"Before I dropped out of uni I was doing a course in hydrodynamics. The tomb is airtight, right? It also has its foundations below the water level of the lake." He indicated the three stone steps leading down to the door of the tomb. "What if hot weather was to effect the air pressure inside, causing the lake water to seep in and flood the tomb? It would float the coffins about. Then, when the weather changes, the water disappears, the coffins settle higgledy-piggledy, and there's your dancing dead."
"Well, firstly, lad, the floor of this tomb is tiles."
"Tiles crack. Tiles break."
"Secondly, the Chenoweth coffins are lead-lined; too heavy to float."
"If the coffins are airtight they'd be buoyant. Steel ships float, you know."
"And pigs may fly. Let me tell you again that I've seen – that's seen -- them coffins danced about: upside-down, against the wall, laying atop each other. There's nothing natural about this particular grave."
"Wouldn't you like to be sure?"
"How do you mean?"
"I mean have some method to see if I'm right -- or wrong."
"How?"
"With a glass jar."
"A what?"
"We leave an empty glass jar, weighted with lead so it won't float, in the tomb next time it's opened. Then, if I'm right, the next time the coffins are found danced about our jar will be full of water."
Monty nodded. "There's something in it, I admit. But what do you mean exactly by 'we'?"
"You're the one responsible for opening and closing the tomb. A little sleight of hand before you lock the doors after the next funeral, and when the tomb is opened again we may have our evidence, one way or the other. Haven't you ever wondered what really goes on inside this tomb, way down deep in the dark? In the next few days we may have our only opportunity to discover the truth of the curse of the Wailing Woman once and for all. What do you say?"
"I don't think it's a good idea. It's tampering with the unknown."
"All we'd be tampering with is the tomb's phoney reputation."
"Young George, there's nothing phoney about the Chenoweth Grand Tomb."
"Then prove me wrong."
"With a glass jar, a lump of lead and a little sleight of hand?"
Next morning the news broke that W.W. Chenoweth had died during the night.
***
The day before the funeral Monty opened the tomb in the presence of the cemetery manager who, with an air of business-like solemnity, stepped into its shadows. When he re-emerged his expression was one that belied any belief in curses or rumours of curses.
"Very good, Mr Montague. Carry on."
Duly checked, the mausoleum was closed for a further twenty-four hours.
On the morning of the funeral George handed Monty a glass jar coiled about with a thickness of lead. An hour later when he re-opened the tomb, Monty secreted the jar in a back corner, beneath the rear-most bier. That afternoon, as the last mourners left the island, he closed and locked the doors. All he and George could do now was wait for hot days and low water.
They got them two years later in a summer full of hot days. Despite a connection to a nearby creek, the lake level dropped. George could almost see it falling day by day. He grew restless and impatient to the extent of having vague fantasies of waylaying a Chenoweth just to get the tomb open.
The lake was little more better than mud when the late autumn rains finally broke the dry. But by then George had left the cemetery to have another crack at university.
***
Many months passed before George laid eyes on the Chenoweth Grand Tomb again. It was a sunny afternoon, and he'd decided to skip a class and visit Monty. He found him gardening by the lake. Almost immediately their conversation turned to the tomb. George expressed disappointment that the tomb hadn't been opened since he'd left the cemetery.
Monty smiled with mock agreement. "Yes, it's irritating how none of the Chenoweths have had the common courtesy to drop dead yet."
"Why wait?" said George.
"Why what?" Monty's smile disappeared.
"Why wait for a Chenoweth to die? Why not take a look ourselves?"
"Now?"
"Tonight. The water's what? Knee deep? Easy wading."
Monty shook his head. "It'd be my job. It's not worth the risk."
"Then lend me the keys. They can't sack me."
"The keys'll not be leaving my keeping. Ah, it was a stupid thing I did, putting that jar in there."
"The only stupid thing you did was failing to see that the dancing dead are caused be a series of circumstances all very natural in origin."
"There's nothing natural about the Chenoweth Grand Tomb, lad. It's what I've always said and it's what I believe."
George pointed to the tomb on the island. "Proof of what you say is there right now, Monty. The lake went dry last summer; plenty of time for low pressure within the tomb to suck up water, plenty of opportunity for your Wailing Woman to cross and call the next dance. Whether I'm right, whether you're right, the coffins must've been disturbed by now. The drying up of the lake is the common factor. But if you want to wait for a Chenoweth to die before you'll take a look inside that tomb, then you may be waiting a long time. In fact you may be dead yourself before --"
"All right." Monty looked across the lake. "All right. We'll go tonight. But if the coffins have nor been disturbed then I'm waiting for the proper time."
George nodded. "Agreed."
***
The mud oozed between their toes and the midnight water was cold about their knees. They climbed onto the island and padded across the lawn to the tomb.
Monty unlocked the tomb door.
"The torch, lad."
George handed it over. Monty pushed the door until it opened wide enough to admit half a face. He flicked the torch beam around inside, and what he saw he saw in fragments: a bit of wall, a dried wreath, the glint from a glass jar... He pushed again. He stopped.
"Go on, Monty, open it," George said nervously.
"I can't! There's a coffin jammed against it!"
George peered around the edge of the door and saw that it was true. A coffin was jammed edgewise in the entrance; others were strewn about the tomb in total disarray. It took several minutes of steady pushing to open the door wide enough to permit George to slither through. He took the torch and made his way over and around the scattered Chenoweth coffins, trying not to look behind him, his eyes fixed ahead on the beckoning glint of glass. At the rear-most bier he stooped and plucked the jar from its corner. He didn't dare look at its contents. Should it be dry he knew he could not long vouch for his reason there among the dancing dead.
Back at the door he handed Monty the jar, then squeezed through.
Monty held the jar up to the torch light and they saw.
After a moment George said, "I'm sorry, Monty."
The grave-digger shrugged. He produced a lid from his coat pocket and screwed it down on the jar of water. "Well, maybe the Chenoweths will reward us if we can show that the Wailing Woman is just a tomb full of cold water. Perhaps you could take the water to your university labs and get it checked. You never know, it might come from a different source than the lake. An underground stream, perhaps, or perhaps it's only condensation." Monty's eyes glistened in the torch light. "You never know," he repeated softly.
"I'll get it checked," George promised.
***
Monty met George a week later, standing in his usual spot at the edge of the lake, staring out at the black marble tomb on the island.
"Did you get the water checked, lad?"
"Yes," said George, still staring outwards. "In fact I've just come from the lab."
"What's the matter? You're not acting like the one who proved there's no such thing as the Wailing Woman."
"I wouldn't say that, Monty. It wasn't just water in the jar." George finally turned around. "It was tears."
On the Other Side
“Wish!”
The old man turned, the talisman i
n his hand, and regarded her with a fear born of her mad demand that bordered on blasphemy. His voice shook as he said, “He has been dead ten days, and besides, he – I would not tell you else, but I could only recognize him by his clothing.”
“Wish!” said his wife.
***
It was night. He was standing at the end of a muddy street that seemed somehow familiar. He couldn’t remember how he got there. He’d been walking, he knew, in a kind of stupor for a long time. How long he couldn’t tell anymore. Nights and days had merged into a continual grey blur. He was cold and hungry and his feet hurt almost as much as his brain since the horror had seized it.
What he could remember he remembered in thin fragments: lending spare clothes to Charlie after the dynamo wheel splattered him with oil; someone saying “Don’t stand so close,” then a shriek; something splattering him that wasn’t oil; something like a rag doll torn and dirtied, minced and broken; his mind overwhelmed by the horror … wandering lanes and fields, nights of cold, mind gone and blank. Staring like a madman.
But bit by little bit his memory was coming back. Like waking up to pain renewed.
Something very terrible had happened all those blank wandering days ago. So terrible his mind had shut down like machinery turned off, like meshing gears jammed with …
The image of the broken doll came back again, making him shudder unawares, and his thoughts lingered on the word jammed.
He had stumbled away from the scene of the accident, the spinning dynamos, the meshing machinery, his mind utterly gone, to wander the countryside oblivious, reduced in mind and drinking from streams, existing on berries and field mushrooms. Now here on this muddy road, somehow familiar, his stunned mind began to regain some semblance of sanity. He recalled his home, his loving parents, aged now and frail. Virtually by instinct he had made his way back to this lonely out-of-the-way place where his father had once grumbled one rainy night while they waited for a visitor from far away that the pathway was a bog and the road a torrent.
The visitor had brought something from that far away place, a thing small and shriveled, a thing he had described with mixed wonder and fear. All at once he had thrown it on the fire and father had plucked it out. They were going to be rich and happy and …
And then a frightening thing had happened.
Confused, weak with hunger and bitterly cold with the night chill he opened the gate of a snug little cottage named Lakesnam Villa and knocked feebly on the front door of home.
Home. How the word was balm to his broken mind. Hope and joy swelled within him when he heard his mother’s voice call from upstairs.
“It’s Herbert!”
Then he heard his father’s voice too. But why did it sound so strained, almost angry?
“For God’s sake …”
Yes, yes, it’s me, he thought, his brain still too shocked to speak aloud. He pounded again on the door. I’m home! I’ve come home!
Memory was clearing faster now, unmercifully. He saw how Charlie had been caught in the machinery by his borrowed clothes. The noises he had made, like breaking sticks and burst fruit.
Oh god, let me in! Let me in!
He heard his mother rattle back the door chain, draw the bottom bolt stiffly from its socket. In a frenzy of excitement, happiness and nausea as returning memory assailed him he pounded wildly on the door, a perfect fusillade of knocks, knowing he would soon be reunited with his loved ones and this nightmare of horror would end.
He heard scratching at the top of the door, heard his mother cry to her husband, “The bolt! Come down. I can’t reach it.”
A chair scraped across the floor somewhere inside, banged against the wall beside the door. Herbert pounded louder, faster.
The top bolt squeaked, drawing back.
Then his father grabbed the monkey’s paw and wished him dead.
Out of the Storm
The destroyer found her in the middle of the Indian Ocean, drifting bows down from out of a storm that had killed three other ships. Binoculars trained on her from the warship’s bridge and they saw she was HMAS Barrinji, a minesweeper-corvette missing nearly a week. The destroyer sounded her siren, fired a blank shot.
No response. Barrinji, silent, dead, rolled to the troughs and crests, her bows lifting sluggishly, dipping deep. The ropes from the empty life-boat davits trailed in the water. The canvas flap of the door to her bridge slapped against the woodwork.
With her guns swinging through their arcs, the destroyer circled, then came abeam. Those on her bridge and lining her decks saw the ugly black gash behind the four-inch gun on the foredeck of the little ship. Grapples were thrown, clanking, catching, and Barrinji was boarded.
The first man to hit her deck clambered downhill, forward to where the bomb or shell had struck behind the gun. What remained of the gun’s crew was already black and drying, draped over the splinters of the deck and merging into the blast mark across the front of the bridge superstructure. At the bottom of the hole, not far below, oily water oozed around twists of jagged metal; and in odd, quiet moments something down there made soft bumping noises.
The others who boarded climbed upward to the tilted quarterdeck or down deep into the engine and boiler rooms; over hatch coamings and into echoing steel alleyways, finding no one. The wireless office, crew’s space, lobbies, lockers, messes, wash-places, small-arms magazine, officers’ quarters, engine spaces and boiler room, cold now, were all deserted.
The hatch leading to the bosun’s store forward was shut and dogged watertight. The leader of the boarding party, Lieutenant Dixson, stood beside it. He said, “What’s it sound like?”
The seamen there had already pressed their ears against the steel, hearing only their own blood and breathing. Someone thought there was a faraway tap-tap behind the silence behind the hatch. But none of this was said to Lieutenant Dixson, whose beard and close-set eyes seemed to fix his expression with a permanent What did you call me! look, regardless of the occasion.
A Leading Seaman cautiously said, “Sounds dry behind it, sir.” He stood aside.
Dixson bent to the hatch and listened. “What about the seams and rivets in this bulkhead?”
“Dry, sir. Bone dry.”
“Hmmm.” He heard nothing that sounded like the sea sloshing around in there, though there was perhaps a rhythmic tap-tap somewhere in a muffled distance. “Everybody get back to the last compartment and close the hatch behind you.”
Not being heroes or fools, the seamen did as they were told. Not being a hero or a fool himself, merely the officer in charge of the boarding party, Dixson eased off the hatch’s bottom dog-iron. He gripped the locking wheel central of the hatch and jerked it counter-clockwise, then kicked against the steel just above the coaming. No sudden wetness glistened on the bottom edge so he eased off the remaining dog-iron and inched the hatch open.
***
An electric voice crackled across the water. “What’s it look like, Number One?”
Lacking even a loudhailer to reply, Lieutenant Dixson had to shout through cupped hands to his Captain as the destroyer steamed slowly down Barrinji’s port side. “Complete derelict, sir! All dry aft of the gyro compass room bulkhead! It’s buckled and been shored up pretty rough! I’m having it re-done!” He hesitated, glancing at the front of the bridge superstructure. “A steam hose would be appreciated, sir!”
“Understandable.” The figure holding the microphone on the destroyer’s bridge nodded, turned and spoke to others. The warship’s engine room telegraphs clanged flat notes on the still sea air and she slipped away from Barrinji at increased speed to circle with asdic pinging the depths. It was unhealthy not to keep moving in these waters.
Dixson watched her glide away, all too aware of his sitting duck status. Except for the four-inch gun which was smashed to uselessness, Barrinji’s only weapon was a 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft gun on the boat deck aft. That and two 20mm machine guns mounted one either bridgewing. The four-inch, he decided, could be --
He jerked about, startled by a sudden hollow hammering inside the dead ship. He relaxed. It was the damage control party reshoring the gyro compass room bulkhead. He returned his attention to the four-inch gun sitting askew and jammed on its mounting, its breach block shattered by the blast that had shattered its gunners. It would have to be cut up and ditched, which would help bring up her bows. They’d need that extra freeboard if Barrinji was to be steamed back. He tried not admitting it to himself, but he was unhappy in the knowledge that if they did get her underway he would have to captain her. He’d often dreamt of a command of his own, but this was a nightmare he’d not counted on. Down below the hammering abruptly stopped.
For a second Dixson thought the hatch had given way, and recognised in the thought an actual wish. But there was no crash, no shouts, no gush of inrushing sea. A moment more and the hammering started again. He looked out over the near-sunken bows. Luck was with them. The sea was calming.
***
For what it was worth, some one said a prayer before the steam hose was turned on.
The job was done hastily without further ceremony. Their Captain was not one to be wanting his destroyer stopped with a hose pipe draped over the side for any longer than the grisly work needed. Neither radar nor asdic were returning echoes, but the sea was now unusually flat and the sky clear. They were the perfect targets.
In the Captain's Cabin aboard Barrinji, Lieutenant Dixson sat himself down at the desk to sort out the situation. In front of him, screwed to the bulkhead just above the desk, was a framed photograph showing a group of naval officers dressed in tropical kit of short-sleeved shirts and shorts sitting forward of Barrinji's four-inch gun. Dixson glanced away, then looked up again with a shock of recognition – he knew the First Lieutenant pictured there, a rather lanky fellow with a thin face and fair, receding hair. Dixson had trained with him at a shore station before the war. For the life of him, however, he could not remember the man's name. Nevertheless, the photograph was a horrible coincidence in black and white.
The Dark and What It Said Page 10