by K. A. John
She started when she heard Patrick’s approaching footsteps and immediately flipped up the visor. Keys in hand, Patrick shut the boot before sitting in the driver’s seat.
‘What’s the time?’
She checked her watch. ‘Nearly ten o’clock.’
‘We should reach there in about three to four hours, depending on traffic. Hopefully there’ll be no one about at that time in the morning.’ He switched off the interior light, turned the key in the ignition, reversed the car and set off down the drive.
For the first time since they’d moved to Wake Wood they headed directly out of town into the network of narrow lanes that led – eventually – to the motorway. A silent hour and a half later they reached the six-lane thoroughfare. Patrick flicked through the channels on the car radio until he found one that played innocuous background music.
Louise settled back and tried to pretend that the drive was no different from any other she and Patrick had taken. But she couldn’t prevent a sick sour feeling of foreboding rising from the pit of her stomach. Her imagination went into overdrive. She tried to picture Alice in her coffin – not as she’d been when they’d buried her, but as she’d be after months in the earth. How long did it take a child’s body to decay? She hadn’t asked at the time, but now she wondered if the coffin they’d chosen was airtight. If it was, would that have delayed decomposition? Would Alice’s face still be recognisable? Would she be able to bear to look on her again?
What seemed like half a lifetime later, Patrick turned off at an exit and entered a 1930s-built suburb of the city centre. After the rural surroundings of Wake Wood, even at night the built-up area appeared strange, almost alien. The lights were too bright, the neon signs gratingly garish, the streets dirtier than Louise remembered from the time they’d lived there. She’d never felt at home in Wake Wood. And now she felt like a stranger here. Would she ever find a place she could truly call home again?
It was then that she remembered the promise Arthur had elicited from Patrick. Alice’s return would bind them to Wake Wood for the rest of their lives. They could never leave the town afterwards. She’d wanted to ask Arthur what would happen if they tried but she’d lacked the courage.
She dared to look at Patrick but he was staring straight ahead, concentrating on the road. She couldn’t believe they were even contemplating what they were about to do. But, as she’d told Patrick, she simply couldn’t think of an alternative.
They reached the deserted city centre and turned west. They passed tower blocks of social housing, pubs, a solitary church, a supermarket, off-licence and a bingo hall, before turning down a side street bordered on one side by an Edwardian terrace of houses long given over to multiple occupation and, on the other, the railings of the cemetery where they’d buried Alice.
Patrick slowed the car to walking pace. Behind the railings, uniform rows of gleaming wet marble headstones stretched as far as they could see. He finally parked on a grass verge some distance from the locked gates and as close to the railings as he could get. He switched off the engine and the windscreen wipers fell silent. Rain was still sheeting down from the skies in a heavy, unrelenting downpour that gleamed blue-white, like icicles, in the light of the street lamps.
Louise sensed Patrick looking at her. His voice was eerie, disembodied by the darkness. ‘We don’t have to do this.’
‘Yes, we do.’ It wasn’t that she was simply contradicting him. They had no option but to carry out the plan they’d made in order to bring back Alice. The danger of discovery they faced in the cemetery was very real. But she was prepared to risk everything she had, even her life, in order to see, touch and hold her daughter again. She made an effort to empty her mind of everything other than the task in hand.
She couldn’t predict with any certainty what was going to happen with Arthur or with the ceremony of Alice’s return. She only knew that now she and Patrick had made the decision to proceed and set the chain of events in motion, they would have to continue and see it through. Risking the outcome, whatever it brought them – and Alice.
‘It’s foul out there. You should wait in here. I’ll be as quick as I can.’ Without waiting for her to reply, Patrick left the car and stepped out into the rain. She heard him open the boot. He lifted out the shovel and pickaxe and pitched them over the railings. The bag and torch followed, but he leaned over the rails and deposited them more carefully on the ground.
She watched him step up on to the bonnet of the car and jump over the metal fence into the cemetery. When he landed, he picked up and switched on his torch, pointing it away from himself and the road and into the cemetery. She glanced at the car door. Patrick had parked too close to the rails for her to open her own door, so she took her handbag and slid across the seat to his.
Patrick looked round when he heard her click the car door closed. He turned up the collar of his jacket against the rain and came to the railings when he saw her climb on to the bonnet of the car, as he’d done. Extending his hand, he helped her jump down on to the cemetery side.
‘Are you sure you want to come with me?’ he asked.
‘We made this decision together. I want to help.’ She picked herself and the shovel up from the ground and followed Patrick along a path between the headstones. Ten minutes later they were in front of the white marble angel they’d chosen because of its resemblance to their daughter.
Patrick shone the torch on to Alice’s name and dates and the pair stood for a moment, rain streaming down their faces, remembering their lives as they had been before Alice had been taken from them.
The angel was heavy. It took their combined strength to lift it and its plinth from the plot and set it aside on the path. When they finished, Patrick handed Louise the torch and raised the pickaxe over the ground that held their daughter’s coffin.
‘Ready?’ he whispered.
‘Ready,’ she answered softly. She propped the light on the ground behind the headstone in front of Alice’s grave and prepared to wield the shovel.
Rain had already soaked through their clothes, weighing them down and dampening and chafing their skin before they’d even started digging. The ground was wet, sloppy. Earth had turned to soft liquid mud that oozed into their boots, permeated their trouser legs, and slimed beneath their coat sleeves. It irritated and rubbed but they worked on steadily, gasping in cold gulps of air as they shivered and froze.
The cemetery was quiet, still, and Louise was very aware of the noise Patrick was making every time he hit the earth with his pick. It was easier for her to work quietly. All she had to do was slide the spade into the earth and pile it out beside the grave.
When they heard a car engine Patrick hissed, ‘Stop!’
Louise switched off the torch and they flung themselves flat on the swampy ground between the grave markers until the car headlights moved on and all sounds of the engine died away.
Patrick waited for silence to reign once more among the tombstones before reaching for his pick and returning to the hole. Louise continued to shovel out the sodden clods of earth he loosened, adding them to the pyramid she was building to the side of the grave.
Louise’s spade hit Alice’s coffin before Patrick’s pick. When she heard the dull clunk of steel on wood, she tensed and looked across at Patrick. His eyes were enigmatic, glittering pools in the light from the torch.
‘I need the bag,’ Patrick whispered. He was standing waist deep in the hole they’d made, covered in mud from head to foot.
Louise was closer to the bag than him. She stretched out and pulled it towards her. After unzipping it she lifted the torch on to the side and studied the contents.
‘There’s a small axe somewhere in there,’ Patrick prompted.
She found it and handed it to him before moving away from the hole to give him more room to work.
Patrick lifted the axe high above his head and struck a blow. The blade bounced off the highly polished oak. It was then she remembered that they’d opted for the highes
t-quality coffin because neither of them could bear the thought of cheap wood rotting beneath Alice, leaving her to lie in the dirt.
Patrick followed the first blow with another, and another. Louise closed her eyes and winced after every one. The noise he was making echoed around them so loudly she was sure it could be heard in the bedrooms of the houses across the road.
Mouth dry, heart pounding, skin crawling with fear, she stared at the darkened windows, expecting curtains to move or a light to be switched on at any moment.
Apparently oblivious to the din he was making, Patrick continued to strike the wooden coffin lid. He only stopped chopping when he heard the wood splinter.
Crouching low, he inserted the blade of the axe into the gash he’d made in the surface, pushing and twisting, exerting pressure to widen the aperture until it was large enough for him to insert his hand.
He leaned back and wiped his face, rubbing more dirt on to it than he removed.
‘Here.’ He handed the axe back to Louise.
She took it and returned it to the bag.
Patrick kneeled down on the coffin in the bottom of the grave and felt around inside the hole he’d made with his right hand. The torch flickered and the shadows thickened.
‘I can’t see what I’m doing down here. Move the light closer,’ he ordered Louise, emotion making him brusque.
She lay on the ground, leaned over and shifted the torch to the edge of the grave. She blanched when, through the hole Patrick had made in the coffin lid, she caught a glimpse of Alice’s shroud clinging to her decomposing remains. She closed her eyes tightly against the sight of blackened skin and pale bones. But it was too late. The image was already imprinted on her memory, as was the deterioration in the coffin lining she remembered as white satin trimmed with lace. It was now green with mildew and, after Patrick’s rooting around, stained by brown slimed earth. The thought of the daughter she’d loved and cared for every single moment of her life since her birth, lying in the ground in such filth, horrified and sickened her.
Nauseous, trembling, she crawled behind a neighbouring tombstone and retched.
Patrick climbed out and followed her. ‘Louise …’
Ashamed and disgusted by her reaction and of their desecration of their daughter’s grave, Louise couldn’t bear to look at Patrick.
‘Louise,’ Patrick repeated, urgently. ‘I can’t do this alone. I need your help.’
She mumbled, ‘Sorry.’
He touched her shoulder. ‘Think of Alice.’
She pulled herself together and crawled back to the side of the hole. Picking up the torch, she waited until Patrick had climbed into the grave again before shining the light down on the coffin and its macabre contents.
Fresh wooden splinters were strewn around the oak box, all mixed in with the rain and mud, and she couldn’t help thinking that now the coffin had been breached her daughter’s body would decay all the quicker. The words the minister had spoken at the service echoed through her mind.
Ashes to ashes … dust to dust …
She turned aside but it was useless. The sight of the hole, the coffin and its contents had seared into her memory and she knew the images would haunt not only her nightmares but her waking moments from that time on.
‘The bag.’ Patrick held out his hand.
She passed it to him.
He took it from her, opened it wider and moved her hand that was holding the torch so the beam illuminated the contents.
He searched through it until he found a pair of garden secateurs. Angling the torch again so it shone down on the coffin at the bottom of the hole, he said, ‘Try to keep it steady there,’ before stooping down over the damaged lid.
Breathing heavily, desperately trying to think of what Patrick was about to do as ‘necessary’, Louise watched as he inserted his right hand back inside Alice’s coffin. He rooted around in the muddy, waterlogged remains for a few minutes before pulling what was left of Alice’s right arm through the gap he’d made. It was pale against the mud, skeletally thin. Louise had to suppress an urge to lean down and stroke it.
Holding the arm up outside the coffin, Patrick passed Alice’s fingers into his left hand. Something was wound around them. It glittered silver in the torchlight when Patrick removed it and slipped it into his pocket. Then Louise remembered. She’d placed the silver chain she’d bought Alice for her birthday in her daughter’s hands before the undertaker had closed the coffin.
Patrick separated and splayed Alice’s fingers. He gripped the little finger tightly, picked up the secateurs with his right hand and, taking his time, placed the blades either side at the base where it joined her palm. He exerted pressure on the secateurs and snapped, freeing the slender bone that still had skin, flesh and nail attached to it.
He released Alice’s hand, and it and the length of arm he’d exposed slithered back inside the coffin. He felt in his back trouser pocket and removed a sample bag. He dropped Alice’s finger into it and offered it to Louise. She stared at him in horror.
‘Take it,’ he ordered.
She reluctantly took it from him, went to her handbag, opened it and laid the bag gently inside.
When she turned back, she saw that Patrick had climbed out of the hole and was busy with the spade, filling in Alice’s grave. She knelt down beside the earth she’d piled up and helped him to push the mud back on to the splintered coffin.
All the time they worked, she felt that it was Alice and not the angel who was watching them, and all the while Alice’s voice echoed through her mind.
Mum? Dad? Are you both mad?
Was she? Was Patrick?
Had they both been driven insane by the loss of their daughter?
Were they crazy to believe Arthur? Would they really be able to hold Alice again tomorrow night? Not the rotting, decomposing Alice buried in the grave they’d just despoiled. But the smiling, living, breathing child they had both loved.
When all the earth had been returned to the grave, Patrick scraped as much of the mud from the path as he could. He shone the light around Alice’s plot.
‘Too much mud – someone might get suspicious. Take that flower pot to the standpipe and fill it with water. We’ll wash down this whole area.’
Louise did as he asked. When it was as clean as they could make it without brushes, they dragged the angel and its plinth back on to Alice’s grave.
Patrick stared at it. ‘No one would ever guess we’d been here,’ he murmured.
‘Except us, Patrick. We know and we’ll never forget it,’ she said sadly.
He lifted up the pick and shovel. ‘All we can do is hope that Arthur keeps his promise and that this will have been worth it.’
She retrieved the bag and her handbag and followed him back towards the railings.
Twelve
PATRICK AND LOUISE were emotionally and physically drained by the time they drove back into Wake Wood. When they turned up the drive to the cottage, Louise noticed a faint streak of a lighter shade of grey lining the eastern horizon that suggested dawn was breaking somewhere above the rain clouds.
Patrick parked the car, turned off the engine and slumped over the steering wheel. Louise switched on the interior light and glanced at her watch. ‘In one and a half hours I’ll have to open the pharmacy.’
‘No, you won’t.’ Patrick sat up and rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s more important you sleep for a couple of hours. If people find the shop locked they’ll return later if they want something. I only hope no animal is hurt or falls seriously sick today. I’m barely capable of rational thought, let alone operating or doctoring.’
She glanced down at their filthy clothes. ‘Before we make any decisions about today, the first thing we both need to do is shower and change.’
‘And give the car a good clean,’ Patrick added ruefully; the interior light illuminated seats and a car interior coated in a layer of mud as thick as that on their boots and coats. ‘If you take first shower, I’ll tackle the car. I can
’t get any dirtier than I am now.’
Louise clutched her handbag close to her chest. ‘Do you think—’
‘There’s no point in discussing what’s going to happen. Not now, Louise.’ Patrick spoke harshly, cutting her short.
It was then Louise realised that he’d had as many, if not more, misgivings than she had about their desecration of their daughter’s grave.
‘We’ll find out one way or another tonight,’ Patrick said in a softer tone.
Louise knew it was the closest she would get to an apology. She glanced at her handbag. She couldn’t stop thinking about the contents of the sample bag inside it. She longed to ask Patrick if he was as terrified of a negative outcome of the ‘return ceremony’ as she was. Especially when she recalled the lie they’d told Arthur. But she simply couldn’t bring herself to phrase the question. There were so many imponderables that could affect the outcome.
Patrick was right. At nightfall they would find out the truth – or not – of Arthur’s promises. And if he really did return Alice to them, despite their lie, then all the trauma and horror of the night would have been worth it. Wouldn’t it?
Patrick finished cleaning the car, stripped off his filthy clothes in the porch off the kitchen and went upstairs to shower. Clean and dry, he went into the master bedroom to dress. He’d assumed Louise was downstairs but as he was about to go down the stairs he noticed the door of the guest room was open a little. He pushed it wider. Louise was standing in the middle of the room, looking around.
He gazed at the shelves full of toys and books. ‘It might be a different room in a different house, but it’s as if Alice had never left,’ he murmured. ‘You’ve arranged all her things just as she had them on the morning of her ninth birthday.’
