Sophie Cleverly - A Case of Grave Danger

The boy suddenly stumbled sideways, falling into the mud beside the grave. Bones pulled away from me and began to lick his face.

‘Violet! Violet! Are you there?’

It was Father! I had never been so thankful in my entire life. ‘Father! Come quick, please!’

He dashed through the darkness towards me, his hand shielding his eyes. ‘What on earth …’ he shouted as the water drummed on the stones around us. Bones pressed a wet nose against his trousers. My father was wearing nightclothes under an overcoat, like myself.

I watched as Father slowly took in the sight before him – the pouring rain, his daughter looking like a drowned rat, and the blond boy slumped against a stone cross, chest heaving with the breath of life.

‘Oh my …’ Father said, as though hardly able to believe his own eyes. He looked at me desperately. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘I don’t know!’ I said breathlessly. ‘I heard a noise, so I went downstairs, and I found his coffin empty! The door was open, and there were footprints …’

Father pulled me into his arms. There was a brief moment of warmth and shelter, before he released me. ‘You should have fetched me immediately! There could have been grave robbers about!’ His words were cut short as he looked at the boy again. I didn’t know how Father could see a thing – his spectacles were steamed up and splattered with rain. ‘How could this have happened?’ His face had gone as pale as the boy’s.

The boy shook his head as if trying to regain his senses, and shivered in the cold. He looked up at us, and finally spoke again. ‘W-what’s … happened to me?’

* * *

The blond boy was dead. He had been dead. Hadn’t he? He’d been sent to us to be buried – I’d seen it with my own two eyes. And yet, whatever he had been, he was very much alive now and firmly back in the land of the living.

Father held a shaking hand out to the boy. The boy took it, but it took several attempts to lift him up – his weakened legs kept buckling beneath him. When he was finally standing, he seemed to be capable of staying up. I wanted to take his hand so badly, to give him comfort in any way that I could, but Mother’s voice in the back of my head whispered that it would be improper.

He moaned again, and tried to bat the light away.

‘He’s delirious,’ Father said.

I gulped. ‘It’s all right,’ I said to the boy, trying my best to soothe his quick breaths. ‘Please, stay calm. We need to get you inside. Can you walk?’

‘I think so,’ he said, but his voice was barely a whisper, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d truly heard or only seen his lips move.

Father tentatively put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. ‘I’ll run for Doctor Lane. Violet will help you back to the house, if you can make it.’

The boy nodded again, silently, and I couldn’t help but shudder. I knew he was alive, but at the same time still felt as though he were a dead man walking. Like Frankenstein’s monster.

In the lamplight, I could see that he was covered with mud and damp grass. Bones gently licked him.

Then Father was running, and Bones shot away after him with a sudden burst of greyhound speed. They darted through the headstones like minnow through a stream – they knew them as well as I did.

The blond boy staggered again, and I ducked underneath his arm to try to bear him up. To heck with improper , I thought. He needs me . And I couldn’t keep calling him ‘the blond boy’. ‘What’s your name, master?’ I asked.

‘Oliver,’ he replied, and then he began coughing violently.

When the coughing subsided, I spoke again. ‘Can you walk? We’ll need to get you back to the house. You’ll catch your de—’ I stopped myself. ‘Sorry.’

He didn’t seem to notice my faux pas . He began to stumble forward, and together we walked back through the rain-washed graveyard, the mud and sodden grass threatening to pull our shoes from our feet. I tried to steer him around the graves, but at one point he tripped on Nathaniel Partridge’s broken headstone and nearly brought us both down.

It seemed like it took an age, the two of us walking in silence under the black sky. The ghosts’ voices were mere tingling whispers now – I fancied they were talking amongst themselves, not to me, about the evening’s excitement. The barrier between living and dead was a hard one to cross, like shouting underwater.

As the clouds began to melt away, I glimpsed stars beginning to twinkle. ‘Not long now,’ I kept saying. ‘Nearly there.’ Eventually it was true, and we were outside the back door.

It was wide open – Father must have run through the house.

The boy – Oliver – stopped and leaned against the wall, his breathing still rapid. One of his hands clutched his stomach, the other his head. I quickly reached inside the door and stretched to hang up the lantern on the hook, so that I had both hands free.

‘Please … Master Oliver,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to get inside.’

He looked at me, and I was suddenly struck by his eyes, which were – for all their sunkenness – a deep, dark brown like a warm cup of cocoa. So different from my own, which were storm grey.

‘I …’ he paused. ‘I don’t want to tread mud inside your house, miss.’

And then he fainted.

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