The Boy in the Cemetery (9 page)

“Do you know who these are?”

“No.”

The detective smiled a disappointed smile.

“We have a witness to say he saw the three of you together. The school says these two bullied you.”

“I don’t remember anything; I hurt my head,” she repeated with a worry in her voice.

“Carrie Anne, I’m not going to lie to you, these two teenagers, kids, were not the nicest. They were criminals in the making. But they are missing, and you have been attacked. They have loved ones just like you. If you want to tell me anything, anything at all, I will listen.”

Carrie Anne looked at her parents. “ I don’t remember anything.”

“Detective, please, we’ve just got back from the hospital,” Dad said.

The detective held up her hands in surrender. “OK, that’s it for now, but we will need to talk again.”

The detective left, much to the relief of the family. She ran against the rain and escaped into her black unmarked police car. She wiped the soaked hair from her face and opened up her notebook. The rain pattered against the screen. In the time she had spoken to the family she had only actually made one note. Just one word;

“Lying.”

Chapter Nine

Carrie Anne’s parents talked about the future and holidays they would have once Carrie Anne had fully recovered. After dinner they watched TV and avoided the news channels. Then they mostly sat in awkward silence, her father watching Carrie Anne with distrust and whatever secret thoughts he kept to himself.

“Don’t go into the cellar,” he said as if carrying on a conversation they had before.

“Why, dear?” Mum asked.

“We have rats, probably from the cemetery. I’ve put down traps.”

“David! That’s awful.” Mum screeched.

“Doesn’t matter; they will be dead soon.”

“Can I go bed? I’m tired…” Carrie Anne said.

“Of course, dear, of course,” Mum said.

Carrie Anne felt anything but tired. Instead her thoughts buzzed around her head, giving her too much to think about and making sleep impossible. She had put on a fresh pair of her pyjamas and cleaned her teeth and brushed her long hair. She lay in the dark, watching the shadows of trees dance on her ceiling. She heard her parents come to bed. Her door opened quietly and Carrie Anne closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. There were footsteps in her room and her heart pounded as for moment she thought it may be her father sneaking into her bed once again. Her mother kissed her forehead and she was alone. The relief made a tear run from her eye to her pillow. After a time the house went quiet. She left her bed and stared from her window to the cemetery. She saw trees swaying and the gravestones crumbling. She saw the shadow of the boy staring at her window,watching her.

The house was dark but Carrie Anne’s eyes had adjusted. She put on her coat and trainers with effort and crept out of her room and onto the stairs. Each step downwards was followed by a deafening creak of wood and a pause, before she moved on again. Each step was with a prayer that her parents did not wake. She walked through the kitchen. She could see in the moonlight several slugs were crawling along the floor tiles, living trails of spittle in their wake. She stepped over them and turned her attention to the back door. The door was of thick, varnished wood. She turned the key as slowly as possible. Please, please, please, she thought with each click of the key. The door opened and the night air filled the room. The rain had stopped but there was a damp smell to the night. As she stepped outside, the stars in a clear sky greeted her. And for a moment she was in awe of them. There was a movment from the floor, at her feet the slugs from her kitchen moving with haste through the doorway. There were at least six, maybe seven, and they fell from the door frame before they slimed together onto the pathway. Carrie Anne followed them onto the grass where they were joined by maybe hundreds more, all moving in the same direction, as a carpet of wet, living tissue. And along the grass other creatures flowed with them. A mass of spiders of all shapes and sizes crawled from the garden and followed the slugs. Far from disgusted Carrie Anne was fascinated by the sight of more and more crawling and slithering things. Maggots rolling, cockroaches marching, woodlice, earwigs and beetles, all together towards the cemetery they went.

She followed the creatures to the fence separating her garden from her cemetery. The creatures poured over the fence and through the railings. She found the dugout area under the fence and she managed to clamber under, but slowly, as her ribs pulled as she went. She didn’t care at all and had only just noticed she hadn’t brought her walking stick. Here amongst the dead and the insects and crawling beasts she felt no pain at all. She parted the grass that rustled with not only her presence but also the mass that she followed.

She came to the clearing where the angel gravestone stood and there, holding on to the stone, was the boy. Although dark and shadowy there was no mistaking the boy’s shape. Small and willowy, hunched yet agile. The boy leapt from the gravestone and landed gracefully by the grave. Then he knelt on one knee and placed a hand to the soft ground. Carrie Anne watched in amazement as the slugs and creatures that followed flowed around the boy before climbing and covering him. At first Carrie Anne thought the insects were here to consume him; however, she soon saw this was not the case as the creatures were absorbed into the boy. They found their way into one of the boy’s many wounds before disapeering into his body altogether. He moved like an ape, covering the distance between the angel gravestone and Carrie Anne just as the last beetle disappeared into his eye socket. He stood in front of her, gently swaying. By the moonlight she saw him clearly for the first time.

He wore clothes that at one time may have been a dark suit of some kind, but now his attire was threadbare, moth-eaten rags. His body was dried sinew and bone, with pieces of one-time flesh dripping bones like a burnt candle the colour of tripe. He wore no shoes or skin on his feet. His head was swollen and oversized, a patchwork of tears and fissures. His one blue eye regarded Carrie Anne deeply. He was indeed, as she had thought when she first met him, a young boy in an old used body.

“How are you alive?” she gasped.

The boy didn’t reply. His teeth, however, did chatter together with a click, click and click. She held her hand out and touched his cheek. It was dry as dust and dead cobwebs. He attempted a smile but it was crooked and his jaw appeared as if it would fall to the ground.

“You saved me; I know you saved me. Thank you.”

The boy did not or could not reply. He simply stood there clicking and swaying and Carrie Anne wondered what would happen next, until it began to rain again and a crack of thunder boomed through the air. The boy hissed at the sky as the rain burst forth. Suddenly he took Carrie Anne by the hand and began to hurriedly lead her. He was strong, very strong, and she was almost pulled to the ground that was quickly becoming mud. They splashed along the gravestones until they arrived at a large tomb. The boy removed twigs and leaves placed over the entrance and disappeared inside.

The tomb was not dark at all. Instead there was a fire lit on a bone covered in rags and placed in the crumbling stone wall. In the yellow light Carrie Anne watched as the boy disappeared into a large tunnel entrance that had been dug into the dirt. She followed into the darkness that took a sharp dip downwards. She could see more torches lighting up as she went down and down and deeper into the ground. The dirt walls were smooth except for roots protruding from the dirt, searching for water and finding none, and deep hand grooves, marking for ever where the tunnel had been dug into. The air had a musty, vegetable smell to it. And despite being deep under the cemetery, she didn’t feel worried or oppressed by claustrophobia. In fact this was the calmest she had felt in a very long time.

She stepped from the tunnel and it took her breath away. Carrie Anne found herself in a chamber of a huge size lit by dozens of bone torches and dripping candles. Thousands of roots dangled from the “ceiling” creating a canopy. From there were vines hanging in various places and at the ends there were skulls or animal bones just like the tree growing through the church floor. From the walls coffins protruded from the dirt. Some had succumbed to time and woodworm, so the occupants had fallen through, hanging and dangling like dejected decorations from holes in the coffins.

The boy ran around the room, jumping from coffins and swinging from roots that hung from the dirt roof. Carrie Anne spun around at the boy’s home. There were chairs made from bones and twine. The seats were made of ribs and the backs of spines, the arms, arms, and the chair legs, well, legs. She walked amongst the macabre furniture, running her hand over a skeleton dining table. Upon it were various trinkets of such an unusual variety that Carrie Anne wondered for a moment where they could have possibly come from. Until she realised these were sentimental treasures that had been buried with the dead. There were dolls and teddy bears and stuffed animals left in coffins to keep dead children comforted. The boy had managed quite a collection. Then there were piles of photographs and love notes and jewels and long-dead flowers. The boy ran his hands through the piles and through the objects in the air while attempting a laugh that was a guttural wheeze. Carrie Anne smiled and clapped politely as the boy juggled with stuffed toys, throwing them into the air in a form of macabre slapstick. When he was done he crept over to Carrie Anne and placed a red tattered rag doll in her hands.

“Thank you,” she said. The boy chattered by way of reply and Carrie Anne saw that his throat had rotted away, leaving a dry gap where his vocal chords would have been. The boy’s one eye gleamed at Carrie Anne’s gratitude at his gift. Carrie Anne turned her attention to part of the wall that had been cleared down to the bare rock. She stood in front of it, captivated by the sight. Painted in black against the orange stone was a tableau. A series that Carrie Anne could barely comprehend but also understood.

There was a boy and his mother; they were both smiling.

The mother was now lying down. Red was smeared across her mouth. The boy’s smile was upside down in sadness.

The next picture showed the boy crying. The mother was under sways of water. Her eyes were crossed out.

The mother now had wings and was high in the sky, where the boy stood next to a big man with a monstrous angry face.

Carrie Anne ran her fingers over the paintings; the boy swayed behind, whining with melancholy.

The boy and the man, each with a spade in their hands, stood in a cemetery—no, The cemetery, this cemetery. There were hundreds of black crosses around them and an open grave with sacks next to it.

The man was lying in front of the boy; there was a lot of red painted from what appeared to be a knife sticking from the man. The boy had no expression in the painting; it was obvious he was indifferent at the loss.

From here on the wall paintings took a more erratic style as the paint was smeared in think messy blobs.

There was the cemetery again and in the centre the head of a dead thing with the boy trapped in its teeth. Then there were people—men, women and children—running with fearful faces into the town and the boy was angry and surrounded by body parts. Next:, the boy being chased by the townspeople and they had swords and knives and fire. And the boy was alone in his cemetery again and painted tears fell from his eyes and he sat on the angel gravestone. Then on the last picture there was a figure Carrie Anne recognised. A sad child looking from the window of a house. It was her.

A tear welled from her eye; she wiped it and looked at her feet, embarrassed. There were skulls by the stone, each holding a different coloured “paint”, and by the skulls, various squeezed rodents and insects were strewn where they had been used to make the colours. Carrie Anne turned and the boy saw the emotion in her face. He moaned to echo her sadness before scampering off into one of the many tunnels that surrounded the catacombs. The sound of the storm echoed down those tunnels and each thunderclap rang like rattling bones. Between the thunder, Carrie Anne could hear screeching coming from the tunnel. She stepped closer towards the sound. The boy came dancing from the tunnel. In his mouth was a large brown dead rat. He dropped the bloodied thing at her feet. The boy nodded at it encouragingly. She wasn’t sure, but picked up the still-warm rat. She held it at arm’s length and it dripped its insides onto the ground and her already-filthy pyjamas. The boy gripped it from her hands and bit into it. Flesh and fur was pulled and disappeared into his mouth and fell from tears in his throat and stomach. He handed the rat meal back to her. He waited expectantly, still chewing. Not wanting to upset the dead boy, Carrie Anne brought the rat up to her mouth. She held down vomit as the smell of wet meat assaulted her nostrils. Still she felt she owed it to the boy to at least to try. However, she could not bring herself to bite into the rat. Instead she pretended to chew and made yummy noises, much in the style of being fed by a child at a tea party.

The boy clapped and snatched it from her once again, before placing it on the bone table. He leant over it and opened wide his mouth and gagged as if choking. But instead the boy spat out a ball of maggots onto the rat’s corpse. The maggots hissed as if acid through flesh and in a moment Carrie Anne could see that the bones of the rat gleamed once the maggots had done their work. The boy’s hands worked over the bones at an almost impossible speed. He opened his fingers and spiders crawled from the splits in his skin. They webbed the bones in a thick silk as the boy sewed with the web. When they had done their work, the spiders and wriggling maggots found themselves reabsorbed into the boy. He proudly presented Carrie Anne with the gift he had created. She took it from him in her palm. It was beautiful; she held it up to the light. It was a dream catcher, made of webs and bones and with a rat skull centrepiece. In the torchlight it sparkled.

“Thank you,” she said, genuinely touched. “I don’t understand this, any of this. But thank you.”