Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

My feet are submerged in mud, the water up to my knees. Something grabs my ankle and I lever forward, my arms slapping the surface next to the corpse before I start sinking. I pull my legs from the mud, but there is nothing to stand on. This lake is a Goddamn death trap, and now I know why it’s full of corpses. These people came to grieve for the dead and ended up joining them. The water is ice cold, locking up my chest and stomach and cramping my muscles. My eyes are open and the water is burning them. There is only darkness around me, compounded by the silence, and I can sense hands of the dead reaching to pull me deeper, wanting me to join them, wanting fresh blood.

Then suddenly I’m racing back to the surface, my hand tight around the rope that is pulling me up. I kick with my feet. Point my body upward. And a second later I’m right next to a bloated woman in a long white dress. It looks like a wedding dress. I push away from her, and the three men help me onto the bank. I sit down, gasping for air. Both my shoes are missing.

“Goddamn, buddy, you okay?”

The question sounds like it is coming from the other side of the lake, and I’m not sure which one of them asked it. Maybe all three of them in unison. I lean over my knees and start coughing. I feel like I’m choking. I’m shivering, I’m angry, but mostly I feel embarrassed. But none of the men are laughing. They’re all leaning over me, looking concerned. With two floating corpses nearby, it’s easy to understand why nothing here is a joke.

“There’s something else you need to know,” the digger operator says when I’ve stopped coughing enough to hear him. “I was trying to tell you before,” he says, slipping that last part into the conversation as if each word is its own sentence, and his face screws up slightly as if each word has its own taste too, and none of them good. He makes it sound like whatever he has to say is going to be worse than what just happened, and I can think of only one thing that could possibly be.

“Yeah?”

“Marks. On top of the coffin,” he says.

“How did I know you were going to say that?”

Now it’s his turn to shrug. He doesn’t come up with any suggestions of mind reading. “Thin lines,” he says. “Like cuts. They look like shovel cuts,” he says.

“From a shovel,” I tell him. He gives me a funny look. I ignore it. My mind is running a little slow from the swim it just took. “You think this coffin has been dug up before?”

“I’m not just thinking it, I’m saying it. There are definitely marks on the coffin that nobody here caused. Shit, I wonder if she’s empty.”

She . Like a plane or a boat, because the coffin in a way is a vessel taking you somewhere.

We walk over to it. The coffin has survived the fall pretty well. There’s a large crack running from the bottom corner along the side from the impact, but we can’t see into it. I’m tempted to open her up, see what cargo she has or if she’s been plundered, but the approaching sirens kill the idea.

I watch as the two police cars arrive, along with an ambulance and a pair of station wagons.

There is a natural progression to things. An evolution. First there is a fantasy. The fantasy belongs to some sadistic loser, a guy who eats and breathes and dreams with the sole desire to kill. Then comes the reality. A victim falls into his web, she is used, and the fantasy often doesn’t live up to the reality. So there are more victims. The desire escalates. It starts with one a year, becomes two or three a year, then it’s happening every other month. Or every month. Their bodies show up. The police are involved. They bring doctors and pathologists and technicians who can analyze fibers and blood samples and fingerprints. They create a profile to help catch the killer. Following them is the media. The media spins the killer’s fantasy into gold. Death is a moneymaking industry. The undertakers, the coffin salesmen, the crystal-ball and palm readers, then eventually the digger operators and the private investigators: we’re the next step in the progression, standing in the rain and watching as one travesty of justice reveals another.

I have shrugged out of my wet jacket and wet shirt, dried off using a towel an ambulance driver gave me, and pulled on a fresh windbreaker. My shoes are still sleeping with the fishes and my pants and underwear are soaking, but I’m safe from pneumonia. Nobody is paying me any attention as I sit on the floor of the ambulance with my legs hanging out, looking over the scene of, at this stage, an indeterminable crime.

The graveyard has been cordoned off. The two police cars have become twelve. The two station wagons have become six. There are roadblocks covering the main entrance, as though the police are preparing to fight back an upsurge of angry corpses. There are two tarpaulins lying across the ground; on each one rests a well-dressed but decomposing or decomposed body. A canvas tent has been erected over them, protecting them from the elements. Somebody has strung some yellow Do not cross tape around the tent. It keeps the corpses from going anywhere. There are men and women wearing nylon suits studying the bodies. Others are standing near the lake. They look like divers preparing for some deep-sea mission, only there are no divers here. Not yet, anyway. There are open suitcases containing tools and evidence beneath the tent. The rain is still falling and the long grass ripples with the wind. The digger has been taken away, and the coffin has been taken to the morgue.

I tighten my windbreaker and reach around for a second blanket. The inside of the ambulance is messy, as if it’s sped over dozens of bumps on the way: God knows how the paramedics ever know where anything is. I wrap the blanket over my shoulders and let my teeth chatter as I watch the few detectives who have shown up. More will arrive soon. They always do. So far there hasn’t been much for them to do other than look at two bodies and a lot of gravestones. They can’t go canvassing the area because all the neighbors are dead. They have no one to question other than the caretaker, but the caretaker is off somewhere in a stolen truck.

The wind has picked up. Acorns are still falling, flicking off the tombstones and making small, metallic dinging noises as they hit the roofs of the vehicles. All this extra traffic, yet no other bodies have risen up from the watery depths of whatever Hell is down there. I glance over at the ambulance driver. He has nobody to save. He has nothing else to do than watch the show, bury his hands in his pockets, and keep me company. All of us are in that boat. He’s probably just hanging around until he gets the call that somebody is dead or dying, blood and limbs scattered across the highway of life that he cleans up every day.

The buzzing of a media helicopter approaching from the north sounds like a mosquito. I touch the outside of my trouser pocket and run my finger over the bulge of the wristwatch I stole from one of the corpses after we pulled it from the water.

One of the medical examiners, a man in his early fifties who has been doing this for nearly half his life, comes out of the tent, looks around at the small crowd of people, spots me, and then heads over to a detective. They talk for a few minutes, all very casual-the relaxed conversation of two men who have delivered and received many conversations about death. By the time he comes over he is sighing, as though being in the same graveyard with me is such tiring work. His hands are thrust deep into his pockets. There are small drops of rain on his glasses. I stand up, but don’t move away from the ambulance. I have a pretty good idea what the examiner is going to say. After all, I spent some time with those corpses. I saw how they were dressed.