Page 24 of Stay Buried

“He was dead, Uncle,” I said at last, unable to take the silence any longer. “We’re both sure of it.”

“I am absolutely certain.” Uncle Thomas added more brandy, stirring it into his cup, the spoon banging against the bone-white china.

“So then, someone must have taken the body.” I tried to sound confident.

“But who? Why? And with no one in the household hearing a thing?” He set down his cup, rubbed at his head again. “It makes no sense,” he said. “I’ve gone through every possible scenario I can think of, and none of it makes any sense.” He looked at me, eyes bloodshot, ringed with dark circles. “I have seen a great deal of death, Frankie. I know what it looks like, sounds like, feels like. I swear on my life, the knackerman was dead.” He picked up his cup, his hand trembling slightly.

I nodded, took a long sip of my own coffee, then pulled out my notebook, wrote:How does a dead man get up and walk away?

We went out again in the afternoon; a few more inches of snow had covered our earlier tracks. Again, the only trace of theknackerman was his snow-covered cart in front of the pub. We said nothing to the few people we encountered on our walk about what had transpired in my uncle’s office. Eventually, soaked and chilled to the bone, we made our way into the pub for a bowl of soup and a pint to sip while we warmed up a bit.

“You haven’t seen any sign of the knackerman, have you?” Uncle Thomas asked Bert Osbourne, the owner of Loon’s Call, as he poured our ales. He was a big man with a red face.

He nodded in the direction of the front door. “Only his cart. Been there since yesterday. Horses must have gotten sick and run off. I imagine the knackerman went back up the hill to his place. Strange that he’d leave all his tools and knives like that, though.”

The five o’clock bell at the clothespin factory rang, and men began to gather at the pub to sip drinks, smoke, talk. The place was suddenly packed with men in worn work clothes—overalls and dungarees coated in sawdust.

The pub was warm and had the familiar din of talk, the smell of ale and tobacco. The coal stove glowed softly, warming the space. Normally all of this would have comforted me, but right now it felt claustrophobic, too warm, too close. I heard bits and pieces of conversation, of which there seemed to be two main topics: the weather and the horses.

Luther St. James walked in from the snow. Spotting us at the bar, he pulled a stool up next to us.

I could smell the liquor on him.

“How can it be?” Luther demanded, and I was sure that he was asking about the knackerman. That he knew somehow. I looked frantically to Uncle Thomas.

“How can all the horses have gotten sick like this?” Luther went on. His face was ruddy, the raised pale scar on his forehead glowing white like an albino centipede. For half a second, I was sure I saw it writhe and wiggle under his skin.

“Every horse in town, gone—dead, shot, or run off.” Luther slurredhis words, teetering uneasily on his barstool. I took a sip of my ale, watching Luther closely, and slid my barstool ever so slightly farther from him. “We depend on these beasts, for God’s sake. We plow our fields with them. Keep the snow clear and pack down on the roads with them. Bring timber to the clothespin factory and get the clothespins out of town when the trains aren’t running.”

Uncle Thomas took a sip from his mug and nodded. “Luther, I understand the gravity of the situation,” he said reassuringly.

“I’ve never heard of anything like it,” Luther went on, voice loud, agitated. Several other men had turned to watch, listening, waiting to see what the doctor might say or do.

Uncle Thomas shook his head, took a long sip of his ale. “Nor have I.”

“So what could it be?” Bert chimed in from behind the bar. “Is it like the grippe? The grippe for horses?”

“I can’t say,” Uncle Thomas told him. “I think it would be wise to send for a veterinarian. He can examine the remains. The ones we haven’t burned.”

“I’ll ride down to Montpelier myself when the weather breaks,” Luther stammered. “Have to use the old oxcart. Funny thing, isn’t it? That all the other animals are fine? Even the ones that shared barns with the horses? My cows, oxen, pigs, and chickens are healthy as can be.”

“Canwecatch it?” Bert asked now, looking directly at Uncle Thomas.

There was a terrible silence, then all of the men turned toward us, waiting for Uncle Thomas to answer. He took another sip from his mug of ale, then looked into it, as if hoping to find an answer there.

I thought of the knackerman and the yellow glow of his eyes, the hot, sticky sweetness of his breath.

The hollow sound of his chest when I listened in the early hours of the morning: no heartbeat, no breath sounds. Only stillness.

Gripping the pencil tightly, I wrote one word and circled it:Knackerman.

My circle continued, became a spiral, a little hurricane on paper, and there at the very center, the eye of the storm, was the knackerman.

The door to the pub flew open, a burst of cold air coming in with it. I spun on my stool, sure that the wind had carried the knackerman here. He would come tottering in, naked, his skin mottled, his eyes blazing yellow like sparks; the walking dead.

Can you hear them?

I blinked in disbelief to see Pearl hurrying in, her hair and coat mounded with snow. Pearl, who, I was quite sure, had never so much as set foot in Loon’s Call Pub. It wasn’t a place for the well-to-do young ladies of Boone’s Ferry. I stood up as Pearl came right toward me, her eyes wild.