What the Night Knows

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

Three weeks after the mountain lion acknowledged his status, the boy found the graveyard in a clearing surrounded by a wall of pines.

He had crossed this ground often during the years that he was apprenticed to the night. Nothing about it previously intrigued him.

The oval clearing measured about sixty feet end to end, forty at its widest point. Wild grass tended to be long and silky. Here it was scrubby, bristling, growing every which way instead of in the uniform fashion ordained by rain, by prevailing winds, and by the predominant angle of sunlight. The grass wasn’t aggressive enough to choke off invading weeds, and the earth was soft underfoot.

He entered the clearing in a peach-and-scarlet twilight and therefore couldn’t overlook the digging that had been done recently by an industrious animal, perhaps a wolf or a bobcat, or possibly a pack of raccoons. Strewn in a patch of torn raw earth were human bones. A complete skeletal hand missing only the end phalange of the thumb. The radius and ulna of a forearm.

As the twilight bled away, the boy stood beside the excavation, staring at those bones, which in the purple shadows seemed to glow as if irradiated. The stars came out before he turned away from the evidence—this must be more than mere remains—and made his way back to the house.

A secluded building with stone walls and embrasured windows, well removed from the main house, served as the estate workshop, containing woodworking machines, numerous tools, and the landscaper’s equipment. Teejay, patriarch and sportsman, also kept his hunting and fishing gear in this structure.

The boy found a Coleman lantern in a carrier with a can of fuel, a packet of spare cloth mantles, and a box of wooden matches. He took this carrier, a spade, a pick, and, under a rising moon, returned with them to the distant clearing in the woods.

He sensed the raven high in flight, but he heard only a conclave of owls hooting to one another from their different podiums in the surrounding forest.

By the ghostly light of the hissing gas lantern, the boy mined the shallow grave with care. He proceeded cautiously not out of any respect for the deceased but because of concern that he might miss or destroy something that identified the remains. He had no intention of bringing in the police. He hoped to ID the dead only to satisfy his curiosity. The body appeared to have been interred in a pit no deeper than three to four feet.

To hasten decomposition and to counteract any malodor that would attract animals, the corpse had been laid in a thick bed of powdered lime and covered with a lush blanket of the stuff. The white lime had caked, hardened, combined with other minerals to form crystals, and become veined with yellow and gray. But it did the job. The bones were clean and bleached.

On close inspection, some bones were pitted, as well—pitted, pocked, etched with peculiar whorls. This suggested the murderer’s recipe called for acid of some kind to be added to tenderize, to hasten decomposition.

The skull revealed death by bludgeoning, both parietal bones having been staved in. The brain that had been pierced by shards of the skull was long gone to poisoned soil. Only a few scraps of rotted clothing remained. But perhaps the body had been interred many years earlier.

For whatever reason the raccoons or other animals had burrowed into the grave, they had not been drawn by the scent of carrion. As he dug, the boy could detect nothing other than a faint persistent odor of lime, a separate and fainter astringent scent that might have arisen from the breakdown of the acid, and underneath all, the smell of damp earth.

Carrying the lantern, he searched the clearing and gradually came to see the subtle waffle pattern of regular depressions that time, weather, and snarls of scraggly grass couldn’t entirely disguise. He had found not one grave, not evidence of just a single crime, but an entire graveyard without headstones, with no memorial flowers except for the stunted blossoms on the stems of withered weeds.

He was much stronger now than when, years earlier, the raven had selected him, and the earth was soft. He dug faster, with less care than before.

The well-limed earth disgorged the remnants of those on whom it previously had gorged. In every case, there were no fragments of a casket, only bones, scraps of fabric, the rubber soles of dissolved shoes.

The boy found three deteriorated skulls of babies killed so soon after birth that the fontanel of each, the soft spot at the top of a newborn’s head, had not yet closed and hardened. Infant bones were too soft to survive long in a grave. There were only a few smooth white discs and lozenges, like water-worn stones, that might have been fragments of hip bones and scapulars.

The third adult skeleton was not the last waiting to be found, but the boy didn’t disinter a fourth. No flesh remained on these bones, either, but he knew how long the deceased had been resting in this hole. Seven years, two months, and a few days.

As this was the most recently interred of his discoveries, the scraps of clothing not yet dissolved were larger and retained more color than those in other graves. He recognized the dress that his mother had been wearing the last day he had seen her.

The boy stood over this discovery for a while, considering his life in the guest house with his mother, comparing it to his life in the tower after she apparently abandoned him.

Long ago the owls had moved on to feed in moonlit fields, and the surrounding forest seemed to be asleep and dreaming.

The lantern hissed as if calling serpents to it, and the mantles—incombustible little bags filled with gaslight—pulsed softly.

The boy did not tremble, although he watched his shadow shiver slightly across the stunted grass and the excavated earth of the secret graveyard.

The light played masquerade with his deformed shoulders and with his misshapen head, costuming his shadow in a robe and cowl. When he lifted the pick, the shadow appeared to lift a scythe.

The boy wasn’t the goat-legged, horned god of anything, as once he wished to be. He was Death, and just being Death might be a most satisfying life.