came the side of a green plastic garbage bag with something inside. Something I hit. Something that made a clanging sound.
A horror-stricken look came over Ruby as I pulled the bag out of the hole. It was light to lift, easy to move. Brown rivulets of dirt slid down the sides of the bag after I tossed it out of the hole. I climbed out myself and brushed away dirt that had caked up on my blistered hands. For a quiet moment, Ruby and I stared wide-eyed at the plastic bag. Almost immediately, I noticed a change in the air—a scent, a smell, that I didn’t like one bit.
“What are you going to do?” Ruby asked.
“I’m going to open it,” I said.
“John—”
I wasn’t listening. I was too busy untying the bag.
The instant the top came apart just a little bit, I recoiled at the stench. My nostrils burned with the putrid smell of death and decay. Ruby gagged several times before turning her head away in disgust. I gagged, too, retching as I clumsily turned the bag upside down, spilling the contents onto the ground by my feet. I buried my nose in my arm to help block out the smell. At first I couldn’t register what had fallen out with a thump—no, make that two thumps. Slowly, as the initial shock gave way, my brain began to connect the dots and I understood what I was looking at.
Two severed heads had fallen out of the bag.
Ruby’s screams pierced the quiet woods loud enough to send resting birds scattering in flight. I didn’t scream, but I think I was moaning as though wounded. The heads didn’t look real. Rather, they looked to be made of wax, or maybe even beaten-up mannequin heads. But the flies that began to swarm around them said they were real. The stench that forced me to cover my nose and mouth did the same.
One of the heads—the one that rolled a few feet to my right—had long brown hair that was matted down and stringy. I could see molted blue skin on the nape of the neck. The neck itself appeared to have been severed from the body with near-surgical precision. That head had come to a stop facedown, so I couldn’t see the eyes or mouth, but I could see that duct tape had been used to secure two objects to where the ears should have been. Without closer inspection, I couldn’t make out what they were.
My eyes shifted to the other head, which hadn’t rolled as far. This head belonged to a man. The skin was tight to the skull, but a lot of tissue remained. Like the other head, the hair was matted down, but the color was dark. The skin around the man’s ample nose had browned and peeled at the tip, revealing a pinkish layer underneath. But that was just the start of the horror. The man’s lips were mostly gone, so his teeth looked to be protruding from his mouth in a twisted, wicked grin.
I could see on this head what I couldn’t see on the other, which was how I lost the voice to scream. My mouth formed the shape of a scream, but the only sound to come out was a whisper of air. I studied the head absently, vacantly, as though all my senses had been overloaded by a profoundly sickening horror. Affixed to the head, with several judicious applications of duct tape, were severed fingers: two planted on the eyes, two dangling down from the ears like decaying earrings, and two adhered to those protruding teeth.
See no evil.
Hear no evil.
Speak no evil.
CHAPTER 45
I didn’t know how many hours had passed. Ten? Maybe fifteen? We weren’t in the forest anymore, that’s for certain. We were at Boston police headquarters, or at least I thought we both were there. Ruby and I weren’t together for the first time since becoming vessels for Uretsky and his game. The cops had separated us. They never questioned you in the same room. But our stories would match up perfectly because we had agreed before making the call to 911 that we were going to tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the horrible truth.
We didn’t stick around the woods very long after the heads came tumbling out of the garbage bag. We didn’t dig anymore, either. Ruby started to run, frantically, back the way we had come. I followed her, calling her name, while branches lashed at