The Boy in the Cemetery (3 page)

The boy had to push branches to one side as he approached. It was as if the trees themselves were trying to deter him from his path. The boy could not be deterred and the scratching of the trees was nothing to the pain that fate had already inflicted upon him. He reached out, pulling the ivy from the door. The plant resisted but was torn aside nonetheless. The wind blew harder and the trees shook harder as the boy pushed at the creaking doors. They opened with no resistance. As the boy took his steps into the tomb the wind howled.. It sounded like a mother crying.

The tomb itself had an instant chill to it. There was moonlight seeping in from holes in the ceiling, giving the stone a grey misery. In the centre of the tomb, a stone coffin lay broken and open. It seemed that the boy was not the first to come looking for treasure. He was surprised at how fate had led him to the tomb only for his curiosity to be rewarded with disappointment. At the moment the boy turned to leave, the shadow flowed from the corner and gripped the boy, holding him in the air. The darkest of things holding the boy was at one time a man. That same-said time had ravaged the creature of its flesh. Clearly it was dead, yet it stood straight holding the boy; its eyes had long gone, but it stared at the boy through empty sockets. The sight before the boy was so far beyond the world he knew, that all fear was replaced with awe.

The dead man moved with the grace of dried twigs and leaves. It was barefooted and dressed in shredded rags. It was bald save for a few strands. When it spoke it sounded like urn ashes blowing on a storm.

“Boy? Why you here, boy?” it asked. The boy answered clear and true; he had no fear of this ragged beast. He had seen the death of a loved one and the death a hated parent. There were no horrors in the entire world or the next that could compare.

“I came for your secrets; the dead have no need of such things,” he said with defiance.

“Don’t we? Do I look dead to you, boy?”

“Yes, although this is not a true death. I have seen a true death.”

The dead creature laughed a rotten laugh, its breath a rancid stench. It slowly lowered the boy to his feet, before kneeling with a creak before him.

“Are you not scared, boy?” it asked.

The boy wondered if he should be and searched his inner soul for even a hint, curious he felt no fear at all.

“No, I feel nothing.”

“Why?” the dead man wanted to know.

“I have lost everything. There is nothing more that would cause me more upset.”

“How?” the creature wished to know.

“The Consumption took my mother’s mind and I watched as the river took her body. My father taught me how to search for the dead’s treasures. But I found only an undead thing. Like my father’s life, his teachings amounted to naught.”

The dead man pondered the reply. Its fleshless face wrinkled as if trying to understand. The dead man seemed to reach a decision. And it spoke. “Are you alone, boy?”

“Yes.”

“And you want my secrets, boy? Do you truly want my secrets and will you accept them as they are?”

“Yes,” the boy replied without hesitation.

“Then take them, boy; I have been this way for more years than there are worms in the ground. It is time to finally rest.”

And the dead man opened its mouth so wide its jaws snapped and from the maw came a green gas. It found the boy and entered his mouth and nostrils and eyes. The boy tried to cough but the gas found its way deeper into his lungs. And when the boy’s eyes stopped watering, the dead man had gone, replaced by rags decomposing on the tomb floor. The boy, to his dismay, realised no breath left his lips or heart pumped in his chest. He looked at his thin pale arms and the veins had turned black. For now they held the secrets of the dead. All that was left to do for the boy was to scream and scream and scream.

Chapter Three

The sky was a miserable overcast grey of obese clouds and depressed rain. Carrie Anne knew exactly how it felt. She sat in the back seat of the car, staring through a window that all the rain in the world seemed to be pelting. Her reflection, broken by the rain giving her face a melted look, stared back with bored and uninterested eyes. Her hair was long and blonde or so she always hoped it would be. Instead staring back at her was a sad face with lank hair that fell over her dark eyes and gaunt face. Her head rocked slightly as it lay on the headrest and in time with movement of the car, no, no, no, no, no, no, over and over again. She hardly recognised the reflection that looked back. She didn’t want to be that person; she didn’t want that life. She was twelve years old but felt a lot older in an unreal way as if time had aged her beyond any human means and now she was trapped in an emotional limbo, too young to understand herself as yet and too old to change. The rain tapped the car with the sound and force of a thousand pebbles; she felt the weather echoed her mood and Carrie Anne wondered if the sun even existed any more. Her father swearing at another driver broke her thoughts.

“David! There is no need for that.” Carrie Anne’s mother squealed in surprise at the string of expletives that had left her father’s mouth.

“Oh really, Lucy? Did you see that idiot? He nearly drove me off the road.” The rain was so thick that the constant swishes of the wiper blades were making it difficult to see the motorway roaring around them, never mind a driver intent on killing them. If they had been run from the road, Carrie Anne doubted she would even care.

She looked at her parents and inwardly felt a wave of sinking from her stomach. Her father sat driving, gripping on to the steering wheel and leaning hunched, as if he was trying to squeeze his face against the windscreen. His hair was dark and greasy and slicked back on his balding head. His hair looked like it was holding on for dear life before time took more of it. However, he did have a dark beard as fairly recently he had taken to not shaving, as this made up for his retreating hair line. Her father always had a permanent scowl. He was always angry with the world and any chance to vent was taken at every opportunity. For as long as Carrie Anne could remember her father had been disappointed. Sometime before she was born her father had an accident at his job as factory supervisor (what the factory made or what he supervised she didn’t know) but since then Carrie Anne knew two things about her father. The money settlement meant he would never have to work again and couldn’t thanks to his twisted spine that made him limp. And his life disappointed him and now he was never satisfied. He had been that way even before his accident that permanently took his ability to work. Carrie Anne suspected he was waiting for the favour the world owed him. Of course there was the other side to her father that she dared not dwell on, a secret side that although hidden was always in her thoughts and followed her as an overbearing shadow. No one knew of its existence except the three in the car.

All daddies do this, it means I love you, it’s OK mummy said it was OK, but it’s a game and we can never talk about it to anyone, you understand? Good girl, good girl.

Too late now, she had thought on it and her skin crawled and panic began to deepen her breath. The familiar feeling of being trapped and needing to suddenly run made her nerves prickle. She concentrated on her mother to distract herself. Her mother was extremely thin and her skin was mapped with deep blue veins. Carrie Anne’s mother had a presence of denial about her. It was in her shuffle walk, her drooping shoulders and her dark ringed eye sockets. It soaked from her skull to her hair, which was a weave of long split ends. Despite her mother’s total inability to face reality, Carrie Anne loved her; she just wished she was different, stronger and able to think for herself rather than be told what reality was. She was too influenced by her husband, but Carrie Anne didn’t hate her for it. She knew that for her mother the truth must be too horrible to comprehend. Even when she caught him sneaking from her room. Had she always known?

Carrie Anne sat on her bed and pulled the covers around her ears to block out the sound of the shouting. There was screaming and accusations and crying. No one came to see if Carrie Anne was OK.

This is your fault; this is entirely your fault. You hurt your parents. This is your fault.

“Mum, say something.”

“How long has he done this?” The words came as easy as speaking with a mouth full of nettles. Carrie Anne could see the pain in her mother as she spoke.

“Just that one time you found him in my room,” she lied to spare her.

“Has he done anything else to you?”

“No, just…the touching.”

“Did you lead him on?” The words choked her.

“No, how could I? Why would I?” Her voice croaked through pain and upset and the knowledge that her mother couldn’t help her. She watched as her mother stood up and, like a blind woman, wandered out of the room to nowhere in particular.

That was the family: David and Lucy Jones, parents to twelve-year-old Carrie Anne Jones. It was just the three of them and they were all running away. Carrie Anne dared not think of it and tried to keep it locked in the back of her mind, whereas her parents denied the existence of any kind of problem and saw their leaving as just a fresh start somewhere new, together as a normal solid family. Yet it was there like a presence in another room, silent and unseen but there nonetheless.

Carrie Anne remembered sitting in the bathroom, hating herself and the memories trapped within her. Her mother knew they were there. But now instead of relief and sanctuary there was only confusion. Carrie Anne knew what her father had been doing all these years was wrong, very wrong. She hated her weakness in not being able to call for help. She prayed every day someone would notice she was different and help her. It never happened. When she was younger, when she lay in her dark bedroom she would pile her teddy bears and dolls in a soft wall on her bed. She had a fragile hope of the wall stopping her father, but it never did. Although, try as she may, she could not hate either her mother or father. She was their daughter and it was her duty to love them, despite the cruel loss of her childhood and alienation of her innocence. So instead, she did the only thing she could do, and hated herself. She had found what she was looking for in the bathroom. A razor blade of her father’s from a cabinet on the wall. The orange plastic around the sliver of steel was broken easily against the tiled floor. She paused with the blade shining under the gaze of darkness. She pushed the blade against her skin, slowly and softer. Then, after holding it there a moment, she pushed it deeper still. There was no pain as the skin split, the blade being so sharp it only caused a slight stinging sensation. Immediately she felt all her frustration pour from her arm with the blood that pooled around the razor. She pushed the blade against her skin again and again, creating a tally-marked pattern. Each cut taking away heaviness that crushed her ribs. Her goal here was not to die, but to create a physical pain, a distraction from the worse pain from the scars that penetrated her soul. But as the blood flowed, that relief turned to fear, as she dripped from the patterns criss crossing her skin.

Carrie Anne who had learned to keep silent for most of her life screamed and screamed and screamed.

Her mother and father ran to her, bleary-eyed from being woken, their shocked faces and fear as they stemmed the bleeding with towels from the room.

“What did you do?” they accused. “What did you do?”

Carrie Anne remembered being sat at the dining room table. The room with the red velvet wallpaper that she had always hated but had been there since she had been born. Tears were stinging her eyes and she looked at her mother for love and comfort from the seat opposite. But her mother had withdrawn into herself and couldn’t meet her daughter’s gaze. Carrie Anne’s father paced the dining room talking with the determination of a man trying to convince himself as well as those listening. He paced up and down. He wore his usual outfit of a cheap shirt and jeans a size too big. It had been a few days since she had been found in the bathroom but the memory was fresh…

“Get the first aid kit,” shouted father.

Mother was crying as she ran from the room, reluctant but hurrying. In one hand father gripped her face; the other held the soaking towel against Carrie Anne’s arm.

“Why? Do you want to destroy your mother? Is that what you want?” He spoke in an angered whisper; his teeth were gritted and spittle ran from his chin.

“If you do this, if this continues, you will kill your mother and destroy this family. Now I promise I won’t touch you again. I’m clear now; I just got confused how I loved you. This attention seeking needs to stop. Do you understand me?”

She nodded. With that, Carrie Anne resigned herself to the fact that this was her life now. As the lasr of her self esteembled from her, Mother entered the room…

Carrie Anne’s arms were bandaged. They didn’t hurt but they itched like dry scrathes infected by ants.

“I’ve been talking on the phone to a few people and I’ve decided to do what is best for this family.”

“She needs medical help, David,” Carrie Anne’s mother said. “We need to get her some help.”

They both looked at Carrie Anne who had hung her head down.

“And what would you tell them, Carrie Anne?” Her father was frantic.

“Nothing,” she whispered.

“No, we can’t let things destroy this family. I’ve been busy; I told you.”

“What are you saying, David?” Her mother finally spoke but it was without conviction; there was only defeat.

“I’ve given notice on the house, and I’ve put a deposit on another, far from here, where no one knows us, where we can live in peace without fear of persecution because of a mistake. We can be a family.” Throughout his entire speech, there was no pleading for forgiveness in his voice, no real sense he had done wrong.

Carrie Anne wanted to stand and scream from the top of her lungs. To cry for help and tell the world what had happened to her. She wanted to shake her mother, to say help me, be a mum and help me. And in her mind for the briefest of moments she did just that and reality changed to match her version of it and she was away from the nightmare that was her life. But that was for only the briefest of moments. All she could do was to cry bitter child’s tears. However, things were just the way they were. Carrie Anne could see that. She saw it in the way he looked at her and in his eyes; she knew he was alluding to their previous conversation. Agree, keep quiet or destroy her mother.