Peter May - The Lewis Man

In the summer months it was too light to sleep. By the time June came around, it stayed light until almost eleven, and restless soul that I was, I couldn’t lie awake in my bed with the thought of a whole world of adventure out there.

I discovered very early a back staircase leading from the ground floor of the east wing down into the cellars. From there I was able to unbolt a door at the rear of the building, and escape out into the falling dusk. If I sprinted, I could very quickly reach the cover of shadows beneath the trees that lined the park. From there I was free to go where I would. Not that I ever went far. I was always alone. Peter never had trouble getting off to sleep, and if any of the others were ever aware of me leaving they gave no sign of it.

My solitary adventures, however, came to an abrupt end on the third or fourth outing. That was the night I discovered the cemetery.

It must have been quite late, because dusk had given way to darkness by the time I slipped out of the dormitory. I stopped at the door, listening to the breathing of the other boys. Someone was snoring gently, like a purring cat. And one of the younger ones was talking to himself. A voice unbroken, expressing hidden fears.

I could feel the cold of the stone steps rising as I descended into darkness. The cellar had a damp, sour smell, a place mired in shadow. I was always afraid to linger, and I never did know what it was they kept down there. The bolt protested a little as I eased it back across the door, and I was out. A quick glance in each direction, then legs pounding across asphalt to the trees. Usually I would head up over the hill, then down again towards the village. Street lights reflected on the water there, where the wheels of ten or more mills had once turned. Silent now. Abandoned. Lights twinkling in a few of the windows of the tenements built for the millworkers, trees and houses rising steeply on either side below the bridge that spanned the river a hundred feet above it.

But tonight, in search of something different, I turned the other way instead, and soon discovered a metal gate in the high wall that bounded the east side of the garden. I’d had no idea that there was a cemetery there, hidden as it was from the view of The Dean by tall trees. As I opened the gate I felt a little like Alice passing from one side of the looking glass to the other, except that I was passing from the world of the living into the world of the dead.

Avenues of tombstones led away left and right, almost lost in the shadow of willows that seemed to weep for those who had gone before. Immediately to my left lay Frances Jeffrey, who had died on 26 January 1850, at the age of seventy-seven. I don’t know why, but those names are etched as clearly in my mind as they were in the stone that they lay beneath. Daniel John Cumming, his wife Elizabeth and their son Alan. How strangely comforting, it seemed to me, that they should all be together in death as they had been in life. I envied them. My father’s bones lay at the bottom of an ocean, and I had no idea where my mother was buried.

One whole length of wall had tombstones set into it, with well-kept oblongs of grass in front of them, and ferns growing around the foot of the wall.

I am amazed that I was not afraid. A cemetery at night. A young lad in the dark. And yet, I must have felt that I had much more to fear from the living than from the dead. And I’m sure I was right.

I wandered off along a chalk path, headstones and crosses huddled darkly on either side. It was a clear sky and the moon was up, so I could see without difficulty. I was following the curve of the path around to the south when a noise made me stop in my tracks. It would be hard now to say what it was I heard. It was more like a thud that I felt. And then somewhere away to my left a rustling among the grass. Someone coughed.

I have heard it said that a fox makes a coughing sound that is almost human, so perhaps that is what I heard. But another cough, and a movement among the shadows of the trees, much bigger than any fox could have made, stilled my heart. Another thud and I was off. Running like the wind. In and out of the moon-dappled shade. Almost dazzled by the patches of bright silver light.

Maybe it was only my imagination, but I could have sworn I heard footsteps in pursuit. A sudden chill in the air. Sweat turning cold on my face.

I had no idea where I was, or how to get back to the gate. I stumbled and fell, skinning my knees, before scrambling to my feet and leaving the track, heading off among the shadows of brooding stones. To crouch now in the gloom, behind the shelter of a large tomb taller than myself, crowned by a stone cross.

I tried to hold my breath so as not to make any noise. But the pounding of my heart filled my ears, and bursting lungs forced me to suck in oxygen, before expelling it quickly to make room for more. My whole body was trembling.

I listened for the footsteps but heard nothing, and was just starting to relax and curse my overactive imagination, when I heard the soft, careful crunch of feet on gravel. It was all I could do to keep myself from crying out.

I peered out cautiously from behind the cross and saw, less than twenty feet away, the shadow of a man limping by on the path. He seemed to be dragging his left leg. A few more steps, and he emerged from the shadow of a huge copper beech into moonlight, and I saw his face for the first time. It was ghostly white, pale like my mother’s the day she told us our father was dead. His eyes were lost in the darkness beneath prominent brows, almost as if the sockets were empty. His trousers were torn and he wore a ragged jacket and grey shirt open at the neck. A small sack of belongings hung from his left hand. A vagrant seeking a place to sleep among the dead? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.

I waited until he had shuffled off again to be swallowed up by the night, and I moved out from behind the tomb to see for the first time the name cut in the stone of it. And every hair on my body stood on end.

Mary Elizabeth McBride.

My mother’s name. I knew, of course, that it wasn’t her lying there beneath the ground. This Mary Elizabeth had been in residence for nearly two hundred years. But I couldn’t shake off the sense that somehow it was my mother who had guided me to that place of concealment. She had charged me with looking after my brother, but had taken it upon herself to watch over me.

I turned and fled, back the way I had come, heart trying to crack open my ribs, until I saw the black-painted metal gate standing ajar. I was through it like a ghost, and sprinting across the asphalt to the door at the back of The Dean. The only time in my life, I think, that I was glad to be inside it.

Back in my bed I lay shivering for a long time before sleep took me. I’m not sure when it was that I was wakened by Peter. He was leaning over me, caught in the moonlight that angled in across the dorm in elongated rectangles. I could see the concern in his eyes, and he was touching my face.

‘John,’ he was whispering. ‘Johnny. Why are you crying?’

It was Alex Curry’s fault that the adventure on the roof ended in disaster. He was a brute of a boy, older than the rest of us, and had been there the longest. He was about as tall as Mr Anderson, and probably stronger. He’d always been a rebel, the others said, and had his arse belted more often than anyone else at The Dean. But in three years he had developed to the point where his physical strength matched his rebellious nature. And that must have been pretty intimidating to Mr Anderson. Lately he had refused to cut his thick, black hair and grown it into an Elvis quiff and duck’s arse. I think that’s probably the first time that Peter and I became aware of Elvis Presley. We had barely been conscious of the world outside of our own. The belting of Alex had tailed off, and it was rumoured that he was to be sent to a hostel. He was too old for The Dean now, and far too much for Mr Anderson to handle.