Chapter 5 - In the Graveyard, Spirits Rise Grudgingly

“Orville,” Marilyn interrupted, her tone irate. “We are both in the mausoleum! Orville, how can this be? Both of us are dead!”

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Recap: Previously in The Graveyard House, the Brahms family were cleaning up house after a surprise attack from a malevolent Elf which got inside after being cursed into the form of a raccoon.

Marjorie confessed to her Papa about having taken something very important to him; he forgave her, then went downstairs to reinforce the protective spells surrounding his house, so that the Elf should not return.

As soon as Papa left her room, she noted that it was suddenly, inexplicably cold—and a glance out of her window sent a further chill up her spine—but she could not have guessed what was going on outside, in the graveyard, their backyard…the cause of the sudden cold…

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The old St. Claire graveyard had been left unused for nearly a century, its headstones left to rust, the names on them forgotten as posterity elected to be laid to rest down the hill.

Until the arrival of Bamoy and his wife, there had been no signs of movement aside from the fluttering of leaves. Johann Brahms purchased the gravedigger’s house for a ridiculously cheap price. It was cheap, because nobody else wanted a house so far from town; furthermore, the superstitious took umbrage at the small legion of headstones.

At the time of the house’s purchase, Nina Brahms cared only that it was in a state of disrepair. Promising his wife that he would help her turn the old house into a home, Bamoy the Magician felt the sense of achievement at having finally settled, after years of wandering.

He thought that nothing wicked could find them there, but he was wrong.

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St. Claire was a large graveyard in proportion to the village parish it had once served. It boasted of over one hundred graves, several of them unmarked. In many cases, headstones had been stolen; other graves were unmarked due to inconveniences surrounding the person’s death.

Legends existed explaining some of these away. Among them was the story of a thief who had been caught stealing from a local baron. Enraged, the baron killed the thief before he could make off. In a tragic twist of fate, it was discovered the thief was the baron’s second-born son. Knowing he was not the heir, he’d developed a gambling addiction; having squandered his own funds, he needed money to pay debts, and had not the courage to ask his father directly.

Rather than suffer the scandal of murder and the way it had come about, the baron ordered that his son be buried in an unmarked spot known only to his family. He told the villagers that said son had gone to the Continent, glibly avoiding any questions about when he would return.

After the remaining family died, no one knew where to leave Junior a daisy. He had been lost to time, though some townsfolk did believe that the youngest son had moved to Romania and that he had descendants.

No one would ever truly know…right?

This legend is one of the many which survived the passing of time, regarding unmarked bodies. As for those souls whose names were forgotten, one could only hope their spirits had gone someplace pleasant (or at least tolerable).

A name on a rock didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. The wise person would hope for peace after death, in a place where they might not recall what it was like to have a human body, let alone worry about the bit of land in which it had become dust.

That was, however, an unpopular opinion; it was not to be uttered in the presence of the priest.

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Mr. Orville Shelley yawned, stretching his old limbs as his eyelids fluttered open. He stared into the darkness, enjoying the pleasant sensation that followed uninterrupted sleep. As an investor and businessman, such slumbers for him were few and far in between.

It was worth the effort, at day’s end; he was proud of the reputation he had built for himself and his family. Certainly, there had been a few deals that he was not so proud of—some corners cut, so to speak—but he’d made sure to go to Confession after each white lie.

Orville blinked at the ceiling as awareness returned to him. Marilyn would have to remind him of any appointments he had reserved for to-day. As he entered his fifties, he’d become incompetent keeping track of things. He could not be convinced to hire a secretary; no, such a person would only to poke about in his business.

Besides, Marilyn was far better for the role; she was unafraid to knock some sense into him.

Judging by the darkness surrounding him, he’d woken so early that Marilyn hadn’t needed to shake him from sleep. Odd; he was not in the habit of doing that anymore. When he’d been a young man, perhaps, but now…

Yawning, he sat up and reached for his night-table in hopes of finding his timepiece—but the night-table was not there.

Orville frowned. He could not imagine that the piece of furniture had been moved while he slumbered. The sound would have woken him, surely. He strained his fingers, but did not so much as graze the table’s edge.

That was when he realized he wasn’t in his room. He wasn’t in his bed. The surface on which he rested was not his feather-bed, but a hard, concrete slab. He could not imagine how he could have slept so deeply on a—

“Orville?” Marilyn’s voice sounded different as she called for him. “Is that you?”

“Marilyn?” She was not beside him in bed, for he was not in bed. Her words came from across a narrow space, and they echoed eerily, laced with fear. “Marilyn, where are we?”

A pause ensued.

Orville squinted into the darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he could see movement: Marilyn pacing back and forth in state of agitation. The space they were in was too small to be any room in their house, except perhaps the cupboard.

“Oh, Orville,” said Marilyn, and her voice broke. “To hear your voice again after twenty years—though I suppose it must have been more than that by now—Orville, if only I could see you!”

His puzzlement increased with each word that his wife spoke. “Darling, I wish you would speak more clearly,” he said. “You know that my mind isn’t young or sharp as yours, and—”

“Orville,” Marilyn interrupted, her tone now irate. “We are in the mausoleum! Orville, the two of us are dead!” Her panic rose as she began to ramble. “Do you not recall the stroke that killed you when you were sixty-one and I forty? No—I suppose not, since it killed you.” 

Orville listened in disbelief, wishing that he could see his wife’s face as emotions shifted her features. She was always so expressive.

He supposed it did feel as if he’d not seen her in a very long time. Unhinged as her story was, he wished only to gather her into his arms and calm her, and…

“I lived twenty years without you,” Marilyn continued, voice breaking. “I wore black in mourning. I returned to this place every Sunday, regardless of the weather. In the spring, I placed flowers in the vase. In pouring rain, I brought an umbrella. I suppose I must have died in my sleep, and of course I would have been laid to rest here with you.

“I cannot understand why I am awake and talking. The dead stay dead; I was raised to believe that, when our lives are over, we are awarded eternal rest and the hope of meeting our loved ones in the next life…”

Orville cut her off, beginning to feel dizzy.

“Marilyn,” he said, “you aren’t making much sense, but if what you say is true and we are both dead, then perhaps this is the next life. Perhaps we are together now to argue and waltz through eternity.”

What he’d hoped were romantic words of encouragement seemed to have the opposite effect on his wife.

“The next life would not look like the inside of our mausoleum, surely,” she argued. “Wouldn’t there be rays of light? Would we not be at the gates of St. Peter, accounting for the times that we fell short of being good Christians? No, I can feel it in my bones—my—my bones! There they are, arranged on the slab of marble, just as my body was placed on the day of my funeral. I am a spirit, not a body, and I have no bones to feel. Orville! Something is not right here, and I know that it is not something of the Lord. It is not a good thing that you and I are awake and talking, while our remains continue motionless on marble.”

Orville was beginning to feel alarmed, though when he replied to his wife next, he did so with the calm voice that he utilized when striking deals with jittery investors.

“There is no need to fret, darling. Why, if we have returned as ghosts, then we might step out of the mausoleum. In all of the ghost stories I’ve heard, walls have not been barriers for the restless dead. We might go for a stroll through the cemetery. I know that it’s not the park you loved so much, but I would like to walk arm-in-arm with the woman that I married.”

These words silenced Marilyn’s whimpering. At last she whispered, in a tone of indescribable fear, “Oh, Orville, I have missed you.”

Orville and Marilyn stood together for the first time since he had died, and though they could not see one another’s faces, it was enough.

Tentatively, he reached for her hand; it was the same hand he’d held throughout their marriage, delicate, worthy of artwork. He’d delighted in adorning it with gems of bright colors. Her favorite, he recalled, had been the emerald. If they were dead, Orville wondered which of their three daughters had inherited it. Helen, perhaps; it was her birthstone.

Do spirits weep? he wondered, pressing his wife to his non-beating heart. She had always been petite, precious in the way that small perfume bottles held most value.

Orville and Marilyn might no longer have internal organs that worked the way they ought to, but fear was a habit. He supposed it was habit which kept Marilyn trembling the way that she did. Orville, himself, was not yet fearful enough to stiffen up. He’d been to battle; he’d seen friends perish before his very eyes. While he’d never imagined that his life—or afterlife—would take such an odd turn, he met it with his chin up and his shoulders back.

Oh, his shoulders—they no longer hurt with the ache of age—and his back! How it felt to be able to stand up without wincing when he disturbed a certain muscle. Life after death could not possibly feel so close to freedom! The aches and pains that had made his final years so arduous were no longer present…

“If I recall correctly,” he said, running a hand through Marilyn’s curly hair—he imagined it must have turned a charming shade of silver before she breathed her last—“the door to our mausoleum is in front of us, and we are going to walk through it together, you and I. There’s no need to be afraid; we’re both already dead. The worst that can happen is that we lose one another again, but I do not see how that would come to pass. Our bones are housed in the same temple. Our spirits, surely, would be inseparable.”

Marilyn’s trembling had eased. He felt her peering up at him in the darkness, and remembered the first time he’d seen her.

He’d been a widower for a decade, and she had managed to escape from a marriage where nothing belonged to her but her dreams. Her eyes gleamed cerulean that afternoon as he watched her from across the park. He’d tipped his hat to her, and she’d smiled shyly, but that first time they did not speak. They continued in their own directions. However, he was unable to forget the woman with the blue eyes for an entire week, and then he spotted her walking the same path at the same park…

“Alright,” said Marilyn, and he was glad to hear that calm had entered her tone. “You’re right on all accounts, Orville, and I trust you. I want to step into the moonlight with you. I want to know what you look like now.”

He kissed her forehead reassuringly and tightened his grip on her hand. Together, they walked to the door of their mausoleum.

The mausoleum had been designed so that, once sealed for good, not even the cleverest of thieves could break in. He had done so, because he did not want to risk their wedding rings being stolen from their fingers. One of their children would be in possession of the key, he wagered. 

Was it Oliver? Orville always imagined that Oliver would be the one to watch over the family legacy, as he took great pride in it.

Oliver had married shortly before Orville’s death. He wondered, vaguely, if his son had gone on to have children. He wondered if he was a grandfather.

One step, two steps. He reached ahead with his free hand, waiting to feel the concrete of the mausoleum wall, all of the while hoping that he would not. While he was mostly certain that spirits could not be kept in place by doors, there lurked in him a human fear of being trapped in small places.

As he advanced, he felt no concrete; he continued walking, and so did Marilyn, whose exclamation of surprise indicated that she’d also feared a cold barrier.

They walked, and walked, and all of a sudden the full moon shone above them. He recognized some of the gravestones on which its pale light shone. They belonged to friends whose funerals he had attended as a boy. Others had been added later; he remembered attending their memorials as a young man, and later as a colleague.

His frown deepened when he realized that the night was not finished with its surprises.

Orville and Marilyn were not the only deceased who had encountered a rude awakening. Other souls, pale and every bit as confused, emerged from the ground, craning their necks to take in the veil of stars that had been obscured to them. Ghostly children, not fearful for long, began to play and laugh—as if they hadn’t been taken by scarlet fever or the consumption. It was their parents, grandparents, and elder siblings who asked themselves the same questions as Orville did.

Housewives who had long been dead gathered around gravestones, whispering as they had once gossiped over their washing. A priest, one of the Franciscans who had sealed in the oldest mausoleum, wandered listlessly in a battered habit, clutching a Bible. Several pairs of lovers were locked in embraces less chaste than those which Orville and Marilyn had shared, but he could not blame them for wanting to feel one another again. He had been young once; he understood.

Voices that had been silent for centuries echoed into the night. They were taken by a cool breeze, carried up to the splatter of stars that seemed to twinkle slowly in their puzzlement.

Orville shook his head in bemusement. It was then that he spotted a light in the distance. It shone through the window of the house where the old gravedigger used to live.

Many years had passed since One-Eyed Frank and his family took care of matters pertaining to shovels. It must be a different family, then, residing in those walls. He wondered if they, too, were gravediggers; who else would elect to live in a place so remote and macabre?

“Let us go there, my darling,” he told Marilyn. “I believe that whoever lives in this house ought to know that their yard is the scene of an audience tonight.”

Wordlessly, she allowed him to pull her along in the direction of the house.

Children played. Young lovers kissed.

The dead walked again.