Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

It takes me ten minutes to reach the other side of the cemetery. Running through the gravestones and the trees is like running around in a maze. There could be a dozen other people in here and I’d completely miss them. Given the amount of time I’ve spent in the cemetery lately I ought to know the place like my own backyard, because that’s what it’s become. Maybe if I started drinking it’d all come back to me. The rain starts to ease up again, and the soft ground sucks at my feet. When I get to the section of plots I want, I don’t even know for sure that I’m in the right place. Everything looks the same.

I start scanning the headstones. Names and dates start flashing by as I begin running between them, hardly slowing down as the flashlight lights up the inscriptions. Birthdays, death days, messages from the dead, from the living, beloved by all, by some, by few-they blend into one as I move between them, my feet threatening to slip on the grass with every step. I start looking for freshly turned earth.

There are thousands of graves out here. But only one of interest.

It doesn’t take long to understand that I’m lost. Dark trees and dark graves, and nothing to help me get my bearings. Even when I start to backtrack my steps, I don’t know where they are. The grave I want could be anywhere. The church could be anywhere.

Then the world rushes up as my feet drop away, and suddenly I’m falling. Six feet down to be precise. I get my arms halfway up my body, but not all the way, and my face hits the opposite edge of the grave wall; my head snaps back, my shoulder smacks into the edge of the coffin lid, one leg goes into the coffin, and the other is shunted against the dirt wall. For a few moments I can’t move as the darkness settles in around me. I have no idea what has happened. The world has gone dark and my mind is spinning.

Slowly this land six feet down from the rest of the world shifts into place and it isn’t pretty. I can feel a hand beneath me, pressing into my chest. My face is wedged up against the side of the coffin. I manage to roll onto my side, and suddenly the light appears again as my body shifts off of the flashlight. I pick it up.

I’m the only person in the grave. The coffin is open, the pink lining clean except for a sprinkling of dirt, and the entire thing is wet. And blurry. The entire coffin is blurry, and when I hold my hand out ahead of me and point the flashlight at it I see both hand and flashlight are blurry too. I reach up and touch my forehead, and my fingers come away wet with blood.

I grab the edge of the coffin to try to pull myself up, but my hand slides across it and I slip back. I kill the flashlight and let the darkness settle over me, and for a moment I have fallen far deeper than the depth of the coffin, and into another world that light or life has never touched. I listen to the night, but can’t hear a thing-not at first-then I begin to make out a soft murmuring. It disappears, and I begin to convince myself it was only the wind when it starts again. I turn the flashlight back on for a second to orientate myself, then I make my way to the end of the coffin and step onto it, balancing myself by pushing my hands into the damp walls of the grave. I think about Sidney Alderman, and then I think about all the policemen and policewomen I’ve known over the years, and all the cops in movies and TV and books who say they never believe in coincidences. I think of Quentin James and I think of the man I became. I think all those cops who don’t believe in coincidences need to live a little more.

I reach up and brace my arms over the ground and kick at the cold wall of dirt as I make my way up. Every day above ground is a good day, so the saying goes, and suddenly I know whoever came up with that got it dead right. I listen for the sound again, but can’t hear anything. I point the flashlight at the temporary gravestone and highlight Father Julian’s name. There are no other inscriptions-they’re being saved for the real gravestone.

There’s a mound of dirt piled up about a meter away from the coffin. A large tombstone ahead of it must have blocked my view of it before. I stay low to the ground and look around, but all I can see are dark shadows across a landscape of black. I creep a few gravestones along, then squat down. I reach into my pocket for my phone, only to find that it’s been busted in the fall. Maybe God is trying to tell me something about cell phones.

I drop down to my knees and I listen as hard as I can. I close my eyes and wait, and after a few seconds the noise returns-just briefly, but it’s enough for me to get a fix on the direction.

I move a short distance away from the grave.

I take the flashlight out of my pocket. There is a dark shape on the ground. I crouch and turn on the flashlight. A girl, perhaps in her late teens or early twenties, is naked, her skin scuffed up with mud. Her hands are bound behind her, her ankles bound too. The same duct tape binding her has also been placed across her mouth. The rain has swept the blood from a cut in her shoulder over her chest. She is shaking. Her face is so pale she looks as though her body has been completely exsanguinated. Her dark eyes are wide with fright as she stares at me. She tries to pull away. All she can see is the flashlight, and I realize she thinks I’m the one who did this to her. I have no idea who she is, what sister she could be. I turn off the light and take off my jacket to put over her, and then the sound of a car comes crashing through the silence.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of here, okay?”

The flashlight is still off, so I can’t tell whether she looks as though she believes me or not. But I’m sure her mind will grip tight to the or not bit when I tell her what’s going to happen next. I have put my jacket back on.

“I’m going to leave you tied up, okay?”

She starts whimpering.

“I need him to think he’s here alone with you.”

The headlights wash toward me, and I duck down on the other side of the gravestone to where the girl is lying. The car comes to a stop, and I figure David has just dumped Father Julian in the lake. David is following the same routine, even though he didn’t start it.

“Don’t let him know, okay? If he lets you speak, don’t tell him. You have to be calm. I’m a police officer, I’m going to help you get through this, but you have to trust me. You’re going to be okay, I promise.”

The lights are no longer pointing in my direction, but rather at the grave I fell into. David keeps them on, but shuts off the engine. He steps out of the vehicle and crosses the path of the beams, and I can see he’s dressed completely in black. Maybe he’s mourning his father. There is another change that has taken place since the last time I saw him, but then I realize it isn’t a change at all, that the man I am looking at is the David Harding he has been for the last two years since he found out the woman he loved was his sister. The man I saw two months ago was the impostor, the grieving David Harding who stared at the ring and who looked like his heart had just been torn open. I move out from behind the stone and duck behind another one five graves away.

He looks out over the graveyard and I wonder if he’s looking for me. He pauses when his eyes come to rest on the girl. There is enough ambient light for him to see her. He shrugs his shoulders back as if to get rid of a crick in the middle of his back, then walks forward. He isn’t holding anything in his hands. When he reaches her he crouches down.

“This isn’t your fault,” he says. “Really there is only one person to blame, but if it makes you feel any better, he’s taken responsibility for his actions.”