A Stranger's Grave

by Craig Saunders

  Those little things, well, later, they got bigger, just as any child’s prone to grow and learn things. She didn’t do anything like book learning. She was too young. But she learned, and learned fast, and by the time she was killing things it was too late to do anything about it.

  *

  62.

  Harrison stopped for a while and Elton was half on the nod.

  ‘So you adopted her? Emily?’

  Harrison nodded. Sad.

  Elton shook his head. Tried to imagine what it would be like, back in those day, even now, bringing up a child with such obvious disabilities. People would be cruel. The world could be a harsh place, even for a child with that beautiful, beautiful smile.

  ‘You want some coffee?’

  Harrison nodded again. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

  Elton put the coffee on, just a couple of cups in the percolator. He listened to Harrison knocking out his pipe. Heard the rustle, like he was going through his pouch, stuffing the bowl again.

  He thought while he listened to the sounds two old men make at night, late into the morning. Rustling, bones clicking and popping.

  Tried to reason out the shape of things but couldn’t get a grip on it. The whole thing was too damn big. He didn’t understand it. He wasn’t stupid, not by any means, but he just couldn’t feel it. Like he had a tail, but the rest of the thing was hidden in the bushes.

  The two men sat down again, coffee brewed. Looked at each other for a while, smelling coffee and pipe smoke.

  ‘You want to hear the rest of it?’ said Harrison, his pipe billowing smoke into the cottage.

  ‘I have to, don’t I?’ said Elton. ‘Because it’s down to me.’

  Harrison nodded again. He didn’t reply, but he didn’t need to. Even without Harrison in his cottage, Elton would’ve known it was true.

  Rock the buggy. Squeak, squeak.

  Harrison puffed, stared up at the ceiling. Thinking back.

  *

  63.

  The first time Harrison realised there was something wrong with his little girl was when his neighbour died. She wasn’t even three years old.

  It was 1960. Macmillan was Prime Minister. It was sometime around spring, because the tulips were out in the garden.

  The little girl was in the garden and the neighbour, Margeret, with an ‘e’ not an ‘a’, was in her garden. The little girl got her speech early, and just one tooth that stuck out at a funny angle, so she spoke funny, but her speech was good, quite advanced for her age, and she could understand things well enough.

  She was a beautiful little girl, despite all the things that were wrong with her, but back then, as now, people could be cruel. Margeret was hanging over the fence. People had lower fences back then, too.

  Harrison felt like hitting her, because his neighbour had just called his little girl ugly.

  ‘She’s such a good girl,’ she says. ‘Good of you, too, to take her in. Being so...ugly...sorry...deformed...’

  Henry Harrison said, ‘She’s beautiful, and she understands perfectly well.’

  He turned and took the little girl’s hand and drew her back into the house.

  Margeret went back into her house as the sun was setting, carrying her washing in a basket in front of her. The washing was crisp from drying in the sun without a breeze to soften her undies and flannels and socks.

  There was a big panel of glass, single glazed, back in those days, on the upper panel of her back door. The glass was frosted.

  Maybe, because of the washing in her hands, she misjudged the step.

  She tripped up the back step and somehow contrived to put her head right through the glass. She cut her neck and bled out silently. Henry didn’t hear the glass break as he made himself and his daughter some beans on toast for tea. The sun set and rose and his neighbour but one, a kindly man who lived alone and maybe batted for the other team, in the old way of speaking, found Margeret still impaled on her back door. Her washing was ruined. Henry thought about that, later. That maybe just the washing being ruined would have been enough, but his daughter didn’t do things by half. She didn’t make people’s washing dirty, or make people fall off their bicycles, or trip over a shoe lace that had been double tied a minute earlier.

  She wasn’t that kind of girl. Sweet, yes. Beautiful despite her deformity, yes. But sick inside, too. Yes.

  Maybe it wasn’t the first time he thought there was something wrong, because he didn’t know it was her doing, not then. It wasn’t until later that he figured it out.

  *

  64.

  Other things started to go wrong. A dog that tried to take a lump out of his daughter’s leg got hit by a car about two minutes later, even though there weren’t that many cars around back in those days, especially not in the country. It wasn’t unusual for an hour to pass without a car going down the street, but a car came along at just the right time to hit the dog.

  The dog bled out in the street for a while, through its rectum, like the car had squished its insides. If you jumped on a carton, right in the middle, all the contents squished out in a stream. It was like that. Like the car had hit a carton. That’s what Henry thought while he watched the dog bleed out.

  The car hit the owner, too, but he didn’t die.

  Harrison couldn’t remember his name, but he didn’t suppose it mattered.

  His daughter was in a rare foul mood for the rest of the day, and Henry put it down to shock, as she’d watched the dog bleed out from the window upstairs and the owner scream because his leg had been broken. Henry didn’t want her to see such things, but he was busy trying to save the dog’s life, for a short time, and then waiting for an ambulance for the owner.

  Seeing something like that must have upset her, and she didn’t want tea that night.

  There were plenty of other things, but in 1961, the year his daughter died, he became sure there was something wrong with her, that it wasn’t just shit luck hitting a couple of people. It was when the farm had a fire in the barn and three local kids burned to death.

  *

  65.

  She was playing in the front garden one sunny day. It was spring again, because the tulips were in bloom and the snow drops were gone. Late spring, not that far off summer, maybe April or May.

  Three local kids came by.

  One, Simon something or other, threw a stone at Henry’s daughter and caught her on the head, opening a cut. They all called her names, some terrible hurtful names. Then the other two boys started throwing stones, too. They were bad boys and pretty much no one in town liked them, and Henry knew for sure two of the boys’ parents really didn’t. They were always causing trouble. Today, they might be the kind of kids that got ASBO’s out on them. Then again, they might have been the kind of kids who went into a youth prison for knifing someone. It could have gone either way, but nobody’d ever know, because later that day, playing in a barn, probably smoking, a fire started. All three boys’ bodies were found easy enough.

  Henry could see in his mind’s eye the way things had panned out, though no one ever put all the pieces together.

  The one named Simon tried the door first after a discarded butt started the fire in the old hay. The door wouldn’t budge, like someone had bolted it from the outside.

  The three boys tried to piss on the fire to put it out. It might have worked but maybe it didn’t because the boys were too embarrassed to piss all at the same time and took it in turns, by which point the fire had spread.

  The bodies were found melted together, fused by fat and tendon and bone that was the only thing remaining, although the boy named Simon still had some scraps of hair for some reason.

  Henry knew there was something dreadfully wrong with his daughter the day after that, when he realised that despite being hit by stones the day before, she’d smiled all day like it was her birthday. It was the first time he knew, really knew, that there was something wrong.

  It wasn’t the kind of knowing that came from evidence, exactly.
It was the kind of truth you got from looking into someone’s eyes, or listening to what they say or what they don’t. Real truth, the one you get down inside that starts out as a feeling and soon becomes a certainty.

  Her elder sister must have known that her half sister was coming to power, too, because a week later she came to see her sister, but by then the little girl was already in the dirt and Harrison wasn’t home, because he was in a mental hospital just outside of Norwich.

  *

  66.

  ‘It wasn’t grief that drove me mad, Elton,’ said Harrison. ‘It was guilt, because God help me, it was me that murdered her, and me that paid for the gravekeeper to bury her in a stranger’s grave, so I’d never know where she was. So her sister would never know where she was. Because I knew she’d come back. You understand? I knew.’

  *

  67.

  Elton nodded.

  ‘I figured something like that. It was a long time ago, Henry. You want me to judge? You want my absolution?’

  ‘No. Doesn’t matter now. You know I’m cursed. Just as you are. We’re both kind of dead, right? I can see it in you.’

  ‘How’d you get through the door, Henry?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter to the dead. Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Does to me.’

  ‘You’re the gatekeeper. You know that. You’re on the edge. You see her, like no one ever could.’

  ‘How do I get them back to sleep?’

  ‘I never did know where she was buried,’ said the old man, as though he couldn’t hear Elton. He puffed thoughtfully on his glowing pipe and smoke swirled in the small drafts that crept through the window frames, bowed from true with age.

  Elton watched the old man, smoking, and wondered if he should do something about the windows, like people sometimes wonder if they should put the dog out while their wife talks about the shopping.

  Elton pushed his mind back to Harrison, tried to figure him out. Figured he couldn’t, because the old man, solid or disappearing, walking through walls or pushing the buggy, smoking a pipe, the thick smoke in the air, swirling in the light and the breeze...Harrison was just like him, just smoke. There, but light, somehow.

  The smoke was making his eyes water. He couldn’t help but blink. His eyes stinging, wanting to shut.

  It didn’t matter and he couldn’t get through to Harrison, because Harrison wasn’t there. He was in the past, remembering the day he killed his daughter, or the day he went mad, maybe.

  It didn’t matter, none of that mattered.

  All Elton cared about was that buggy, rocking, rocking, because as much as Henry was fixed on the past, Elton was fixed on the present.

  The sunrise wasn’t far off, and he knew the man wouldn’t be there that long. He wouldn’t be getting any sleep, and for the rest of the day the two women, the little girl, they wouldn’t be around. It’d just be him, his thoughts. He wouldn’t be able to sleep during the day. Never could.

  He wouldn’t sleep, and the next night? He’d have some hard work to do...something involving the sisters.

  A day, wondering. A day waiting. Waiting for the night and them to come again and still not knowing how to get three restless spirits into a buggy and rock them rock them rock them.

  ‘How do I get them back to sleep, Henry? How?’

  Henry jumped, like he’d forgotten where he was.

  ‘Bring them back together,’ said Henry.

  Bring them back.

  ‘How?’ said Elton. His eyes were sore. He longed just to shut them. Blinking against the smoke. Shutting his eyes, a little longer each time.

  ‘They’re under the three angels, don’t you know?’

  ‘But her? Your daughter?’ Elton’s words slurred.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the old man. ‘I never did. I thought she was dead. God, I’m sorry. I thought she was dead. But then she came back and I don’t know how to stop it, because she’s awake, no matter how hard I rock.’

  But for some reason, Elton thought Harrison sounded afraid. Whatever he was, he was afraid of the little girl. He tried to think it through, to reason it out, but the smoke was getting to him, and he was tired. So tired.

  His eyes closed and didn’t open again ‘til morning, and Henry wasn’t there.

  *

  And Death Shall Have No Dominion

  There’s an inscription on the base of a monument in a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town.

  It is from a poem by Dylan Thomas.

  Dylan Thomas died 9th November 1953, aged only 39.

  The inscription reads:

  And death shall have no dominion.

  Dead mean naked they shall be one

  With the man in the wind and the west moon;

  When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

  They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

  Though they go mad they shall be sane,

  Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

  Though lovers be lost love shall not;

  And death shall have no dominion.

  Dylan Thomas did not come back.

  There’s a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town where three sisters did.

  *

  68.

  Henry Harrison watched as Elton’s eyes closed.

  The gatekeeper was the only one who could stop it. The only one who could finish what he had started.

  The only one who could rock him back to sleep, and by God he was so tired.

  He closed the door behind him and as he left three sisters came in.

  *

  69.

  Elton looked down and saw the buggy’s handle in his scarred knuckles. A little girl was in the buggy. He still did not know her name. She looked up at him. She was wide awake, her one eye stunningly green, an exquisite shade like summer grass in a meadow. She was smiling at him, but for some reason even with her beautiful smile and beautiful eye, terror rode his back, a cold kind of fear that ran up his spine, because there was something wrong with her that had nothing to do with the way she looked. She was an abomination.

  Now, why did he think that? How could he think such a thing?

  And even in his dream, he knew that thinking like that was dangerous, very dangerous indeed, because as Harrison had told him, this was a girl that didn’t take slights easily.

  ‘Shh,’ he said, and rocked, even though the hand he rocked with had once been broken and ached. It ached like he’d been rocking for a long time, gripping the handle hard because he was afraid. Afraid to stop rocking, because she was awake, and any minute now he’d be screaming. She wouldn’t scream. She was a good child. She hardly ever screamed, even as a little baby. She just cried a little when she was hungry, or when her nappy needed changing. She never was one to make a fuss.

  She didn’t cry when her adoptive father smothered her, even though she’d been awake.

  Henry Harrison had smothered her in her buggy.

  Elton looked down and found a pillow in his hands. He was shocked when he saw those hands, his old man hands with thick veins and tendons proud along the back, his hair greying, even on his hands as it was on his head and face.

  He pushed the pillow down and found that he did not want to stop. Something about her smile, her eye, made him want to do it.

  That’s it, said a woman’s voice behind him.

  Bring her to us. Send her over.

  The woman in white. Nothing erotic about her now. Elton saw her move around to his side, and her face did not arouse him at all. The side of her face had been caved in. He knew, as he knew Harrison had suffocated his daughter in a buggy, that a woman named Elsie Archer had taken a two handed swing with a skillet at the face of the woman in white while she fucked Mrs. Archer’s husband.

  Mr. Archer never strayed again, nor did he ever sleep with Mrs. Archer again, because she was sentenced to life in prison. Life in prison was longer back then.

  Harrison told him some, the rest he just knew, just as the
dream was somehow true.

  But the woman in black was shaking her head.

  That’s not true, she said.

  That’s not true, said the woman in white.

  Bring her over. Kill her, said the woman in black. She moved around to the other side of Elton, and he saw that she, too, had been beautiful once. It was age that had taken her, some kind of cancer eating her inside.

  Liver, he thought, from her pallor, her jaundiced skin.

  Kill her, she said, and there was hunger in her voice.

  But...but...

  Something tickled at him. Something about a woman in white.

  Had they both told Henry the same thing? Had they whispered in his ear? One a ghost, one a witch, driving him mad?

  Maybe they had. But Elton wasn’t Henry.

  No, I won’t, he said in his dream, and shifted on the couch, murmuring. In his sleep he ground his teeth and twisted his fists shut so tightly that his knuckles ached when he woke.

  No, I won’t kill her, he said, as he pushed the pillow down onto the little girl’s face. He heard her breathing slow. I won’t, he said, I won’t, and pushed down harder until the girl’s chest hitched, then stopped moving.

  He pushed down and killing her felt right, though he didn’t know why.

  Thank you, Elton, said the woman in white and the woman in black as one.

  We know you can do it. Now, she’s asleep. Bring her to us. You know what to do.

  I won’t, he said again, and on the couch in his cottage he cried in his sleep because he’d just killed the little girl.