordidness. It was his job to learn exactly whatever crime had been committed. He peered in. With a shudder, he saw his worst fears realized.

The coffin was empty. Whatever body had been in the coffin, it was gone now. He let the lid close again, setting it down gently and respectfully.

“God of my fathers,” he muttered to himself.

He turned and painfully hopped off the truck. He signaled to the driver. The empty casket was now evidence in a criminal proceeding. It was being taken to an annex of the medical examiner’s office. It would be inventoried and held as evidence. It couldn’t be reburied without an occupant.

The truck started to move.

Van Allen knew he would have to call his captain of detectives as soon as possible. Minimizing publicity would be an excellent idea. Who knew what kind of nuts would be drawn out of the sunshine of the Southwest to visit the cemetery once this story got out?

But other thoughts also rustled through his mind as he walked toward the telephone. He asked himself: What sort of comment was this on the human condition?

“Grave robbery. Body snatching.”

There was no other way to term this. What in God’s name did someone want with the embalmed corpse of a man who had been dead for more than seventy years?

What was this all about? A coven of Devil worshipers? A dark prank for the upcoming Halloween? Some new sort of satanic cult? Or was this just some frightening new clique of left coast screwballs, the raw material for New Age nightmares?

Naturally, Van Allen reasoned, something like this would have to spring up in Los Angeles. Just what his city needed was another black eye.

Why couldn’t this have happened back East in New York or New Jersey, where secretly Van Allen felt all this wacko stuff came from? Or why couldn’t it have been in San Francisco, where in its sick rainy-seasoned sordidness it could have fit in with the mood of the city? How about Boston? Wouldn’t that have been a better setting for this?

But, no. It had happened in his city, on his watch.

To this, he again asked the question that, in his line of work, he never finished asking. Why?

These people, the sick criminals who had stolen a body, didn’t deserve to be in California. They deserved to be in a zoo. Or at best a state nuthouse.

“And yet, and yet… “

Van Allen got into his car and followed the coffin to the Health Department. There he managed to cool any potential controversy surrounding the inquest. By phone, he spoke to his captain, who shared his desire to keep a lid on publicity. He filed his police report, couched it in vague terms in his logbook, and mentioned only that a grave had been “disturbed, probably by vandals.”

Then he went home.

But like many crimes he had dealt with over the years, this one followed him.

He couldn’t get it off his mind. It was like a bad dream that kept coming back, an atonal tune from some mysterious place that kept playing in his head.

Toward midnight, he realized what was gnawing at him. Deep in his gut, he had the impression that he was dealing with something much larger; perhaps much more evil than he had any way of imagining.

He felt as if he were on the brink of some bizarre and terrifying new experience. An image came to him from somewhere. He pictured himself in front of an unopened door, frightened of its opening, yet picturing a disembodied hand settling on the doorknob on the opposite side…

…slowly turning the knob
…

What the detective felt was dread. Pure and simple. Dread.

Then he realized: This was it!

This was the event of which he had had a premonition, a sense of foreboding and impending catastrophe. What he had feared most was now right in front of him, waiting for him to figure it out.

“Grave robbery. How much lower does human behavior get?” he growled.

At a few minutes before 1:00 A.M., Van Allen was seated again in his kitchen. On the wall there was a picture taken at Huntington Beach several years ago in happier times: His wife, Margaret, and their son, Jason.

The picture was in a cheap frame from a drugstore. The frame had warped from heat and cooking exhaust. But as Van Allen sat at his kitchen table over a beer, the picture and its metal backing suddenly came loose. It slipped out of the frame and crashed to the linoleum of the floor a few feet from where Van Allen sat.

Van Allen’s heart leaped. He nearly jumped out of his skin. He found himself on his feet, his heart hitting three beats per second, and, from years of experience, he reached for his service weapon. There was even a cry of fear in his throat.

For several seconds he looked at the picture and the happier times that had hit the floor. Then, as his heart settled, he picked up the picture and cleaned it off. Fortunately, there was no damage.

He vowed that the next day he would take the photograph to a decent studio and have it framed properly. He set the picture down carefully on a table in his dining room. And now he was so spooked, so fatigued, and so upset with the day’s events, that his mind was even playing tricks on him. Distantly, he thought he heard laughter.

A man laughing at him. Another beer, and he dismissed the laughter.

But then, as he was going to sleep that night, in the moments before he drifted off, he thought he experienced something even worse.

There was a touch to his shoulder. Then, a few moments later, there was a tug to his bedcovers. He sprang up and turned on the light in the empty room, one hand on the lamp, the other again on his service pistol.

He scanned the room. Nothing. It took an hour, but he went back to sleep with the light on.

‘He was going nuts,” he told himself! Van Allen was glad that he didn’t have to peer into defiled coffins every day of his life. Otherwise he would have lost his mind years earlier.

He was on the brink of sleep, on the hazy dreamy side of consciousness, when the day had a final benediction. Words came to him out of the ether. But they were soothing, not scary.

“
Have no fear, Edmund
,’ the words were. “
I’m near”.

His body shook with a sleep tremor. His eyes flicked, scanned the empty room again, and then closed for the night. Sleep was otherwise natural and tranquil.

Rebecca was in a strange land, also. It was the same night, and she too was lost in the unknown land midway between wakefulness and sleep.

She rolled over in her bed. She tossed. The night outside her home was quiet. The last thing she had seen when she had looked out the window was stars, plus a yellow moon. So why couldn’t she sleep? She was safe in her home. Her husband was near her. But a husband and a home were physical protections within the tangible world. And what was approaching her was emanating from another plane of reality. The one inside her head. Or an unfathomable one that could travel through walls, doors, or even flesh.

It was a thought. A notion. A feeling. A vision. An image. A horrible one was coming together in her subconscious mind, and she didn’t like it. She knew it was going to be unsettling. Frightening. She knew it even before the image took over her.

She rolled again in bed.

She could almost hear herself thinking.

“Oh, God… Oh, God, please help me…

She experienced a sensation of tumbling, and she knew she was drifting off into the scarier nether regions of sleep. And then she was shocked. She felt an extreme comfort. She was lying somewhere. She was all dressed up in a favorite dress lying on white satin sheets. Her eyes were closed, and she was very still. Gradually, in her dream, people around her came into view, and she suddenly realized that they were crying.

These were people she loved. Her family. Her parents. A favorite grandmother who was already deceased. Her friends. And, to make it all the more bizarre, a few old movie stars. Gable. Lombard. Monroe. Hey, what a great turnout of people whom you didn’t even know! But they were all really sad.

They were crying because their Becca was lying perfectly still and lifeless in a coffin, hands folded across her chest. Her dry-eyed husband stood by, looking as if he had expected something like this.

She tried to cry out in her sleep. She wanted badly to escape this vision.

But this dream held her in its grip. In the dream, she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t move in her bed, either. And she realized that she was looking at herself estranged from her own body. She was at her own funeral, seeing it through the eyes of others. The murmuring voice from the turret room again: Rebecca, be calm. Rebecca, there is nothing to fear…

The voice was silky, yet familiar. It was from something deeper in her past than her own birth, if that was possible.

Then there was something else. She saw her head turn quickly in her own coffin. Her eyes opened and went wide. Bright as a couple of little beacons, windows on a tortured soul.

In her coffin she sat up. Hey, what a great trick. We should all sit up in our coffins. Scares the crap out of the mourners!

“Where are my children?” Rebecca asked. “Where are Patrick and Karen?”

She searched. “Who will care for them?”

“Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca… I am protecting them now. And I will protect them through eternity…”

“Where are they?” she screamed. “Who’s talking to me?”

From the coffin she looked in another direction. There she saw her children. Two small coffins next to hers. Children’s coffins. Open. Patrick and Karen. Dead as the ages. A terrible serene beauty in their deaths. Rebecca turned sharply in her bed, arms flailing, crying out in her sleep.

Don’t leave now, Rebecca. This is the future.

She yelled again.

“Who is talking to me?”

A strand of irritating, irrational poetry strangled her.

A mother’s eyes,

Tears wet she’ll weep,

Her children murdered

In their tombs they sleep …

The rhyme was like an inscription on a seventeenth century tombstone. On the wings of the verse, the coffin lids slammed shut, closed by unseen hands. The hands of a phantom. Or a dark angel. Or a devil.

They were at a cemetery. Her husband, not a tear in his eye, stood by. The children were lowered into the ground. Rebecca felt a very real scream bottled up in her throat, ready to break loose. She felt herself sinking again. Sinking like the children’s coffins going into the ground. The earth coming up around her. Four tight dirt walls.

Then she realized. She was going into the ground with her children. Her own coffin lid slammed shut, and she was within it. She was being lowered into the ground, a closed, dark box around her, walls of dirt forever.

Even though she was within it, she could see it.

The scream broke loose. A wail like a banshee.

She bolted upright in her dark bedroom at Topango Gardens. A man was shaking her, and instinct told her that she should be scared of him.

Terrified! So she was.

That voice again, accompanied by that maddening subliminal tune from the turret room. Ronny’s room.

“Becca, Becca, Becca… Careful, Becca, he’s trying to kill you…”

She opened her eyes and flailed at the man who had his hands on her. He was a handsome man but in the darkness she couldn’t see his face.

The words of the dream and the words of reality merged.

“Becca! Becca! Becca!”

And then she had the sense that it wasn’t a man at all, but something from another world, the fiend with the sunglasses, these were his hands and she flailed away at him. He released, she hid her eyes. The lights went on in the bed room like a thousand flashbulbs. “Becca?” a familiar voice said. Demanding. Firm. Tough love or unvarnished brutality?

“Becca! Wake up!”

Hands on her shoulders again, shaking her.

Bill’s hands! Her husband’s! He pulled her upright and held her close to him.

“Becca! Open your eyes and look at me! Open your eyes… Open… Open!”

Her eyelids flickered. She obeyed. Her eyes did open. Welcome back to reality, Mrs. Moore. And a stupefied 3:00 A.M. consciousness in a lit bedroom flooded into her brain. The room lights hit her eyes like an express train. It hurt like hell. Her pupils felt as if they’d been fried. But at least the terror slowly began to dissipate, like smoke from the dying embers of an opium pipe.

“Becca?” Bill asked. His voice was softer now. Beckoning. As rich and welcoming as warm fudge.

The scream was long gone from her throat. All she could feel was relief. The familiar arms were on her, the familiar man in the bed beside her. Never had she appreciated him more. She felt closer to him than she had in years.

“Oh, God, honey,” she said, falling into Bill’s grip. “It was absolutely horrible. That was the worst dream of my life.’”

“Becca…” he said.” What’s going on here?”

He steadied her and continued to hold her. His eyes asked what it had all been about. She shook her head. Then she put her hand to her face. She felt like crying. He knew it and held her closely.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on. Talk it out so that you understand how silly it was.” She tried to gather herself.

“Not yet,” she said, her voice barely audible. A car was passing outside. “I can’t yet.” She was aware of a creak on the floorboards. It sounded like someone leaving the room. She glanced in the direction. Nothing.

Bill didn’t look. Maybe he didn’t hear it. But there was no one at the door. From somewhere another line of poetic doggerel. Like bad words to invisible music.

At three A.M., a spirit now walks,

In your home and heart, to your soul he talks.

She shuddered, a very tangible shake. Then, gradually, Rebecca unburdened herself to her husband.