A Stranger's Grave

by Craig Saunders

You know what to do, said both women in unison, their voices melding and becoming one, and in his hand he no longer held a pillow, but a pointed spade.

  You know, they said, and he said, no, but he was down to his knees in a grave with dirt piled to one side.

  Sweat covered him. The night was warm. He thrust the spade into the earth once more. He looked around and saw where he was.

  I won’t bring her to you, he said, but he was already pulling a body from a stranger’s grave. Not her, but the one above. He discarded the bones and clothes that he found, throwing them aside into the pile of dirt.

  He dug down again, through the dirt that had fallen into the rotten casket, until he hit bone. He pulled the bones out, and they all came together, a naked skeleton with scraps of her last dress on her body, her clavicles like a coat hanger for the remains of the dress.

  The one tooth was still in her head, and her skull large on one side. The bone where her missing eye should have been was fused, too. Her left arm was just a stub, with a tiny hand at the end of the malformed bone.

  Bring her, said the woman in black, lay her to rest.

  I won’t, said Elton, cradling the bones in his dirty arms. I won’t, he said, as he walked in the darkness through his cemetery to the black angels and knew that no matter how hard he protested, he would bring her.

  *

  70.

  While Elton slept fitfully on the couch three sisters watched him. One, the white, to the left. The black to the right. And a little girl in the centre.

  ‘You come to us tonight. Bring us together.’ The black one, kneeling beside Elton and whispering in his ear, like she was talking to a lover she’d never had.

  ‘We love you. You belong with us. Not with him,’ said the one in white. Distaste as she said the last, but she was not talking to Elton or about him, but to her little sister.

  The little girl nodded, the gesture somehow obscene with her deformed skull, bloated on one side. She wasn’t mentally impaired, not at all. She’d always been a fast learner, and if she hadn’t been able to make herself understood because of her slurred words, well, she’d been able to make herself understood in different ways.

  The black, the white, both looked at the little girl with undying affection.

  She didn’t run from them anymore, but looked at them with a sweet smile, like all the hide and seek was done, just a game. Now she was growing and games were things for children.

  Death has no dominion. The good lord does not care who sleeps and who wakes, who dies or who lives. There is no heaven, just rest in the earth. Sometimes little girls sleep and sometimes they wake, and if they’re good little girls they don’t cry when they wake.

  And a good girl, with two sisters who loved her?

  Maybe she’d send a spirit with more power than her to do what she could not. To kill two boys who defaced her home.

  The cemetery. Her stranger’s grave.

  Good girls don’t cry when they wake. But others might. They might, if the little girl looks up at them while they lean forward with a pillow in their hands and pray for God to take them and rock their daughter to sleep.

  They might cry when good girls make themselves understood in childish ways, like burning bad boys to death, or sending her sisters to do what she could not.

  Good girls don’t cry when their father smothers them, but they might feel anger and maybe they express themselves in the only ways they can, with the powers they have. Scream or smile or giggle or cry.

  Same in life or death, because in a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town, death has no dominion, nor God, nor man...but a little girl?

  Maybe. Maybe a little girl’s anger comes out in different ways, ways that kill and burn and mutilate, but she’s just a little girl and she doesn’t understand.

  Elton could have understood this. Sometimes anger comes out, whether you want it to or not.

  *

  71.

  The sun came up.

  Elton opened his eyes at 6 am precisely, as he had nearly thirty years.

  He’d fallen asleep on the couch again and his neck cracked loudly when he sat up, and it hurt like a bastard. He rubbed his knee, aching, too, from sitting in the same position all night. He had no idea when Harrison had left. The only thing that told him the crazy old man had been there at all, and not just a dream, was the lingering smell of sweet tobacco.

  He breathed it in, like coffee.

  His hand ached and he remembered rocking a buggy like a man terrified of what he might do should his child wake. His hands ached from gripping a pillow and pushing it down hard. Fire in his knuckles, his once broken hand the worse of the two.

  He clenched his fists over and over, trying to work out the stiffness.

  His neck ached from falling asleep on the couch, yet again.

  His knee wouldn’t work as he pushed himself upright. He stumbled and limped into the kitchen. He felt like he’d aged twenty years overnight.

  He put on some water to boil in his new kettle in the kitchen he loved. The kitchen he’d cleaned, the surfaces spotless, the brass and cooker gleaming. He looked around, thinking of what he’d like to do should he live long enough to do it.

  A few shelves, a few more cupboards over the sink. Things to keep new things in. He thought, should he live through the night, that it might be nice to own some things he didn’t need. It might be nice to sit on his couch late at night reading a book by the light of a lamp. Might be nice not to dig graves at night, but read himself to sleep, listening to the slow traffic or the birdsong or the whistle of the wind through the cracks in the door and the windows. It could be a wonderful, wonderful way to spend an evening to just light the fire in the winter and drink a cup of hot coffee watching the coal burn, making out shapes in the flames and maybe daydreaming about a different time.

  Daydreaming about the times he’d had with his wife, or the birth of his beautiful daughter, instead of dreaming about a cleaver in his hand, or beating two men to death with his scarred fists.

  Francis, he thought, as he took his first cup of coffee on the couch. She’d been born in their home. The last home he’d had. Now the cottage was home, and his life was different. It was just him, just the cottage, just the dead.

  He could imagine spending the rest of his life in the cottage. To work keeping the cemetery, his cemetery, tidy and clean. To show some respect for the dead. He didn’t want to dig graves anymore. He wanted his coffee, his book, the wind blowing and whistling and the dark outside and the light inside.

  But the dream remained, and he knew, at last, how to rock them back to sleep. With a spade and some dark work, for digging graves was night work, and that was the way it was meant to be.

  If he’d have a life after, he wanted it. He wanted the book and the fire and the coffee. He wanted to cook himself a meal that didn’t come from a can. Buy a cookery book. Have a rack of spices, a rack of herbs. Like people had, maybe, if they were happy. Was that what happy was? A rack of spices, a row of books? Was that happy, having things you didn’t need to live, but that made life easier and a little more pleasant?

  He didn’t know. Tonight, dark work.

  Tomorrow, life or death. It would be the last night he’d ever dig graves in the dark again, one way or the other.

  *

  The Ledger

  There’s an entry in a ledger in a cottage in a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town.

  The ledger was written between 1941 and 1944 while a woman named Edith Holt waited for her husband to return from a war he wanted no part in, yet still he gave his life for his country.

  She hung herself from the once exposed rafters of the gatekeepers’ cottage. No one ever rocked her back to sleep, but she rocks from the rafters still. She watches the gatekeepers come and go, watches the dead from her eternal unrest. Sometimes the rafters creak and people wonder if the wind is up, but not so much since the plasterboard went up and a company working for the council installed insulation in the loft space.<
br />
  But she watches still, Edith Holt, and hopes that one day a gatekeeper can come and release the little ones from their torment.

  The ledger is arranged with a key against a small map. The new section of the graveyard is not included, because it did not exist then. But the old parts are, marked clearly on the map. One part, where the little ones were buried and then forgotten, carries a single annotation:

  The Strangers’ Graves.

  *

  72.

  6:30, drinking his second coffee of the day, and someone pounded on Elton’s door.

  He undid the lock on the door to find PC James and Davis standing before him, with DI’s Terry and Francis behind.

  His mind ticked into overdrive straight away.

  Ex-con, standing on his doorstep in the same clothes he wore yesterday. Crumpled clothes, unshaven. Hair probably a mess. And what?

  He tried to gauge something from their expressions, but couldn’t tell a damn thing.

  Plus, old man in his house, the smell of pipe smoke, and a door locked from the inside.

  A worry for later. Four coppers on the doorstep was problem enough for the minute.

  ‘Is this a stay at home visit or a get my coat?’

  James looked over his shoulder at Terry. Terry spoke for them, it seemed. Elton didn’t think James would have been calling the shots, a PC over a DI, but the PC shrugged at Elton anyway, like he was saying he was sorry, but couldn’t put it into words.

  Elton shrugged, like he was saying it didn’t matter.

  ‘PC James told us a story,’ said Terry.

  ‘Did he?’ said Elton, looking at no one but James.

  ‘I guess we’ll come in. See how this goes, eh?’

  Elton puffed out some air and stepped back. ‘You trust the crazy man to make you coffee?’

  ‘I’d trust Harold Shipman to make me coffee, Mr. Burlock, so long as it’s hot and strong.’

  Elton didn’t laugh, but he appreciated it for what it was. A little nod; this doesn’t have to be hard. Not if you don’t want it to be.

  Though DI Francis was looking at him like he was a hard man the whole time Elton brewed coffee, Elton didn’t let it faze him. He was just making coffee, making small talk, like his heart wasn’t hammering in his chest with unanswered question.

  Biggest question in his head?

  How do I stay out of jail, or the nuthouse?

  Either way, he knew he had to do his best, because a little girl was awake. Might be she was hiding from her sisters and it might be that she was just playing a game with them, like a little girl might, if she’d never progressed past three years old because her father had murdered her.

  Fuck, here he was, a murderer, trying to sway some seasoned coppers, thinking; why the hell would they take any notice of me? But all the time, too, listening to Henry Harrison, a murderer himself, trying to talk him into...what, exactly?

  Digging a little girl’s rotten corpse out of the ground and burying her beneath the three angels?

  Fucking hell. He really was nuts.

  And Harrison. A man who walked through locked doors. Could he be trusted?

  Maybe not.

  He couldn’t tell the coppers any of that, though. Couldn’t tell them that, no.

  ‘So,’ he said, finally, figuring they were pussyfooting around and he’d have to get to it if he wanted his day back. Maybe they were just waiting for him to trip himself up. He knew for a fact he wasn’t entirely off the hook. Knew the murders were still unsolved. One of those things where everyone waited until ‘new evidence came to light’. Like DNA, or a convicted murderer fucking up a coffee morning and ending the day in jail.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said.

  ‘PC James? Your ball. You want to run with it?’

  PC James looked distinctly uncomfortable, but Elton figured that was largely because this was like some kind of interview. Maybe PC James would see a jump in pay come the end of the year. Maybe he’d be laughed at every time he opened his locker. Find a voodoo doll, or a cornhusk doll, or a satanic bible...some shit. No doubt. Same world over, boys’ shit going down in the locker room, the kind of thing ended with young boys raped to death in prison and ended with someone being beaten so badly you couldn’t even tell where his eyes were anymore.

  ‘So, I looked into it. Didn’t think there was anything to it...but I looked.’

  Elton took a sip of his coffee, which was still too hot. He watched the PC looking uncomfortable and tried to keep calm himself.

  ‘Henry Harrison?’ said James.

  Elton nodded. ‘Henry Harrison. That’s the man. He knows what’s going on. Told you to talk to him. I remember.’

  ‘Well,’ said PC James. ‘I can’t, because he killed himself in the grounds of the cemetery back in1961.’

  Elton sighed and shook his head as it all clicked into place. Of course Harrison had killed himself in the cemetery. And the story Harrison told, did it have any truth in it at all?

  Some, for sure. But Elton was no longer sure which parts.

  ‘Is everyone fucking dead?’

  ‘Cemetery, Mr. Burlock,’ said DI Terry. But he wasn’t smiling.

  That's a good thing, thought Elton, because when coppers started smiling you knew you were screwed for sure.

  *

  73.

  ‘Shit,’ said Elton and put his head in his hands.

  ‘This puts us in a position, Mr. Burlock,’ said Terry.

  Elton didn’t look, because his head stayed in his hands. He could feel his thick stubble. He tried to remember the last time he’d shaved, just for something to keep his mind ticking, because he felt like he was shutting down.

  He couldn’t shut down, though. Because the job wasn’t done.

  And he was fucked, too, because now he didn’t even know where to start.

  ‘Tell us about Henry Harrison.’

  He laughed, then, because one man he’d thought was maybe the same as him? Dead. Three sisters? Dead.

  Any chance he had of getting the whole lot of them back to sleep and letting the rest of the cemetery sleep?

  Dead.

  The only question for the day now was how long he could bullshit four savvy coppers and if he could do it well enough to stay out of the nuthouse himself.

  ‘He died in ’61?’ he said, trying to give himself more time to think.

  James nodded. ‘Slit his throat with a kitchen knife and bled out in the dirt. Local vicar, too.’

  ‘So, you all figure I’ve either been talking to ghosts, or that I’m insane. Or both.’

  ‘Known a few schizos in my time,’ said Francis. ‘Seem normal, some of them, ‘til they try to take a chunk out of your arm. Think they’re zombies or some shit. You know?’

  Like he was saying, you fancy a trip? The kind of trip you get when some nurse or doctor gives you little pink pills or little blue ones.

  Maybe they have pink bars in mental hospitals, too, and not just prison. He didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.

  He did want to know how much of what Harrison had told him was bullshit.

  ‘Did he have a daughter? PC James? Did he have a daughter?’

  ‘Yes. Yes he did.’

  ‘Which is why we’re having a friendly chat,’ said DI Terry. ‘Why you’re not in a mental hospital or a cell already. You understand that?’

  ‘All too well,’ he said. He noticed Davis wasn’t saying anything, just looking up. Looking at something above his head that only he could see. Elton wondered what it was, or if Davis was just really dim. Could be both. Something there, like a cobweb. Or just a mote on the paintwork.

  Could be nothing.

  ‘He adopted a little girl. I looked back through the records. She died the same year as he did – a little while before he killed himself.’

  ‘Any questions about how the girl died?’

  ‘No. Natural causes. The girl was disabled.’

  ‘Survived by a sister,’ said Elton.

  PC Jam
es wasn’t expecting that.

  ‘Yes. Ah...’

  ‘How did I know?’

  ‘That was going to be my next question,’ said Terry.

  What the fuck is Davis looking at? It was putting him off, but he couldn’t ask. Wasn’t up to him to tell the PC to pay attention.

  ‘My next question, Mr. Burlock?’

  ‘How did I know?’ he asked, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure it out. Two degrees, smart arse, and he couldn’t figure what was true and what was shit. He couldn’t think, couldn’t get it, and all the while it tickled him, like pepper up his nose, like the knowledge, the truth, was something he had to sneeze out, look at the light, or pull out a nose hair, do something, because not knowing might get him in jail, or a mental ward, or just plain dead.

  ‘Yes, Mr. Burlock. That’s the question.’

  And what do you say to that?

  Henry’s ghost told me. He told me he was a murderer. Just like me. Take my word for it. Really. Take my word for it.

  Told me the little girl had two sisters. Told me one was killed, one lived ‘til 2007...what did he tell me?

  What didn’t he tell me?

  Didn’t tell me he was a vicar, for one. Didn’t tell me he was dead...but then you knew that, right? You knew, didn’t you? Of course you did.

  Elton knew full well he’d been a fool, and he was going right along, still being a fool, because he could feel the shape of it but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  I’m going to have to dig up a grave, he thought, either way. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night. I can’t go to jail or a mental hospital, Detective Inspector, because I’m the gatekeeper and I’ve got to rock them back to sleep.

  He knew that much was true. He knew there was a little girl, haunting the cemetery, right along with her sisters, and whatever way you looked at it they were responsible for two, maybe three, deaths, and driving one young girl insane.

  Dangerous, yes. As dangerous as going in blind?