Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

One of us whispered to the other, That was a kitty!

The other whispered, That was a fox!

At the bridge over the river where there’s a steep ramp, Daddy braked the car to a stop. Daddy was frowning and irritable, and Daddy said to Esther, Get out of the car. And Daddy turned, grunting to us in the backseat, and Daddy’s eyes were glaring angry as he told us to get out of the car.

We were very frightened. Yet there was no place to hide in the back of Daddy’s car.

Outside, Esther was shivering. A chill wind blew from the mist-shrouded river. We huddled with Esther as Daddy approached.

In Daddy’s face, there was regret and remorse. But it was remorse for something that had not yet happened and could not be avoided. Calmly Daddy struck Esther a blow to the back with his fist that knocked her down like a shot, so breathless she couldn’t scream or cry at first but lay on the ground, quivering. We wanted to run away but dared not, for Daddy’s long legs would catch up with us, we knew.

Daddy struck us, one and then the other. One on the back, as Esther had been struck, and the other a glancing careless blow on the side of the head as if in this case (my case) the child was so hopeless, he was beyond disciplining. Oh, oh, oh!—we had learned to stifle our cries.

In long Daddy strides, Daddy returned to the car to smoke a cigarette. This had happened before but not quite in this way, and so when a thing happens in a way resembling a prior way, it is more upsetting than if it had not happened before, ever in any way. On the lumpy ground in broken and desiccated grasses, we lay sobbing, trying to catch our breaths. Esther, who was the oldest, recovered first, crawled to Kevin and me, and helped us sit up and stand on our shaky stick legs. We were dazed with pain and also with the sick sensation that comes to you when you have not expected something to happen as it did, but, as it begins to happen, you remember that you have in fact experienced it before, and this fact determines, in the way of a sequence of bolts locking a sequence of doors, the certitude that it will recur.

In the car, Daddy sat smoking. The driver’s door was open partway, but still the car was filling with bluish smoke like mist.

Between Esther and Daddy, there was a situation unique to Esther and Daddy, as it had once been unique to Lula and Daddy: If Esther had disappointed Daddy, and had been punished for disappointing Daddy, Esther was allowed, perhaps even expected, to refer to this punishment, provided Esther did not challenge Daddy or disappoint Daddy further. A clear, simple question posted by Esther to Daddy often seemed, to our surprise, to be welcomed.

Esther said, with a catch in her throat, Oh, Daddy, why ?

Daddy said, “Because I am Daddy, whose children must never give up hope.”

From the fields of the dead, the harvest was brought forth.

Tended by resurrection farmers with grubby fingers, cold hearts, and greedy minds, the fields were worked with shovel and spade and sweat. Beneath a pall of thin moonlight, the crops were plucked from the moist, black earth, torn from wormy boxes and mildewed shrouds like rotting corn from corrupting husks. The harvest of cadavers was piled in the beds of muddy wagons and taken to market, sold to the highest bidder to supply dissection room and anatomical house. The farmers worked their bone fields night after night, thinking they were alone in their grim harvest. But there was another who worked the graveyards and mortuaries, another reaper whose cultivation reached back to antiquity.

Moon-faced and skeleton-fingered, he was the grand lord of the charnel harvest, master of graveyard harrow and yield.

Long after the mourners and weepers sought the higher, drier ground of the city, Samuel Clow stood in the graveyard, his narrow face latticed by shadow, his grubby hands gripping a short dagger-shaped wooden spade. Somebody had slit open the leaden, fat underbelly of the heavens and its blood poured earthward. It fell and became a rain that washed the color from the world until it stood shivering and dripping in a dozen hues of gray. It turned the graveyard into a bog of yellow, sucking mud, creating rivers and creeks and finally, a great inland sea of slopping charnel muck.

“A lovely night it is for such work,” Clow said, water dripping from the brim of his John Bull top hat. “What I’ll do for a pint sometimes even amazes me.”

“Aye, but you cannot be blamed for your choice of occupations, things being what they are,” Mickey Kierney said from the open grave, grunting and puffing, throwing out clods of wet earth onto a canvas sheet heaped with sodden dirt.

Clow was tall and narrow, his hair long and greasy, falling over a sharp, bony face in strands like wet straw. Kierney, on the other hand, was short and thick and muscular, his face bovine and streaked with dirt. He had once been described by his father as looking like “a silly pig.”

Rain washed Clow’s face like tears and a cold drizzle seeped down the back of his neck. The sky above was a roiling firmament of swollen clouds, black and gray, backlit by struggling rays of moonlight. The graveyard below was slowly filling like a drum, rainwater creating pools and swamps from which the leaning tombstones jutted like rotting teeth. Crosses, steeple-shaped markers, and stone angels were tangled with ribbons of shadow. Crumbling slabs had drowned and high, weed-choked sepulchers were sinking into that mud ocean like the masts of ships.

Clow looked out across the dire, funerary landscape, on guard for those who would take an interest in the work of resurrectionists, but on such a night the storm had driven the pious to bed and hearthside. So much the better.

The shaded lantern threw a somber yellow light that reflected off puddles and saturated earth, created wild, leaping shadows that crept along the desolate ivy faces and wrought-iron doors of burial vaults.

A draft horse and buckboard waited in the downpour on the winding dirt road beyond. The horse—Old Clem—shook his flanks. All around, Clow could hear the scratching and stirrings of the big rats that haunted the cemetery.

“Think I’ve hit something in me digging,” Kierney said, his shovel thudding against wood. He rapped it a few times, scraped mud away from what he had revealed. “What do you suppose could be down here, Samuel Clow? I’m thinking I don’t like this, not at all.”

Clow hung his frock coat from a tall, chipped mortuary urn and pulled Kierney up out of the grave. Donning his apron, he jumped down himself, brushing mud aside until he felt the rough-hewn surface of the pine box beneath his hands.

“Aye, you’ve found something, all right,” he said, pawing dirt away from the top. “Me thinks it be the Devil’s work, so pass down them hooks and bring Old Clem yonder.”

They had opened the grave only enough to expose the upper third of the coffin. This would be enough for what they had to do. Two iron hooks were lowered on ropes to Clow, and he inserted their tips under the upper lip of the lid. He arranged sacking over the coffin so the sound of the rent wood would be muffled. Then he crawled up out of the hole, wind-driven rain drenching all the spots it had missed before. The draft horse was unharnessed and led through the forest of headstones, the ends of the ropes attached to his collar and bit.

“All right, let’s do it, then,” Clow said.