The Last Coffin
Pipsqeak tossed an antique spice cabinet onto the fire, not bothering to dump out the spices, then returned to gazing out towards the barn. “They musta found something good,” he said. “Ain’t like Nico to waste time.”
Aura discreetly offered Jill a puff of her joint. She refused.
“I’ll try to get him to let the little one go,” Aura whispered. “That’s the best I can do.”
“And what if he refuses?”
Aura searched for an answer.
“What the hell you gals talking about over here?” Pipsqueak ambled toward them, his right thumb hooked in his pocket, from which the grip of his .25 jutted.
“Let me cut the little girl loose,” Aura said.
With a surprised expression, Pipsqueak reared his shoulders back. “You goin’ soft, girl?”
“We don’t need to kill her.”
“Her brother killed the Chief’s woman,” Pipsqueak reminded. “Blood for blood.”
“I’ll take responsibility.”
Pipsqueak threw his head back but didn’t laugh.
“Oh!” Candace exclaimed; the first sound she had made in nearly an hour. “You guys…you gotta run! Now!”
Pipsqueak caught movement from the field in his peripheral vision. He took a few steps out from the fire’s glare and saw a figure walking toward them with an odd gait.
Nah. One of his brothers, carrying a bag or sack in his right hand, and maybe a rag in the left. Nico or Jiggy was wearing her sweater and dress and—what, her… hair? Pipsqueak laughed. “Oh no, you guys didn’t!”
“Run!” Candace squealed.
Aura came to Pipsqueak’s side. “I don’t think that’s Jiggy or Nico.”
“Right,” Pipsqueak scoffed. “Then who…?”
“Tricks!” Everett raised his left hand. In it were the fresh masks he had made—taken, rather—from the bikers.
“What the—”
“Run nooowww!” Candace screamed.
“Shoot it,” Aura whispered.
Pipsqueak shook his head, trying to comprehend. Aura reached into his pants for his handgun, snapping him out of it. “Hands off, bitch!” He took it from her and aimed. “Stop right there, creep!”
Everett dropped the sack and the faces, his grin growing wider. “Cowboys for Halloween!?” He clasped his hands together. “Yee haaaw!”
Everett reached into Matilda’s sweater pockets and drew Nico’s Luger and Jiggy’s .38. He swung them around dramatically like a character from a John Woo film.
Pipsqueak got off one ineffective shot just as Everett fired. Bullets riddled Pipsqueak, knocking him down.
Blood splashed on Aura. She screamed and spun toward the house.
Pipsqueak pressed a hand against the worst of his wounds as he tried to aim his little gun.
Everett was close enough now that Pipsqueak saw the deranged gaze behind the skull-and-flesh mask. His aim went to hell.
Candace was hyperventilating. Aura forgot escape long enough to cut the little girl loose.
Everett stood astraddle Pipsqueak and emptied the guns into his chest. The mortifying death mask was Pipsqueak’s last sight—made all the worse in the gunpowder flashes and spatters of blood hitting it.
Aura tried to drag Candace away. “Jill too!” insisted the child.
Aura saw that Jill was at last showing fear. Tears of terror flowed like Pipsqueak’s pumping gouts of blood.
Humming, Everett dropped his empty guns and went back to get his sack.
Taking the bonesaw from it, he strode back to Pipsqueak’s corpse. “Swappies!”
“Hurry!” Candace shouted,
“Hmm!?” Everett popped his head up. “Canniss?”
Aura sliced through Jill’s ropes, gashing her wrist in the process.
The trio dashed into the house. Hands shaking like mad, Aura and Jill worked together to get the deadbolt and chain lock connected. “Run upstairs honey!” ordered Jill.
* * * *
Stuart landed lightly on his feet.
He spun to look above—make that behind him, and saw Bernard, at the exit a foot away. “What? You see a spider?”
Stuart aimed his flashlight at his own feet on the new room’s earthen floor, about six inches lower than the tunnel he had just exited. “Something’s messing with our heads.”
He aimed his beam at a cluster of mushrooms growing where the wall met the floor. He touched one with the toe of his shoe, raising a shimmery brown cloud from it.
“Don’t breathe it!” Bernard shouted.
Throwing his arm across his mouth, Stuart backed further into the dark chamber, until he stumbled into something solid at hip level.
Stuart spun, training his flashlights on the object—an oblong box.
“Is that a…?” Bernard took a hesitant step into the chamber.
Stuart examined it. The thing lay atop a stone stand that resembled a scaled-down Stonehenge monument. Something like an inverted cone protruded from the top of the box.
“It’s a”—given the implications, Stuart chose not to say either of the two-syllable C words that came to mind—“box. It’s some kind of big box.”
Despite Stuart’s tact, Bernard rasped with despair.
It was impossible to see what the box was made of through the layers of mushrooms and black moss that covered it. Stuart’s impact had raised another puff that swirled in his beam with a subtle glitter.
“Oh god, oh god!” Bernard crowded so close to Stuart, the latter could feel him trembling. “Is she…in it? Oh god!”
“Can’t be,” Stuart said. “It’s way too old. Hasn’t been open in…” He could not imagine.
Stuart moved the flashlight around the room, finding it to be roughly thirty-by-thirty, housing about a dozen more of the coffin-like structures aligned in three rows, all fitted with open-ended cones.
“They’re stone,” Bernard whispered, holding an arm across Stuart as if to keep him back. Like that was necessary.
Stuart took a step closer, resisting Bernard’s trembling arm, running his light along the room’s length. Symbols were painted there. “We saw these weird symbols in some of the historic stuff.”
“Up there on the walls too,” Bernard said. They held their beams side by side for a broader view. Through the dampness, the runes, painted in some thick dark liquid, were barely visible. Stuart decided to focus on something other than whether the paint was actually paint.
But he wouldn’t leave here until he found his friends. Not this time.
Hand over mouth, he brought the beam back around, stopping on a casket near the far wall that was separate from the others, clean and white. “There’s a newer one.”
Bernard’s breathing became somehow even more strident, but he said nothing.
Stuart played the beam over the entire chamber, searching for a second newer coffin.
Coming back to the lone pristine box, he swept his beam over its surface, to an inverted funnel that resembled a termite hill. “Maybe this is a breathing spout.”
Bernard’s wheezy puffs were still strident and urgent, but there was some sense of relief in them. “Can we open it?”
Are you crazy? cried Stuart’s brain. But he knew that was what had to be done. He tucked the light under his arm and shoved at the lid to check its heft. It was considerable.
Stuart considered how the labor of removing it would tax Bernard’s lungs to the limit. “We have to depend on each other to get this done.”
Bernard gulped and took tentative steps toward the container, his light beam dancing before him.
“It’s okay, Mr. Riesling,” Stuart said, hoping his cracking voice wasn’t just making things worse. “We’re gonna get your wife and my friend. And we are getting the hell outta here.”
It took a minute for Bernard’s breathing to steady. He held the flashlight between his shoulder and neck, and they set to work.
Bernard began wheezing within seconds, but his engineer’s mind rose to the task. He quickly settled into finding the best use of strength and leverage, making adjustments. The lid moved, little by little.
Once a pencil-thin opening appeared at the top edge, Bernard pointed his light into the crack, issuing an ecstatic laugh with a heaving breath. “It’s her!”
Stuart was relieved about Stella; more worried than ever about DeShaun.
Bernard went to the foot of the casket and gripped the lid. “Push…it toward…me…”
Stuart did, relieved that he was strong enough to move it. Then he spotted something. “Wait!”
Initially, he was afraid the coffin was booby-trapped. A shining spike jutted downward from where the funnel was, just over the unconscious Stella’s pale face. He pushed the light closer, getting a better view of the crystalline lance. It was just shy of touching her. “Should be okay,” he said. “Just…go slow.”
Stuart kept the light focused on the spike, warning the excitedly puffing Bernard whenever it came too close. After a strange aeon, they had created enough space and leverage to flip the stone lid off. It smashed on the floor with an echoing thunder.
Startled awake, Stella popped up with a croaking scream.
“It’s okay, Stella!” Bernard hugged her with a loving ferocity that Stuart remembered from his own parents.
“Bernard?”
“Yes, darling! It’s me!”
Stuart wished DeShaun were there to share an eyeroll at Bernard’s melodramatic lingo.
While the reunion continued, he checked the inside of the coffin and found clumps of the weird mushrooms, still fresh, along with dried flower petals and—pumpkin seeds.
But there was no time for an investigation. “We need to go.”
Stella, still disoriented, moved like an old lady. As they helped her out of the coffin, Stuart felt a sudden strange sense of danger. He panned the flashlight all around and then up, instantly wishing he hadn’t.
Crystalline spikes burst from the stone wall and grew down from the ceiling like greedy reaching claws, angling straight for them.
Bernard made a strange squeal as he pushed Stella’s head down and covered her.
* * * *
As Candace obeyed, Aura and Jill scrambled to push the remaining furniture—Matilda’s old overstuffed chair and a flimsy dining tray table—against the door.
They stood side by side, backs to the door as a minute passed.
Two.
“Why is he not trying to get in?” Aura whispered.
“He is,” Jill answered. “You can count on that. And he won’t stop till he does.”
They went to the window and squeezed their heads together to peek out as Jill eased the curtains apart. The roaring fire’s glare ruined visibility past its outer radius of about six feet.
“He went to the back!” Aura whispered.
Jill clapped her hand over Aura’s mouth as she saw Everett walk out from the far side of the fire, wearing his new mask.
A mess of twisted bloody flesh, peeling off a cracked skull front, was bound around Everett’s head with twine—Pipsqueak’s muttonchops were unmistakable.
Everett took a flaming chair leg from the fire and examined the house.
“Oh my god!” Jill whispered. “He’s gonna burn us out!”
Aura pulled her away from the window and stared intently at her.
“What?” asked Jill.
“I can give us a chance.”
“How?”
Aura peered back toward the window. “If I can get to one of those skins out there, I can change.”
Jill pulled her arm away. “I’m not so sure I bel—”
“We’ve already done it!” Aura insisted. “And that is a dead psycho! Do you believe in that?”
Jill had no answer.
“If I can get a skin, I’ll do the spell and kill him.”
Jill wanted to say “Good luck with that” but held her tongue. “Guess I’ll have to distract him.”
“I can’t do both, girlfriend.”
“I’m not your girlfriend.” Jill took a deep breath. “I can make him chase me I guess.”
“What about the little girl? Would he go after his own sister?”
“I’m not gonna put her—”
“We better come up with something, goddammit!”
Jill squeezed her eyes shut, dreading to say “I’ll run out.”
“Get to that barn. Maybe you can hide or hold him off till I finish the spell.”
“Doubtful.” Jill went to the door. “You just get Candace to Deputy Hudson Lott.” She unlocked the deadbolt. “No matter what.”
* * * *
Aura nodded. Jill opened the door and dashed out. “Everett!”
The madman was closer than she expected, extending the torch toward the dry splintery porch rails. Seeing him so close, Jill was startled. She stumbled down the steps but caught herself with her hands.
Everett dropped the torch—onto the porch’s warped floorboards. “The chasing game!”
His takeoff speed was insanely fast. “Catch and cut!”
Before she could go after a skin Aura had to stop and stamp out the fire; a single precious second.
Candace, watching from the room where she and Jill had been held, saw her friend running from her brother. “No!”
Aura gathered up the book, the jar of salve and a wolf skin, then bolted back to the house, too afraid to watch and see if Jill would make it to the barn.
She wouldn’t. Everett drew the athame from the sweater pocket and sailed it toward Jill in a single, underhand motion.
Jill felt the cold stinging steel invade her lower back, just to the left of her spine. She fell face-forward in the wet grass.
Everett’s high-pitched giggle scraped across Jill’s brain like a knife on a blackboard, jolting her from her grogginess.
She took a split second to choose between trying to get into the barn or delaying Everett and chose the latter. She pulled the athame from her back and rolled over, hoping Everett would lunge onto her and the knife point.
He didn’t. He stopped some eight feet away. Backlit by the dying fire, his form was a twisted parody of a human being. Pipsqueak’s muttonchops dripped blood. Matilda’s hair trailed in black streams from the scalp crookedly adhered with blood onto the head of the boy-monster. She couldn’t see the grin, but her mind’s eye knew it was there.
She pointed the knife at him like a warning, though she knew warnings meant nothing to him.
He took several stalking steps toward her—then halted upon hearing the high, stirring note of a wolf’s howl.
* * * *
Aura’s voice took on a new timbre as she repeated the skinwalk incantation. It was a deep guttural hungry sound. The wolfskin shrunk, fitting itself against her. The dead fur rippled with new life and luster. Her eyes, reflecting wild and yellow firelight, fell on Candace. “Go now.”
At this crucial stage of transformation, Aura had to focus on the ancient words; on giving herself over to primal ferocity.
Candace ran to the door and burst outside to hit the ground running. “Everett!”
An eerie and unnatural howl spread across the night.