by Amy Cross
"Such as what?"
"You know what."
Dr. Wellington pauses for a moment. "It's hard to say. The accident is certainly explicable in terms of a simple crash. It's late, they were drunk, so I guess the driver simply lost control as they entered the town square. It rained a little earlier, so the cobbles were still damp in places. God knows where they'd been during the night or what they'd been doing, but..." He pauses for a moment. "I suppose it's possible that our mutual friends could have had a hand in events, but I'd rather just put this down to a simple accident. It's a sad fact that this kind of thing happens almost every day somewhere in the world. There's not a stone hand working behind the scenes of every tragedy, you know."
Matthews looks back over at Anna Marsh's body, just as the paramedics start loading her onto a trolley.
"It's a damn waste," Dr. Wellington says with a sigh.
"It's more than that," Matthews replies bitterly. "We can't afford to lose the children. We have so few already, and we need them. If they all throw their lives away in such stupid, pointless ways, there's no chance for Rippon to survive. These deaths are going to bring the whole town down."
"Then we're going to have to do something, aren't we?" Dr. Wellington adds, closing his medical bag. "We can't risk missing another chance."
"I'll impose a curfew," Matthews says. "I'll arrange things with Winters in the morning. We're going to have to keep all the children at home during the evenings. It won't be a popular policy, but we've lost two prime specimens tonight. Any more, and the whole town's going to be at risk." He looks down at the stream of blood that's slowly trickling between the cobbles. "I'll get someone to collect as much of the blood as possible," he adds ruefully. "Every little helps."
"Fine," the doctor continues, "but this is getting out of hand. You must have felt the tremors."
"Let's not spook ourselves out right now," Matthews replies, determined to cut off the superstitious part of the conversation. Sighing, he looks across the town square. "This is a mess, but I don't think there's much more for me to do here. It was an accident. I should get off and inform the parents." Taking a cigarette from his pocket and lighting it, he pauses for a moment. "That's gonna be fun, isn't it? Telling two families that their kids are dead. We have enough trouble with kids already. Make sure to squeeze out as much blood as you can. It's better than nothing." With that, he turns and starts making his way across the town square, bound for two houses that are about to receive the worst possible news.
Chapter Three
Stepping bleary-eyed through the door of the cottage, Sam stops for a moment and looks out across the cemetery. Everything seems so calm and peaceful again, as if the events of last night have settled and become little more than a bad memory. She can see a couple of beer bottles glinting in the early morning sun but, apart from that, things seem to have returned to normal. Still, Sam can't shake a feeling of restlessness, and after a moment she remembers the statue of Death, which seemed to go missing during the night. Slowly, she turns and looks over at the mausoleum.
The statue is back in its usual position.
Still holding her cup of tea, Sam wanders over to the mausoleum and looks up at the statue, which stares back down at her with its usual impassive expression.
"So where did you get to last night, huh?" she asks.
The statue doesn't reply. Of course it doesn't, she reminds herself; it's a statue.
"Did those kids drive you away?" she continues. "I know the feeling. I guess they were a bit too noisy, huh? Did you decide to get out of here and hang loose for a couple of hours? Where did you go? Isn't everywhere shut at that time of night around here? Or did you just go for a nice walk?" She pauses for a moment as she imagines Death wandering through the streets of Rippon and sitting in one of the local bars. In a strange way, the image makes sense to her, and she can imagine Death being a regular member of the community around the place.
The statue stares back at her.
"What's this about, anyway?" Sam asks, reaching up and touching the statue's outstretched hand, which - as usual - is reaching down from the top of the mausoleum, as if it's trying to grab anyone who comes too close. Smiling, Sam turns to Sparky. "You see this guy, Sparky?" she asks, her hand still touching Death's stone fingers. "It's like he's determined to look moody as hell. I guess that's what it's like being Death. You can't -"
Suddenly she feels a slight movement in the statue's hand, and she steps back. Her heart racing, she looks up at the statue's face and forces herself to calm down.
"That didn't happen," she says firmly. "That did not happen."
Silence.
"That was..." she says, before she's able to reassert her usual rational thought processes. "Nice try," she says, turning and walking over to Sparky. "Did you see that?" she continues. "Old Death up there got me going for a moment." Setting her cup of tea on the window ledge, she starts unchaining Sparky from the side of the house. "You'll have to forgive me," she says with a smile. "I left you chained up here for far too long, but I'm gonna put that right. I've found the perfect spot for you. Somewhere you can really chill out and have a good view. You'll like that, won't you?"
She glances at Sparky's face.
"Jesus Christ," she says after a moment. "This is pathetic. It's like you're my best fucking friend or something. What the hell is wrong with me?"
After finishing her tea with a big gulp, Sam decides there's no point delaying the inevitable. Carefully and slowly, she starts pulling Sparky across the grass. It's a tough job, and Sam has to stop every couple of minutes to take a little break and get her breath back. Wiping sweat from her brow, she glances up at the sky, where the early morning sun is already starting to bake the town.
"Don't worry," she says eventually, patting Sparky's shoulder. "It'll be worth it in the end. You'll see."
Pulling the angel a little further, Sam eventually crosses the tire tracks left in the grass from the bike during the night. Feeling a twinge of annoyance at the fact that she's going to have to fix that somehow, and determined to make sure that no-one finds out that a bunch of kids broke into the place, she glances over at the gate and realizes that she'll be okay so long as Mayor Winters doesn't decide to make another of his unannounced visits. He usually comes fairly early, so Sam decides that she'll have to get working pretty fast. Lost in thought, she doesn't notice that she's approaching a particularly bumpy part of the cemetery, and she suddenly loses her footing and falls back, with the stone angel tumbling straight down on top of her.
"Fuck!" she shouts as the angel lands on her chest, and there's a cracking sound, accompanied by a cry of pain. "Fuck," she says again, bracing herself for a moment of extreme agony before realizing that the cracking sound didn't come from her at all; squeezing out from beneath the angel, she sees to her horror that one of Sparky's hands has been broken away.
She stares at the damage.
She frowns.
Who cried out in pain? She definitely heard a brief yelp, but she's certain it wasn't her, so...
"Sparky?" she says after a moment, but the angel - as would be expected of a statue - remains completely still.
Sam stands in silence for a moment.
"Okay," she says eventually, hauling Sparky back up from the ground. "I'm sorry about that. Don't worry, I'll glue you back together later, okay? You won't be hand-less for too long." She pauses for a few seconds as she stares at the angel's stone face. If she didn't know better, she'd swear that the cry of pain came from Sparky, even though such a thing is clearly impossible. "You know," she continues after a moment, "sometimes you freak me out, do you know that? Sometimes, just sometimes, I can't help wondering if you..."
Her voice trails off.
"Stupid," she mutters, and she gets on with the job of hauling Sparky to the spot over by the gate where she's decided to erect the statue. She already cleared a plinth yesterday, and it only takes a moment to get Sparky in position. "Okay," she continues, "I'm going to get some
metal straps and secure you in place, and then I'm going to sort out your hand and have that back as good as new, and then..." Sighing, she turns and looks over at the skid marks from the bike. "And then I'm going to fix that, and then I'm going to do the million other jobs that are piling up. I swear to God, there's no rest of the wicked, as my grandmother always reminds me." Feeling a chill pass through her body at the merest invocation of her grandmother, Sam pats Sparky's broken wrist. "You'll be fine."
Just as she's about to turn and make her way back to the cottage, Sam notices movement over by the gate. She looks over and sees to her horror that Mayor Winters has arrived and, as she'd feared, seems intent on making one of his regular unplanned visits.
"I need to open that!" she calls out, hurrying over and pulling the key from her pocket. She unlocks the gate and pulls it open, before glancing back at the skid marks. "Okay," she says, panicking a little, "before you ask about that, there was a slight incident that requires me to repair some of the grass. It's nothing major, and you don't need to worry, and I'm sure I can get it sorted quickly." She turns back to look at the mayor, who seems unusually quiet. "It's just a quick -"
She stops speaking as she sees the mayor's forlorn expression, with tears in his eyes.
"What's wrong?" she asks.
The mayor opens his mouth to speak, but it's as if the words are caught in his throat.
"Has something happened?" Sam continues. "What's going on?"
"Sam, my dear," the mayor says after a moment, clearly struggling to compose himself, "I'm afraid there has been the most awful accident."
Chapter Four
"There," Dr. Wellington says, squeezing the lung as tight as possible and watching as a thin dribble of pale liquid falls down into the beaker. "Two liters. Not bad, considering most of her blood seemed to have been spewed out across the cobbles last night."
"How much do we have in total?" Matthews asks, standing over by the door. Having spent the morning dealing with the families of Dean James and Anna Marsh, he's come to watch the final moments of this gruesome ritual. Although he hates seeing things like this, he often forces himself to attend; he keeps thinking that eventually he's going to get used to the sight of bodies being cut up, but so far his attempts to numb his senses have come to nothing. Standing here right now, staring at Anna's corpse, he feels physically sick.
"One hundred and twenty-five pints," the doctor replies. "Not exactly an abundance of the stuff, but it should be enough to keep him calm for a while. Believe me, I've had to scour the whole county to get supplies. It's not easy, finding all this blood. We might like to mention that to our pal when we see him."
"I'm not sure he's the kind to keep up a conversation," Matthews says, wandering over to the table and staring at Anna Marsh's naked, drained body. The chest has been carefully opened and her internal organs have all been removed; all morning, the doctor has been collecting her blood, and now the shriveled lumps of flesh and meat are sitting over on one of the nearby benches. "Are you sure we can't do something with the rest of the body? Couldn't we liquidize it or something?"
"We have to stick to procedure," Dr. Wellington replies, pouring the contents of the beaker into a special sink that's connected to the large reservoir deep beneath the surgery. "If the bodies could be liquidized, they would have been liquidized in the past. Anyway, where the hell would you get something that could liquidize an entire teenager? It'd take years to break the body down in anything other than acid, and we wouldn't have anything useful at the end of the day. We don't want to mess with things. That's what happened in 1965, and look how that all turned out."
"But we'll be ready soon, won't we?" Matthews asks. "Don't forget, we're already a couple of years behind schedule. It's getting restless. You've felt all the tremors -"
"The tremors are nothing," Dr. Wellington says as he gathers together the necessary equipment for sewing Anna's chest back together. He grabs the wrung-out old organs and dumps them haphazardly into her chest cavity, before forcing her ribs closed and setting up the stapler. "This is the worst part of my job," he mutters. "Imagine how much more annoying it'd be if I actually had to do it properly. Thank God people in Rippon don't go in for that American tradition of open caskets."
Matthews loiters by the foot of the table, watching as the doctor's stapler starts to seal Anna's chest cavity closed. It's a gruesome procedure, and one that Matthews finds to be strangely hypnotic; he even leans a little closer to watch as the thick metal staples are driven through the red, sore flesh on either side of the cut that runs from just below the girl's neck all the way down to her belly.
"Do you ever wonder if this is all worth it?" Matthews asks after a moment. "Are you sure we're not just delaying the inevitable?"
"It's not a question of being worth it," the Dr. Wellington replies. "It's a question of what we have to do. You know what happened when it went wrong last time. People around here need security. They don't want to know exactly what's under these streets, but they sure as hell don't want to have to worry about it coming popping up through the cobbles." He finishes with the stapler and steps back, admiring his handiwork. "I remember when she was a kid," he continues after a moment. "Her mother used to bring her in sometimes. She seemed pretty bright. It's a shame to see her end up like this, but I guess it was always on the cards. Somewhere along the way, she went totally off the rails."
Nodding sadly, Matthews turns and makes his way to the door. He knows that Dr. Wellington is right, but he still can't quite bring himself to have the same happy-go-lucky demeanor that the doctor enjoys. For Matthews, Rippon has become something of a nightmare, and he feels more and more than his attempts to hold back the flood are starting to fail.
Chapter Five
"There," Sam says, using the back of the spade to smooth the ground. "Done."
Stepping back, she admires her handiwork. Two graves, dug and then re-filled in the space of a couple of days. It's been almost a week since Anna and Dean were killed, and for Sam the whole period has passed in something of a blur. The whole town went into mourning, of course, since Rippon is the kind of place where everyone seems to know everyone else. There aren't many teenagers in the tight-knit community, so this double death served as a real blow to the town's future, and Sam felt for a while as if the place had been dealt a wound from which it might never recover. Coupled with that, there was the added surprise of the local priest's death, his body having been discovered crumpled on the floor of the church. All in all, the past week has been pretty intense, but now that the last of the graves has been completed, Sam feels as if she can finally start to relax.
"Rest in peace," she adds, taking a step back. Spotting a mouse nearby, she frowns. "Don't you have anything better to be doing?"
"You've done a fine job," Mayor Winters says, standing over by the trees. He seems to have been hit particularly hard by recent events, as if the deaths of Anna and Dean have shaken him to his core. "I know it'll be scant consolation to the families of these poor souls, but their graves shall at least serve as a reminder of their happy, if brief, lives." Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a white handkerchief and briefly dabs at his eyes. "Such a waste. Two young, bright citizens, cut down before they could reach their potential."
Sam smiles politely. She hasn't told anyone that Anna and Dean were in the cemetery shortly before they died. To be honest, she's a little worried that in some twisted way she might be blamed for what happened. After all, she let them ride out of the place, drunk on their bike, even though there was no real way she could have stopped them. Overall, she feels as if she came a little too close to being involved in the incident, and she prefers to keep a respectful distance. She keeps telling herself that none of this is her fault, but she can't help wondering if she could have handled things differently on that dark and fateful night.
"Sometimes I wonder if the Lord has taken his eyes off this place," the mayor continues. "First, these fine young specimens, and then the discovery of Father J
ames' body. So much death and blood in such a small town. The people are suffering terribly. It's almost as if a plague of death has descended. I can assure you, Ms. Marker, that Rippon has not known such a sorrowful week for a very long time. You must think you've stumbled into the middle of the most horrific town on the face of the planet."
"Not at all," Sam says, staring sadly at the graves and imagining the two bodies resting six feet below in their coffins. "I'm just sorry it happened. They seemed nice." She stares at the dates on Anna's brand new, gleaming gravestone. "I guess it's even worse that she died just a few days before her birthday."
"Walk with me," the mayor says, turning and heading over toward the gate. "Death has a place here in Rippon," he continues as Sam follows him along the path. "As you can no doubt tell, Rippon is a rather unusual place, and I'm afraid I haven't been entirely honest with you. This cemetery comes with certain... duties and obligations that might not seem immediately apparent. I must ask you something, though, and you must be absolutely straight with me." He stops as they reach the mausoleum. "Have you noticed anything strange happening around here?"
"Strange?" Sam asks, her mind immediately flooded with half a dozen examples of weirdness that she's encountered since she arrived in Rippon. "What kind of strange?"
"Any kind of strange," the mayor replies, turning to her for a moment before looking up at the statue of Death. "Anything at all. Anything that strikes you as being a little unusual."
"The odd thing, maybe -"
"Like what?"
Sam looks up at the statue. "That thing," she says after a moment. "I'm probably imagining it, but I swear, the other night, it disappeared for a while."
"It did?" the mayor replies, his eyes wide with horror.
"Well," Sam continues, deciding to backtrack a little, "I mean, I thought it did, but it can't have, can it? There's no way a statue can just..." Her voice trails off as she starts to wonder whether she sounds insane. "The more I think about it," she continues, "the more I realize it was just a trick of the light. I mean, it was dark out here, and the moon was bright, and there were all sorts of shadows and stuff like that. You know how easy it can be to get a little jump." She stares at the statue, and she makes a conscious decision not to mention the time when she thought its hand moved. "Ignore me," she says eventually. "I'm just rambling on."
