A Graveyard Visible

by Steve Conoboy

  Her innards tell her something else. These things can’t exist. The world can’t be like this.

  She falters.

  27

  That noise, the wrongness of it, the pulsating cycles of it. It makes Caleb want to cry. And the old man in the grave, he’s shouting, his voice coarse and panicky.

  Of course the man’s panicky. They’re burying him.

  These people have ordered him into the hole and they’ll bury him alive. Caleb is about to witness a murder. A horrible, grisly murder. What could the old man have done to deserve it? Caleb can’t imagine the horror of such a death. Doesn’t want to. Can’t bear to think about being down there begging for his life, shouting for help that isn’t coming, pelted with shovel after shovel of mud, dirt landing in his mouth and eyes, and the mud getting higher around his legs, and higher, and higher, and then his legs can’t move at all, and then his arms are trapped under the weight of soil, and then it’s up around his neck, and cutting off his air

  and Caleb feels himself choking and gasping to breathe

  and why can’t he keep quiet when he’s this close to murderers

  and he’s got to go and help.

  He can’t believe that the girl is up there, a part of this, on the side of the sick killers in suits. No, can’t think about her! Someone’s in real actual danger, and I’m the only one here to see it and I need to go and get help, before they start shovelling!

  But would help come too late? He’s near the top of Daisy Hill. There’s a lot of running back to do. Then he’s got to get in the house. Then Father won’t believe him. Or Caleb could go to Gramps. But the old man might be having a bad day and not understand what he says. Perhaps a stranger would help. But there might not be any strangers. He might go running down to the street to find someone and no one’s there to be found.

  How much time is he wasting?

  Seconds. His mind is racing so fast. But there’s no time to run.

  He’s no hero. He can’t go striding up there and beat them all up, including the girl, the girl, what’s the girl doing here?

  Caleb can’t run, can’t fight. He’ll shout.

  28

  Her brain forgets the Scales, wants to scream at Granddad, because none of this is meant to be real. Why couldn’t he and his horrible friends do this without her?

  He’s down there, slowly turning over the crumbling remains of a woman long dead, and he’s chanting instructions, and he’s so lost in what he’s doing, they’re all so lost, so far into the Scales, that none of them has a hope of seeing that she’s losing control. Sextus has fallen.

  In seconds a revenant will be on her. On them all.

  Where is she in the Scale?

  A rasping whisper, rushing around from the other side of the grave.

  A note, any note!

  She starts humming again. She’s a split-second off the beat and she’s started at the wrong time for sure, but it’s okay because at least she’s humming.

  A boy’s voice shouts from somewhere distant, ‘Leave him alone!’, and before there’s enough time for that to confuse Misha, she’s shoved in the back, jolts forward a step to the very edge of the grave, and the soil gives out under her foot, and she’s falling.

  29

  He’d expected to be shouted at, or chased. What he hadn’t expected was that Misha girl throwing herself into the grave. Some of the suits are looking into the grave after her. Some of them are staring at Caleb.

  One thing: that God-awful noise has stopped.

  He suspects he should run, but his legs are rigid. She could be hurt. She could be trying to get the man out. They’ll bury her as well.

  ‘I’m going to get help!’ he shouts. They’ll come running to stop him now. There’ll be no murders done tonight. Unless they catch him.

  Caleb regains control of his legs. He turns, ready to sprint for home. And as he turns, there’s a phosphorous flash by the graveside, and a suit, a woman, is launched backwards into the air.

  30

  Granddad reaches out to catch her. Fumbles. She lands flat on her back. Something crumbles beneath her. Air whuffs out of her lungs. A firework bursts at the base of her skull, shooting sparks across her eyes, sparks that glitter like stars fleeing the darkening sky. Her lungs forget how to work, lie flat in her chest. Granddad’s saying a lot of words quickly, but they come to her scrambled. She’s sinking. Or the mud walls are stretching up. And narrowing. It feels like they’re sliding inwards, and the remaining light is retracting. That boy’s voice again, louder yet further away: ‘I’m going to get help!’ She likes the sound of that. Help should come quickly, Misha thinks. There’s movement beneath her, like the ground or whatever she’s lying on wants to roll her over. Granddad’s reaching down for her, and he’s taking a long time about it, like she’s shrinking away from him, and none of this is quite right and she might be sick. A searing white flash blinds the sky and floods the grave with heavy light. A woman screams. She wonders if it’s Morgan. Something’s rolling her over. It’s got a solid grip for something that’s been buried for so long.

  Buried. So long.

  It’s a dead hand that holds her.

  Misha hasn’t screamed since she was a toddler. She’s screaming now. Fear, tearing through her throat. More hands have her. She thrashes, lashing out.

  ‘Misha! I’ve got you, I’ve got you!’ Granddad’s voice is sharp, like she’s come up for air after too long underwater. Time runs normal up in reality.

  Granddad hauls her upright, kicking out at something. She won’t look at the hand; she won’t look at what the hand belongs to. She can’t. Her mind might snap.

  Now that she’s started screaming, she cannot stop.

  ‘Keep off her!’ bellows Granddad, swinging another kick. It lands with a dry crunch. ‘Misha. Misha! Listen. I’ll boost you out.’ He laces the fingers of his hands together, leans back against the mud wall of the open grave. ‘Come on!’ She places her foot in the cradle of his hands. ‘You head straight home. You don’t wait for me. You don’t wait for anyone. Go!’ He heaves her up towards the sky, and she gets hold of solid ground, and scrambles out of that awful hole, and then wonders whether or not she should jump back in.

  There’s a lot of shouting, and running, and a pair of torches swinging around. She can’t remember anyone bringing torches. Crosswell, Morgan, Grayson, the others are thirty yards downhill, their motions lively, frantic. Waving his arms in big sweeping gestures, Crosswell pushes his people out and around to surround one of their own, the one with the torches.

  They aren’t torches.

  As the beams slice from one person to the next, Misha sees that they are blazing out of Miss Neuman’s face, out of her eyes. They’re as bright as twin lasers. Neuman’s mouth unhinges. From it belts a crackling wail, an animal warning. The message is crystal clear: come near and die.

  Misha wants to be nowhere near a thing like that. She’ll run back to the house like Granddad said and lock all the doors and windows. And that will be her marked forever as a coward. Crosswell and the others already hate her. They’ll blame her for this, even though she wanted nothing to do with them in the first place, even though none of this was her idea.

  She won’t let them call her a coward. She won’t. Not even Vic Sweet gets to call her that.

  She runs towards Torchhead Neuman and the others. She has no idea what she can possibly do. Crosswell shouts at her to get away, and he has a round mirror in his hand, they all have a mirror, and Neuman is whirling and spinning those two beams like a broken disco ball. When the lights hit the mirrors they fragment, they bounce off at crazy angles, and one beam flashes across her eyes

  through her eyes

  and she sees Oh God she sees

  the world stripped bare, blasted by some terrible weapon, all flesh and prettiness torn away, all pasted in icy blues and steely whites that scorched to the very back of her head, to the very core of herself, and the trees no longer have leaves or bark and they lean in he
r direction, and the grass has seared away from the hard jagged ground, and the gravestones burn white hot like metal too long in the fire, and the occupants of those graves seethe with fluorescence, and Crosswell and Morgan and the others are without suits or skins or flesh

  and Neuman is monstrous, a grinning, glowering invention of a mad god

  and the beam is gone. The trees are dressed. Everyone has their skin on. The ranks of the dead are all hidden from view by six feet of earth. Neuman’s still a demented Halloween lantern.

  Misha sinks to her knees on the rain-soft ground. She’s overly aware of the flesh on her bones and it’s all turned to rubber. Two voices shout at her at once. ‘Get away, you stupid girl,’ bellows Crosswell

  and ‘I told you to get home!’ hollers Granddad, emerging from the grave.

  She wants to tell them that she can help, she really can, but her jaw feels slack. Neuman’s going off like a lightning storm, jagging at anyone it thinks might lower their guard, flickering back when it can’t find an opening.

  Neuman, hunting for weakness, spins towards her. She turns away so fast her neck hurts: that cyanotic version of the world is a place she never wants to be again (see not be – never wants to see again, because she was never really there, not really, was she?). Misha turns, and see the boy fleeing.

  He’s been spying.

  The rubber leaves her legs. She runs after him. No shouting at him to stop, no yelling at him to come back. All her energy goes into running.

  And she’s fast. A hunted lifetime keeps her fleet-footed, and she knows this graveyard, know the very ground. Her feet remember where every bump and ditch lies. Only slippery mud can slow her down. Caleb is all spinning limbs. He can barely keep his balance. Hearing footsteps behind him, Caleb speeds up. He doesn’t look back to see who it is, doesn’t know it’s her, just wants to go, go, go.

  He veers off to the left, darting behind a hedge, trying to shake off his tail. A mistake. He should have held a straight line for the gates. There’s a slim chance that he might have got away from her. She doesn’t take the same left, keeps running alongside the next hedge. He’s weaving through trees now, which slows him a little. Misha’s getting faster. She feels like she could take off, soar off the side of Daisy Hill and keep accelerating. Her elbows pump, her legs blur.

  Caleb shoots out from behind a tree, crashes into a bush he didn’t see until too late. The dense foliage tangles around his ankles, pulls him down. He hits the ground hard, one arm at full stretch to protect his head. Misha leaps on him, lands squarely on his back. She pins his shoulders, leans close to his ear. ‘Couldn’t stay away, could you? You’re in big trouble now, and it’s your own stupid fault.’

  Her turn for a mistake.

  Leaning forward leaves her off balance. Caleb bucks and rolls, throwing her off. She tumbles, but is quickly upright, and grabs Caleb even as he’s finding his feet. ‘Get off!’ he shouts, shoving her away. ‘Just leave me alone!’

  ‘Leave you alone? You’re the one who came looking for us!’

  ‘Us! You said us! I was right, you are one of them!’ He’s angry, like he’s been tricked.

  ‘One of them who? What are you talking about?’ Misha suddenly feels like she’s the one who’s been caught, not the other way round. It’s uncomfortable. It’s weird. She’s done nothing wrong.

  There’s a lot of shouting further up the hill.

  ‘I knew there was something going on up here, I knew it, and I’m right, and I saw it all, I saw everything they’ve been up to, and you’re a part of it.’

  Her fingers flex rapidly, her shoulders hunch, her head tilts forward, she glares at him from under the hoods of her eyelids. ‘Like you’ve got any idea what’s going on. Like you’ve got any clue what you’re talking about.’

  Even though her voice dropped really low, and despite the escalating noise of whatever’s going on behind the trees, Caleb heard Misha clearly, and he heard the threat within the words, and he doesn’t like her broad, ready stance, and he takes a step back. ‘I know enough,’ he says. ‘I’ve heard about cults, I’ve heard what they get up to.’ He tries to put the threat in his own words, his stance.

  She laughs. Genuine, musical, delighted. A girl who’s heard a wonderful joke so good she can ignore the howling madness that’s tearing through the graveyard. ‘Oh my God, you think I’m in a cult! Oh my God! What did you think we were doing, drinking the blood of virgins, summoning Satan and all of his minions?’

  Caleb’s not quite sure what virgins are, but he’s not about to admit that. She’s already laughing at him. ‘If you’re not in a cult…’ All those noises seem far, far closer than can be safe. ‘If you’re not in a cult, then what were you doing up there? Because it didn’t look like anything normal.’

  ‘You don’t need to know.’ She steps right up to him, intensely serious, the seriousness of a teacher telling someone their exam result might ruin their life. ‘It’s not for ordinary people like you. If any of them saw you, if they find out who you are, they’ll come after you, you better believe it, and no one will stop them.’ A loud crack. Loud enough to be a tree trunk splitting down the middle. Blazing eye-lights chopping and whirling. The unholy air-ripping of its screams.

  Neuman comes screeching out of the trees.

  The children run.

  Misha peels away at incredible speed. Caleb, needing to be far from the mad monster with light bulbs where eyes should be, automatically follows her. She yells something at him. He can’t make it out. The monster’s screeching too much for him to hear anything else. She waves. Points. Shouts again. ‘Get out of the graveyard!’

  He looks to where she pointed. The gates. The way out. He’ll have to double-back on himself to get there. His gut tells him no turns. Keep going straight. Get as far from it as possible. It’s only a few paces behind. Thump, thump, thumping after him. His back is cold, like he’s being chased by a glacier. Relentless, inhuman, hungry. Caleb runs harder, the world bounces frantically. He can’t catch Misha. She’s a sprinting machine. All pistons. Those lightbeams. Everything they touch changes for a heartbeat. A glimpse of wasted blue grass burning away from the ground’s steel layers. Misha becomes a flashing x-ray. Fences appear made of enormous bent claws. And what are those shapes he can see underground, through the ground, right through the very ground itself?

  A thump. It’s tripped. He does a quick look over his shoulder. There it is, ten yards back, face-first on the ground. He might get away! It looks up. Its beams flash across his eyes

  through his eyes

  and he sees Oh God he sees

  A slap across the side of the head snaps him out of it, sets his right ear ringing. It’s Misha. She came back. ‘Run, you idiot!’ She shoves him in the direction of the gates.

  The torchhead monster is getting up.

  Behind it, the suits emerge from the trees.

  Caleb runs. He slips again and again but doesn’t fall and doesn’t stop running until he’s home.

  31

  It’s all about those few dishes.

  Father is relentless about them. ‘I don’t ask you to do much, Caleb. It’s a simple little job, it’s five minutes of your time, but you’re still too lazy to get off your backside and do it. I mean, what is it that you think, Caleb? That it doesn’t need doing? That I should go to work all day long then come home and tidy up after you?’

  Caleb washes them as fast as he can with a heart in his mouth and his nerves on fire. He nods along with everything Father says, gives out some ‘sorrys’ and ‘I knows’ in all the relevant places. Wings flutter against his lungs. The doorbell will ring at any moment, and Father will answer because he’d never listen to Caleb telling him not to, and the suits will be there asking for him, and Misha will be behind them, glaring at him with her head tilted forward that way she does, looking at him like he’s something monstrous.

  No knock at the door. Yet.

  But it’s coming. It is.

  He pulls the plug from the
sink, gets a tea towel to dry the dishes, and still Father is ranting. ‘It’s the same thing every day. I ask you to do something, then you don’t bother, then you apologise, then you promise it’ll be different tomorrow, then it’s exactly the same. It’s not like I’m asking a lot from you. It’s basic cleanliness. It’s learning how to live like a human instead of like a pig. It’s a little bit of your time. I know it must be a wrench to pull yourself away from such important things like computer games and comics and…’

  It’s tempting for Caleb to place the glass he’s drying back on the drainer for a moment, look Father calmly in the eye and tell him a truth like, ‘I watched some people try to bury a man alive and I was chased by a monster with lights for eyes and I saw the stuff that’s underneath the world we see, and you’re going mad because I didn’t do a few dishes? Which of these things do you think is more important? You tell me.’ He’ll never say that. Not even as a grown-up. He finishes drying that last glass, and puts it away in the glasses cupboard, and stands with his back against the fridge, and waits for Father to finish telling him what a disappointment he is and how ignorance is the least of his crimes.

  Caleb’s heart hammers because people are out looking for him, they are, and they’ll come here and they’ll get him.

  Or that thing will come. That thing with the lighty-up head. The lights that peel back the skin of the world.

  Father’s walking away, shaking his head. It’s possible that he asked a question that Caleb didn’t answer. Too busy thinking about x-rays and the steel layers of the ground and the buried shapes six feet below. And the sky.

  He can’t think about the sky.

  To his room he runs, taking the stairs two at a time. He almost doesn’t dare to approach his window for fear of what he might see. Almost. Curiosity remains resistant to all efforts to squash it. He steps across his room, and he feels the blood drop out of his head and upper body and arms and flood into his feet, making them lumpen and draggy. The thinness of his veins, the dry heave of his pumping heart makes him feel pasty and faint, and he flops onto the windowsill, propping himself up with jelly elbows. He looks out into an evening grown dusky, casts his eyes over the graveyard and up the hill.