‘You’ve fallen down then?’
In the dreary grim of a fog laden cemetery, two strangers gazed into the gloom and thought on matters of elevation.
It was still.
Lowly bowed conifers lilt wearily with dew as a breathless-air coils through branches timorous and cold. It was a furtive kind of nightfall. Where lithe shadows slip silkily between the gravestones, the rustle of careful movement stalking soft-footed through the cemetery. What little light that remains is drawn into tension. Only a fool would raise their voice against the blanket of this lupine silence.
‘Fallen?,’ a perturbed voice shouted in reply, ‘No, sir, not fallen at all. Just asking for directions, sir. Thought it right to enquire with the locals.’
Lifting himself from the ruination of a decaying coffin and its quiet patron, Grahame deFallow peered up towards the light flickering at the edge of his grave and lamented the sheer out of reach-ed-ness that it was now resting upon the precipice of.
It was supposed to be easy, he grumbled while searching for somewhere unoccupied to stand. All he had to do was stride into the cemetery, exhume a very small box filled with quite a reasonable amount of solid gold, and from there on he was then free to abscond towards mildly wealthier pastures.
It was simple, three-points to a neatly ordered plan and three-points in a perfectly ordered balance.
Grahame was a man who tried to maintain balance. Entranced by the beauty of numbers as a small child, a younger Grahame would tirelessly work to ensure that all numbers levelly accrued and that every check was aligned with every sum. But as is so often found when an abacus bead falls behind a bookshelf, he quickly discovered that the bottom line was more intangible than ink would lead you believe, and that a misplaced decimal here or there was nothing to earnestly worry over. So as the years wore on, the beads on Grahame’s abacus did too, and it was through the loose application of morals picked up though accountancy that the weary clerk, known as Grahame deFallow, did find themself in the world of semi-if-not-defendably-legal grave audiation.
It was a lonely affair, exhuming past relics by lantern light. You’d spend hours of research, and for a reward you just find another shovelful of dirt. Months could go by and it would seem that all you were selling were a few lonely wedding rings after another. But when you did strike gold—of which Grahame was currently attempting to—well then, the birds would sing, and the debt collectors would darken no door that had been recently kicked in. And as for the previous owner? Well, who cares, they were dead!
But tonight, there was a problem. Two shadowy figures were lurking in the fog of the cemetery. Two additional figures to add into his three-point plan and two additional figures more than he cared to account for.
‘Why did you jump into a hole?’ the simple-hearted voice called down towards Grahame. It was a clear voice with the kind of tone that enforced its directions with a literal means: a metal stamp engraved with the word “Rejected”, as it were.
‘It’s not a hole, it’s a grave.’ Grahame replied as curtly as he could manage.
‘What’s the difference?’
Difference!? Grahame shouted internally. How can there be a difference? Holes, graves, depressions of the earth, among all these things Grahame felt defined.
‘The difference is that one can be where you place a body, and the other is where you’ve placed your brain. Now that were clear, could you lower something down? I’d quite like to stop standing on a skeleton.’
‘Says here that his name is Rudyard,’ the voice called, moving around the grave and kicking the lantern precariously off balance in their careless extrapolation, a fragile ember of fire teetered ever closer to the precipice of falling.
‘What kind of name in Rud–‘
There was a sudden metallic shudder and the man’s thought was halted almost off-handedly.
With a short cough the man turned in the heavy fog and began to wonder why the world was getting so dark all of a sudden.
There was a second clang.
And a third.
‘Sorry about that,’ A new voice commented with an intonation of believing their lie.
‘I slipped.’
Fire, dancing upon the vapours of liberated oil, dropped unceremoniously into the grave, thumping into the splintered casket with the lethargy of a wet towel against the edge of a hamper. Recoiling, Grahame pressed himself against the compacted earth and deftly baulked as the broken lantern then landed beside him in anger, its fragile case bursting into countless fragments of glass and all too enthusiastic fire.
‘Bit of a trouble down here,’ he shouted, kicking at the spreading flames and managing to push the oiliest fragments of coffin timber into a pile.
Panicked and now dancing upon the grave of a man once named Rudyard, Grahame scrabbled at the dirt walls of the hole and lamented ever leaving the world of living accountancy.
‘You’re not sorry. Sorry people don’t smile when they apologise.’ The simple-hearted voice barked with a slurred note of departing faculty.
There was then the sound of a dropped shovel and finally the sudden exhale of a person who just imagined the cost of their next dentistry bill. The second voice made no reply.
‘Could really do with some help now.’ Grahame shouted, his shoes further melting with each panicked stomp. Eyes now watering from the billowing smoke, Grahame noted that his trousers were beginning to take on that itchy kind of pre-flammability that clothing takes on when standing too close to a fireplace.
Fully aflame now, the skeletal jaw of the man once known as Rudyard appeared to cackle at Grahame from within the inferno, hellfire glowering upward from its empty eyes.
‘I do not want to be cremated with a dead man!’
With a tap upon his shoulder, Grahame was woken from his moment of terror by the edge of a shovel dangling from up above. Death gripped knuckles latched onto the handle and with a flurried strength, Grahame was yanked clear free of the flames, becoming deposited onto the dew-covered grass, still quite unable to unclench his hands.
‘Mum says that cremations are a waste of good fertiliser.’ The towering first voice opined before falling into the blissful silence of unconsciousness. He had two shovel sized lumps on his forehead and a nose that was now oriented for smelling around the edges of an octagon.
The graveyard, invariably returned to stillness.
In finally regaining his composure, Grahame hugged at the shovel and wondered how the large man had stayed conscious for long enough to pull him from the grave, the snores of a beast trapped in his throat quite enough vital signs to not warrant checking for a pulse.
A second man, as crumpled as an origami rock, was laying in such a way that would be hard to unfold and Grahame wondered what his plan was.
Competition, Grahame mused, if this was the quality of his competition, then was he really in the right profession? He had always considered himself to be a dubious kind of archaeologist, a post-mortem fossicker, able to read records as deftly he could dig a hole. But in seeing a coward and a buffoon asleep in their own spittle, and in seeing himself almost incarnated an accidental pyre, it all felt a bit daft.
Maybe I should find another job, he fretted while moving closer to the burning grave in effort to warm himself against the still coiling fog.
Maybe there was more to life than numbers. Maybe he would be happier on a farm, sowing sheep or whatever farmers did with their time.
The was no gold to be found here, or at least it had been there, once.
As three bruised men sorted through the embers of a once promised fortune, they each came to the realisation that the gave had been dug up before. Rudyard had seen a few visitors over the years, and many would wonder why the dirt upon his grave always would look so fresh. But tonight, in the stillness of a silent graveyard. Hands were shaken, apologies made, and separate ways were made into the moonlight.
For it was a lonely world to be spent in grave audiation. And with soot covered boots Grahame deFallow had finally resigned.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 