corpse continues to grow even after the bones are dry and brittle and old. Now and then, when the Eel River rose in flood, it washed open hillside graves, and the skeletons that tumbled out into the muddy current to go clacking away to sea had hair that wisped around the bones of their shoulders and in which was tangled the trinkets they were buried with.
There was a curse right then and the sound of a spade ringing against iron coffin handles and then scuffing off across pine boards. The man standing waist deep in the grave before him wore a black topcoat with cuffed sleeves. His hair fell dark and oily around his shoulders. Judging from the grey pallor of his bearded face, he might have been dead himself for a week and then dug up and animated.
The boy, who leaned on a shovel above and half hid his eyes and who was stricken with terror now that the coffin had at last been unearthed, was even more frightened of the man in the grave, whom he despised. Unlike the moon shadows round about them and the sighing of things on the wind, he was a flesh-and-blood horror. Though he was weak, as if he were starving and tired and ill, his eyes were dark and deadly. But he had offered Peebles something – hadn’t he –that would make it worth the terror and more.
The man cursed again and then hissed something through his teeth.
‘What?’
‘I said, give me the bar. Are you deaf?’
Peebles said nothing but picked up an iron crowbar that lay in the damp grass and handed it to the man, who looked back fiercely, as if he’d just as soon kill the boy right there and have done with him. The man bent back to his work, levering the crowbar under the coffin lid. There was the squeak of rusty nails pried loose and the scratch and scrape of the iron bar when the rotted wood of the lid snapped and broke away. The man cursed again and slammed the curved end of the crowbar into the lid smashing and smashing it until the night rang with the blows and the man gasped for breath and there was nothing left of the coffin lid but splintered fragments still fixed by long casing nails to the edge grain of the coffin’s side.
Peebles looked away as a cloud shaded the moon. The trees above him faded into blackness and the shadows of gravestones slowly disappeared. A drop of rain plinked down onto his hand, which grasped the shovel so hard that it shook. Another drop fell, and then another. In an hour the gravel road out of the cemetery would be a muddy rill that would bog the wheels of their cart in mire, and he’d find himself trudging the two miles home in a downpour. He pushed his glasses up onto his nose, shaded his forehead in an effort to keep the glasses dry, and looked back at the black-coated man, who stood beside the grave now, scowling and grinning in turn, as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be insanely happy or insanely angry.
Peebles peered into the grave, imagining the gumless teeth, the empty sockets, the wisps of greyed hair, the dusty and worm-eaten clothing slumped across the xylophone curve of rib cage. It was a horrifying thought, to be sure, but it was fascinating too. Something in him loved the idea of death and decay. He’d found a book once on a high shelf in the village bookshop, and in it were sketches of instruments of torture and of dead men hanging from gibbets. He’d torn the pictures out and kept them, fearful they’d be found and hating the people who might find them because it was their fault – wasn’t it? – that he had to live in fear of being discovered. Those were just pictures, though, and what lay in the grave, dead these long years, wouldn’t be a picture.
He bent closer, relishing the anticipated shock of horror. What he saw was a disappointment. The skeleton lay buried beneath scattered debris. And it hadn’t any webby, overgrown hair. The flesh had returned to dust, and even the bone seemed to be crumbling, so that the skeleton lay in mouldering pieces, like an instructive