“Of course,” she agreed.
“Why does it matter? Why do you care if I remember?”
Her lip was ragged from all the times she had bitten it that day, but she gnawed it gently again. When she spoke, she glanced away.
“He’s dead, Brian. The rest of my life, I’ll have it hanging over my head. I’ll be fucking haunted ‘cause I never got to make him talk to me.”
Slowly, as though he was about to pass out, Brian’s head tilted backward until he was staring at her down the line of his nose. He took a deep breath and shook his head, letting his chin drop again.
“Jesus, Sam—”
“I can’t do it alone, Brian.”
“No, Sam, holy shit, come on!”
“Even if I managed to not get arrested, I’d never be able to get him out of the ground.”
He still shook his head back and forth in denial, but the movements were tiny, almost imperceptible. “Sam,” he warned.
She steeled herself and reached out to take his hand, silently daring him to look away.
“I need you, Brian. You saw it that night, I know you did. And besides … I don’t have anyone else.”
He closed his eyes. “Oh, fuck.”
4
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Brian stared at her, enshrouded in the darkness inside the van.
Samantha would not answer him. She sat in the passenger seat and stared out her window across the moonlit fields. If she were to turn, the view would change. Through the windshield, she would see the aging, decrepit, chain-link fence that marked the border between the Applecrest Farm and the Ashgrove Cemetery and she could not look at that fence just now. Not yet.
“Sammie.”
There was an uncomfortable tension in Brian’s voice unlike anything she remembered from their childhood together. She had to keep reminding herself that no matter what she felt this was not the old Brian. As familiar as everything seemed, as comfortable as she felt with him, five years had passed, many hundreds of days that had flowed by for each of them. She wanted to tell him not to call her “Sammie,” that nobody called her that anymore.
“Sam,” he said, insistent.
His voice pressed at her to look into his eyes again. There was not even the dashboard light to see by. Only the moon. And even that was veiled behind a thin cover of clouds.
She had rented the van that evening for just shy of thirty bucks. Applecrest Farm was so enormous and so quiet this time of year that with the headlights off there was very little risk of them being discovered. They had waited until there was nobody else on Grove Street and then turned right on the dirt tractor road that wound up the hill among the rows of apple trees. No headlights, engine running quiet.
Now they were parked on the other side of the hill’s crest, out of sight of the farmhouse and barns where the owners had a bakery shop that sold gifts and the products of the farm.
Brian stared at her now and it felt to Samantha like a dream. Not a nightmare, exactly, but a terrible, weighted, surreal moment that could only have come to her mind during the helplessness of sleep.
“Fuck, Samantha, come on!” Brian rasped.
It wasn’t a dream. Samantha knew that. She was not some sickly, flighty heroine from a tragic Italian opera. The seat beneath her, the cool glass beside her, even the chilly air that pushed through the slightly open window to rustle her hair— all were tangible things, even Brian’s presence and the scent of his aftershave.
“Don’t ask me again if I’m sure,” she told him. “I don’t think I can do this without you, but we’re here now, so if you’re not coming I’m going to have to try to do it alone.”
Samantha got out of the van, making sure to be quiet with the door, cursing the dome light as it went on. The hill was not terribly steep, but she knew that with the weight of the burden she hoped they would be carrying back, it would seem like a mountain. She marched downward toward the ravaged, rusty fence. Beyond it was a small wood and she knew just past that were the first rows of headstones, the oldest in the cemetery. She could see them in her mind’s eye and silently she cursed her father for the cold heart that had led her here.
Brian caught up with her just as she reached one of the many openings that had been cut and torn in the chain link over the years. She slipped through easily with only a soft chinking of metal as she pushed the fence aside to allow her passage. They moved quietly through the wood—really little more than a copse of trees—until they came to the small cluster of ancient headstones that dated back to Colonial times. Thin slabs of granite, brittle, some of them cracked and broken. The grass needed trimming, for there were no surviving loved ones, nor even descendants, to keep after the groundskeeper about their care.
The cemetery was vast, with winding paths and roads. Many of the more recent stones were beautiful marble, carved and ornate, more akin to monuments than gravestones. There were several dozen crypts as well, scattered far and wide across the lawns. Fortunately the land flattened out, so that they would not be trudging uphill the entire walk back.
Not once had Samantha turned to confirm that Brian was following, nor had she offered to help him carry the tools that they would need. She reached their destination, the rose-tinted marble yet to be etched with record of the most recent burial there.
Her eyes burned with the threat of new tears, but Samantha ignored them, would not allow them. She turned away, looked out across the stone gardens for a night watchman or the groundskeeper, but there was no sign that anyone else was about, not even a light burning in the window of the small brick building near the front gate.
Samantha could smell the fresh-turned earth of her father’s grave. The dirt was still soft there. She thanked God it hadn’t rained. Brian stepped up beside her, handed her one of the shovels, and they set to work.
From the moment this course of action had occurred to her, Samantha had somehow managed to gather up her grief and pain and regret and used it to push down within her any sense of the enormity of what she had proposed, the sheer grotesque horror of it. Now as she began to dig, it flooded in. Yet once begun she found it was a task she could not abandon. And as the digging went on, hours in which she and Brian sometimes shared the effort and sometimes alternated, she found herself becoming numbed by the monotony of the labor and the chill of the cold spring night.
They worked together in silence save for the call of night birds and the chink of metal shovel on the occasional stone in soft, turned earth. Though she had somehow walled herself away, dulled her mind from the reality of what precisely she was uncovering, more and more her mind turned to Brian. Twisted as her thought process had become, she could not imagine how he could justify to himself participating in this act.
What must he be feeling, she wondered, what emotions snaking through his heart enabled him to aid her this night? Despite the time since they’d last seen one another it felt to her in so many ways—as she now realized it must also feel to him—that those years had come and gone almost unnoticed. They had been inseparable, the closest of friends. She would have died for him. Brian had loved her, and maybe, just maybe she had loved him as well.
For Sam, that love had faded over time, perhaps buried in a grave of its own so that she would never have to wonder what might have been. Perhaps Brian had put his own feelings six feet under as well, but now they had been unearthed or else why was he there at all?
She watched him digging down in the hole they had made, carving out the long rectangular shape that the gravediggers had obscured that same morning. Brian worked for perhaps ten minutes more, then wordlessly climbed out and let Samantha replace him. She dropped carefully into the hole, not wanting to pack the earth down any further.
On the third thrust of her shovel she struck wood.
The impact reverberated up her arms and she froze there, wide-eyed, staring at the ground. A fresh surge of nausea roiled in her gut. It was as though despite the burning of the muscles in her shoulders and back from her labor
, none of this had been real until the shovel struck her father’s coffin through the loosened soil.
The cemetery fell silent save for the whistle of cold wind past her ears and the hush of rustling leaves in the trees above. Brian said not a word. The night birds were quiet. There came not even the sound of an engine from the road.
“Oh, Jesus, Daddy,” Samantha whispered, and the shovel fell from her hands.
Her knees were weak, but she did not collapse, slumping instead against the cold, damp earthen walls inside her father’s grave. She covered her mouth to keep from screaming. As though it might shelter her from that sound, that feeling in her arms, she turned her face toward a comer of that hole, the scent of moist earth enveloping her completely.
A dry voice rasped her name. “Samantha.”
She started, jolted by the sound, and spun around, nearly stumbling over the handle of the shovel.
Brian crouched at the graveside above her, his form silhouetted against the indigo sky, a shadow upon a shadow.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I understand. You had to do this. But we should go now. Come on, I’ll take you home.” He reached his hand down as if to hoist her up out of the hole.
Eyes stinging, dirt on her lips, Samantha bent and picked up her shovel, then turned back tothe work at hand. In a soft voice layered with grim emotion Brian asked her to stop. She realized that he had never imagined she would go through with this. Looking back now, Samantha was not sure herself if she had intended to see it through.
She bent low and began to scrape shovelfuls of dirt from the top of her father’s casket. Brian said nothing more but after a few minutes he dropped into the grave with her. It took another twenty minutes for them to clear away the earth around the coffin, to free it completely from the ground.
They moved on either side of it, squeezing down between the walls of the grave and the casket, and took hold of the steel handles on either side. As they tried to lift it, Sam’s already aching shoulders screamed in protest. In her head, macabre math calculations: her father’s weight while he was alive, the amount of blood in the human body, the size of organs removed during preparation for burial. A corpse had to be much lighter than the deceased had been in life. So it had to be the casket.
“Try just the top,” she told Brian. “Tilt it up.”
Together they grabbed the handles at the head of the wooden box. It was still unimaginably heavy, like shimmying some enormous bureau, drawers full, across the carpet. But somehow they managed to raise that front end, to drag the bottom across the dirt, to lean the casket against the wall of that hole in the ground.
Awkward weight shifted and thumped inside the coffin. Samantha winced but tried not to think about it.
“Get up there,” Brian told her.
Samantha climbed out of the hole, reached down and grabbed hold of one of the steel handles. Brian crouched behind the casket and put his fingers beneath its bottom edge.
“On three,” he said.
Then he counted, and they pulled. The casket rose perhaps two feet from the bottom of the grave. Brian’s face reddened, his eyes wide, veins standing out on his neck.
“Shit!” he muttered. “I’ve gotta drop it.”
He backed off and let it crash down to the earth again. It rocked forward, nearly falling upon him, but he pushed it back, bumping it against the wall of the grave. Brian rested with one arm on the casket, chest rising and falling. His eyes looked haunted and Samantha wondered if he had made himself as numb as she was.
When he stared at her, she knew what he was going to say.
“There’s no way we’re getting this thing out of here without help.”
“We don’t have any help,” she reminded him.
“Unless you’ve got a cable long enough to tie to the bumper of the van that would reach all the way down here and drag this thing out of the ground … maybe a winch and a pulley… we’re done here. It’s time to go home.”
He gazed at her. “This is crazy and you know it. There are other ways to work out what you need to work out.”
“Not really,” she replied, pressing her lips together so hard they hurt. “Maybe there are ways for me to find out how to live with it. But there’s no other way for me to resolve it. I need to know. I need to hear his voice and look him in the eye.”
Brian’s expression hardened. “He doesn’t have eyes anymore, Samantha. And his lips are sewn shut. He can’t say anything to you. He’s dead.”
Samantha began to breathe in short gasps like a child about to have a tantrum. She glared at him.
“Brian, look at me, right now. You look me in the eye and tell me that you didn’t see what 1 saw that night up at Scottie’s.”
For a long moment he met her furious gaze; then he dropped his eyes and looked away. Samantha swallowed, her throat dry, her breathing slowing.
“Open it,” she said.
His head snapped up. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“Open it, Brian. You help me get him out of the hole and I’ll carry him the rest of the way. You don’t even have to come with me after that if you don’t want to.”
He swore through gritted teeth, stomped about a little down in the grave. Then he grabbed the shovel.
“How?” he asked. “How do you open it?”
“I don’t know. There’s got to be a way to do it from outside. Otherwise funeral directors would constantly be locking them shut by accident.”
“Maybe,” Brian whispered. “But Sam, I don’t know the first thing about caskets and I don’t want to.”
“Open it.”
His lips pressed together as though the ghoulish reality of their chore had finally struck home to him. “Fine,” he muttered. “Jesus Christ, 1 can’t believe we’re doing this.”
Brian lifted the shovel and managed to get its tip lodged in the crease between the lid and the base on the upper part of the coffin, where the head would be. He set one foot against the wall of the grave. Earth showered down around his ankle. Then he pulled, using his leverage, groaning as he pried open the coffin with a shriek of a wood and a snapping of locks.
It opened.
Samantha watched her father’s corpse tumble out at Brian’s feet.
Something shut down inside her. She stood frozen at the edge of the grave. The way the body had struck the earth the skin on the corpse’s face was pulled taut. Whatever stuffing had been packed behind his lids to replace his eyes pushed now against the thin skin. His lips were slightly parted, thread visible where they had been sewn together.
She should have screamed. Samantha knew that. She should have screamed and turned and run away and prayed to God to forgive her. But her breath came easily and her eyes were dry. Her skin was cold, but that might have been just the air.
Brian stood immobile, muttering the name of the Lord again and again under his breath. “Jesus Christ, oh Jesus, what the hell are we doing? Oh, Jesus!”
“Pick him up, Brian.”
He looked up and she saw that he was crying. “Sam, come on! Oh, Jesus.”
“It’s too much now,” she said. “Too far. You know why we’re doing this. Where we’re going. You know what 1 think is going to happen there. Help me, Brian. Pick him up.”
Brian sucked in a breath and nodded silently. He moved around the corpse, slightly crouched, his hands searching the air as though trying to find a place where he could pick it up and not be touching something dead. At last he grabbed her father’s body under the arms and began to lift.
“God, it’s heavy. I didn’t think it would be this heavy.” He squatted down, got his weight under it and grunted as he drove upward, pistoning his legs, forcing the corpse with its awkward, flailing limbs up onto the edge of the grave. Samantha bent and grabbed the back of her father’s suit jacket in both fists. The fabric scrunched up in her hands as she hauled it forward, this dead thing, this hollow shell. Brian pushed the legs up from behind and they succeeded in rolling it onto the lawn of the cemetery.
“We’re going to need something to cany him,” Brian said, his voice small and tight. “We can manage now, but if we’re going up to Biddeford, we’re going to need something to carry Kim in.”
Samantha knelt and rolled her father’s body onto its back. “Then we’ll stop on the way.”
She reached out a hand to her father’s face. His skin was cold to the touch but it did not feel human; more like rubber, dry and without the oil and elasticity it would have had in life. The face of the dead man was contorted into a horrid Halloween mask expression.
Father Corcoran had consecrated the grave, had given this dead thing over to God.
But God would just have to understand.
“Come on.”
Samantha slid a hand beneath the armpit of the corpse and Brian did the same on the other side. Together they hoisted him up.
“We’re just going to drag him?” Brian asked.
For the first time since the corpse had been unearthed, Samantha met his gaze, searched his eyes. They were glazed over, wide with a numb sort of fear almost like surprise and she thought of some human-shaped animal caught in the headlights of a speeding car. There was still time for Brian to get out of the way, but like that deer or raccoon, he was so stunned by his circumstances that it really was too late for him. He had surrendered himself to the devastating collision with the grille of that oncoming car.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to carry him?” Brian asked.
“It’s just as easy to drag him,” she said. “We’ll have to carry him later. Might as well wait until we don’t have a choice.”
So they began, moving back across the cemetery among the trees and headstones, trailing the dead man across the neatly cut grass that was green in some places and brown and ragged in others. A chilly wind moved through the trees, a quiet rustle that seemed almost respectful but was perhaps merely cautious.
The hill began to slope upward and the way became more difficult. Samantha kept her eyes forward, determined now. Every few moments Brian glanced anxiously around as though some unknown predator lurked nearby. When they again passed those Colonial-era gravestones, he paused and Samantha stumbled, nearly fell.
Four Dark Nights Page 10