In Silent Graves

by Gary A Braunbeck

  That framed photograph now sets on the mantel in the home of James and Elizabeth McCarrick of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Elizabeth McCarrick is the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Cynthia Dawson. Contact the McCarricks, as well as the Green Bay Police Department, and then have the Green Bay authorities get in touch with the Metropolitan Police and New Scotland Yard. Nick’s fingerprints, taken from the set that Rachel filed at Hospital, has been in their computer systems since 1990, when several sets of records from 1897 were discovered and deemed to be of “great educational and research value,” and so were entered in the Yard’s system.

  Go ahead, see for yourselves whether or not it all checks out.

  Dismiss this story then.

  I can hear the children beginning to gather in the Story Chamber. It’s my turn tonight. I think I shall tell them about an elephant named Horton and how he one day heard a Who.

  Rael just stuck his head in to inform me that everyone is waiting, and if I want him to make cheese-boogies (using Ian’s recipe, of course) then I’d better damned well get my “back-door half-breed ass” out there.

  I think he’s getting used to me. I have, believe it or not, grown quite fond of his ugly mug.

  Oh, wonderful…now he’s got the children chanting, “Cheese-boogies! Cheese-boogies!” His idea of subtlety.

  We are happy here. The little ones are safe. That is all we ever wanted.

  I leave you, then, with this: Believe me when I tell you that there will come a morning when the world will be awakened by the sound of a lone child crying somewhere in the wilderness, and on that morning it will realize once and for all that its children, every child, must be loved, cherished, protected, and healed at any cost. When this happens, when the world of man at last assumes responsibility for the small ones, the weak ones, the innocent and trusting ones, then those children who did not live long enough to see the dawning of this day, whose tortured, raped, mutilated, burned, abused bodies lie in silent graves, will rise together and speak the names of those who did this to them, and the world will exact justice on their behalf.

  And if the world doesn’t, then I will. Make no mistake about that.

  Raise no fists; don’t touch where you should not; and, most of all, never ignore the pained shrieks from next door. For I will know, and I will remember.

  Do you despair?

  Perhaps you should.

  For there will come a morning when the world at last cherishes its little ones as they should be cherished, and when that happens the mountain will open up for the last time; on that morning a melancholy, crippled, weary old man, who as a little lame boy was lonely since all his friends went away with the Piper, this old man will look up at the distant hillside and watch in wonder as these friends return to him, dancing toward the home and friend they left so long ago. Then I will walk out of the wilderness with my True Love by my side, and the children of Chiaroscuro will follow us from the shadows to forever remain in light.

  And that morning we shall begin to tell our stories.

  Just like this one. Will you remember it?

  Shhh, listen then. Ready? Good.

  Once upon a time....

  Chapter 12

  The day after police and detectives discovered the bodies in room 207 of the Montrose Motel, the following news item appeared on page 12 of the Cedar Hill Ally:

  Suspected Corpse Thief Disappears From Hospital

  A man being held for observation in connection with the theft of several infant bodies from various morgues and funeral homes has been missing since late last night.

  Joseph Alan Connor, 26, was under police guard on the sixth floor of Cedar Hill Memorial Hospital, scheduled to begin the second in a series of psychiatric interviews to determine if he is competent to stand trial.

  According to hospital and police sources, Connor was secured in his bed by hospital staff at 10:30 p.m. A bed-check performed at midnight reported that he was still in bed and asleep. Connor has been kept under moderate sedation since after his arrest by Cedar Hill Police last week.

  One sixth-floor staff member remarked, “I just can’t figure how he managed to get himself free of the restraints. Those things are locked in place. When we found that he was gone, we checked the restraints and they were still secure. I don’t know how a body could do such a thing, unless they were Houdini.”

  Connor, who was taken from his home by Childrens’ Services after the scalding death of his sister when he was seven, was frequently seen at the Cedar Hill Open Shelter in the company (Continued on Page 14)

  GUEST FAXING SERVICES

  February 19

  From: Ben Littlejohn

  Cedar Hill Division of Police

  Burglary/Homicide Unit

  To: William Emerson

  c/o Victoria Grosvenor Hotel

  101 Buckingham Palace Road

  ENGLAND

  Dear Detective Hand Model:

  Hope you and Eunice survived your hop across the pond; I know how you hate to fly. I’m sorry to have to bother you with this, but a couple of things have happened since you left that I figured you’d want to know about. I was just going to mail this but then I got a call that’s left me kind of rattled.

  I finished reading through everything a few of days ago. Did some of it creep you out as much as it did me? Cheryl kept asking me what I was reading; no way in hell I was going to tell her about it. She was, to put it mildly, unhappy with my refusal to Share. I’ve been sleeping on the couch for the last two nights, and for that I want to thank you.

  I contacted Green Bay Police, who put me in touch with the McCarricks (come on, you had to know I’d be curious). Elizabeth McCarrick is a very sweet woman. (I think she was really excited to be taking part in an “unofficial” investigation; I’m guessing she’ll tell her friends this story until the day she dies.) She confirmed Londrigan’s claim; she did have that photograph and the fingerprint card. Guess what? She also has Rachel Dawson’s diary. It seems that Rachel strongly suspected Nicholas was being “mistreated” by his parents but could never get the boy to admit anything to her. Mrs. McCarrick’s going to send me a Xeroxed copy of Rachel’s diary; she said I’ll find it “fascinating from an historical standpoint.”

  Anyhoo, she faxed a copy of the prints to me, and I had good old Latent George run a quick comparison, then I faxed everything to the London Metropolitan Police.

  I got a call this morning from a Detective-Sergeant Terrence Johnson of New Scotland Yard. You might want to pop open one of those room-temperature beers and sit down for the rest of this.

  The print from Elizabeth McCarrick’s card not only matched the one from the manuscript, but also matched the one in the Yard’s system on *sixteen* reference points, including two rare abnormalities in the whorl pattern. There is no doubt that it belongs to Nicholas Dawson.

  Hang on, Pard, it gets better.

  I contacted the Montrose lab about the paper the manuscript was written on and the ink used for the fingerprints. The paper stock is from a mill in Seattle. According to the tests, it’s not quite two years old. The ink used for the fingerprinting is manufactured—guess where?—Cincinnati. I was on the phone for three hours and was transferred about a million times, but I finally found out that the formula for that particular ink has only been in use since 1991.

  Think about that for a second, Bill.

  When Johnson and I talked on the phone (he may be contacting you during your visit, by the way), I could hear that he was as stunned as I was. I asked him what he thought, and he quoted Sherlock Holmes: “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  Which means there’s a nine-year-old boy out there who’s been alive for over a hundred-and-twenty-five years. And if that, however improbable, is the truth, then how can we write off the rest of what Londrigan claimed?

  Just thought you’d like to know. I’m guessing there’s a long conversation in our immediate future. Kisses to Eunice.


  —Ben

  Reliquary

  Uh, okay...hi, everybody. Rael said that tonight it’s my turn to tell a story. I think I got a good one. It’s one of Father’s stories, but he says that I tell it better than he does, so here goes.

  This doll belongs to Father. He says it’s just like the vase where that old rose was sealed, only instead of a rose, it’s got this memory inside. The babies used to tell me the same thing whenever I found them in the rain. They said everything has a story inside it.

  You see the face on the doll? It’s that woman Father met on the bus. Do you remember when he told us about the two old people who were on the bus that night? How he thought the old woman looked familiar?

  Well, we’re sort of a ghost now, all of us, and we’re back on that bus. Father is sitting in his seat and watching the old woman. She’s talking to her husband. Since we’re like a ghost, they can’t see us, so the old woman doesn’t know we’re listening. Can you see her face? Now you know why she looked so familiar to Father. I mean, she’s a lot older and she ain’t as big as she used to be, so maybe that’s why he didn’t know her right off. Her name’s Alice Rutledge and she used to be a nurse. She took care of Father when he was a little boy and in the hospital. He used to call her something that made her laugh.

  Okay, we have to be quiet now, because she’s telling her husband about something.

  Listen:

  “It’s the strangest thing, hon, but I just now remembered something about that little boy who used to call me ‘Nurse Claus.’ Don’t know why. Lord! I’ll bet I haven’t thought of him in twenty-five, thirty years. Remember that deformed and cut-up baby that was abandoned at the hospital all them years ago? Well, that little boy, he used to like for me to take him to see all the newborns, and one day when we was up there, he asks me about the door to the ICU and I told him that was where we had to keep the babies who were really sick. Well, he just stood there for a minute looking at the door, then he said something like, ‘I hope they get better.’ I thought that was just the sweetest thing! He was like that, real gentle, you know?

  “Well, a couple of nights later I stopped by his room to check on him and he’s not there. I asked Janet Tyler if she’d seen him but Janet’d been busy with the charts so she didn’t know. I got to worrying, so I went looking for him. He wasn’t looking in on all the newborns like I thought he’d be doing, then I remembered how sad and worried he’d looked when I told him about the babies in ICU.

  “That little stinker had snuck in there without anybody catching him. Can you imagine? I go in, and I see the nurses all gathered around the window looking at something. That little fellah had not only snuck into the ICU wing, but he managed to get into the isolation room where we was keeping that deformed baby! I got it out of him later, how he managed to get in. He’d just walked through the doors into the ICU and went right up to the window and saw her. They didn’t have all the fancy electronic security they got nowadays, and the gals on the ward were making their rounds so there wasn’t nobody at the desk to see him. He tried to get into the room but the door was locked. The gals started coming back from their rounds, so he hid behind a cart one of the orderlies had left in the little hallway that ran alongside the door to the isolation room. He waited there, pulling this I.V. stand along behind him the whole time on account he was still on a lot of antibiotics because of his spleen and all.

  “He waited while the nurses unlocked the door to go in to check on her, then as they were coming out he made real quick-like and snuck in before the door closed again. He walked right up to that baby—and I tell you, Douglas, I still just want to cry when I think about what that poor baby looked like! And then to have been treated like she was, starved and half-froze and all cut up...makes me wonder about some people.

  “So he goes right over to her incubator and picks her up in his arms. Well, by now the gals on the unit have seen him in there, and they go in to try to get him out and he pitches a fit, won’t let go of the baby or nothing. The nurses didn’t want to try and take the baby from him because she was still recovering from her surgery and they didn’t want to chance hurting her, so they left him in there and called Security.

  “I saw him in there and I knocked on the glass and he looks up at me and smiles.

  “‘You know him?’ asks Marge Cooper.

  “‘Sure do,’ I said. ‘That’s the little fellow who calls me “Nurse Claus.”’

  “‘Think you can get him to lay her down?’

  “‘I bet I can.’

  “So Marge lets me into the room. Little guy’s trying real hard not to cry. ‘She’s so sad,’ he says to me. ‘She’s pretty sick,’ I told him. ‘You really should put her back down so she can rest.’ ‘Is she gonna be okay?’ ‘I think so, yes,’ I said. ‘Will you help me?’ he asks. So I go over to him and hold out my arms, but before he gives her to me he takes hold of her hand and leans his face down real close to hers and says, ‘You’ll be okay, don’t be scared. I hope they find a nice place for you to stay when they let you go.’ Then he kisses her forehead and hands her to me and I put her back in the incubator, but before I close the lid he put his hand down on her.

  “‘Her heart’s beating real good,’ he says. Then he looks at her and says, ‘I think you’re a great baby. I think you’re really pretty, too. I hope you have a home with lots of brothers and sisters and that your mom and dad love you. You have to promise me something, okay? I want you to promise me that you’ll never forget me. If I had a baby sister like you, I’d take real good care of her. So you go to sleep now, and remember that I love you, little baby. Wherever you go, I’ll always love you.’

  “Oh, Douglas, I’ll never forget what happened then. That little baby, she opened her eyes, and he told her again that he loved her and hoped she felt better. Then she held up one of her awful little hands and he squeezed it.

  “You should have seen how her eyes lit up then, and the way she smiled at him, like they had some kind of secret....”

  —end—

  Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of the acclaimed Cedar Hill Cycle of novels and stories, which includes In Silent Graves, Keepers, Mr. Hands, Coffin County, and the forthcoming A Cracked and Broken Path. He has published over 20 books, evenly split between novels and short-story collections, and his work has earned 7 Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, three Shocker Awards, a Black Quill Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination. He doesn't get out much, which everyone agrees is probably for the best. Find out more about his work on-line at garybraunbeck.com

  Afterword

  February, 2015

  Okay, so you’ve now finished In Silent Graves and have discovered this lengthy Afterword wherein (as you’ve been promised and have shelled out the Serious Bucks for) I am going to reveal to you How I Did It.

  Ah, hmmm, well....

  A couple of things about this give me pause, not the least of which is I am not sure how interesting most readers find the writing process; you pays your money for a book, you want a good story, a compelling read, and hope that you can turn the final page feeling that you’ve gotten your money’s worth. If you really liked the book, maybe you’ll read it again someday, or perhaps pass it on to a friend with your heartfelt recommendation that they read it.

  Cool so far.

  But here you are now, the story over, and find yourself confronted with twelve thousand additional words—including a short story sandwiched between two sections of an essay—and you’re thinking to yourself: Do I really need to know this much about how this story was created?

  Which leads me to repeat myself: Ah, hmmm, well....

  As a reader (and a rabid collector of special editions), I find when it comes to “bonus material,” I tend to do one of two things: I either read the extra material before I read the book itself, or I wait until a week or so after finishing the book before tackling the extras. The first option, more often than not, gives me some hints about what was going through the writer’s mind
as she/he was grappling with the you-should-pardon-the-expression creative process; the second gives me the necessary distance to let my reaction to the book settle comfortably into place, and more or less guarantees that I will not feel that I’ve gotten too much of a good thing.

  To me, there is no greater disservice to one’s readers than to wear out one’s welcome, so if you’re among those who have decided to exercise option #1 and are reading this bonus material before reading the actual body of the novel, I beg of you to stop at the end of this paragraph and read the book before returning here. Yes, I’m going to talk about the process of writing Graves, but in the course of explaining some choices I made, I’m going to discuss certain revelations in the story that, for lack of a better term, were/are intended to be surprises; which is a roundabout way of saying that the remainder of this essay is going to contain a lot of spoilers (and they’re called that for a reason). I don’t want to ruin any of Graves for you so, please, stop reading in about thirty-eight words, go back to the book, and read the story. What’s here (barring some massive quantum accident) will still be here when you’re done. I promise.

  Now go on, go back, read the book.

  * * *

  One of the perks about writing this essay now is that I have some idea of what the critical reaction to the novel has been.

  I am pleased to say that, with one exception (the redoubtable Bentley Little eviscerated this in Hellnotes), all of the reviews for the novel have been excellent, and I like that right down to the ground (and in all honesty, even Little’s less-than-glowing review had several good things to say, much to my surprise). Readers seem to think I have a certain flair with the English language, that I’ve created believable, compelling characters, and written a story which frightens, entertains, and moves them.