The Devil's End Read online

Her mother waved absently. “Go on…but save some energy. We’re goin’ to have to unpack at least some of this stuff tonight. I know I won’t feel like doing any cookin’, though, so we’ll probably eat out. You gettin’ hungry yet?”

  “Not really.” Lana bounded to her feet, the prospect of getting out of the house giving her a fresh burst of energy. “I won’t be gone long.”

  The late afternoon air was beginning to chill enough for Lana to wish she’d grabbed a sweater, but once outside, she didn’t feel like going back in to get one. Standing in the driveway behind her mother’s car, she peered down both directions of Cameo Lane, trying to decide which way to head out. But before she took another step, she heard a deep, muffled sob coming from the direction of the backyard. She walked quietly through the shadowed space between her house and Spiro’s. Peeking around the rear corner of his, she could see him hunched over on his back porch, his face buried in his hands, his little puppy nipping playfully at his ankles unheeded.

  “Hey Spiro, you okay?” she called out softly. She entered his backyard and sank to her knees, encouraging the pup to come to her. He bounded over joyfully and licked at her face, assaulting her nostrils with puppy breath. Lana grimaced and rolled him over on his back to tickle his tummy. Spiro had still not answered or looked up. Lana said a little louder, “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

  The young hulk finally raised his head. The bulbous features of his face were twisted in apparent anguish, his eyes red and puffy from crying. “Mama says…Mama says I can’t keep Sam.”

  Lana frowned. “Oh yeah? That’s too bad. He sure is cute.”

  “She says she’s gonna take him to the dog pound,” Spiro went on in his slow monotone, “if I don’t get him another home real quick. I know what’ll happen t’him if…if he goes to the pound. He’ll die. Mama said.”

  “Maybe I can keep ’im for you,” Lana offered impulsively, knowing full well her own mother would probably hit the ceiling like a helicopter. “Then you’d still be able to play with him every day.”

  Spiro’s face brightened instantly, like a child’s whose skinned knees had been miraculously healed by the mouth’s receipt of a bright red sucker. “Yeah, yeah,” he chanted, rocking back and forth. “Yeah. You keep him and I can play with him every day, all right. He can be your dog and my dog too, right?”

  “An’ Luke’s too,” Lana added sourly. “Luke’s my kid brother. He’s a real pain in the ass. Anyway, he’ll scream bloody murder if the puppy ain’t at least part his. But he’ll be nice to Sam, I promise.”

  Spiro nodded gratefully. His woe vanquished, he tuned in fully to the fact of Lana’s presence. She both intrigued and confused him. The possibility that she might really like him seemed too good to be true. Fantasy was safer somehow. He began to feel a little dizzy.

  “My mom’s gonna kill me for this,” Lana mumbled, feeling Sam’s needle-sharp puppy fangs sink into her hand. She could well imagine the havoc the fluffy little chomping machine would wreak in the house of a Taurus woman who had an annoying penchant for “nice things.” A vision of the pup gnawing on the furniture legs or her mother’s Italian shoes inspired subsequent visions of all hell breaking loose, but Lana had already given her word.

  “Your mama will kill you?” Spiro asked, shocked.

  Lana giggled. “Not really. I meant it’ll just take her a while to get used to this idea. But she’ll get over it. Don’t worry, Spiro. I’ll take good care of your puppy.”

  Spiro nodded and felt his tension relax. He found himself wishing she would sit down the way she had earlier, so he could see…

  The door behind him suddenly opened. Lana looked up to see an obese woman with gray hair pulled into a severe bun step out on the porch. She was wearing a tight, scruffy blue sweater over a faded flower-print dress, and a pair of black shoes that appeared far too small for her oversized feet. She glared at Lana. “What are you doing here?”

  Lana nervously rose to her feet, but was unable to stand still with Sam nipping at her toes through her sandals. “Well, ma’am, I just moved in next door,” she explained as she tried to dodge the bites, appearing to be dancing on hot coals. “Spiro was just tellin’ me you wouldn’t let him keep his puppy, so I offered to take it. That’s all.”

  “Then take it,” Bertha Guenther spat. “And I don’t want to see it in my yard again, you understand? First time I do, I’ll call the pound, and I mean it. I don’t need no damn dog doing messes over here for me to step in when I go to hang my laundry.”

  Lana stooped and gathered the puppy in her arms, anxious to get away from the terrible woman as quickly as possible. “Yes’m, I know just what you mean. Well, I guess I’ll take him home now. Nice meetin’ you. ’Bye, Spiro.” She shuffled away at a fast pace, biting her tongue to keep herself from telling the old sow what she really thought of her. Now she felt doubly sorry for Spiro; the poor guy certainly wasn’t getting any breaks. With a woman like that for a mother, who needed any additional problems? Before turning the corner in front of her garage, she heard the fat woman yell at her son: “You get in this house, boy! I got supper on the table getting cold as ice…

  And then a thud; it sounded like she’d kicked him.

  Marla headed north on Bower Avenue, which took her through the main shopping district on her way home. For once she obeyed the twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, being in no particular hurry to arrive at her destination; she knew the minute she walked in the door, her mother would start the inquisition about where she’d been and what she’d been doing in the time since school had let out. The Rule was that after dropping Nancy off, she was to report home before going anywhere else, or in other words, her presence was expected by three p.m. Whenever she broke the Rule, it was usually because she’d had detention, but her lateness was explained with a variety of creative excuses to avoid further hassle. She was having trouble thinking of one for the two hours she presently needed to cover, and decided a little more time wouldn’t make any difference; chances were she was already nailed anyway. After this long Pamela Mingee would have called Nancy’s mother, who fortunately and unfortunately was one of her oldest and dearest friends, and who undoubtedly would have promised to call back as soon as she found out what was going on. That would have been about five seconds after Nancy walked in the door.

  It had been almost a year since Marla had last been in the old graveyard on Beacon Hill. On Halloween night it was tradition for a bunch of the high school kids to take a keg of beer up there and party. After the dancing and necking were finished and the keg drained, they would all sit in the shadow of the Ober House of Death and tell ghost stories. Marla had never carefully studied the tomb’s entrance with breaking and entering in mind, and she reasoned that sometime before Saturday night such an inspection should be done to see what sort of tools would be needed.

  She turned left on Brookings, which would intersect a mile and a half west with Parish Lane. Parish wound through the foothills and eventually circled around the crest of Beacon Hill. Now was as good a time as any; she still had to give more thought to the incredible story she was going to tell her mother, assuming she would even be given a chance.

  She’d never been in the cemetery alone before, but didn’t imagine it would be very scary in the daylight, though there wasn’t much left of it. There was enough; she wasn’t going up there to meditate. The sun wouldn’t go down for another half hour. With that in mind, she turned up the volume of her stereo and mashed on the accelerator.

  The cemetery was in a clearing surrounded by pine, scrub oak, and spruce trees about fifty yards from the scenic overlook. Marla parked the Cutlass near the narrow path which led down to it and got out, shivering as a gust of cold wind danced around her. Why no one had previously thought to have a look inside the tomb she couldn’t begin to guess; the forbidding structure certainly fired the imagination. Perhaps others had tried and had simply failed to succeed. Surely s
he would have heard about it if the case were otherwise—unless, of course, the perpetrators were smart enough to keep their mouths shut. What a rip-off if someone else had gotten there first and made off with the evidence.

  Evidence of what? her mind asked hauntingly, though she already knew the answer. She believed what her grandmother claimed, that the Obers had been practitioners of black magic.

  Purse in hand, she entered the shady path, her feet crunching rhythmically on fallen pine needles and dead leaves. The only other sound was that of the wind whistling through the tree branches, the whispers of departed souls. Marla knew she was alone, but imagined —as she supposed Nancy would on such an occasion— that the penetrating stares of a dozen pairs of soulless eyes were burning into her, their moldy bodies hidden from view by the dense foliage on either side of her. In spite of her earlier confidence, she admitted to herself that daylight or no, being alone in such a place was scary as hell, especially having a best friend like Nancy, who always came up with the most godawful “what if” statements Marla had ever heard, and they now echoed loudly in her brain, every grisly one of them, like the voice of a demon.

  By the time she reached the clearing, her nerves were completely on edge, and she still had no inkling of the excuse she would feed her mother for coming home so late; she had totally exhausted the supply of believable ones. Even if Nancy had been savvy enough to cover for her, this time she would probably just have to admit to the detention. It might cushion her parents’ shock of later learning about the suspension, should that dreaded occurrence come to pass.

  Why she didn’t just turn around and run back to the car she really didn’t know; that was exactly what she wanted to do. What was the hurry on checking out that stupid door anyway? On Saturday she and Nancy could do it together, supposing they weren’t grounded for the next four years. But she was already there, and in another five minutes, or less, she could have the duty done, and would be able to proudly tell Nancy that she had (as a matter of fact!) come to the graveyard alone. Let Nancy try to call her a chickenshit then.

  Her eyes scanned over the uneven rows of stones, most of them tilted and covered with moss. The one nearest her marked the grave of Jeremy Todd, 1862-1877. Fifteen years old. Marla was sixteen; she couldn’t imagine her own life being snuffed out so early. What had Jeremy looked like? What had been the cause of his death? She’d always thought such information should be included on grave stones.

  The entrance to the tomb faced east; Marla could not see it from where she was standing. The sun was beginning its descent into the west; soon it would disappear behind the hills. Nancy, naturally, would stick around until the sun did go down, just to turn the pragmatic excursion into a chilling adventure. But that was Nancy. Marla stepped over the graves toward the tomb, drumming up visions of the decayed corpses beneath her feet. She couldn’t help it. Was she disturbing their rest? Were the eyes of the dead able to see her through the layers of earth?

  She then noticed something peculiar, at the far end of the clearing; a new grave, not yet marked. Unlike the others, the ground covering it was void of grass, the clods of dirt mingled only with fallen leaves and acorns. Freshly dead was somehow worse than long dead. Marla quickly looked away, pushing down her curiosity about who lay beneath that deep, suffocating blanket. Strange that anyone would be buried recently in the old cemetery, she thought, her eyes falling on the tombstone of Sybil Holmes, Loving Wife and Mother, dead for almost seventy-five years. Everyone who died these days got planted in the new cemetery on the other side of town.

  “How are you doing down there, Sybil? Are you having a nice day?” Her voice sounded foreign to her in the desolate place. A crow cawed in response, bringing Marla’s heart up to her throat. She hurried over to the tomb’s entrance. The door was metal, and covered with a good deal of rust, corrosion, and naked vines. There was no handle, only a small hole on the left side where a key would go. Who would have the key…?

  She pushed on the door with both hands; it didn’t budge. She was beginning to think they would need a stick of dynamite to get in; an electric drill certainly wouldn’t do them any good out there. There were no hinges on the outside to unscrew, no space between the door and the frame to wedge a crowbar into, and neither of them knew the first thing about picking locks. So much for their long-embraced, great idea. Whoever had built the tomb obviously didn’t want the Obers to be disturbed.

  She stepped back a few feet and gazed up at the engraved names above the door. She called out giddily to taunt her fear: “Hey, anybody home?”

  As she would later recount to Nancy, what happened then was nothing short of a scene from a heart-stopping nightmare; too terrible, too frightening to accept as reality. She had been too frozen by terror to scream, as her mind urged her to do when the creaking of metal responded to her mocking words. Her eyes, unbelieving, watched as the door of the tomb slowly began to open. She tried to convince herself that she was having an auditory and visual hallucination, but this was clearly not the case. The door was opening, revealing a widening space of blackness beyond the outer frame.

  The Obers were home.

  “Then what happened?” Nancy asked breathlessly over the telephone.

  “What do you think? I ran like the Devil himself was after me,” Marla retorted, shivering convulsively at the memory. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack; by the time I got back to my car, I could actually see my heart beating through my blouse. I know what you’re going to say, but I’m not going back there, Nan—ever. What Gramma said was really true. Those people were witches. And I personally don’t care to know anything else about them.”

  “Oh, good grief, Marla. You pushed on the door, right? That’s why it opened. It just took a little while, that’s all. What…you actually think one of the Obers got out of his or her coffin and opened it for you? Get real. But if you really don’t want to go back, that’s just fine with me. I didn’t think you’d wanna do this anyway. I really don’t care. But if the door’s open, I’m going to go out there tonight, before someone else sees it. If there’s anything in there worth taking for a souvenir, it’ll be gone if we wait very long.”

  “We?”

  “Well, you can at least give me a ride out there, can’t you? My mom’s at her stupid cooking class and my dad went bowling. I don’t have a car. You don’t even have to get out of yours if you’re going to be such a baby. I’m not afraid of old bones, and that’s all the Obers are by now. Come on; if you won’t take me, I’ll have to ask Jay, and then it won’t be just our little secret anymore.”

  The only excuse Marla could think of for not taking Nancy to Beacon Hill was that she had to clean up her room, and that if she didn’t, her mother would throw everything she found on the floor into the trash. But she’d already confessed that all her worrying about what she was going to say about getting home so late had been a waste of energy, since her mother hadn’t even been there when she got home, and was still due to arrive. Her brother had informed her that she’d gone to visit Gramma Colter at the nursing home, and after that she had planned to do the grocery shopping.

  “Look, it’ll only take about thirty minutes,” Nancy said impatiently. “You can stay in the car, and it’ll just take me about five minutes to check it out. Come on, this is our big chance…we’ve talked about doing this forever. And we don’t even have to break into the place.” Marla groaned in resignation. “All right, I’ll take you up there. I don’t see why this couldn’t wait until tomorrow afternoon. No one’s going to go snooping around there tonight.”

  “No one but me,” Nancy quipped. “See ya in a few.” The line went dead.

  Marla replaced the receiver on her ivory Princess phone and looked glumly at the disaster she called her bedroom. With a defeated sigh, she reluctantly grabbed her purse and car keys and stepped out into the upstairs hallway. The last orange rays of sunlight had already disappeared from the sky. When Marla re
ached the living room downstairs, a plush, earth-toned testimony to the Mingee’s financial success, blackness greeted her through the massive picture window overlooking the front of the estate. Her fourteen-year-old brother Rick sat slumped in the center of the sectional beige couch, watching MTV on the forty-six-inch television screen— which meant that their father wasn’t home yet either; Harold Mingee could stand MTV for about 1.2 seconds.

  “I’m going over to Nancy’s for a little while,” Marla informed him. “I’ll be back in about thirty minutes. If Mom gets back before I do, I was here when I was supposed to be, in case she asks. Got it?”

  Rick dipped into his crumpled bag of Fritos and shrugged. “I dunno if I can remember that, since it’s not the truth. What’s it worth to you?”

  “What’s it worth to you if I continue to keep my mouth shut about August fifteenth?” Marla snapped, disgusted by her brother’s audacious attempt to extort money from her for such a simple favor…totally galling, especially considering the goods she had on him. The previous summer their parents had gone on a three-day trip to Las Vegas, leaving their two children home alone, knowing how responsible, mature, and trustworthy they were, not to mention how much more fun they could have in Vegas without them around. Responsible Rick had snuck his girlfriend, Celeste Johnson, over to spend the night with him on the fifteenth, which Marla had easily discovered.

  “All right, all right,” Rick said irritably, then grinned before adding, “Can’t blame a guy for trying, though. I was just kidding, anyway.” He stuffed a handful of Fritos into his mouth.

  “Yeah, I’ll just bet you were.” Marla slammed out through the heavy oak front door and walked briskly to her car, parked in the stone circle drive.

  Spiro helped his mother wash and dry the dishes after supper, then went to his bedroom to work on his model airplane, though his thoughts kept returning to his puppy next door, and especially to Lana. Why was she being so nice to him? Other girls had pretended to like him before, but it had always been a mere charade to set him up for a cruel joke. Being mildly retarded obviously didn’t stop Spiro from thinking about girls in romantic and sexual ways, but he had no hopes of ever actually becoming involved with one. His fantasies at least partially satisfied his emotional need for a female companion; sexual release, he assumed, would always have to be taken care of in solitude, and only after he was certain that his mother was asleep. She’d caught him masturbating once, and had blistered his hands over the stove as punishment.