The boy clapped and snatched it from her once again, before placing it on the bone table. He leant over it and opened wide his mouth and gagged as if choking. But instead the boy spat out a ball of maggots onto the rat’s corpse. The maggots hissed as if acid through flesh and in a moment Carrie Anne could see that the bones of the rat gleamed once the maggots had done their work. The boy’s hands worked over the bones at an almost impossible speed. He opened his fingers and spiders crawled from the splits in his skin. They webbed the bones in a thick silk as the boy sewed with the web. When they had done their work, the spiders and wriggling maggots found themselves reabsorbed into the boy. He proudly presented Carrie Anne with the gift he had created. She took it from him in her palm. It was beautiful; she held it up to the light. It was a dream catcher, made of webs and bones and with a rat skull centrepiece. In the torchlight it sparkled.
“Thank you,” she said, genuinely touched. “I don’t understand this, any of this. But thank you.”
The boy just stood there with a content look in his eye and chattered his teeth.
“Do you understand what I am saying?” The boy did have an understanding of sorts, that much was obvious. He was clearly capable of deep feelings. For his young age, the boy was very old with advanced rot and rigor mortis that made him creak at times. However, his inner child seeped through his rotten body. Carrie Anne was unsure if he understood the actual words or had years of decomposition had taken its toll on the boy’s mind.
“How do you even talk to the dead?” she thought to herself but also out loud at the same time. She yawned loudly in contemplation, the lateness of the hour catching up on her despite excitement’s best efforts to keep tiredness at bay.
The boy saw this and loped behind her. He began to push Carrie Anne towards the corner of the room. She was presented with a coffin that had been opened and filled with rags and blankets.
“Oh I see; you saw me yawn.”
The boy grunted at the death bed.
“I suppose a little sleep isn’t going to hurt,” Carrie Anne said climbing over the side. It was surprisingly comfortable and, despite the musty smell, quite pleasant. She hung the dreamcatcher from a stone jutting from the wall, and gently laid the rag doll on the dirty pillow. There were several ruined candles around the coffin, burning a bright flame, which the boy simply extinguished with his hand.
“OK just a minute,” she yawned. “ Just…a…min…” And she fell into a sleep as the boy stroked her hair.
She dreamt, but as with all dreamers it was her momentary reality, as strange as it was. She dreamt she was dead, but rather than being a dead girl she was a dead cemetery. She was still a thing of flesh but it was grey and mummified and dry, and within her septic and weeping wounds, headstones protruded from her. The covered her body in monuments to the dead buried in her fat. She knew she was hollow and her body was a home to a city of maggots and they praised her for the bounty of dead flesh she brought. They tickled in her catacomb stomach and the wriggling made her wake with a start.
To her surprise and confusion, Carrie Anne found herself in her own bed. It was light as the sun seeped through the blinds and warmed her face. The quilt was pulled up to her shoulders and made her sweat. She went to shake it off her but found the bed sheet held in place. An arm held her and another moved beneath the quilt. She fought against the pressure and turned to see her father lying in bed with her. He smiled and was dead and worms moved under his skin. When he spoke black bile dripped from his lips.
“I know I shouldn’t love you this way, but I do.”
Carrie Anne gasped and woke again. Back in her coffin bed, sweaty from heat. The sunlight shone down the tunnel system and shafts from cracks in the cemetery-soil ceiling. The boy was curled up in a ball at the base of her coffin. He appeared to be asleep as he wheezed from tattered lungs and chest. There was a relief to being away from the nightmares, but she was now filled with a new dread. She had been here all night and now the sun was out and she had no indication of what time it could be. She climbed out the coffin and over the boy. As fast as she could with her still-healing body, Carrie Anne climbed through the tunnel back to the stone tomb and out into the cemetery. She could see now it was a clear early morning, the clouds rained away leaving the sky a dull blue again. The birds were chorusing in the trees and morning dew covered the grass and filled the air with a wet aroma.
Chapter Ten
She made it to the rusted fence and strained to manoeuvre through the gap under the railings. Each crawl was a strain on her ribs. She got through and made it to the back door and fully expected the door to be locked even thought she had left it unsecured. This was quickly followed by an even more terrible thought that her parents would be awake and waiting for her. As she tried the silver door handle her heart pounded and her breath became very shallow. Mercifully, however, the handle turned and the door opened. She crept inside and closed the door behind her, so softly it was as if the door was made from mothballs. Every creak seemed loud enough to destroy the glass in the windows as she moved through the house. She saw the clock; it was five-thirty a.m., meaning her parents wouldn’t be waking for another thirty minutes. She took heavy step after heavy step, climbing the longest staircase ever taken with the loudest stairs ever created. Each foot placed was done so through gritted teeth and prayers that her parents did not wake. She finally arrived and crept past her parents’ closed bedroom door, without breathing, and into her own room. She caught her own reflection in the mirror on her wardrobe. The wardrobe was white with a square mirror in the middle—the length of an average-sized person. Carrie Anne always thought she looked trapped when she looked in it. There was the same sad reflection looking back at her, except now she was covered head to toe in mud and wet blades of grass. She stripped down naked. Her body, something that always made her feel ashamed, was an autopsy of pale skin and dark purple bruises. There was a footmark on her left side. She considered for a moment that the boy in the cemetery would never want her in the way boys want girls. He would protect her and love her and never need any physical affection; he would love her unconditionally and that would be unconditionally perfect for Carrie Anne. There was the sound of her parents’ alarm blaring, followed by the snooze button being hit. She screwed her dirty pyjamas into a ball and hid them under her bed. Next: into the bathroom; she ran a hot shower. The steam misted the windows and the shower screen and the water swirled the cemetery dirt into the drain.
By the time she returned to her room with a towel wrapped around her and her long hair dripping against her neck, her mother was waiting for her, sitting on Carrie Anne’s bed. Carrie Anne was startled by her.
“Mum, you made me jump.”
“I was just checking on you, your dad is out for his early morning jog. Why are you up so early?” Carrie Anne’s mother was wearing her worn blue nightgown, her thinning, balding hair tied in a ponytail.
“I was thinking I could go back to school.”
“School? I don’t think you are ready; you need rest and stay here where it’s safe.” There was genuine panic in her mother’s voice.
“I just want to feel normal again—” Carrie Anne thought about the words that her mother may want to hear “—so we can be a normal family, like Dad wants us to be.”
Her mother thought about that for a moment. Without Carrie Anne’s father to bludgeon his influence over her, she was confused and a little lost.
“I suppose,” she said.
Carrie Anne sat next to her mother and put her arm over her shoulder.
“I’ll be fine, I promise. I need this; I need to be less inward.”
Her mother thought about it.
“OK,” she reluctantly said.
Carrie Anne smiled and kissed her mother’s cheek. She stood up and began to find her uniform. Her mother went to shuffle out of the room.
“I’ll walk with you,” she said. Carrie Anne had no intention of going to school, so her mother walking with her, trying to take h
er there, would be a disaster.
“Mum,” she said as casually yet as persuasively as she could, “I need to do this on my own. I need to fit in.”
Again her mother’s eyes flickered as she thought of the best course of action.
“If you think that’s best, if you think that’s best.”
Chapter Eleven
Carrie Anne kissed and hugged her mother before leaving for “school”. What she wanted to learn would not be taught in school. She needed to know how to talk to the dead.
The morning was cool and clear now that last’s night storm had drained the clouds. Carrie Anne headed over to the library, located just in the centre of town. Her progress was slow because of her ongoing injury holding her back, but despite that handicap she was eager. She also had to contend with avoiding anyone who would recognise her from the school. She pulled her hood over her head and went on her way. The town was quiet for this time of morning. Only a few cars passed by, splashing the road puddles onto the pavement. As she reached the town, where the houses stopped and the pound shops and sandwich shops began, there was eeriness to the precinct, as if the morning was a dream and the town was not real. Only a few people went by like ghosts. As she walked past the shop windows, her reflection was interrupted in every window by a poster. “MISSING,” each poster cried in big bold black letters and underneath were two photographs and descriptions of the Miller cousins. She paused for a second and looked into each of the eyes in the photograph. She felt nothing and carried on her way.
On the outskirts of the shopping precinct was the library. A red brick building that stood out from the grey of the estate. It was surrounded by thicket bushes and there was graffiti on two of its many front windows, lines that made no particular sense. She hurried into the library. It was quiet as expected. The smell of books hung in the air. There were computers in the corner and DVDs and magazine and leaflets with helpful numbers. Standing on the deep brown carpet were wooden shelves holding plastic-bound books. There were old people sitting at tables reading newspapers. In a corner of the library was a colourful snakes and ladders carpet surrounded by children’s books. A poster showed a sad child staring at Carrie Anne. There was a phone number to call for help. She ignored it. Each of the shelves had a category sign above it. The nearest she found to what she needed was “religion”. She could have tried to use a computer to find what she needed but was unsure how to use the Internet properly as her father discouraged it, and asking for assistance would only draw attention to herself. Instead she picked a few books that may contain what she needed. Books on ghosts and spirits and theories on what the afterlife may contain. She sat with them at a desk in a quiet corner.
She was absorbed by the world that was hidden within the dark places of our own. Or so the books claimed. She read case studies of ghosts and unexplained happenings. Of phantom nannies and nuns who haunted orphanages and churches alike. Of mediums, people who could talk to the dead only using their minds. There were chapters on spirits that were not even human who wished to possess the living and walk amongst them wearing their flesh like a suit. There were pictures, some black and white, some in faded colours. There was a school photo with all the children of a class smiling for the camera. They were flanked by two old lady teachers, except the teacher on the left-hand side of the class was see-through. The classroom could clearly be seen through her clothes and faded skin. The caption read: Mrs Gaskel pictured in her school where she was a teacher for twenty years. This picture was taken three years after her death.
There were other pictures, of faces appearing from walls on family photographs, hands clawing from shadows, a picture of a child dancing with fairies in the garden. After reading for most of the morning and into the afternoon, with only breaks for the toilet and to look up as the lady librarian walked by smiling, she finally found what she had been searching for: How to communicate with the dead. There was a story of a ten-year-old girl, Francesca. She had been given a Ouija board by her dying grandfather. Carrie Anne read that a Ouija board is a wooden board with the letters of the alphabet engraved into it. There are also numbers and the words: YES NO. By using an upturned glass, Francesca asked questions of the dead and the glass moved to the letters, spelling the answers. The spirit was a young boy who died in World War Two…
The first time the boy heard the voice was one dark evening of course. Less than a whisper, he would barely notice it at all and although it didn’t wake him, the little boys’ sleep became disturbed and he gave a troubled murmur. His eye lids flickered. The second time the boy heard the voice it came him to him like a breeze through an open window. At this moment it was as if it was in the dark room with him. So much so that the boy could tell the voice belonged to a girl. Not a girl like the ones at his school, or even like his mother. It was a girl’s voice somewhere in the middle of the two. He opened eyes that would not adjust to the night, still not sure if the voice was his imagination or a dream; he spoke to his toy bear, an old and tatty thing, before falling back to a shallow sleep.
“Do you hear that bear?”
…
“It sounded like a lady. Did you hear the lady bear?”
…
His breath was white smoke that disappeared into the dark. He shivered despite thick wool blankets and his ever present bear. The Third time the boy heard the voice it was spoken as if an inch from his ear. It came all of a sudden and disappeared again as if never there. He woke instantly and now knowing the voice to be real, could not muster the courage to call for his mother. Instead he lay scared and alone in the dark, too terrified to move, too paralysed by fear to return to sleep.
“She’s back,” he whispered to the bear.
And the voice returned night after night, always at the same time, when the evening was at its blackest. Always with the same question; Are you there? It asked, Are you there? It sounded so close as in the very room, yet there was a distant echo quality as if hearing it from under water.
The new time boy heard the voice, knowing that no harm came to him previously, the boy replied. He had been sat in bed with his back against his head board. He held his bear on his lap for comfort and as a shield. His bed was a treasure island on a sea of darkness.
“Hello?” he asked timidly, “I am here”.
Are you there? It asked, Are you there?
This confused the boy and feeling bolder he replied once more.
“I am here, I am here”, and from the dark the boy listened.
The voiced didn’t return and eventually the boy fell asleep where he sat.
The next the boy went to bed early, eager to hear from the voice once more. He didn’t see the sun go down, for the windows of the house had been blacked out. There was a bad man who sent planes and bombs to destroy them. Father had gone to be a solider to fight the bad man. He remembered his father dressed in a green uniform hugging him and wiping the tears from the boy’s cheeks. He remembered his father telling him, he was the man of the house now and he had to look after his mother. His mother was weeping and she squeezed father harder than the boy had ever seen. Father pulled her from him; he smiled and told them he loved them both so very much, before finally marching off with the parade of other solider fathers. That same day the boy and his much loved mother went through the house applying black paint to the windows.
“We will be safe now.” she said and kissed him on his forehead. The boy couldn’t remember what his father’s face looked like anymore.
Are you there? It asked, Are you there?
“Yes I am here,” the boy replied trying to peer through the darkness. He waited and waited and finally the voice spoke again.
Please if you are there, it asked, knock once for yes, twice for no.
Puzzled the boy took a tiny hand and hit the wood of the head board.
KNOCK
The voice spoke again; there was an excitement to it the boy recognised. It was how he had felt on his fifth birthday or waking up on Christmas morning.
&n
bsp; If that was you answering? knock again.
KNOCK,
How old are you? The voice wanted to know.
The boy learning the game quickly became braver, eager.
KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK AND KNOCK.
A knock for each year of his birth.
Does my voice seem near to you?
The Boy thought for a moment. The first time the voice has called him, it had been far away, echoing and muffled. Now each time the voice had returned and the more the boy had acknowledge its presence, the voice had grown closer. He could now even hear the breath that belonged to voice. He could almost feel it.
Are you in a room?
KNOCK.
Does it sound like I am in the room with you?
KNOCK.
The voice didn’t return and the next evening he was fretful and his thoughts wandered to dark places. The voice had yet to return and he was becoming disheartened that it may never return at all. The darkness seemed to be thicker than usual like when he used too much black crayon on pictures of London being bombed by the bad man. He missed his father and wished he would come home soon. Although while there was a war across the sea, the boy knew his Da's return would be a long time away. Just as he knew his father’s safety was not certain thing. The boy wanted to run to his mother sleeping in the next room but was afraid he would be trapped to the darkness. Besides she always slept deeply and fretted about waking her. Since father had left, she had become very weary. Her face was shallow and she moved slowly with heavy shoulders. Then there were the sirens. The sirens that warned of the bombs that came with fire and screams into the night. He had feared their return since the very first attack, since the very first time his parents had sat him down and explained about the bad man. Why hadn’t the voice returned to him? Had the mysterious lady abandoned him also?
Are you there? Are you there?
No not at all, and with rare happiness the boy Knew how to reply.
The Boy in the Cemetery Page 8
