Tales From Valleyview Cemetery

by Brhel, John

  "Eric, over here," Helen called from the kitchen. She was standing with some of her friends Eric recognized from school. Much to his surprise, they all waved and smiled at him.

  The next hour was something akin to a dream. Helen’s friends were as nice as can be. They laughed, made fun of some of 'Shire High's worst teachers and talked pop culture. They all marveled at Eric's encyclopedic knowledge of music and literature. For the first time in years, he felt accepted. He wondered, could I actually make some living, breathing friends?

  The fun was interrupted by the sound of Blane screaming from the front door. “Are you fucking kidding me?! Eric Verlaine? Who the hell let this queer in?” Kevin and Dave stood behind him like silent guards.

  Eric’s chest felt tight. Everyone in the party was staring at him. It was like the hallway at school all over again.

  “We did,” said Helen, defiantly. She scowled at Blane and nodded back toward her friends. “You got a problem with that?”

  “Tierney, you’re too good for this creep,” said Blane. “Since when did you start associating with the scum of the valley?”

  Maybe it was the alcohol. Or maybe he just couldn’t stand there and let this dick attack his newfound friend. Eric walked out into the living room and got face-to-face with Blane.

  Blane laughed. “What do you think you’re doing, Verlaine? You want to kiss me or something...faggot?”

  A rage fueled by months of torment reached a breaking point and Eric charged at Blane like a bull. He knocked him into a coffee table, sending an expensive lamp crashing to the floor. Kevin and Dave quickly pulled him off Blane and started pummeling him.

  “Get off him!” said Charles Beaumont, a junior on the cross-country team. He and another one of Helen’s friends pushed Blane's goons away, giving Eric enough room to run out the front door.

  Eric dashed down Claire’s driveway and kept running. His house was two miles away, and it was getting late, so he headed to the only place he felt safe: Valleyview Cemetery. When he got to his favorite spot, he stopped to catch his breath. The graves of his friends looked different under the light of the moon, though no less welcoming.

  Eric told them about the party and what happened, about how amazing it felt to talk to kids his age, and how shitty Blane and his buddies were. “That kid deserves a beating,” he said, looking down at Abraham Hill’s grave.

  That’s when he heard a voice.

  “Who the hell are you talking to, faggot?”

  It was Blane. Kevin and Dave were standing there, too. They were drunk, and angry.

  “Go away, Blane!” shouted Eric. “You’re not welcome here!”

  “That’s it, you creepy fuck. You’re dead.”

  Blane ran up to Eric and clobbered him in the face, sending him down to the cold cemetery grass. Before Eric had a chance to recover, Kevin and Dave started kicking him in the ribs.

  Eric screamed out in agony. “Help me! Help!”

  Blane grabbed him by his leather jacket and pulled him up from the ground. “No one is going to help you. You chose the wrong place to hide.”

  He pushed Eric toward Kevin, who socked him in the stomach. Eric cried out in pain as Kevin pushed him toward Dave, who kicked him in the nuts and elbowed him in the face.

  The three of them passed Eric around like a doll—back and forth, back and forth. Blood streamed down his bruised, swollen face. He was a small kid, and they had no idea how close to death they were driving him.

  Finally, they dropped him to the ground and stood in front of him, laughing.

  Behind their backs, Eric saw movement out of the corner of his throbbing eye. Four transparent shapes were rising from the ground. They had a dayglo green shade to them, like the black light posters hanging in his bedroom. They ranged in height from about 5 feet to a little over 6, and they seemed to be dressed in the clothing of a bygone era.

  They drew closer to his attackers, and that’s when it hit him—these were his friends, his dead friends. They took on more of a corporeal shape, and he could make out individual features of each entity. One of the guys looked like the front man for some New Romantic band like Spandau Ballet. But that guy didn’t have flesh hanging from his face like this one. Eric wondered, in awe of the moment, Is that Abraham or Jonathan?

  Suddenly Blane, Kevin, and Dave were whisked into the air, ten feet up. They screamed as they looked down and saw the ravenous, glowing bodies hoisting them up. The ghosts dropped Blane and his lackeys, and they screamed as they connected with the ground.

  The attack continued for several minutes. Blane was thrown headfirst into an obelisk. Kevin was kicked back against a marble angel. Dave’s mouth was stuffed full of dirt and worms and godknowswhat. Finally, after a few broken bones and a half a pint of blood, the ghosts let them go. They ran screaming out of the cemetery and towards Blane’s BMW.

  Eric watched as Blane’s car sped away wildly. He turned to the ghosts and smiled. “Thank you.”

  They looked at him and nodded, before drifting downward and disappearing into the dirt. Seconds later, Eric heard a loud crash up the road and saw a large flame shoot up into the sky.

  * * *

  The loudspeaker in the hallway clicked and out drifted the muffled voice of Lestershire High’s principal. “I’m sure you’re all aware of the accident that took the lives of Blane Easton, Dave Standish, and Kevin Ryerson this past weekend. A counselor is standing by for those impacted by this event. May this serve as a tragic reminder that you should never drink and drive.”

  The announcement ended and Eric and his new friends continued their conversation. Eric’s face was still pretty banged up from the other night.

  "Can't believe what happened to those guys," said Helen to Eric and her other friends. "They were assholes, but geez."

  Eric thought about the ghosts. He saw the faces of Blane, Dave, and Kevin screaming, a look of manic terror in their eyes as the avenging spirits clawed at them and threw them around like cats toying with mice.

  The group discussed their deceased classmates for a couple minutes more before the bell rang.

  “So we’ll see you at the arcade later?” said Helen.

  “Definitely,” said Eric. He waved goodbye to his new friends and shut his locker.

  He walked down the hallway, clad in black, holding his poems. And no one bothered him.

  See Appendix C for more of Eric’s morbid poetry.

  EASY PREY

  He first noticed the well-to-do, thirtysomething couple walking their terrier from his seat at the Broadview Diner lunch counter. It was a great observation point for looking out across the western portion of the cemetery. Normally, there wasn’t much to watch—it was more like a meditation—and the man at the diner, whom the regulars knew as ‘Tommy,’ had plenty of time to think. Soon enough, Tommy was scheduling his Saturday evening dinners around the couple’s little trek—watching and waiting.

  The woman looked good—prim, black walking heels, bundled up in an expensive fur-fringed jacket. The guy on her arm was a little more disheveled, but he wore nice clothes and had a fat, expensive-looking watch on his wrist. Tommy never saw them go in or out of the cemetery, and the pair certainly never stopped by his favored slop house.

  They walked the semi-circle at the same time and stopped at the same grave each week. The man at the counter was timing them, irritated that he never saw the pair enter or exit the west gate. They would pause at the grave for about ten minutes, the dog would sit patiently at the woman’s feet, then Tommy would lose sight of them behind stones, shrubbery, and trees as they continued on the other half of the path.

  It seemed like there was always some disruption that prevented Tommy from tracking their coming and going. One week it was this melted-cheese blob of a couple blocking the window as they struggled to remove their coats and get situated for their slovenly feast. Another time it was the plain-faced, track-marked waitress trying to chat him up that drew his attention away during those crucial minutes just befo
re 8 p.m.

  Tommy didn’t get mad at the waitress or the other working-class folk he shared most of his meals with. The diner people were his kind of people. He knew more than a few of the regulars had done a stretch or two. He sat there at that counter staring out the window, thinking about the couple who walked the dog.

  He eventually dreamed up a whole story for them—the wealthy couple with their palace in the hills above the cemetery slope, how they spent their money on extravagant things while he moldered away in the valley. Just thinking about it pissed him off.

  He wouldn’t mind spending some of their money—snatch a credit or ATM card, a checkbook, a few hundred in cash, and spend a night at the nice motel just up the road, as opposed to the hovels he had been drifting in and out of since parole.

  There was something about the woman that got him all worked up. The way she carried herself just maddeningly turned him on, while also simultaneously enraging him over his own lot in life. Tommy grew jealous of her pathetic-looking husband. He knew that eventually his idle jealousy would lead him to act, but he had to make sure he wouldn’t get caught and sent back to County.

  It was finally the Saturday night that Tommy’s plans would come to fruition. All those weeks he sat studying and timing the couple would soon pay off. He went into the graveyard twenty minutes before their usual time and waited. It was 7:55, and maybe five degrees, with a nipping breeze, when he crouched just out of sight of the grave they regularly approached. He had taken the time and made sure no eyes had followed him in. A light snow shower aided his stealth.

  Tommy heard the dog first. A little pitter-patter on the pavement, slight panting breaths. He didn’t make a sound as he fingered the outline of his knife over his pants pocket.

  When he thought they’d passed out of sight of the diner window, he jumped out of his hiding spot, grabbing a handful of the woman’s jacket. Tommy was surprised at how easily she slipped out of her coat and soundlessly ran off between a row of mausoleums.

  Her husband lunged at him, but Tommy had his knife ready and drove it into the guy’s chest. He was a weak man and fell to the ground, grasping at his injury, making very little sound. Tommy figured he must have hit a lung, as the man couldn’t scream for help.

  Tommy was astonished at how hard the little dog bit down on his thumb and forefinger. He nearly dropped the knife. But he was able to throw the canine against a particularly large marble headstone, where it let out a sharp yelp.

  Once two of the three were dealt with, he went after the woman, his heart pounding in his throat. He hated running, and when he caught her he was going to do more than take her purse…

  * * *

  Early the next morning, as he drank his coffee in his shack, the cemetery’s caretaker calmly contacted the police about the body in the snow. He had seen this sort of thing before and hoped the ambulance would arrive soon and move the corpse, as it was in view of his favorite breakfast spot.

  There had been a stabbing in the cemetery overnight. He had seen the wealthy guy around, from time to time, visiting his wife’s grave. He had been the one that found the unconscious victim on the path and drove him to the ER. There was something about that small section near the western gate (within full view of the Broadview) that drew in the crazies, addicts, and the general bottom-feeders in town.

  When the police arrived, they found ‘Tommy’ with a woman’s fur-fringed jacket in hand, not thirty feet from where the caretaker claimed he’d found the stabbing victim. The mugger’s face was frozen in a ghastly agony, corpse-white, and he had large red stains and bits and pieces of dangling, mutilated flesh concentrated around his crotch area. They noted the little dog’s tracks in the snow and Tommy’s wild path through the cemetery, which seemed to go in circles.

  After a brief questioning, the police told the caretaker that the man he brought in to the hospital would likely be fine, and that he had probably saved his life. The caretaker told the officers that he couldn’t take credit for saving the man, that it was blind luck that he’d spotted the wandering terrier when he did, and drove his truck over to investigate.

  The coroner’s report, regarding the perpetrator found dead in Valleyview Cemetery, didn’t go into detail beyond the toxicology readings (which came back clean), but she did comment that the wounding to the penis and testes was certainly not the primary cause of death—which was recorded as ‘exhaustion/extreme dehydration.’

  RANDALL’S COMPLEX

  January 16

  It being the 16th of the month, Randall Orr left his data entry job at Fleishman Associates, bought a bouquet of mums from Allen Flowers, and went to Valleyview Cemetery to visit his mother.

  Rebecca Orr had passed away on May 16, 1992. At the time of his mother’s death, Randall was still living with her. The pair had been attached at the hip since the severing of the umbilicus, and his lack of a career or a long-term relationship proved it. The adult world was just too much for him. So when she keeled over on that cool spring day from sudden cardiac arrest, he had no one and nothing to turn to.

  The 16th was his day with Mom. He couldn't go with her to the flea market or Phil's Steak House like he used to, but he could drop by with some of her favorite flowers and have a heart-to-heart. There was just one problem; Valleyview Cemetery, Mrs. Orr’s eternal resting place, scared the living daylights out of him. She was buried under an oak tree in a far corner of the cemetery, just a stone’s throw from the back fence.

  During the winter month, by the time Randall got out of work, bought her flowers, and made his way across town, the sun was already setting, and that patch of dirt that contained his dear mother was already partially shrouded in darkness. He always made sure to leave her grave before the entire place fell into shadow; that would have sent him over the edge. No matter how terrified he was, however, he couldn't miss his monthly visit.

  It was 4:30 when he walked up to her grave and placed the bouquet of flowers delicately against her headstone. "Hi, mom," he said, as he knelt down in front of her grave. "It's me again."

  He stopped and stared at the grave, as if waiting to hear her raspy voice talk back. "I sure miss ya," he said. He paused and tried to think of something interesting to say, but it had been a pretty slow month.

  As usual, he informed her of all of the near-death and potentially cataclysmic things that had occurred to him over the past 30 days. There was the car that took the same four turns behind him on his way home from work the previous week. He had avoided that madman by pulling into a driveway, turning off his lights, and waiting ten minutes.

  Then there was the cheese. He bought a block of Crowley's sharp cheddar cheese from Akel Markets and had eaten a few pieces before noticing it was moldy. To avoid potential poisoning, he underwent an intense herbal cleanse (i.e. he guzzled vinegar for three days.)

  This went on for half an hour, his sharing of the full, dull details of his paranoid existence to the indifferent corpse below. He looked at his watch. 4:52. He'd gone on a little longer than usual, and a shuddering gloom crept over the cemetery.

  "Mom, I'm sorry, but I’ve got to go. It's getting on, and you know how I feel about being out this late. I love you, and I'll see you next month." He hurried out of the cemetery as the sun hit the edge of the horizon, its golden rays replaced by the unmerciful blackness of night.

  February 16

  Randall pushed the pedal to the floor of his ‘88 Buick LeSabre and slammed his fist on the steering wheel. "C'mon, c'mon!" he said, as he waited for the light to change at an intersection. The flowers from Allen's lay on the passenger seat, thrown there haphazardly as he had rushed into the car.

  His last meeting at work had run extra-long, and he hadn't been able to leave the office until 4:30. To make matters worse, he had to stand in line at Allen’s while a customer reamed the owner out for not delivering flowers to his wife on Valentine’s Day. He nearly had a panic attack in witnessing the altercation.

  When he walked in, the guy was leaning over the cou
nter, his hands pressed hard into the wood, like he was about to jump the florist. Randall rehearsed all of the probable outcomes of the confrontation. The owner's not going to give him what he wants and he's going to get mad and they're going to yell at each other back and forth until the guy pulls out a gun and shoots the owner, and since I'm a witness he'll probably shoot me, too. Or maybe he'll see me looking at him funny and kick my ass, slam my head into the cooler, and drop a vase on me. I don't know who this guy is. He could be a mob boss or drug dealer for all I know. Oh, my god.

  Luckily for Randall, he left the scene unscathed. The owner gave the customer a refund and he left smiling. But it could have gone badly, thought Randall. You have to be prepared for every contingency.

  He parked in front of the cemetery and hurried to the gate. He had never entered this late before. It was too dark. Every ounce of his being told him he should turn around, that only doom and terror awaited him if he went in. But the calmer side that he popped 100mg of Zoloft a day to maintain made him move onward.

  I'll make it really quick, he told himself as he neared his mother’s little corner of the cemetery. Just a “hi, how are you, I got to go” sort of thing. That will be good enough for this month. Mom will have to understand.

  He approached her grave and set the flowers down. He had never seen her headstone look so dreary, so gray. A small sliver of light cut across the family name, ORR in big, blocky letters. All he could hear was his own breath and the brisk wind blowing through the trees.

  “Hi mom,” he said, more nervous than usual. “I’m sorry I’m so late.” He explained his workplace predicament and the incident at the flower shop to his mother, all the while watching the sky darken. He didn’t think it was possible for light to recede so quickly.