Gravedigger's Cottage (8 page)

But I was soothed quickly enough by the rising volume of Robin’s flute competing with the elements, filling the swirling air with “Greensleeves.”

And the last was Debbie, who I wanted to pick up and squeeze from the minute I saw her. She was littler than me by a good bit. She was smiley, almost in a perpetual state of laughter, though on closer look I could see that was just the way her face was built—eyes creased and ready, nose twitchy, mouth turned up.

But she was smiling, too. “Really glad you decided to come, Sylvia,” Debbie said, first shaking my hand like this was a business meeting, then putting both hands on my shoulders like she was imparting sage wisdom—from a half foot below. “Walter said you were being kind of shy about the party thing, but here you are.”

Right. Here I are. At the party thing.

You’d have to say it was more thing than party.

I saw no sign of anyone beyond these four girls, huggy-buggy Carmine, and Walter. This was supposed to be some kind of annual summer-ending tradition featuring the entire under-twenty population of the village. Was this the entire under-twenty population of the village?

“Where’s the rest of the village?” I asked casually.

The girls exchanged glances. Walter just looked at me kind of sheepishly while Carmine looked at the ground like a bad dog.

“It’s over that way,” Debbie said, smiling and pointing in the general direction of the rest of the village.

I didn’t want to sound unpleasant, but I kind of needed more. “Where are all the other village kids?”

Again looks went around the bonfire like the wave at a football game. Robin resumed playing the flute, some hoppy Irish-jiggy thing.

Again, Debbie smiled, and Debbie gestured. “Over that way, I guess,” she said, indicating, again, the village.

“You seem confused,” Jennifer said quite rightly. She took me by the arm and led me over to a nice spot in the sand, sculpted sort of like a beanbag chair, just close enough to the fire. As we got near, something snapped, a little explosion. I jumped, scared, excited.

“Yes,” I said, catching a breath, “I’m confused. A little. I thought this was like some kind of ritual, like a big celebration with every kid in the town and all the teenagers…”

I could see by the flickering firelit expressions that I was way off and sounding stupider by the syllable. Then, all eyes turned to Carmine.

“What did you do?” Jennifer said.

Carmine didn’t answer. Walter also looked peculiar, and guilty, but in a different way. A stupider way.

Jennifer turned back to me. “Sorry, Sylvia. We were having a little beach fire. We do that sometimes. Just us. So then my brother, Mr. Delirious, starts blah-blabbing about how he knows you guys and how he’s been hanging out with you guys and even your dad is showing him around the place and everything…”

Rude it may have been, but I found it physically impossible to look at Jennifer anymore. I found it impossible to look at the other girls or the fire or the sea. I could see nothing in this world other than the top of Carmine’s demented, rectangular head. I stared at him so hard, if I were a magnifying glass he’d already have a white-hot pinhole in his head.

“So,” Jennifer went on, “like I said, sorry. For Carmine. He has reality problems. He should be made to wear a sign or something.”

I looked at Walter then, and he at me. He shrugged. I shrugged. He just looked so forlorn, so young, so dumb. We were here now, so what could we do?

“Tell us all about yourself,” Emma said, “tell us
all.”

Well, I didn’t want to do that. But like I said, I didn’t really want to be rude either.

“There’s nothing to tell, really. We lived in New Hampshire before we moved here, up near the Canadian border. Then our dad was asked to move for his job. Then we came here. And then, tonight, we came here.”

I don’t suppose I really thought that would be quite fleshed-out enough. I hoped, though.

Everybody waited. You know that thing when people can help you out of an uncomfortable moment in the conversation, or they can just let it hang there, floating in the air and picking up gas until it’s like a blimp…

“And she had a whole lot of pets that are dead now and buried all over the yard at our old house,” said Walter, being so helpful I wanted to bury
him
in the yard.

“Shut up, Walter.”

I thought it would just be a minor embarrassing moment, but it was apparently more.

Debbie, Emma, Jennifer, and Robin all looked quickly to each other, pointing and nodding as if I had just said the secret word or something.

“What?” I asked.

Robin started playing something sad and mournful on her flute.

“Nothing,” Jennifer said. “It was just that, well, we didn’t
know
that exactly about you but we
knew,
you know?”

“No, I don’t know.” I didn’t mind sounding a little crisp with them now, since they were creeping me out. Or making me angry. They were weird. Or they were nosy. I wasn’t sure what they were, but right now they were too much of it.

“Listen, stop,” Debbie said, getting up and coming over to wedge herself between Jennifer and me. “You’re scaring her.”

“I’m not scared.”

I was fairly seriously scared. I was right about the night. No good, the night, no good at all. Should have been in bed.

“We just figured, there was some sort of…sorry…death connection to you, that’s all.”

“Why?” I said, sliding away from Debbie through the sand.

She slid along after me. Robin’s flute played louder, but the sea, the surf, got oddly flat and quiet.

“It’s not you, Sylvia—don’t worry. It’s the house, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” I said. “That’s all? Don’t worry? I think I will worry, maybe. What about the house? What about my dead pets?”

“It’s just what happens,” Debbie said. She turned to address her friends. “Remember Sarah? She was really nice, remember? It was the same with Sarah. And what was the name of that girl before? It seems like such a long time ago…”

“I’m going home,” Walter said, and stood up straight and expressionless as a toy soldier.

“Don’t,” Carmine said. “Please, don’t do that. Here, let’s go down to the water and throw stuff in.”

Walter was allowing himself to be towed toward the water’s edge, but he kept looking back at me kind of hopelessly. Serves him right. I told him not to come. Or I meant to. Anyway, he should have known…

Well, who got us into this?
I said to him telepathically because I was too stunned to say it normally.

“The house,” Emma said with an almost irritated sigh, “just attracts people who have, sort of, histories of
death stuff
attached to them. Your pet cemetery is probably the answer. But the fact is, everybody who has ever lived in the Gravedigger’s Cottage has been just dripping in it.”

“We are not—”

“Is it just the three of you, then?” Emma asked sharply, sweetly, softly.

“Emma,”
Jennifer scolded.

“That’s okay,” I said. “Yes. It is just the three of us.”

They waited again, the blimp growing almost visibly in front of us.

But that was fine. Let it grow.

Eventually, Robin lowered the flute from her lips. I already missed the sound of it.

“How come nobody ever sees your dad?” she asked.

“People see him,” I said.

“We don’t see him.”

“He’s a private person. He’s been busy. There’s a lot to do at the house before he goes back to work. He likes his privacy. He’s going back to work tomorrow. There’s still lots to do though.”

“Hmm,” Robin said. Then she started playing “Amazing Grace.”

“He’s the Digger now, you know,” Emma blurted, shattering the song, shattering everything.

“He is nothing of the kind!” I shouted.

Debbie came right up to me, put her small arm around my shoulders. I wanted to pull away but I didn’t. I didn’t because I also wanted to feel the way an arm around my shoulders made me feel.

“She doesn’t mean it like that, Sylvia,” Debbie said.

“No, she doesn’t,” Jennifer said forcefully. It was an odd mix, her high breathy voice and a bossy manner, but she did it. “She just means that that’s the tradition, that the new owner of the Gravedigger’s Cottage becomes the new Digger, that’s all.”

Again, that’s all. That’s
all?
I was beginning to wonder what folks around here would consider worrisome.

“My father is no gravedigger, thank you. And we don’t change like that just because we moved into a house.”

“You don’t move into The Diggers,” Emma said, “it moves into you.”

Oh, how much I hate the nighttime. That probably would not have bothered me in the nice light of daytime. Nothing would have been hiding in there, in the dark corners of that stupid, stupid statement, if the beautiful burning cleaning light of daytime were here to clear it all up. But this was nighttime and I was out here, on the beach by the fire under the bald weak moon, and that stupid, stupid statement got in me and thrashed all around inside.

“Well, that’s just stupid,” I said.

Emma stood up. “Are you calling me stupid?”

The whole point of how Walter and I wound up here on the Beach at the End of the World in the middle of the night was that we wanted to get along, not alienate people. That was the idea.

“Yes, I suppose I am calling you stupid. And now I’m getting my brother and going home.”

I got to my feet and stormed toward the surf, pounding with each step, with each step of course making no sound in the sand so why bother pounding? I expected somebody to follow me, to try and make things better. Nobody followed me.

“Walter,” I called into the darkness.

Almost instantly Walter appeared, almost too instantly, his round white face blossoming out of the black on black of the water under midnight sky. I caught my breath. “We’re going,” I said.

“Great,” he said.

I took him by the hand and led him back up the beach.

“Wait. Don’t,” Carmine said, rushing along behind us. He sounded wounded, genuinely sad to see us go—which was a weird bit of nice in the middle of the weird load of weird.

We passed through the group of girls, past their fire, which was dying down. Robin was back to playing softly, something like “Taps” actually, piping the fire into the next life. Debbie merely said good-bye to us in a nice enough way, while Emma predictably said nothing.

Carmine was still chasing after us as we headed up the sand dunes, where we were also caught up by his sister.

She didn’t say anything before grabbing me lightly by the elbow. I turned, pulling my elbow back.

It was nearly the exact spot where she had first greeted me. We could have been standing in the same footprints. “Don’t take it so hard,” Jennifer said. “It’s just the way things are. You inherited all that goes with the house. No big deal. Not your fault. Nobody’ll hold it against you.”

“Hold
what
against me?” I snapped. “There is nothing to hold. This is stupid. We haven’t done anything. We haven’t
become
anything. My father is about the farthest thing from a Digger you could possibly get. And our cottage is a perfectly lovely place.”

I felt an overwhelming desire to cry, as I listened to my words. As I heard myself defend my dad and my home. I felt an even more powerful desire not to, not now.

“Yah,” Carmine said from behind her.

She was about to say more. Then she stopped herself. “Of course it is,” she said. “And of course you are good folks. We all know that. Look, I’m sorry Emma got you all upset. And I am glad you came down. Thanks for coming down. We’ll see you again. Maybe we can come by, maybe help you work on the walls or whatever.”

“What about the walls?” I said. “I didn’t say anything about the walls. Why should anything be wrong with the walls. They’re great walls.”

“Oh,” she said, shrugging and backing down the dune. “Small village, you know. Everybody knows everybody’s stuff. Everybody knows everything. What can you do?”

“My
walls?”
I called after her. “Everybody knows my walls? How can a village be
that
small?”

“It can,” she said, with a weary kind of sigh as she started trotting back to her friends. “Especially if it’s a village that has Carmine in it.”

Carmine. If we really were the Gravediggers, the next person death was going to attach itself to was Carmine.

For once, Walter did the right thing before I had to.

I heard a thump behind me.

“Ouch,” Carmine squealed.

“Stop telling people about our walls and stuff,” Walter said flatly.

Then Jennifer turned and called one last thing, “To make it up to you, we can let you keep Carmine.”

“Hey,” said Carmine excitedly, “that seems fair.”

I walked on, didn’t turn around. “Stop hugging yourself, Carmine. We can’t keep you. I can’t have any more pets.”

We had crested the dune and were headed back down the other side, to the street and home.

“You could stop being mean,” Walter said finally. It then occurred to me that he had barely spoken during the entire beach
party.
Like he was traumatized by the whole thing and only reanimated now that we were headed home.

“I’m sorry, Carmine,” I said. “But I have been having a hard time.”

We all kept walking. I kept looking straight ahead. The only real sound was Carmine’s suddenly accelerated breathing.

“If you are hugging yourself again, I do wish you would stop it,” I said. Kindly.

“Sorry,” Carmine said.

We hit the street in silence, walked the sad, dark road in silence. The moon, which had been our only reliable light throughout the evening, was no longer reliable, as it tucked in behind thickening clouds. I could feel moisture in the air, even more than when we were down close to the sea. My hair was starting to get kinky, which is the world’s most reliable rain forecaster, and my clothes felt damp.

We were almost home, but, boy, did I wish I were home. Boy, did I miss my home. Boy, did I wish I had not left my bed. God, did I wish I still didn’t know anybody here.

We stood at the back gate for a minute, trying to make a polite job of telling Carmine to go home. We were not even letting him inside the magic perimeter of our grounds, which was not the friendliest thing to do, but enough was, after all, enough.