Robert Walker: Grave Instinct

Groveland Memorial Cemetery, Morristown, New Jersey August 16, 1990

Working quietly, Daryl Thomas Cahil had dug into the cemetery earth for several hours while the windswept night played about the headstone he had located.

AMIEE LEE PHEIFFER

BELOVED DAUGHTER 1983-1990

He again sank the spade into the dirt, finally gaining a response-a greeting between metal and concrete. At last, he'd found the little crypt. A concrete vault concealing the coffin, a slab-stone top over all.

“ All right… good…” he congratulated himself from the bottom of the grave he'd spent the early-morning hours reopening. Glancing at his dirtied watch, he read 4:02 A.M. Less than an hour and the cemetery superintendent would be driving up to unlatch the rusted old gates. Still, it was enough time to gain the prize buried here, which he had come to claim as his.

Daryl had to dig out earth alongside the vault to create space enough to force the concrete lid aside, just enough to get at the coffin. He worked to clear the lid of remaining soil as a light sprinkle began to add to his problems. He needn't remove the lid entirely, only partially, enough to climb in and open the coffin lid.

Spade tip against stone tablet clattered more than once, making him wince. Finally, he tossed up the spade to the level earth, fearful it was making too much noise now against the outer stone coffin.

The cemetery stood amid a half-mile-long quad of neighborhood homes, homes he would just as soon leave undisturbed. He could not afford waking so much as a dog.

He got down on all fours.

He clawed away at the dirt lying over the small coffin.

He imagined what lay inside, what he had come for, his goal.

He felt his pulse quicken, his heart pound.

He felt cold and hot at the same time. And the cold rain only added to the chills following the sweats.

His brain calmed him, talking soothingly to him, saying, “Once you have it and you consume it… you will know a tranquility and enlightenment like none other.”

He kept digging and clawing the dirt away from the lid. Soon Daryl Thomas Cahil reached up over the lip of the grave to locate the crowbar. As he felt for it, he also felt that the temperature in the grave was far cooler than that overhead at ground level. Stretching for the crowbar, he heard the night sounds of the graveyard-leaves rustling along the ground, scurrying in unison with small vermin; dead branches scratching at tombstones; a haunting whirr of the city's electric current coursing through the silence.

His hand found the crowbar and his handheld, battery-operated bone saw. He brought both into the pit with him. With the crowbar held firm, he pried open the small stone lid, the noise of his rending the stone from its moorings sent up a soft scraping sound like muted barking and crackling.

A dog somewhere on the other side of the cemetery walls barked its reply. Daryl cursed under his breath. He had come a long way to find Groveland-a quiet old cemetery protected by a high wall on all four sides, its entire length and breadth. And he had spent many days and nights waiting to learn of a suitable burial in the papers. He had even listened for the weather report, and he expected the wind to soon turn to storm, rain and possibly thunder and lightning.

This was not his first grave-robbing foray, and the newspaper in Newark had made so much of his earlier raids that he'd had to come to Morristown for a fresh start. In Newark over the past year, he had earned a reputation in the press as the New Jersey Ghoul.

The lid moved slowly under his bleeding hands now. He had finally made enough jpace to crawl through to get at the coffin inside. The actual coffin lid came open easily once he located the latch, and there she lay as if in slumber, a little princess. Blood from his bruised and cut hands dripped onto the child's virginal white taffeta dress.

Overhead, he heard the low rumble of approaching thunder, and the light sprinkle turned to full raindrops that found him even below the concrete lid inside the vault. “I only need your head, dearie,” he said to the corpse in her ballet outfit. The papers said she'd been buried in her favorite dancing outfit, that she'd been a beauty-pageant child, and he could see why. But he was little interested in her appearance, her name or who she'd been in life-only that her brain was intact. “I only want your head,” he confided as he brought the battery-operated handheld saw to her throat.

The thunder would help mask the noise from the saw, but even as he turned it on, light flooded into the chasm of the vault and men and dogs descended into the pit and onto the stone lid, the dogs barking wildly. Daryl saw guns pointing and heard voices shouting for him to drop the saw and to come out with his hands in the air.

He instead desperately turned to the dead girl and began cutting her head off until a powerful blow struck him unconscious, and he fell across his dead victim, whose head had been halfway severed.

“ My God, we got the Ghoul, Mac! It's him, the one they've been troubling with for a year in Newark. It's gotta be the Ghoul.”

“ If it ain't him, this one'll do for now. Cuff 'im and drag his ass outta here. Get 'im up to ground level.”

Pulled and yanked aboveground, Daryl Thomas Cahil watched as lights in the windows from all the surrounding houses came on in a flurry of activity. “Turn your lights on the girl! Illumination. You can see I only wanted a piece of her,” he shouted.

Daryl pulled loose from a uniformed cop's grasp and dove headlong back into the pit, shouting, “I must have her brain! I must have it now!”

Again Mac Strand and his Morristown police officers dragged the ghoulish offender from the child's disturbed grave.

Duval County, Jacksonville, Florida June 6, 2003

Grant Kenyon grabbed his head in his hands and pleaded, “Stop asking me to kill. Stop making me kill.” Grant sat upright in the lonely Jax-Town Motel bed in his empty room, catching glimpses of his mirror reflection as if it were someone else. “It is someone else. Sure,” he said aloud to himself, yet if he worked at it, he recognized something in the twisted image-the boyish face, the sad and deep-set eyes. But here in the semi dark, there was something else going on… Nothing fit-not his features, not his manner and not this place so far from his wife, Emily, and little Hildy. Staring into the looking glass, he felt that the real Grant Kenyon had fallen into it and metamorphosed into what he now saw. “It's really not me, this guy in the mirror. It's some other force that has hold of me.”

He lifted the beer and toasted to the uncanny image toasting back, and he hated what he saw.

He clawed his way to a standing position and, once sure of his footing, Grant bellowed and charged at the reflected image now moving toward him-that other entity-and they nearly collided where they met, face-to-face. “What the hell do you want from me?” he asked the stranger in the mirror.

“ Just do what you're told,” replied the other.

“ Leave me, now! I don't want this… this kind of life… this possession of me by… by you.”

His reflected image in the half-light showed an irregular brow, eyes too close together, a crooked nose larger on one side than the other, a sad set of dark eyes, a mouth in perpetual downturn. Do I feel as bad as I look? He wondered.

“ I've grown 350 percent since your ancestors crawled out of the muck, Grant,” his reflection said, as if it had a brain independent of his.