“The Dead Man’s Door”
Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by New Forum in Fiction, New Forum
The Dead Man’s Door
By Aaron Elias
Paddy felt a lonely rejection as he watched the undertaker leave through the gates. Too aware that he was unwanted by the town, and wouldn’t admit that he wanted his mother nearby. If only he had seen his partner for what he really was… but as a long-dead friend once told him: wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which fills first.
Three hours later found Paddy working under a battalion of clouds threatening rain that had rolled in and obscured the stars. He had been unable to see even the blurred sphere through the clouds that would be the moon due to a sea of fog that had crept in.
Paddy plunged his rusted shovel into the hard earth, pushed until it got underneath a good amount of dirt, pulled, and heaved.
One-a-dig two-a-fig three-a-gig four
Who is knocking at the dead man’s door?
Paddy ejected another spray of dirt from the grave and continued
whispering the old children’s rhyme, the one children believed their parents didn’t know about:
Five-a-jig six-a-wig seven-a-rig eight
Best be leaving before it grows late.
An open coffin housing a rather portly young man with the skin almost hanging off his bones lied next to the open grave.
“There,” Paddy huffed and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, leaving a smear of dirt. “My hopes that it proves to be roomy enough for you.”
He threw the shovel up and out of the damp grave onto the straw-yellow grass. An anchored rope ladder allowed him to exit the hole. A glass-encased kerosene lamp sat in the grass as close to the lip of the grave as Paddy dared sit it. He didn’t enjoy the thought of being in a wet hole in the ground in the dark. Especially with sleeping corpses neighboring him in every direction on his level.
The tiny flittering flames threw shadows over rotting trees, lifeless rocks, and cracked gravestones that had beetles and earwigs scurrying out of one fissure to the next.
“It was enjoyable talking to you, friend,” Paddy said as he slipped the coffin lid back on. “But do lay off the sweets. Watch out now, the landing is rough.”
He braced both hands against the coffin’s top edge, gave a great shove, and watched the coffin capsize sideways over the grave’s edge. Paddy took a moment to cross himself before picking his shovel up and setting to work filling the grave back up. A small dune of loose earth sat by the headstone. The funerary ritual of the poor. Paddy didn’t doubt he was headed for the same process. He wondered who would bury him.
The cemetery was full of all types of headstones, but it was the mausoleums and tombs that gave Paddy the most unrest. He looked at a squat tomb in the dark now and his unbridled mind explored the possibilities of what lay – perhaps moved– within. Now flattening the gravetop with his shovel, Paddy felt a familiar shiver scuttle up his spine.
“Why at night? Paddy thought. Why can’t they have me do this in the daylight? But it was more complaining than wondering. The city paid him only to bury the poor, the societal leeches who had nothing to offer and couldn’t pay for a funeral. Throwing corpses into a hole was “unsightly”, they had said. “Do it at night and spare the good denizens of Brells unneeded nightmares.” So all the nightmares nobody had as a result of his work came to Paddy.
Done with his work, Paddy hefted his shovel and lantern and made his way through the quiet of the graveyard. The hair on his neck was stiff and his skin textured with gooseflesh. Many of Brells’s citizens believed that nothing pleasing to the eyes could grow in the cemetery because of the poor soil. The trees, now dead, had been planted by the city to make it more welcoming. A cemetery. More welcoming. Paddy gave a nervous chuckle. He thought nothing could grow because so much death was trapped under its ground.
He soon came upon another rectangle of grass, empty save for the fresh gravestone and coffin waiting to be thrown underground and forgotten. His anxiety and haunting fantasies ebbed at the prospect of new company. He set his tools down by the casket and kicked the lid off.
“Good evening, cully, welcome to-”
Paddy stopped short when he gazed on the inhabitant’s decayed face.
The natural process of decay usually made it hard for Paddy to identify anyone he buried. Every so often he would recognize an acquaintance or someone who had laughed at him on the street, but it was uncommon.
But when he stared at the thinning face, Paddy felt a flare of familiar contempt flash within him. The face was not yet far gone, and he still recognized the handsome and deceitful features that once were. Of course, they had seen the course of a week without any beating heart or ticking brain to sustain them, but Paddy saw them as he had seen them five years ago.
“You,” he said and allowed an unbelieving hitch of laughter. “It’s you.” They were supposed to have started a cab company together.
“What was it? Hemlock? Maybe something else. A dagger in the back?” Paddy mused, and started to circle the coffin to get a better view of its owner, to see him from every angle. “Do you know what you did?” he said in a raised voice and then cowered back like an animal when his voice echoed back, looking to his left, right, fore, and back as if he was in danger of waking the cemetery’s tenants.
“…Of course you don’t,” Paddy whispered after a moment. His voice trembled, his breath came quicker, his face had grown hot in the swirling mist. “No. You were afar in Naples or Bath or England in some mansion you bought with my money. How did you lose it all?”
The lamp flame flickered hard for no reason, and Paddy thought he saw the corpse give a quick smirk in the shifting shadows. Without thinking, he raised his shovel by the handle and chopped it down. A dull thock and an arm flipped out of the casket.
Paddy withdrew his shovel, breathing hard. He stared at the serene face. His left ring finger spasmed. In his fury, Paddy took his shovel to the corpse again, and then again after that, and then many more times afterwards and only stopped in a fit of ragged, angry breathing and staggered – sobbing– against brittle tree bark for support. The body behind him laid battered and mutilated.
Paddy remained propped against the tree for a good amount of time. He shut his teeth against shaking sobs and wiped and sniffled and permitted unwanted thoughts about his very ill mother and then cried some more. It was the futility of his situation, he had decided, that upset him the most. Feeling somewhat relieved as one does after spilling an excessive amount of tears, Paddy leaned against his flesh-and-blood stained shovel and wiped his eyes and face, heaving a sigh.
He spent the next few hours digging a grave out in the packed soil with as much calm and dignity as a gravedigger could. During those hours not one sound disturbed the quite shuffling his shovel made with each thrust into the earth; where he would have stricken up a conversation with the casket’s inhabitant, Paddy instead kept his lips tight.
He spaced the grave out so that there was no question as to its capacity for the coffin, as he always did. He made sure the moist bottom was level and the sides were straight, as he always did. He got out and with a great heave picked up his dismembered offender’s coffin. He almost fell over trying to balance it before dropping it into the grave so that when it landed –a potpourri of diced appendages jumped and fell when it did – the villain could still stare up into the cloud-blanketed beyond that was his ceiling.
This he had never done before.
Paddy stood at the foot of the grave and stared at the desecrated corpse below him, holding up his lamp for better light. The clouds above rolled by in the gentle wind as he stared down into the pit, his eyes unmoving from the corpse until he felt an involuntary shiver induced by the cold and circling mist.
Maybe it slipped from his hand, beaded in cold sweat. Maybe some unconscious and depraved part of his mind, locked and chained away, whispered loud enough to convince him to drop it. Maybe he actually flung it with great force into the grave. All Paddy knew was that one moment the kerosene lamp hung in his hand above the open coffin. The next moment, a rogue beam of moonlight that had penetrated the clouds was glinting off the tumbling lamp’s metal frame as it plunged into the grave.
The glass lamp hit the body and exploded in a fearsome and large flare. The spilled burning kerosene would have fizzled out if not for the gases escaping from the corpse and with a frightful swiftness grew to engulf first the chopped corpse and then the coffin.
Paddy watched the growing pyre until his eyes buzzed and grew hot and he had to blink hard several times
Staring, it was all too easy for him to imagine other graves erupting in flame as their emaciated residents emerged. Hands reaching out from behind trees. Eyes watching him from some far and obscure black corner of the cemetery. Twisted corpses flashing out of the darkness. Paddy tried to force the images away and his mind only made more.
Paddy’s flesh crawled and his teeth clenched. It was then that he could have extinguished the thrashing flames with ease. The fire was sourced in a small pit and he had a pile of cold dirt at his disposal. He had his vengeance. But he was haggard, weary, dejected, and now terrified. The town had turned its back to him. His pay was infinitesimal, the doctors expensive. His careening mind kept expecting to see twisted corpses flashing out of the darkness.
Paddy felt a hatred for Brells and its citizens birth within him the same instant his resolve broke. Panic at unseen horrors buzzed in the base of his skull and he feared corpses flashing at him out of the dark. He spun with wild eyes and prickling flesh and flung himself at the gates on the other side of the graveyard, heart trotting in his chest. The flames were licking the dry grass on the lip of the grave now.
By the time he had torn out the noisy Gothic gates of the graveyard, the entire cemetery was ablaze, alive with fire. A floor of parched grass dotted with trees full of spiders, trees that splintered from dehydration and were covered in naked branches or leaves that could crunch underfoot. All more than enough to fuel a roaring inferno. The only thing needed was a hot spark.
The flames swelled huge, twisted, whipped back and forth and snatched at the clouds until all of the fog within two street corners had dissipated from the night, pushed back into the rest of the fog or banished to whatever land dead fog goes.
Paddy slowed and spared one glance back at the towering flames. They looked to be panicking, clawing and reaching for the heavens. Like the bodies still waiting above ground for a burial must be doing in their burning coffins. What couldn’t be brought back to life only to squeal from that unholy level of heat, that monstrous firestorm?
He hoped one body in particular was burning slower than the rest.
Paddy turned around with a new and feral satisfaction in his heart. He disappeared with his shovel into an alleyway that sat deserted save for a puddle of stale whiskey and a curious alley cat. Moments after he did, the first few townsfolk rushed in on the scene. Silk nightcaps toppled off heads to the street as necks craned upwards to measure the fire. Embers zigzagged up into the sky like hot rain that had lost its mind.
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