A particularly nasty gust of wind blasted foul-scented soil off the top of the backhoe bucket and scattered it in the eyes of the restless watchers. More tears were shed in those few minutes of near blindness than had been shed by the man's grave during the past three months.
In Colby Maxwell's mind, it was a warning. His streaming eyes warily searched the uneven dark beyond their lights. After his experiences with Jarron Marshall, a graveyard at night was the last place on Earth he wanted to be.
Still, it was the way his employers operated. In their labs it was all stats and controls--but give them a field trip and they reverted to stealth and skulduggery. They seemed to think that skulking in the dark was the only way to get this job done.
Or maybe they just think the object of all this attention will feel more comfortable in the dark. Colby gave an uncontrolled shudder.
The soil stank, like fouled water. This grave's still pretty new. Shouldn't smell this bad.
It's his grave. What did you expect?
Colby glanced around--sure that he saw more movement in the neighbouring monuments than their concrete and stone content should allow. There were liquid shadows everywhere, that shifted whenever he did. Tricks of the light, tricks of the eyes. Everything in motion, with the silence thick and loud--crowding the tractor's roar and rattle. It was the kind of place you didn't want to visit anyway--even in daylight--with its forced peace and morose overtones. It was definitely the last place to traipse through on a moon-challenged night. All charming memorials on the top, and hard-packed earth beneath your feet.
Earth that sheathed concrete, caskets, rotting corpses, and yellowing bones. Damn it! he swore silently, then instantly wished he hadn't.
It would have been smarter to do this in the daytime. To camouflage it as an interment. No questions that way. Nobody wanted to take on someone else's sorrow.
But no, they had to be out here in the dark, with only their flashlights and the tractor's jouncing light for company.
Makes us look like a bunch of graverobbers.
We are robbing a grave.
No. Colby Maxwell did a rapid mental turnaround. We are not robbing, he assured anything within reach of his mental wavelengths. We are merely resituating, to a choicer piece of real estate.
It was a mind game. Chances were it wouldn't psyche out even the most stupid of spectres. People liked to think of spirits in the "ether" having some kind of eternal knowledge, but Colby believed otherwise. Some ghosts were so lacking in knowledge that they couldn't even figure out they were dead.
He also began to realise he was carrying excess baggage; residue from his religious upbringing. Despite any of his efforts to rationalise what they were doing here, he knew he was about to aid and abet in something that could earn him a spectator seat on the hotter side of Hell. Playing with the unholy tended to lead to that kind of thing.
Get a handle on it, Maxwell. This isn't the Middle Ages. There are natural laws governing both sides of the "veil"--we just haven't discovered them all yet. There's nothing here that math and science won't eventually label. Stats and formulas--that's what it's all about.
It's what he wanted to believe--that he might have some control over his destiny. That what he did in this plane wouldn't eternally taint his existence on another. But--if all else failed--he also clung to what he'd been taught: that forgiveness at the end of his days could redress most of the wrongdoing, and a good deal of the wickedness. What he wasn't able to balance with the occasional good act during the herein, he damn well would confess away in his last hour, before he hit the hereafter.
But it was going to take a surfeit of good acts, and a darn glib confession, to counter tonight's little field trip.
Don't look at the shadows. The stones and crosses were bad enough, but throw in the carved angels, and the odd obelisk or two--
This is the last goddamn place I want to be, Colby thought again, then mentally kicked himself for thinking in profanities on hallowed ground.
"Hallowed" nothing. One piece of ground's the same as any other.
Don't knock it, Colby. The "hallowing" may be the only thing that's keeping Him here.
They'd wanted Colby along for verification. He didn't see why they'd chosen him. There must be a dozen other psychics in the programme who could have done the job for them.
Hell, who needed a psychic anyway? All they had to do was open their eyes. The air was so thick it was clogging his trachea.
He could think of only one reason why they'd selected him.
It was because he'd seen the other one. That unhappy event had somehow made him an expert. The dubious privilege of holding hands with a ghost child--and surviving--had upped his value in the wrong circles. Nice to be needed, but damned uncomfortable at moments like this.
The tractor chugged smoothly in a reassuring background timbre that was comfortingly loud. Colby had a feeling the noise covered a lot of sins--not the least of which was their effort here tonight. The volume of activity hid any extraneous sounds that might issue from the earth beneath their feet.
At that moment, the tractor operator misjudged his distance, and the backhoe clanged, then did a rattling scrape across the box in the hole. The driver withdrew the bucket and rolled backwards, then sat with it idling while they checked his work with their lights.
Colby wondered whether he was the one to notice it first, or whether the horror descended with equal rapidity on them all, like darkness during an eclipse. The even chugging of the idling machine developed a stutter, and then a deep throbbing rumble.
The machine was having problems, but they weren't mechanical. The engine rasped, with a harshly staccatoed death-rattle, "Go to hell." The voice may have been machine generated, and drawn from such manmade objects as manifolds, and cylinders, and pistons, but the result was far from the machine-tongued smoothness of computers or answering machines. Having made its statement, the backhoe's engine choked and died. The operator jumped clear as the tractor--against all gravitational laws--toppled over onto its side.
Colby stood stiff and stunned in the mass silence that followed. He was the first to recover, though. After all, I've heard--and seen--worse, he thought.
He moved cautiously to the lip of the hole and peered in, at the box below. For just an instant, as he could have sworn there was movement in the soil: writhing, slithering, coiling. Gooseflesh roughened his skin, and a sheen of moist terror blurred his eyes. It took a moment for him to get control.
Get it done, and get out of here, Colby.
With something remarkably like resignation, he broke the silence. "This is definitely it," he said, surprised that he could sound so calm. There was even a trace of amusement in his voice as he added, "And I can verify the site is active."
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