CHAPTER 16 GRANDPA REDWOOD, 1947–2000 #2
Mom returns her attention to the seal around the vault.
“Stay here,” she says. “I’ll be right back.
” She darts out, then returns a few moments later with a small triangular-shaped bag.
She tosses it down and fishes around inside, coming up with something that looks like two long wrenches stuck together in the shape of an X.
“What is that?” I ask.
“A lug wrench,” Mom says. “It’s all I had in the car but I think it should work.”
“Are we about to break into the vault?” I ask.
“We don’t have a choice,” she says. “If the book’s not here, we have to go back to square one and time is not on our side.
” She grips the lug wrench. “These people, Meka, I don’t think they’re the kind of people we want to mess with.
” She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth as she tries, and fails, to keep her chin from wobbling.
“I can’t imagine what somebody who is essentially immortal would do if they had a mind to be awful. ”
We set to work chipping away the freshly laid seal around the edge of the vault door. We work quickly and in fifteen minutes, we’ve got the seal completely broken. It takes all three of us to pry off the facing stone and set it on the floor.
Mom shines the light from her phone into the narrow space.
A mahogany coffin with brass fittings sits inside.
A gust of cold air sweeps through the crypt and a strange tingling sensation sparks in both my hands.
It’s familiar, painful, like a cut in the skin of both palms. I quickly open and close my fists in front of me, halfway expecting to see an open wound but there’s nothing.
“You okay?” Noah asks.
The feeling doesn’t dissipate but I lower my hands. “Yeah—I—it’s nothing.”
Noah doesn’t look convinced, and I feel like my expression is betraying everything. I know this feeling. It’s what I felt when I touched what I now believe was this strange book as it was concealed under the seat of the hearse.
“We’re going to have to pull the casket out,” my mom says, her words cutting through my thoughts.
Noah takes a step back. “What do you mean?”
“We have to open it,” Mom says. “I don’t see anything in the vault itself so if the book’s here it’s probably inside the casket.”
Noah clenches his jaw and while his face shifts, the little area I had repaired with mortuary wax stays unnaturally still. “I don’t think I can do that, Mrs. Redwood.”
“I’ll open it,” my mom says. “But I still need you both to help me take out the coffin and put it on the floor.”
“It’s solid mahogany,” I say. “Probably three hundred pounds on its own. We can’t lift it alone.”
“I don’t see any pallbearers around here, baby,” my mom says. “And we don’t have time anyway. We can probably just pull it forward until it drops.”
“You want us to drop the coffin?” I ask. It’s one of those weird unwritten rules. You don’t drop a coffin. You don’t even let it touch the ground if you can help it.
“Again,” Mom says, exasperated. “We’re out of options and we need to look inside.” She grabs the brass handle on the foot of the coffin and yanks on it. It barely budges.
I grab one of the ear panels and Noah does the same on the other side.
“Pull on three,” my mom says. “One. Two. Three!”
We yank the coffin toward us and it moves about halfway out.
It teeters on the lip of the vault like a seesaw.
Then it slips under its own weight and slides to the floor.
The foot of the coffin slams into the ground with a loud thud as the head end scrapes the inside of the vault before clearing it.
It tumbles to the ground, sending a cloud of dust into the air.
Noah stumbles back and so do I but my mom rushes in and runs her hand along the panels until she finds the latch pin.
She pushes it aside and grips the head panel.
“If PeePaw Redwood is in there, you think he’s gonna be pissed we just threw his whole box on the ground?” Noah asks.
My mom hesitates. “He’s probably in here and probably very dead. I don’t think he cares. Jonathan would never reanimate somebody and then keep them in a box.”
Eternity in a box? I can’t imagine anything worse.
I’m about to ask my mom to wait but the protest dies in my throat as she lifts open the lid of the coffin. Noah steps back until he is pressed against the inner wall of the mausoleum. It’s a good thing, too, because what’s inside the coffin is a horrific sight.
Grandpa Redwood. A man I’d never met, though I had seen a few pictures of him, lies moldering in his casket.
In one of the photos I’d seen, he’d been wearing a dark gray suit, a pair of thick, black framed glasses, his facial hair cropped close.
He had started to bald in the photo. I step closer as my mom stares down at what’s left of the body.
I had expected him to look mostly the way he had in the picture, but I’m wrong. Very, very wrong.
“Oh my god, Mom,” I say. “He wasn’t embalmed?”
Grandpa Redwood is a pile of bones in the remnants of a black suit.
The cream-colored satin lining of the coffin is stained dark with bodily fluid.
A few bits of emaciated muscle and skin that look almost petrified cling to the yellowing skull, which is wearing a pair of black glasses, and I think Grandpa Redwood had maybe enjoyed candy when he was alive because nearly every exposed tooth has a silver filling.
A rancid smell begins to creep up my nose and I quickly pull up my shirt to cover the lower half of my face.
My mom’s expression falls. She searches around the perimeter of Grandpa Redwood’s body.
“It’s not here,” she says. She’s on the verge of tears.
A thought occurs to me. A terrible thought but I figure it can’t be much worse than digging up an old man’s rotted corpse. “Can we—can we bring him back and ask him where this book might be?”
“What?” my mom asks, her eyes wide. “No. That’s backward, Meka. You need the book to bring him back. We don’t have that and even if we did nobody here knows how to use it.”
“Grandpa Redwood did,” I say.
Mom tilts her head and looks at me. “You’d want to do that? Bring him back just because we need something?”
A deep sense of shame washes over me. I guess my idea doesn’t really make sense to begin with but what I’m not going to admit to her is that yes, I would bring back Grandpa Redwood’s casket of bones if we knew how and if it meant we could help my dad.
“The book’s not here,” my mom says.
“It’s not?” I ask. “Are we—are we sure?” The tingling in my hands and the hum in my ears have intensified so much I almost feel like my bones are vibrating. I move to my mom’s side and peer into the casket. “Look,” I say.
Grandpa Redwood’s hands are crossed over his chest but they’re not touching his body.
It’s as if something invisible is holding them aloft.
I lean closer and as I do, the tingling in my hands turns to a burning.
A soft green glow begins to illuminate the gore inside the coffin.
A rectangular object materializes under Grandpa Redwood’s decayed hands.