After Sundown

by Mark Morris

  More nervously than he welcomes Maurice says “How do you mean?”

  “My colleague must have wedged too many books in. You’d have thought someone was keeping hold of it on the shelf. Just tell me where I’m sending it.” When Maurice gives his name she cries “Not the Bell man.”

  “I’m glad someone’s heard of me.”

  “We’re often asked for your books. Drop in and sign some whenever you’re in our part of the country.” Having copied his address with a chatter of plastic keys, she says “So there are two of you there.”

  “Two of whom?”

  “You and Bretherton. He was the sexton at one of your local churches.” Perhaps she thinks the silence means Maurice needs to be placated, since she says “You’re the one people know.”

  “We know about him.”

  “I’m afraid we’re a dying breed.” The phone emits a rustling sound, and the bookseller adds “Well, here he is.”

  “Who?” Maurice feels further driven to ask “How?”

  “My colleague let a draught in, as if it isn’t cold enough. Don’t pull that face or it’ll stay lopsided, Dan.” To Lavater she says “It turned up your man.”

  “His story, you mean.”

  “I’m looking at his words right now.” A thud leaves Maurice unaccountably anxious until she speaks again. “He’ll be with you tomorrow.”

  The thud was her shutting the book, of course. May its imminence let him write? His mind is strewn with fragments of Bretherton’s description, and he can’t think past them. In the hope of dislodging the obstacles or of coaxing his mind to relax he wanders out of the house. He’s about to go for a stroll when he decides to see if anything significant is to be found at the church.

  On the far side of the road that divides the district, every second street denies entry to traffic. By the time he finds St Aloysius his mind feels as tangled as the route. As he drives around the outside of the churchyard, pale figures glide from behind others of their species. They’re memorials lent movement by the car, but why do some of their discoloured outlines flicker as though uncertain of their shapes? He could think his eyes are growing unreliable, or his mind – and then he sees that the unsteady glare comes from lamps on the roofs of several police vehicles drawn up outside the church.

  He’s coasting past them and trying to make out the dim interior beyond the porch when he’s overwhelmed by an aroma of cannabis so powerful it sets his head swimming. His foot falters on the accelerator, and the car stumbles to a halt. A policeman using a mobile phone stares at him, which makes Maurice stall the engine afresh once he has wrenched a shriek from the starter motor. His mime of comical incompetence brings the officer over to him. More like a warning than an invitation the policeman says “Can I help you, sir?”

  “I’m a writer.” Since this earns no response, Maurice adds “I was wanting to research the history.”

  “Too late for that now.” Not much less ominously the policeman says “Should we know your name?”

  “Maurice Lavater,” Maurice says and fumbles out his driving licence.

  “Weren’t you in the paper recently?” When Maurice confirms this, though he’s unsure how accusing the question sounds, the policeman says “This would have been right up your street.”

  “I don’t deal much with drugs. Just opium because I’m writing Victorian.”

  The policeman gives him a searching look. “How the neighbours found out what was going on would be. The watchman for the gang, he started screaming in the night. That’s why someone called us.”

  “Too much cannabis, do you think?”

  “Too much.” As Maurice starts to feel admonished the policeman tells him “The watchman said he thought someone kept looking in the windows. Said when he tried to chase them their face came off the inside of the glass.”

  “There’ll be faces in the stained glass, I suppose.”

  “He said it wasn’t one of those, and it kept following him round in the dark. Some of us might say it serves him right.” When Maurice finds the notion too disquieting to endorse, the policeman says “What kind of research were you looking to do?”

  “Whatever documents there are. Perhaps the parish magazine.”

  “They’ll be well gone somewhere if they’re anywhere. The place has been shut down for years, and the priest’s house.”

  Maurice manages to drive away without betraying any further clumsiness. Could breathing in the smell from the cannabis factory have affected him? In that case it should have acted on the policeman as well, and wasn’t the man’s peaked cap a shade askew? He’s out of sight by now, and Maurice sees no way of sneaking back. Instead he drives home so carefully he feels as if he’s striving not to wobble his attenuated head.

  When at last he finishes inching the car into the only available space near his house, the retired teacher who lives opposite hurries up to him. Her urgency disconcerts him until he realises she’s being propelled by a hound large enough to feature in an Edwardian tale. She only just succeeds in tugging it to a temporary halt that lets her greet Maurice. “Written any books this week?” she says, cocking an eyebrow that’s presumably meant to be humorous.

  “Ah ha.” While this is designed more to acknowledge than to celebrate the joke, does it resemble agreement too much? “Ha ha,” Maurice adds without mirth.

  When the hound hauls her onwards he makes for his desk, but can’t think past the day’s events. What’s so significant about them? Perhaps the policeman helped him after all, and the church records have indeed been preserved somewhere. Maurice calls the central library in Birkenhead and learns that the archive has a set of the St Aloysius parish magazine. If he requests it now he can view it tomorrow.

  First he’ll need to wait for the package from Terrific Tomes. He makes himself a pasta dinner before spending time with the television. Vintage films generally help him relax, but all those he tries to watch contain at least one man with a moustache. When this persists in troubling him he retreats to bed. Thoughts that feel like fragments of a tale someone has already told keep him awake, not least because he has an impression that they apply to him. He can’t judge how while he’s unable to define them. At last he sleeps, only to dream that somebody is pounding on the inside of a lid. The sound pursues him into daylight, and he realises it’s at the front door. He stumbles to the window in time to see a uniformed figure heading for a van. “Hello?” Maurice shouts, louder once he has raised the plastic sash.

  “On your step.”

  The man might almost be fleeing the item he brought. He turns no more than momentarily to respond, so that Maurice can’t be sure one side of his face is higher than the other. Perhaps it was distorted by a grimace. Maurice hurries downstairs to find a parcel not so much delivered as abandoned, its padded envelope partially unstuffed by a bid to force it through the letterbox. He shakes its greyish innards into the kitchen bin and unpicks the staples with an aching fingernail. The book wrapped in a plastic sheet like a cluster of translucent eggs is indeed Tales of the Ghostly and the Grim.

  Maurice sprawls in a front-room chair to read Simeon Bretherton’s story, which concerns a sexton who rings the church bell most enthusiastically whenever there’s a funeral. His gusto appears to offend or else to rouse one of the deceased, who sets about returning piecemeal. Local villagers the sexton hasn’t previously met prove to have features reminiscent of the dead man – one feature each. In preparation for Sunday mass the sexton is struggling to remove hymnals so firmly wedged into a shelf that it feels as if someone is gripping them when they yield all at once, and he almost ends up supine. Did he glimpse a shape behind the books? The shelf is empty, but beside it a mirror reveals the face looming at his back. He swings around to see he’s alone in the sacristy, or at least that part of it. The lopsided sneering face is behind the glass, and sidles forth as a long thin greyish arm reaches for his head. When the pries
t finds the sexton’s body, it bears the dead man’s face.

  Maurice shuts the book and lets it fall beside his chair. Now that he has finished the story, he hopes it has finished with him – hopes it stays trapped in the book. It strikes him as an incoherent piece that could only have impressed him as a child. Surely reading in context the paragraph he hadn’t known he quoted will have freed him to write – but when he tries to work on his novel, his mind feels as obstructed as ever. He could fancy Bretherton’s description isn’t satisfied with its revival, a nonsensical notion he can’t dislodge. He still has to visit the library archive, and even if he finds nothing worth the journey, perhaps leaving his desk for a while will shift the hindrance out of his mind.

  In twenty minutes he’s at the library, where the front entrance huddles under a massive two-storey porch between twin wings full of windows. The stone is grey as twilight beneath the sunless sky. Nobody looks at Maurice until he rests his elbows on the counter in the midst of a multitude of shelves. When a librarian approaches he says “Maurice Lavater.”

  “Oh yes.”

  This sounds nowhere close to recognition. Her colleague’s glance across a table piled with new books suggests he knows the name, but Maurice finds this less than heartening, since one of the man’s eyes appears to be paler than the other. “You have some parish publications for me,” Maurice tells the woman.

  “If I could just see your card.”

  Of course she isn’t doubting his identity, and he hands over his library card. “Where would you like to start?” she says.

  The online paragraph about the sexton gave the date of his death. “I think nineteen hundred may be what I’m after.”

  She hands Maurice a hefty foolscap box, which he takes to a seat, though not at once. He’s wary of sharing a table with a morose man whose nose is spectacularly dislocated, and a fellow sneering so hard at a newspaper that his lips drag his moustache awry seems worth avoiding too. Instead Maurice finds an empty table by a window overlooking a lawn and a wide low shrub, its leaves reduced to blackness by the unforthcoming sky. When he opens the box, the topmost magazine lifts its flimsy cover as though it has been waiting for him.

  The cover shows the church as it was more than a century ago. It doesn’t mention Simeon Bretherton, but he’s lying in wait on page five. The obituary praises his commitment to the church and celebrates how vigorously he used to ring the bell, though the writer stops short of specifying any occasion. Maurice finds he needs to read all this as a distraction from the photograph that accompanies the testimonial. Despite its age, it preserves every detail: the rakish wide-brimmed hat, the eyebrow raised in sympathy with the unaligned and mismatched eye, the sideways nose, the moustache lined up with the sneer.

  Surely the sexton wouldn’t have chosen this expression for a photograph, and Maurice can only conclude he was permanently deformed by the look. Did he write his appearance into his story in a bid to set it apart from him? Maurice hasn’t realised he’s clenching his face until he feels it relax. He very much hopes the insight he has gained will let him return to his own tale. He lifts his head as though his mind has raised it and his consciousness, and meets the eyes of the face outside the window.

  He could imagine he’s still looking at the photograph in the magazine, or at any rate he’s desperate to think so. When he wavers to his feet and ventures closer, the face advances too. Was it wearing a hat to begin with? It is now. No, that’s the blackened shrub, which he misperceived because his right eye isn’t functioning too well. He rubs the eye, an activity the watcher imitates with a finger on a pallid eyeball. Perhaps Maurice is grimacing even though he thought he’d managed to relax, and the watcher is copying him. Maurice leans forward and sees the patch of grass where the tilted shrub stands – sees the grass through the face. Now his viewpoint no longer lets the shrub pose as a hat, but he ducks forward again and again in a wild attempt to rid himself of the appearance on the glass. Before anyone can reach him he has smashed the window with his face, and the opposite as well. He’s no further use to me, but now I’m in your book.

  Same Time Next Year

  Angela Slatter

  It’s just gone dusk, when the day bruises blue, and Cindy sits on the tomb, one of those big old ones shaped from grey granite into a box, about four feet high by six long by two wide; it’s not hers. She’s wearing a black leather jacket she got from god-knows-where and she’s drinking a beer. It’s got the word ‘craft’ on its label, which is pink, like no beer bottle she’d ever seen in her life. It tastes kinda weird, not like she remembers. Then again, she’s not really tasting it, is she?

  Hell, it was free, set like an offering on a grave with a bunch of wildflowers that were probably wilting even before they got left, so no complaints. And then again, it’s not like the beer does anything but pour through her, what with ghosts lacking in solidity and all. It’s just waterfalling from her lips, inside her throat, outside her neck, down her front, through her lap, and pattering onto the slab beneath her spectral butt.

  Cindy shrugs off the leather jacket, drapes it on the tomb; it might be here when she gets back, it might not. Things disappear and reappear in the cemetery with surprising regularity. So does she, sometimes. If it was just stuff, just things, she’d suppose Kids, like an old lady. Kids daring each other to jump the rusty iron fence and run through, teens trying for the high of making love among the dead (“coming while you’re going,” someone used to say, yet she cannot remember who for the life or death of her). But who else except her could pick up this thing that’s not really made of leather, not anymore, just wishes and cobwebs and bad dreams? Maybe a memory or two, although not ones she can recall. Besides, not many come out here nowadays, none but those who’ve got no choice.

  It’s not like she needs it against the cold or anything. Beneath the jacket she’s wearing a dress, the dress she woke in, the lavender chiffon whisper of a thing that’s almost a nightgown, maybe a prom dress. She wonders, oh yes she does, where she was going and what she was doing when she died, but that seems to have been wiped away with her passing.

  Passing.

  Stupid word. Dying, gone, rotted, decayed.

  Dead.

  She’s sure as shit she never owned anything like this in life. There are splinters and shards of before she woke here. Cracks and fractures and fragments of a rundown house, small squalling siblings (their number is never fixed), a woman who yelled and a man who yelled louder still. Maybe there was some school, too, but she can’t quite lay heavy hold on those thoughts. But there must have been, if she’s dressed for a prom, right? Junior or senior? Who knows?

  She shivers, a human action remembered, not felt. She looks down, notices some dark spots on the skirt. She waves a hand across them and they disappear: either covered or disintegrated, she doesn’t really know. The things she can do she doesn’t really understand, but wishes she’d been able to do them in life, might have made living a damned sight easier. Whatever her life was then it doesn’t feel easy, not in the broken recollections that float in her head. Whatever comes back to her has no rhyme or reason.

  But now, right now, she can feel the weight coming upon her − one night, one night a year − she should have waited to drink the beer. How could she forget that? Cindy reaches out and touches the jacket: yes, it feels different now, weighty. The scent of it is dead and dusty, animal and musky. Old, old, old. She pushes herself away from the tomb, takes steps that are at first tiny, then grow longer, grander as she feels her own heft upon the earth. The grass is dry, this time of year, a fire risk, but it’s not as if that bothers her or anyone else here. The little chapel by the half-empty pond is painted red and white like a barn; half the roof’s caved in. No one tends to anything anymore. The paths are overgrown, the hedges are scrappy, the trees thin-limbed, their leafy cover sparse against the darkening sky; just enough to keep the light of the incipient stars at bay. Clouds cover the moo
n but she doesn’t need light to see by.

  The rows of the cemetery aren’t especially orderly, and the headstones... many of them have a lean to them, and layers of moss, names and dates worn away. She can’t remember where the bones of her lie, not anymore, if she ever knew.

  When she begins to thicken, some of the memories come back, but not that one, never that one. It makes her think that maybe she wasn’t ever properly interred. Interred. What a word. Fancy way of saying planted.

  Cindy.

  The last boy called her that. She doesn’t know what function she was fulfilling for him, only knows he called her that as he put his hands around her throat, pushed himself into her − there’s just one night a year she can be solid. He sounded so angry as he said the name, even angrier when she began to laugh despite the choking pressure of his big hands. Not so angry when she dissolved beneath him, left him with cock rapidly softening, mouth slack and fingers empty.

  He got up, though, got up and ran. She just floated along behind, dead breath at his shoulder, a purplish mist. She stayed with him until he ran into an oak tree. He’d put his head down, running like he was heading towards a touchdown, so when he hit the trunk it was at just the right angle to fracture his neck. Not enough to kill him, though; she watched him flop back on the grass and lie still. His gaze shifted − the only thing that could move, she guessed − and he watched her with concentrated terror. How quickly things changed! She watched him in turn for a while, grinning like a loon, then settled on his broad chest, put one hand − suddenly solid, suddenly heavy, this one night − onto his throat and began to squeeze.

  He took a while to die. Four minutes, isn’t it, to strangulation? She was sure she’d read that somewhere. She’d touched her own throat with her free hand; stroked the non-flesh, felt it give, pushed her fingers through it, just a little − not entirely solid, then − and felt creeped out. She’d pulled her fingers away. She wanted to tell him that she was angry too; everybody was angry even if not everyone could recall the why of it, but what was he going to do with that knowledge?