“Jesus!” exclaimed the electrician, as he levered the back off the hulking, great chest freezer. “What did you have to dig ’em back up for?”
Weathered brown, whip-lean, sixty-plus, half-smoked cigarette behind one ear, the gravedigger grinned, displaying an uneven row of yellow splinters that had once been teeth; he leaned forward, bare wrinkled elbows resting on the freezer lid.
“The new by-pass. It’s going to take half the graveyard yonder, so before they lay the new road, we have to lift the blighters and plant ’em in the new municipal ground up on Pontefract Road.”
Pulling a face, the electrician wiped the palms of his hands on his overalls. “There must have been some sights. Well, they’ve been dead years.”
“Aye. First one were interred in 1836. So… most of the coffins were well rotted. Soon as you tried to lift ’em,” – he made a wet crackling sound – “they just folded – just folded like wet cardboard boxes. And everything – everything spilled out into a heap. Just imagine that.” The gravedigger waited for the young man’s reaction.”
“Jesus.” He wiped his mouth as if something small and extremely unpleasant had just buzzed into it. “You must have a strong stomach.”
The gravedigger recognized the inflection in the young man’s voice. Disquiet, distaste, unease. He eyed the electrician up and down. The floppy white hat, slack mouth and wide-eyed gormless look signaled, here’s a lad that believes everything; every tall story that comes his way he’ll swallow; the kind of lad that cropped up on every factory floor, in every shop and office, who, when asked, would conscientiously hurry to the foreman or stores’ manager to ask for the long-wait, or jar of elbow grease, or a pair of sky-hooks. The gravedigger had been steeling himself for a dull afternoon of ten Woodbines, five cups of tea and a solo darts tournament in the cemetery store-cum-restroom. However, a faulty freezer, and Fate at her most obliging, had brought entertainment in the shape of the young electrician in his floppy white hat; someone who was, the gravedigger realized, as green as he was cabbage-looking. “I’m just brewing up. You’ll want a wet when you’ve done.”
“Oh, ta. Milk and two sugars. Trouble is with this unit, it’s been too near the window. Direct sunlight makes them overheat. Shouldn’t take long though.” He looked around the untidy, brick-floored room. Spades, shovels, picks, rusting iron bars leaned into dusty corners. Fading graveyard plans curled away from the corrugated iron walls. At the far end, stood a table cluttered with chipped mugs, cigarette boxes, empty milk cartons, and the greasy remains of a Cornish pasty. Overhead, an asbestos ceiling punctuated by dozens of tiny brown corpses – spiders that had died and been mummified by the dry air.
“Are the others out, you know, digging?” the electrician asked conversationally.
“Oh, aye.” The old man accurately tossed tea bags into two mugs. “They’re working up the top-side. Look.” He pointed a yellow-brown, nicotine-stained finger that boasted a startlingly large black fingernail. Through a grimy, cobwebbed window, two men could be seen digging in the graveyard. They hurled spades full of soil over their shoulders with cheerful abandon. “That’s where they’re going to plant James Hudson, the old Mayor. Top-side, you see, is where all your nobs are – doctors, solicitors, aldermen, bank managers. Bottom-side is for your working folk and paupers.”
“And that’s where the new road’s going through.” The young man returned to work, prising at cables with a screwdriver, while whistling in such a way the awful dirge would make a saint curse.
“Aye… that’s where they have to be dug up.” The gravedigger licked his lips. ‘Disinterred. Exhumed. Aye.” Taking the kettle from the solitary electric ring, he limped to the freezer top, which he used as an impromptu table. There, he filled the mugs with boiling water. Then he paused. Dreamily, he stared into the rising steam. “Aye, a bad business this disinterring. You see some things so bad it makes you fair poorly. You know, in some of the older graves? Well, we opened coffins and found…”
“Found what?”
“We opened the coffins and found that the bodies had…” Once more his voice trailed away.
The electrician’s eyes opened wide.
“Well,” said the gravedigger, “they’d moved.”
“Moved? The bodies had moved?”
“You see, sometimes years ago, people got buried alive. Not deliberately of course. ‘Spect some poor wretches were in comas so deep they were certified dead. They buried them. Course, then they woke up.” He glanced at the electrician to see if the man appreciated his macabre statement’s full significance. “Buried alive. Just imagine. No light. No air. They’d be suffocating, trying to fight their way out. But six feet down? Who would ever hear ’em? There, in the grave, they screamed, they fought and clawed at the lid; breathed up all the oxygen and then… well, you can picture what happened to them, can’t you, lad?”
“What did they look like?” Clearly the electrician’s imagination wasn’t up to conjuring the grisly scene.
“Oh… terrible, just terrible. You see, in this part of Yorkshire, there are natural salts in the soil. They preserve the bodies buried here. Only turns ’em yellow. Bright yellow like a sunflower. Apart from the colour, they looked the same as the day they died. Like this.” Eyes wide open, his face the distillation of pure terror, the gravedigger hooked his brown fingers into talons and contorted his body as if twisted by unendurable agony. “Those buried alive, they just froze like that. Like statues. But, dear God in heaven, the expression on their poor faces.”
“Jesus… that’s awful.”
“Oh, I’ve seen worse, lad.”
“What-what was the worse you’ve seen?’ The man gulped his tea.
“Ah… that’d be two days ago. When we disinterred Rose Burswick. The moment we opened the coffin lid we saw… ah, no… no.” He shook his head gravely, slurped the tea, then scratched his leathery ear. “No, it’s so bad I can’t bring myself to… no.”
But he did go onto describe others in lurid, eye-watering detail. “Old Walter Weltson. My uncle were gravedigger when they planted him – summer of 1946. Weltson was the fattest man in Hemsworth – thirty stone or more. It took so long to build a coffin that the meat-flies got him. Ah… last week, when we opened his coffin up, it were like opening a box of long-grain rice. Couldn’t see him. Just this mound of maggots, all hard and white, like dried rice. Then it rained. My God, I’ll never eat rice-pudding again. Look.” The gravedigger pointed at something small and white on the brick floor. “There’s one of the maggots. Must’ve trod it on me boots.” The gravedigger watched with satisfaction as the young man nervously peered at the white morsel.
“Oh, Christ,” he murmured loosening his shirt collar. “Awful.”
“Then there was…” The gravedigger had more stories about graves, involving worms, rats; even rabbits – “you see, the rabbits had tunneled down and built nests in the coffins, and we found the baby rabbits scampering about inside empty ribcages” – and there were grisly yarns about valuable jewelry lodged in backbones, about pennies on eyes – “of course, when the eyeballs dried they stuck to the pennies, so when you lifted the pennies…” – and then back to maggots, and mole nests in skulls, and… The gravedigger noticed the young man’s attention had wandered; he even finished replacing the freezer back plate and swigged off his tea without really taking any notice of what he was being told.
Time to play the ace.
Sighing, the gravedigger lit the cigarette butt that had been tucked snug behind his right ear. “You know, I can’t get that last one we dug up out of my mind. Aye, Rose Burswick.’
The electrician’s eyes focussed on the gravedigger. “You mean that really… awful one?”
“Aye. The worst.” Sombre-faced, yet inwardly gleeful, the gravedigger tragically put his head in his hands. “The worst ever. And I’ve seen some terrible things in my time.”
The young man was hooked. “What happened?”
“Well, promise me you’ll tell no one.”
“You can trust me, mister.”
“Remember the old factory down by the river?”
“Yeah, that’s the one that got sealed off with those radiation warning signs.”
“That is because during World War One,” the gravedigger jabbed the glowing tab into the air for emphasis, “that’s where they painted luminous faces on watches, ships’ instruments and such-like.”
“Uh?”
“Back then, they used radium to make things glow in the dark. And radium is radioactive. They took girls, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, to apply this stuff to watch faces and compasses. Course, way back when, nobody knew what radiation did to you. Most of the factory girls were dead before they were twenty – just rotted away as they worked. Rose Burswick was there for five years. She used a little brush to paint the radium on the watch faces. Trouble is it dried quick, so she’d lick the brush every couple of minutes to keep it moist. Each time she did that, she must have swallowed a few flakes of radium.”
“My God. It’s a wonder it didn’t kill her.”
The gravedigger shrugged. “It did – at least that’s what the doctors said. In 1935 Rose Burswick was buried – she was thirty-six.”
“Bet she was a mess, living that long after.”
“Aye, but that’s not the worst of it. Like I said, two days ago we opened the grave.”
“Ugh… what did you find?”
The gravedigger rubbed his eyes as if trying to erase the terrible image. “Well… we lifted the coffin, it were intact. It was then I noticed something strange… where the lid met the coffin, there was like this pale-yellow trim round the edge. Funny, I thought. But reckoned it were just a bit of mould. Anyway, when we came to prise off the lid it – it just flew off. Bang. Like the top popping off a Jack-in-the-Box.”
“Jesus Johnnie!”
“And inside… inside, it were full. Ram-jam full to the brim.”
The electrician rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. As if a bad taste oozed across his tongue. “Full of what?”
The gravedigger shrugged. “Rose Burswick.” He pulled on his cigarette, hard. “They say she weighed six stone when they buried her. But when we opened that coffin it were like opening a carton of ice cream. There was just this big block – bright yellow. It had grown and grown until the coffin sides had stopped it growing any bigger. But even then, the pressure inside had been so great it were being forced through the crack between the lid and the coffin, making that yellow trim. Course, we just thought it were some kind of fungus, so we tipped it out. It came out like a banana jelly from a mould. On the grass was that yellow block – moist, glistening – coffin-shaped.”
“What – what’d happened to Rose Burswick?”
“Oh… that’s just it. It was Rose Burswick.”
“How?”
“Mue-tay-shun.’” The gravedigger rolled the syllables around his mouth like a juicy morsel. “Mue-tay-shun. You see, the radium’d caused her to mutate in the grave. The coffin had become her – her second womb. Aye, and she like… gestated… she evolved into something that was not human.”
“Did you touch it?”
“Not on your nelly. We ran like hell. But when the Cemetery Board found out, we had to go back to… IT.” The gravedigger leaned back against the freezer. “And do you know what we found there?”
The young man shook his head.
“We found it had changed. Just sort of become a soft mound and, aye, it had grown. It had swelled and swollen. Oh, I tell you. That shook us to the core, it did. You see, Tuesday was that sunny day, scorching hot. The heat must have brought it on, and it were growing fast.”
“Jesus. Then what?”
“We tried to lever it into a skip to take it down to the Crem. Burn it. But this soft mound of a thing had taken root. Mue-tay-shun caused what were left of the intestine to grow, and to worm its way into the earth. Just like a long yellow snake. It ended up us taking a shovel to it, then cutting through the fleshy tube. She… it screamed. Pain. Real pain! God, it were a living nightmare. Then – there it were – up and moving. Moving like I don’t know what. What were left of her arms and legs had turned into swollen, yellow stumps, with back-to-front feet, and hands that had twisted up into hooves … oh, I tell you, lad – revolting, utterly revolting. It were growing dark,” he continued, “and we were trying to get this thing into the hut. That’s when we noticed the worst part. I held a torch to it and studied it close up. This yellow stuff, almost transparent, like yellow jelly, and I – I could see inside of it.”
The young man’s eyes bulged. “What ya’ see!”
“Terrible. Just under the surface, about four, maybe six inches down through this thick jelly, I could see – clearly see! – Rose Burswick’s face. Or what was left of it. Wide, staring eyes coming out of their sockets three inches or more, like red, raw sausages. The tongue… long, thrusting out the mouth, up through the skin until the top wiggled all pink and wet above the surface. Aye… and the mouth. Good God. The mouth opening, shutting like this.” Wordlessly, he solemnly slapped his lips together like a goldfish. “I reckon she was trying to say something. Call for help. A desperate cry for mercy. You know, that expression on her face will stick in my mind forever. Sheer terror. Like a continual state of shock. As if she knew what had happened – mue-tay-shun. That and being buried alive.”
“What happened to it?”
“What happened? Why, it kept growing. So we had to find a way to stop it.”
“And how…” The electrician trailed off in horror, as if guessing.
“Sub-zero temperatures.” The gravedigger tapped the freezer lid with a nicotine-stained finger. “Why else do you think that a cemetery store would keep a freezer?” He began to lift the lid. “Look.”
“No!” The electrician’s voice rose to a shriek. Slamming the part-opened lid down, he tightly shut his eyes. “No!”
Enjoying himself hugely, the gravedigger kept a straight face, but he couldn’t keep the mischievous twinkle from his eye. “Suit yourself.”
“I-I-I’ve got to go. I’m late.” The electrician snatched his screwdrivers and pliers together, bundled them into his toolkit, then holding onto the limp, white hat, ran from the building.
The electrician was starting the van when the gravedigger breathlessly hobbled up.
“Hey… oh, my leg is giving me gyp. Hey, you’ve forgotten this.” The gravedigger waved a spool of copper wire in the air.
“Oh, ta.” Opening the door, the young man tossed the reel into the back.
The gravedigger fixed him with a look. “You know, as long the freezer’s working,” he said, “nothing’ll happen. Old Rose Burswick is frozen solid – like a block of ice cream.”
Something occurred to the electrician. “Wait a minute. How long since the freezer packed in?”
“Ah… let’s see… I saw some water on the floor yesterday morning, but Bill said not to bother, it’ll only be-”
“Jesus! The freezer’s been off more than twenty-four hours? You’re lucky it didn’t thaw.” He suddenly fixed the gravedigger with a fierce stare. “Tell me you’ve switched it back on now? And you’ve got it on fast-freeze?”
“No. I haven’t touched the thing. Thought you did.”
“It’s still switched off? My God! Just pray we’re in time.” He jumped out of the van and hurried back in the direction of the hut, the gravedigger trailing behind and grumbling about his dickey leg.
Too late.
Much too late.
They heard a noise from inside, just like dozens of loose boards being knocked over, a succession of thumps, a crash of mugs hitting the floor, then with a loud crunch the twin doors burst open. And what had once been Rose Burswick, swelled and flowed out onto the path. A mass of quivering yellow, the size of a beached whale, it moved as fast as a man can walk.
The gravedigger hollered a warning to the electrician, turned, then ran. The limp forgotten, he sprinted across the cemetery, leaping over headstones at such a hell of a speed it would have drawn murmurs of approval from any two-hundred-metre hurdles champion.
Luck had deserted the electrician. Stumbling backwards over a mound of soil, he slipped and fell into Mayor Hudson’s grave-to-be. Down at the bottom of the pit, the electrician opened his eyes to the darkness. For something had blocked out the daylight. Looking up, he saw that covering the grave, like a lid, was the gelatinous yellow form of Rose Burswick. Briefly, the sun shone through the yellow to reveal shapes suspended in the translucent body; they resembled fruit suspended in a dessert jelly – an arm, a leg, splinters of bone, distended internal organs.
And a head.
The head turned in the jelly… rotating slowly, and smoothly, and remorselessly, until its face was turned, gradually, to the electrician.
The face. That expression.
On the far side of the cemetery, the gravedigger scrambling over a brick wall, heard the muffled scream. He wanted to go back and help the lad, he really did. But fear drove him from the cemetery as fast as his legs could carry him.
Back in the grave: the electrician’s eyes were fixed on that face as Rose Burswick plopped into the hole.
And after more than sixty years of solitude in her cold and lonely grave, Rose Burswick hugged the handsome young man in the floppy, white hat. She hugged him in an embrace that seemed to last forever and ever.
And the expression on her face remained in the electrician’s memory, as if burnt there by fire.
She was smiling.