Karl Wagner - The Year's Best Horror Stories 18

"Are the others out, you know, digging?" asked the electrician conversationally.

"Aye." The old man accurately tossed tea bags into two-pint pots. "They're working up the top-side. Look." He pointed a yellow-brown nicotine stained finger. Through a grimy, cobwebbed window two men could be seen digging in the graveyard. "That's where they're going to plant James Hudson, the old Mayor. Top-side, you see, is where all your nobs are — doctors, solicitors, aldermen. Bottom-side is for your working folk and paupers."

"And that's where the new road's going through." The young man returned to work, prising at cables with a screwdriver.

"Aye… that's where they all had to be dug up." The gravedigger licked his lips. "Disinterred, aye." Taking the kettle from a solitary electric ring, he limped to the freezer top to fill the mugs with boiling water, and then he paused, staring thoughtfully at the rising steam. "Aye, a bad business this disinterring. You see some things so bad it makes you fair poorly. You know in some of the older graves, well, we opened coffins and found that they…"

The electrician's eyes opened wide.

"Well. They'd moved."

"Moved? The bodies had moved?"

"Well sometimes, years ago, people were buried alive. Not deliberately of course. 'Spect some were in comas so deep they were certified dead. They buried them. Course, then they woke up." He glanced at the electrician to see if he appreciated its full significance. "No air, no light. They'd be suffocating, trying to fight their way out. But six feet down. No one would ever hear 'em. There they screamed, fought, clawed at the lid, breathed up all the oxygen and then… well, they died."

"What did they look like?"

"Oh… terrible. You see, natural salts in the soil preserve 'em, only turns 'em bright yellow. Apart from that they looked the same as the day they died. Like this." Eyes wide open; his face the distillation of pure terror, panic, and the gravedigger hooked his brown fingers into talons and contorted his body as if twisted by unendurable agony. "They just froze like that, like statues."

"Jesus… that's awful."

"Oh, I've seen worse, lad."

"Wh-what was the worst you've seen." The young man gulped at his tea.

"Ah… that was two days ago. When we disinterred Rose Burswick. When we opened the lid we saw… ah no… no." He shook his head gravely and slurped his tea. "No. It's so bad I can't bring myself to… no."

But he did go on to describe others in lurid detail. "Old Walter Weltson. My uncle was a gravedigger when they planted him — summer of 1946. Weltson was the fattest man in the country — twenty stone or more. It took so long to build a coffin that the meat-flies got him. Ah… when we opened his coffin up it were like opening a box of long-gram rice. Couldn't see him. Just this mound of maggots all white and hard like dried rice. Then it rained. My God, I'll never eat rice pudding again. Look." The gravedigger pointed to something small and white on the brick floor. "There's one. Must've trod it in on me boots." The gravedigger watched with satisfaction as the young man nervously peered at the white morsel.

"Oh, Christ," he murmured loosening his shirt collar. "Awful."

"Then there was…" The gravedigger had stories involving worms, rats; even rabbits — "you see, the rabbits had tunneled down and built nests in the coffins, and we found the baby rabbits scampering about inside the empty rib-cages" — and there were stories about valuable jewelry, about pennies on eyes — "of course when the eyeballs dried they stuck to the pennies, so when you lifted the pennies…" — and then back to maggots and… The gravedigger noticed the young man's attention had wandered, he even finished replacing the freezer back plate and swigged off his tea without really taking any notice of what he was being told.

Time to play the ace.

Sighing, the gravedigger lit the butt that had been tucked snugly behind his ear. "You know, I can't get that last one we dug up out of my mind. Aye, Rose Burswick."

The electrician's eyes focused on the gravedigger. "You mean that really… awful one?"

"Aye. The worst." Sombre faced, but inwardly gleeful, the gravedigger tragically put his head in his hands. "The worst ever. And I've seen some terrible things in my time."

The young man was hooked. "What happened?"

"Well. Promise you'll tell no one."

"You can trust me, mister."

"Remember the old factory down by the river?"

"Yeah, that's the one that got sealed off with those radiation warning signs."

"That is because during World War One," the gravedigger jabbed the glowing tab into the air for emphasis, "that's where they painted luminous faces on watches, ships' instruments and such-like."

"Uh?"

"Then, what they used to make things luminous was radium. And radium is radioactive. They took girls, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, to apply this stuff to watch faces. Course, nobody knew what radiation did to you. Most of the factory girls were dead before they were twenty — just rotted away. Rose Burswick worked there five years. She'd use a little brush to paint the radium on. Trouble is it dried quickly so she'd lick the brush every couple of minutes to keep it moist. Each time she did that, she must have swallowed a few flakes of radium."

"Jesus. It's a wonder it didn't kill her."

The gravedigger shrugged. "It did — at least that's what they said. In 1935 Rose Burswick was buried — she was thirty-six."

"Bet she was a mess, living that long after."

"Aye, but that's not the worst of it. Like I said, two days ago we opened the grave."

"Ugh… what did you find?"

The gravedigger rubbed his eyes as if trying to erase some terrible image. "Well… we lifted the coffin, it were intact. It was then I noticed where the lid met the coffin there was like this pale yellow trim round the edge. Funny, I thought, but reckoned it were just a bit of mold. Anyway, when we came to prize off the lid it — it just flew off, like the top off a Jack-in-a-box."

"Jesus Johnnie!"

"And inside… inside it were full. Ram-jam full to the brim."

The electrician rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. "Full of what?"

The gravedigger shrugged. "Rose Burswick." He pulled on his cigarette, hard. "They say she weighed six stone when they buried her. But when we opened that coffin it were like opening a carton of ice cream. There were just this big block — bright yellow. It were as if it had grown and grown until the coffin side had stopped it growing any bigger. But even then, pressure inside had been so great it were being forced through the crack between the lid and coffin, making that yellow trim. Course, we just thought it were some kind of fungus, so we tipped it out. It came out like a banana jelly from a mold. On the grass was that yellow block — coffin shaped."

"What — what'd happened to Rose Burswick?"

"Oh… that's just it. It was Rose Burswick."

"Christ! How?"

"Mue-tay-shun." The gravedigger rolled the word around his mouth like a juicy morsel. "Mue-tay-shun.

You see, the radiation'd caused her to mutate in the grave. The coffin had become her — her second womb. And she like… gestated… aye, evolved into something that — well — was not human."

"Did you touch it?"

"Not on your nelly. We ran like hell. But when the Cemetery Board found out, we had to go back to… IT." The gravedigger leaned back against the freezer. "We found it had changed. Just sort of a soft mound and, aye, it had grown. Tuesday was that sunny day — scorching hot. The heat must have brought it on, and it were growing fast."

"Jesus. Then what?"

"We tried to lever it into a skip to take it down to the Crem. Burn it. But… but it'd taken root. Mue-tay-shun caused what were left of the intestin' to grow and worm into the earth like a long yellow snake. It ended up us cutting it through with a shovel. She… it screamed. Pain, real pain! God, it were a nightmare. Then — there it were up and moving. What were left of her arms and legs had turned into like swollen yellow stumps with back-to-front feet and hands that had twisted up into hooves like… oh, I tell you — revolting.