Scarecrow

Chapter 8

Donnelly sleeps fitfully, and dreams of the dead.

He is at a funeral, the walls of his dozing mind cloaked in dark banners of dreary paint. The faces of his fellow patrons are shrouded in shadow, but their strangled wails of grief trickle back to his tender ears nonetheless. All around them is gray, gray as the sky on a moonless night, gray as only a funeral can be. The great coffin sits at the head of the cathedral, an open casket, but its inhabitant is hidden by a swirling cloud of mourners.
As he draws closer, Donnelly sees that the name printed upon the coffin's ornate golden plaque is one he recognizes, the letters blurring and grinning up at him with ink teeth and black tongues. It is a name he has not spoken for some time, its memory much too painful, and powerful, to recall.

James Donnelly, Sr.

Donnelly feels dizzy, wants to run from the room and empty out his stomach on the cathedral steps, to puke, force, claw the reminiscence from his mind, but his own feet betray him. They pull him to the coffin's open lid, and behind him the mourners' sobbing has stopped, changing instead to raucous, mean-spirited laughter as he fights against the trajectory of his own legs. I won't look, I won't, he screams, but his voice is silenced by the scratchy melody of a thousand crows joining into the mirth. And now his head is snapping round, his eyes peeled open by unseen hands, and he must look down and into his father's final resting place.

Except the body in the coffin is not his father's. It wears his work overalls, weathered almost white by years in the sun, but they cling to his skeletal frame like rags on a line. Dangerously thin hands are folded mummy-like over a caving cloth chest, and above that...

Nothing. A burlap mask covers the face, devoid of shape or any indication of emotion. Between the seams in its cheeks are the writhing outlines of a thousand little white worms, each one blind and probing from the dark recesses of its skull.

No. Not worms, he realizes with a jolt of understanding. Straw. Straw everywhere, not just in the body's face but between its neck, its armpits, packing the very walls of the coffin.

A hand on his shoulder sends him spinning, every nerve in his body poised for the next horror. But it is only Walt, still wearing his uniform despite being buried in a blue suit. His golden sheriff star gleams wickedly on his chest.

"What are you doing here, friend? Thought you were in prison."

Donnelly grips Walt's arm. The flesh beneath his sleeve is cold, cold. "We'll find who did this to you, I promise. I won't rest until–"

"Don't bother," Walt interjects calmly, untangling himself from Donnelly's grasp. "I already know who the killer is."

"Who? For God sakes, who?"

Walt smiles then, and Donnelly can see maggots, fat and glistening, moving behind his dead friend's decaying teeth.

"Why, Jimmy," he says, "it's you."

And now blood, rich and red as wine, is flowing from Walt's open throat. It turns his dress shirt black and paints the gold star dull with crimson hate.

"No..."

"It's always been you, Jim."

"No."

"Murderer."

"NO!" Donnelly stumbles back as the faceless mourners close in, chanting the accusation like a satanic ritual: murderer, murderer, murderer. He falls over the coffin trying to get away, and the creature inside sits up with the sickening crunch of snapping bone, reaching out for him with claws fashioned from sharpened sticks. There is something more beyond the burlap mask than straw, for the stitches around where the mouth should be are splitting open to form a grinning, pitch-black maw studded with needle-like teeth. No eyes, no nose, just that blind, hungry hole yearning for his flesh. Donnelly opens his mouth to scream and the creature consumes him, and now he is falling into the bottomless darkness with straw clogging his throat like an unbeatable infection and the echoing calls of murderer, murderer, murderer, bleeding into his ears.