by Bark, Jasper
The fingers of the hand were clutching something. Jim bent to get a better look and saw it was Sloman’s phone. A tiny flutter of hope awoke in him. There might just be a way out of this, he could still call for help. Jim had not owned a phone, a laptop or a tablet since he came to the cemetery. It was one of the things he did to stay off the grid and avoid detection. He regretted that now. He desperately needed to connect to the outside world.
Jim pried the phone from the still warm fingers of the hand and tapped the screen to check for a signal. No bars were showing, but the screen was open on a text conversation. He swallowed hard. He was sure he recognised the number and it made him nauseous. The most recent message had been sent a few hours ago, while Jim had been out weeding. It read:
TY Phil, once again u r a STAR!!! I’ll b there soon 2 pick up the spare keys. Don’t tell J I’m w8ing for him @ the bungalow. Don’t want him 2 do another runner!!! xxx
Jim’s hands were so sweaty his fingers were almost too moist to scroll to the top of the conversation. The first message in the conversation, from a week ago, confirmed his worst fears:
Hi Phil, sorry 2 bother u with a txt, but u’ve been so gr8 and I’ve been out of my mind since Jim took off. He got rid of his phone and everything. I have so many bills 2 pay and I’m due in just over a month. u don’t no wot it means to finally find him. thnx Fi xxx
Jim thought Sloman had been a bit off with him for the past week and now he knew why. Fiona had tracked him down, but how? How had she known he was at the cemetery? Had she guessed why he really came to work here? She’d be the only one who could.
There was another tremor and Jim turned to look back into the office. For the first time he saw the huge hole in the corner. It had been behind him when he entered, so he hadn’t seen it. The small pile of soil poking up through the hole began to shake and grow, sending loose earth onto the blood soaked floorboards.
The cloying smell wafted out of the office and Jim knew he had to get to the bungalow. He wasn’t certain what he dreaded more, finding Fiona alive or dead.
5:
Six months earlier . . .
Jim added kindling to the newspaper and reached for the logs he’d found round the side of the bungalow. It was his first night staying at the cemetery, and he wanted to take the late February chill off the place.
Once he’d built the fire and put a match to it he took the letter from Fiona out of his backpack. He scanned the handwritten pages, working himself up to the task at hand, picking out the key phrases, the ones that enraged him the most:
“This is your baby I’m carrying . . . ”
“ . . . I want you to stop acting like a child for once and be a man. You can’t keep running away from me forever . . . ”
“You can’t expect me to do this by myself. I need your support and so does your unborn child. I will get the CSA involved if I have to.”
Even the bright red ink she’d chosen seemed to shake with rage and accusation. She always knew how to push Jim’s buttons.
Jim’s feelings were hot embers beneath ash. Fiona wouldn’t let them just smoulder. She’d blow and blow on the ash until his smouldering resentment burst into flames. Was it any wonder he didn’t want to be with her? He fed the pages one at a time into the fire before the anger got too great to control.
It was time to start a new life, kill off his old self and become someone new. Jim McLeod must die, so that Jim McCann could live free of controlling women.
He felt a hollow sadness as the last of the pages curled up and crumbled into ash. Fiona hadn’t always been like this. When they first met, she was probably the wildest woman he’d ever come across. He smirked at the phrase ‘come across.’ It was appropriate though.
She had a hell of a sexual appetite and was more adventurous than any woman he’d ever known. She’d picked him up in some after hours dive that no decent woman would ever frequent. Jim didn’t mind, he wasn’t looking for a decent woman.
She took him back to her place, trussed him up and broke out the strap on. He’d lain face down on the bed with his ankles tied to his wrists and his butt in the air, wondering just how she’d talked him into it. It didn’t stop there though. She wasn’t just into filthy acts, she liked to do them in the worst possible places.
Graveyards and cemeteries were her big thing, the creepier the better. There wasn’t anything she didn’t want to try draped over a tombstone or tied up in a mausoleum. Jim didn’t quite know what he’d gotten himself into, but he was hooked. It was a wild and scary ride and he was discovering all kinds of things about himself, finding tastes and predilections he had no idea he had.
For all her wildness, Fiona could still get rather tiring. She was as demanding a girlfriend as she was a lover and Jim liked a quiet life. He was also developing sexual tastes that not even Fiona could satisfy. She may even have guessed this. A certain distance crept into their sex at the end. This might have been because she knew she was pregnant however, and was waiting for the right time to spring her trap.
Jim didn’t like it one bit when she did. He’d faced this problem before, but not with someone like Fiona. The minute she found out she was bearing his child it was like she had a chain round his neck.
The kid itself was an even bigger nightmare for Jim. The last thing he wanted was to look after a squalling brat. He didn’t want to see it puke and shit its nappy. A man had needs and there was nothing worse than having to put them aside to look after a little tyrant who would scream the house down if he didn’t.
There’d be no more attention from Fiona, either. He’d be in constant competition for her affection and he knew who’d win that fight. Women forget about their men when they drop a rug rat. It’s like a little switch goes off in their brain and they lose sight of the things that really matter. All they care about is the little parasite in the cot.
So Jim had taken off, like any sensible man would. He left the city and returned to the tiny little town of St Leonard’s. Then he went off the grid so he couldn’t be found.
Ironically, he’d left St Leonard’s, many years ago, for this self same reason—to avoid being a father. He was really young at the time, an off-comer to the town. Dawn was his first serious relationship and the first woman he ever lived with.
They’d been really happy for about six months, then Dawn showed him her pregnancy tester. She came right out of the toilet with it when he got home from work. Little drops of urine fell from the plastic stick onto the carpet. She was so shocked she hadn’t even washed it. They looked into each other’s eyes and saw the same fear there.
Jim was too young to cope with that level of responsibility. It brought back all kinds of bad memories from his own childhood. He didn’t want to see a repeat of that. He knew there was no way he could hang around and make a go of this. He suggested she have an abortion, said he’d pay for it and everything, but Dawn told him she wasn’t brought up to do that sort of thing. She wouldn’t hear of it after that. As far as Jim was concerned, that left him no other option.
Maybe he was a coward and maybe he didn’t want to see the look of heartbreak on Dawn’s face when she found out he wasn’t going to be there, but he slipped away late at night without telling her or leaving a note. He packed everything he wanted to keep into the back of his old van and drove away.
Jim didn’t give much thought to how Dawn would cope with a child by herself. He didn’t think it would be that difficult for her, what with all the state benefits she’d get. He did know that a baby would mean the death of their relationship. He didn’t want to hang around and watch it slip away like some ancient relative on life support. He preferred a swift, clean break with less emotional consequences.
It was easier to disappear back then, phones were less complex, not everyone had broadband and there was no social media. Jim did stay in touch with a couple of friends from St Leonard’s, those who knew how to keep quiet. That’s how he learned what had happened to Dawn.
She had found it too diff
icult to cope with the burden of bringing up a child by herself. Her father was the only living relative she could turn to. A strict, moral man who terrified her. She was so frightened of what he’d think, having an unmarried mother in the family, that she took an overdose of sleeping tablets.
Jim felt bad then. He didn’t know why she’d want to go and do something silly like that. She didn’t have to kill herself, she could just have gotten rid of the baby like he’d wanted. He blamed her father in the end for driving Dawn to it.
He didn’t think Fiona would try anything that stupid. She just wanted to nail his balls to the floor for getting her pregnant. She couldn’t control him sexually anymore, so she was going to use a kid instead. He wasn’t going to let that happen. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.
He knew people would say he was pulling the same cheap trick as before, and this bothered him more than leaving Fiona. Jim cared a lot about what people thought of him, you couldn’t fault him there. It was just that he also knew the things he could and couldn’t do, such as being a parent. You couldn’t blame him for knowing his limitations.
Fiona should have known better than to hound him until he left. She’d be really pissed off when she couldn’t find him, and if she ever did, she’d tear his balls off. Jim planned to stay away from women for a while, it was a lot safer. Besides, the way his sexuality was heading, he probably wouldn’t need them.
6:
Halfway to the bungalow Jim’s lungs were burning and his legs shook. He stopped and bent forward with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. He was more out of shape than he realised. Coming up behind him he heard the familiar rumble on either side of the path. There seemed to be two of them now. There was twice as much noise and the ground on either side of the path shook.
They rumbled ominously at his heels and he stumbled into a brisk trot. “Alright, alright,” Jim said. “I’m going.” Despite his fatigue and his mock bravado Jim was very, very afraid. He’d seen what those things could do and he knew they were playing with him.
He came to a crossroads in the path and his pursuers cut in front of him blocking two of the paths, including the most direct route to his bungalow. He knew where they were taking him. He gasped for breath and his head throbbed as he jogged past the second of the three affected graves. Like the first, the huge hillock had caved in and was now a pit filled with folds of loose turf. At the foot of the grave there was another slit in the ground that also led onto a small tunnel. Once again the turf had been folded back on either side of the slit and Jim was struck by the similarity to a pair of female labia.
He stopped dead still at this, trying to process his feelings. His two pursuers began to circle him from below. As they closed in, his legs shook so much he couldn’t tell if it was fear or the ground vibrating. Jim leaped forward and began to run again, drawing on hidden reserves and pure desperation.
He now had no doubts about what he’d find when he got to the bungalow. He placed a hand on the door lintel, struggling to get a grip on himself. He was terrified to enter, but he was even more afraid to stay outside. As he opened the door he felt that cool and sickening feeling in his gut that comes with an awful sense of premonition.
Fiona’s scent was the first thing that struck him. He’d know it anywhere, a mixture of patchouli and fresh leather. Hanging under it was the thick coppery odour of blood, and then he was hit by the familiar cloying putrescence that had marked the last two murder scenes.
Fiona, or what remained of her, was in the living room, arranged around a giant pile of earth that had broken through the flagstone floor.
Jim was overwhelmed by what he saw. This was so much worse than what had been done to Sloman and Cundle, there just weren’t words to describe it. Jim stood for a moment with his mouth hanging open, his jaw moving up and down as though trying to form words, or simply find a sound to describe how he was feeling.
The ground beneath him swayed. The walls seemed to rush at him then recede just as rapidly. He wondered if the strange creatures in the ground were doing this, but then his legs went from under him and he fell to his knees.
His stomach could no longer hang on to its contents and Jim felt it contract violently as a wave of nausea burst through him. He leaned forward and threw up, sobbing between heaves. He breathed a ragged sigh and choked on his own vomit. This didn’t stop him bringing more up and he coughed and cried and puked and then he let go of his bowels in panic.
Jim had been intimate with the flesh that was shredded and scattered over the dirt covered floor. He’d kissed and stroked the skin that lay draped in tatters across the broken furniture.
It wasn’t just Fiona in the living room. In amongst her desecrated remains was Jim’s unborn child. The enormity of this suddenly hit home and Jim felt an immediate and wrenching sense of loss. He’d spent seven months trying to avoid being a part of this child’s life, to sever all ties with its mother, and now that those ties were irrevocably cut, he felt nothing but regret. Deep aching regret.
Jim might not be long for this world. Now nothing of him would survive it. He didn’t know what the things in the ground had planned for him, but he knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant. This child might have been the one thing he could have left to the world and they’d taken that away from him. Torn its tiny, frail form apart before it even had a chance to breathe.
The terror and loss that sat like a hard lump on Jim’s chest turned to anger. “Fuck you,” he shouted as he got to his feet. “Fuck you, whatever the fuck you are. You do not get to do this. You are not going to beat me!” He wiped the vomit from his chin and adjusted the front of his jeans which were uncomfortably wet.
The same putrid smell wafted into the room, its strength intensifying as if in reply. “Fuck you,” he said again, and kicked at the pile of earth. Jim stomped from the living room and left the bungalow.
There was a small side entrance no more than a hundred yards from Jim’s bungalow. It was his best way out of the cemetery. He didn’t know if the single wrought iron gate would be padlocked, too. If it was, he would just clamber over the wall.
Could his underground tormentors follow him out of the cemetery? He hoped not. It was a short walk to the centre of town. He could get help. Why hadn’t he tried to look for Fiona’s phone, or kept hold of Sloman’s? It was too late for that now. He’d just have to depend on his speed and cunning.
Jim took off at a sprint, drawing on reserves of energy he didn’t know he had. As he approached the side entrance, which wasn’t padlocked, his two pursuers tore along the side of the path and overtook him. Jim picked up speed, pushing himself beyond his limits.
As he got within a few feet of the gate, the ground on either side of the path before him started to crack. The fissures in the soil grew rapidly until there were two sinkholes. Jim slowed his pace, wary of what might happen next.
Without warning a fierce spray of soil issued from both of the holes, like two brown fountains sending up jets of fine earth. The soil fell on the path in front of the gate and within seconds a great mountain of dirt had formed, blocking Jim’s way to the gate. There was no way he could get around the heap of dirt without going off the path, and that’s where his pursuers lurked. He thought about trying to climb it, but it was at least nine feet high and made entirely of loose earth. Earth was their element. There might be worse things hiding in the pile than lurked at the sides of the path.
Jim cast about for another course of action. There must be some way out of this, somewhere he could go to evade these things. Then he remembered the church, St Dunstan’s, on the other side of the cemetery. If he could get there, he could claim sanctuary from whatever was chasing him. The church was a holy place, a refuge from dark forces, surely he’d be safe there? Jim wasn’t the most religious person, but he knew that whatever was chasing him wasn’t natural, and under those circumstances you needed something pretty big like God on your side.
Jim set off at a jog, panting hard and try
ing to ignore the cramp in his leg and the stitch in his side. A third underground tormentor had joined the other two. He could feel it switch from one side of the path to the other, occasionally rumbling up behind him with menace.
Jim didn’t bother to take the most direct route to the church. He knew where his pursuers wanted him to go. The third grave was only a few minutes from the church, and he headed straight for it. Like the other two graves it had a distinctive headstone with an angel on it, one that Jim knew well. The hillock that had once grown out of it had also collapsed and at its foot Jim saw another gash in the earth with the turf folded back like a pair of labia. The little tunnel behind them looked for all the world like a birth canal.
Jim turned a bend and St Dunstan’s loomed up ahead of him. It was an imposing church, almost the size of an Abbey. It looked far too grand for a tiny rural town like St Leonard’s. The rear wing of the church was the original, medieval building. The rest of the building was an eclectic mix of Corinthian columns, battlemented parapets and Gothic stone reliefs featuring gargoyles and saints.
Jim thought of the vicar, Father Powers. He would know what to do. He was the one person in St Leonard’s that Jim trusted most. He just prayed the old man was alive and unharmed.
7:
Two Months Earlier . . .
Jim was just putting the weed puller back in his tool shed when he saw the snow-white hair of Father Powers moving between the gravestones. Jim wiped the sweat from his brow as the elderly vicar stepped into view. He was a short man with a ruddy complexion and wild grey eyebrows that sat atop bright brown eyes. He was thickset, with powerful broad shoulders and big rough hands that suited a builder or a boxer better than a man of God.