In a way, you live two lives. Or, more accurately, there are two stages of life. These two stages are divided by a significant event, something life-changing, and from that point on your innocence is lost. So too, the person you used to be.
Faces from the past dredge up life-changing events much like those machines searching rivers for bodies, where little happens for some time before a forceful and sudden discovery. I watch two of those familiar faces from my vantage point. They’re out for their regular evening stroll. They lean their heads together, laugh together, obviously comfortable in each other’s company. I wonder about the shape of their lives, lives lived beside the graveyard, that transformative, magical place. I haven’t set foot there since, well, since that night.
Now, I don’t want you to think I’m all doom and gloom and existentialism; familiar faces stir good memories, too. Memories of house parties with friends, old girlfriends, exam successes, and teenage kicks. But being back here overrides those things, this being the location of the seminal point of my existence.
Let me take you back to that night and this place. Let me tell you a story about a party.
***
Sophie and I huddled closer together, each of us staring into the fire, feeling its warmth on our faces. Our friends were dotted about our little camp site, chatting and drinking. Music played over the speakers, raucous guitars and poetic lyrics serenading us all. My best buddy Mark’s parents were caretakers of the crematorium and lived in the little cottage on site. Ivy crawled all over their home, slithered down its gabled roof. A little beyond it was the tip of the crematorium itself, a modern building of clean brick and clear glass. The two structures made for an uneasy coupling. Nothing surrounded us, just forest chockful of pines and spruces, and open farmland from which a thick odour spilled. A brilliant white moon cast its glare over the sparse rural wilderness.
Oh, and there were graves. Thousands of them, bathed in white light, their shadows reaching for the next headstone. Right behind us was the gated entrance to the land of the dead, where silence gnawed away at the stone of the tombs, rotted the flowers left by mourning loved ones. An aura radiated from that space, simultaneously pushing away, and drawing in.
“Mark says it’s haunted, you know,” Sophie whispered into my shoulder.
“What is?” I replied, pulling away to look into her face. Mark hadn’t mentioned anything about ghosts to me.
“The graveyard. The old caretaker, before his parents took it on, said you shouldn’t walk alone at night. People go missing or come back not the same.” Sophie giggled awkwardly, as if she didn’t believe it herself.
I sipped my beer and shifted on the bench.
“Tom, we should go for a walk in the graveyard,” Sophie added.
“What if we get lost?” I said, picturing labyrinthine paths and tall hedges and Jack Torrance chasing us with an axe.
Sophie stiffened beside me. I reached my arm out to pull her into an embrace again.
“Hey Sophie, come check this out,” Mark called from the tent. Mark was long and gangly like an alien, bending over, poking his head through the zipped down entrance. And Sophie, my girlfriend of three weeks—which meant much more aged sixteen—lumbered off, wide hips swaying and long blonde hair bouncing as she went.
The zip came down behind her once she’d crawled in.
I was happy my best friend and my girlfriend got along so well. It made things easier. Other couples were surrounded by disapproving glances and sniping comments, typical teenage drama. I wondered if the two of them were plotting some birthday surprise for me.
Yes, I genuinely believed it was harmless.
Summer nights were always lovely at that time of year, no matter the weather. As it happened, it was a warm one, and we all planned to sleep outside, but we’d brought tents just in case. None of us were outdoorsman, so only one had successfully been erected.
My favourite song came on, the new My Chemical Romance single, and I started singing along.
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Knock it off, man!”
I glared at the others, sat in separate little circles; somehow, we’d formed cliques within a group of nine people. When you’re young, people drift together and drift apart so easily; those you thought you knew became unrecognisable, almost entirely different people.
I rose from the bench by the fire, told everyone who’d jeered me to go fuck themselves, flipped them the bird, and mooched over to Mark’s tent.
A soft, muffled sort of sound could be heard, and my naïve ears couldn’t identify it.
I pulled the zipper down.
“Holy fuck!” I cried. Light bounced off a bare bottom. Clothes lay about the tent floor. Pale flesh huddled together, as if seeking warmth. An animal smell escaped the enclosed space.
Someone shouted my name from within, but I’d yanked the zip down already and turned away. Beyond the fire, the others remained seated on the grass. No one’s eyes met mine and their forms cast ugly long shadows like gnarled fingers, that bright moon smiling on their backs.
“You all knew, didn’t you?”
I was screaming. A light flicked on in the cottage. Mark’s parents were at home, could probably hear the disturbance.
“Well?” I threw my beer bottle between the two groups, caused them all to dive aside, to yell and curse.
“What’s the matter with you, man?!” someone shouted, though whom I couldn’t say.
“Some fucking friends you lot are.”
After that last verbal volley, I turned and ran. I passed the point where the grass of the cottage’s garden became a gravel path, passed the row of bushes growing before the row of metal railings and skidded to a halt at the graveyard entrance. The railings formed an arch above me. Over my shoulder there was commotion, but no one coming after me, no one seeking to check if I, the wronged party, was okay. They weren’t friends, only wraiths with faces shrouded in shadows.
I faced the graveyard again, felt that unnerving aura, and passed through it.
***
Darkness covered the graveyard in the distance like a blanket easing up over your legs, torso, head. I carried the moonlight with me, illuminating just enough to see the path ahead. A variety of headstones were set out in regimental fashion. Some were basic monoliths, others elaborate statues; mottled, moss strewn, grotesque and twisted images. What possessed people to consider such things an appropriate monument to deceased loved ones? Unless the hideous statues were for hideous people, to mark the decaying remains of monsters?
A light gust of wind brought forth the earthy smell of open ground. It made me think of open graves, but I didn’t even know if they did burials here anymore, figured it was only a crematorium these days. The air grew colder the deeper into the graveyard I went, walking among this army of the dead.
I didn’t grab my jacket when I stormed off. Goose pimples decorated my forearms.
A flicker of white caught my eye to the right, a flash of light disappearing behind a hefty headstone; my eyes were playing tricks on me. Or maybe I was compromised by the beers I’d drunk.
I told myself I was a brave soldier and that monsters weren’t real anyway.
Gravel crunched underfoot.
Still, no voices called out for me, no one followed, no one sought to find me. I should have known it was best to be alone. From the start of things with Sophie, an urge to run away needled me, a little voice in my head telling me being alone would be simpler, alone like the dead in their graves.
But I ignored the little voice. I let her in and look what happened.
I wished pain and misery on the two of them. I hoped a sinkhole would open up to engulf their tent, swallowing Mark and Sophie in a horrifying deluge of mud, stone, canvas, and flesh.
I paused. Another breeze blew across my face and, as it eased, only silence remained. I’d walked and walked without stopping, as if carried onward by some prevailing force. My feet ached.
Something seemed amiss. Far off, well beyond the confines of the graveyard, rose a mountain. A mountain that shouldn’t be there and wasn’t there earlier. There were no mountains in Manchester. What was happening?
There it was again, a flicker of white light, as if the moonlight were bouncing off the gravestones. My limbs stiffened and it was difficult to move, my aching feet heavy, my head swimming with some oncoming wooziness.
Between the line of graves was a narrow pathway, a shadowy tunnel. A ball of white light hovered some fifty feet away. It edged out from behind a squat stone building, a small mausoleum. The ball of light shuddered, elongated, sprouted limbs in the slow fashion of tree roots pushing down through earth. The legs touched the ground. They ran at me.
The heavy feeling in my head, the heavy feeling in my feet, they washed away in an instant. I sprinted dead ahead, further into the graveyard, deeper into the darkness, towards the impossible mountain; the moonlight couldn’t catch me.
Gravel crunched underfoot.
The taste of stale beer, a lump in my throat, in my stomach, overwhelmed me.
I risked a glance over my shoulder. A slim white form pursued me; a figure carved from moonlight.
My foot hit something hard. I soared through the air. My bare arms tore up as I crunched and scraped against the gravel. My chin and cheek bounced off the tough, gritty path. Blood and dirt swirled in my mouth, a taste of metal and earth.
I crawled toward the grass, tears in my eyes, cursing my stupidity for marching off alone. My face inches from the grass, I inhaled its earthy odour and spat murky blood.
A sudden chill overcame me. Deep, deep cold, so intense as to burn.
A high-pitched voice spoke from above.
“Why do you run away? I only wish to talk.”
I raised myself up by my elbows and slowly rolled over, breaths coming quick, hurried, shallow. Looming over me was the brilliant white form of a young man. He could have been one of our group of friends, passed for a local teen. Cold nausea filled me up, forced its way up my throat, its grim bitterness splashing the back of my rancid mouth.
“I just wanted to be alone,” I said. A stinging pain ran along my jaw, which hung heavy and loose. Warmth oozed from gashes on my arms.
I was pinned to the grass, laid across a raised clump. Not just some random knoll; I was laid across a grave. I tried to push myself away. Nothing happened. All I felt was my fingers digging deeper into the dirt.
“Alone is not often better. You look… frightened.” The boy’s voice sounded far away, an echo from another time.
“What is this place?” A shiver ran through me, but not from the cold. I begged my legs to listen and carry me away from here, but they refused.
“You are a lonely person, aren’t you? This makes me happy. It is not wise to walk alone through this graveyard at night.”
“It’s not wise to walk through any graveyard at night,” I mumbled. The ghost blocked the main path. I could escape among the graves, but they were endless, eternal, somewhere you’d be lost forever. My fears were true; this place was labyrinthine. And Sophie’s fears were true; this place was haunted.
“This is a special realm.”
My heart rattled a drumbeat in my chest, played the marching beat of a troop of soldiers, the marching beat of my favourite song.
“Are there other ghosts?” I looked up into a face so similar to my own and shivered. The figure drifted closer to me. Over its shoulder, I saw that strange and unfamiliar mountain again, standing alone against the horizon. I wondered why no one had come after me. Where was I, truly?
“Ghosts? Whoever said I was a ghost?” He shone brightly.
And the white light entered my heart.
From there, warmth burst outwards, flushing through my limbs as if pins and needles inhabited my whole flesh. But that subsided, replaced by the sense of being overfull, having eaten too much like some gluttonous pig, and the heavy weight of my being was dragged out through my pores by an unknown, compelling force.
And that was it. A release.
I was floating away, weightless, drawn upwards, but my body remained on the ground. I could see me; I was no longer me. Yet I felt… nothing. This was freedom and somehow serfdom too. And I knew, though I could not say how, that the mountain awaited.
***
It’s been quite some time since that night, and I’d enjoyed a full human life since the displacement. Grateful to Thomas, part of me always sympathised with him and, being privy to his memories and feelings, his mistreatment at the hands of that awful group of so-called friends became a fixture in my new life, a grudge that stayed with me.
I push aside the stray strings of leafy hedge obscuring my sightline. Sophie and Mark hold hands as they pass under the arched gateway and walk into the graveyard.
Mark and Sophie remained an item and married. Eventually, they took over as caretakers of the same crematorium Mark’s parents oversaw.
And as I step out from behind the hedge, the vantage point from which I’ve watched them for so many nights, I chuckle. Mark cheats on Sophie a lot. Sometimes it’s the people who deserve to be alone that aren’t, such is the inherent unfairness of the world. Thomas thought that, once upon a time. I figure the place in which Thomas lost his physical form is the perfect place to take his perfect revenge.
After all, he’d wished upon them pain and misery. You understand, of course, I had to distance myself from these people to establish a new Thomas. But, finally, I can seek them out. All of them.
Moonlight illuminates the thousands of headstones, that army of the dead. Sometimes, the dead are only sleeping, waiting, plotting. I cross the threshold of that special place, feel its energy and power. In the distance rises a mountain.
Yes, pain and misery are things I can do.
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