The August Second Selected Writer is

K. R. Helms

You can email K. R. at:

JLL1369@roadrunner.com

LIFE'S A GRAVE; DIG IT

by K. R. Helms

Eddie Saunders walked through the cemetery that was cloaked in darkness, a large black duffel bag over one shoulder.

He wasn’t your typical grave robber.

He had made a career of digging up the dead. He had prospered greatly from his macabre profession. Digging up the stiffs was the easy part. The hard part was knowing where to look, and which ones to hit. The graves of the wealthiest were too protected and therefore too risky to exhume. But he knew where there were some that less-seasoned grave robbers would have overlooked.

Yeah, there was competition, not much, but some. Usually they were dilatants equipped with shovels, flashlights and no preference to which grave they robbed. They simply dug up whoever lay in a secluded area and more often than naught found jack squat.

Eddie was too cautious to believe in the dream of El Dorado in one well-crafted casket. Instead, he spent a lot of time in various libraries studying old newspapers, old obituaries then cross referencing his findings with his master list of the deceased.

You can learn a lot at the library.

The obituaries had the names of the dead with a brief history and most importantly, where the smelly bastard was planted. With this information, he’d then go to the records department find a map of the area that was marked with every cemetery in that particular county or township, then find and make a copy of the individual cemetery to find the exact location of one desired plot. Now this was the routine in which he initially used, but with the advent of the internet…well the footwork was a lot easier and a lot more subtle.

He would visit the cemetery with a handful of unusually-colored flowers and a mournful expression, under the guise of a relative paying respect. He always checked the dates of birth and death in their obituaries to avoid running into actual family members, then he would mark the headstone or mausoleum with the flowers to easily find the grave that night. He considered himself a very meticulous person.

He preferred to plunder mausoleums. They were a lot easier than digging in the dirt, but there were times when he found it necessary to get his hands a little dirty.

He thought of himself as more of a prospector or maybe an archeologist with questionable ethics than a simple grave robber.

Grave robber sounded too ghoulish. He wasn’t a ghoul.

You didn’t drive a Benz if you were a ghoul. Ghouls drove a Yugo or a primer-gray Cutlass with a naked lady air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror. Ghouls didn’t have a plan of attack. He did.

Business was good. It was always good.

He was thirty-three years old, had been in this line of work for twelve of those years and was proud of the fact that he’d never spent a single night in the slammer for anything.

He hoped he could retire in a few years but he didn’t honestly know if he would or not. It was just too damn exhilarating. He didn’t drink or do drugs, he didn’t have to. His work supplied him with more than enough adrenaline to get him high.

It was safer than being a mugger, after all, because you didn’t have to worry about Johnny Rigor Mortis screaming for help or pulling a gun on your ass. It was also a lot more private, so that was less to worry about. Dead folks never I.D.’d you to the cops.

Not to mention the fact that he was the outdoorsy type.

The rich might think themselves immortal but death is an equal opportunity destroyer, thank God for that. The thing he liked best about the rich was their greed and their eccentric belief that they could take it all with them when they died.

Stupid bastards. He loved stupid bastards.

And now he found himself in another graveyard on yet another night. He inhaled deeply with a sly smile. A cemetery smelled like old money to him and tonight was sure to be a profitable haul. There were three mausoleums in this bone yard with his name on it... well, not his name, but it wasn’t like they really needed a name anymore. Each tomb was successively larger and more ornate than the previous.

His duffel bag contained the tools of his trade. Bolt cutters, side cut pliers (for those hard to remove rings, he could just lop off the finger), utility knife to cut through layers of clothing quickly and efficiently, a can of oil, a hand sledge. Chisel, trash bags, an industrial dust mask that was smeared with a couple of dollops of Vicks Vapo-rub to better deal with the stench, leather gloves for the hard work (he already wore two pair of surgical latex gloves), a small battery powered lantern and a thick dark blanket to drape over the doorway to the private mausoleums.

It paid to be cautious.

Eddie walked past a strange statue of a man holding a guitar, looking down upon a small headstone; despair was etched onto the statue’s face. A cemetery was supposed to be a place of peace and comfort to the mourners. A statue with such a semblance of pain, well, that didn’t quite add up to him.

He shuddered, surprising himself. It wasn’t just the chill in the air or the wind that crept down his collar like snakes made of smoke coiling around him, constricting his breathing. No, it wasn’t the chill in the air but it was something hiding within its shadows; a secret that only the stones could know.

Suddenly he noticed an angel perched atop a monstrous obelisk. He almost had to strain his neck to look up at her. Apparently the angel was a guardian of the grave. He thought he could see her feathers flutter slightly in her wings. Her head seemed to turn as he marched past her, her eyes never leaving him.

Her eyes…looking into her eyes.

Eddie realized he was seeing things. Statues don’t move. He quickly averted his gaze like a child being reprimanded by a parent. He looked down upon his shoes and traced his path before him. This night seemed wrong, as if he were Odysseus trespassing into the nether world. Never before had he been gripped by a sense of panic that threatened to send him sprinting in blind terror. But that panic was there, scratching at the door of his heart. It hadn’t penetrated him as yet, but if he didn’t hurry it soon would.

He quickened his pace a bit, and then cursed himself under his breath. He was letting his imagination get the best of him and began to feel angry at himself; he had done this enough times to know better than to let superstition bother him. It was only shadows in the moonlight, playing tricks on his mind, he reasoned. It was enough to keep his legs moving for the time being.

He had seen a pumpkin patch growing around one of the headstones. That was a first. It just proved that this was one hayseed ‘burgh. They probably gathered in droves every Halloween and waited for the Great Pumpkin to arise from the patch to grant them wisdom for the next year’s harvest.

Jokes were a human reflex against anxiety, to quell the mind of its fear; psycho babble from a distant college course years ago. He decided that maybe he should switch to decaf and repeatedly tried to reassure himself but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. The small hairs on his neck and forearms stood on end; a subconscious primal defense. He thought about returning to his car and moving on to the next scheduled appointment.

He again cursed himself for acting like an adolescent playing ‘ghosts in the graveyard.’ He was a pro and he had better damn well act like it. This haul would really cushion his wallet.

He had to keep things in perspective. Money, baby, money. Eddie told himself.

But this night, shadows darted at him from the corners of his eyes making him snap his head around; shadows that were so substantial, he could almost hear them move through the grass, each step shushing the other.  He might hear you.

Suddenly he heard a childlike tittering; light as a baby’s breath.

He felt icy fingers glance over the short hairs on the back of his neck, sparking electric-deep within his spine, startling him. He bit his tongue and he cursed under his breath. The sudden pain from his tongue cleared his mind for a moment. Why was he imagining things tonight? Certainly this night was no different from any other. Or was it?

No! It was not different. He had not heard a child laughing, it had to have been an animal or bird or something; something completely natural.

Continuing on, his steps were slow as he traversed his way through the cemetery. Earlier that day when he had placed the flowers in the brass urn, the cemetery had smelled clean and fragrant, the way it unfailingly does in rural areas. But now as the fog drifted among the stones, the air smelled thick with decomposition. He imagined worms burrowing into empty sockets, their tails flickering as they disappeared into rotted nostrils and parted lips. In his mind he saw grubs pulsating beneath the tissue-thin flesh, gyrating in a morbid dance like a birthing ritual. He scratched at his neck, itching at the thought. He could almost feel the vile little things upon his skin.

Step…breathe. Step…breathe.

With each step he pushed himself by force of will closer to his reward. He glanced around him as he walked and saw the tombstones protruding from the ground like jagged and broken teeth; a smile that held no humor. It was the smile of a dead man, looking like lips rotted away to reveal those elongated teeth. He had seen that smile many times and he had always smiled back. He didn’t feel that familiarity tonight. These stones looked as if they had been pushed up from beneath by angry corpses straining to free themselves from their earthen beds wanting to greet the stranger that walked among them. He cringed at the thought.

Somewhere in the woods surrounding the cemetery, a night bird shrieked and his blood ran cold in his veins. Adrenaline coursed through him and he began to run toward the mausoleum. He could see its black silhouette not far ahead. He tripped, looked down and saw a skeletal hand reaching for him from the ground. He jumped back and watched it warily and swallowed hard.

You stupid punk, it’s just a stick. He chided himself and laughed nervously. Just a stick. He told himself again but still he gave it a wide birth as he jogged toward the concrete structure.

When he reached the mausoleum, he could see an engraving upon it in the dim moonlight. Above the wrought iron gate of the mausoleum was a Bible verse that read: Be sure your sins will find you out. It didn’t mean much to him, he was just relieved that it hadn’t said: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Dante was a lot scarier than the Bible. That was probably the source of all his fear tonight. It had to be. Some Freudian connection; of course that’s what it had to be. Something about this place had triggered a subconscious account of rich visuals that Dante’s words had painted in The Divine Comedy. He laughed at himself again, it was more genuine this time but he still kicked open the iron gate with false bravado.

It was time to go to work.

He entered the concrete structure and grabbed the blanket from the duffel and draped it over the barred door. He peeked through it and quickly scanned the cemetery to make sure no one had followed him.

There was no one there, but there seemed to be a breeze picking up. He shivered violently. It seemed colder for some reason.

“Got to get it together, Eddie, ol’ boy.”

He turned the lantern on and surveyed the Spartan, rectangular room. There were four sealed sepulchers. Beneath these, he knew, were the caskets of those he so much wanted to introduce himself to.

This was going to be cake, a little noisy, but cake.

He looked for the fine seam separating the lid to the box of the vault, found it as his eyes adjusted to the dim lantern’s aura and wedged his crowbar into the slight gap. He heard the wind moan a more frantic chorus outside and realized that he was sweating. With a healthy wrench to the crowbar, he heard the lid to the sarcophagus lift a little with a loud grating sound. He slid the bar further into the gap with a groan.

He wrenched on the bar again and the sound of stone on rough stone was even louder, but he could have sworn that he had heard something else.

A scream.

He froze, silent and still as any cenotaph, listening as the scream faded into the zephyr outside that reminded him of a dirge being played on a pipe organ. His eyes dilated to capture every glint of light in the dim of the mausoleum. A sense of dread washed over him; baptizing him in spider legs that skittered up his spine and crawled through his scalp. It was unnatural. He felt weaker, exposed as if every stitched closed eye lying in the dirt had suddenly snapped open and were fixed upon him.  Eddie crept toward the gate and peeked through the blanket, scanning the night. He held his breath, listening for a sound, any sound to cut through the fog and the darkness.  He heard only the wind buffeting the grass and whistling through the stones. I’m just being paranoid he told himself.

Finally deciding that he had only heard a screech owl, Eddie returned to work. He wrenched on the bar again. This time it was the stones that screamed as they separated. The sounds of the parting stones seemed to echo through the empty tomb and he had to clamp his jaws shut to keep himself from screaming in response. His whole body began to shake convulsively and his teeth chattered even faster than his racing heart. He knew that he had to work fast or he was going to lose his nerve completely. He couldn’t stand much more, but his greed managed to keep him going.

He slid the bar in further for one last heave. He paused for a moment, expecting another stone-scream and then wrenched the crowbar as hard as his body could. This time the stones wailed even louder and more shrill than before. He dropped to one knee, his hands cupping his ears. His eyes were so tightly shut that the muscles in his face began to cramp. He moaned with agony and began rubbing his hands vigorously over his face.

The pain had rescued him from his mind. He was panting now and stayed crouched for a few minutes. The worst is over, Eddie. The worst is over.

He took slow deliberate deep breaths to allow his hammering heart to ease up before he thought it would fracture his ribs. Slowly the near hysteria passed and he placed a wavering palm over his heart and tried to smile but it felt like a death mask on his face.

He stood on trembling legs, picked up the lantern, and shined it in vault that had been opened with his crowbar. The casket inside was polished mahogany, but was covered by a thick layer of dust and spider webs. He had always wondered what the hell spiders hunted there, in the sealed darkness. He passed a hand almost reverently over the expensive crate and found initials engraved in the top on a golden placard.

This guy had to be loaded. He pulled the gold placard off the casket with a pair of needle-nose pliers, and with hands still shaking, he slid it into his bag. He didn’t waste time with the mask or Vicks to stifle the stench; the trek through the cemetery had built up enough of a tolerance already.

He ran his fingers along the bottom of the lid and expertly found the catch. It released smoothly with a barely audible click. He opened the casket with one hand and shone the lantern upon the contents with the other.

The corpse was completely naked. There was only the gray, mottled flesh hanging over bones like a cheap suit. The body was sexless in this condition.

It was also valueless, without any jewelry or any other expensive send-offs; there weren’t even any teeth from which to pilfer any gold fillings. His brow furrowed as much in confusion as anger. What was this? Why would a body in such an ornate casket be buried without any trappings of the wealthy? It was a nasty surprise.

He was about to roll the body on its side when he felt a presence. Eddie spun around on his heel and his vision closed in from its perimeter as he felt a cold wave wash over him. A sudden, almost hysterical fear stabbed deeply into his heart and threatened to make him pass out. He saw the black borders closing in on his periphery but he clawed at consciousness and held the darkness at bay.

It was the angel! It was the stone angel he had seen earlier! It was real, it was alive, and it was here.

The angel from the obelisk stood facing him, bathed in the fluorescent light of his lantern. Her face was mere inches from his. It was her, the stone angel that had stood silently above a grave outside; he was sure of it. But somehow she looked different. Her face was scarred on one side, one eye glazed with white, blind. She wasn’t pretty or serene as she had seemed earlier when she had been outside guarding the grave.

She looked larger than before and she towered over him, her features twisted in anger. He could smell death upon her. She stared at him with unwavering eyes, one of them white and blind, and he wanted to look away, but could not.

“These are my stones!” said the angel with a deep, resonant voice that belied any femininity.

Eddie fell to his knees, whimpering in submission. He wanted to beg for his life but his breath was caught in his throat and he could not form the words. His mouth felt as if it was full of spider webs and husks of insects wrapped in shrouds of dust. He tried to say something to defend himself but only a raspy croaking sound came out.

The angel spoke again in that oddly deep voice, “My stones, my garden.”

Eddie noticed that her appearance seemed to morph and swell: angel…blurry…then angel again.

Suddenly Eddie felt his paralysis break; he jumped to his feet and flailed wildly towards the angel. He ran under her outstretched arms, out of the mausoleum and into the chilly night air. With each step his feet felt like they were sinking in quicksand, as if the graves beneath were pulling at his ankles, clawing for him, wanting him. He pumped his legs harder, his energy rapidly expiring.

The wind had picked up and gusted at him fiercely as if it was trying to restrain him. He ran, completely forgetting his tools and his golden desires. As he traversed the maze of stones he wove a helter-skelter course. In his fear he couldn’t remember which way led him to his car.

From behind, he could hear heavy footfalls getting closing in on him. He glanced quickly over his shoulder and in the darkness could only see the white robes of the angel floating, buffeted by the wind, long white hair whipping to and fro. Still peering over his shoulder, Eddie could see the angel holding what looked like the blue flowers he had used earlier to mark the grave. In the angel’s other hand was a ….sword? He couldn’t be sure.

He turned his head forward once again to see where he was running. “Oh Jesus…” he cried. His heart hammered within his chest. He felt the strength go out of his legs as he ran past where the angel had originally stood upon her perch atop the towering obelisk.

He slowed down to make sure of what he was seeing. What….how…the angel was back on her perch! The angel was back where he had first seen her, looming over the grave. She was stone once again, unmoving.

He stopped running, his strength spent, his spirit virtually extinguished and looked up at the angel, defeated. She seemed to stare down upon him accusingly. Don’t look into her eyes his mind madly reminded him.

How could she be there? She had been right behind him. Hadn’t she? He dropped to his knees and choked on his sobs. “I’m …sor …Jes …us …sorry.”

From behind him he heard a deep voice say, “My stones.” and his chin sagged to his chest. He felt a bright pain flash in the back of his skull then he saw nothing but darkness.

*****

The caretaker held the shovel before him then wiped the spade end on the grass. He didn’t want the blood rusting the steel. The man was winded and leaned on his shovel for a moment. His white bath robe had come untied during the chase when it had flowed behind him in the wind.

“Forgot your flowers, son.” He said in his deep voice then tossed them down on the Eddie’s crumpled form. The caretaker looked up at the statue of the angel and nodded. A ghost of a smile, a secret smile, played at the corners of the angel’s lips.

The caretaker trudged back to the mausoleum and retrieved the thief’s bag of tools, lantern, and ripped the blanket from the wrought iron gate. He walked back to where the man laid, blood pouring from his head wound. He checked his pulse and found that it was still as a tomb. He had been pretty sure he had heard the skull crunch beneath the shovel’s business end but he figured that it was better to be safe than sorry.

He spread the blanket out beside the dead man and rolled him onto it, then threw the bag, flowers and the shovel onto him and dragged him through the cemetery to the secluded back where three wooden crosses had been pounded into the earth. Each cross had a year marked on it. 1989, 1997 and the last said 2011. This one had a fresh six foot rectangular hole dug out before it.

The caretaker removed the flowers and shovel from the blanket then rolled the corpse into the open grave. The tool bag landed on top of him with a sickening thump and clatter and the blanket fell heavily, engorged with blood.

He picked up the shovel and looked at it thoughtfully. He usually dug the graves with the backhoe but these three graves had been special. The angel had told him so.

He began to fill in the hole with the pile of fresh dirt beside it. He could see the blood soak into the dirt as he shoveled it upon him but eventually the dirt prevailed. The dirt always prevailed. Death and taxes, people said. He shook his head as he continued to shovel. That was wrong. People cheated on their taxes, but they never cheated death.

With the grave covered, he tamped it down with the flat of the blade and said “Don’t worry, son, no one will disturb you here.” His voice was kind but his tone changed as he added “If they do…I’ve got a spot ready for them, too.”

The caretaker’s long white hair blew around his shoulders and he cinched up the belt of his white bathrobe, chilled by the night. In the moonlight, his scarred face almost glowed ethereally. He stared ahead, lost in thought, although his one blind eye could not see. He grimaced as he thought about how some men chose to live their lives, and then shrugged his shoulders.

Life can be a grave endeavor, he thought with a bone-tired smile. Yeah, life always ends with a grave. He could dig that.

K.R. Helms is a former Marine and freelance writer. He work has been featured in Dark Gothic Resurrected, Down in the Dirt, and "A Means to an End" from Postmortem Press. He is featured in Death Head Grin and Dark Highlands Anthology Vol. 2 and has work upcoming in Sex and Murder Magazine and two anthologies from Static Movement later this year. He resides in rural Ohio with his wife and daughter.