Cemetery of Angels 2014 Edition: The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd # 2

by Noel Hynd

  “And the whole thing happened during my lunch hour,” Martinez said.

  “What?” Van Allen asked. Martinez repeated.

  “I walked back here this morning, so I know this grave was intact,” Martinez said. “I was tending to some flowers back here.”

  The custodian turned and indicated a blooming garden several feet away.

  “I close up at twelve o’clock and everything’s fine. I come back at one o’clock and I see this!”

  There was nothing going on in the back of Van Allen’s mind now. His entire concentration was necessary to process what Martinez was giving him.

  “How does anyone human do something like that?” Martinez asked with thorough perplexity in his tone. “Would you tell me? How is this possible?”

  Van Allen stared down at the defiled grave. He would have been happier if Armando Martinez had never asked him that question.

  “Someone came in with some equipment, Armando,” Van Allen suggested. “They worked very quickly and…”

  “The gate was locked.”

  “Someone else must have a key.”

  “It’s locked by combination. Only I know it.”

  “Someone somehow discovered it.”

  “There’s no tire tracks to move that monument,” Martinez continued. “You’d need a small truck. Ten strong men couldn’t carry the marker that far.” He paused. The imponderable questions posed themselves. How could a vehicle or an armada of workmen get in or out? How could they have defiled a grave so quickly? Where had they gone? Why would anyone have done this as a prank, even with Halloween coming?

  “And then, how do you explain this?” Martinez asked next. “How do you account for what someone did here?”

  He pulled a flashlight from his pocket. He threw a bright beam down the narrow hole so that Van Allen could get a better look at what lurked or what no longer lurked below. Martinez’s hand was unsteady on the light. But for one horrible second, which would always remain frozen in Van Allen’s memory, the light was right on the spot where the wood of the coffin had been broken.

  Above, a cloud helped by passing over the sun, taking away some of the brightness of the day.

  There, down below the earth, was the satin pillow upon which the head of the deceased must have rested for years. The pillow looked stained where the head would have lain, as did the sheet below it where the corpse would have rested. But Van Allen couldn’t see any remains.

  “Now. Final funny thing, Detective,” Martinez said. “You see about the wood on the coffin. About how it broke?”

  Van Allen had already noticed. He stared at it but was helpless to make any sense out of it.

  “The wood looks like it was broken from within the coffin. Not from the outside,” Van Allen said evenly. “Is that what you’re suggesting, Armando?”

  “That’s what,” the custodian said. “Apply some explanation to this, please.”

  “Very simple,” Van Allen said, stepping away from it and replying with all the cynicism that he had accumulated over two decades on the job. “After being dead for many years, this particular corpse tired of being in the ground. The corpse smashed open his box, burrowed upward while you were away on your lunch break, threw over his granite marker weighing twenty-five hundred pounds, scaled the gates, and is currently loose in Los Angeles, probably at Mel’s Diner on Sunset having a burger. There, presumably, no one will pay much notice as long as he doesn’t cause any other trouble.”

  Martinez held the cop’s gaze for several seconds then finally blinked.

  “Very funny,” the custodian said. “Now, please. What you really think?”

  “Sorry, Armando,” Van Allen said, feeling the sun come out on him again. “Aside from the facetious explanation I offered you, I have no guess at all.”

  The custodian let Van Allen’s answer sink in. “We got to file police report?”

  “Yes, we do,” Van Allen answered.

  The policeman took out his notebook. He did better these days when he took notes. In the breast pocket of his jacket was his prized pen, a sturdy green Mont Blanc fountain pen that his father had given him upon graduation from college. The pen had some heft to it. It had always felt good in his hand. Using it made him feel professional.

  Normally he had kept it on his desk at home. But now that he had decided to make more written notes, he carried it.

  Van Allen began to write. At least, he told himself, he was now on duty and could bill the city for his time. After several seconds, he looked up from his notepad. “If I were you, I’d keep your gates closed this afternoon.”

  “Gates,” Van Allen heard the custodian mumble. “Gates don’t matter none, anyway. People. Bodies. They go in or out whether I lock the gates or not. Some kind of city we live in, huh? Some kind of place where dead men walk away at lunch hour.”

  “Some kind of city, Armando,” Van Allen agreed.

  Van Allen was busy writing. He let Martinez’s comments pass. But he had heard the old man very clearly, and was ill at ease with the idea.

  Chapter 17

  Two hours passed. Van Allen remained at San Angelo. A squad car with two uniformed cops came by to witness the disturbance. And because a tomb had been violated, an investigator from the Los Angeles County Board of Health had to be notified.

  The investigator, a fat, bald man named Jack Ritter, appeared in a Windex blue Chevy Nova. Then Martinez summoned a pair of union gravediggers. Martinez spoke to them in Spanish. They were Salvadorians. The presence of so many police made them nervous. The diggers were also skittish about their task, which was to enlarge the hole in the ground that had come up from the grave.

  Van Allen crouched nearby, massaging the back of his leg where the pulled muscle still throbbed. He watched with growing apprehension and a widening sense of disbelief. Both the gravediggers and the investigator from the Board of Health remarked about the narrowness of the hole coming up from the grave. The two cops, a male and a female, stood nearby and watched curiously.

  “Just wide enough for a man’s shoulders, right?” Van Allen finally said, looking at the hole and giving voice to what they were all thinking.

  No one answered when Van Allen made this suggestion. Six sets of eyes were perfectly averted,

  “Come on, you bastards,” Van Allen said. “Get a grip on reality. Tombs don’t fly open by themselves.”

  “What’s your guess?” Ritter asked. “What did happen here?”

  “I don’t know. What are you suggesting?” Van Allen asked. “Spontaneous combustion within the coffin? Or some restless corpse that came up to join us?’

  “So you give me an explanation,” Ritter said.

  The Salvadorans hadn’t communicated a single word in English during their entire visit. But they appeared to be tuned in perfectly to this conversation.

  “Ask me again in a few weeks,” Van Allen said. “We’ll find out.”

  Van Allen’s reasoning did little to ease the gravediggers. Once they reached the coffin, the Salvadorans couldn’t wait to leave. They spoke to Martinez in agitated Spanish and climbed back up to ground level. Martinez tried to calm them. He was failing.

  “The men refuse to dig any farther,” Martinez told Van Allen. “They no want to touch the grave any further, either.”

  “None of us do,” Van Allen said.

  The uniformed cops smirked. The Salvadorans laid their shovels aside and walked away from the pit. At the same time, two more cemetery workers arrived in a black vehicle that seemed to be part hearse, part pick-up truck. There were chains and a winch in the vehicle. The truck’s occupants stepped out and waited for some command. Van Allen knew the procedure. Martinez retrieved a motorized forklift at the same time.

  When all his helpers were assembled, Van Allen felt a fatigue in his own spirit. There was nothing quite like a task that no one wanted to do. He sighed. Then, bad leg and all, the detective jumped down into the grave.

  The men from the utility van dropped four chains into
the pit. One of the workmen came down into the grave with Van Allen. He and the detective attached chains to each side of the coffin. The Salvadorans returned to the hole and cleared dirt from each side. Then someone turned on the winch. Its mechanism, like a rusty lock giving way, began to grind. The handles on the coffin, presumably untouched for decades, creaked. So did the chains from the truck.

  Van Allen and the cemetery worker climbed out of the grave and stepped back. Van Allen nodded to the man in the truck.

  The winch noisily continued its work.

  Then, with a groan, the coffin came loose from the earth. Van Allen gave an order to halt the digging for a moment and the chains stopped pulling. The detective leaned down and steadied the coffin. Then the winch continued and raised the casket completely from where it had rested. When the casket was up to ground level, the forklift took over and transported the pine vessel to the truck and set the coffin into the vehicle.

  Van Allen continued to watch it. Then he turned.

  “I want everyone who worked on this to come over here,” he said. He summoned all seven men present. “I don’t know what we’re dealing with here and my guess is that none of you do, either,” he said. “But I’m going to make a request. You know how the media eats up something like this. You know what a circus this can turn into. So nobody tells what he’s seen here today. Do I have a promise from everyone on that?”

  Assurance was forthcoming from all present, except the gravediggers. Martinez had to translate. Then the Salvadorans nodded their agreement. They seemed anxious to go. Van Allen released them, nursing a bad feeling about their ability to keep quiet.

  It was nearly dark. The driver turned on the lights of the transport truck.

  Van Allen climbed into the truck and knelt by the coffin. He put his hand to the side of it and found that there was plenty of give in the lid. He gave it a slight push and found that it would lift.

  He wasn’t sure what he would find, but he knew that he wanted to know. He held his torchlight on the coffin and lifted the lid until it was up about a foot.

  He felt that he was defiling something sacred. And perhaps he was. But he had already been drawn into this vortex of sordidness. It was his job to learn exactly whatever crime had been committed. He peered in. With a shudder, he saw his worst fears realized.

  The coffin was empty. Whatever body had been in the coffin, it was gone now. He let the lid close again, setting it down gently and respectfully.

  “God of my fathers,” he muttered to himself.

  He turned and painfully hopped off the truck. He signaled to the driver. The empty casket was now evidence in a criminal proceeding. It was being taken to an annex of the medical examiner’s office. It would be inventoried and held as evidence. It couldn’t be reburied without an occupant.

  The truck started to move.

  Van Allen knew he would have to call his captain of detectives as soon as possible. Minimizing publicity would be an excellent idea. Who knew what kind of nuts would be drawn out of the sunshine of the Southwest to visit the cemetery once this story got out?

  But other thoughts also rustled through his mind as he walked toward the telephone. He asked himself: What sort of comment was this on the human condition?

  “Grave robbery. Body snatching.”

  There was no other way to term this. What in God’s name did someone want with the embalmed corpse of a man who had been dead for more than seventy years?

  What was this all about? A coven of Devil worshipers? A dark prank for the upcoming Halloween? Some new sort of satanic cult? Or was this just some frightening new clique of left coast screwballs, the raw material for New Age nightmares?

  Naturally, Van Allen reasoned, something like this would have to spring up in Los Angeles. Just what his city needed was another black eye.

  Why couldn’t this have happened back East in New York or New Jersey, where secretly Van Allen felt all this wacko stuff came from? Or why couldn’t it have been in San Francisco, where in its sick rainy-seasoned sordidness it could have fit in with the mood of the city? How about Boston? Wouldn’t that have been a better setting for this?

  But, no. It had happened in his city, on his watch.

  To this, he again asked the question that, in his line of work, he never finished asking. Why?

  These people, the sick criminals who had stolen a body, didn’t deserve to be in California. They deserved to be in a zoo. Or at best a state nuthouse.

  “And yet, and yet… “

  Van Allen got into his car and followed the coffin to the Health Department. There he managed to cool any potential controversy surrounding the inquest. By phone, he spoke to his captain, who shared his desire to keep a lid on publicity. He filed his police report, couched it in vague terms in his logbook, and mentioned only that a grave had been “disturbed, probably by vandals.”

  Then he went home.

  But like many crimes he had dealt with over the years, this one followed him.

  He couldn’t get it off his mind. It was like a bad dream that kept coming back, an atonal tune from some mysterious place that kept playing in his head.

  Toward midnight, he realized what was gnawing at him. Deep in his gut, he had the impression that he was dealing with something much larger; perhaps much more evil than he had any way of imagining.

  He felt as if he were on the brink of some bizarre and terrifying new experience. An image came to him from somewhere. He pictured himself in front of an unopened door, frightened of its opening, yet picturing a disembodied hand settling on the doorknob on the opposite side…

  …slowly turning the knob…

  What the detective felt was dread. Pure and simple. Dread.

  Then he realized: This was it!

  This was the event of which he had had a premonition, a sense of foreboding and impending catastrophe. What he had feared most was now right in front of him, waiting for him to figure it out.

  “Grave robbery. How much lower does human behavior get?” he growled.

  At a few minutes before 1:00 A.M., Van Allen was seated again in his kitchen. On the wall there was a picture taken at Huntington Beach several years ago in happier times: His wife, Margaret, and their son, Jason.

  The picture was in a cheap frame from a drugstore. The frame had warped from heat and cooking exhaust. But as Van Allen sat at his kitchen table over a beer, the picture and its metal backing suddenly came loose. It slipped out of the frame and crashed to the linoleum of the floor a few feet from where Van Allen sat.

  Van Allen’s heart leaped. He nearly jumped out of his skin. He found himself on his feet, his heart hitting three beats per second, and, from years of experience, he reached for his service weapon. There was even a cry of fear in his throat.

  For several seconds he looked at the picture and the happier times that had hit the floor. Then, as his heart settled, he picked up the picture and cleaned it off. Fortunately, there was no damage.

  He vowed that the next day he would take the photograph to a decent studio and have it framed properly. He set the picture down carefully on a table in his dining room. And now he was so spooked, so fatigued, and so upset with the day’s events, that his mind was even playing tricks on him. Distantly, he thought he heard laughter.

  A man laughing at him. Another beer, and he dismissed the laughter.

  But then, as he was going to sleep that night, in the moments before he drifted off, he thought he experienced something even worse.

  There was a touch to his shoulder. Then, a few moments later, there was a tug to his bedcovers. He sprang up and turned on the light in the empty room, one hand on the lamp, the other again on his service pistol.

  He scanned the room. Nothing. It took an hour, but he went back to sleep with the light on.

  ‘He was going nuts,” he told himself! Van Allen was glad that he didn’t have to peer into defiled coffins every day of his life. Otherwise he would have lost his mind years earlier.

  He was on the bri
nk of sleep, on the hazy dreamy side of consciousness, when the day had a final benediction. Words came to him out of the ether. But they were soothing, not scary.

  “Have no fear, Edmund,’ the words were. “I’m near”.

  His body shook with a sleep tremor. His eyes flicked, scanned the empty room again, and then closed for the night. Sleep was otherwise natural and tranquil.

  Chapter 18

  Rebecca was in a strange land, also. It was the same night, and she too was lost in the unknown land midway between wakefulness and sleep.

  She rolled over in her bed. She tossed. The night outside her home was quiet. The last thing she had seen when she had looked out the window was stars, plus a yellow moon. So why couldn’t she sleep? She was safe in her home. Her husband was near her. But a husband and a home were physical protections within the tangible world. And what was approaching her was emanating from another plane of reality. The one inside her head. Or an unfathomable one that could travel through walls, doors, or even flesh.

  It was a thought. A notion. A feeling. A vision. An image. A horrible one was coming together in her subconscious mind, and she didn’t like it. She knew it was going to be unsettling. Frightening. She knew it even before the image took over her.

  She rolled again in bed.

  She could almost hear herself thinking.

  “Oh, God… Oh, God, please help me…

  She experienced a sensation of tumbling, and she knew she was drifting off into the scarier nether regions of sleep. And then she was shocked. She felt an extreme comfort. She was lying somewhere. She was all dressed up in a favorite dress lying on white satin sheets. Her eyes were closed, and she was very still. Gradually, in her dream, people around her came into view, and she suddenly realized that they were crying.