I’d expected that she was going to close the door back and attack me, but instead it just waved and walked out of sight down the hallway. I considered running out screaming, but I worried that might provoke the thing inside the young deputy, so instead I kept my back against the far wall of the interrogation room and called Deputy Ellison on my phone.
I told him what had happened in a brief whisper and he said he was on his way. True to his word, less than a minute later he was running into the room. Shutting the door, he looked at me with anxious frustration. “Have you seen her again?”
I paused, weighing if this could be another trick, the Gravekeeper having taken over Ellison now, but decided it seemed unlikely and worth the risk to trust Ellison for the moment. I shook my head. “No, she just told me about Jarvis disappearing, tricked me into answering a question, and seemed satisfied with that. She left out of here going to the right and I was scared to follow her.”
He nodded. “I don’t blame you. Based on your description, I had the front desk check for any female deputies that left in the last few minutes. Rachel Minas left in a hurry just a minute ago. I told dispatch to get ahold of her, but I don’t know how likely that is based on what you’re telling me.” He sat down at the table with a sigh and gestured to the other chair. “Look, I know something fucked up is going on, and I’m past thinking it’s likely that it’s your fault. But you’re clearly involved whether you want to be or not. It wants something from you. So if you have any more information, now’s the time to give it to me.”
Sitting down across from him, I recounted the details I had omitted earlier about what had happened at the house, as well as what I had read so far in the letter from the coffin. Ellison listened intently, not speaking after I had been finished for close to a minute.
“Okay, well, several things. First, you should have told me all this to start with. It might not have helped anything, but it wouldn’t have hurt. Second, the way the items were in the coffin makes sense…or well, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s consistent with a theory I had about Jarvis.”
I frowned at him. “What was your theory?”
He puffed out a long breath. “That he didn’t escape. That he just…went away. I don’t really know what that means yet, but I saw no way how he could have gotten out of that room short of teleportation, and I saw no reason why he would leave a souvenir behind either. Because Minas wasn’t lying about the rock. We found one in the cell, just like you described from the coffin. And then, with me watching it as another deputy went to go get an evidence bag, it just vanished into thin air.” Scrubbing his hand through his hair, he went on. “The thing is, Minas was never in that cell with him. Or with the rock. As far as I know, she wasn’t even in the jail section of the sheriff’s office. She’s a road deputy and had just come back from the end of a shift.”
I didn’t know what to make of that. I’d always assumed that the rock was somehow tied to people getting taken over by the thing, but that seemed unlikely if what he was saying was true. A thought occurred to me. “Was she at one of the workers’ houses when you were dealing with them? Maybe she got ‘infected’ there somehow?”
Ellison shook his head. “No, she’s a good deputy, but green. Hasn’t been on the road six months. She was one of the few we kept out on normal patrol while we were dealing with all this other.” He tapped the bag containing the letter. “You say there’s more you haven’t read?”
“Yes, I got interrupted by Jarvis at the hospital.” I shuddered involuntarily at the memory and tried to push it away. “We should finish it and see if it gives us any ideas.”
Glancing at his cell phone, he pushed the bag to me. “Go ahead. Just read it out loud.”
The first time that we witnessed the strange power dynamic between the Gravekeeper and Dr. Middleton was during one of our rare social interactions with the Men’s Ward at Greenheart Home. For various reason, there was generally strict segregation between the sexes, with separate wings, dining halls, and recreational areas for women and men. For the most part, it was easy to forget that they were even there, and that was typically preferable.
The monthly picnic on the vast front lawn of Greenheart was always an ordeal. Some of the women eagerly anticipated the day, putting extra effort into their appearance and making every attempt to garner attention from one or more men during the three hours we were together. For me, it amounted to huddling amongst my friends and trying to avoid eye contact with those men that were actively looking for female companionship. While the picnic was supervised, our caretakers were far from assiduous, and I came to understand that they would deliberately turn a blind eye if a couple wandered off into one of the distant stands of trees or bushes closer to the outer perimeter fence. There was no way for them to escape, after all, and if some indiscretion led to a pregnancy, they had means of profiting from that as well.
It should be clear that I do not hate men—far from it. But I’ve never seen much benefit in purely physical congress of that sort, and it wasn’t as though I could establish a relationship with someone that I saw briefly once a month. While I pitied their plight as I did my own, I had no desire to be an outlet for some stranger’s pent up lust.
So I resigned myself to small conversations with my friends, watching the clouds, and reading the latest book I would get out of the lending library. I enjoyed poetry the best, and on this particular day I was reading, funnily enough, Men and Women by Robert Browning. I was thoroughly engrossed, but I looked up when I heard a commotion up near the top of the lawn near the building.
“Ya think yer clever, doctor?” The Gravekeeper’s accent was light but his voice laden with threat as it rolled across the grass. He was talking to Dr. Middleton, who took a step back as he raised his hands.
“I don’t know what you mean, Meeks.” I could hear anger in the man’s voice, but it broke as he said the Gravekeeper’s name.
Meeks let out a wet, nasty laugh. “Oh, ya know well enough I think. Yes, I think ya do.” He took a step toward the doctor, who retreated in kind. “Ya think I don’t know about yer lil’ side ventures?” He looked off in the distance for several moments, to the point I thought Dr. Middleton was going to respond before he was cut off by the Gravekeeper’s next words. “I do. I do. I don’t care about the babbies, but I do about the trucks, you ken? Ya stop ‘em, or I’ll stop you.” As he said the last, I had the odd image of a hand stopping the pendulum of a clock, killing its motion, its life. I learned later that several of my friends who watched the scene unfold had the exact same image as I.
One of the head nurses headed over to the argument, presumeably to help the crumbling Dr. Middleton, but the Gravekeeper turned his gaze on her, pinning her to the spot. “This lil’ soiree is over, nurse. I want everyone back inside, now. Need peace and quiet on my lawn so I can hear myself think.”
The older woman’s mouth moved wordlessly as she turned to glance at the doctor. Even at a distance you could tell by his rounded shoulders and the way he ignored looking at her that he was beaten. “Yes. Um, yes, let’s cut it short this month. I have too much work to do.” Dejected, the nurse turned and started calling for the nurses to collect their charges and return them to their respective chambers in the Greenheart.
We gathered up our things and headed for the building, but as we approached the top of the lawn I felt something at my core tremble. I turned and saw the Gravekeeper looking at me, his dark eyes steady as the deathwatch gaze of a crocodile or an angler fish—seeing and not seeing at the same time. My heart leapt, and then leapt again when his gaze followed my movements.
“What’re ya looking at, my girl?” He pronounced the last “gull”. His voice was rough and deep, and at such proximity it took all I had not to run at hearing it.
Turning away from him, I lowered my head and murmured, “Nothing.” Most of my attention was on keeping my steps measured as I crossed the threshold into the building, on not showing the fear I felt. But then I heard his chuckle behind me as he muttered something low.
What I feared then was confirmed over time—I had been somehow marked by the thing we called the Gravekeeper. As for his low muttering, it didn’t make sense to me when I was at Greenheart, but sitting here in the spring of 1931, I see its significance all too clearly.
”That’s one, my pet. Yes, I think that’s one.
I looked up at Ellison. “This is the same kind of shit he was saying to me. Or she was…Minas…but you know what I mean. It’s something to do with tricking some people into answering him several times. I don’t know why it’s not like that for everybody, but it can’t be. From what you’re saying, that deputy would have never even seen him.”
He nodded, his face drawn. “Yeah. I mean, no, she wouldn’t have ever had a chance to be asked shit by Jarvis. Fuck…keep going. I want to know how we stop this fucker, and this is all we have to go on.”
I knew from the pages I was holding there wasn’t much left, and my heart sank at the realization. I had been hoping that this letter from the past would hold some hidden key to how to stop this thing. That’s what always happened in horror movies, right? You just had to put the puzzle together and your reward would be the thing that could slay the beast.
But there was no point in dampening our spirits more by saying it out loud. Instead, I finished the letter.
Over the next several months I saw and heard gossip of several more confrontations between Meeks and Dr. Middleton. In most of them, it seemed the Gravekeeper’s primary point was to shame and cow the doctor, but there did seem to be some common thread regarding something the doctor was doing that Meeks didn’t like. It wasn’t until Christmas Eve of 1911 that I fully understood what that was.
We were all gathered in the dining hall having our dinner—roasted geese, figgy pudding, and bowls of steaming potatoes filled every table, and despite our situation, the mood in the room was actually something close to merry. Dr. Middleton sat at the head table, sourly picking at his food while pretending to pay attention to one of the other doctors that had come on at Greenheart just a few months prior. The head doctor’s face changed as the doors at the opposite end of the room banged open.
It was the Gravekeeper. He strode down the middle of the long hall, and I shuddered as he spared me a knowing glance in his passing. Without any real effort, he leapt the five feet onto the raised platform where the head table sat, his hands loose at his sides like a gunfighter from the stories my father would read me as a little girl.
“I told ya, Doc. But ya thought ya knew better. Thought ya were smart and could fool me.”
Middleton visibly paled. “I…I don’t know what you mean, Meeks.”
I heard that rough chuckle again. “Sure ya do. Ya kept sending out our cattle here.” He gestured back in our direction. “Sending ‘em to another butcher.” He suddenly slammed a fist down on the table, caving it in and sending food flying amid screams of terror and shuffling feet. The Gravekeeper’s voice somehow carried over the commotion, and I wonder now if he was speaking at all, or if I was hearing him in my mind.
“But I’m a greedy, selfish butcher. Greedy and so very hungry.”
Middleton’s face went red with anger. “Shut up, you fool! You’ll ruin us both!”
I watched as Meeks’ hand shot forward and through the doctor’s head. Bone and viscera exploded out onto the other staff that were now scrambling desperately off their platform and toward the doors.
“I don’t want to share, ya see? Never have. So I think it’s time to start fresh.” He turned around to face us, slinging his arm hard enough that meat and gore splashed against the far wall. “Yes, I think it’s time for a change.” A number of staff and inmates were at the doors by now, but they couldn’t escape. Only the door nearest me seemed to be open, and people flooded out of it as flames began to appear along the walls and tables.
I had been somewhat transfixed by the horror unfolding before us, but the warmth of the fire brought me to my senses. I pushed away from the table and headed for the door, pushing my way through the crowd and out into the cold night air. Even through the crackling of the flame-wreathed walls and the distance we had moved from the building, I thought I could hear Meeks laughing.
Nearly forty people died that night. By the next morning I was on a train headed back here to my family. My trip was uneventful, and my return home was unceremonious. There was no discussion of Greenheart Home or my unwilling confinement there. Life had moved on without me, and carrying the perspective I had gained at Greenheart Home, I found myself grateful for being removed from it. I missed my friends terribly, but never saw or heard from them again. I was told in blunt terms by my mother that I was welcome to stay as long as I behaved, but if there were any further problems, or if I attempted to leave my family’s tender care, they would see me put in a state hospital that would make Greenheart seem like a paradise. The certain reality of that threat terrified me, and to my shame, kept me a largely silent and docile prisoner over these years.
I quickly divorced myself from all but mandatory family functions, staying mainly in my room or the library at times when I knew others weren’t apt to be around. I was like a ghost haunting my own home, and that separation was a comfort. I lost myself in books and writing poetry, and occasionally talking to a distant aunt on our new telephone. She had no ability to help my predicament, but she was a kind voice in the dark nonetheless, and while I was initially put off by the alien means of communication, I soon came to look forward to her calls once every week or two.
The last of my calls with my aunt was strange from the beginning. She seemed uninterested in what I was saying and her manner of speech seemed somewhat abnormal. I was wondering if she was sick or preoccupied by some trouble when I realized she was asking me a question.
“Would you like me to come and visit you, Emily?”
My chest flared with happiness. I had wanted to ask her for months, but was afraid that the suggestion might have the opposite effect of pushing her away. Trying to not sound overeager, I paused before breathlessly answering yes.
There was a strange smacking sound on the other end of the line. “Ah, there we are. That’s two, my girl. Don’t ya worry. I’ll be visiting ya real soon to get the last one.”
I had dropped the phone with a clatter and ran from the house, but to no avail. I was caught, I was locked in, and I was just watched closer afterward, my family apparently having warmed to the idea of acting as my wardens and preferring it to the embarrassment of public institutions. It was in this trap that I stayed, waiting for him to come—waiting for it to come—for how could such a thing be human? I heard some days after my last phone call that my aunt had taken her own life, but I knew the lie of it. That thing had murdered her and was coming for me next.
Except it never came. Years passed, and as time dulled the edge of my fear and trepidations, the banality of my existence made me almost pine for something as strange as whatever the Gravekeeper might be. Of course, that was a foolish wish, but it was one that was soon granted.
It was my mother this time, asking if I wanted any lunch, and as soon as I answered I felt the change come over me. It felt as though someone had set fire to my brain. I stumbled back from the threshold of my room and collapsed against my bed, sliding to the floor as the world receded to black.
When I awoke, I knew I was ruined. Tainted. I could feel him nesting in my mind, in my soul. He didn’t take control often, but I could feel him sending out tendrils as he probed my thoughts and feelings. I began to have dark and perverse thoughts, as well as the reoccurring image of a face that was both Meeks and not Meeks, its mouth a red slash full of broken knives cutting and re-cutting the long, purplish tongue that lolled out of its mouth, wet and hungry.
I could feel that mouth in my mind, consuming me bit by bit, replacing me with something else. I could feel that dark tongue roving and questing, burning everything with its acid touch. I could feel it licking the inner chambers of my heart.
My mother is dead now, and they’ve decided I’m to blame. The past two weeks have convinced them that I’m evil—possibly possessed. As I don’t remember spans of that time, and given what I know, who am I to argue?
They mean to bury me. Bury me and leave this house forever, though whether that last idea is truly theirs or the bank’s, that’s another matter. I wish I had it in me to fight them, but I’m too tired. And considering what lives inside me now, perhaps it’s the best thing.
I always wrote such happy poems. I was embarrassed to have anyone read them because of their optimism and bright view of a world beyond the borders of places like Greenheart Home or my own family. Perhaps the idea that there are good people and good places—places where truth and love and kindness can find light enough to grow tall and strong—is a fantasy, but I don’t think so. I just think it’s foreclosed to me now.
Last night I woke to find that a new poem had been written. His poem, not mine.
The Magpie Song
There's a flock of magpies round me, round me,
They soar as high as you see, you see,
They took my eyes, but fairly paid,
For I rest in their eyes as even trade,
Spanning the land and the sea, the sea,
There's a flock of blackbirds in flight, in flight,
They move to and fro every night, every night,
They took my ears, beaks sharp and wry,
But it favors me with each sobbing cry,
Found in the spaces away from the light, the light,
There's a flock of crows crying loud, crying loud,
They cast shadows great as a cloud, a shroud,
They took my tongue, and so my voice,
By then I was strong--they had no choice,
It's with their pink darts I taste the tears, the tears.
There's a sky full of rooks and it's me, it's me,
See the remains in the field I used to be, used to be,
But now I move free, still young and hungry,
Still reaching out into the void.
I see you.
Shining there.
Your spirit.
Unaware.
I think he wrote it at least in part to mock me. To twist something that I love and show me how he’s going to taint every corner of my life, letting me watch until it’s all gone. But I’ve lived a small life. I blame my family for some of that, but I can’t lay it all at their door. Perhaps I should have been braver and bolder. Stronger. I should have found a way.
But it’s too late for me now. They mean to bury me tonight. As horrible that is, I won’t fight them. The one benefit of having such a small life is that it is easier to risk it, easier to finally be brave. I’ll gladly give my life if I can carry the Gravekeeper with me. Keep him…it from touching others. Protect the goodness that I know is out there somewhere in the world.
I hear them coming for me now so I must end this. I will try to hide this on my person as well as the means to write more if I have the need and the ability. I’ve just realized what I’ve been writing this all with. I don’t remember this pencil, and I wonder where
“It ends there.” My mouth was dry and I felt on the verge of tears, both for Emily and for myself. I felt no closer to a solution, and I could tell Ellison felt the same. We stared at each other for a moment before I asked a question that had been in the back of my mind since I started reading us the rest of the letter, “Why do you believe me? Why do you believe any of this?” I laid the letter down and sat back. “I could just be crazy or a liar. I could have faked this letter, be giving these people bath salts or something. So why are you so willing to believe that the Gravekeeper is real?”
Ellison rubbed his mouth and gave me a wan smile. “I’d like to say it’s just my gut. My cop’s instinct. But my instincts have never been that great, if I’m honest. The real reason is because this isn’t the first time I’ve ever seen a monster.” I raised an eyebrow and he went on. “Not this thing. Nothing like this thing, whatever it is. But there was a time when my brother got taken by someone. Some thing. I was a teenager at the time, and I was stupid. Thought I’d track him down, hunt down whoever took him. Wound up, I was the one being hunted.”
“I got drug to the place where it had my brother—turns out I hadn’t been too far off, but I was too late. He was torn apart.” I saw tears welling in his eyes as he looked away to the wall. “Suddenly this man was there. He killed that thing and saved me.”
I leaned forward, my eyes wide. “How did he kill it? Maybe that’ll help us.”
He laughed softly. “You’ll think I’m lying, but he killed it with a crowbar and an electric drill. When he was done, it was just gone. Disappeared. Before today, it was the most bizarre thing I’d ever seen, and it’s still a close second.”
I went to ask something else but my phone rang. It was Sandra. And she was screaming.
---
Credits
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