The Boy in the Cemetery (12 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Through the shadow of the house, Carrie Anne crept and crept quietly. She opened the cellar door, which obliged with a creak. She clicked the pull-string switch and the cellar was filled with a dubious flickering light. One slow step after the other she descended before finally stepping onto the cold stone floor. It sent a shiver from her bare feet to her spine. The musty and wet smell from the damp walls were now tinged with the now familiar scent of death. There were ten or more snapping vermin traps on the floor. The kind of trap that was designed to break the necks of any creature that dared to come sniffing for the bait. There were six fat rats in the traps, with broken backs. Carrie Anne knelt by each one and pulled back the snapping device. A couple of times it slipped from her small hands and cracked the rats further. She cradled her collection of six rats in her arms, like horrific, dead children. They were cold and sticky and limp but she didn’t care. With her prizes she went into the night. The wet grass of the back garden soaked her toes. The trees danced at her arrival to rustling music and her skirt blew around her legs. She lobbed the first rat over fence.

“Boy, are you there?” she whispered.

She thought she heard rustling in the dark bushes. She placed another rat on her side of the fence and waited. The night was must have been magical for it had the power to turn moments into hours. Her heart pounded with anticipation and then relief as the boy’s rotten arm came through the fence, disappearing to the other side with the rat.

“Come on, boy, come to me,” she said, dropping a rat by her feet. The boy clicked his jaws, click, click, click.

“That’s it, boy; it’s safe here, it’s safe.”

He sniffed the air and crawled under the gap in the fence. His arm was caught for a moment and flesh was peeled like a skinning a rabbit. The boy didn’t stop. Like a curious beast he came to the girl before snatching the rat and devouring it. Carrie Anne had backed further towards the house and she dropped another rat at the back-door entrance. Again the boy happily took it as Carrie Anne stepped into the kitchen. The boy paused at the door, looking at Carrie Anne questioningly.

“It’s OK boy; it’s safe, I promise. No one will look for you here.”

The boy waited. He held out his hand to the doorway as if feeling an invisible force. Carrie Anne held out another rat by its tail, tempting him. The boy slowly and with trepidation crawled into the kitchen, leaving mud prints on the tiles. She lead him to the cellar and down the creaking stars. She closed the door behind them as the boy crouched on the floor. Carrie Anne gave him the remaining rats, which one by one went messily down his gullet. Then she joined him on the floor and she cried because he was safe and she hugged his bones and dry skin.

Carrie Anne took a screwdriver with a red handle from her father’s toolbox that he kept in the cellar. The boy watched her intently as she scraped symbols into the stone, blowing the dust away.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 YES NO

It was her own version of a Ouija board, except the dead she wanted to speak with was not floating in a sea of darkness and the unknown. The dead was sitting in front of her, in the form of a young boy.

“This is so we can talk; do you understand?” she asked.

The boy looked at the symbols, his eye and socket flicking over them. He raised his finger and pointed. As he did, dirt and lice fell on the stone. The lice scuttled off into the shadow the flickering light could not remove.

YES.

Carrie Anne gasped and held her hand over her mouth as if to stifle the noise. She freed her voice.

“You understand. I have so many questions I don’t know where to begin. How old are you?”

12

“How long have you been twelve?”

L O N G

“Have you always been in the cemetery?

L O N G L O N G

“Do you have a name?”

YES

“What is it?”

B O Y

“Boy? That’s what I call you. Do you remember the name your parents gave you?”

NO RMEMBR

“That’s so sad; you must be very lonely.”

NO ANYMRE

The boy stroked Carrie Anne on her cheek. She began to cry more sweet tears; he ran a finger under her eye, catching a droplet and placed it on his own torn cheekbone. She smiled and again he reached out a grey hand and stroked her.

“Why? Why did you help me?”

The boy tried to return her smile in a twisted, broken way.

YU NO BE SAD, I SW YU SAD, YU NEEDS BE HPPY.

The boy held a hand to his mouth and he chocked before regurgitating a crawling beetle. He gripped the thing as not to let it escape as it writhed in his fingers. He leant into Carrie Anne’s mouth; she didn’t resist as he opened her lips with his free hand and placed the beetle on her lips with the other. Instantly it crawled into her throat, she panicked for a moment before the insect went tickling into her gullet. Her eyes glazed over and turned an onyx black. As Carrie Anne fell backwards, the boy caught her and suddenly she saw the past as if it was her own…
The dead man crumbled to dust, his hissing gas spent. The boy choked and gagged as if drinking sand. He stumbled with blurred vision and skin that burnt and itched. His bones ached and he felt as if the very blood in his veins congealed. He fell against gravestones and the dirt of the graves alike. He wandered blind, drunk without gin but something more potent and deadly. The town was alive at night and he fell over the cobbled streets. Too late to see the blackest horse pulling the blackest carriage it reared and crushed the boy under hoof. Split, he surely was dead, but death ignored his wounds as he lurched, jittering. People screamed and were reviled at what he had become. He stumbled away not feeling the breaks and the seeping. He stumbled over the dock and between boats was swallowed by the ever-hungry river. He lay at the bottom in the silt, wondering how he was not dead as his lungs that no longer required air instead filled with the black water. And like overfilled pigskin canteens, they split. With little choice he walked from the riverbed to the bank and pulled himself sloshing from the water. He felt no fear or panic as his nerves were now dead and useless. Knowing he was now dead he made his way back to the cemetery and sat in the cold unforgiving tomb where he met his fate. He didn’t move for a very long time, instead he watched with a newly developed morbid curiosity as maggots and all manner of crawling carrion burrowed into him and feasted. Curious still he now could hear their thoughts and with that he could control them. In return for doing his bidding he gave them the shelter of his flesh and belly. He used them to spy on the comings and goings of the cemetery. There were his eyes; they were his ears. They helped him burrow into the ground and dig out the graves and helped him build bone creations for his new home. He killed grave robbers and those intent on doing the dead wrong. He added their bones to his collection. He used the rags of the dead to make torches to light his way with fire from flint stone. In the evening he would praise the angel who looked like his mother and watched over the dead child. He would speak to her through guttural tones until his vocal chords rotted away. He tended her and kept the stone clean. Mostly, however, he hid from the living that had forsaken him. Until, over time, no one came to his cemetery at all. Until… He remembered her first day here when she looked out of her window and saw the cemetery for the first time.

She remembered thinking that wouldn’t it be strange if someone lying in that cemetery would be looking back. What she didn’t know was that she was right.

The boy saw her first as he peered from the dirt in a grave. He pulled himself up, crawling from the cold dirt to the grass. He spat spiders into his hand and then let them crawl over his fingers. He blew dead breath onto them before releasing them onto the ground. They crawled through the grass past the cemetery and into the garden, to the outside wall, up the drainpipe and into the house. They watched the household and the inhabitants. They watched the oppressed young girl who held so much sadness and confusion inside. They watched her parents who were monsters disguised as humans. The spiders crawled back to the boy and into his hollow dusty body. He saw what the spiders saw and understood what they showed him. And the day she came wandering into his cemetery he watched her from the graves, beneath the dirt watching. She found the angel stone that reminded him of his mother, and that he kept clean, free from dirt and time. She found his bones, which he used to decorate the tree, by breaking into the church and she rejoiced in them. For the first time in nearly two centuries the boy felt love in his decomposed heart.

When it was over, Carrie Anne slower sat up she stopped trembling and composed herself. Her eyes returned to normal and she saw the memory beetle skitter to the shadows.

“I need to tell you something, please understand,” Carrie Anne said as she held the boy’s hands. “There are people coming to the cemetery; they will be looking for the people you saved me from. I am afraid they are going to find you and your home. They will take you away from me.”

NO.

The boy looked sincere in his belief and attempted to calm the girl, despite his crumbling face. Before Carrie Anne could talk further, she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the stairs above. She froze, hardly daring to breath. The boy heard it too and growled.

“Shush, stay here. I will be right back.”

Carrie Anne held the boy back, pleaded with him. He paced and threatened as she made her way to the cellar stairs.

“Stay there,” she said and closed the door behind her.

Chapter Fifteen

She hoped to be back in her room and undiscovered as she came to the foot of the stairs. Her father was standing above on the landing. He was wearing a white T-shirt and black pyjama bottoms. He looked down at his daughter from the landing, his beard a dark shadow across his face, a scornful shadow..

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I needed a drink of water,” she stuttered. Her knees felt like jelly and suddenly her muscles didn’t wish to work; every inch of her cramped. “Really? Why are you still in your school uniform?” He threw a bundle of clothes at her. It landed at Carrie Anne’s feet. Even in the dark she knew it was her mud-covered nightclothes from the previous evening. She felt sick; she could feel bile crawling up from her stomach to freedom.

“I’ve been in your room.”

“Why?” Heart pounding, ba dum, ba dum, ba dum. As he spoke he began to step down the stairs- 1, 2, 3 and so on closer and closer.

“Why do you think? I cannot deny what I am any more. I don’t expect you to understand, but your mother, try as she may, is not enough for me.”

“I’m your daughter,” she said with no strength in her body.

“And you have your secrets and I have mine; we can keep each other’s.”

“I’ll scream for Mother; she will know.”

“Do you think she will care? Or do you think she will be happy in her denial? Besides she’s taken one too many sleeping pills.” To demonstrate his point he shouted at the top of his voice “Mother! Mother! The house is on fire.” He smiled, happy with himself. “See? Nothing.”

Carrie Anne spun out of the hallway and into the living room. In the dark she misjudged the room and hit the wooden coffee table. She fell over it, hitting the floor and jarring her chin on it. Her lip split and blood filled her mouth. She turned to see her father kneeling over her. He held his hand out and caught her chin, turning it this way and that.

“See, silly girl, you’ve hurt yourself,” he said as Carrie Anne trembled at his touch. “My way is so much less painful for everyone.”

There came a scraping sound from the kitchen.. Her father heard it too.

“Those bloody rats.” He spat and, determined, stood to investigate, much to Carrie Anne’s horror.

“Daddy, please don’t; stay here with me,” she begged.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he replied. “I’ll right back for you.”

He disappeared through the dark house into the kitchen. By the time Carrie Anne had stood and gone after her father, he had already disappeared through the cellar door. She stood at the doorway and Father looked up.

“Stay there—” he pointed “—I’ve not finished with you yet.”

As he stepped on the stone-tiled floor, Carrie Anne closed the door and locked the latch. She heard her father begin to scream and she held her hands over ears and slid to the floor, sobbing. But this was not enough to stop the sound of terror and pain and cracking and splashing. He screamed so shrilly that it pierced her ears, until finally after the noise was etched into her future nightmares the sounds suddenly stopped.

Carrie Anne lay by the cellar door until the night evaporated as the sun began to rise. A scratching sounded against the door; Carrie Anne held her hand against the wood. The boy’s teeth clicked together. Click, click, click, his jaws snapped.

“It’s OK, boy. It’s OK. He was no father. My tears are only for misguided childhood memories. I feel nothing at his loss. You did the right thing,” she whispered. “We have to go see Mother.” And Carrie Anne unlocked the latch and the door opened and the boy crawled out.

Chapter Sixteen

When her mother opened her eyes the room was dark except for the morning creeping through the curtains.

“Hello Mother. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, dear, what are you doing here? Where is your father?” The light half illuminated Carrie Anne with a yellow beam. Her face was shrouded in shadow.

“I wanted to see you. Father is in the cellar.”

“The cellar? What is he doing there?”

“He is with the rats.”

There was a smell in the air of rotting vegetation and compost. And something else metallic, not unlike a rare steak.

“I need to tell you something, Mother. But I also need to ask you a question.”

“You can tell me.” Was there nervousness to her voice? “Where is your father?”

“Mum. When you found out what Dad was, why didn’t you do anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you found out what he had been doing to me, why didn’t you do anything?”