Unquiet Grave

a highlighted story by Iris Shaw

It was Patrick’s idea to visit the cemetery.

I wouldn’t have gone at all, except that it was mid-October, and everything was dull and grey and dripping with rain, and I was depressed as hell. Actually I was a photography major with a project due, and dating time (or any kind of free time) was a sick joke for Patrick, who had decided to be an architect. So much for romance.

We were lying on the couch (Patrick’s couch, blackish-brown and peeling) with my feet in his lap. He alternated between tickling my toes and typing on the laptop beside him, while I stared at the stippled ceiling. A record was playing, Debussy, maybe, something that seemed to mesh with the rain as it faded in and out.

“Here’s something,” Patrick said. “The museum. It has gargoyles on the roof.”

I groaned. “Have you seen those gargoyles?”

“Of course, every day.” Patrick was a local.

“Victorian,” I said, rolling the r, and shuddered. “Hideous.”

“Victorian Neo-Gothic,” he muttered, but he smiled, and waggled my big toe. “The bank?”

I yawned. “The project theme is ruins.”

“Technically speaking, love, you should be scouting your own locations.”

“But you look so good doing it for me.”

“Hmm.” He pushed his glasses up his skinny nose. “Do I?”

“Incredibly sexy.”

“All right.” He typed something out. “Mm. I didn’t think of this before, but there’s the old Catholic graveyard.”

“Why didn’t you think about it?”

“I’m Church of England.”

“Oh.” I blinked.

He laughed at me. “Kidding. That’s not why. But the Catholic church is up the hill now; I think this is a chapel.”

I sat up. He turned the laptop towards me, clicking through pictures of crumbling headstones, angels with ruined faces, birth and death dates worn away to unintelligible grooves.

“Maybe,” I said. The last picture was of an angel whose features had almost vanished, but all the same it had a weirdly knowing expression. I didn’t like it much. 

“Come on. When’s your project due?”

“Too soon.” Outside the rain came down harder, almost drowning out the music.

“So, let’s go. When’re you free? Tomorrow? We could make it a date.”

“In a graveyard? Who are you, Mary Shelley?”

“Oh, Percy!” He fluttered his eyelashes madly.

“Stop it,” I said, laughing. He turned his profile at me, simpering, making me laugh harder. “Okay, fine, we’ll do it.”

He kissed me. On the record player, Debussy turned into Ravel, and the rain still came down.

---

We were drunk, only a little, when we drove out to the graveyard the next day. It was past three, and the light had already begun to go. We scrambled out of the car into the rain, shivering and unfurling umbrellas. The street was empty save for us.

Patrick hummed something he claimed was Bach as he took the camera bag out of the trunk. I glanced down at my phone – the screen only wavering slightly – and then looked up.

“Patrick.”

“C’est… hmm… au bout…”

“Patrick, I think that’s a tango. Look, something’s weird. Where’s the graveyard?”

He pointed up the street. And there was a graveyard there, tombstones surrounding a chapel. But then he blinked too.

“Oh, that is weird. That’s not…”

“The address. But that was.”

I pointed to the other side of the street, where a tall black iron fence stood, the road sign for 23 Russell Drive in front of it. Inside the fence was a line of willow trees, half-bare of leaves, their tendrils drooping to the ground, and beyond them were graves. Dozens of tombstones.

“What’s that?” Patrick asked.

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve never seen it before. I thought there was – well, a field. Maybe. I’m not sure.” He shut the trunk. “Have a look?”

“Not sure I like it,” I admitted. The fence was rimmed with dripping iron spikes, and the trees inside grew so thickly, tangled together, that you couldn’t see much of what lay beyond.

“There’s a gate.” Patrick pointed, and I saw it, a Gothic arch under which the gates themselves hung dangling from rusted hinges.

“I don’t—”

“Come on.” He took my hand, and we hurried across the street, umbrellas bobbing, me clutching my camera bag.

The gates weren’t locked, and as we approached you could hear them creaking slightly, swinging back and forth on their hinges – though these were rusted, oddly enough, the gates themselves seemed untouched. We peered through the bars to look into the cemetery itself.

“Impossible,” Patrick said flatly.

The graves seemed numberless. Derelict monuments and headstones, domed mausoleums, stone walls set with hundreds of brass plaques; and everywhere there were trees, poplars and willows and larches and oaks, stooping, kneeling, pressing all around the graves, their leaves turning to yellow, falling one by one in the rain. There were stone angels on the monuments, hundreds of them, a lichen covered hand reaching from behind a tree, the feathers of a wing visible in the gap where a stone had crumbled away. There were other, stranger things than angels too; chimeras, satyrs, women with snakes’ tails.

All ruins. The grass was long and wet and dying, the stone worn. Trees stretched out bare rotting limbs above newer branches.

Patrick pushed the gates open. They swung inwards, with only mild protests.

“Well?” he said. “There’s enough ruins for your whole class.”

“What is it?” We both spoke in whispers, though who could have heard us?

“It’s a hell of a project,” Patrick said. “Hell of a grade, I’ll bet. Come on, Em.”

Inside, there were two angel statues on pedestals, one on each side of the gate. One held arms out in blessing, while the other trailed a spear, and both seemed to pin you between their benevolent gazes.

Or not quite benevolent. Looking closer you could see how the weather had worn away their faces, so that their smiles had become subtle leers under broken noses and sunken eyes filled with moss. They were twisted, distorted, wrong.

“We must not look at goblin men, 

We must not buy their fruits,” I mumbled.

“What?”

I looked again. The angels’ faces were vacant, pleasant, ordinary.

“Nothing,” I said. What an odd thing to remember.

We passed underneath another iron arch, where a sign hung from clinking chains. Burntlands Cemetery, it read. I shivered – less a shiver of fear, than one of anticipation.

“I knew it,” Patrick said when he looked at me. “I knew you’d like it.”

I furled my umbrella and leant it against a tree. There were gravestones all around us, epitaphs and names jumping out at me; an angel’s mossy eyes, a crumbling cross. The almost-perfect shot. The perfect place.

“What would you know?” I said to him, but I was laughing as I took out my camera.

Did the pictures survive? I can’t help but wonder. They were far and away the best I’ve ever taken, as if I’d thought my craft a game and not an occupation, the rules mine to follow or evade. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see them again, but they were brilliant, and they were mine.

I shot epitaphs, vanishing verses and stanzas through falling leaves. I shot the lichen-covered feet of horses, the sky itself from inside roofless mausoleums. I framed monsters’ heads with crumbling stone walls, solemn cherubs with the legs of satyrs, and lying on my back, I shot gravestones with branches dripping rain above them.

And I shot Patrick. Patrick dancing to a statue’s inaudible harping, arms windmilling, Patrick reading off the gravestones, wandering down an avenue of larches; dripping and hatless Patrick, reciting poetry to his umbrella, linking arms with a chain of bacchantes. He sat cross-legged on top of walls, serenaded serpent women, made faces at scythes, chatted companionably with skulls, solicitously held his umbrella over small children with baskets.

He took my hand and pulled me on, until I stopped taking pictures. We shrieked and sang, running through the avenues and memorial walls in some demented game of tag. We danced to his invented melodies, curtsied to the statues, lay down on gravestones wet, shivering, and too exhausted to speak. We were drunk as we had never been before, drunk on the rain and the cold, the statues and ourselves.

The fog came creeping in after a while, and at first we scarcely noticed. At length I got up from the stone where we’d been lying, and could no longer see the ground twelve feet in front of me.

“We should go.”

Patrick looked at his watch.

“Yeah, probably. Can’t think why it isn’t dark yet.” He hauled himself up with a groan. “Did I deliver or did I not?”

“You did.”

He smirked. “Told you so.”

I recovered my camera and we set off, me at a walk, Patrick loping in front of me. He was singing again, some godawful sixties song he’d learnt off the radio.

“Make me an angel

Darling, do

Give me some wings

And I’ll fly to you

Give me a halo

And I’ll rend the skies

I’ll burn through your soul

With heavenly eyes”

When the angel began to move, I jumped. I thought it was no more than a trick of the fog, but when I blinked something slipped past me, half-hidden, and there was an empty pedestal beside me.

“Patrick.”

He didn’t hear me.

“Do what you like, baby, turn me to stone

Just never let me walk alone…”

There was something in the fog near me, something tall, ponderous, slow. You could hear the grind of stone on stone as it walked, closer and closer – it wasn’t alone, either.

Patrick was farther ahead than I had expected by now, and I hurried to catch up. Something moved near me, creaking, skittering stone, but I couldn’t see it; the way in front of me was clear, but either side of the path was obscured by a shifting white wall.

“Patrick,” I called, “wait up.”

I heard him singing, but by some trick, he didn’t hear me. I began to jog, though I was sticky and sweating. But the longer I kept at it, to my horror, the more the distance between us increased.

My mind began to wander. I thought I saw all kinds of things. Wings, tails, horns, appearing and vanishing, riders in the distance, a dragon crawling across the path. I looked up once, and saw a giant ruined head above the fog. The statue walked silently beside me, and turned its head once to regard me. At the sight of its empty soulless eyes I ran, terrified.

“Patrick!”

Miraculously, he grew closer. I saw him turn, frowning – and then I saw the statue behind him, snake-crowned, winged, all blank face and twisted smile, arms raised as if to embrace him. 

I stopped. I don’t know why, but all I could think of was, the perfect shot.

Elated, petrified, half-mad, I held up my camera. I took the picture.

Then the fog swallowed him up.

“Patrick!” I screamed.

There was no reply. I ran, camera bouncing against my chest. Every way I turned there was only white. “Patrick?”

He stepped out of the fog, to my right. I jumped and nearly fell.

“Em?” He steadied me. “What is it?”

“Patrick.”

He smiled at me, slightly crookedly, wryly. “Yes. What?”

“There was a–a statue. I— you disappeared.” I stopped, confused.

“Just the fog. The wind’s up a bit, have you noticed? That’ll soon take care of it. Em, you’re soaked.”

“So are you.”

He put his umbrella up, since I’d long since lost mine. And he was right; the fog was already beginning to thin. I put my camera back in its bag.

“The song you were singing,” I began, then stopped.

“What song?” He took my hand. “Let’s go home.”

I glanced at him. There was the shadow of a cunning, unnatural look on his face, but it faded when he smiled at me. I squeezed his hand back – there was no sound except the returning rain, no movement out of the corner of my eye, and the statues were still. I found myself no longer afraid as we set out down the path.

We had to slow after a while, because Patrick’s legs were turning to stone. He found walking easy enough at first, but as the stone crept further up his legs he began to lumber. I had to let go of his hand after a while as it became first too cold, and then too heavy, to hold.

“Doesn’t it feel odd?” I asked.

“Not terribly.” Antlers, many-tiered and graceful, sprouted from his head. “It’s not half so cold as you’d expect.” 

To pass the time, he hummed, a sweet melody he couldn’t tell me the words to. The humming rasped and buzzed as the stone crept up his throat. 

“I’ll play it for you when we get back,” he promised. He blinked, then his eyes flattened, disappearing into hollow grey sockets.

“My project,” I reminded him.

“Oh, you can do it at my place. Then we can go out for dinner, if this rain ever lets up.” He smiled then, that terribly twisted smile.

When he had turned completely to stone, I left him there, stooping over a gravestone, antler-crowned, still holding the umbrella. The cemetery gate was nowhere in sight, so I went back the way we’d just come, aimlessly, wandering between the silent statues. As I walked I felt my toes begin to grate against each other. The stone was almost warm, a pleasant sensation.

I passed the grave we had lain on, the statues I had photographed, the graves we had examined. Curiously, the names seemed familiar, as if I had known those buried there. I remembered their faces, as wings began to grow from my back; heavy, lithe, feathered things.

At last, when the fog was gone, I came to what I thought must be the end of the cemetery. To my dismay, acres on acres of tombstones stretched out into the distance, topped with dragons and four-armed men, while angels with broken swords stood guard over innumerable mausoleums. The statues were motionless, yet expectant, waiting. 

“Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?” I murmured, and turned back. The afternoon light was changing now, slowly, infinitesimally, bending its way back towards darkness.

“Soon,” I said to the chimera with eyes on its claws.

“Soon enough,” I said to the pale rusalka.

For a while I paced, wet stone wings dragging on the grass, weighing me down. I examined my fingers, grown long and pale, and viewed myself in a puddle: ashen and graceful, taller than Patrick, taller than any man. I felt a pang of regret that I couldn’t remember where I’d dropped my camera bag.

“I am a monument,” I said out loud, and again, savouring, “I am a monument.”

I marveled how my voice, though grating, now possessed an unimaginable power and sweetness. I felt immortal, beneficent, a very archangel.

When the weight of my wings almost bowed me down, I went back, shuffling, to the place I had left Patrick. I stood in the clearing surrounded by dripping willow trees, wondering at how lifelike he looked. I touched his hand, almost surprised at the scrape of stone against stone.

For the first time I looked at the gravestones around us. The names on all but two had worn away, and those two were freshly carved. If you looked, you could still see stone chips in the cuts.

Patrick Bearns

Emma Lockwood

Were the graves always there? Were they waiting for us, and who made them? Even now I have no answers.

I felt the stone creeping up my neck, over my mouth, freezing my heart, my lips, my eyes. I looked at Patrick one last time, then up at the sky. Raindrops slid smoothly down my face, pooling at my shoulders, in the corners of my wings.

In the end, I stepped up on my grave and turned to stone. What else was there to do?

---

It’s October again now. Rain drips off my arms. Perhaps it’s a year to the week—a year to the day—that we came. I can’t tell. The leaves turn, and fall, and grow, and turn again. The other statues walk sometimes, striding across the grass in the moonlight, but we are still and silent here.

I haven’t seen Patrick—not as I am now. It’ll take years to learn to walk, or to move, in our state. But I’ve no doubt he’s behind me, and perhaps some day I’ll turn, and see him again. Or perhaps someone will touch me, and I’ll wake up fully; it does happen. There are consequences, of course, and the cemetery’s acquired a few new residents since we arrived, standing on their own graves.

Mostly, though, we sleep. Sometimes, we dream, and waking seems like more than half a dream.

I remember, sometimes, the last few pictures I took of Patrick before everything changed. I have nothing else to do, of course, so I’ve thought of them often, recalling them with the perfect clarity that seems to be part of my condition.

I remember that he holds hands with an angel, living flesh in stone, his head turned away from the statue as if in despair. In the next, he looks at the angel, in the next, at me, and in the next, he’s pulled away, his hand still stretched out, barely touching the stone. But he doesn’t look at me, not anymore, he’s looking at the sky. His hair is plastered to his forehead, and rain drips into his eyes—more fool him; though it won’t stop raining, he holds his umbrella up like a sword to stab the clouds. He looks like he could vanquish the world, with that umbrella.

I wonder if he still looks like that?

For more of Iris Shaw’s work, see her page below!