A Stranger's Grave Read online

  He wondered if he would be like Harrison – wandering the cemetery with his memories in a buggy, like a man already dead.

  Or was Harrison a man like himself, a living man who straddled both worlds?

  Elton understood what it was like to be dead. To be cold on the inside, but to go on moving, eating, sleeping, all the while waiting for corruption and decay to catch up to his soul.

  Fuck, he thought. Maudlin and lyrical tonight.

  He pulled on his outdated coat and shrugged his shoulders so that he was comfortable. The coat sat loose across the shoulders. He’d lost some muscle since taking the job as caretaker. Entropy setting in, finally?

  He laughed as he shut and locked the door behind him.

  He didn’t like the sound of it outside. It didn’t seem right, laughing in a cemetery. So he stopped, because you had to show some respect to the dead, and because he thought he sounded a little bit crazy and a little scared, too.

  He stood for a second, breathing, checking for the telltale aroma of thick pipe smoke on the still air, but listening, too. Listening for footsteps, or voices, or the squeak of an old wheel on a buggy that maybe needed oiling, but could be just old enough to be past oiling.

  Could a buggy be a ghost, or was it just some prop, some artifice, like a funeral director asking a husband if he wanted his wife’s rings back, or whether she should be buried with them, marking her his for the rest of time?

  He found himself thinking of a skinny man with a face like a knife and shook his head, scratched his face where his stubble itched. There were worse things abroad in the cemetery at night than anything he’d faced in his life. Worse than murderers and burglars and rapists.

  He locked his door not because he had anything to steal, not because he was concerned about disturbing someone trying to steal his good mug, but because he wanted to come back to an empty house and not one full of the restless dead.

  He could do without meeting the woman in white and the woman in black tonight.

  The little girl?

  He could do without meeting her, too. Whatever the three were, he could do without meeting any of them ever again, though he knew before this was over there would be a reckoning, and those three were in it somewhere.

  Three people were dead. Two destroyed. Mutilated beyond anything he had once been capable of.

  Maybe he should have been terrified.

  He was scared, sure, but not terrified. He didn’t want to meet his end like that. Maybe he deserved it, maybe he didn’t. But once he’d cared. Once he’d cared enough about his wife and baby. Cared enough about a mad kid called Wayne and a psycho called Harry. He could care.

  He could love.

  Never again, but if death came he didn’t want it like that, and sure as he was cold inside, death walked the cemetery tonight.

  But he had other business and no intention of dying.

  His business was Harrison.

  *

  56.

  Elton sat on Henry Harrison’s favourite bench, in the centre of the cemetery. There was no light but the waning moon and the distant street lights from the west and east sides of his home, his back garden, but he still knew what the bench said – In memory of Lily Anne and Frank Holt.

  He always wondered if they’d been cremated or buried. There were so many graves, he hadn’t read anything like all of them, though he tried to read some on his rounds, as he cleaned and tidied and mowed. When he emptied the bins, full of sweet wrappers and cigarette packets and cans of fizzy drinks that the school kids dropped, he read the headstones nearby.

  Took. Holt. Burgess. Lambert. Weston. Local names, maybe, back before people travelled so much. Maybe before cars, when people became more mobile and worked further from home. Possibly whole families of farmers. Brothers and sisters from before WWI. Brothers and fathers and sons wiped out in the wars, or by an outbreak of some disease.

  Graves with deformed bodies like the little girl. Maybe encephalitis, or polio, things that people didn’t understand back then.

  People missing limbs, mauled by a thresher while harvesting mangelwurzels, or something country. Elton wasn’t country folk. He wasn’t raised in a cottage in the country, but on a housing estate full of nurses and students and old mean drunks.

  He couldn’t imagine all the ways that death could take a man. He wished he wasn’t trying, sitting in the low light in the cemetery late at night.

  The cemetery took on a different feel during the night time hours. After dark, when the gates were locked, something about it seemed...captivating. A world inside the world, something private, lonely.

  Eerie, too. The night sounds, different creatures to the day. Shuffling and snuffling in the bushes. No footsteps, and yet...

  Something out there, just the same.

  He was sure of it. Some kind of intuition, like in prison, knowing when a fight’s going to break out. A smell on the wind, maybe a premonition of death, or violence. A disturbance on the air, some kind of pre-echo, the sound a broken rib might make as a man prepares to take a breath.

  But something was there. Waiting in the dark. Watching.

  No footsteps, but the sense of someone walking. Walking around, just outside his circle of vision. His eyes, adjusting to the dark, seeing shadows and people moving.

  More people than just the two women, or just the little girl.

  An old man. A young couple, hand in hand. A woman sobbing silently into cupped hands. Another woman, looking around and walking as though her hips pained her even in death. A man dragging his guts along behind him, tripping sometimes like a man past his prime trying to remember how to use a skipping rope.

  Women, men, children. All walking. All restless. Things he had not seen while he’d been within the light.

  People who could not rest, even in death.

  The walking dead. Like him. Like Harrison.

  The cemetery was full with them and he could feel them, feel their distress crawling across his skin.

  The cemetery was awake. The dead were rising and they were in agony and pain. They were confused and frightened because this was nothing like eternal rest in the bosom of a loving God, but a nightmare that would last until...

  Until you sing them back to sleep. Sing them a lullaby. Rock them. Rock them, Elton.

  Because you’re the gatekeeper.

  He knew that now. He wasn’t just the groundskeeper, and these people, these restless dead...

  It wasn’t up to Harrison, or the police. It fell to him.

  And yet, among the many dead, there was no squeaking wheel. No old woman, telling him to bring her, make her come, while she searched for the little girl with that one stunning eye. He didn’t need Harrison to tell him what the old woman in black wanted, what the woman in white wanted. It was obvious, from the need in the old woman’s voice to the fear as the little girl scurried away and hid whenever she heard that beautiful, plaintive voice urging her to come...to what, Elton did not know.

  He knew what the cemetery was. That there was something wrong with it. The dead could not rest. At night their spirits were being called from the grave.

  There was something terribly wrong, either with him, or with the cemetery itself. It was not natural.

  Elton didn’t disbelieve, nor believe. It was just something he saw.

  Someone in the darkness spoke and the dead were gone.

  ‘Bring her, Elton,’ she said.

  He tried to shut his ears, close his eyes. He did not want the vision of either woman, the dark or the light, though the light was the more dangerous of the two, because she was beguiling, beautiful.

  He could feel her there, even though he squeezed his eyes tight shut. He could feel her desire, maybe her smell, and something in him wanted her so badly, that woman in white with her body underneath him, her dress hitched, pounding, her breath in his ear, coming beneath him, bucking, fucking...

  Don’t speak, Elton. Don’t you dare look.

  ‘Bring her,’ said the one.<
br />
  ‘Elton,’ said the other, and her voice alone was enough to make him hard. Though he knew the words, he did not listen. He would not look.

  Do a job ‘til a job’s done, he thought, and on its heels, saying no to a woman is the hardest thing in the world.

  He rose from Frank and Lily Anne Holt’s memorial bench, and walked back toward his cottage.

  ‘Bring her,’ she said. ‘Make her come.’

  But he would not. Not this night, or ever.

  ‘Elton...Elton...please,’ said the other.

  But he walked on, eyes shut, back to his cottage. A straight walk along the path, correcting when he felt grass beneath his feet, to the sound of his own footsteps only because of course the women made no footfalls. The dead were light, nothing more than spirit.

  He kept telling himself that – the dead have no weight. They cannot touch. They cannot touch.

  And yet, as he walked, he felt their breath at his neck. He felt their fingers on his shoulders, stroking as he walked.

  He felt them because something was wrong with the dead, and even without talking to Harrison, he knew it was the two women, the opposites, the black and the white. What should have been balance, turning to chaos. It was place of peace in turmoil. The dead were no longer resting, but awake.

  He needed to rock them back to sleep, but without Harrison...

  He did not know what to do, nor how to do it.

  There was nothing to do, but to take the slow walk back to safety. To light and home and hearth.

  Elton stumbled, eyes still shut, as he hit the west gate. Turned, found the wall to his cottage, stumbling over the beds of marigolds outside his home, and felt his way to the door.

  As he drew his key from his pocket, he felt a finger lightly brush his hand, even as they implored again and again, begging, commanding, always with the same words.

  He pushed the key into the lock and pushed the door, pushed against the voices following him.

  The key wouldn’t turn.

  The one, the dark, calling for the little girl. The white, calling his name.

  He bit down on his tongue to feel the pain, to focus. Because as much as he wanted to get away from the black one, he wanted to turn to the white, even though he knew it would be his end.

  He took a different key, pushed his key into the lock, turned the key, shut the door, locked the door.

  He laid his head against the door and breathed deeply the smell of pipe smoke. Heard the wheel on the old buggy. Squeak, it said, and a mouse...wearing a bonnet...squeak, said the mouse.

  *

  57.

  ‘You’re a brave man,’ said Harrison.

  Elton’s heart pounded, because the old man was in his house, pushing his buggy, back and forth, in a rhythm that said he could go on rocking that baby, all night, all day, if need be.

  But his baby was already awake.

  Elton knew in the same way as he knew the old man was something other than natural. A man on both sides of the fence. Dead and alive. He knew because he was too. He understood that more now, living in the cemetery.

  The boundaries were blurred. Like a solid man who could get into Elton’s cottage, a living man who could somehow get through a locked door.

  Unnatural, but the smell of the pipe was something good. Something warm, cosy. It reminded him of his father, smoking a pipe when he’d given up cigarettes but still needed something to ease the pain of his wife, Elton’s mother’s, passing.

  Elton didn’t bother asking the old man how he got in. There was no point. It wasn’t the point.

  The point was who the two women and the little girl were. The point was how to rock them back to sleep, because they were awake now, and the dead were restless.

  ‘Who are they?’ he asked.

  ‘You ready for this?’ said Harrison.

  Elton wasn’t. Never would be. But he nodded. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  Harrison took out his pipe. Raised his eyebrows, like, you mind?

  Elton shook his head. It was a sweet smell, comforting. Might make the night pass a little easier, but somehow he doubted it.

  ‘How do I get them back to sleep?’

  ‘To understand that, we’ve got to go back. Back to the sisters. Can you guess how many?’

  ‘Three,’ said Elton, without having to think, because it was obvious.

  ‘Three,’ agreed Harrison. ‘And God help me if I didn’t do right by them. God help me, but I never did. Never could.’

  Smoke filled the air while Harrison spoke long into the night.

  *

  The Lies of the Past

  There’s a vicarage next to a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town.

  Three sisters were born there.

  Their father was the local vicar. Some had him pegged as a philanderer, some as a fool, a man with a wife and many a mistress. A man of the cloth.

  Yet when the third sister was born and the mother died during childbirth, his wife died in shame.

  The foolish vicar repented his ways.

  He devoted himself utterly to the church and daughters for three years, right up until he committed the final sin of his life in the grounds of the cemetery with a kitchen knife. He slit his throat, cutting three times. The first two didn’t go deep because he wasn’t brave enough to put sufficient pressure on his neck, yet he persevered and put the blade to his neck a third time. His blood spurted onto the grass, pouring out, a torrent of sinner’s blood full of sorrow and guilt sinking into the hallowed ground.

  *

  58.

  It was in 1921, late in the year, that the first sister was born. She died in 2007, the oldest and longest lived of the three at age 86. She never married, never took a man to her bed. People called her a spinster in those days, even back in the 70’s, when people had by and large forgotten what the term meant. She always wore black. Toward the end people only thought she was in mourning for a lost husband. She was in mourning, but not for a dead husband.

  For 86 years she remained a virgin.

  She may have died chaste, but her younger sister certainly did not. She took many men to her bed.

  A trollop, a tart, a whore, people called her.

  The drives that the eldest sister never had, the younger had for her. She was the heartbreak and ruin of many men, single and married alike.

  She died in 1958. She was only 26 years old and died, insatiable, in her lover’s bed. She was ever careless, and careless is what got her killed. Killed stone dead by her lover’s wife. The wife’s name was Elsie Archer.

  Both sisters stayed local. People did back in those days. Henry knew them both well enough. The one was dead by the time his little girl came along. Dead before her little sister became his daughter.

  But he knew the other, the elder. She was like you’d imagine an older sister with such a large age gap would be – kind of involved, but hands off, too.

  She was a big help, but she was called away in ’61. She wasn’t there for the funeral. She wasn’t angry, not anything like that. But she hated Harrison for what he did. Maybe it was her that cursed him, or maybe it was just the way things turn out for some people. For a time Harrison thought that is was her, the old spinster, the eternal virgin, that wouldn’t ever let him forget.

  Maybe it was her gave him the buggy.

  Then again, maybe he just took it on himself.

  *

  59.

  It was in 1958 that the third sister was born, the same year in which the middle sister died. The third sister wasn’t born to the vicar’s wife but to his mistress. The vicar’s wife wasn’t so interested in the vicar by that time.

  He was a philanderer, back when people knew the word. He had a few squeezes, round the town. Easy enough for a vicar to hide from his wife, but people talked, and when he took his mistress into the family home to give birth, people talked some more.

  She never did get over the shame of it, his wife. Never did. She took her own life not much later than that. She h
ung herself from a tree in the grounds of the vicarage, and an Irish man who’d once been the gatekeeper would have seen her, but he never did go into the vicarage after dark when the vicar’s wife still swung in the wind.

  The mistress died in childbirth from some kind of internal haemorrhage.

  The little girl, Henry Harrison’s little girl by adoption...she was only three years old when she died.

  Even at three, she was more powerful than the other two sisters together. She made them, in a way. One in life, one in death. She was the fulcrum around which they revolved.

  Back then, people called the two older sisters spinster and whore.

  The third they called an abomination, but really, all three were one thing, and one thing only.

  Witch.

  *

  60.

  Henry Harrison’s wife was dead by then. He never really got back on his feet.

  They never had the children they wished for. Henry and his wife never got round to it. People in town thought maybe she was barren, because back in those days women fell pregnant fairly soon after marriage, sometimes before, but two years passed and she hadn’t quickened. People talked, but the truth of it was, they were in no hurry.

  Like a lot of people, they presumed they had the rest of their lives. They travelled a little while, had some money, unlike a lot of people. Unlike a lot of people, they did plenty of things. Figured life would last forever. War was gone. There wouldn’t be another one and Vietnam wasn’t anything they needed to worry about. They were young, vibrant, had money that other people didn’t.

  A lot of people figure they’ve got the rest of their lives to do things, and no matter when they die it’s always true.

  *

  61.

  Harrison adopted the little girl who was born in sin. For a time, he was happy.

  Until, that was, she grew in power and he realised what he had living under his roof. At first it was little things, kind of like a kid playing with plasticine, figuring out the shapes of thing and how to make them work.