A tale from a gravedigger.
This is a work of horror fiction in four parts, written to resemble diarised blog posts. Originally published on /r/NoSleep. CW for homophobia, grief, potential mental illness.
Part 1
This story has been a long time in the making.
I’ve been meaning to write it down for years now, because it still… Well, I suppose to say that it haunts me is the wrong word, or maybe precisely the right one, but I’ve been meaning to write it down, and it’s just never been the right time, or I’ve never been able to sit down and focus enough to do it.
Gez — Geraint, that is, my husband — has been on at me to write it down, though, has insisted that he wants to read it, because I’ve tried to tell him once or twice, but I’ve never been good at putting words together and talking out loud. I’m not too great at writing either, but I’m better at it, I am, I swear.
And it needs to be told. The longer I carry it with me, the heavier it feels.
My name is Ray, Ray Darvill, and these days I’m basically employed as my boyfriend’s tech support, but for 19 years I was a postman, and for several years after that, I was a gravedigger.
In 2001, a few months after I’d turned forty, I was in a bad turnover on the M6. You might have seen about it in the papers at the time, I don’t know if it was a big thing or not — I was still a postman at the time, and it was a pretty bad wreck. Some prick in a Saxo, on his phone and not watching the road in the pouring rain, rammed into me and sent me skidding into the path of an eighteen-tonne lorry.
I was in hospital for a while, but they cleared me up pretty well, and for all the pile-up it caused, I was mostly alright — no head injury, no damage to the spine. Once they had me hopped up on morphine, the thing I was most worried about was the letters — my van doors had been busted open, and there was post all over the road in the pouring rain. Apparently, so the nurses told me, I was babbling like Hell about it.
I always wanted to be a postman when I was a little boy, you see, and I took it seriously.
After the accident, though, my hip was shot, always stiff — I ended up having a hip replacement a few years after the accident when it didn’t improve. For the first few years, though, I limped quite badly, and I used a cane to get myself around. I could have stuck with the Royal Mail, could’ve taken a desk job, I s’pose, but what I liked about it was the people, you know?
Not meaning to sound soppy about it, but I always thought letters were important, must’ve had about 20 pen pals when I was a lad, spent all my money on stamps, and whenever I went on my rounds, people’d know me, greet me, and they’d be pleased to see me. Who isn’t happy to see their postman?
Well. People with big bills, or pushy mothers, or whatever else — but the majority of people were pleased to see me, and I was pleased to see them.
I didn’t want to sit at a desk and do the admin in the depot. It wasn’t what I’d signed up for.
I went back to my home town, a village in the south of England — forgive me if I don’t say which one, but you’d be able to figure it out anyway, once you have all the details — and I took my granddad’s old bungalow.
My parents wanted me to be closer to them, because they’d been in pieces at me being alone in the hospital and then in my flat, being as I was at the time a confirmed bachelor, as my granddad would’ve called it, and to be honest, I wanted to be closer to them, too. They were getting on a bit, and I’d had a bad scare — and they’d never actually been fussy about me being gay, you know, just until I met Gez, they were concerned I was so bad at it, and didn’t like me being alone.
So I packed up my stuff and my cat — fat, lazy little twat called Wodehouse, who’s still alive, so don’t worry about that, although he’s 22 now and all the lazier for it — and I came home.
I’d been in contact with the pastor at our old church — Arthur, his name was, and we called him Pastor Arthur. He was in his mid-seventies in ’01, and although he was sprightly for his age, he was getting on a bit in years.
My granddad, when he was alive, also called Ray — although everyone used to call him Raymond — had been the gravedigger at the little chapel for the big village cemetery, which was across the field from the proper church. They only really used the chapel for funerals, and the bungalow was just around the corner from it — it was a nice little building built in the late 1800s, with a mausoleum sort of half-underground, and even its own bell tower. When I was a little boy, I used to walk out there on Friday afternoons and meet my granddad after school, and I’d sit in his office as he did clerical stuff and whatnot, and I’d walk home with him to have tea with me and my granny.
“They don’t call it being a gravedigger anymore, of course, but a cemetery worker,” Arthur said to me as I came into chapel, and I watched the old man’s eyes zip down to my bad hip and the way I was leaning my weight on my cane, “and you wouldn’t have to dig any graves. We get a third party to do that, anyway — they’ve a digger for that these days, and they measure out the plots and such. It’s… Can I be frank with you, Ray?”
“’Course, Pastor,” I said. “You’re the one offering me a job.”
“You don’t have to take it if you don’t want,” the old man said, folding his ancient hands loosely over his belly and looking at me seriously. It was funny, seeing him in a cardigan and a shirt — when I was little, I’d only ever seen him in his vestments, and without them on, he seemed half the size. “We get all these young kids, nineteen and twenty, who take the job for a year, and none of them have any sense of organisation. Perfectly pleasant young people of course,” he added hurriedly, in his affable way. “But perhaps slapdash.”
I chose not to mention at the time the fact that I could smell the lingering scent of weed as we went back into my grandfather’s old office.
“The chapel’s on a shortlist, you see,” the pastor said. “In the new year, the Beeb want to film a documentary here, you know — not just here, of course, they’re going into a lot of old chapels built around the same time period, and even if they weren’t, I just… Your grandfather used to run a tight ship, you know. Perfect files, everything in its place, everything quick and done to perfection. This…”
He and I stood together in the middle of what had once been my grandfather’s office, and we looked at the old chapel, the newspapers and half-finished paperwork scattered around on every surface, the half-filled ashtrays, and a bouquet of flowers wilting in the windowsill.
“You want someone you don’t have to supervise,” I said, and the old man looked at me powerlessly.
“I don’t have time, Ray,” he said. “And you know, I know I’m asking a lot of you, and if you’re not actually looking for work — ”
“I’m not looking,” I said. “This’ll do me, Pastor — help an old friend, keep myself busy. So long as my leg’s not a problem.”
“The benefit of our dearly departed, Ray, is that they rarely require us to give chase,” he said. “I think you’ll be safe.”
I laughed at that.
“Show me how to do the forms,” I said, “tell me what I can do to help. Save you having to do another job interview.”
“Oh, good,” he said, sagging with relief, and he put one of his wizened hands on my shoulder. “You know, Ray, I hate job interviews.”
I’d helped my grandfather out when I was a young lad — I used to trail after him until I was eleven or so, follow him about and linger in the background as he did what he did, and then when I came to visit my grandparents when I was a teenager, and my grandfather was starting to get on a bit, I used to dig a few of the graves with him, and I’d help trim the hedges, take care of the rose garden, and all that.
He used to be so gentle with the bereaved, I remembered that.
He didn’t talk much to them, really, but he was a sort of big man, in a comforting sort of way — d’you know the sort of men that are big, but hold themselves so that they’re smaller? A teddy bear, my granny used to call him — a big, heavy bloke, but cuddly.
I was relieved, when I realised how little of that part of the job I actually had to do. There was a company who did the graves, dug them and filled them again, and even did the big hedges that went all around the graveyard edges. What I was to do was to keep on top of the more minor bits of horticulture, make sure the graves were kept in good condition, and mostly, fix up the inside of the chapel.
It hadn’t been used for funerals in a few years, Arthur explained to me, and they’d just been using the file room and the office — there was dust and cobwebs all over the short pews, more like benches than pews, really, and a lot of extra chairs and fold-out tables for the village fête were stored in here to keep them out of the way.
The chapel had its central room, with a raised stage at the front underneath a stained glass window of Saint George that was in surprisingly good nick compared to everything else, although the altar that I remembered being there when I was a kid had apparently been smashed by some teens who’d broken in a few years back, and been taken out.
In the wings of the chapel, on one side there was a records room, which kept records for the whole parish from since the chapel had been built, and half underneath it, an old mausoleum, with some inset graves that were all from 1860, or something like that. The mausoleum was half underground, but you could see its roof from the outside, albeit overgrown with ivy that crept up the walls and roof of the old building. It’s insidious stuff, ivy — once it really makes itself at home, it’s hard to tug it loose without ripping out any of the cement.
In the other wing was the gravedigger’s — the cemetery worker’s — office, and past that, there was a door into the base of the old bell-tower.
“The bell doesn’t work, does it?” I asked on our first little tour of the building. “I remember it never rang.”
“Well, I’m sure it’s a bit rusted, but the bell should be in good condition,” Arthur said, and he took the key to the bell tower, which was noticeably more old-fashioned than the others on the gravedigger’s set of keys, and he gently pushed open the door to the tower’s bottom. It wasn’t a very tall tower — only a little bit taller than a house — but it was further than you could get up to without stairs, of which there were none.
“This used to have stone stairs, but shrapnel came through that window,” Arthur pointed to the big window, which was plain frosted glass, without any stained design like most of the other chapel windows had, “during the war, and knocked out the main stairs. It was lucky there was no damage done to the rest of the chapel, really. They replaced it with a wooden frame for a long while, but it started to rot in the fifties. One of the younger bellringers fell when the first landing gave way, poor lad, and we stripped out a lot of the old stairs. We always meant to have it replaced, but we just never had the money, or the time.”
I nodded my head, looking up toward the top of the tower, where a splintering stair showed just underneath a closed hatch, the last remnant of whatever ladder had once been there.
“Was the bellringer okay?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, in the end,” Arthur said. “Your grandfather called for a doctor — all he had was a nasty knock on the end and a sprained wrist, but Raymond, he took safety very seriously. I sometimes get annoyed at some of the risk assessment stuff we have to do, but I think about how well he’d look on it, from time to time.”
I smiled. “Safety’s important,” I murmured.
“Yes,” Arthur agreed. “But your gramps, I hope you don’t mind me saying, was a bit of a scaremongerer.”
I remembered the old man’s warnings for everything I did — making sure a ladder was steady, keeping my eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel when I was driving, checking the light was off twelve times before checking the switch off.
“Yeah,” I said. “I miss it, sometimes.”
My grandfather had died in ’92, about a decade before all this, and Arthur had sighed, and nodded his head.
“Me too,” he said, and then we walked back into the office to go over how the paperwork was done, what needed to be recorded, what he wanted kept from all the stuff in the office.
“I’ll leave you to it,” he said then. “Give me a ring if you need anything else.”
“Will do,” I said, and got to work.
For the first few weeks, I set myself into a regular routine.
I tended to work a sort of loose eight to six — I’d come in in the morning, meet up with the young lad, Joel, who worked with the digging company, and walk through the grave plots with him for the week, take in the paperwork that needed doing, make sure it was all sorted out. He actually offered when he first met me to do the mowing for me, what with my leg, and said he’d been doing it the past few weeks anyway, and I wasn’t exactly going to turn that down — I fucking hated mowing grass even before I lost a game of head-to-head with a lorry.
I’d do two rounds of the cemetery a day — once when I came in in the morning, and once before I went home in the evening, and when I walked out to the bungalow for lunch in the early afternoon, I’d keep a casual eye out.
There wasn’t much that needed to be inspected, really — when flowers were really on the way out and withered, after a week or longer on the gravesite, I’d take them away, but other stuff I’d normally leave in place. I’ve heard tales of teens messing about in graveyards, but I never had a problem with it the whole time I did that job, except for the story about the altar, and that had happened when I’d barely been old enough to walk.
A few people walked their dogs through the cemetery, but that wasn’t disrespectful in itself — the only thing that bothered me about it was when they let their dogs off the leash and let them run all about, and then I’d ask people to maybe keep them in a bit closer, but no one ever kicked up a fuss.
Most of my job was spent inside, cleaning up the chapel.
I made up a list, to begin with, of everything as needed doing — cobwebs and dust and cleaning in every room, inventory that needed doing on the tool shed, maintenance on the guttering, ivy that needed cutting back from the windows, a few light bulbs that needed changing, and so on, but that would come later.
To begin with, I started on the office.
I tossed out all the ashtrays and the rubbish first, and then I started to sort all of the paperwork, fixing the stuff that was ingoing and outgoing, the stuff that was out of date and the stuff that still needed to be completed. Apparently, the last person who’d worked the job, a young woman in her twenties, had gone on holiday to Ibiza and never come back, and this was the state she’d left it in.
Funnily enough, I think it was the sort of work I really needed at the time.
It was quiet, meditative, just sorting and organising and stacking things to be attended to, and every day I’d work out a schedule for myself. When I got up for breakfast, Wodehouse would be waiting for food; I’d do a round of the cemetery, do paperwork, go home and join Wodehouse for lunch; I’d go back to the paperwork, do one last round of the cemetery, and then I’d drop in on my parents, or go into the pub.
Everyone knew me as Raymond’s grandson, and they were nice enough, chatted in the pub or in the shop — people were a bit funny about my leg, tended to stare at the cane but didn’t want to ask about it, but they weren’t any funnier about that than they were asking why I wasn’t married.
It was nice, is what I’m saying, and I didn’t feel depressed, really, or anything like that, that’s important for you to know — I was sad I wasn’t working as a postman any longer, but I wasn’t having a breakdown over it, you know? I was just doing a job, and living quietly.
If I’d been having a tough time, if I’d been struggling, you know, or if I’d been depressed, maybe I’d have thought I was hearing things, but I felt fine, felt, you know, alright, so that’s not what I thought.
I first heard it when I was in the office, and I was on my hands and knees, cleaning out the old fireplace — there had been a board in front of it, and a few of those file boxes sort of stacked up in front of it. All the people who’d been using the office the past few years, it seemed, had been using this battered old halogen heater that ambled around on three out of four squeaky little wheels, but I like a fire place, and I remembered learning how to put a fire together when I was first in this office, kneeling on the rug beside my granddad as he showed me the coal and the firelighters.
The whispering was so loud, I almost thought someone had somehow snuck in right behind me, but when I turned around, there was no one there. I could still hear them, though — two hushed voices speaking quietly to themselves, and then the sound of laughter, like two young men sharing a joke.
Just like that, it was silent again.
I can’t quite remember what I thought about it — I suppose I put it down to the sound having travelled down the chimney from outside, or something like that. I remember I heard the sound very clearly, and I remember taking note of it and thinking it was strange, but it didn’t linger with me at first. I didn’t puzzle over it, you know.
But that was the start of it, I think.
The next time that there was something strange — this time, something frightening — it was on a Thursday evening, and it was a little past seven o’clock.
It was November, and I’d been scrubbing some of the benches in the main chapel, working some of the crime out of them. I’d been alternating between doing that and doing some of the backdated paperwork, so that I didn’t have to spend too much time sat low down, to keep the strain on my bad hip to a minimum. The cold weather was making it ache worse than usual, and it was almost always stiff. I had these exercises I was meant to do, but honestly, I rarely ever did them at the time — the only reason I do my exercises these days is because Gez does them with me.
Because I’d gotten so into the work, more time had passed than I had expected, and I did my rounds of the cemetery later in the evening that I ordinarily would. I sort of rushed about the yard with my cane, limping away, and had my lantern in the other hand — I had a proper torch on a carabiner on my belt, but I liked the lantern because it was a wind-up camping thing, and it let out a really wide range of light all around me. It wasn’t as bright as the torch was, but it gave me a more complete view of things, even if it probably did look stupid like something out of a ghost story, me limping along with my lantern held aloft.
But because the light wasn’t very bright, it didn’t stretch all that far ahead of me.
Ahead of me on the path, as I went to leave, I saw a silhouette of a man I hadn’t seen before — or at least, I didn’t think I had. I couldn’t really make out much about him — I saw that he was skinny and that he was looking down at a grave, but I couldn’t really make out anything about his face or what clothes he was wearing.
He wasn’t a regular visitor to the graveyard that I’d seen before, though, and as I limped further up the path, I said — gently, I wasn’t being a prick about it — “Excuse me, sir? I was about to lock the side gates as I left, but you’ll still be able to go out of the main one.”
I thought it was weird that he didn’t turn his head, and then…
Well.
I lifted my lantern higher, to try to see him better, and he wasn’t there anymore.
There was no sound of him running away, no sudden movement, nothing — a silhouette of a man had been ahead of me a second ago, and suddenly, he wasn’t any longer.
I’ll admit it freely: it spooked me.
Sent a shiver down my spine, it did, and I very quickly limped to the side gate to lock it. I felt cold and shuddery, feeling all my hairs stand on end, and I tried my best to shake it off as I went back to the chapel to lock up, I realised the lights were on inside.
They hadn’t been on as I’d left — I hadn’t locked the doors just yet, because I’d left my satchel just inside the door so I didn’t have to carry it around the yard with me, but I’d turned off all the lights. I was sure I had — and yet when I pushed the door open, the main chapel lights were on, and more than that, the lights in the corridors were on, the lights in the office, in the file room, even.
I went around to turn them all off, and I don’t know what it was that made me check, but it was just a funny sort of tug at the base of my belly — maybe I told myself it must have been something to do with the fuse box, lighting all the lights at once, I don’t know. But I took the big heavy key for the bell tower, unlocked the door, and pushed the door open.
When I saw the lights in there were on, it was exactly what I expected to see and also punched me in the gut, both at once.
I quickly shut the light off, dragging the door fast shut behind me and locking it again, and then I went into the office to check nothing had been touched, and it didn’t seem to me that anything had been, but…
Maybe this has happened to you — have you ever been looking for something, your wallet or your phone, and you’ve put it down somewhere, and you go through the whole house looking for it, checking everywhere, and it’s absolutely nowhere to be found? But then you walk into a room you’ve already checked three times, and suddenly, it seems almost as if someone’s circled it for you — it’s the first thing your eyes jump to, and it was somewhere obvious the whole time, and you think you were an idiot for never seeing it before?
I had a moment like that.
Standing in the doorway of my office, I stared dumbly at the fireplace that I’d spent the past week cleaning out to work on, and realised that one of the bricks was loose.
The bricks were grey, such a light hue they were almost the same colour as the cement that had glued them into place, and I moved slowly forward, staring down at the brick I’d suddenly noticed, and somehow never noticed before. I could see the gap in the cement, see the dark shadow where the brick was loose, and very slowly, still trying to shake off the willies I was feeling, I reached out and tugged it loose.
I don’t know what I expected — for some sort of monster to jump out of the gap and bite my fingers off? See a gremlin or a ghost or what have you? Maybe, I don’t know.
None of that happened, anyway.
There was a puff of old stone dust that made me cough, but inside, there were no little monsters that I could see — there was a tin lockbox, blue that was caked with the cement dust, and I had to lean my cane against the chair to use both hands to pry it out, and when it fell and hit the tile with a loud clatter, I almost pissed myself, let me tell you.
I tugged the little lockbox free, and I expected it to, you know, actually be locked, but it wasn’t.
I opened it up, and stacked tightly, bound with yellowing twine, was a stack of envelopes — the paper of the envelopes was turning yellow too, and it looked old, very old. There was no date or address on the envelopes — they all said the same thing, in a spidery, looping handwriting — and that was old-fashioned, too.
“Peter,” I said aloud, reading the name written on the envelope: at the exact same time, a voice whispered in my ear, loudly, with breath so cold I felt like an icy wind had done it, “Dear Peter.”
It shocked me so hard I jolted, shifting my weight so that my bad side buckled, and I cried out as I hit the floor on my side, swearing at the top of my lungs for the pain as I looked wildly around for whoever was there, but there was no one.
With shaking hands, I reached for envelopes and I picked them up again, turning them over, looking for a sign of a date or an address on any of the envelopes further in the stack, but there was nothing there. Every envelope just had the same name written on it in the same cramped handwriting: Peter.
I was shaken, and I quickly put the letters back into the lockbox, and limped back to the entrance of the chapel, dropping the lockbox into my satchel, and then I turned off the last of the lights and locked the chapel behind me before I made my way home.
I didn’t open the letters up right away, I’ll admit to you freely.
That night, I went back home to my grandparents’ old bungalow, and I checked that the front and back doors were locked twice, Wodehouse tubbily winding his way around my ankles the whole time, before I even took a breath to put the kettle on.
Once the beast was fed, he agreed to act as my bodyguard, and sat his huge arse on the arm of my granny’s old chair as I sat back in it with the TV on for the sake of the noise — Wodehouse had come to terms quite quickly with the fact that I complained if he sat his fat weight on top of my thighs after my accident, but he would always sit next to me like a round gargoyle when we watched TV together.
I fell asleep to the sound of his purring.
It was the last peaceful night’s sleep I’d have for a while.
Sorry, I need to take a break — speaking of the pudgy old prick, Wodehouse is currently screaming up at me from the floor, and advising me it’s time for his supper before Gez and I go to bed. He never asks Gez for food — always pesters me, instead. I think it’s because Gez has been putting him on a diet, or trying to.
I’ll be back with the next part soon.
Part 2
I was having the dreams again last night, stronger than before. I woke up a few times, almost crawled out of bed and back to the computer to keep writing it all down, but Gez sleeps on top of me like I’m his personal bloody pillow, and he was wrapped around me last night — maybe he knew I was having nightmares, I don’t know.
He hasn’t mentioned it this morning, but he never does. He knows I don’t want to talk about it, I s’pose, and I did say I was writing it down.
It’s a little past seven, and he’s in his office on the other side of the village — he’s a counsellor, and he prefers to do everything in his little office, and there’s no one else in there with him, so he doesn’t have to worry too much about restrictions. All the appointments he does via video.
I’m waffling — procrastinating, I guess. Avoidance and all that.
The nightmares are relevant, though. I had my first of the nightmares the night I took them letters home.
I don’t normally dream much. Not that I never dream, you know, but I just don’t dream very often — or if I do, I almost always forget them.
The dream sort of started out where I thought I’d woken up — I was sat up in the armchair and came to, and Wodehouse was gone, and somehow, the TV had turned off. I sort of sat there for a moment, thinking that something had woken me up, but I wasn’t sure what, and then, it was like…
It was like being assaulted with sound.
I could hear lots of sounds all at once and I could pick them out of the cacophony (looked that up in the dictionary, no harm in that), but they were all happening at the same time, painfully loud: pages turning and voices talking sort of whispered and hushed and a knock on a door and screaming and a bell ringing and splintering wood and a big clatter of something hitting a tiled surface and trees creaking in the wind and the wind itself howling up a storm and everything else —
I put my hands over my ears and screamed and shouted for it to stop, because it felt like all those sounds were advancing on me, like somehow they were solid and I was going to be crushed between them all, and then it went so silent I thought I’d gone deaf.
It was the shock of the silence that woke me up properly, and when I blinked awake, I had a crick in my neck I’d not had in the dream, and Wodehouse had sort of strangely worked himself into my armpit like a hot water bottle so I was soaked with sweat on one side more than the other, and the television was flashing brightly as Dad’s Army played on mute, so I turned it off.
I hadn’t put it on mute myself, but given that the picture was also scuppered, I put that down to Wodehouse stepping on the remote rather than any ghostly intervention — he had an awful habit of doing that. Still does now.
I was shivering a bit, still in my work clothes and, as I said, damp with sweat, and it was still dark as anything, but it was about five o’clock, or something like that. All the lights were still on in the house, and I felt silly about it, about my turn the night before, and I almost turned a few of them off, the ones that didn’t need to be on, but I just didn’t. I even reached out for the light switch in the corridor to switch it off, because the light in the living room always lit the little corridor just fine, but I was cowardly about it, and pulled my hand back.
I turned on the hot water and had a shower, and spent far longer under the spray than I really needed to — my parents had kept my grandfather’s bungalow in pretty good nick since he died. He’d died in ’92, and my grandmother had died a few years before, and although my parents had away some of their personal effects, not the photos, you know, but knick-knacks and what-have-you, they’d left most of the furniture and the sheets and stuff, so that when any family wanted to visit, they could stay in the bungalow, and they’d never sold it — I think, really, because they wanted me to come home and live nearby. Not under the circumstances I did, obviously, but I think that was why they’d never sold it on.
Anyway, my granddad had been getting on a bit before he died, and although he always kept at his job in the graveyard, he had a few things put in the house that I used then — there were bars to help you get in and out of the bath, which is a godsend when you’ve got one weak side and can’t trust the purchase you can get even on the shower mat, and he had this brilliant, white plastic shower chair with a sort of plastic cushion on it.
Me and Gez don’t live in the bungalow — we rent it out to some funny, artsy looking girl with an Irish Wolfhound — but I brought that chair with me, and Gez, I can tell you, hates it.
That morning, I sat on that chair for ages — I barely even scrubbed myself down, just sort of sat under the water and tried to rub the ache out of my neck, and did my best to make sense of the night before.
I just kept thinking about the man I’d seen in the graveyard and how he’d disappeared like a puff of smoke, and how I couldn’t think of what he looked like, because I’d not really seen him properly, you know? I sort of sat there, my head in my hands and my elbows on my knees under the shower, and I tried to think of everyone I knew in the village and slotted them into the silhouette I’d seen and tried to make them fit, but no one did.
I didn’t even really remember the actual letters until the water started to go cold and I had to get out — I remembered getting them out, and I remembered the scare I got in the chapel, but I forgot that I took them home until I stepped onto the bathmat, and then I remembered all at once, and I felt a sort of cold, horrible dread take hold of me.
I couldn’t think why I’d done it as I dried myself off and put on fresh clothes — it seemed mad to me, like the actions of someone else. Why the fuck had I decided to bring them home? I should have left them there. I should’ve put them back into that loose brick and pretended like I’d never laid eyes on it, but that wasn’t what I’d done, and now I’d brought them letters home and put them in my house.
I went into the little kitchen in a daze, put a tin of food out for Wodehouse, and put some sausages in the frying pan to cook, and after I’d drunk a little bit of my tea, I sort of looked at my satchel out of the corner of my eye, like it was a girl I was trying not to make eye contact with in a club, in case she got the wrong idea.
When I opened it, I think I was hoping it would be gone, or that I’d dreamed it up, but obviously, I hadn’t. There was grey stone dust all over the inside of my satchel off it, and I slowly lifted it out, and put it down on the little kitchen table.
Wodehouse, mistakenly thinking it might be more food — he’d already finished his finest from the supermarket — toddled up and gave it a cursory sniff. I stood there, holding my breath, waiting for him to hiss or yowl or stand up on his back paws and make the sign of the cross or something.
He just dropped heavily onto his back and made the table creak, although it did make me laugh, so I was grateful for that.
I didn’t read all the letters at once, so I suppose what I’ll do is sort of transcribe them — I still have them, normally keep them in the back of the wardrobe in that same box, although much cleaner now — one by one, but at the same time as I read them myself.
They weren’t dated or nothing, like I said before — they were just in a kind of sheaf tied together, and now I smelled them in my kitchen, instead of in the chapel where it had smelt of stone dust and soap and still a bit of cigarette smoke, they smelled musty, like old paper did, and a bit waxy, like they’d been sealed with it, but when I pulled the first envelope out of the stack, I could see it hadn’t been sealed at all — none of them had.
The tongue of the envelope had just been folded into the opening, and the glue was very dry and felt rough under my fingers when I touched it — it had never been wetted.
I’ve never been a psychic or believed in any of that shite, but stood there in my kitchen, holding that envelope in my hand, I felt the sort of… I felt an absolute, real certainty, knew it right down to my bones, that no one had ever opened it before.
It’s not right to read someone else’s post — my grandparents, both of them, always nailed that into me, even before I ever thought about being a postman. They got sent other people’s post sometimes, because there was another Ray Darvill but spelt with an E — Darville — who was a farmer, and whenever he got the post misdelivered, he’d put the envelopes in my satchel and pat me on the head and send me to walk out to the Darvilles and give it over.
I think I asked him once, if he wasn’t ever curious what got told to Mr Darville in his letters, and he went off on a whole speech about how morally wrong and reprehensible and all that that it’d be to open someone else’s post, ’cause it was an invasion of privacy and you could get hauled in by the coppers and all that.
It didn’t occur to me then, though, that my grandfather had ever seen the letters. The lockbox was old enough, and made of tin without plastic, and it was very square — it could easily have been in that wall long before my granddad took up his shovel and the job.
My instinct was to return the letter to sender, but there wasn’t even a delivery address, let alone an RTS, and as I sort of worked my finger under the tongue of the envelope and pried it out with a crinkling sound of dry paper, I think for a second, I sort of had a little fantasy of seeing an address inside and delivering them all those years late.
There wasn’t any address. There wasn’t any date, either — and that surprised me, because it was old paper, nice paper, that had been written on with a fancy ink pen or something, and I thought of all my lessons letter writing at school, and how you always had to put the address and the date in the top right corner, and put your address to, and all that.
Dear Peter, the letter started, and it made a shudder run down my spine because I remembered that horrible whispered voice right in my ear at the chapel again, and I put the letter down and went to turn my sausages over, and kind of stood there staring blankly out into the dark of the yard before I steeled myself and went back to it.
Dear Peter,
I miss you.
I know you’d laugh to hear it from me, and it is stupid, I know it is, but I keep thinking of the bit in my novels where the heroine thinks the hero has gone off for ever, when she thinks he’s dead or that he’s gone away to war forever, and then he hoves in out of the darkness to embrace her, and she’s so happy she could die.
I keep hoping that will happen, that you’ll come home, and I understand why you won’t, but I still miss you.
I always thought of heartache as something metaphorical, a literary trope invented purely for the purposes of fiction, and yet when I think of you now, I know that I was always wrong: my heart does ache, Peter. It’s a sort of dull, hollow pain in the very core of my chest, a painful emptiness, like a part of me is missing — and I suppose a part of me is, because I thought when first we met that we were part of one another.
I think of you near constantly. There hasn’t been a moment of the day since you left that I haven’t thought of you.
I think of the way you always used to pick up the music box off the shelf in the antique shop and wind it up, and how you’d dance around as I sat behind the desk with my hand on my chin and watched you, and laughed, because you were ridiculous — and do you remember, Peter, you’d say, “You must never sell this, you know, or I’ll simply cease to come back.”
And I said, “I don’t see why I should care if you come back or not — you never buy anything.”
“Maybe I’m sizing something up,” you’d say, with that wry grin of yours, and I’d feel exhilarated and my cheeks would burn, and I’d have to duck into the back office to do something to cope — or my mother or father would call me from the workshop, and interrupt.
I play memories of you, Peter, the way you used to wind up that music box — I wind them up and dance with them, at all hours of the day.
I think of the first time you stood next to me in church, and you stood so close to me, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what you were at, and when your hand brushed mine I thought that it was an accident even though it made the back of my neck burn, because when I looked at you your gaze was focused forward, listening intently to the sermon — but you were smiling, and I hoped, I hoped so desperately, that it was for me, and when it turned out that it was, I thought I’d drop dead of it.
I never used to tell you you were handsome, did I?
I always thought it, you know.
I didn’t want to tell you because I knew that you already knew, and if I said it it would only go to your head, but I always thought you were handsome, always thought you were impossibly charming. I know you loved to make fun of my books, Peter, but when you mocked up the heroes in the books I read, when you brushed your hands through your beard or when you pretended to fence with an invisible sword, or just when you pulled your shirt open and showed your chest hair and asked if I wanted to stroke it until I all but cried with laughter, you really did resemble one of them.
When I walk past the chapel, now, I look up at the bell tower and I think of all the times we used to spend together in there — how I’d sit there by candlelight with by book, and I always meant to keep an eye out for you, but as I waited, I’d get so into my book that I’d be enveloped in it, and I wouldn’t hear you come in.
I wouldn’t know you were there at all, but then you’d blow out the candle, and as shocked as I’d be by the darkness, as breathless I would be with surprise, I’d feel like a balloon about to burst because I’d feel so much joy, because you were there and we were alone together, and I used to dream about the way you laughed into my mouth when you bent to kiss me.
Do you remember, Peter, how after you lit the candle again, hours later, you’d always grab whatever romance I’d been reading, and you’d quickly rush to read the last page? It used to infuriate me that you’d do that, but now I think of it it makes my heartache worse.
I remember you said to me once, “I have to know how it ends!”
“But you’re not even reading the rest!”
“That doesn’t matter,” you said. “We’re all just endings, really — it’s the ending that makes a romance, beloved. All that comes before doesn’t matter.”
And you dropped the book in your lap and cupped my hands in yours and you bent and kissed the backs of my knuckles and it was so impossibly romantic, the two of us lit by candlelight, I almost imagined that in a hundred years, we might be able to be on a cover of a book like that ourselves.
I didn’t know it would end the way it did, and I don’t suppose you did either.
Oh, Peter.
I miss you. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you — I could write those three words forever like I was back in the schoolhouse, but they wouldn’t do anything, would they?
I find myself talking to you, sometimes, as if you’re there, when I’m alone in the shop. What with Mum and Dad and now you too, it seems like everybody in the world has abandoned me at once, and I know that’s a terribly selfish way of looking at it, but I just feel so dreadfully alone, Peter.
Maybe it’s because they’ve been gone for longer, but I don’t find myself talking to my parents, just to you — I have dreams, sometimes, that you answer me back from wherever you are, and they feel so very real.
I thought a letter would help.
I think it has, even if only in a small way.
I miss you, Peter — I love you still. I hope you know that.
Your beloved
It was an impossibly intimate letter that I was holding in my hand, I realised, and once I’d finished it, I hurriedly folded it away and put it back in the envelope like I was frightened of someone catching me. It really did feel shameful, you know, looking over someone’s shoulder at the aftermath of their break-up, and I felt like it was very wrong of me to have looked — and at the same time, I wanted to read the next one, and I felt very bad about that, too.
I didn’t read the next one right away.
Perhaps if I had, what happened next wouldn’t have happened — I’m really not sure.
But what I did after that was I put the letter back int the stack with the letters, and I opened the drawer at the bottom of the kitchen drawers and slid it in on top of the fire blanket, and I focused on making my breakfast.
That’s the last thing I remember about that day — my hip gave a little bit of a twinge, and I shifted my weight onto my good leg, and I remember turning to the fridge and getting the bacon out, and the carton of eggs, too. I remember, a bit more fuzzily, then, cracking open one of the eggs.
After that…
All the lights went out. And I mean all of them, not just the lights in the house, not just the light bulbs, but the little red light that showed that the hob was turned on and the green lit-up numbers that showed on the microwave and what little sun had just been starting to show wanly through the clouds outside, that was snuffed out too.
It was so, so dark, and I was so frightened, and I remember trying to cry out, but my mouth wouldn’t move, and I was so very cold I really, genuinely, thought that I was dying. It was a cold like I’d never felt in my life, even after the year I swam in the sea on new year’s day a few years before to help raise money for a cancer charity, and I came out with my teeth chattering and my body shaking, feeling like I’d never be warm again.
This cold wasn’t like that.
When I was cold from that, from the damp, there was a sort of strange feeling to it — my body was very cold, my skin, that is, but I could feel how hot the inside of my chest was, and as numb as my hands and feet were, my blood felt so hot in my gut that I felt like it would burn me, the difference between the temperatures I was at on the inside and the outside were so different.
This cold wasn’t like that.
There was no hot burn in the centre of my chest — there was just more cold, and it was so all-encompassing, so oppressive, so painful, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t shout for help, couldn’t even think, really. I felt a vague terror but I couldn’t even concentrate on that because the freezing cold was needling at me, and I didn’t think it was ever going to stop, it felt eternal.
I couldn’t move an inch, ramrod straight with my back lent back against one of the kitchen counters, and when I felt a tear run down my cheek, it felt so cold I thought it must have turned to ice before it reached my beard.
I couldn’t tell you how long it lasted.
I was fucking insensate to whatever time even meant anymore, I was sat there for however long, and then there was a sudden burst of extremely bright light — but for how bright it was, it was still very very cold, like when the sun shines very brightly on a snowy day, and the reflection off the snow hurts your eyes.
But there was this painful flash of light, and I saw a man crouched in front of me, and he wasn’t like the skinny man I’d seen before — this man, even crouched down, was built more like me: he was broad and heavy. Because the bright light was behind him, I couldn’t really make out his face except for his eyes, which were a sort of flinty grey colour, and the curve of his smile shadowed horribly on his face — I knew that he was handsome, but in that light, with those horrible shadows, it was twisted, somehow.
And then the light went out again, and I was in the dark, and the coldness was fading quickly like I’d been dropped into a very hot bath, and it really did burn, it hurt. I sort of hissed and fidgeted and tried to shake out my frozen joints, and I became aware that my bacon was burned to a crisp and the smoke detector was screaming, and Wodehouse was frantically walking back and forth over my legs and trying to put his paws on my chest and miaowing at the top of his lungs.
The bottom drawer was open.
The lockbox was open too.
The letter I’d already read, I realised when I, with trembling hands, picked up the letters again, had been moved to the back of the pile, so that it was easier for me to read the next one. Like a ghost’s fucking answer to a modern man’s Netflix queue.
I took up the box, then, putting it aside, and I gave up with breakfast, tossing the burnt to a crisp sausage and bacon aside, because they were so close to charcoal even Wodehouse wasn’t interested in them, and the eggs had all but evaporated.
I walked out of the house with the lockbox with me, and went to the chapel — it was past seven, but I did get there earlier than I ordinarily would have, and when I went in, I went straight into the office, putting the letters on my desk and lighting a fire.
I think that was why I wanted to be in the chapel, maybe — it could have been something else, but I wanted to be next to a nice fireplace, wanted to feel its heat. The cold had faded away, but I remembered it keenly — I still remember it now, more vividly than I’d want.
I was slow walking to work, and I was slow sitting down in the chair beside the fire, too — the cold was a memory, but my bad hip felt stiffer and sorer than ever, and I sat there for a few moments and rubbed at it, as if that’d make a difference.
Then, I reached for the next one.
Dear Peter,
I’ve been thinking of you this week.
You know that, of course, you have to know it, even if you never read this letter, never know of its contents, but I’ve been thinking of you constantly, always, always, I think of you. In my dreams, we’re together in the chapel belltower, laid out on the picnic blanket you stole from your sister the first time we crept up there together, and you showed me the wood-floored room above the hanging bell, and said, “This shall be our sanctum, beloved: look, let me christen it!” and you spread the blanket out on the floor.
How many hours in our lives, in the decade we’ve had together — if we can call it being together — do you think the two of us have spent laid on that blanket together, our legs entangled, a romance abandoned on the corner of the blanket beside us?
I remember, I used to find it so very cold in the tower, when I was ringing the bell with the others, but somehow, when it was the two of us, it never bothered me. Sometimes, my wrist would twinge if it was very cold — do you remember that? — and you’d notice my little wince, and you’d pick up my hand so gently and lay kisses along the skin, and say you were pouring love into the wound.
I’ve been thinking of that a lot.
But…
But, Peter.
I know I talk out loud sometimes, and I know I miss you, but I’m so certain that you’re listening at my door sometimes, even though you don’t answer me, and it drives me so crazy. You mustn’t do that, Peter.
I do miss you, and I do want you, and I do love you, but, Peter, you mustn’t do that.
It frightens me.
It frightens me so badly — didn’t you hear me last night, when I asked you to stop, and to go away?
But I knew that you weren’t there. I couldn’t hear you, exactly, and of course I couldn’t see you, but I was so very certain that you were just there on the other side of the door, and even though I started talking more, even though I was talking to you, until I was begging, Peter, you can’t just —
You can’t do that, you mustn’t.
You mustn’t listen like that, and never say anything — but you mustn’t say anything either. You must stop this, Peter.
It isn’t right.
And it does pain me to write this, because I love you, and I miss you so very badly, and though a part of me swells to feel you there, you are gone from me for a reason, and you mustn’t frighten me like that.
If you love me, Peter, you wouldn’t scare me so.
Your beloved
I don’t think I even breathed between reading that one and picking up the next one. I folded it up and put it back into its envelope, and I picked up the next one, I think, before I’d even considered what I was doing. I did it on autopilot, almost, or automatically.
Dear Peter,
You woke me last night, Peter.
It doesn’t make it better for you to come to me when I’m not awake.
It’s been difficult for me to sleep, these past few days — I’ve been trying so hard not to speak out loud, thinking of you, trying not to talk to you again, because I think I almost convinced myself I had just gone a little mad, that I’d had a little episode and upset myself, that that was all it was. I’ve had such a stressful year, after all, and that sort of thing happens to a man from time to time, and I believed…
What made you do it, Peter?
Did I say your name when I was sleeping?
You used to tell me I talked in my sleep, and the first time you told me that, after I’d fallen asleep with my head in your lap in the belltower on a warm summer’s evening, where we’d snuck up although it was still so light outside, I had such a vivid imagining of the two of us sharing a bed, some time in the future, if we could ever go away from here and have a sort of marriage for ourselves, no matter what our families would think or say, what anyone would say.
It seemed so wholly and entirely darling, the very thought of the two of us laid in the same bed together, side by side, our hands entwined while we slept, although you said you’d never be able to sleep a wink lying at my side, because I talked even more sleeping than I did awake.
I remember when you told me that it took me by surprise, and I was worried you really hated that part of me, that you were speaking candidly when you said you would never share a bed with me, and oh, Peter, if you could only have seen your own face, the way it crumpled, your mouth falling open, your brows furrowing. You cupped my cheeks and held me so close to you, and said, “Beloved, beloved, I would sleep beside you ’til the end of time if someone offered it to me, no matter how much you babbled.”
Was that it, Peter?
Did I say your name?
It gave me such a shock, that knocking at the door, and I’m sorry to say this and I hope it doesn’t wound you but in that moment, I forgot about you, Peter, for the first time in all these months I forgot about you, and sleepily and confusedly I tumbled from my bed and I rushed to the door to see who was knocking so loudly and I pulled the chain out of the loop and I opened the door and I stared out into the empty corridor, into the deep, heavy blackness of it, and all at once, Peter, I remembered.
Did you listen to me cry?
That was wrong of you, Peter.
You mustn’t ever do it again. It hurts me so much, to know that you might be so close to me, but that you would then hide from me — I already feel mad with grief, and you needn’t compound it.
I’m sorry I forgot you. Even for a moment, to have forgotten you, it feels like the most awful of crimes, but it was only a moment, and even having forgotten you for but a second, I still loved you so dearly: love of you, Peter, is my natural state, and it will be my natural state until the day I die.
But you mustn’t hurt me like this.
Not again.
Your beloved
Horrible, creeping shudders went through me as I sat beside the fire with that letter in my hand, and I think I sat there for quite a while, waiting for the shivers to pass, but whenever I thought they were almost done with, they’d start up again.
It was a sort of fucking…
I don’t know.
It was creepy is what it was. It scared me.
I had to open up the graveyard, though, so I put the letters in their lockbox, and I put them into my top drawer in the desk, and I locked the desk drawer to keep what had happened earlier from happening again, and then I picked up my keys and I walked out in the yard.
Before I stepped past the chapel wall, I braced myself, expecting to see the silhouette I’d seen the night previous standing on the path again, but I didn’t, and I thanked my lucky stars as I went to open the side gates.
An older woman who worked in the corner shop met me as I went to unlock the other gate, and she had a few questions about how she’d go about getting a grave plot, and she had other questions about the cemetery too — she wanted to know where the oldest graves were, and she was interested in the chapel itself, and even though I didn’t know too much, she was interested.
She used to take grave rubbings, she said, when she was a little girl.
I never even learned that woman’s name, and never spoke to her again — I don’t know if she’s dead by now, because she was only sixty or so when I met her, but I think she realised, one way or another, that I was shaken, and I think she talked to me for longer than she’d meant to, and although she glanced down at my cane once or twice, and rushed to hold the door to the chapel open for me like I’d collapse into dust if I tried to pull it open myself, she didn’t say a word about it, and didn’t stare or make any funny remarks.
I was very grateful, at the time.
It didn’t make me forget what I’d been reading, what had been happening to me, but it let me think about something else for a little while, and after she left, I went back to scrubbing the pews, and had them finished up.
I worked through paperwork after I broke for my lunch, and then, I picked up another letter. It was a little past five o’clock, and already beginning to go dark.
I’m sorry, my hands are shaking a bit badly as I write this now — it’s not from remembering, I think, it’s rereading the letters, transcribing them. I forgot how it felt to read them — they feel so real to me. Maybe it doesn’t come across on your screen, because it doesn’t on mine — maybe it’s holding the paper in my hand, smelling the tin and the old paper, or maybe it’s just that he wrote those letters, that he held them, that…
Well.
I can’t transcribe another just now.
I’ll write again soon.
Part 3
Alright. I’ve a cup of tea in front of me, I have Wodehouse purring on his little cushion on my desk, and behind me in the kitchen, Gez is laughing at some show on the radio as he does the washing up. It helps, having him there, it really does — he’s not even looking at me, but just the fact that he’s there is, Christ, I don’t know, something sentimental. Medicine for the soul.
Next letter.
Dear Peter,
We’ve talked about this, Peter.
I can hear you moving about downstairs when the shop is closed for the evening, can hear your footsteps creaking on the boards, hear the soft clink of the teacups when you touch them in their display case, hear the rattle and ring of the register as you open it and close it again.
I wish you wouldn’t, Peter.
I won’t give into it, you know, I won’t rush down to see if you’re there — it’s such a ghastly thing to do, Peter, don’t you know that? Don’t you know how ghastly this all is?
It’s so very dreadful, you know, because I think of all the times that you wished you were invisible, so that you could creep into the shop and past my parents at all hours of the day and come up to my room without them knowing, and all the times I wished that we could both be invisible, that we might walk hand-in-hand up the street together, or sit on a park bench, or go to dinner, and not worry.
How naïve I was, to want such things as that.
I’d never let a single person see my face again if it meant that I could have you back, Peter, and have you back properly — but that’s not what this is, and I know it, and, Peter, you know it too.
You’ll make me quite insane.
And people in the village already look at me like I’m quite tragic — it’s to do with my parents, of course, not to do with you, but it still makes me so sore, the way people pretend not to stare when I go into the grocer’s or dip into church, and sometimes, young people will come into the shop ostensibly to look at the books, and I don’t mean to be cruel to them, and not one of them has ever so much as jostled something in passing, let alone broken it, but the boys do stare at me, and I wish they wouldn’t.
Sometimes I don’t open the shop for days on end, and I just lie in my bed with books, but as much as I look at the text and I turn the pages, I take so little of it in.
It feels as though I’ve not enjoyed a romance since you left me, Peter, not even the most torrid of them.
What is the point of it, if I’ll never know real romance again?
This isn’t a romance, anymore, Peter, and you know I never cared for ghost stories.
Please, Peter, I can’t stand it.
You mustn’t come again.
Your beloved.
Dear Peter,
I was weak last night, answering the phone, and I wished I hadn’t done it as soon as my hand closed around the receiver, but it was as though my arm were moving without my permission, the action already half begun, that I couldn’t stop my hand in its tracks as I lifted it up to my ear.
I don’t think you know how mad you’ve driven me this past week, ringing so incessantly as you have, ringing the shop phone and the one upstairs, at all hours of the day.
It’s so horrible, Peter.
Whenever I’ve picked up the shop phone this week and heard silence on the other end of the line, it’s stunned me, punched through me like something aiming for my heart, and I’ve no doubt you’ve seen how it affects me.
I’m losing weight, Peter. I’m pale and I’m thinner than I used to be and I’m still losing weight — I can scarcely eat, and my eyes are horribly shadowed from lack of sleep, and I can’t so much as pick up a pen without trembling. Don’t you care about that? Won’t you stop until I look as dead as you do?
Even when I fall asleep for a little while, the dreams of you are so terrible — I dream of you alive and big and handsome and holding me, and the joy of it is so strong it is agonising in my sleep, and when I wake and it all goes away again, it hurts more badly than anything has ever hurt me before.
But for losing you the first time, that is.
Was it a kindness, calling all night, and stopping me from sleeping at all?
I couldn’t stand it, Peter. I really couldn’t stand it — there were tears in my eyes when I finally went to the phone in the hall and I thought I’d rip the unit off the wall, and my knees went weak as I fell against the hall table and held the phone in the crook of my shoulder and gripped at the phone wire, and I listened to the silence on the other end of the phone.
Could you hear me breathing, Peter?
I couldn’t hear you.
That’s the real cruelty of all this.
You make me feel like I’m going mad. I know that you’re there, but when I go to look, or listen, when I reply to you, and there is no sign that you’re there except that I know you’re there, it’s…
When does it stop, Peter?
When does it end?
Did you watch me as I sank down to the floor with the phone in my hand, and crawled to the front door, so that I could listen to the silence on the phone with one ear and know that you were on the other side of the door with the other, so that I knew you were there, and all around me, and still not there at all?
When I slept, I dreamt you were holding me.
I could have died right there.
Your beloved
As I finished the second letter, I could hear the laughter again in the chapel, and this time, I really could hear where it was coming from, could hear its soft echo from the belltower — it was louder than it should have been, because I don’t think, when the stairs were still there, that I’d’ve been able to hear it from down here.
It did sort of narrow down the window that the two lovers, Peter and his girlfriend, must have been alive for — they must have been alive before the stairs had crumbled in the belltower, so the letters were at least fifty years old, and that did make sense to me, what with the whole thing of secrecy.
I’m sure you’ve realised by now that Peter’s beloved was a man, but I didn’t even consider that at the time — stupid, I know, but I guess it just didn’t click in my head, forty years old, had never really been on a date with someone. It was the early noughties, you know, gays were making strides and all that, but for me, I still didn’t really think of us as being romantic — or if we were, I wasn’t part of it, and I wasn’t a fun, slutty gay either, I was just a guy with a cat and a limp, and there was nothing fun about that.
Maybe if this had all happened to me now, having met Gez, having been with him for so long — married and everything, which as you can imagine, my mother was thrilled about — I might have realised right away.
Or, maybe I wouldn’t have.
Gay or not, I’m kind of a stupid guy.
The laughter spooked me a little, and I folded the letter I’d just read and put it away, and I walked outside to lock up the side gates. It was getting darker and darker, and as I limped up the path, my lantern in the other hand. My hip was sorer than usual, that day — even though the horrible cold from that morning had faded away, I could still sort of feel the stiffness it had left behind, and the bone on that side felt heavier than on the other.
The silhouette of the man on the path didn’t surprise me, this time — no, that’s a lie, it did scare me, but I also expected it to be there. I didn’t stop walking, didn’t stop even for a moment: I just kept walking forward, and this time, it faded in front of my eyes, like how smoke dissipates.
I stood where the ghost had stood, and I faced the way he’d been facing, and I looked down at the grave closest to the path.
PETER DENBOROUGH, it said, LOVING BROTHER.
The dates were underneath: 26th May 1931–26th December 1959.
I don’t know how long I stood there for, staring down at that gravestone. A lot of the graves that were that old were a little messy and overgrown, but this one was well taken care of, I could tell. There was a bouquet of fresh flowers resting on the grass of the grave bed, and there was no moss or anything growing on the stone — it looked very clean.
I remember that struck me, somehow.
This’ll make me sound like a prick, but at the time I thought, God, imagine having someone love you enough to think you’re haunting them, and have someone else take care of your grave, to have two people who loved you like that. I knew that they were different, and that Peter’s beloved was dead.
I stood there for a long time, staring down at the headstone, and then I limped along and locked the other gate, but when I came back to the chapel, the lights were on inside again, and it scared me shitless until I crossed over the threshold and saw Arthur standing there.
“Pastor,” I said, and he turned to look at me, smiled. He was wearing his coat still, although it really wasn’t that cold inside, and the old man smiled at me as I came back inside.
“You really look a bit creepy with that lantern like that, you know, like a spectre,” he said quietly. “Your granddad used to use it for Halloween.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, putting it gently down on one of the pews.”
“You have the place looking well,” he murmured, gesturing to the room.
I’d managed to dust most of the cobwebs out of the eaves and off the beams with a mop on a long pole, as much as it had been a balancing act, and I’d done the same thing with the windows, cleaning off the marks and dust from the stained glass frescos; the pews were clean and I’d put a coat of wood polish on them, and beaten out the rug that ran up toward the stage so that it had gone back to being red instead of grey.
“There’s still a lot to do,” I said. “Are you here for anything in particular?”
“Oh, I saw the light, that’s all,” the pastor said, giving a wave of his hand. “I thought it was…” He trailed off, shook his head, and chuckled. “Well. I realised it was your lantern. You were out there for longer than usual.”
“I was looking at one of the graves,” I said. “Peter Denborough, did you know him?”
“Of course,” the old man said. “He died a few years before you were born, of course, you’d never have met him, and his sister doesn’t live in the village anymore, she just comes every few months to visit his grave. What made you look at him?”
“He died on Boxing Day,” I said, because it was true, and I had thought about it, and I thought it might make me sound a little less bonkers than if I said that I thought he’d been haunting me.
“Terrible thing,” Arthur said quietly, nodding his head in a slow, sage way. “It was a car accident — he was a solicitor, and he worked in… Oh, I don’t know, I don’t really remember anymore — in town, anyway, and he was driving back to the village. It was too wet for the snow to settle, but there was slush and ice on the roads. It was a horrible wreck. He was a bit like you, actually — a very nice young man, but…” He stumbled over his words for a second, before he settled on, “Unmarried.”
And then he smiled in a fragile, hurried way, like he was scared of hurting my feelings, but luckily for him, I was a fucking idiot, and didn’t understand what he was insinuating about me — or Peter Denborough — until I was home in bed that night.
I didn’t ask him about the letters just yet. It didn’t feel like the right time to.
I thought about Peter Denborough and his sister who loved him and the car accident he was in and his well-maintained gravestone and his beloved, and it wasn’t until after I was laid down in my bed, trying to convince Wodehouse that he shouldn’t put the whole of his weight directly on my throat, that I realised what the pastor said, and realised at the same time that I’d forgotten the letters at the church, and then the horrible, dead cold feeling set in again, and I couldn’t even struggle, and I laid like that all night, because I couldn’t break loose of it until the sun came up.
I cried when it let me free.
They weren’t tears of relief or anything like that — I cried so hard with terror and nausea and pained fear of the unknown that it hurt, that I felt like every tear squeezed out of me would bruise my cheeks, and I was late to work by a few hours.
Not that anyone noticed.
Not anyone alive, anyway.
Dear Peter,
It reminded me, last night, of the first time you taught me to dance.
You’d snuck into the shop by the back window when my mother and father were up in London — how I wish we could have had more moments like that together — and came up to my bedroom, and you put the needle delicately down against the vinyl, and you chalked out your steps on the ground so that I could follow them and do as you did.
It felt like that, last night.
Like you were stepping into the chalk marks I left on the floor, like you were shadowing me — like you were my ghost, instead of your own.
I could feel you there as I walked to and fro in the flat, and I knew that you were there, a hair’s breadth from me, and I was so certain if I simply turned my head I would see you out of the corner of my eye and know you to be there, but whenever I looked, I didn’t see you.
I don’t know if it is getting easier.
Will you be with me like this, always?
I don’t think I could bear it, Peter. You must go — you should go. This isn’t right.
Do you haunt Christine like this?
I couldn’t sleep last night, knowing you were there, standing over me, watching me, and I wanted more than anything for you to crawl into bed with me and wrap your arms around me and hold me and you didn’t, Peter, you just stood there and looked down at me, the way I stand over your grave sometimes when I know that Christine will be at work and won’t come by.
Mr Darvill is so kind to me, you know, the way he always was, but kinder than usual, and it seems to me that now you’re gone, he’s the only man in the world that knows who I am, and he barely knows anything about me at all.
I think he takes these letters when I leave them on your grave, Peter.
They’re never there when I walk by twice in a day.
That’s very good of him, I think. He always greets me by name when he sees me, and asks me in that sort of soft, quiet way that some people do how I am, but he’s the only one that knows that when I come into the cemetery every day, it isn’t my parents’ grave I linger by.
I miss you, Peter.
I miss you more and more, the more that you are with me. Even as I write this, I feel you hovering behind me, reading over my shoulder — Peter, I am so, so alone, and it’s only worse knowing you’re with me.
When you finally do go, I don’t know how I’ll cope.
Your beloved
Gez has run a bath for us, and if the idea of two old men crammed into a bath together sounds stupid and uncomfortable and ridiculous, you’d be right, but they’re also surprisingly nice, and he always plays some stupid television show on his iPad when we do it, and we drink a glass of wine together, and the hot soak of the water is good for my hip.
Hope you don’t take it personally, but a hot bath with my husband’s a bit more appealing right now than writing all this horrible stuff down to be read — and I know I started writing it and I know I have to write it down, or the dreams won’t ever stop again, but it’s hard.
It’s tough.
More soon.
Part 4
Dear Peter,
Sometimes when I read my books these days, I think about the way you would read to me — I think about the countless times we lay together in the belltower, the only warmth to be found in each other, my cheek rested on your chest, as you read aloud from whatever book I was reading and mocked every line in the same breath, but you always did it with such affection.
It never wounded me.
Sometimes, the way people talk about books like that, they do it with such scorn — they are disgusted by the delight with which so many people read them, criticise the women (and they only ever mention women) who read them, say that they are lacking in character or plot or craft, and it is so derisive that it does wound.
Not when you made fun of them, Peter.
It made me laugh, when you made fun.
You always sounded as affectionate about the books as I did.
Last night, as I locked the door to the shop, it took me by surprise when the music box began to chime its tune, and it shocked me so much it hardly even occurred to me to cry. I just stood there, stock-still, watched the little dancer spin in front of the mirror, listened to the song.
I can never remember what it’s called. Mozart or Beethoven or one of them, I know you told me, Peter, I know you told me a dozen times, but I don’t remember anymore what it was, and I hardly have anyone left I can ask.
Last night, when you sat on the bed beside me, I felt the mattress depress, and I didn’t dare open my eyes because I didn’t want you to rush away if I tried to look at you, and I wanted so badly to feel you warm on the bed beside me, but you weren’t cold, even — just there. I fell asleep imagining you were stroking my cheek, and woke again when you knocked on the walls so hard that dust fell from the rafters.
I miss you, Peter.
Your beloved
Dear Peter,
I saw Christine yesterday.
I didn’t know that she’d recognise me, not from the one time that she caught a glimpse of me climbing out of your bedroom window — perhaps she didn’t recognise me at all, but simply knew that there had been a man, that you’d had one.
I didn’t see her before she saw me. I was lost in my own world, standing over your grave and huddled in my coat, speaking under my breath to you, and she must have had a moment to rev up her engines, so to speak, because when she ran up to me it was with more fury than I’ve ever seen.
“Get the fuck away from him!” she screamed at me, like the harpy she always was. “You have no right, no right, get away from here!”
That wasn’t all she said, of course. She had a lot of other choice words besides, but they were the sort of words you never liked to hear — the sort of words you used to tell me you’d rinse out of my mouth, if you ever heard me repeating them.
It used to make me smile, when you said things like that.
I don’t really smile at anything anymore.
I know she’s your sister, Peter — I know you loved her, that you were always patient with her, but as much as she loved you, she hated what you were, what we were. But I don’t know how you used to stand it, the way that he was — I don’t know how you stand it now.
Perhaps that’s why you haunt me instead of her.
I hate to ache for you, Peter, the way that I do, desperate for you to touch me again and knowing that you won’t.
When you knocked on the door last night I ran so fast that I tripped on the rug, but I thought in the moment that if I couldn’t only get there fast enough, haul the door open fast enough, pull the phone off the receiver fast enough, answer you fast enough, that you might really, truly be there.
But you weren’t, Peter.
The hallway was as empty as always; the phone was as silent as always; I was alone as always.
It isn’t fair.
Your beloved
After work that day, I walked over to the church proper, and caught the end of the church choir’s rehearsal, watched all of them singing — they were readying Christmas carols leading up to the reason, and it sounded good to me, not that I knew anything about music at the time, or even know anything about it now.
Arthur was stood at the front, but he wasn’t the conductor — the conductor was a tiny old woman who had taught me maths at school, and as tiny as she was, she had lungs on her like a fucking bellows, could produce sound you’d never expect from someone her size.
When Arthur saw me, he looked at me with concern, raised his eyebrows as if to ask if I needed him right this second, but I shook my head, mouthed it was okay, and waited for them all to finish.
I heard someone call her Christine, and I turned to look at a tall, thin woman in a burgundy jumper, wearing pearls. She looked very neat and well put-together, but there was a gauntness in her cheeks like she didn’t get enough to eat.
“I’m going to go along to Peter now,” I heard her say to one of the other women, and I watched her friend step back to let her pass, watched her pick up a little box of flowers to put on his grave.
It had begun to drizzle outside, but that didn’t seem to deter her, and I said, “The side gates are locked, Miss. You’ll have to use the main gate.”
She sniffed at me, looking at me with a haughty look on her face, glancing down at my cane. “You’re Raymond Darvill’s boy. His grandson. I don’t see how anyone can dig graves with a cane.”
“Er, I don’t,” I said. “I’ve been cleaning up the chapel, and I keep the books in order. I used to be a postman.”
Something changed in her face, a sort of catch, and I watched her lips downturn slightly, saw the expression of something almost like sympathy as she glanced down at my cane again.
“Car accident,” I said.
She nodded, stoutly, and then she walked off very hurriedly, the block heels of her boots making a loud click-clack on the stone floors.
“She was very gentle with you,” said Arthur, and I huffed out a low, almost-laugh as I followed the old man toward his office, standing with my back toward the old halogen heater so I could let it warm my backside and my sore hip — the rain was tugging at it, it seemed to me, and making it worse than usual, that day.
“I wanted to, I wanted to ask you a question,” I said haltingly, tapping my fingers against the side of the cane’s handle, pressing against the varnished wood every few moments.
“Ask away,” Arthur said, sinking slowly down into his chair with a soft sigh.
“My granddad,” I said. “If he saw letters on a grave, what would he do with them?”
“Leave them,” the pastor said, looking at me funny, his thick, furry eyebrows furrowing together, like two kissing caterpillars. “He left everything on a grave as long as he could without it causing a problem.”
I looked at him. I don’t know what my face looked like, don’t know if it showed on my face what I wanted, what I expected him to say next, but I watched him sort of falter, his lips parting, and he looked at my all serious, concentrated, and then he slowly crossed his arms loosely over his chest, leaning back in his chair so that it gave a musical creak.
“This is about Peter Denborough,” he said slowly.
“Yeah,” I said. When he said nothing, I said, “You knew — You knew, right? About his boyfriend? He wrote letters. It looks like my granddad picked them up. To keep Christine from… You know.”
“Yeah,” Arthur said. “Yes. She’s not as volatile as she used to be.”
“Still a homophobe?”
“Don’t look at me,” Arthur said. “It’s not what I preach.”
I laughed, dragging my thumb over my lip, and then I asked, “Did you know about his boyfriend? At the time? Before he died?”
“Yes, I knew,” Arthur said. “I never knew who he was, but I knew that Peter had a regular… Whatever you want to call it. Christine mentioned it to me a few times, she wanted it to stop — it was illegal then, you understand. A lot of police would be very glad to… Well. It wasn’t talked about, and I think Christine had an understanding that she was well off enough that she could ensure Peter got away with everything his partner didn’t. She wanted to know what his name was, always asked me if I knew.”
“But you never did?”
“No,” Arthur said quietly.
“His parents were dead,” I said. “They both died, I think maybe the same year Peter did. Does that ring a bell?”
It was a subtle change in the pastor’s face. His eyebrows jumped up a tiny bit, his lips went sort of loose on his face, and I saw his eyes move a little, like he was studying something I couldn’t see — realising something I wouldn’t know anything about.
“No,” he said. “No, it doesn’t.”
I knew it was a lie, and I think that in that moment, he knew that I knew I was lying, but the two of us just stood there, looking at each other, and then I nodded again, wrapping my hand more solidly around the handle of my cane.
There was one final letter for me waiting at the chapel, and I was terrified to face another night as a corpse, so I didn’t go home, but walked back to the chapel and stepped inside. Christine was already gone by the time I went back to the graveyard, but I didn’t mind that.
I wouldn’t have to talk to her until later.
Dear Peter,
I can’t stand it, Peter.
I’ll die.
I’ll die if you keep doing this to me, and I’ll die so slowly, Peter, so torturously, of sleep deprivation or starvation or just of heartache, and I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it anymore, because I want you back so badly, I need you, and I feel like you’re just behind a shroud, just out of my grasp.
Do you remember, Peter, how we used to meet?
How I’d light a candle and sit with my book and when you came into the bell tower you’d blow out the candle, and in the dark, we’d be together again?
I know I mustn’t ask, Peter.
I know I mustn’t encourage it.
I know I told you you shouldn’t and that I didn’t want you to do this and I know I told you that you had to leave, but, Peter…
Tonight, Peter.
Tonight, I will light a candle in the bell tower, and I’ll wait for you, Peter.
Please, come.
And if you don’t, if you don’t, then…
Please.
I miss you, Peter. I love you, Peter.
I just need to know what the last page of our book together would have been — I just need to know that I’m not mad, that you’re there, really there, I just need a real sign, I need you, Peter.
I’m nothing without you.
I feel sometimes as if I am the ghost you’ve left behind.
Please come, Peter. Please.
Your beloved
I don’t know how long I stood there in my grandfather’s old office, turning the letters over again and again, rifling through their envelopes, looking at the back of the letters, trying to search for any kind of clue or hint as to what it all meant, what came next, but there wasn’t anything. Why would there be?
It was a collection of fucking letters from a grieving boyfriend, not a treasure hunt, but…
Well.
Well.
I saw through the office window the man standing over Peter’s grave, the same silhouette I had seen before, and I rushed to grab my helmet and stumbled as I limped as fast as I could out toward the door, and when I walked out under the rain, my cane and my boots both squelched in the grass.
The silhouette, the ghost, was still there as I walked up the path, until I got close enough, and then it faded away into mist again, like it had before, and I stood there, breathing heavily, feeling the cold, wet air in my lungs, feeling its sting on my cheeks.
Christine’s new flowers rested on Peter’s grave.
Maybe —
Maybe it had happened before. I would never have seen it from inside of the chapel, but all the times I’d walked the graveyard before, it had been early in the morning or in the evening — it was nearly nine o’clock now.
The candlelight in the belltower flickered slightly, as if someone was moving inside, and it sent a wave of tower running down my spine.
I didn’t know, for a second, what the Hell I was supposed to do, didn’t understand it, because the stairs had been destroyed, so how was I meant to get up there, how…? And it was like… I don’t know, it was light seeing it highlighted, somehow, light there was a spotlight — a car must have passed by, and the light shone on the building exactly where it was supposed to show.
All at once, I saw the low roof of the mausoleum, covered over with turf so that you could walk straight up onto it; I saw the thick, layered ivy up to the flat edge of the end of the chapel roof; I saw more ivy, thick and luscious and green, that led all the way up to the opening of the belltower.
No wonder it was their safe haven, if they started to meet up there after the stairs were gone.
I know it was crazy, and I know I shouldn’t have done it, especially not with my hip, but I did — climbing up onto the mausoleum roof was easy, but climbing the ivy up to the first roof and then to the other was probably the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life. The ivy held as I climbed it, and although I could feel the leaves shift under the weight of my hands and my feet, as I moved up through it, it didn’t tear away even slightly from the wall, the ivy was so tightly embedded, so strongly rooted against it.
My hands trembled as I climbed. My hip ached, and the higher I climbed, the keener the pain got. It wasn’t really a tall climb at all — like I told you at the start, the actual tower wasn’t much taller than a normal house — but I wasn’t ever an athlete, and I couldn’t even climb trees as a kid, let alone fucking walls.
It hurt.
By fuck, it hurt, hurt more and more and more, and yet somehow, the roaring, screaming pain on the whole of one side of my body as I forced myself to climb higher, shoved myself flat again the building, it drove me onward.
It was agonising, that pain, but it was nothing like the cold, throbbing pain I’d felt in my waking, haunted nightmares — this was a hot, searing pain, and it made me know I was alive.
When I got to the top of the belltower, there was a kind of outer ledge I could get my knees onto, and I rested my hands against the ledge that was a little higher than my head — the edge of the bell tower’s room, or entrance, whatever you wanted to call it. I was breathing heavily, and I could taste the torch that I’d decided to carry in my mouth like some idiot cop in an action movie, and it tasted fucking awful, like rubber and salt.
I hauled myself on shaking, pained legs to look into the bell tower.
The lit candle rested on a little dish, flickering slightly in the wind, and it illuminated the room, which I realised now must have been over the bell itself — there was a gap in the centre of the floor where the chain suspended from the frame at the top of the ceiling went through, and I could see the top loop of the bell through the gap. This room, with wooden floors, was on top of the bell itself.
Beloved’s corpse was staring at me from sightless eye sockets, empty. It wasn’t a skeleton just yet — the body was shrivelled and rotted and old, but it didn’t smell like anything except a sort of musty sweetness, and cobwebs, and dust. The body had a mildewed old book in its lap, was wrapped in blankets, and I stared at it, stared for —
I don’t know how long.
But not long enough that the candle’s wick had burned down, and not long enough for a sudden gust of wind.
The candle went out, and the tower was plunged into darkness.
I think I screamed as I fell.
The most remarkable thing about it, I suppose, is that I didn’t have to go to the hospital afterward. I’d had a soft landing somehow, despite the height of the fall, and I had a few bruises on me, but that was all.
When I called the police, they didn’t really believe me, and I had to limp into town the next morning to get one of the constables to come along, and Joel, the kid who actually dug the graves, managed to get a cherry picker for us, to bring us up to the bell tower without needing a ladder.
I don’t think PC Plod had seen a dead body before, because he vomited over the side of the picker’s trough, and there was something artistic about the way the spatter fell all the way down to the grass.
I don’t want to tell you his name.
He never signed it, and I feel like it’d be wrong, somehow, to put it out there when he never wanted it put out there, but I’m sure, like anything else, if you really wanted to know it you could probably find it out.
His parents had died, like I’d suspected, in ’59, in February of that year, of carbon monoxide poisoning after some sort of leak in their flat, which was above the antique shop in town. When he disappeared, the sad thing was, no one ever noticed. I think he must have gone up there in February or March, but it wasn’t mentioned in the local police reports until July.
It wasn’t anything unkind, it wasn’t intentional — I don’t think so, anyway.
It was just that beloved was telling the truth, when he said Peter was the only connection he’d had left. It seems like people noticed the shop was shut, but everyone just assumed he’d gone off somewhere, and run away. The police report at the time described him as shy, sweet but insular, not comfortable with people.
I tried to tell Christine.
I went up to her, with the letters — the cops refused to take them, what with how they weren’t signed or anything, so they didn’t count as evidence — I tried to explain, to explain that…
Ah, fuck it.
I don’t know what I’d have explained to her, and it doesn’t matter either way: she told me to fuck off, and she called me, I’m sure, a lot of the names she’d called beloved.
For years, I was alright.
I met Gez down in London while on a weekend retreat with my parents, and despite the fact that I told him this from the get-go — almost shamelessly — he fell instantly in love with me, and we’ve been together ever since.
Disclaimer: that’s not exactly, or even at all, how it happened, but the result is the same.
The nightmares started about a year or two after that.
They were intermittent, at first, once or twice a year, and then they happened more often… This year, they’ve been every week. They weren’t the corpse dreams, mostly — I would dream at first that Gez was almost there but I couldn’t touch him, couldn’t feel him, couldn’t see him, but that he was there, just out of my reach, and it was agonising.
But this year, the corpse dreams started happening again.
I knew the whole time I needed to write it down, I knew that I…
They wanted it told, I think, one way or the other.
They wanted those letters read.
I think about it, regularly, I think about it, ’cause it’s fucked up.
I love Gez. I love him fiercely, powerfully — I love him in a way I never expected to fucking love anything, anybody, and it’s a kind of hot feeling in my chest whenever I look at him, whenever I think of him, and I know he loves me too.
And I read beloved’s letters to Peter, sometimes, and I think about the fact that in those letters, there’s never any proof he was being haunted at all.
No friends. No family. No one who’d be able to vouch for if he was acting normal or not, if Peter was an actual ghost with him, or if he was just a grieving man gone crazy with grief.
You could say I was crazy, too, and maybe I was, but I do think what I experienced was a haunting, simply because I had to discover things as I went, because I ended up at the end with a corpse — if it was a haunting, I’m uncomfortably prophetic, and I’d rather it was the first thing.
I was haunted. But was beloved?
I don’t know.
As I finish this up, I’m watching Gez.
He’s fallen asleep on the sofa with Wodehouse collapsed like a ton of chubby bricks on top of him. He’s still got his reading glasses on even though he knows it leaves a horrible imprint in the side of his face when he sleeps like that, and his phone is dangling from his hand.
They couldn’t find a cause of death for Peter’s beloved. The body wasn’t well preserved, even though it was put together — it could have been a heart attack, an aneurysm, a heart attack, anything. I wonder sometimes if Peter killed him, or if he just died of grief.
I wouldn’t want to do that to Gez — I wouldn’t want to haunt him, and I don’t think he’d want to haunt me, but if he did, would I go crazy with it? Would I die of it? If I was dead and Gez was still alive, would I torture him so much that he died, just so we could be together?
I hope not.
But I love him, you know. I love him so much, sometimes, I love him so much that I could…
Maybe I won’t show him this part.
I feel so… relieved, having written all that down. Like I’m finally free, somehow.
Like it’s over.
Thanks for reading.
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