I had been unemployed for the greater part of a year when my case worker at the unemployment office got me an interview for a gig as a groundskeeper for the city cemetery. I was to meet a Mr. Bowman at 2pm for the interview. I showed up in jeans and a t-shirt hoping to get to work as soon as possible. Mr. Bowman was an elderly gentleman who walked with a cane and spoke with a deep southern accent. He reached out to shake my hand and I instantly jumped at a grip far firmer than I had expected.
He smiled and ran me through the usual questions. I told him that I didn’t drink or smoke and that I had my own car. He smiled again before telling me to show up each morning at dawn. For the next few weeks I showed up at the crack of dawn and tasked myself with mowing the grass, weed eating around the gravestones and picking up cigarette butts along the roads. It was hard work but a welcome change of pace from sitting on my butt watching daytime television.
Mr. Bowman passed a few weeks after I was hired and as the only person working the cemetery I was offered a promotion. A guy from the city came by with a clipboard asking if I had ever been convicted of a crime worse than a speeding ticket before having me sign some papers and giving me the key to the groundskeeper’s house. He told me I could move in or live off site but that someone had to be there at night in case of any “incidents.”
The emphasis he put on that word disturbed me slightly.
Not one to say no to free rent and utilities I moved out of my parents’ house and into the small cottage to the rear of the cemetery. It was relatively uneventful. Before long I hired a kid to fill my old job and enjoyed the luxury that came with a title and a free house. Aside from tallying hours and telling the kid what to do, I got paid to watch daytime television.
I must’ve lived there for the greater part of a month before the first late night call.
I’d never even noticed the black phone on the kitchen wall before but it didn’t have a bell inside. No, that would have made sense. Instead, I woke to the sound of a klaxxon coming from the phone on the wall in the kitchen. I answered it only to hear a man with a nasally voice say, “We’ve got another one. Unlock the front gate.” I walked into the living room and pressed a button to open the magnetic lock on the front gate as I stood on the porch and watch as a police van backed up to one of the mausoleums and carried something inside before locking the place up tight and speeding off.
These calls happened about once or twice a month and that was pretty much all it was. I would answer the phone, open the gate and watch the police load stuff into that mausoleum. The thing is, I started to notice a pattern. We had a real problem with kids kicking over gravestones and other vandalism. It seemed that these calls seemed to happen on the night of or a few nights after someone had kicked over a gravestone or did some unauthorized digging in around the graveyard.
I had been on the job for nearly a year when one morning I worked up the courage to walk over to the mausoleum and see what all the hubbub was about. I grabbed my keyring and fiddle around with the keys and locks before opening up the heavy iron door and peering inside. Instead of finding a standard mausoleum, the door opened to stone stairs that went down a bit before opening up in a huge room with crates lining the walls with a doorway to the rear of the room that seemed to be the opening of a long hallway. I closed the place up as I found it and went back to the house to catch the latest episode of Judge Judy.
That night when the klaxxon went off I pushed the button first before walking over and answering the phone. A frantic voice on the other end said, “Don’t open the gate. Don’t go outside. They got out. Somehow, they got out. Oh fuck, oh fuck…” The line went dead. I walked over to the window and peered outside.
Nothing.
It was a calm and quiet night. The moon was high in the sky and it was almost bright enough to make out the individual gravestones that peppered the graveyard all the way up to the main road. Everything was normal. The pale blue glow of the moonlight shined down and illuminated the almost serene graveyard. The owls were hooting. The crickets were chirping. Mr. Bowman was staring at me from the other side of the window.
I jumped back.
“You forgot to lock the mausoleum!” he shouted before turning and walking off into the night.
I stumbled back to my chair and sat there staring at the door until I passed out at some point. I was met the following morning by the same guy with a clipboard and a nasally voice. I was promptly fired and given until the end of the week to move out. As I moved the last of the boxes from the house into my parents’ van I noticed the original papers I noticed my termination papers sitting on the table.
There on the paper in the comments section was a handwritten note:
“Employee terminated for failure to properly contain the recently deceased.”
—
Credits to: xylonex
Comments