They Thirst Part 11

He wasn't going to die after all, wasn't going to die, wasn't . . . Hotshot grinned.

The four fangs in his mouth-two protruding from the upper gums and two from the bottom-were yellow and dripping with fluids. The lower fangs curved inward slightly, like fishhooks; the upper ones were slanted toward each other, making a hideously efficient V. Hotshot's face glowed white, like the moon; his fingers, skinny and clawlike, dug deep into Luis's flesh to keep him from twisting away.

And now Hotshot was bending forward, the eyes in that terrible face starting to roll up into the head with greedy expectation.

Luis screamed a single word, the word that had carved itself into his brain as if from a red-hot switchblade-"Vampiro!"

Above him Hotshot cackled and bent forward to his feast. The lower fangsnt pierced flesh and hooked. Hotshot twisted his head a fraction to home in better on the flaming river of life that flowed just beneath Luis's chin. Luis's hands came up to push Hotshot's head away, but they moved too late with too little strength. When the V of Hotshot's fangs came down, blood spurted across his face. He blinked, s.h.i.+fted his position again, and as if from a great distance Luis heard his blood being sucked, the sound like someone sucking Coca-Cola through a straw or sniffing fine cocaine from a golden spoon. Luis's hands fluttered, one finger digging into the corner of Hotshot's eye. Instantly he heard a voice in his brain, something dreamy and soft-Lie still, little brother. Lie very still. Luis's hands fell to the floor like dead birds.

He was beginning to feel cold, really cold, but where Hotshot's lips were pressed against his flesh, an inferno raged. He lay very still while the arctic cold crept through his veins, inch by merciless inch. Winds were rising in his head, deafening him with their shriek. And by the time his jugular vein collapsed, as flat as a gutted worm, Luis was fast asleep. Gradually the hideous sucking noises that echoed through the many rooms were quiet. But in a few minutes they were replaced by another noise-the sound of bodies being dragged across the floors.

NINE.

Roach-much younger, but with an agonized madness already fermenting in his brain-pushed open the door.

In the small bedroom, with its mustard-yellow wallpaper and acrid smells of tobacco smoke and sweat, another stranger was astride his mother, riding her roughly with flesh-smacking thrusts. The man's b.u.t.tocks and thighs tensed and untensed like the action of a mindless machine. Bev's hands gripped his shoulders, and the man's broad back was gridded with scratches. The bed trembled, springs squealing beneath their combined weight. There was an empty whiskey bottle at the foot of the bed. Roach moved into the room, bent, and picked it up. He could see Bev's face-blank, drunken, bloated. She seemed to be looking right at him, her eyes lascivious and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with invitation. His groin was throbbing that hateful ba.s.s drum beat of desire. He lifted the bottle by the neck and stepped forward, already choosing the spot he would strike. As the bottle came down, he heard Bev scream, "NO!" And then it had crashed down not upon the stranger's darkhaired skull but across his right shoulder because he'd twisted with the scream. The bottle broke across a shoulder blade, jagged edges digging into the flesh. The man shrieked, "G.o.dd.a.m.n it, you crazy little bas-" and then struck out with the back of his hand, hitting the boy across the nose and dropping him to the floor. Roach, blood stringing from his nostrils, scrabbled to his feet and, whining like an animal, rushed forward. The bottle was forgotten now, he was going to kill this man with his hands. The stranger twisted off Bev and drove a solid blow to the boy's chin that lifted him off his feet and then down again like a heap of laundry. "You stay away from me!" the stranger shouted, bending quickly to retrieve the broken bottle. "You stay away or I swear to G.o.d I'll kill you!" Roach started forward again, his beady black eyes as dead as marbles, but then Bev s.h.i.+fted in the bed, and he stopped. Her thighs were exposed, and between them her s.e.x glistened like a gateway to all the pleasures he'd ever imagined in his tortured dreams. He turned toward her, the stranger forgotten now, and approached the bed on trembling legs. Bev's face flushed red. She closed her thighs and pulled the sheet up to her neck. Her son stood at the foot of the bed transfixed, his hand moving in slow circles at his crotch.

"My G.o.d," the stranger whispered, droplets of blood tapping to the floor. "My G.o.d . . . how long . . . has this been going on . . .?"

"It's not what you think, Ralph!" she said, avoiding her son's languid gaze.

"Please . . .!"

"You . . . and him?" The stranger's eyes moved back and forth between them.

"Your own son?"

"Not long, Ralph ... I swear to G.o.d, not long!"

He saw it all then. "You . . . you like it, don't you? Jesus! You like it with your own son?"

And suddenly it all came bursting out of her before she could stop it, the anger and fear and black guilt that was her legacy to her son. "YES, I LIKE IT!" she shrieked. "I like it when he touches me! Don't you dare look at me like that... get out of here! GO ON! GET OUT!"

The man was already struggling into his pants. He grabbed his s.h.i.+rt from the back of a chair and shrugged it on over his injured shoulder. Bev was screaming now, a high, drunken scream. "I'm glad we do it! He's more of a man at thirteen than you'll ever be . . .!"

"Sure, sure," he said, working his shoes on. "You're both nuts, aren't you?

Christ, I knew he was off his rocker, but you, too?"

"GET OUT!".

The man paused at the doorway, fumbling with his wallet, and flung a few bills at her. They spun like dead leaves at the boy's feet. "Maybe they'll give you the same room at the nut house," he said, and whirled out. A door opened and closed, and then there was silence but for Bev's harsh breathing. She stared at her son, tears beginning to slide down her cheeks. "It don't matter," she said softly. "Not a bit. We've got each other, don't we? We'll always have each other. They don't understand how bad it is to be alone, do they, Waltie?

Nothing matters. Come on. Hurry."

And he did.

The bedroom and Bev and the mustard-colored walls rippled like a pond into which a stone has been tossed. The ripples strengthened, moved faster and faster, and suddenly the whole scene vanished as if it had been sucked to the dark depths of a whirlpool.

Roach rubbed his eyes and sat up in bed in his dark apartment. It was still very dark outside, and somewhere jukebox music was playing. He could hear the black c.o.c.kroaches scrabbling in their gla.s.s tanks. He stood up and went to the window, looking down on Coronado Street. Dreaming about his mother made him nervous; sweat had come up on his face. It made him angry, though he couldn't exactly figure why. Perhaps it was because he knew now how much of a liar she was; she had left him after all, and because she had, they had sent him off to a place-the Crazyhouse-where people laughed and shrieked all the time, where he had to take pills and drink a lot of water.

Something within him needed but hated that need. A When he found his mother, as the Master had promised him he would someday, he wouldn't have to fear going back to the Crazyhouse again. Everything would be all right. He walked across the room to the table on which sat the little tanks filled with roaches. Their backs glistened like black armor in the darkness. He picked up a matchbook, struck a match, and held it to one of the tanks; the roaches scrambled away. When the flame died down to a red pinpoint, he could hear them scurrying back over each other again.

Walter Benefield was dead now. His name was Roach, and it was a name he liked. Ever since he'd gotten the job at Aladdin Exterminators four months before, he'd been studying them in their death agonies when he sprayed Dursban or Diazanon in cracks between floors and walls. Sometimes the roaches would flood out in a strange kind of dance, flopping and running and falling as the chemical began to drown them. Often there would be large black roaches, the bulls of the nest, that would start to recover and scurry away; they were the ones he would catch by hand and drop into a plastic bag to bring home for his experiments. He was awed by their strength, by their sheer tenacity; very few things could kill a ma.s.sive three-inch bull. The Diazanon might make them crazy for a little while, but without a good second spray they would recover. Even stomping on them couldn't do it; they played dead for a few seconds and then zipped away with their guts hanging out, like relentless tanks. They were so fast, natural survivors that had remained virtually the same for millions of years. Over the months he'd burned them, tried to drown them in the toilet, tried to suffocate them, cooked them in a pot of boiling water, and performed a dozen other experiments in death. Very few things worked. It had just been luck that he'd had a bag of them in his car the night he'd picked up that first girl. After she was dead, he wondered whether the roaches would suffocate inside her mouth, and so he went to work. They had, finally, and he'd been very pleased with himself. Doubly pleased when he realized the papers were calling him Roach. It was an honor to him, and so he continued doing it just for fun because the papers and the police seemed to expect it. Now when he saw himself in a mirror, it seemed he was beginning to look like them. His shoulders were broad and slightly stooped, his hands and forearms as muscular and large as steel clamps; he had the heavy, dark-browned forehead and small black eyes that missed nothing. Once his hair had been black and curly, but when he started working for Aladdin, he cut it very short, right against a large, bulbous skull. Very small ears and jutting, bony elbows completed the image he had of himself-that he was undergoing an evolutionary change, crossing the line between man and insect, becoming stronger and smarter and almost invincible, just like them.

He untaped a corner of the waxed paper that covered the top of one of the tanks and reached down inside, grasping a roach between his thumb and forefinger. It got away, and it took him a few more seconds to get another one. Then he pressed the corner back so none of them could escape and, holding the squirming roach inside his balled left hand, he turned on the lights. The overhead fixture, an opaque umbrella of dirty gla.s.s, lit the room with a harsh glare that threw the man's huge shadow out around him. He went to the stove, turned on the gas flame, and dangled the roach over it. The insect scrabbled frantically at his fingers.

He had the power of life and death over it, just as he did over those girls who were friends of Bev and who laughed at him when they thought he wasn't looking.

Oh, he knew how they laughed; he was much smarter than he let on. Some of them he'd seen with Bev before, when he was just a kid and she used to walk the street. They were her friends, and they were hiding her from him. It used to be he could fix them with his hands and stop them from laughing; but the Master had said that was a waste. The Master wanted them for himself, so he'd told Roach that he should take poisons from where he worked-liquids and powders-and use them on those girls to make them sleep for a while. Roach had taken some of them-Sevin dust, V-1, Dursban, Diazanon and a few others-from the stockroom at work late on Sat.u.r.day night; he knew very little about them except that Mr. Lathrup had warned him to wear his mask when he used them. So he did just that when he mixed the chemicals in bottles on his stove. Then he tore up an old towel and soaked the rags in the solution for a long time, pouring what was left-an oily brown liquid-into an orange juice bottle which he stored under his sink. The first time he used it was the next Tuesday night, and the Master was very angry at him because the girl was dead when they reached Blackwood Road.

After that he cut the mixture twice with water, and it worked just fine. The roach caught fire. He watched it sizzle and then dropped it into the sink, where it writhed and ran around in circles. He turned on the water, and the roach spun down the drain, still kicking.

He looked up suddenly, his eyes glowing. He thought he'd heard a faint whisper coming in through a crack in the window, filling the room. He stepped to the window and put his palms against the gla.s.s, staring out into the darkness. He listened, his head c.o.c.ked to one side. The Master was going to need another one tomorrow night. Now he wanted Roach to sleep, to forget all the bad things, to think only of tomorrow and the new kingdom that was to be. Roach pressed his forehead against the gla.s.s for a few minutes and then wentjit to turn out the lights. When he was in bed again, he picked up his handgrips from the floor beside him and began to squeeze them. Squeeze . . . hold . . .

release, J1'1 squeeze ... hold ... release: he would do that two hundred times before he went to sleep, and in the darkness the springs sounded like the rubbing together of hungry I;, mandibles.

Monday, October 28

THE GRAVEDIGGER.

It was twelve minutes before three in the morning. Noel Alcavar had his feet propped up on his desk, and beside him a transistor radio blared Latin disco loud enough to wake the dead. No, not quite, Alcavar mused as he slid his gray cap forward over his eyes. At least the stiffs out there weren't sitting up in their graves yet, he thought. If they did, I'd kick 'em in their a.s.ses and send 'em back to h.e.l.l. Ai-yi-yi, what a job this was! He closed his eyes and moved one foot to the dis...o...b..at, trying to forget that there were about fifty stiffs lying out in the darkness under huge gnarled trees filled with the green drip of Spanish moss. j-For the last five nights, Alcavar had been covering for his brother Freddie, who held the dubious t.i.tle of Head Watchman for the Rarnona Heights Cemetery in the Highland Park district, dubious because Freddie Alcavar was the only real full-time watchman, and he held rank over one skinny Chicano kid who was mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded but smart enough to play sick most of the time. And now Freddie had been hit by a virus that kept him in the bed between dashes to the toilet, and the doctor had told him to stay home and rest. So Noel was helping out, playing loud disco so he could imagine that he was boogying with the foxes at the Disco 2000 on North Broadway. Freddie had told him he was supposed to take his flashlight, leave the green-painted shelter, and stroll through the cemetery every half hour or so. Noel had done it twice since he'd gotten here at ten, and that had been enough to leave him with a lingering case of the chills. In every whisper of wind he thought he heard the icy tinkle of ghostly laughter, and every mound of gra.s.s seemed to be pressing upward, about to split open for a skeletal hand covered with mold. This ain't a job for a young man, Noel had told himself as he hurried back to the shelter and turned the latch on the door. Bet old Freddie's fakin'. Bet he's at home laughin' his a.s.s off right this minute If he hadn't felt sorry for Freddie because of the way his ex-wife had treated him during the divorce, Noel would never have volunteered for this graveyard s.h.i.+ft. But as it was, he was going to be stuck with it until Freddie was back on his feet, which might be another day or two. Noel s.h.i.+vered when he thought about that and turned the radio a bit louder.

He was about to close his eyes again and drift into the spin of Disco 2000 dancers when he saw the two headlights right up against the front gate about thirty yards away. Noel straightened up in his chair and peered out the window.

Now who the h.e.l.l is that? he wondered. High school kids parkin, maybe? Doin'a little drinkin' or dope-smokin'? No, they wouldn't have their lights s.h.i.+ning like that. He stood up, moving to the window. In the dim backwash of the lights, he could see that it was a large vehicle, some kind of truck with markings on it. The thing was just sitting there, and now Noel could see a couple of shadowy figures moving alongside the gate. One of them stopped and looked in through the bars. What is this? he asked himself and quailed at the thought-Trouble? No way! He remembered what Freddie had said just before he made a flying leap into the bathroom, "Is easy job, Noel. No trouble, n.o.body bothers you. You jus' make your rounds and look like you know what you're doing. Everything is okay. No trouble."

Now both figures were standing at the gate, peering through the bars; the headlights made their shadows thin and gigantic on the cemetery drive. They seemed to be waiting, taking their time. But suddenly one of them rattled the gate, and Noel felt his stomach roil.

He took his flashlight from atop the desk, and went outside, the single thought, no trouble, no trouble, repeating over and over like an incantation against harm. He neared the gate, the headlights blinding him, put a hand over his eyes, and switched on his own light. The large vehicle was a U-Haul truck, and the two figures were kids younger than he, maybe in their late teens. One was a black dude wearing a headband, the other was white with shoulder-length brown hair; he was wearing a T-s.h.i.+rt that bore a cartoon, a Big Daddy Roth beach b.u.m smoking a bomber joint over the message King Kahuna Wants You! Noel moved uneasily toward them and saw that they were both smiling. But their smiles hardly made him feel better because their eyes were as cold as those of a dead fish. Noel stopped and shone his light in their faces. "Cemetery's closed," he said stupidly.

"Yeah, amigo," the white one said. "We see that." He reached over, pulled at the gate's padlock, and grinned. "You got the key to this?"

"No." The key was in his breast pocket, but he didn't want these two to know. Somehow he didn't feel safe, not even with the gate between them.

"Yes you do," the black dude said very quietly, his gaze boring into Noel's skull. "You got the key, don't you? Got it right . . . right in your pocket. Yeah."

"No, I don't. I don't ... uh ... have ... a key ..."

"Open the gate." The black dude coiled his fingers around the bars. "Come on ...

Noel? Open the gate, Noel."

Noel shook his head. My name? How does . . . he . . . know . . . my name? He thought he could hear the blood rus.h.i.+ng through his head; he felt dizzy, weak, confused. What would be the harm in opening the gate, anyway? he asked himself, and a smaller voice shouted, You're not supposed to do that, no trouble, no trouble ...

"Noel, we don't have much time, man. Step on over here . . ." His right foot moved. He blinked, his brain full of disco thunder.

". . . Let us in, okay?"

For an instant he thought he was strutting on the Disco 2000 dance floor with the foxiest chick there-Dianna Valeric maybe-and the mirrored ball at the ceiling reflected a thousand different colors, all as electric-bright as exploding novas. The music stopped with a quiet click!

"That's good, man," the black dude said as he stepped through the opening gate.

He gripped Noel's wrist with freezing fingers and took the key. "Who gets him?"

he asked the white boy.

"The new girl's thirsty," he replied, and they led Noel around the rear of the truck, unlocked the door, and lifted him up. Noel's face was frozen with a crazy, crooked grin, his heart about to beat its way through his chest. He thought it was quitting time, six A.M., and he was on the way home. Made it through another night, he told himself. Wasn't so bad.

"For the girl only," someone said.

The doors slammed shut behind him.

There were five or six people in the darkness, and one of them-a slender wraith of a thing-took his hand. He felt like he'd stepped into a meat locker. Then there were arms around him, enfolding him closer toward the heart of the chill.

Hev stumbled over something-a pickaxe-and then a freezing mouth kissed his lips, darting tongue forcing its way in; the mouth kissed his cheek, his chin, his throat.

And became hideous."'', In the darkness someone sighed and whimpered. The truck's engine rumbled to life, and it moved through the opened gate into the Ramona Heights Cemetery while the boy in the Kahuna T-s.h.i.+rt stood watch on the quiet street. Deep within the cemetery it stopped. The rear doors were opened again, and now the figures came out-five of them because the girl was,f filled and lazy-carrying shovels and pickaxes. They scattered out beneath the trees and set to work on the graves, digging like well-oiled machines without pause. When the first coffin was struck two others stopped their work to help; they dug it free in less than a minute and heaved it out of the ragged hole. Inside there was a skeleton in a black suit and yellowed s.h.i.+rt. The casket was quickly turned over to dump out the bones, then shoved into the rear of the U-Haul. There was a faint clang! as another coffin was struck. This one was small, cradling the brittle bones of a child. The bones were spilled to the ground and cracked underfoot like twigs as the coffin was loaded into the truck.

At the end of an hour almost thirty coffins were stacked in the rear of the U-Haul. Mounds of dirt and scattered bones littered the cemetery, and the clothes and faces of the exhumers were filthy. But still they worked on, until finally the black with the headband straightened up from the empty hole below him and said quietly, "Enough."

They returned their tools to the truck. The figures climbed in and the doors were locked. The truck backed up across the bone-littered gra.s.s and turned toward the gate, where the lookout was picked up. Then, gathering speed, the truck pulled out of the cemetery and turned right along Aragon Avenue toward the commercial district of L.A.

TWO.

Gayle Clarke, squinting in the bright early-morning sunlight, pulled her red Mustang into a public parking lot off Pico Boulevard and walked half a block to a small gray building that had been, in previous incarnations, a karate school, a health club, a Zen Buddhist temple, and a j.a.panese grocery specializing in varieties of kelp. Now the legend painted across the plategla.s.s window in bold blue scrolled letters said THE LOS ANGELES TATTLER. WE PRINT IT AS WE HEAR IT.

WE PRINT IT AS WE SEE IT. There was what looked like a prim virgin in a tacky long dress beneath the words holding a flaming torch. The ethics of corn, Gayle told herself as she went through the front door.

Inside, six desks were scattered across the room in various stages of disarray; there were stacks of old copies of the Tattler and other newspapers and magazines on the floor, a battery of dented file cabinets bought at a warehouse fire sale, a bookcase crammed full of decaying dictionaries and reference books either copped from the library or bought at flea markets. Across one wall was an airbrushed mural left from the kelp store days-spouting whales, sea otters playing happily in the kelp beds, the sun s.h.i.+ning on a beach full of perfect, healthy bodies. She hated that mural because every time she went on a binge of Twinkies and Oreos, she had to come in on Monday morning and look at those disgustingly healthy figures. Holly Fortunate, wearing her usual skintight black dress, looked up from the reception desk which was about ten feet away from the closed door with the plaque that read, Harry Tracy, Editor. She smiled. "Hi, Gayle. Have a goooood weekend?"

"Same as usual," Gayle said tonelessly, ready for the next line in the ritual.

"I had me a kinky weekend," Holly breathed. She was wearing glittery eye shadow, and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s heaved like black melons. "Kay-ink-key! I was just telling Max . . ."

"Hi, Max," Gayle said to the studious-looking young man at the nearest desk. He looked up from his typewriter and smiled, the braces on his teeth showing. Then he went back to work without a word, and Gayle sat down at her own desk in the back beneath the precariously leaning bookcase. She hung her purse over the back of her chair and began straightening a mora.s.s of papers and magazines so she could have a clear shot at her typewriter, an old gray Royal with a mind of its own, usually malevolent.

"I met this guy at a party down at Marina Del Rey," Holly was saying. "And you know what? He was a director. He did a movie a year ago called Free 'n Easy .

"Sounds like p.o.r.no," Gayle said.

"Oh, no! It was about a couple who meet in a nudist camp!"

"That's what I said," Gayle replied. "p.o.r.no." She crossed the room and poured herself a cup of coffee. She could hear Trace muttering through the tissue-thin wall.

"Anyway, it had a limited release, but he said he was working on another one, and he'd like for me to . . ."

Gayle tuned her out and nodded whenever she felt she should. In the meantime Bonita Carlin, a thin girl with crimped red hair who favored punk outfits and covered what she called "the world of rock 'n roollll," came in carrying an armload of Rolling Stones, and immediately Holly began at the beginning with "Hi, 'Nita. Have a goooood weekend?"

"s.h.i.+tty," Bonita said.

Gayle sipped her coffee and checked the a.s.signment board. Beneath each name printed with a Flair pen on pieces of colored cardboard were index cards with the details of their stories for the week. She glanced over each one in turn to get an idea for what next week's Tattler was featuring: "Biology professor at UCLA-Dr. Peter Willingham-says eating eggs can cause sterility. Call 555-4949 ext. 7"; "Rod Stewart-Do married blonds have more fun?"; "Could Kim Novak cop this year's Oscar for Best Supporting? Her agent wants to talk"; "CHiPs may be Dips-motorist group charges Highway Patrol with reckless driving. Call Mrs. Jordan, 555-7008."

Oh G.o.d, Gayle thought as she came to her own name. There were four words% scribbled on her card, "See me. HOT! Trace."

She drank down half of her coffee before she knocked at his door. "In!" the voice behind the door said.

Trace was on the phone; he waved at her to close the door and sit in a chair next to his desk. A fresh copy of this week's Tattler lay open before him.

"Okay, Warren, okay!" he was saying. "So I ruffled some big money birds with the story. So what? I mean, if the Tattler can't print the truth, who can?" He paused, his high forehead wrinkled; he was in his early forties, a hippie who'd never quite outgrown the life-style. He was almost bald except for the wild tufts of graying hair that stuck out from the sides of his head, and his thick-lensed gla.s.ses had slipped down on his severely hooked nose. As he listened, he unscrewed a bottle of vitamin C and popped down a couple of orange pills, then offered some to Gayle, who shook her head.

"Fine," he said. "Warren, I don't give a s.h.i.+t! Those guys have built a condo that's going to go sliding into the Pacific the next time the San Andreas fault even thinks about moving! What are they going to do, sue the earth?" He listened again, his face beginning to redden. "It's structurally unsound, the engineering reports prove it! And I don't care if some people are moving out of their condos. Jesus, they should move out before the next quake hits! And everybody-all the national psychics-are predicting The Big One within five years! So let 'em get out while they can! Listen, Warren, I've got to go, I've got a paper to put out." He paused, his lips working, but no sound coming out.

"What do you mean by that remark? My people can write rings around the Talking Leaf!" He slammed down the receiver so hard his desk trembled. "Wait a minute, Gayle," he said, and began to breathe rhythmically. "Negative air floating around here. That was my silent partner, not so silent today." He shrugged and pushed the paper across to her. "Seen this yet? The front page is a grabber!" She turned the paper around and opened it. There was one of Jack's photos of the skeletons at Hollywood Memorial; the picture took up the entire page and was bordered with red spot color. Above it, also in red, the headline screamed, WHO IS THE GRAVEDIGGER? Beneath that in much smaller print, "See Gayle Clarke's shocking story, page three."

"The . . . Gravedigger?" Gayle said quietly, a knot of tension growing in her stomach. "Trace. What's this . . . this Gravedigger bulls.h.i.+t?"

"It's not bulls.h.i.+t," Trace said, looking genuinely hurt. "I thought the buildup would please you. Listen, the Gravedigger's going to knock Roach out of every paper in this town!"

"The Gravedigger," Gayle repeated, not believing what she was seeing. She felt like crawling into one of those ragged holes in Jack's photo. "Trace, I don't think the story merits a push like this. Okay, I admit it's a weird item. I don't think anything like it has ever happened before, at least not in L.A., but what's the bogeyman angle? I didn't imply anything like this in my piece."

"Roach is old news. The guy's gone underground. He's all used up. You know what sells papers, Gayle? Evil. That's right. People pick up a magazine or a tabloid or even the Times looking for evil, for something to blame for all the misery in their lives. And most of all they want a villain, a Nixon or a Dracula or a Hillside Strangler. The Roach has disappeared, so we've simply given the people what they want-another villain. And we can build this thing, Gayle, G.o.d can we ever! The Gravedigger, creeping through cemeteries in the dead of night, digging up coffins and scattering the bones . . ."

"Please," Gayle said, and s.h.i.+vered. "I was there, remember?" She felt sick to her stomach, as if she'd had another whiff of the reek of rot in the hot, lazy suns.h.i.+ne. "The cops say it must've either been a death cult or kids on drugs, and that's what my story says, too. So how can we say anything that may be untrue?"

"Ah. You don't read your own copy, do you? Look at page three." A surge of panic rushed through her. She opened the paper and saw a redbordered box right in the middle of her story surrounded by more of Jack's gruesome photos. The headline of the story read, "Did The Gravedigger Visit Resurrection Cemetery?" "What is this?" Gayle said, her voice trembling between horror and fury.

"You think I don't have contacts, too? I got interested in this thing and made a few phone calls over the weekend. The same thing that happened in Hollywood Memorial happened at Hope Hill and at Resurrection. Missing caskets and everything." He shrugged. "Friend of mine on the force owes me a favor, so I collected. I went over to the printer's Sat.u.r.day night and typed the story right there."

Gayle quickly read through the article. It was written terribly but got its message across: Resurrection Cemetery had been vandalized in exactly the same manner a little more than a week ago. "So you see?" Trace said, lifting one eyebrow. "The Gravedigger makes the Roach look like an amateur, at least in the chills department."

"Christ." Gayle put the paper back down on his desk and looked at him in numb astonishment. "What's going on?"