The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  The Gravedigger pushed his hands against his face, leaving smears of dirt like war paint across his cheeks. He waited a moment, squinting as he stared up at his pale, freckled wife, and shook his head.

  “You’ve got nothing.”

  “It’ll come to me,” she said. “What do you need rope for? Just run up the side and jump. I’ll pull you up. Why you always have to make things so complicated?”

  The Gravedigger grumbled and shrugged. “You going to catch me?”

  Clementine rolled up her sleeves and flexed her arm muscles. She was enjoying this far too much for the Gravedigger’s liking.

  “I’ll get you with one hand, just in case anyone’s watching. We’ve got an image to maintain. Oh, I do have one request.”

  The Gravedigger threw up his arms and said, “What’s that, my sweet, precious, milky-white princess?”

  To give her a start, he ran up the side of the pit and jumped into the air.

  Clementine called him a “son of a bitch,” and with one arm, as she’d promised, she caught him.

  “God damn, you’re heavy, Atticus,” she wheezed, lifting him up and back into the world of the living.

  Clementine, with the Gravedigger’s hand still in hers, fell down to the ground with him and lay there a moment, laughing.

  “The rope,” she said, smiling too hard to speak right, “it’s already under the bed.”

  For the Gravedigger’s family, dinner most often consisted of the “same old, same old,”—a traditional meal prepared by Clementine every evening consisting of the same meats, vegetables, and breads she’d been serving for the past thirteen years. Will used to complain about his mother’s lack of creativity in the kitchen. After visiting the homes of his friends, now he was just glad she made the effort.

  “Hope you’re starving,” Clementine said, as she always did, as she came into the dining room, balancing two plates on each arm.

  The Gravedigger and his son sat at the table, their stomachs competing against one another’s, trying to prove who was the hungriest.

  “Instead of the same old, same old,” Clementine said, bending down and sliding the plates before her boys, “I thought we could have something a little different.”

  The Gravedigger and his son went wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Will may have even shed a tear, but they were too caught up in the moment to truly notice.

  Something a little different was another meal entirely. It was the holiday that only comes once a year, when no one is expecting it, because they thought they’d already missed it. Something a little different was a dinner cooked in secret, over the course of the week, using the finest meat and most expensive seasonings. Something a little different was a dream made real by Clementine’s insistence on finding the finest vegetables, grains, breads, and sauces across Gallows and its borderlands. Ultimately, something a little different was the reminder that they were doing well, and that all good things were well worth the wait.

  “You’ve really outdone yourself this time, Clem,” the Gravedigger said. Giddily, he cut through the piece of steak on his plate as though it were butter. He took a bite of the pink square of meat and said, “Mmthasmmmyupgudnkswf,” which translated into, “Mm, that’s really good. Thank you, my loving wife.”

  Clementine smiled, took a drink of water, and looked at Will. “How is it?”

  Will nodded behind the corncob glued to his mouth and hands. Bits of corn flew onto his shoulders, he went at it so hard.

  His father eyed him from across the table, so he quickly said, “Thank you, Mom, it’s great.”

  Clementine took a bite out of a piece of garlic bread. “Digging awfully close to the house.”

  “Running out of room,” the Gravedigger said. He let out a belch even the dead could feel. “Last one this way, I promise. Once the mayor gives me the go ahead, I’ll expand southward. I have to get this new body in the ground before it starts to stink up the place.”

  “Who is it?” Will asked. He leaned back in his chair and undid the top button of his pants. He took a deep breath, and then went at the meal again.

  “You remember that uppity boy—Brinton?”

  Will shook his head.

  Clementine said, “That son of a bitch got himself killed? Did he ever make it to Eldrus?”

  “Yup,” the Gravedigger said, nodding, “made it all the way into the royal guard.”

  “Shut up, Atticus. Really? Brinton?” Clementine let out a laugh and hit the table with her fist. “What happened? What the hell is he doing back here? He’s got no family.”

  The Gravedigger shrugged. “He got himself killed guarding the King, I suppose.” He took the last steak, cut it into three pieces, and gave the largest two to Clementine and Will. “I don’t understand it, them sending his body back here, but they did last night, while you all were sleeping. Two soldiers from Eldrus dropped off the box. I think they’re staying at the inn, unless they’ve already left. Best they do leave soon. Not much love for Eldrus here nowadays.”

  Will picked at the food in-between his teeth. “Must be a perk to serving royalty. You know, being sent back home.”

  “It’s strange,” Clementine said, her mouth full of a little of everything. “King Edgar is a strange one.”

  “I expect anyone would be after going through what he did.” The Gravedigger sighed, slouched in his chair, and allowed the digesting to commence.

  “I bet he made it all up,” Will suggested, his voice a little too high, a little too unsure to suggest anything other than he was trying to get a rise out of his parents.

  “Well, aren’t you the rebel?” Clementine said. “He’s a king. They all make things up. Surviving the Nameless Forest? Eh, I doubt it.” She looked at the Gravedigger, and he nodded in agreement. “But murdering his whole family? Come on, now.”

  “I’m not saying I love the kid,” the Gravedigger said, as though King Edgar were five and not twenty-five, “but he’s done more than his father, that’s for sure.”

  “Hell of a lot better than the council did when he was missing,” Clementine chirped. “But he hasn’t stopped sending soldiers to all the towns, though. They’re going to lose support if they keep it up. They ought to send people to Nachtla. Place is a ghost town.”

  The Gravedigger wiped his mouth. “At least Gallows is far enough out for them to more or less let us be.”

  Will sat up and drummed the tops of his legs excitedly. “Ronny down the road said that was on purpose, that Archivist Amon screwed things up on purpose so we’d be happy to have King Edgar back. You know, kind of makes sense.”

  “Ronny down the road is a dumbass,” Clementine said bluntly. “He keeps trying to hock Old World artifacts that aren’t worth nothing to no one, claiming it’s to help pay for his kids, which he don’t even take care of to begin with. Ronny’s trouble, and if you go around him, you’ll get in trouble, too. Just stay the hell away from him, otherwise, the next body your dad will be burying will be his. I’ll make sure of it.”

  Stunned, Will mumbled, “Oh, okay.”

  “Enough about Ronny,” the Gravedigger said. He took his wife’s crimson hand and stroked it to calm her. His face had gone hard, and though he didn’t show it, he was pissed. “Clementine, thank you for this delicious dinner.” He raised her hand and kissed it like a gentleman. “Let’s think good thoughts, before we do bad things.”

  Clementine smiled, sniffled her nose. “Good thoughts. Only good thoughts.”

  CHAPTER II

  The Gravedigger and his wife weren’t the only ones to break their bed that night. Something else had, too.

  “Atticus, where are you going?” Clementine said, sitting up, her wrists still bound, her body glistening with sweat. “Let it be until morning. We’re not finished here.”

  The Gravedigger lit a candle and turned around. Many so-called experts on the institution of marriage had warned him he’d tire of his wife and her looks, that he may venture elsewhere to satisfy his needs. He hadn’t believed i
t then, and he sure as hell didn’t believe it now. Staring at Clementine there in the candlelight, he felt the same as he had the first time they’d made love. It was as though he had never grown out of being the nervous, overly-excited boy who always finished too soon, and who tried to make up for it too much. If there were other women in the world, then he hadn’t seen them; they must’ve disappeared the day Clementine came into his life.

  “You going?” she asked, shaking him from his thoughts. She lay down on the broken bed, her body at odd angles because of the way it fell. “Untie me then, so I can finish what you started.”

  Thirty minutes later, the Gravedigger emerged from the room, sore but satisfied.

  At night, when it thought everyone was asleep or having too much sex to pay it any attention, the house came alive. The floor creaked with phantom footsteps, while the attic howled ghastly gusts of ghostly orders. Things were moved or sometimes broken. If they came down at the right time, when the house was least expecting it, they found rooms shifted slightly, or the staircase somewhat crooked. For the first few months here, they chalked it up to the Black Hour, but now that it was so frequent and it hadn’t killed them yet, they figured it was something else entirely; a haunt, maybe, with a soft spot for interior decoration.

  So, thirty minutes later, when the Gravedigger emerged from the room, he was understandably confused when he found nothing had changed at all. As he descended the stairs, hot wax from the candle he held dripped onto his hand. Grumbling, the Gravedigger reached the first floor and waved the light about, like a nun at night searching for out-of-bed orphans.

  “Will?” the Gravedigger called out, expecting, and getting, no response. His son slept deeper than most of those buried out back, and usually only woke for his girlfriend, Hazel.

  The Gravedigger needed some fresh air, so he stepped outside and got some. The night was windy, but humid, and it smelled like wet dog. He took a seat in his father’s rocking chair and put it to motion, as his eyes tried to break up the black that blanketed Gallows.

  They lived on the outskirts of the town, nearest the Nameless Forest, which, thankfully, was not all that near. It was a good place to be, he often thought, because if something went down in Gallows, they were close enough to see it, but far enough to get away.

  He rocked his chair a bit, adding its creaks and cracks to the chorus of bugs and bats that sang around him. Across the yard, where the old chapel sat broken and godless, the graveyard was a mass of severe shapes and mostly bad choices. How he’d gotten into this line of work, the Gravedigger couldn’t recall, but he loved it. The money that came with burying the dead was poor—that’s what the farm was for—but it also came with a kind of satisfaction he couldn’t get elsewhere. Maintaining the graveyard was like maintaining a garden; if only everyone else could appreciate its beauty as much as he did.

  A grunt, and then the snapping of wood: He turned his head toward the barn and saw a light through its window; a light that shouldn’t be.

  The Gravedigger went back inside and grabbed his scythe, because if there ever was a weapon that suited his profession, that was it. He hurried down the porch and sprinted through the grass. Crickets got out of his way as he went.

  There were voices in the barn now, hurried but soft. They knew he was coming.

  The barn’s front door was half-open, so the Gravedigger took it and flung it back the rest of the way.

  Two dark shapes froze where they stood. They dropped the lantern they were carrying and slipped through the space between the boards he’d been meaning to fix.

  The Gravedigger turned around, and went around the side of the barn. The dark shapes were tearing across the field. Before he gave chase, they’d already disappeared into the woods.

  The Gravedigger sighed, and shook his head. He rested the scythe against the side of the barn. He’d been looking forward to a good fight, and they’d robbed him of that. What else had they taken?

  The discarded lantern lay face up in a bed of hay, the sharp shadows it produced stabbing the light where it rested. The Gravedigger picked it up quick—the last thing he needed was a fire—and had a look around. No tools had been taken, nor had the few horses been woken. Had he caught them before they could get started?

  “Dumbass kids,” the Gravedigger mumbled. He’d been one of those dumbass kids once, but he’d long since shed that thick and stupid skin.

  After silently vowing to fix the boards in the back wall, the Gravedigger made to leave, but stopped. He heard a whistling—a whining wind through wood—and hinges on rust. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the door to the annex unlatched, with a hole where the handle should’ve been. The annex was where he kept the dead. What had the little dumbasses wanted with the dead?

  Lantern held high, just in case he needed to clobber a straggler on the other side, the Gravedigger crept into the annex. The smell hit him hard, as it always did. No matter how many times he’d worked in here, the pungent preservatives always found a way to make themselves known.

  The walls of the annex were not wood, but Rime Rock—stones from the Far North that held a permanent cold. Grave Soil and Devour were applied liberally to the area to prevent decomposition of the corpses inside. These components weren’t cheap, nor were they especially common. Dumbass kids always came around trying to get at them.

  But not this time.

  This time, they’d come for the body.

  Brinton’s box lay on the long table, front broken and busted, as though the dark shapes had taken hammers to it.

  The Gravedigger leaned over the dead man’s bed and lit it up. Except for the bone-deep gash running across his neck, Brinton looked like Brinton. He was paler, yes, but the boy never had much color to him. He was thinner as well, but Death will do that to a person.

  No, what stood out the most to the Gravedigger were Brinton’s eyes. When he lived in Gallows, they’d been an unimpressive brown. But as the Gravedigger pulled back the man’s lids, he saw that his eyes had frozen over, and in that icy stillness, there were blotches of red around his pupils.

  “What’re we going to do with you?”

  The Gravedigger knew the body would keep so long as it stayed in this room, but would it stay in this room? Brinton’s death looked a violent death. If he’d died with enough hate in his heart, he just might come back to share it with the rest of the class.

  The Gravedigger took a jar off the shelf above the table. He shook out a large leaf with sharp edges and crystalline veins, and gave the corpse this Gift of Sleep, which was a little something to help Brinton’s spirit sleep better.

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He backed out of the room and shut the door to the annex. Whether or not the tiny, faerie-like Inferi would come for the Gift didn’t seem to matter; the leaf itself was almost always enough to calm the restless dead.

  The Gravedigger emerged from the barn and grabbed the scythe he’d propped up against its side. He felt anxious, on edge. He wouldn’t be able to sleep, even if Clementine used every trick in the book on him. He needed something to fix, something to destroy.

  Cleaning his teeth with his tongue, he surveyed the graveyard across the dirt path, searching for heads amongst headstones to crack and split. Finding nothing, he returned his attention toward the old chapel. Here, Gallows’ outcasts would occasionally have themselves a séance to seduce those grim sweethearts who couldn’t be wooed by other means. If he was lucky, he may even catch a few of them in the act tonight. If he was really lucky, he’d even have some new components to show for it, too.

  The Gravedigger crossed the path and went quietly through the grass. His ankles itched as the dew-laden blades slid past his skin. With as much silence as he could muster, he climbed the few stairs outside the chapel, ducked beneath the lopsided archways, and made his way inside.

  No longer tightly bound by the words and ways of Penance, the old chapel had learned to relax. Its walls were all but separated from one another. The roof was simp
ly the sky and whatever happened to be in it that day or night. Most of the pews were gone, as well as the candleholders and stained glass windows. The altar was still there—it was too heavy to move, and cursed, or so people said—and that’s where the Gravedigger’s best friend now sat, snacking on someone’s spleen.

  “Gary,” the Gravedigger said. He dug the scythe into the ground and leaned on it.

  The ghoul bit into the bruise-colored organ. “Atticus.”

  The Gravedigger folded his arms across his chest and sighed. “I expect you heard the commotion?”

  Gary kicked his legs into the air as though he were a small child enjoying a sweet. He was the Gravedigger’s age, and claimed to have been that way longer than he could remember. The flesh he ate ensured his didn’t drop from his bones. His condition itself left his body the color of burlap, and gave it the fabric’s texture as well. Supposedly, this made the ghoul’s form more agreeable to transforming into whatever it had recently consumed. But Gary had no need for such parlor tricks; the Gravedigger’s protection was more than enough to make him feel comfortable in his own skin.

  “What was that all about?” Gary chewed on the spleen. “I stuck my head out there to see what I could see. They kept to the shadows, but they knew what they were looking for. They didn’t waste no time sniffing about the property.” Dried blood mixed with the ghoul’s saliva and dripped down his chin. “I can track them if you want. I could smell them from here. Smelled familiar. One was a fatty. I’m sure he didn’t get too far.”

  “I’ll think about it,” the Gravedigger said. “They went for the body. The new body. Brinton’s.”

  “That son of a bitch got himself killed?” Gary’s heels banged against the front of the altar. “How’d that happen?”

  The Gravedigger shrugged. Ten pounds of sleep weighed down his eyelids. “Throat was cut to the bone. Who’s for dinner tonight, eh?”

  Gary set the spleen down on the altar and licked the tips of his fingers. “Judith Myers, row eighteen, plot twenty. She’d been in there a long time.” He cringed. “Probably should’ve just let her be.”