And now she was gone. No note, nothing.
Instead of feeling guilt or concern, Dave instead felt something sour twist in his gut and suddenly he was sure it was Anna behind the whole Christmas card charade. She was the one who had been secretly forging the handwriting. Probably got someone, her lover maybe, to drop off the card in the first place. Perhaps she thought to drive him into a nervous breakdown then divorce him on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. Striding across to where the card hung on the string, he ripped it off and opened it, expecting to see another message supposedly written in the hand of a dead friend or relative. But the only new message was from Anna herself, written in broad strokes with a bright red ink marker.
Dave screamed with rage. Here was the proof! She’d left him and couldn’t help herself from twisting the knife that bit further into his heart with a last mocking jeer. Dave grabbed at the string, tearing it from the wall, scattering cards like startled birds. The one still clutched in his hand he would take upstairs and use to wipe his…
The doorbell stopped him dead in his tracks. He meant to ignore it but then realised it might be Anna, back to collect her things. He yanked the door open ready to spray his unfaithful wife with the black bile gathered in his heart. But it wasn’t Anna. It was two uncomfortable looking police officers. One removed his hat and twisted it in his hands.
‘Mr Thompson?’
Dave nodded.
‘Got a bit of bad news, sir. I’m afraid your wife was in a car accident this morning…’
Dave was no longer listening. He noticed it was snowing. Fat snowflakes dropping from the leaden sky like heralds of heartbreak. He looked down at the Christmas card still open in his hand and saw the snow was soaking into the messages, causing the various inks to run and merge into a mosaic of loss and profound grief. Only one message was still legible. The most recent one written in red ink marker – Goodbye Dave, All my love. Anna, your loving wife xx.
Dowsing for the Dead
It was getting close to dusk as a dozen men wearing high-visibility vests and protective clothing zig-zagged their way in an intricate dance across the barley field, their heavy boots trampling crops into sodden mush as they worked. Most of these men held L-shaped dowsing rods that swayed slowly back and forth like the antennae of large, wary insects. Others worked with crystal pendulums, stopping every few steps to check for circular movement. Standing on the raised grassy verge adjacent to the field, the foreman, McVie, sighed as he thought of the complicated compensation forms that would require completing to reimburse the farmer for his ruined barley.
A shout went up from halfway across the field and McVie saw the man’s dowsing rods crossing over violently, the thin lengths of copper vibrating with such force the dowser was struggling to keep hold of them. Others rushed to the spot to verify the find and a marker pole was planted. More markers were quickly positioned at a radius of ten feet to create a boundary. The mechanical digger they’d brought would be useless as access to the field from this spot would mean demolishing the drystane wall or driving three miles to where the farm gate stood. Spades were issued to the men while McVie gave the order to fire up the generators and have the portable floodlights rigged up at the dig location.
Soon, heavy-duty cables were snaking across the ruined barley crop and with a dull whump of released voltage, a section of the field was illuminated in harsh white light, the glare so fierce McVie had to momentarily shield his eyes until they adjusted. There was no talking among the men, the only sounds in the still night air being the sharp rasp of the metal spades biting through earth and the laboured breathing of the men wielding them. Three dowsers still patrolled the perimeter of the dig with their rods to make sure the creature they sought didn’t escape. In rich, loamy ground such as this the creatures could move surprisingly quickly.
Tonight they were lucky as their prey was only four feet or so beneath the surface. It was a young dowser named Galston whose spade crunched into something other than wet earth. As the shout went up, McVie called out, ‘Keep it pinned down, lad. You two, Crawford, Denholm. Dig it out.’
Two men immediately began to enlarge the hole Galston was standing in to give them room to work. When this was done they cleared channels either side of where Galston’s spade kept the creature from wriggling away to freedom. As clots of damp earth flew like dark rain beneath the floodlights, a pale, white body was revealed, squirming grub-like as it flailed against the spade embedded halfway through its broken spine.
Finally the excavation was complete and the body fully exposed to the grim-faced men crowding around the hole. McVie saw the creature had once been a woman although he would have been hard-pressed to tell without the evidence of the sparkling rings on the poor soul’s fingers. All the burial clothes were long-gone of course, being shredded away as the woman had burrowed through the earth. Likewise, swathes of decayed skin had been flayed from her arms and legs to reveal dirt-encrusted bone and leathery sinew. It was a wretched thing you could only pity. The hair matted and filthy, the eyes long-gone, fingernails cracked and broken as they flailed at the soil which would soon be the creature's grave.
The men around McVie knew their task well by now and a dowser named Dawson began sloshing petrol over the struggling corpse in the hole. This was the part that McVie hated most. He knew the dead didn’t feel pain as such, but watching them contort and atrophy as they burned made him sick to the stomach. Regardless of how it made him feel, McVie knew the job had to be done. His eyes already stinging from the petrol fumes, he gave the signal for the men to stand clear, the sound of the spade twisting free from bone and cartilage making his stomach churn.
As the dead woman scrabbled to dig her way back into the safety of the earth, McVie took a railroad flare from his jacket pocket and sparked it alight, the narrow pyrotechnic cylinder hissing and spitting like a maddened cat as he dropped it into the newly dug pit. He jumped back as a fierce pillar of flame geysered upwards, singeing his eyebrows to dark stubble. When the initial surge of fire had abated, he peered into the hole and forced himself to watch as the pitiful creature arched and fought silently against the all-consuming flames that reduced it at last to nothing more than a smoking, charred lump of bone and gristle. McVie muttered a small prayer before nodding to the men to begin back-filling the hole.
As the young dowser, Galston, trudged past, his face pale and drawn, McVie caught his arm. ‘Take a break, lad. You did well. Kept your nerve.’
The young man looked grateful for the praise. ‘Thanks, Mr McVie. That was the first one I’ve had to hold down. They’re stronger than they look. I was scared it might wriggle free.’
‘Just left school, have you?’ McVie asked.
‘Aye, I was hoping to go to the university, but when the government sent me my call-up papers for dowsing duties……….’
The older man smiled sympathetically. ‘Who’d have thought two years ago we’d find ourselves hunting the dead with copper rods and shovels? Strange times indeed. If it hadn’t been for that blasted comet……..’
‘Wormwood. The Hand of God,’ Galston said, his voice almost a whisper.
McVie wiped his sweating face with a handkerchief as he thought back to the day the world changed forever when the black comet came into their lives. A mysterious lump of frozen rock and ice which appeared without warning in the night skies. Unlike other comets, this intruder to the solar system didn’t so much reflect light as absorb it. Astronomers couldn’t account for the rogue heavenly body, and physicists declared it an impossible phenomenon, but it was there all the same. A dark, brooding stain on the night sky that crept around the sun undetected and then aimed itself directly at the Earth.
Riots had started across the globe as the Bible-thumpers named the comet Wormwood and declared the end-of-times was upon humanity. There were mass suicides, looting, rapes, and murders as the authorities struggled to keep control. But the comet didn’t hit the Earth; only hours from impact it veered away and then vanished a
s quickly as it had come, leaving in its wake a strange radiation signature that had never been measured before. Eldritch radiation that had seeped into the atmosphere and changed the world forever.
‘I take it you’re religious?’ McVie asked. ‘Calling the comet Wormwood, I mean.’
Galston shrugged. ‘My family are. I’m not sure I believe in God, but you can’t deny all the miracles that happened after the comet left.’
‘Miracles?’ McVie raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean like that poor dead lassie we just burned like a witch?’
The young man looked uncomfortable. ‘No, I don’t mean…. them. The other stuff. The healing of the sick and the lame.’
McVie remembered the effects of the radiation were of the small and uneventful variety initially. Beautiful sunsets, startling cloud formations and mini-cyclones. Then other more dramatic changes began to manifest. The so-called miracles with cancerous tumours disappearing overnight, the blind having their sight restored, and paralysed men and women regaining the mobility of useless limbs. The Holy-Marys hailed the comet as irrefutable proof of God’s existence. McVie wasn’t one of them.
‘What about the butterflies disappearing, lad? Was that the Hand of God, too? And all this?’ he rasped, gesturing towards the group of men filling in the hole. ‘The reanimation of the dead? You really believe it’s resurrection day?’
Galston shook his head. ‘I’m not one of those who think they’re the spawn of Satan. I’ve read all the articles about how they’re harmless and hide away from living humans by burrowing underground. I know they don’t eat human flesh or creep around graveyards at midnight. According to the scientists they’re blind, deaf and have no form of communication. They’re not even contagious. But they do pose a danger to society. Why else are we here tonight?’ When he’d finished, Galston flushed bright red and lowered his gaze, unused no doubt to lecturing his elders.
McVie felt a little abashed over taking out his own guilty reservations at the way they disposed of the dead on the boy. ‘I know that, lad. I’m not saying we can let them run wild. I for one wouldn’t feel good seeing my old granny leaping out her coffin and digging a hole in the back garden. But it just seems so….. barbaric.’
They stood in silence for a few moments, each mulling over the reason they were out here in the middle of the countryside tonight. McVie couldn’t deny the dead posed a danger to the living. The dead were attracted to electrical and magnetic fields and chewed through buried cables, causing black-outs and telephone networks to fail. In some cases electrical fires were started by these ever-gnawing subterranean corpses causing fatalities. Governments had convened special meetings to discuss the problem. Through legislation they could control the recently deceased cadavers by forbidding burials and making sure all cremations were carried out within a twenty four hour time span after death. But there were thousands, even millions of the unaccounted dead who had wormed their way from beneath cemeteries to cause chaos in the living world above.
Detecting them was the main issue. Many solutions were tried and failed until it was discovered that dowsers could determine exactly where a roving corpse was crawling beneath the earth. And anyone could dowse; it wasn’t like you needed to be psychic to do such a thing. Provided with the correct tools of the trade, teams of dowsers were enlisted and trained to ferret out the dead. Usually the initial alarm would be raised by phone lines going down somewhere or breaks in the electricity supply. A team of dowsers would be dispatched to survey the immediate area and take the appropriate action. It was slow work, but eventually they would snuff out all the stragglers who continued to cause disruption to society.
McVie realised the team had finished filling in the hole and were standing around smoking cigarettes and talking softly among themselves. He gave young Galston a pat on the back. ‘Sorry, lad. Wasn’t trying to have a go at you. It just sickens me at times, the things we have to do. Go help the others clear up.’
Galston gratefully hurried off as McVie headed for the drystane wall where he would radio in and report another successful despatch. He had almost reached the wall when he heard Galston call out behind him.
‘Mr McVie! Look at the rods!’
McVie looked over his shoulder, and saw an astonishing sight. Every one of the discarded dowsing rods was vibrating madly where they lay on the ground. Some were practically flipping end over end. That was when one bank of floodlights suddenly went dark. Whirling around McVie saw in the reduced illumination that a corpse had broken ground beside a second electrical cable and was furiously attacking the thick rubber sheathing with its teeth. Within seconds there was an eye-searing flash and the second bank of lights went blind, leaving the field in near darkness.
There were shouts of fear as panicked men collided with each other in the gloom, then the shouts became shrieks of sheer terror. McVie snatched two flares from his jacket and lit them one by one with trembling fingers, throwing them outwards to illuminate a scene from deepest hell. In the red spluttering light from the flares he saw the men, his men, being dragged into holes in the soft, embracing earth. Cold, dead arms wrapped around legs and torsos, taking the helpless dowsers down into the underworld. As he watched transfixed, the earth beneath the feet of young Galston opened and swallowed the boy whole.
McVie turned to run, thinking to vault the wall and reach the safety of the truck but there was a figure not three feet behind him blocking his way. Another cadaver, but this one was different. It stood upright. It was naked like the others, an old man this time, the skin dark and leathery, stretched over a skeletal framework of misplaced and fractured bones. From the corpse came the sound of air being forced into the dry, crackling bellows of its lungs and the dead man spoke in halting words, ‘As …we crawl… in …darkness, …so we ….also walk ….in the …..light.’
The cadaver held out a palsied claw and McVie saw a beautiful butterfly sitting there, the first he’d seen since the arrival of the comet. McVie’s thoughts raced like maddened wasps in his head. What was the dead man trying to tell him? That the dead were like butterflies? If that was true, surely that would make living humans nothing more than……..
The butterfly opened wings of white silk and flew off into the night, just as the ground gave way beneath McVie’s feet and he fell into the howling darkness.
Mezzanine and Other Curiously Dark Tales Page 10