My wife left me last winter. I’d like to say it was undeserved, but the truth was I had been slowly making the transition from social drinker to sloppy drunk for the past several years. If I ever was, I had stopped being a good husband or father the last couple of years for sure, and it’s a miracle Sandra tried as long as she did before packing up our little girls and moving back to her old hometown.
After several months of self-pity and self-loathing, I began getting my shit together. I started attending group meetings, working harder at my job, and rebuilding a life for myself and the people I love. I never had any illusions of me and my wife getting back together—some things can’t be unsaid or undone. But I did want to be a good father again. I wanted to gain joint custody and have a home that my kids could come and feel comfortable in—not the forced march trips I had seen with some divorced fathers who either didn’t really want to see their kids or at least did very little to make a place for a child in their lives and their houses.
So I fixed up bedrooms for both of them. They came with their mother and picked out the colors for the walls and the furniture they wanted. I was excited to see them, but also for them to have a chance to see me. Sandra hugged me when they left, telling me that she was so happy I was doing so much better. And if I could keep it up, she added, she’d be happy to agree to joint custody.
This just motivated me further. Summer was coming up in a couple of months, and my hope was that I could get time with them during their break from school. So I looked up summer programs, found attractions and parks we could go to, and set about getting someone to put in a swimming pool.
We had talked about getting a swimming pool for years, but had never had the money. Surprisingly, working hard and not pissing away large chunks of money on booze allowed me to save up enough for a good down payment on the pool fairly quickly. By May I had workers out in my back yard with a backhoe. It was a Saturday, and I was watching them with interest and satisfaction as they began digging out the space for the pool. Within minutes they had a good portion of it dug, but then they stopped amid waved arms and yelling. I stepped outside to see what the commotion was.
Rick Jarvis, the contractor on the job, came up to me with a strange look on his face. “Mr. Sullivan, do you know anything about someone being buried on this property?”
I started to laugh, but it died in my throat as I realized he was serious. “No, of course not. Are you saying you found someone buried in my yard?”
He shrugged before taking off his hat and mopping his forehead with the back of his hand. “I dunno yet. The boys are still getting it up, but they think they hit a coffin down there.”
The coffin was a seven-foot long, three foot wide wooden box that had been buried some ten feet down in our yard sometime before we had moved in a decade earlier. I felt the weight of dread and anxiety as they pulled the box free from the ground with yellow straps and slid it onto the grass a few feet away. One of the men approached Jarvis and told him they thought it was empty because it was so light, and after nodding, Jarvis turned back to me.
“It’s your call, sir. It may be some weird old prank or something. We can open it up and see if anything is even inside, and if there’s not, no harm no foul. We just go back to digging. Or we can go ahead and call the authorities, but that’s going to slow things down whether there’s a body in there or not.”
I glanced at the partially-dug hole and the coffin. More time would mean more money. And it wouldn’t hurt just to look. I turned back to the contractor and nodded. “Yeah, go ahead and check it out. No need to call somebody unless we find something.”
Jarvis grinned and called a couple of his men over with a crowbar. With a bit of grunting and the squeal of rusty nails, they pried the top off the coffin. I stepped closer as the wooden lid fell aside and felt a surge of relief when I saw it was empty. Well, mostly empty. There were several sheets of paper scattered across the coffin floor as well as a small, mostly corroded metal flashlight that looked a good forty or fifty years old. Looking closer, one of the men also picked out a small black rock and the stub of an old wooden pencil.
Jarvis collected the items and held them out to me like an offering. “Where do you want me to put these things, sir? They’re yours, after all.” His expression was unreadable, but I could hear a wire of tension reverberating in his words. I almost told him to just throw it all away, but I had seen writing on those pages and was curious. So I just took the items and carried them inside. When I came back out, I stopped two men from dragging the coffin away, telling them that I’d take care of it. I didn’t want them wasting any more time, and I hadn’t decided what I wanted to do with it yet anyway. They had already set the lid back on top, so I dragged the entire thing around to the side of my garage before setting it down. As I did so, the lid slid off again and landed with the interior side face up for the first time.
The inside of the lid was covered in scratches. Darkly stained scratches that could have easily been old dried blood. My skin crawling, I leaned closer and saw what looked like a small piece of fingernail jutting out of one of the deep grooves in the stained wood. How was any of this possible? Surely it was all fake or there’d be a body, right?
Glancing around, I saw no one else could see the lid from where they were working, and I found myself secretly hoping they hadn’t noticed it before. I wanted time to think before anyone started yelling someone had been murdered or buried alive on the very spot I was planning on putting a pool for my little girls. Covering the coffin with a tarp from the garage, I went back inside to look at the items we had found.
The rock was a small, flat oval of smooth black stone, and holding it in the palm of my hand I was surprised by its weight and how cool it felt. It had an almost greasy texture to it, and after a few moments I put it down with mild disgust. The flashlight didn’t work, of course, but from what I could make out of its shape underneath the green rust, it reminded me of flashlights I had seen at my grandfather’s house as a child. He had worked as a plumber most of his life, and he always kept a large silver flashlight close at hand.
The pencil, such as it was, consisted of an inch-long nub of wood lacquered with faded green paint and stamped with barely legible letters in what was once gold foil. Part of the name had been obliterated by sharpening, but when I held it to the light coming through the window I could make out “Greenheart Ho”. It didn’t ring a bell, so I set it aside and began to glance through the papers. The paper was clearly old and of very high quality. It felt more like a bedsheet than paper I was used to, and I was impressed it had survived so long in the damp of the earth.
But not only had it survived, it was fairly legible. Most of the pages were filled with a neat, slanted pencil scrawl and clearly numbered as pages of a long letter. The last was written in larger, harsh slashes across the entirety of one sheet. The black lines of lead seemed to scream from the page:
DO NOT TAKE ANYTHING FROM THE COFFIN. BURY IT AGAIN AND FOREVER. DO NOT TOUCH THE STONE. DO NOT ANSWER THE GRAVEKEEPER.
My mouth went dry as I read the words. This didn’t feel like some kind of strange joke, and my curiosity had curdled into an acid fear deep in my belly. At that moment, I felt certain in my actions, in my conviction that I needed to do what the message demanded, at least as best I could. I gathered up the other pages and pencil, intent on putting everything back in the coffin and telling them to rebury it. The pool could wait or go somewhere else. I’m not superstitious by nature, but something was very wrong with all of this and I wanted no part of it.
I stopped short when I realized I didn’t see the stone. Swallowing hard, I checked under the table and all around the floor. As I grew more desperate and tried to allow for some miracle of physics that had led to the stone rolling a farther distance, I spread out my search as I tossed my living room and adjoining rooms for the small black rock. But nothing. It was just gone.
There was no chance someone had taken it. I had been standing less than two feet from it the entire time from when I set it down to when I saw it was missing. Still, I found myself considering asking the men outside anyway if anyone had seen it or taken it. I felt foolish at the thought, but my self-consciousness was being outpaced by my growing dread. Reaching for the door that led out to where they were working, I froze as I looked out the window.
All work had stopped and most of the men were gathering around Rick Jarvis, who was thrashing about on the ground as though he was having some kind of fit. My first thought was epilepsy, but then I realized he was screaming. He was clawing at his eyes as he wailed, and even from a distance I could see blood slinging off onto the freshly turned earth and surrounding work boots. And his men, his friends and workers, they weren’t trying to help him at all. They were just watching.
---
Credits
Comments