The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

MEMENTO MORI by Scott Thomas

“A skull with wings!” Rachel called out.

Aunt Maura poked up from behind a nearby tombstone and rushed over. She nodded approvingly, her eyes grinning.

“It’s beautiful,” the younger woman said. She dipped her knees into the morning dew and tore a sheet from a large roll of paper. Careful hands pressed the paper over the relief carving, and fastened it with masking tape. She chose a black bar of wax from a portable art box and began rubbing.

“What’s the year?” Maura asked.

“I can’t tell, it’s too worn. Seventeen something.”

The skull seemed to emerge from the paper as the wax rasped back and forth—gray at first—then darker. Rachel worked intently, leaning close with squinted eyes, biting her lower lip.

For the past three Saturdays, Maura and her niece had ventured out in search of long-forgotten burial grounds such as this. “Grave-robbing missions,” Aunt Maura joked fondly.

Winding New England back roads, dense with autumn colors, led them to solemn huddles of leaning slate—overgrown and secretive—each with the promise of treasures, like the skull carving. Though their friends teased them about their ‘morbid’ excursions, their mutual love of history and folk art compelled them like a hunger.

Maura watched her niece at work for several minutes before wandering off. The stillness of the place was calming. Would the Puritan settlers who created this resting ground have shared her friends’ opinions about her interest? Would they, too, have joked mockingly? Perhaps they had superstitiously avoided coming to these places except when there were dead to bury. She wondered. It wasn’t so much a mood of death which she sought from the old cemeteries; she was here to get a feel for the lives of her Colonial ancestors. The symbols, the names, the epitaphs spoke of more than an end to life.

Leaves crackled dryly beneath her steps as acorns pattered sporadically in the surrounding woods. An occasional squirrel darted, brief and gray. Rattlesnake whispers of soon-to-fall leaves rode gently on the sun-warmed air, there was still a snap of chill in the breeze.

The middle-aged woman neared the edge of the graveyard where the grinning giant’s teeth of a crumbling stone wall attempted to hold back the encroaching forest. She noticed a winged cherub on one tilting stone and knelt to read the inscription:

In memory of Mary Warren, beloved wife of Henry. February fourteenth, seventeen seventy-two. Age fifty-five years. Upton, Massachusetts.

Below this information, caked with fingerprints of yellow-green lichen read an unusual epitaph:

Dearest friends, weep for me not, when my cold grave you view and see. As you are now, so once was I. Prepare for death, for you must die.

A large smile came to Maura’s face, her eyes crinkling with excitement. She had variations of this verse in books about gravestones and their sayings, but this was her first personal encounter. Deft hands pulled a piece of paper from a roll. She smoothed it carefully over the impassive winged face…

Rachel rose with a sigh and smoothed back her red hair. She scanned the little graveyard for her companion. Nothing but leaning stones and the trembling shadows of breeze-inspired trees. No Maura.

“Auntie?”

Rachel set down her completed rubbing and moved off through the stones. Salmon-colored leaves crunched while those clinging on a nearby tree fluttered like nervous insect wings.

“Auntie?”

No reply. The edge of the cemetery was close now. Something white suddenly fluttered out from behind a stone and pressed against her legs. Rachel gave a startled gasp, but looking down, saw it only to be a piece of rubbing paper. Then she noticed her aunt’s prone form poking out from behind the grave.

“Oh, Christ! Auntie?”

Heart pounding, Rachel ran over to where the older woman lay. Maura’s eyes and mouth were open, impassive, as though she were stunned. He complexion was no more healthy than that of the silently watching gray cherub.

“Auntie Maura! Auntie… Oh God, no!”

She bent down. Maura’s head flopped listlessly as Rachel shook her by the shoulders. Maura was dead.

It was less than an afterthought, more of a chance gesture when Rachel, in the midst of sobbing, glanced down at the crumbled rubbing Maura had been doing. The stoic cherub was there, and then were words below it, but larger than the finely chiseled script on the stone. They looked as if someone had scrawled them by hand.

Rachel shuddered. The paper read: Maura—help! My children are burning! They are dying!

Another busy day in Westborough. Neatly dressed professionals clogged the center of the once-small town with shiny compact cars. Rachel, wearing a heavy sweater and fluid white skirt, walked from her apartment on South Street to the old building with the sign that read: Past Presents: Antiques, Crafts, and Gifts.

The air inside was filled with scented candles and potpourri. Chairs, tables, spinning wheels, and other expensive clutter took up the major part of the floor. Off to the sides there were displays of candle holders, dolls, pottery, dried flower arrangements, and wreaths of herbs and grapevines. One wall formed an upright cemetery of framed rubbings. Death’s heads and cherubs stared dully, some blurred ghostly by the passage of time and the elements. There were samples of the urn and willow motif, one with a bird, and another of a sailing ship.

Rachel alone now ran the shop she and her aunt had started a year earlier. It wasn’t the same. The antiques seemed saturated with loneliness, the rubbings more dour-faced. Hours passed more slowly.

Sleigh bells on the door rang as a woman in bland business garb came in, hastily leading a child by the hand. Her eyes passed unabsorbingly over the merchandise and fixed on Rachel.

“Can you tell me where Tech-Supply is?”

Rachel smiled politely and pointed toward the front window. “Right across the rotary. On the other side.”

“Thanks.”

The woman yanked her daughter along as she made for the door.

“Mommy—look.” She had spotted the rubbings. “Those are creepy!”

The door banged, leaving the scent of the woman’s synthetic-smelling perfume to hold Rachel’s stomach in an acrid vice.

“Have a nice day,” Rachel said to the door.

She looked over at the grave art. Creepy the little girl had said. Rachel thought so, too, as a child. Then she came to appreciate the stones as relics of ancient American art. Now the blinkless dull eyes, captured there in wax, gave her a feeling that could be accurately labeled as creepy.

It was folded up in the bottom drawer of the counter where the cash register sat. She had tried to forget it, tried not to contemplate it. Trembling fingers eased the drawer open, paused, then lifted it out and gently unfolded it.

Maura—help! My children are burning! They are dying! The words were still there, broken and pitted as if the wax had captured the nuances of aged carvings.

Had her aunt somehow written it in the delirium of her fatal stroke? Would she have had time? There was no way Rachel could be reading it wrong, and the moss on the epitaph could not be blamed for what seemed to be reproduced here. What other explanation could there be?

There were even less leaves on the trees now as Rachel drove through a tunnel of yellow-speckled branches. She passed a farm on the left, the vegetable stand with pumpkins heaped like orange cairns. A cornfield with a scarecrow like a skeletal rag-strewn puppet.

The trees closed in again as she sped past the entrance to the state forest. Farther; faster. There was no gate to announce the graveyard, not even a dirt path. She parked the car by the side of the road and climbed the slope through rasping leaves.

The grave was leaning, as though tired from so many years of standing. The dull stare of the winged head showed no recognition of the approaching woman. Rachel hesitated, all too conscious of the roll of rice paper in her hand. Curiosity overrode her fear.

She taped the thin sheet to the lichen-scabbed surface and a quivering hand moved the black wax over the surface. The relief of the cherub came through, and below that the name Mary Warren, followed by the date of her demise. But when Rachel worked the wax lower, over the cryptic epitaph, large printed letters showed.

Rachel!—it read—Help us!

The woman shrieked. Leaves shivered and danced as a gust of cool breeze whisked the paper away.

“My God—that can’t be! It can’t!”

She pulled off a fresh sheet of paper and repeated the process. This time letters spelled out: please help… I’m so very ill. Fever. Always dying…

Rachel tore off the paper, tossed it aside; didn’t bother taping the next on. The message continued: Rachel, help!

“Where are you? How… can I help?”

Another sheet of paper, more words emerged beneath the frantic strokes of wax:

Trapped here, we are… Forever dying. My children are burning! Help me, please!

“No, I’m going crazy. This can’t be real!” Rachel stammered aloud.

She found herself on her feet, running for her car.

Pine Grove Cemetery was sterile looking compared to the old Colonial burial yards. Modern graves were squat glossy marble things, their surrounding ornamental shrubs pruned, the grass short. Paved paths meandered through the rows.

A shrill cry came from abruptly stopped tires. Rachel sprang from the vehicle and ran to where a marker overlooked the dull sod of a fresh burial. The name Maura Gould was carved into glassy polished marble.

“This is insane,” Rachel muttered to herself, even as she ripped free a sheet from her paper tube and fished the rubbing wax from her denim shoulderbag. She moved the wax vigorously back and forth. Her mind was whirling. Had some latent psychic ability to communicate with the dead suddenly awakened in her? Had her preoccupation with the places of the dead tuned her into some world beyond?

She scrubbed so hard, the paper began to tear, yet all that showed was her aunt’s name and the dates of her birth and death.

A metallic whirring sound and peripheral motion made her turn to the nearby road. A young couple passed on ten speed bikes, both in black Spandex pants, and T-shirts of noxiously bright orange and green and small strapped-on plastic helmets. They looked at her as though she were an alien. Rachel pulled the paper free and crushed it into a ball. She leaned her head against the grave and sobbed.

The phone rang.

Rachel’s voice answered softly, “Hello?”

“Hi. I tried your house. Open late tonight, or what?”

It was Paul, a computer programmer from Southborough whom she’d been dating for several months.

“No, I’m just hanging around. Cleaning and stuff.”

“Ohhh. Well, hey, how ’bout goin’ out for a bite? You haven’t already eaten, I hope?”

“No. Ummm, I’m sorry, Paul, but I’m pretty tired tonight. Would tomorrow be okay?”

Disappointed sigh. Silence, then: “Yeah, okay. Talk to you later, then.”

“Bye.”

Rachel dropped the receiver into the cradle and sat back. An audience of flat wax faces watched her from the wall. She went through the drawers of her cashier’s counter in search of a flashlight and finally decided to take one of the lanterns that were for sale.

Animated leaves swam through the headlights. Broken pools of them sat here and there while others crawled about carried on the October wind. Rachel was so agitated that several times she nearly stomped on the brakes, mistaking the frolicking things for darting animals.

The road to the burial ground was long and, at this hour of the night, rarely traveled. She passed the farm, the pumpkin stacks now covered with dark tarps, the cornfield rushing along on her left, the scarecrow of crucified rags and straw.

A few of the headstones came into view as Rachel parked by the side of the road. She lit the lantern and gathered her art supplies. Outside it was cold enough to warrant a winter jacket. She would have liked to wear gloves, though they’d impede her.

Noisy leaves on the slope that led up from the road told of her coming, the heavy tree limbs above leaned down to listen. The lantern was not as direct as a flashlight would have been, its glow was soft and squirmed liquidlike over the stones that emerged from the darkness to greet her.

Mary Warren’s stone waited at the edge of the graveyard. Rachel forced herself near, holding the lantern out ahead of her, as if it might ward away the spectral forces. The flame shone weakly on the cherub’s inscrutable features.

Rachel set the lamp down and held the paper to the cool, hard slate.

“I… I’m back. Are you there?” The young woman’s voice strained.

She moved the wax across the paper.

Yes…

“What do you want?”

Rachel, help!

“Your children are burning, you said. But they aren’t dead?”

She was nearing the bottom of the paper. More letters appeared, as if scrawled into the stone and picked up by the wax. They read: Yes. A terrible fire. Dead, but forever here… forever dying!

Rachel shuddered. She replaced the paper.

“I don’t understand.”

Try other stones, the paper said.

Rachel turned to the nearest monument and rustled over to it. A plasma of bronze jelly squirmed on it, cast by the lantern. She held up a piece of paper to the surface.

“Is anyone there?”

Yes—Jonathan Cushing, here. I’m bleeding. Bleeding to death forever.

“Why? I don’t understand.”

The wax felt warm in the woman’s palm; she wiped hard against the slate.

This place—something here, in these stones, holds us here… forever dying!

“Dear God,” Rachel gasped. “What can I do?”

Break the stones…

Rachel thought of something. Quickly she turned back to the grave with the solemn winged face—the stone her aunt had been working on when she died, or was frightened to death.

“Auntie… are you there?”

Her heart drummed, the wax streaked, words showing through the dark.

Rachel, I’m here. My head hurts. Break the stones!

Rachel dropped the wax. She ran to the stone wall and tried to lift one of its components. Too heavy. Smaller stones rested at the base, semi-interred. She worked one loose, the smell of autumn soil thick, a centipede pouring like a bony ring across a finger. Back to the slates; she heaved the thing.

There was a loud crack. The top of the slate fell, the cherub split. Rachel grunted, again tossed the stone. The other grave fell backward and broke. She continued, feverish now, smashing with passion. Headlights swept past, blinding her for a moment. They must have seen! She didn’t care.

She was panting, sweating in her heavy winter coat. Most of the slabs had been downed or broken to some extent. Rachel fell to her knees, dizzy from exertion. She would rest a moment, then finish.

A stone to the right of her bore a grim-faced male with wings for ears. In the dim light, through her lightheadedness, Rachel watched as a smoky face seeped out through the solid one.

“Oh, my God!”

She turned; the woods stretched off behind her with three silhouetted graves in between. A dark figure moved. It was tall, stepping slowly without sound up the embankment.

Rachel got to her feet and stared. Mist, motion—something at the base of one of the shattered tombstones. Watery, details coming into focus. A face of squirming dust motes, burial clothes, and air smearing hands.

“Oh… oh, Christ!”

More and more of them, rising up, moving toward her. A shadowy man, an old woman hobbling, bearing a great toothless grin, a moon-pale little boy with arms offering a hug. There! Aunt Maura, her eyes grinning with gratitude—visible from the waist up, moving through the grass as if wading through a swamp.

It was too much. Rachel turned to run. Her feet on night moistened leaves—she slipped, her weight hitting hard against the base of one of the tall stones.

The remaining graves were illuminated by momentary flashes of blue light. The police car was parked behind Rachel’s and two officers stood amidst the destruction. They’d arrived too late to witness the misty evacuation of freed souls. They did, however find the vandal a passing motorist had reported. In her rampage, she had foolishly tripped over one of the leaning slates, which now lay across her chest.

One of the men shined a flashlight down into her face. The eyes were open, the mouth slack and ajar. Like the stone death’s head on the grave that she wore, she did not blink.