She went to where her mother lay. The mound of dirt was now a small grass hill. Carrie Anne snapped a blade of grass in her hand. It oozed a black liquid from where she had pulled it. This was not an ordinary growth. Not a vibrant living plant life. This was what would happen if plants continued to grow after death, if they were undead. But more than that, it was as if the entire house had died and was festering and suffering from a spreading rigor mortis. The boy, she had to find the boy. He was not in any room she had explored, which only left the cellar. Down the steps she went. Different to the person she used to be, she felt nothing now. The thought of seeing her father lying on the stone meant nothing to her. The walk down the stairs to the cellar proved it was the same as the rest of the house. The wooden stairs were rotten and splitting as the dark growth took the walls and floor. The light bulb was broken as twisted ivy crushed the glass bulb and snuffed out its life. The boy lay against the wall. He was asleep, or what passed for sleep with the dead. At once Carrie Anne understood; not only was the boy cursed, but he was also spreading it to those around him. The black miasma grew from him and spread around him, along the floors, walls and ceiling. Is this why she felt numbness and a disassociation? Why she was dead from inside out? In the darkest corner, Carrie Anne’s father was being consumed by the dead weed. She barely glanced at him. Carrie Anne gently shook the boy. A couple of insects dropped from him as he opened his eye and smiled.
“The house is changing; it’s becoming a cemetery.”
The boy looked upon the Ouija board that had now, apart from one word, been completely covered by the dead grass. He pointed at the one word still visible.
YES.
She took the boy by his hand and led him to the stairs to show him his new home. If the boy was unable to return to his cemetery they would stay here together. If this was the price to pay to be together so be it.
They walked into the living room and a voice said, “What has happened; what has happened here?”
Chapter Nineteen
Detective Barbara Howe stood confused, amazed and horrified at what was around her. It was a moment in her life when she would tell her friends and family that she had literally not seen anything like it. This, however, would depend on if she survived the encounter with the boy. He leapt from Carrie Anne’s hand with ferocious speed and strength, snapping his jaws as he did. The detective lifted her arm to protect herself, barely comprehending what was happening, before she was forced to the grassed floor.. The boy crouched on her, snapping his teeth in an attempt to tear out the detective’s throat. Carrie Anne for a moment considered letting him, but this was only for a moment. The detective hadn’t harmed her and although the loss of her life would be convenient, it would cause the police to focus their missing person search deeper. She pulled at the boy all she could; he wriggled. Holding him back was like trying to hold a thousand leeches.
“Boy, don’t; please don’t,” she pleaded and fought as best she could. The detective screamed, but she was well trained, her radio was out and in between screams she was about to call for help. The boy swiped blindly and the radio went spinning into the darkness.
“Please, please, please,” Carrie Anne whispered into the dead boy’s ear while holding him, but not forcefully; now she comforted him. He relaxed and allowed himself to be pulled back from the prone detective.
“What is he?” She was gasping, trying to catch her breath.
Carrie Anne stood over her and held the boy to her side. There was a low growl and the familiar chattering of teeth coming from him.
“He’s my friend, my only friend.”
The detective was shaking as she spoke. Her eyes were bulging at the sight of the boy. Every piece of him was a lesson in death. The boy should simply not be and the detective’s mind could not accept what she was seeing.
“What is he? Is he dead? I don’t understand.”
“What is hard to understand? He is a boy; he can’t die. He is to be forever. But I found him and he saved me. You have to understand he’s just a boy.”
“Carrie Anne, who did he save you from?”
“The Miller cousins—they wanted to do terrible things to me, but the boy wouldn’t let them.”
“Carrie Anne—” the detective’s voice was full of concern “—where are your parents?”
“My dad is in the basement. He touched me like a dad shouldn’t. So the boy protected me. My mother should have chosen to help me, but she chose him. The boy taught her what happens to bad parents.”
“This is wrong; four people are dead.”
“Define people,” Carrie Anne replied.
*
Detective Howe sat in the briefing room with her fellow police officers. A blackboard in the otherwise white and neon room had the pictures of Sarah and Michael Miller. The sergeant was briefing the thirty or so people in the room of the upcoming day’s events.
Later Howe was holding her raincoat against the spittle from the sky. Her hair was sticking to her face. The cemetery grass was gripping her legs. Around her, police officers scoured the earth for any sign of the missing teenagers.
“Howe, Detective Howe.” A young uniformed policeman called her over.
“You found something officer?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Oh yes.”
The catacombs hidden in the tomb were unfathomably huge. But that was not all of it. There was the bone decoration, the stolen bodies. Something dead had been living here. The flames had died, so the police used torch beams to see their way.
“We need forensics,” said Detective Howe. “We need them now…”
When she was back on the surface, Howe fought back vomiting and she drew in the wet and fresh air. She turned, looking around and saw the house of David, Lucy and Carrie Anne Jones. There was something about it that bothered her. She had yet to discover the secrets of the Jones family, yet something about that house provided enough to draw her attention from the cemetery. Despite the time being well past one o’clock, the Jones’s blinds were closed. Every single one. She looked down and around and saw the dugout path under the fence, with marks clearly scraped into the dirt. Someone had been crawling through this way on a regular basis. Detective Howe decided to pay the Joneses a visit.
“We found the catacombs under the cemetery. Is that where the Miller children are?” Howe asked.
“You are in his home?” Carrie Anne stepped forwards and stooped to face the detective.
“Are the Miller children there?” she asked again, fretfully.
“You shouldn’t be in his home; this will go badly,” she replied.
The boy had heard the exchange and if there had been any proof of understanding, the boy gave it. He pulled at the curtains almost casually, snapping them off the railings and discarding them. With the light that poured in casting into room, they also saw the cemetery behind the fence. Clearly the boy saw the violation of the cemetery and the police presence. Within a moment of a moment, the boy was shattering the window and taking most of the glass with him as he lunged across the ground to the cemetery.
Chapter Twenty
The boy loped on all fours, clearing the garden in moments. Beneath the fence he scrambled into the dirt like a carrion tick burrowing into flesh. In the cemetery a line of police officers had formed. They were fanned across the cemetery shoulder to shoulder, inspecting the ground inch by inch for any information as to who or what had happened there. There were specialists in all-in-one white jump suits, who were inspecting the ground even closer, taking photographs…intruding. There was worse. A huge white tent had been placed to cover the entrance to the dead boy’s underground home. From it, more intruders came and went, bringing them with them the dead boy’s bone decorations. They were stealing his secrets. An Alsatian police dog with sleek brown and black fur, snarled to the misty air.
“Heel,” said the police handler firmly and holding on to the dog’s lead. But the dog continued to snarl, its black eyes staring into the cemetery. Its ears wer
e pinned back, alert, while its hair bristled along the creature’s hide.
The dead boy knew none of these things. He had no concept of what or why the police were there. All he saw was the strangers dressed in black, trespassing in his home, his cemetery and his secrets. He had to do something, for all the dead had, when the flesh was gone, were the secrets they kept.
The dog went into a fit of barks and pulled away, almost standing on its back legs as the angry, distressed beast tried to brake away as the police office struggled to control the dog. The officer looked up to see the cause of the upset. With disbelief and equal measures pure cold terror he saw the boy from nowhere slicing his way through his colleagues. The inhuman thing moved with a creaking blur, passing from one to another leaving blood and torn screams in its wake. The dog was unleashed and it went tearing off in the direction of the monster. They collided, creature and beast, jaws locking, before the dog let go with a high-pitched squeal and dropped to the ground silent and still. In the time the handler got to the pair. The thing should have been dead but it only looked mildly side tracked at the gape that the dog had torn from its face. Despite all the officer’s senses pleading for reason to the sight before him, he swung his truncheon with all the force he could muster, in a huge effort to kill the unkillable.
Carrie Anne screamed for the boy but he was gone. Detective Howe seized the opportunity and grabbed Carrie Anne from behind, holding in a tight grip, but not before retrieving her radio. The speaker crackled into life as Howe began to signal for help. Before she could take a breath Carrie Anne pulled back Howe’s jacket arm to expose her flesh and sank her teeth into the detective’s soft and vulnerable meat. As Howe let go, Carrie Anne scratched across her face. Howe shrieked at the vicious attack, falling backwards overand crashing to the floor.. Carrie Anne ran. Straight through the broken window frame after the boy, shards of glass biting into her feet, legs and skin. She ignored the wounds despite the blood that flowed from the various gashes.
As Carrie Anne crawled under the cemetery fence she heard the screams and shouting and all kinds of calamity. She limped into the grass past the headstones, dripping blood as she passed by, soaking her leg and making her knees unsure of the weight they carried. There was more blood deeper into the cemetery, although not hers. Puddles splashed across the cemetery, grim and red. There were people in police uniforms and others in white overalls and matching masks. Some moaned, too wounded to scream, others were left crying on the ground. Then there were others who didn’t move and made no noise at all. Their eyes were wet and wide and they stared into the sky blankly with nothing but reflections. Carrie Anne had no time for them; she needed to find the boy. For a moment she panicked once more that he would be lost to her for ever, until she felt an overwhelming relief as by his beloved angel gravestone, he was panting and wounded. His neck has been broken and his head hung to the left shoulder. A bone jutted from the wound awkwardly. He coughed great husks as beetles and spiders and various mini beasts rained from him to form a pile on the ground. They wriggled for a moment before lying still. The boy tried to stand; he lurched awkwardly, pulling himself up against the angel, dragging his arms along the marble surface. For a moment he slipped, smearing the angel in a brown tar from his hand as he did so. Carrie could see dry flakes crumbling from him. Like a city dying from disease, the dead boy was being abandoned as the crawling things boring within him fell through open wounds and disappeared to the waiting cemetery. From under his dry flesh a cloud of black flies took to the air.
“There you are,” she said, limping, reaching out and holding him to comfort away the nightmarish thoughts of losing the boy but also losing herself. Her lifeblood flow was coming to an end, emptied.
“What did they do to you?” she said through the euphoria of finding him as the blood sustaining her seeped into the dirt with each pump of her fading heart.
The boy clicked his teeth together in almost a way of explanation. For a moment they hugged, the dead boy and the dying girl. They hugged and she closed her eyes and for that moment fell asleep. Her bare legs were now soaked in red and the wet air of rain. They hugged until the sound of sirens brought the girl back. Her head spun and the wails came from all directions and seemingly from the graves themselves.
“Come on; we have to go,” she said pulling at the boy’s hand. Two of his fingers snapped, yet he refused to move. The dead boy studied the girl. He had known death for more years than not. He recognised it when he held her in his arms.
“Please, please, they will take you away from me, please.” Tears flowed from Carrie Anne’s eyes as easily as the blood from her gashes as the rain fell, again turning the ground to mud and washing Carrie Anne’s blood into a thick red mire.
“Please,” she said weakly and fell to her knees as she attempted to stand. Her world was slipping before her eyes, turning white with strange electric flashes. She had never felt so tired or cold, yet unable to sleep or shiver; she felt now a great darkness coming for her. Just like her dream a dark sea to drown the very soul. The boy’s hand slipped from hers as she fell. He caught her as he had done before, sitting with her in the rain and mud. From the grass came an army of police; they kept their distance but there was no escape.
“Stay back, from it, stay back,” Detective Howe ordered. She looked at the boy and girl. “She is dying, you know that. Let her go; let me help her.”
The boy hissed at them, swiping his arm in defence while holding Carrie Anne with the other. He looked at her and as her eyes were closing for the last time, she looked at him. She saw his face, as old and dead as it was, smile at her. She saw him open his mouth wide, so wide it blocked the world. From it came a green gas that stung her eyes and filled her lungs. She breathed it and it turned her veins to black and clogged her heart. The boy crumbled before her, his face becoming dust, first the flesh then the bone, turning to dust and running into the rain and away, still smiling, turning to dust, dry ember.as Carrie Anne watched and died.
When the girl opened her eyes again it was as dark as sunlight. She lay in velvet lined box, silent and comforted. Outside the box, she could feel the worms chewing the soil. She could hear the breeze on the headstones above, she sensed the corpses decomposing in their ever slumber. She smiled and pressed her hand on the wood above her. It splintered and the coffin began to fill. She felt no fear, she felt no pain, she only felt the cemetery. Her cemetery. She was the girl in the cemetery.
The end, for now.
Still chilled to the bone by The Boy in the Cemetery? Keep reading for a peek at The Asylum for Fairy Tale Creatures, also by Sebastian Gregory. If you dare…
Once Upon a Time
Once upon a forever more, a long time ago in the dark place where imagination and nightmare met, they built the asylum. Surrounded by a forest of dense thorns and crumbling on a precipice falling to an infested monster sea, the asylum held the most insane in the entire fairy tale kingdom.
To be poor abandoned children in the forest, left to the whims of the nearby witch in her gingerbread house—imagine how frail your mind would become. Imagine the trauma of finding a house inhabited by bears who think they are people. How about being a boy made of wood who can think and talk yet is ridiculed and shunned. Or a girl given to a reclusive beast by her own father. It would be enough to drive a person to madness. And so many of the fairy tale creatures went skipping into the comfort of insanity.
Their demented wails carried through barred windows and into a rainstorm to haunt the turbulent air. A raven followed the cries to a break in the highest tower roof. The rain dripped from cracks in the slates. On the rafters the raven shook off the rain and cawed to itself, tipping its head this way and that with dark curiosity, before swooping downwards through the rafters and away amongst stone corridors. Flying between the shadows of the gas lamps, the raven passed the padded cells of the asylum’s inhabitants. All and more locked behind deep oak doors for evermore. The raven explored further, gliding along until it came to a spiral st
aircase. It landed on the stone steps a moment, hopping and pecking before flying off again, downwards. To another corridor and, if it were not a fool bird, the raven would have noticed something different. There was only one door at the end of a dark hallway of stone…bolts and chains and huge padlocks holding it firmly sealed. The raven did not concern itself with this and settled on the bars of the door; it cawed and pecked at the metal with a rat-tat-tat. For a moment something reflected in its onyx eye; from the gap in the bars a bony finger, unexpected and quick, simply brushed the poor creature with all the force of a breath on a nape. The raven cried its last and disappeared, falling within. There was a momentary sound of bones falling on stone, a kind of rattle before everything was silent again, save for the distant sound of the storm, and the ravings of the insane fairy tale creatures.
Blood Red Riding Hood
The woods held no fear for the girl. She followed her grandma’s advice and her boots held to the path hidden amongst the moss and shed leaves. Thick and ancient trees, old and wise, smiled with knotted faces that only the girl could see. Beams of bright yellow split through the dense overhead canopy and created a dark green rainbow. Her way was clearly lit through The Dark-Dark Forest. And the girl loved this place; it was so mysterious, so gloomy but so full of life. Birds perched heavy on the branches and screamed into the air; insects danced strange fandangos to the sound. Creatures of all shapes and colours trembled in the undergrowth. They crawled from rotting bark, playing amongst carpets of compost. “The dank is good for the lungs,” Grandma told her. “Breathe it in, girl.” The scent of wet greenery filled her senses, making her nostrils sting and eyes water. It was the sweet sweat of the forest. She felt so at home here; the other children of the village thought her strange and sneered when they saw her go by. She did not mind; she only needed the forest and her grandma.
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