A Stranger's Grave Read online

  He hoped against rain. The digging would be hard enough work, without the earth being heavy with water and his feet slipping in the mud.

  He wore his outdated jacket because the evening was chill. Heavy work boots on his feet, and a pair of supermarket trousers.

  A Saturday night. He could hear a couple of people on their way to a pub, young people, laughing the other side of the gates. He knew there would be nobody out in the cemetery but him and the restless dead.

  Already he could see the ghosts. Men and women and children abroad in the night when they should be asleep.

  He took his shovel and pick axe from beside the door, where he had placed them earlier so he wouldn’t have to go to the sheds at the back of the cottage in the dark. He took a pack wrapped in an oil cloth from inside the door in the other hand. Big hands, strong arms. Both loads were easy enough to carry now, at the start of the night.

  Might be a little harder, later, when he’d dug a few graves.

  Was he really thinking of doing this?

  No. He was doing it. His mind had been made up maybe the first time he’d spoken to Harrison about it, liar or not. The first dream he’d had, the first visit from the sisters...

  As soon as he took the job as groundskeeper? Gatekeeper?

  Was the whole thing preordained?

  Did it matter?

  No. It didn’t matter, either, because he had a job in front of him.

  Elton walked in the cold night to the old section of the cemetery. Not the oldest, not the newest. Just old.

  He unwrapped the package from the oilcloth. He took five Coleman lanterns from the cloth and set them around himself in a rough circle, a wide circle of light. He didn’t want any surprises while he dug, because he wouldn’t be able to hear anything. Over his ears were a pair of heavy red ear defenders.

  The last thing he wanted was to hear the cries of the dead children as he dug them up.

  He laid the spade against the turf above the first child’s grave, placed his heel against the back of the spade, and pushed.

  *

  80.

  From just outside the circle of light three sisters watched as Elton dug the first grave.

  The eldest sister stood a way apart from her younger sister and the youngest. The little girl had her thumb in her mouth and the woman in white had her arms around her, like she’d missed her all these years.

  The eldest watched, waiting, saying nothing. Each was unseen in the night.

  It might have been hunger on their faces. It might have been hope.

  *

  81.

  The spade hit roots, hit stones. Elton stood knee deep in the hole already, his back covered in a light sheen of sweat. The night was cold enough to warrant a coat, but he had stripped down to his t-shirt. Digging was heavy, hard work.

  His shoulder told him he could not do this all night. His hands ached from fighting with the old earth, and his knee hurt each time he bent to thrust the shovel and throw the dirt to one side. He did not bother with the sheet to lay the earth on. He did not bother laying out the turf, but threw everything to one side out of the grave. As he got deeper into his ragged hole, the digging got harder, and he was all too aware that while the night was young, it was not endless.

  He was aware, too, of the three sisters watching him.

  He felt their hunger, and the danger from them, too, should he not do what they wanted. He wished he had a digger, because his heart was pounding and his muscles ached. But digging up the dead was dark work, and it needed to be done by hand. So he dug, and threw dirt, and sweated, until the spade hit something solid.

  He could feel the sisters’ eyes on him, and he could feel the depths of sadness of the baby that sat and watched him dig from where a headstone should have been. Just a baby, a tiny baby.

  And yet the baby sat up, though it would have been still born. And yet the baby watched, through eyes that would not have been able to focus.

  Elton turned from the baby, because he was cold, and because he was dead inside. He could love, but he could be a bastard, too, and sometimes that had to be enough.

  He thrust the spade down again, to be sure. The blade of the spade struck the lid of a casket. Rotten enough so that without pause Elton took another thrust and broke straight through to the corpse below.

  Just a child.

  He could not tell if the child was male or female, but it was obvious it was not the little girl, Emily. The head was normal. Just a skeleton, so he could tell little else. He couldn’t tell from the ghost watching over him, either, because the baby was wrapped in a white shawl, hand knitted.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but he couldn’t hear himself.

  He couldn’t fill in the grave, either, because there was the next, and the next. All night, if he had to. Until he found Emily Harrison.

  Time was pushing on. It had to be done this night, because he could feel it pressing in on him. He could feel them just outside the circle of light, waiting. Waiting.

  He pulled himself up out of the grave, wincing as his knee took the strain of his weight, and without pause moved onto the next grave, and dug.

  And so it goes, he thought, as the spade rose and fell like a cleaver in his hand. All the while his muscles burning and for some reason he did not know tears ran down his face.

  Could be all the dead, all the little children, that made him cry, but then why would that hurt him? He was dead and cold inside and though he might have loved once, no longer.

  He was the same man with the same anger in his blood, but now with nothing to live for. What would he do if someone came and found him digging into the dirt and desecrating the corpses of little children as his spade sometimes went too deep through wood rot and straight through thin bones?

  Would he kill them, too, so he could do his night’s dark work?

  He didn’t know, and that scared him more than the women and the girl just outside his vision.

  They spoke to him, he knew, but he did not hear, because he wore the ear defenders he wore when he used the two-stroke strimmer. He could not see them because outside the circle of light the night was pitch.

  Maybe Emily Harrison pointed to her grave. Maybe she could take him straight there. But he wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t look, because that little girl could drive him mad or take his life, and he knew, somehow, that this was the way she wanted it.

  She wanted him exhausted, she wanted him to understand...

  And yet he did not. He did not know why he had to search for her when she knew where she was.

  He did not know why, but he knew he had to dig. There was only one way to dig, in the dark, sweating, muscles burning and joints aching.

  Because it was dark work.

  So he dug, and turned his eyes aside from the ghosts of ill-formed children, stunted babies, the ones long forgotten and unmarked and unnamed, but still with souls, forever restless.

  He was in a circle of his own, protected by deafness and blindness so they could not sway him, make him do something other.

  He dug, as Emily wanted, and he knew what happened to people who didn’t give her what she wanted.

  *

  82.

  Then, as he laid the spade against the next grave, the smell of pipe smoke reached him.

  Harrison was there. He had come to see his daughter laid to rest. What he could not do, a mere ghost, Elton could do for him. Maybe he watched and waited, too. Like the sisters. Waiting for a sin to be atoned. Maybe absolution was Elton's to grant, after all. A murderer’s pardon. A jury of one, Henry Harrison’s peer.

  Find the girl and maybe Elton, too, could rest.

  He knew he’d found the girl’s grave. He could feel it, and why would Harrison be here?

  But then, how did Harrison know? Ghost or not...

  He’d told him he never knew. Could he feel her, now that it was so close?

  Outside his shield of light, was Harrison holding his daughter’s ghost tight in his arms? Did he rock her, ro
ck her, waiting for her eyes to close and for the long nights of unrest to end?

  Elton cut the turf at the foot of a small headstone with a simple epitaph for a child named Samuel Smith. He did not care who the other child was, and he no longer cared who watched him dig.

  He was cold.

  He dug, throwing earth, sweat pouring now and his heart beating madly in his chest.

  *

  83.

  He dug down with fire in his muscles until he hit the wood.

  He looked around, within his circle, and saw all the other graves, holes and piles of dirt everywhere. There was no doubt in his mind that he would go to jail if he was found. He knew it, just as he knew the girl was in the grave below him.

  He unrolled the oil cloth sheet he’d brought with him then, laid it on the ground. Cracked the casket and there she was, laid in a tangle with a little baby’s skeleton, dirt around both.

  He was aware it was raining. How long it had been raining, he didn’t know.

  Reaching in, he took her out.

  He imagined, could he hear, that the girl would be crying, waiting for rest, and the older and the younger sisters would cry, too.

  *

  84.

  Elton took the bones from the grave, careful to leave the smaller bones in place. Emily had the scraps of her dress clinging to her frame. He remembered a dream, of a little girl, and how he thought her clavicles looked like a coat hanger, with her tattered dress hanging from them.

  He pulled her from the grave and laid her in the shroud, and saw Harrison, as he looked up, and the women, and the little girl, and sensed something else, too.

  Not love, not peace, but something he hadn’t expected.

  Hatred.

  And not for Elton.

  *

  85.

  The air was thick with it, like hate was smoke, heavy and stinking. He could feel it on his skin. He could not hold the girl intact and bring his light, but he knew the way well enough, and he could not miss the black angels, a darkness heavier than the night.

  The rain soaked him to the skin, and now he was not digging, he could feel the cold seeping through to his burning muscles, feel himself seizing up.

  The bones were not heavy in his arms, but he could feel their weight, as he could feel the weight of the three sisters gazing at his back, following him to the angels...

  As he could smell the smoke of the pipe the old man, the sinner, always had on the go. He wondered if he took his ear defenders off if he would hear the buggy squeaking over the sound of their voices.

  The women telling him to bring her, bring her.

  But he was doing that. So why did he feel afraid?

  Was he afraid of dying, finally? Was he afraid that in death he’d meet a man named Declan and a man named David King and that they would bear their wounds in death like the ghosts who stepped aside for him as he passed them by?

  No. He did not fear that. He had no regrets.

  But he was afraid, because maybe he’d meet his wife there, and another little girl, Francis, who’d look at him, and maybe they’d ask him what he’d done. What have you done to your life, Georgia would say, and he’d be cold, so cold, and what could he tell her?

  I’m a murderer, he would say, and she would cry even though she was dead, and he could not face that. Never that.

  He laid the girl down before the black angels. Finally, he turned to look at the faces of all the ghosts around him. Hundreds, surrounding him. The unquiet dead, hungrily looking on, watching him. Waiting in the rain.

  They surrounded the sisters and Harrison. Hungry and eager to return to the earth and blissful sleep.

  They followed him as he walked back through the cemetery. The multitudes of ghosts, silently following like a procession behind the three sisters and the old man, his pipe on the go even in the rain.

  In silence, Elton reached the children’s graves, his audience trailing him all the way.

  He couldn’t carry all five lanterns, but he could manage three and the pick, and the spade.

  He brought them back with him to the grave at the foot of the three black angels, and finally, after all this time, thought to read the inscription.

  Looked up, and saw Harrison’s smile, and the woman in black’s tears, and the woman in white. Holding the little girl. Not like a sister, but like a mother.

  And he understood and found he was the same man as he'd always been. A killer, and one whose anger never had gone away.

  *

  86.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. Not to Harrison. Never to Harrison. Not to the sisters, no. But to Georgia, because she’d known what he was and what he always would be, and though he’d spent the rest of his life trying to live up to what she would have wanted from him, he could not change. The anger was undiminished, and looking at the inscription, watching Harrison’s smile, he knew what he had to do to make it right, as right as it ever could be.

  Sometimes you can’t rock the dead to sleep. Sometimes you have to let your anger show you the way.

  Elton knelt before the little girl with that one startling eye, and looked deep, and he knew what she knew, saw what she saw from beyond the grave, and he could feel it as she felt it, more keenly for being dead himself.

  Dead and cold, and as he watched the sisters’ pain played out before him...angry. As angry as he’d been when he’d stared down at the random pattern on a patch of linoleum and realised that there was nothing random. There were no mistakes. Everything, even his anger now, was designed.

  He looked into that beautiful green eye and she showed him...showed him the way it was.

  *

  The Sins of the Father

  There are three black angels in a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town.

  Beneath, there is an inscription, paid for by an old woman in 2006, who knew she was dying. It reads:

  And death shall have no dominion.

  Dead mean naked they shall be one

  With the man in the wind and the west moon;

  When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

  They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

  Though they go mad they shall be sane,

  Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

  Though lovers be lost love shall not;

  And death shall have no dominion.

  And beneath that, there are three names.

  Maude Harrison 1921-2007

  Jane Harrison 1932-1958

  Emily Harrison 1958-1961

  Sister. Mother. Daughter.

  *

  87.

  Henry Harrison raped his daughter Maude for the first time when she was thirteen.

  Ripe and plump, he thought often, before sneaking into her room in the vicarage while his proud wife slept in the room next door.

  She was thirteen and loved her little sister. She couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to the little baby, who she doted on, who she dressed and played with like she was a little doll.

  She didn’t understand why her father would take the baby away if she didn’t do the things she did for him.

  Her mother never suspected, until later. By then the damage was done.

  From the first time her father raped her, aged thirteen, threatening to take away her doll, she was barren.

  She wore black from the first time she left home to the end of her life. She was in mourning. Not for herself, but for her little doll, because when she left home she knew she could no longer protect her.

  Her little doll’s name was Jane, and she was ever beautiful.

  *

  88.

  Mrs. Harrison was a proud wife. She was proud of her husband, a man of good standing in the community. She knew he was a scoundrel, of sorts, but she loved her home, the beautiful vicarage, but what was more, she loved the prestige that came with it.

  Henry, she could take or leave. She never suspected what he did to their daughter, right up until she was eighteen
years old. She called her own daughter a whore, and screamed, and cried, and threw her out of the house.

  Mrs. Harrison forbade her own daughter to ever return. Made her husband not to ever see her again, the strumpet that she was.

  Jane Harrison was ever beautiful, and now that Maude was gone, she was a doll no more, but broken, too. Broken by a man that should have loved her like a father.

  He started in younger on Jane, with no Maude to sate him in the dead of night while his wife slept and he shook with desire no man should feel. He crept into her bed, and bade her do things to him. She had no dolly that he could threaten to take away, but he told her that Maude had left because she had been bad, and that she would have to be good for him, or he would never let her see Maude again.

  He kept her like a mistress. She left home for a while, and her and Maude never spoke of it, the things that their father did to them.

  And always, when he thought of Jane, ever beautiful, he shook with desire.

  A woman named Elsie Archer never did stave in the side of Jane Harrison’s head.

  *

  89.

  Jane Harrison got into trouble with a married man, as she often did, searching for something that she never found. Because she was broken by the one man that should have loved her, but used her up instead.

  That one man raped her for the last time when she was twenty-five years old.

  Henry Harrison.

  He brought her to his home to give birth.

  When Mrs. Harrison finally discovered who the father was, she bided her time. She waited nigh on ten months, harbouring her anger, her hatred. Misplaced.