by John Moralee
Staying near the wall was not as easy as I hoped. Twenty feet further on, an arched headstone jutted from a mound of tall grass and nettles. There was a hole beyond where the ground had fallen away. There was a sheer drop into darkness. White roots poked from the sides of the gaping maw like teeth. I was fairly sure I could see the rotten wood of a coffin lid about six feet down, like it was slipping out from the ground. I couldn’t see the bottom. It was too shaded. Sure, we could go around it, staying besides the wall, but it meant that if the soil decided not to take our weight -
Down into the blackness.
We stopped. I looked around. “Joe! Brian! Where are you?”
There was a call roughly from ahead. It sounded like Joe.
Alexander followed me around the perimeter of the hole. We had to take a crooked route between some large tombs where the ground was more solid and level. It was quite disorientating and I lost sight of the wall. Alexander had a finer sense of direction and took the lead, commenting on the Gothic architecture of the tombs and the general ambience. I thought they were grim, lonely things. Why did people want to be buried in miserable eerie places?
We passed a tomb the size of my home and I gagged at the sight of beetles and larvae nested in abundance in the dark recesses. Ivy covered gargoyles stared at me. I was getting tired. My shin bruise was throbbing. “How much further?”
Alexander said not far, which translated as I-haven’t-a-clue.
“Let’s turn back while still we know the way,” I said.
But Alexander pointed proudly at the tiny white speck that was his handkerchief. As if mesmerised, we trailed across the ground, dodging the graves sunk low and darkly in the copse. These graves were behind the large tombs for aesthetic reasons, for they were close together and very early memorials. Some were knobbly slabs of nameless granite. Weather had worn off the names. We reached the handkerchief, but there was still no sign of Brian and Joe.
I called out their names. The silence that followed was truly foreboding. “Forget them - let’s get the ball and go.”
Alexander knew more than a thing or two about projectile motions, including equations of flight and range, and he reckoned the ball was no more than twenty feet from the wall - so we searched through the weeds. A ball could be lost easily in the greens and browns. “We should split up and search in a pattern,” he suggested.
“We stick together,” I said. “Alone is stupid.” I had seen too many Abbott and Costello pictures to go wandering alone in a graveyard, especially Old Carney. I had a feeling Joe and Brian were not larking around. Brian needed his football more than a game of hide and seek. I told Alexander my thoughts.
“You know Joe,” he said, “this is just a laugh to him.” As if that was a good enough explanation. Always the rational one.
I poked my foot into some weeds and brushed against something that rocked and pressed against my foot. Looking closer I saw a smooth brown surface. The ball! I bent down to pick it up. And realised my error -
It wasn’t the ball.
It was a long and ancient bone.
Definitely human.
A femur half buried in grass and soil.
I lurched backwards and fell on my backside, pale and shaken. Alexander rushed to my side - saw the bone and scrunched his face with disgust. He tugged my arms and I groggily stood.
“I nearly picked it up!”
“It’s just a bone,” he said - sounding unconvinced. “There is bound to be loose bones.” He was as shaken as me - his grammar was hiding. “Are,” he corrected. “There are bound to be loose bones.”
Non-verbal understanding passed between us.
It was time to leave: football or no football.
“We can’t leave Joe and Brian,” I said.
“Give them a shout and if they don’t respond it’s their fault.” Alexander wanted me to shout because he sounded like a girl when he raised his voice.
“Brian! Joe!” There was no reply so I sucked in a huge breathe and tried again. “BRIAN! JOE!”
“Try again,” Alexander suggested.
“BRIAN! JOE! We’re going home! You hear? Game’s over!”
There was a scream so far away it was little more than a crow caw.
“God,” I muttered, “that was Brian.”
Neither of us believed it was a joke. There was a second cry and this one was louder, coming from where we had walked between the large tombs. I saw Brian’s terrified face. He was running towards us, directed by our shouts. His mouth was a wide oval. Arms flaying. Legs pumping across the distance.
He was being chased.
Another thought struck like a bullet, lodging in my throat.
Something’s trying to kill Brian!
“It’s after me!” he yelled.
Brian leapt over a headstone, stumbled on the slippery ground, and shuffled forward until he could stand again. He glanced backwards. He cried out at what he saw and sped on blindly, crashing through thorns and bushes, falling and staggering onwards. Running and falling. Running and falling. His face was bloody - but he seemed too frightened to care about pain. A guilty thought stirred in me that I was ashamed to admit: he’s bringing it this way towards me. And then I saw something, a greyness behind Brian. It was chasing him at a blurring speed. I couldn’t focus on what it was nor did I want to because it was death. I knew that. It was death, pure and simple.
Alexander must have seen death, too, because he started to moan and pull me back - but I shook him off.
“Run Brian!”
Brian ran. His legs and arms powered by adrenaline and fear. He briefly gained ground on the grey shape, but there must have been a hole because his left leg buckled like it was trapped in a steel trap.
Krrrk.
Brian’s leg broke and he screamed a raw, unrestrained scream.
And then the grey shape was on him, lifting him as easily as a football. It was like a human dressed in rags, hunched by terrible disease ... but it was something else all together. A ghost?
Something metal flashed across Brian’s throat and he stopped screaming and a blood fountain spattered the ground. Noooooooo! He was discarded like a sack of potatoes, lifeless head tilted impossibly to expose inside the bloodied neck. Then the grey thing had no further interest in Brian. It looked at me.
It didn’t need to speak for me to understand it.
It wanted to kill me next.
I turned and realised Alexander had already fled. I decided he had the right idea. I sprinted in the direction of the gap, afraid the grey thing knew exactly where I was heading and could get there first. I ducked behind a tombstone and changed route, zigging and zagging towards the darkness the elms provided. I was hoping I could hide there.
But it was waiting for me. I saw it rising up out of the dark, its teeth glittering.
Turning, I pounded across soft ground towards the church and heard the thing chasing. I dared not look back. I just ran and ran.
My foot landed on nothing solid. Feeling the ground give way, I stumbled and fell down into a hidden hole. I felt sharp brambles and stones ripping my shirt and tearing my skin. The loss of footing reminded me of toboggan rides during the winter, accelerating down a hill on a wooden sleigh. But this ride was dark and out of control and I felt panic rising inside me as I tumbled down into the dark.
I landed on my knees in total darkness. I was in icy water about six-inches deep. The second finger on my left hand was numb and the others hurt like they had been dipped in fire. I could feel flesh sliding over bone.
Above, the thing growled. I sensed its desire - no, its need to kill me - but it was too large to get down the narrow hole. It was up there and I down here. It couldn’t get me! I felt like laughing, but tears came instead. The thing growled again and scratched at the ground. It was trying to dig down to me. I felt around, touching cold earth on all sides apart from above. I was trapped. It was just a matter of time before it got to me.
It was going to catch me eventually.
I had no where to go.
And then I heard Alexander shouting at it, calling it away. The fool was trying to save me. I tried to call out and tell him to run. I wanted him to save himself and get to the village for help … but nothing sounded from my throat except a pathetic whisper.
The thing moved away after a minute - probably to go after Alexander. I waited and expected it to return, but it did not. I didn’t want to move out of my safe haven, but the fear of being trapped there if the thing returned stirred me into action.
I attempted to climb back out of the hole.
Unfortunately, the sides were too slippery and soft. My efforts just crumbled the tunnel’s walls. I stopped before I buried myself. By then I could see a little in the dark. I could see the water around me. It was moving. Flowing. That meant it had to be coming from somewhere and going somewhere else. Alexander had been right about underground streams. I felt around in the dark until I discovered an opening in the ground. The water was flowing out of it. The hole was wide enough for me to crawl into, but the top of the tunnel was barely above the water level. I lowered myself into the water and crawled upstream, praying I wasn’t making a bad decision. The water was icy, unaffected by the niceties of summer sun. Forty Fahrenheit, if I were lucky. I wormed my way upstream, desperately eager to find somewhere to get out of the freezing water before I died. I could smell two things: rust and methane, smells trapped in the stagnant air. They grew stronger as I went. I had no doubt the smells were from decayed bodies: at least the dark offered one respite from seeing Old Carney’s horrors. I crawled on bloodied knees and elbows for thirty minutes, going where I could, bumping into low ceilings and crawling across things I knew were bones, skulls, teeth.
Then I saw a dot of sunlight ahead. Fatigue and pessimism told me it was in my imagination, but I crawled towards it. The sunlight was real and sprinkled the underground stream with a taste of life, sickening mushrooms and lichens grew from the corpses embedded in the walls. I could see the whites and yellows of human bones, but the cold had taken away my concerns. I pulled myself out of the water, heavy and numb, glad to be alive.
*
Later, much later ... I woke. I felt cheated by sleep - it was the last thing I had wanted, but my body had said otherwise. I was balled up like an embryo. The sunlight was very weak now. It was probably ten and the sun would be on the horizon, or beyond, and this was twilight’s final rays. Carefully, I climbed from the hole. There were dark grey and black shapes all around and I stayed low, hunched, not daring to stand in case I was seen. The sky was the darkest blue, stars arising now the sun had left. I looked and found the church’s spire for some degree of orientation, which was nearby. I was on the far side of the church in the corner of Old Carney that had dissolved back in the 1920s. The church was between me and the gap.
Somewhere, it waited.
There was a sound. It travelled crisp and clear. It was the rustle of weeds shifting. I stayed as still as a rock, hoping whatever was hunting me didn’t detect me.
A silhouette flitted from grave to grave.
It was no larger than a boy.
Was it Alexander?
It was certainly not the grey thing.
I crept after him and he sensed me.
He whispered: “Who is it?”
“Uh,” I said. “It’s Mike. Is that you, Alex?”
“No,” he said. “It’s me ... Joe.”
Joe! The relief was enormous and at the same time I feared for Alexander. Had he been killed like Brian? Joe moved forward. He was bloody, bruised and muddy. He had gone through some nightmare and I saw guilt for Brian’s death etched in his face. He had aged a thousand years. His eyes were hollow. “My fault, Mike. I caused this ...”
“Shush ... where is it?”
“I don’t know. Jesus, it was eating ... eating Brian. Oh, God. I thought ... I thought I was the only one left.”
“Alexander?”
Joe motioned with a finger across his neck. “I think it got him. I heard him screaming.”
So Alexander was dead, too.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked.
“I think we should hide. There’s a tree I’ve seen with a good hiding place.”
Nearby one massive elm had tipped to an impossible angle, the trunk supported by a mass of exposed roots like raw tendons anchored in the black topsoil. There was just enough space between the wide roots for us to hide inside while being protected from attack. We hid there and spoke in whispers.
“Mike, I wanted to scare you and Alexander so I forced Brian to hide in one of the tombs - the idea was to come out and scare you ... but there was something there. Brian said so, but I was stubborn. Then I heard it breathe. Jesus, I wet myself there and then. I mean, the stench was just ... I could hear you and Alexander going past but there was nothing I could do because I was so scared ... and I was afraid to wake it because I knew ... I knew, Mike, that it would kill me. About a minute later Brian cracked and ran out of the tomb screaming. It woke and sort of rushed past me. I don’t think it saw me, but I was knocked aside like a fly. I’m sure if it had seen me it would have killed me first - but it went straight for Brian. It was so fast I ... I must have been knocked out when I hit the wall because I woke with these bruises and could hear Brian screaming at you guys. I’ve been hiding ever since.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said. “But we can’t use the gap.”
“I’ve tried the walls, Mike, but those stones are too tightly packed with moss and mortar. I couldn’t get a grip. But the two of us ... you could stand on my back and get over. At least then you’d get out alive.”
“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “You stand on my back and you escape.”
“No. It’s my fault Brian and Alexander are dead. I don’t want to kill you as well ...”
“You didn’t kill anyone. It did.”
“It’s my fault,” he sniffed.
“Rubbish. You didn’t know.”
“I should have known ...” He reminded me of a rabbit afraid of a farmer’s shotgun: eyes wide, mouth slack. His eyes were dry from crying too much. He wasn’t thinking rationally. I had to do something to get us out of this mess. “Look, we either hide in here and wait for someone to come looking for us, which might not happen for days, or we escape together as soon as possible. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t want to stay here,” Joe said. “Mike, I had an idea but ... you see that tree near the church?”
The tree in question was an oak. Its large branches were like tree trunks themselves.
“We could climb it. There’s a branch overhanging the wall. We could climb it and drop down on the other side. What do you say?”
I nodded. But a fear lurked: I was a poor tree-climber. Joe knew this.
“It’s a good time to learn,” he said. Joe started to move, but I stopped him. I had sensed something. I was sure the thing was out there – waiting for us to make a move.
“Hold on,” I said. “We need a distraction.”
I looked for a stone to throw but there weren’t any nearby. There was a bone, like the femur I’d seen earlier. In normal circumstances I would not have touched it, but I was no longer frightened of dead things. I had crawled through a tunnel filled with them. All I cared about was surviving the day. There was nothing to fear except the living, so I picked it up and hurled it as far as I could. The bone struck a headstone and whip-cracked. A shadow raced across the graveyard to investigate the noise. It had been just a few yards from the us.
We broke cover and headed for the oak, but we didn’t move so fast we made noise or slipped down one of the pot-holes. The time spent going across the ground dragged and I thought we would never make it. It would see us and ...
Reaching the tree, Joe asked me to go first and he’d push me up. I tried it but - damn - it was like gripping treacle.
“You go first,” I said. “You can pull me up from the branches.”
Joe climbed
the tree, moving slowly but surely up the trunk and I waited, keeping eyes peeled for the thing. He slung his legs over the first branch and leaned down, one hand gripping the tree and the other ready to grab me. I hugged the trunk and started an arduous climb, clutching the trunk so hard my skin and the bark were one pulped mass.
And then it saw me.
Joe saw it too. The time for discretion was over.
“Come on, Mike, climb!”
“I’m trying! I’m trying!”
But it was running and it knew the quickest route. It belonged in Old Carney and we did not.
Joe reached for me, but there was a clear foot between us. “Hurry!”
“I can’t!” I was weeping with the effort.
“Come on, Mike, just a bit more!”
It pounded across the distance. I struggled higher and higher. Joe’s fingers touched my shirt collar and vainly tried to grip something.
But I slipped. It reached the tree and swung at Joe, but he was too high for the talons to cut him. He shouted at it from safety - cursing it and distracting, giving me time to sprint in the direction of the church and, beyond it, the gap. Behind me, the thing tired of trying to reach Joe and launched after me.
“Get help!” I cried.
Joe dropped from the branch onto the lane outside Old Carney. He was safe. “Don’t die, Mike! I’ll be back!” I heard him running, but it would take an hour for him to muster some adults and get back. He would return too late.
I hurdled two headstones in quick succession and scrambled up the bank to the church. The broken ruin offered many shadows and places to hide. If I could get there then -
It struck me in the back and shoulders - fast and heavy - I went down into grass and stones and my head swam. It was worse than a rugby tackle. It was above me. On top of me. I couldn’t fight something so heavy and powerful. I knew I had to play dead or suffer like Brian.
Then I was vaguely aware of being dragged by my feet into the church, too stunned to fight. I kept my eyes closed. I was dropped and rolled. A quick slash and my throat would be spill my life on the holy ground. It sniffed me quizzically ... and moved away. I could hear its slow breathing - close - but I dared a look. There was a dim amber fire lit on what was left of the altar - now a sunken slab in the floor. Six or seven grey things sat around motionless, like statues. The grey things were all dead and had been for some time. Human corpses. Skeletons in dusty Sunday clothes twenty-years-old.
