One-Handed Rob
By Ora Leone
“Stop banging on the lid!”
Sir Wilbur Wilberforce - or at least, the life-emanating remainder of the man - shifted in his dry bones and rolled a mangled eye socket in his wife’s direction.
“What?” Even his voice was desiccated, but at one hundred and fifty years old, that was not surprising.
“I said, stop that banging!”
“My dear,” Sir Wilbur sighed, “I have not had the inclination, let alone the equipment, to bang anything in a long, long time. Let me sleep, would you?”
Mildred Wilberforce wasn’t the sort of woman to give in without a fight. Even in Life, she always had the last word (which usually fell on deaf ears, but that suited her fine) and on this Hallows’ Eve she was no different.
“Wilbur. If you weren’t making that noise, then who was?”
He peeled open the other eye and attempted to fix it in the same direction as the first - before he recalled it was a glass eye.
“What noise? What are you on about, woman?”
Then Wilbur heard it. A loud, incessant rhythm coming from Above. Not above Above, but outside, above ground. It was muffled but still blaring and repetitive.
“That’s…” A frown beetled across his brow, dislodging a maggot. His foot tapped in time, almost of its own accord, as he struggled to remember. “Music. I think it’s meant to be music, dear.”
Mildred snorted. “Hah! Call that music? In my day, it had a tune.”
“Yes, dear,” Wilbur said wearily.
“It sounds like a factory mashing up a load of cats.”
“Mmm.”
“Where do you suppose it’s coming from?”
“Mmm.”
“I mean, who would want to live near a graveyard? Graveyards are for the Dead.”
“Mmm.”
“You’re not listening to me, are you?”
“Ahh.”
“BLACKBERRY TARTS!”
Wilbur nearly shoved the top of his head through the coffin lid.
“Ugh. What about tarts?”
“I had to do something to get your attention!”
Not for the first time, Wilbur wished that someone had had the consideration to bury them in separate boxes.
“For goodness’ sake. It’s not midnight yet. Go to sleep, will you?”
Moving into an old vicarage, once you’d gotten married in a church, was a bit much if you weren’t religious, in George’s opinion.
Not that you could tell it was an old vicarage - apart from the bland, slightly fusty décor and the outside toilet, the place was just like any other house, that is if the house you were thinking of had a late-night party taking place in it. It was full of all sorts of interesting people, but George wasn’t getting too excited. When his new wife shouted in his already tinnitus-ransacked eardrum about these “interesting people” he knew she really meant “drunk, embarrassing relatives” and that they would probably both regret it in the morning.
Naturally he kept his mouth closed concerning the not-being-religious part. He wanted to keep Susan happy. Susan was a Christian. Her father was a Reverend, which injected a lot more stress into the wedding procedure - because he was the one who had married them.
“Darling!” Susan yelped above the cacophony.
“Yes?”
“Would you go over and keep Dad company while I just nip to the loo? He’s all by himself and he’s a bit - you know - funny with other people.”
George’s heart sank a notch. Yes, and the Reverend was there, mooching in a far corner next to one of the DJ’s speaker stacks and the window, like a heartsick teenager in jeans and a dog collar.
“Right-ho, Suze.”
“And make sure he doesn’t touch the drink. You know - his problem.”
George did indeed know the Reverend Jones’s problem. Let the man have a sip of wine and he’d end up insulting the guests with his “observational humour” and completely trashing the place. Not that the place in question wasn’t already trashed. More than half the guests were, and the rest of them were wasted anyway.
“Oh, well,” George murmured and prepared to keep his father-in-law dubious company. “Onwards and upwards.”
Dim moonlight cracked into the narrow space as someone lifted the Wilberforce’s lid.
“Hiya.”
Mildred snapped, “Wake us up at midnight, boy!”
Wilbur dragged himself into a sitting position, crackled, popped and groaned. He glared balefully at the moon. “It is midnight.”
“Urgh.”
“Let me guess. You don’t feel like getting out of the crypt. Well, it’s your own fault for not sleeping when I told you to, dearest. You can’t go gallivanting around late in the afternoon. You’re not as young as you once were.”
“Ha!” Mildred bolted upright, groped for her head and screwed it around the correct way. “You’re even older than I am!”
“Enough jaw ache.” Wilbur turned to the young dead man hovering patiently by the sarcophagus. As he was the most recent occupant of that cemetery, the young man had the honour of being the Gatekeeper. It fell on his scrawny shoulders to wake the inhabitants up at midnight on Halloween, until another newbie showed up to take his place.
“…Rob, isn’t it?” Wilbur asked. “Have the others risen?”
The boy nodded.
“Rob?” Mildred snorted. “What kind of a name is Rob?”
“Shh. Don’t hurt his feelings.”
Robert, as far as Sir Wilbur could remember, had been a suicide. He didn’t think it proper to mock that sort of Dead folk. It had an unpleasant way of backfiring.
The loud disco music continued to pound. It made their ribcages rattle, quite audibly.
“This isn’t proper,” Mildred said. “They should show some respect for their neighbours, not to mention their elders and betters.”
“Elders, certainly,” Wilbur muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing at all, dear.”
Rob chortled. “I recognise this song. They played it at my twenty-first. I bet that makes you feel old!”
Mildred took a spider out of her ear and ate it thoughtfully. She did not appear to have heard the dig.
“This isn’t right,” she reiterated. “We’re the ones who are supposed to be bothering them with noises, not the other way around. Something ought to be done.”
“All right, mate?” George sat down on the sofa opposite the maudlin father-of-the-bride. The best way to deal with Jonesie, as George affectionately termed the man in the privacy of his own brain, was to act as if you had inhaled a gallon of happy pills. Otherwise, Jonesie could deflate you completely.
“You know, I don’t approve of this sort of wedding reception, really.”
“Oh!” George knew he was trying to sound sincere, yet failing miserably. “Why?”
“All this.” Jonesie indicated the room with a sweep of a mournful arm. “This is meant to be after a wedding. What do we get? A re-enactment of a nineteen-nineties Manchester nightclub, only all the guests are in dresses and tuxedos. It’s just not right. Something ought to be done.”
“When we told you we were having a DJ, you didn’t seem to mind,” George pointed out.
“Yes, but I thought that everyone would conduct themselves with a little more decorum and respect for the dead.”
George could feel the conversation rapidly spiralling out of his control. “The graveyard, you mean? Jone - er, mate, they’re dead. They can’t hear anything.”
“God works in mysterious ways,” Jonesie said, his expression doleful.
“Take a night off, can’t you?” George said, with feeling. Perhaps he was more inebriated than he thought he was. “Lighten up. The dead are gone, and the living are still here. All there is to it.”
Inside, George blanched, expecting Jonesie’s mouth to drop open and damn him to Hell, or at least somewhere warmer. Instead, the Reverend sat up a little straighter and a light glimmered in the recesses of his eye sockets. Could this be enthusiasm?
“There is a Heaven and there is a Hell,” the Reverend spoke with conviction. “Between those, are the places where the lost get left behind.”
George, not expecting that last remark, sat forward. “You mean Purgatory? I thought that was only for Catholics.”
“No. I don’t mean Purgatory. I mean places on the Earth. Those who can’t be Saved remain.”
George’s interest dulled into resigned disgust. “You mean ‘non-believers’? Yeah. Right. You’ll be telling me you believe in Ouija boards and séances next.”
The Reverend bowed his head. “I warn you, They can hear.”
An intoxicated great-aunt - one of Susan’s, presumably, because George could not recognise her - tumbled over the back of the couch and landed in his lap, shrieking with mad glee, her dentures protruding and starting to come unstuck. This grated further on his nerves.
“If you want the volume turned down, why can’t you just say?” he snapped in Jonesie’s direction. Then, not thinking, “Chill out a bit. Talk to people. Have a bloody drin - Oh.”
The light in Reverend Jones’s eyes continued to sparkle. “You know what, George? I think I will.”
Silently, George cursed himself.
Mildred and Wilbur left the confines of their sepulchre, followed by Rob. Evergreen Cemetery, in the light of the moon, was positively cosmopolitan on that night. On the gravel paths between the headstones milled the Dead - neighbours, friends and even a few family members who they had not seen since the last October the thirty-first. There was a great deal of catching up to do, and the small gangs of eidolons and other ghasts grouped chatting around memorial stones and trees proved that fact.
“We must find the Rambles,” Mildred said. “I haven’t had the chance to finish the debate I was having with whatsherface - Natty. She really thinks she’s It when she isn’t, and it gets up my nose.”
“Who were you arguing with, dear?” Wilbur said, distracted by the shambling corpse of his ex-lawyer, who carried his head in his hands, occasionally giving it an anxious juggle.
“I was not arguing. Ladies don’t argue,” Mildred retorted. “And don’t think of contradicting me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Another ear-blistering, hyperactive track started up from the old house on the other side of the cemetery hedge. The laughter and talking of the Dead - and the odd ironic groan - rattled to a halt, then began afresh with a puzzled urgency to it.
Sir Wilbur’s decapitated lawyer passed them again on his midnight stroll.
“I say,” his head said, blinking up at them from his hands. “What’s that racket? God-awful.”
“Music, innit?” Rob chimed in. “It’s a remix of, er…actually I don’t remember.”
“You’re exactly right,” Mildred said to the old lawyer, who had been affectionately nicknamed Mr. God-awful within his first week of being Dead. “It is a god-awful racket. My darling husband was going to have a word with them, weren’t you dearie?”
If it is possible for a cadaver to go pale, that is what Sir Wilbur did.
“Mustn’t be too reckless about dealing with…people like that, Mildred.”
“People like what? What’s wrong with them?”
“Well, er, they’re the Living…”
She snorted. “Still the same old snob, that’s your trouble.”
Wilbur’s mouth opened and shut, spraying crumbs of dust but not much in the way of words. Mr. God-awful began juggling his head again, the eyeballs of which spun around in uncomfortable directions. Rob, meanwhile, was looking over their shoulders at something else.
“Here!” He attempted to nudge Sir Wilbur, but his elbow mashed right through one side of the man’s ribcage and almost out the other. “Sorry. There’s something going on over there, by the Old Soldier’s Stone. Lots of people.”
Mildred surveyed the damage to her husband’s torso and rolled her eyes. Wilbur gently tapped the back of her head until they rolled back into their original position and looked where Rob was pointing.
“Looks like a pow-wow,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Susan emerged from the outside toilet and frowned. A pale light was glinting through the gaps in the hedge. She put her face to one of them and saw, at the cemetery’s highest point, a collection of something like will-o’-the-wisps. She shrugged, turned on her heel and walked slap bang into George.
“Ahhhh! My… ffffoot!”
“Sorry sorry sorry!” she gabbled, more out of shock than regret. “I didn’t think you’d come out here. Aren’t you getting on well with Dad?”
“We’ll have to get a proper toilet installed once we’re settled in,” George said, deliberately keeping his gaze focused on the wooden outhouse.
“George? We haven’t been married long, but I can tell when a man is trying to avoid a question.”
“Um…”
“It’s Dad, isn’t it? He’s gone off on one.”
“Um, yes. Only…”
“Only?”
“It’s, er, my fault. Sort of.”
“You Herbert.” Susan took hold of his hand and they walked back into the house. A waxy face watched them go from behind the leaves.
Rob pulled his head out of the hedgerow and wondered. What could be so bad about the Living? He had been alive not six months ago. He had never been inside the old vicarage. He hadn’t been to a party in a long time. He missed music and company and breath. It was a big house. There were a lot of guests. And, in his opinion, he didn’t look Dead - in that sort of lighting, nobody would notice.
After a split-second’s deliberation, Rob skirted around the hedge, out of the gate, and knocked on the house’s front door.
The Old Soldier, whose memorial stone it was, never got buried in Evergreen Cemetery because he went missing in action. However, it was a handy meeting spot for Dead folk with unfinished business, or murdered lovers, or for children and parents to find one another again. On this particular Hallows’ Night the inhabitants of the cemetery were in the throes of a Council meeting.
“Order, please. Erm, AHEM! Order!” Councillor Knight barked, but his words fell flat. What with the incessant noise coming from the house over the hedge, and the discontented, excited, sarcastic and worried babble of conversation taking place between the Dead, he was having some difficulty making himself heard.
He took a moment to calm himself, closed his eyes, and shot around the crowd below in a hyper speed blur of tweaks, pinches and pokes. So fast was he in his tapping and prodding that every phantom and zombie below his perch on the Stone stopped and looked around for the culprit simultaneously. Thus quiet descended.
Councillor Knight was not a poltergeist for nothing. He had been telekinetic in his Life and the practice he’d had meant he was very good at it in Death.
“If I could have your attention, please,” he spoke and raised his eyebrows. “Thank you.”
Poltergeists, Wilbur thought, always seem to have a sarcastic edge. I wonder why?
“It has fallen to the public’s attention that there is a Noise and Disturbance issuing from the residents over the hedge. They are married Living folk, one George and Susan Howeth, along with their great many guests. The music is Too Loud. The question I put to you now is, what Action do you want me to take?”
Several suggestions were called out.
“Shake the foundations!”
“Throw food!”
“Could you…eeeeeeeeeeerrrrm, turn the music orf?”
“Smash the roof in!”
“Keeeeeeeel them!”
“Throw food! And drink!”
“ - only the blood of the sinner can expiate the sins -”
“Kill ’em! Kill ’em all! Take no prisoners!”
Councillor Knight raised a hand for silence and rolled his eyes.
“Who was it that said to kill them and take no prisoners? If we did kill them, we would be taking them prisoner. Sensible suggestions only, please.”
“Yeah, genius!” somebody shouted at the offender in question, a pimply-faced, freckled man with a large nose, a moustache and very little body.
“Aha!” Mildred said, and narrowed her eyes at the bloodthirsty ghoul. One of them squelched out of her nostril, and she paused to jam it back up into her head. “I might’ve known it would be your son, Mrs. Ramble!”
Sir Wilbur wished it was the day after All Saints.
“At least my son has the tenacity to make a suggestion!” Mrs. Ramble, a batty woman with a cloud of white hair, retaliated. “I didn’t hear you coming out with better ideas. But then I suppose that’s only to be expected - you’re full of hot air.”
“I am not!”
“Actually,” Sir Wilbur said thoughtfully, “it is common for corpses to continue having flatulence after burial. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Worse than doing it in a lift!” someone called out and a few of the Dead tittered.
Mildred rounded on him. “Whose side are you on?”
“I’m standing on your left.”
“You…are impossible!”
Wilbur smiled. “That’s why you married me.”
“Well you can talk. You never bothered cutting your toenails when we were Living on Inkley Drive and now look at them - they’re even worse! Six inches long in some places! You could fence!”
Wilbur’s smile was all teeth, rotten gaps and no mirth. “Not in company, dearest.”
Rob rapped once more and rang the doorbell. Eventually someone - someone Living! - on the inside opened the door and looked at him. It was a young woman, quite pretty, with a long straight nose and hazel eyes.
“What took you so long?” she asked. “You’re very late.”
Rob cleared his throat and croaked.
She frowned. “You OK?”
He nodded, spat a brown gobbet into the bushes. “Sorry. Ah, I couldn’t find the house. Someone gave me the wrong directions.” This, he reckoned, was a feasible enough excuse.
The girl let him in. “I’m Mina. You one of George’s lot? I don’t remember meeting you.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. I’ve, er, been away.” Now the door between himself and the outside world was shut, Rob was starting to get worried. His knee joints felt worryingly loose for someone who turned twenty-two three months ago. Did his wrists always bend that way?
Mina was leading him down a long, narrow hall into a room filled with the Living, bone-juddering techno and colourful flashing lights. All of a sudden it made Rob think of an entrance into Hell.
“So what’s your name?” Mina asked.
Time to lie a little. “Bertie. I’m George’s second cousin three times removed or something. I forget.”
She paused and regarded him thoughtfully in the doorway. “Sure you’re all right? You look really wishy-washy.”
“Like I said, I was away. Feel a bit beyond the pale. Jet lag.”
Now he was in the throng he felt fragile. He had planned on dancing like a crazy thing and possibly snogging somebody before the night was out, but now he was in the thick of it all Rob wanted to do was sit down out of the way, before somebody clumsy on the dance floor tore off his leg.
Mina smiled. “Why don’t we sit down somewhere?” She had the precise method of enunciation used by the only very slightly bladdered.
“Why not?” Rob grinned and remembered to hide his teeth at the last minute. He didn’t want to go scaring her. He’d come here to forget about being Dead.
“So,” Councillor Knight said wearily. “If you’ve all finished insulting each other - and me - as well as playing Frisbee with Mr. God-awful’s head - yes, don’t think I haven’t noticed, Ramble - perhaps we can get to business. Who’s taking the minutes?”
“Erm, well, I was…” said Mr. God-awful.
“Don’t bother. It’s all nonsense and kerfuffle. Now then -”
“Wait a minute,” Mildred piped up. The urgency in her tone silenced the mob. “Where’s Rob? Where’s our Gatekeeper?”
Heads bobbed, some on necks, some in the air. Voices susurrated. Rob was nowhere to be seen or heard.
“That settles it then,” Mildred announced firmly. “They’ve taken him. Or he’s run off to find out what they think they’re doing raising the Dead with blaring noise at this hour. Either way someone will have to go after him. Wilbur can go and fetch him.”
“However, dearest, I cannot. We are zombies. We’re falling apart. More so in my case than yours. If anything, you should go, you were the one who thought of it.”
Mildred huffed. “Ladies do not Get Involved with Riff-Raff.”
“Now who’s the snob?”
“All RIGHT,” Councillor Knight roared.
“Keeeeeeel the -”
“Ramble, SHUT. UP.”
Silence descended. A cricket chirruped and was smeared into oblivion by the poltergeist Councillor’s stare.
“Here is the plan,” he said.
The Dead crowded forward to listen.
Meanwhile, Rob was starting to have a nice time. He had had four glasses of wine, a tot of vodka and some sort of gin-based cocktail. Alcohol, he had discovered, didn’t have such a bad effect on a Dead body. Admittedly, he was drunk, but it seemed to have pickled him.
Mina had warned him to stay away from the Reverend Jones. He was trouble when drunk, she said. Naturally, Rob found himself gravitating towards the man and soon they were sitting in a corner sipping and having an intriguing conversation about religion and the afterlife.
“S’ all rubbish,” Rob decided.
“Wha’?”
“That thing you jush said about being in three parts. Thingy.”
“Yeah?”
“I know people who’re in more parts than that! Hah!”
The two of them dissolved into laughter, though at the back of the Reverend’s mind, he didn’t understand what was so hilarious, and at the back of Rob’s mind, he didn’t understand what he was doing getting all chummy with a man who probably buried him not so long ago.
“Hold me drink, yeah?” the Reverend asked. “Goin’ for a whiz.”
Rob sat in contented silence, letting the music vibrate his joints and shake some of the cobwebs away.
Mina slid into the seat next to him. “Busy?” she asked slyly.
“M’ all right.”
“Fancy a walk?”
It was tempting. He hadn’t felt a Living girl next to him for months. On the other hand, he was drunk and his bones were rotten.
“When whatshisname gets back.” On the other other hand, he was drunk.
She leaned over and kissed him, right smack on the lips. He kept his tongue in, just in case - didn’t want to lose it - but the sensation brought an icy stab of reality. This girl didn’t know he was Dead. She was kissing a carcase. But there was no way he could tell her that now, not now she’d vaulted herself at him.
“Is this really a good idea?” Mrs. Ramble was querulous as Councillor Knight hammered at the front door of the old vicarage with his mind. A delegation of perhaps twenty-five Dead, children and limbless not included, to march up to the front porch and - what?
“What do we do when they answer the door?” someone else - a squat, bald phantom - said. “They won’t salt us, will they? Or stake us?”
“You idiot, that’s vampires!” someone shouted.
“I am a vampire.”
“Oh. Sorry!”
Councillor Knight turned around. “When -” he began, but just then the door was opened by a middle-aged Living man with white teeth, a full head of hair and eyes that flashed fire. Several there assembled felt their knees go weak with dread mixed with envy. A few kneecaps even snapped.
“Yes?” the Living man said. “You’re a big lot. I didn’t see you at the wedding.”
Councillor Knight floundered for only a second, then took control. “We were unable to attend the wedding. We are Dead, you see, and setting foot in a church would kill some of us. Again.”
The man boggled, then burst out laughing. “Oh! What an idea, you came in Fancy Dress! I’d almost forgotten it was Halloween. Why don’t you come on in?”
So saying, the Living man turned and lurched up the hallway, leaving the door open behind him.
Councillor Knight looked at the other Dead, Mildred and Wilbur included. He shrugged. “All of these people are full of spirits!” he said. “We may as well do as the man says, find Robert and get out of here as fast as we can. Sunrise would be a bad time.”
Rob looked up in dismay as members of the Evergreen Cemetery shuffled into the room, narrowly avoiding the press of bodies ranging around the dance floor.
Mina glanced over. “Friends of yours?”
“A couple of them.”
“Why don’t you introduce me?”
“Er, because they’re Dead. Boring. Er, they’re dead boring. Yeah.”
Mina giggled. “You’re funny.”
Just as she was honing in for another kiss, Wilbur caught his eye. Rob widened his in a ‘help me’ face. Sir Wilbur understood what was happening but only smiled. Rob was on his own with this one.
It was a complete disaster.
Perhaps it was when Eddie, one of the slightly fresher zombies, decided to impress everyone present by demonstrating a break dancing routine so violent it propelled a couple of his limbs across the room, when the Living realised they were partying with the Dead.
Or perhaps it was when Rob’s hand accidentally tore off, still attached to the glass he’d been trying to lift. Mina’s screams would surely have alerted everyone else to the situation.
But in Sir Wilbur’s opinion, the real trouble started when Fran drifted too close to a speaker stack and was blown into a current of particles, which further complicated matters by being inhaled through the Reverend Jones’s nose. It was certainly surprising, to say the least, when the Right Honorable man leapt up with a squawk and began shouting things like “Why am I so tall and solid?” “What’s that bumping in my chest?” “Oh my God, I’m a man!” and “HELP! IT’S ME, FRAN! HELP!” in the voice of a hysterical woman. It took them ten minutes to stop her/him flapping and running about like a demented banshee.
The Living were screaming at the Dead, the Dead were billowing around, falling to bits and screaming at the Living; it was a mess. Forced to kidnap the Reverend’s body with Fran still inside it, they had to grab Rob and beat a hasty retreat.
Just in time, too. No sooner than when the Wilberforces lowered themselves into their coffin, with the help of One-Handed Rob, the sun began to rise.
“Another year of stony sleep,” Mildred mumbled in his ear cavity. “Or whatever the poet said. You know, dear, I actually had rather a nice time. Do you suppose Fran will be all right? I can’t wait for next year. Next time I think we should do that again. Don’t you?”
“Perhaps,” Sir Wilbur replied as the rigor mortis set in. “Perhaps.”
George’s head ached.
Susan’s head ached.
“What time is it?” she groaned.
“Does it matter?” he asked, and put an arm around her.
She frowned. “Is that someone yelling outside?”
George forced himself into a vertical position and squinted out of the window. The bedroom faced onto the back garden, and beyond that, the graveyard. A man was jumping up and down in it like a mad firework and screaming for attention in a curiously high-pitched voice, but he was facing away from the house.
“It’s just your father,” George said eventually, once the amusement began to fade. “Think he’s still drunk.”
“Weird really,” Susan said. “He’s never done impressions when he’s drunk too much before. How long d’you think it’ll be before he calls it a day?”
George shrugged. “I’d better try to coax him back in.” Against his dearest wishes to sleep for a week, he yanked the window open and stuck his head out. “Oi!”
Jonesie continued to jump. “IT’S ME!” he cried to no one at all. “FRAN! PLEASE, TAKE ME WITH YOU! HELP! CAN YOU HEAR? IT’S FRAN!”
“Who the hell is Fran?” Susan grumbled.
“No idea,” George said, then paused. There was something…something about a boy’s hand falling off. Some stupid, childish prank, obviously. He let the window fall shut, but his father-in-law could still be heard.
“FRAAAAAAAN!”
Sir Wilbur Wilberforce - or at least, the life-emanating remainder of the man - shifted in his dry bones and rolled a mangled eye socket in his wife’s direction.
“What?” Even his voice was desiccated, but at one hundred and fifty years old, that was not surprising.
“I said, stop that banging!”
“My dear,” Sir Wilbur sighed, “I have not had the inclination, let alone the equipment, to bang anything in a long, long time. Let me sleep, would you?”
Mildred Wilberforce wasn’t the sort of woman to give in without a fight. Even in Life, she always had the last word (which usually fell on deaf ears, but that suited her fine) and on this Hallows’ Eve she was no different.
“Wilbur. If you weren’t making that noise, then who was?”
He peeled open the other eye and attempted to fix it in the same direction as the first - before he recalled it was a glass eye.
“What noise? What are you on about, woman?”
Then Wilbur heard it. A loud, incessant rhythm coming from Above. Not above Above, but outside, above ground. It was muffled but still blaring and repetitive.
“That’s…” A frown beetled across his brow, dislodging a maggot. His foot tapped in time, almost of its own accord, as he struggled to remember. “Music. I think it’s meant to be music, dear.”
Mildred snorted. “Hah! Call that music? In my day, it had a tune.”
“Yes, dear,” Wilbur said wearily.
“It sounds like a factory mashing up a load of cats.”
“Mmm.”
“Where do you suppose it’s coming from?”
“Mmm.”
“I mean, who would want to live near a graveyard? Graveyards are for the Dead.”
“Mmm.”
“You’re not listening to me, are you?”
“Ahh.”
“BLACKBERRY TARTS!”
Wilbur nearly shoved the top of his head through the coffin lid.
“Ugh. What about tarts?”
“I had to do something to get your attention!”
Not for the first time, Wilbur wished that someone had had the consideration to bury them in separate boxes.
“For goodness’ sake. It’s not midnight yet. Go to sleep, will you?”
Moving into an old vicarage, once you’d gotten married in a church, was a bit much if you weren’t religious, in George’s opinion.
Not that you could tell it was an old vicarage - apart from the bland, slightly fusty décor and the outside toilet, the place was just like any other house, that is if the house you were thinking of had a late-night party taking place in it. It was full of all sorts of interesting people, but George wasn’t getting too excited. When his new wife shouted in his already tinnitus-ransacked eardrum about these “interesting people” he knew she really meant “drunk, embarrassing relatives” and that they would probably both regret it in the morning.
Naturally he kept his mouth closed concerning the not-being-religious part. He wanted to keep Susan happy. Susan was a Christian. Her father was a Reverend, which injected a lot more stress into the wedding procedure - because he was the one who had married them.
“Darling!” Susan yelped above the cacophony.
“Yes?”
“Would you go over and keep Dad company while I just nip to the loo? He’s all by himself and he’s a bit - you know - funny with other people.”
George’s heart sank a notch. Yes, and the Reverend was there, mooching in a far corner next to one of the DJ’s speaker stacks and the window, like a heartsick teenager in jeans and a dog collar.
“Right-ho, Suze.”
“And make sure he doesn’t touch the drink. You know - his problem.”
George did indeed know the Reverend Jones’s problem. Let the man have a sip of wine and he’d end up insulting the guests with his “observational humour” and completely trashing the place. Not that the place in question wasn’t already trashed. More than half the guests were, and the rest of them were wasted anyway.
“Oh, well,” George murmured and prepared to keep his father-in-law dubious company. “Onwards and upwards.”
Dim moonlight cracked into the narrow space as someone lifted the Wilberforce’s lid.
“Hiya.”
Mildred snapped, “Wake us up at midnight, boy!”
Wilbur dragged himself into a sitting position, crackled, popped and groaned. He glared balefully at the moon. “It is midnight.”
“Urgh.”
“Let me guess. You don’t feel like getting out of the crypt. Well, it’s your own fault for not sleeping when I told you to, dearest. You can’t go gallivanting around late in the afternoon. You’re not as young as you once were.”
“Ha!” Mildred bolted upright, groped for her head and screwed it around the correct way. “You’re even older than I am!”
“Enough jaw ache.” Wilbur turned to the young dead man hovering patiently by the sarcophagus. As he was the most recent occupant of that cemetery, the young man had the honour of being the Gatekeeper. It fell on his scrawny shoulders to wake the inhabitants up at midnight on Halloween, until another newbie showed up to take his place.
“…Rob, isn’t it?” Wilbur asked. “Have the others risen?”
The boy nodded.
“Rob?” Mildred snorted. “What kind of a name is Rob?”
“Shh. Don’t hurt his feelings.”
Robert, as far as Sir Wilbur could remember, had been a suicide. He didn’t think it proper to mock that sort of Dead folk. It had an unpleasant way of backfiring.
The loud disco music continued to pound. It made their ribcages rattle, quite audibly.
“This isn’t proper,” Mildred said. “They should show some respect for their neighbours, not to mention their elders and betters.”
“Elders, certainly,” Wilbur muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing at all, dear.”
Rob chortled. “I recognise this song. They played it at my twenty-first. I bet that makes you feel old!”
Mildred took a spider out of her ear and ate it thoughtfully. She did not appear to have heard the dig.
“This isn’t right,” she reiterated. “We’re the ones who are supposed to be bothering them with noises, not the other way around. Something ought to be done.”
“All right, mate?” George sat down on the sofa opposite the maudlin father-of-the-bride. The best way to deal with Jonesie, as George affectionately termed the man in the privacy of his own brain, was to act as if you had inhaled a gallon of happy pills. Otherwise, Jonesie could deflate you completely.
“You know, I don’t approve of this sort of wedding reception, really.”
“Oh!” George knew he was trying to sound sincere, yet failing miserably. “Why?”
“All this.” Jonesie indicated the room with a sweep of a mournful arm. “This is meant to be after a wedding. What do we get? A re-enactment of a nineteen-nineties Manchester nightclub, only all the guests are in dresses and tuxedos. It’s just not right. Something ought to be done.”
“When we told you we were having a DJ, you didn’t seem to mind,” George pointed out.
“Yes, but I thought that everyone would conduct themselves with a little more decorum and respect for the dead.”
George could feel the conversation rapidly spiralling out of his control. “The graveyard, you mean? Jone - er, mate, they’re dead. They can’t hear anything.”
“God works in mysterious ways,” Jonesie said, his expression doleful.
“Take a night off, can’t you?” George said, with feeling. Perhaps he was more inebriated than he thought he was. “Lighten up. The dead are gone, and the living are still here. All there is to it.”
Inside, George blanched, expecting Jonesie’s mouth to drop open and damn him to Hell, or at least somewhere warmer. Instead, the Reverend sat up a little straighter and a light glimmered in the recesses of his eye sockets. Could this be enthusiasm?
“There is a Heaven and there is a Hell,” the Reverend spoke with conviction. “Between those, are the places where the lost get left behind.”
George, not expecting that last remark, sat forward. “You mean Purgatory? I thought that was only for Catholics.”
“No. I don’t mean Purgatory. I mean places on the Earth. Those who can’t be Saved remain.”
George’s interest dulled into resigned disgust. “You mean ‘non-believers’? Yeah. Right. You’ll be telling me you believe in Ouija boards and séances next.”
The Reverend bowed his head. “I warn you, They can hear.”
An intoxicated great-aunt - one of Susan’s, presumably, because George could not recognise her - tumbled over the back of the couch and landed in his lap, shrieking with mad glee, her dentures protruding and starting to come unstuck. This grated further on his nerves.
“If you want the volume turned down, why can’t you just say?” he snapped in Jonesie’s direction. Then, not thinking, “Chill out a bit. Talk to people. Have a bloody drin - Oh.”
The light in Reverend Jones’s eyes continued to sparkle. “You know what, George? I think I will.”
Silently, George cursed himself.
Mildred and Wilbur left the confines of their sepulchre, followed by Rob. Evergreen Cemetery, in the light of the moon, was positively cosmopolitan on that night. On the gravel paths between the headstones milled the Dead - neighbours, friends and even a few family members who they had not seen since the last October the thirty-first. There was a great deal of catching up to do, and the small gangs of eidolons and other ghasts grouped chatting around memorial stones and trees proved that fact.
“We must find the Rambles,” Mildred said. “I haven’t had the chance to finish the debate I was having with whatsherface - Natty. She really thinks she’s It when she isn’t, and it gets up my nose.”
“Who were you arguing with, dear?” Wilbur said, distracted by the shambling corpse of his ex-lawyer, who carried his head in his hands, occasionally giving it an anxious juggle.
“I was not arguing. Ladies don’t argue,” Mildred retorted. “And don’t think of contradicting me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Another ear-blistering, hyperactive track started up from the old house on the other side of the cemetery hedge. The laughter and talking of the Dead - and the odd ironic groan - rattled to a halt, then began afresh with a puzzled urgency to it.
Sir Wilbur’s decapitated lawyer passed them again on his midnight stroll.
“I say,” his head said, blinking up at them from his hands. “What’s that racket? God-awful.”
“Music, innit?” Rob chimed in. “It’s a remix of, er…actually I don’t remember.”
“You’re exactly right,” Mildred said to the old lawyer, who had been affectionately nicknamed Mr. God-awful within his first week of being Dead. “It is a god-awful racket. My darling husband was going to have a word with them, weren’t you dearie?”
If it is possible for a cadaver to go pale, that is what Sir Wilbur did.
“Mustn’t be too reckless about dealing with…people like that, Mildred.”
“People like what? What’s wrong with them?”
“Well, er, they’re the Living…”
She snorted. “Still the same old snob, that’s your trouble.”
Wilbur’s mouth opened and shut, spraying crumbs of dust but not much in the way of words. Mr. God-awful began juggling his head again, the eyeballs of which spun around in uncomfortable directions. Rob, meanwhile, was looking over their shoulders at something else.
“Here!” He attempted to nudge Sir Wilbur, but his elbow mashed right through one side of the man’s ribcage and almost out the other. “Sorry. There’s something going on over there, by the Old Soldier’s Stone. Lots of people.”
Mildred surveyed the damage to her husband’s torso and rolled her eyes. Wilbur gently tapped the back of her head until they rolled back into their original position and looked where Rob was pointing.
“Looks like a pow-wow,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Susan emerged from the outside toilet and frowned. A pale light was glinting through the gaps in the hedge. She put her face to one of them and saw, at the cemetery’s highest point, a collection of something like will-o’-the-wisps. She shrugged, turned on her heel and walked slap bang into George.
“Ahhhh! My… ffffoot!”
“Sorry sorry sorry!” she gabbled, more out of shock than regret. “I didn’t think you’d come out here. Aren’t you getting on well with Dad?”
“We’ll have to get a proper toilet installed once we’re settled in,” George said, deliberately keeping his gaze focused on the wooden outhouse.
“George? We haven’t been married long, but I can tell when a man is trying to avoid a question.”
“Um…”
“It’s Dad, isn’t it? He’s gone off on one.”
“Um, yes. Only…”
“Only?”
“It’s, er, my fault. Sort of.”
“You Herbert.” Susan took hold of his hand and they walked back into the house. A waxy face watched them go from behind the leaves.
Rob pulled his head out of the hedgerow and wondered. What could be so bad about the Living? He had been alive not six months ago. He had never been inside the old vicarage. He hadn’t been to a party in a long time. He missed music and company and breath. It was a big house. There were a lot of guests. And, in his opinion, he didn’t look Dead - in that sort of lighting, nobody would notice.
After a split-second’s deliberation, Rob skirted around the hedge, out of the gate, and knocked on the house’s front door.
The Old Soldier, whose memorial stone it was, never got buried in Evergreen Cemetery because he went missing in action. However, it was a handy meeting spot for Dead folk with unfinished business, or murdered lovers, or for children and parents to find one another again. On this particular Hallows’ Night the inhabitants of the cemetery were in the throes of a Council meeting.
“Order, please. Erm, AHEM! Order!” Councillor Knight barked, but his words fell flat. What with the incessant noise coming from the house over the hedge, and the discontented, excited, sarcastic and worried babble of conversation taking place between the Dead, he was having some difficulty making himself heard.
He took a moment to calm himself, closed his eyes, and shot around the crowd below in a hyper speed blur of tweaks, pinches and pokes. So fast was he in his tapping and prodding that every phantom and zombie below his perch on the Stone stopped and looked around for the culprit simultaneously. Thus quiet descended.
Councillor Knight was not a poltergeist for nothing. He had been telekinetic in his Life and the practice he’d had meant he was very good at it in Death.
“If I could have your attention, please,” he spoke and raised his eyebrows. “Thank you.”
Poltergeists, Wilbur thought, always seem to have a sarcastic edge. I wonder why?
“It has fallen to the public’s attention that there is a Noise and Disturbance issuing from the residents over the hedge. They are married Living folk, one George and Susan Howeth, along with their great many guests. The music is Too Loud. The question I put to you now is, what Action do you want me to take?”
Several suggestions were called out.
“Shake the foundations!”
“Throw food!”
“Could you…eeeeeeeeeeerrrrm, turn the music orf?”
“Smash the roof in!”
“Keeeeeeeel them!”
“Throw food! And drink!”
“ - only the blood of the sinner can expiate the sins -”
“Kill ’em! Kill ’em all! Take no prisoners!”
Councillor Knight raised a hand for silence and rolled his eyes.
“Who was it that said to kill them and take no prisoners? If we did kill them, we would be taking them prisoner. Sensible suggestions only, please.”
“Yeah, genius!” somebody shouted at the offender in question, a pimply-faced, freckled man with a large nose, a moustache and very little body.
“Aha!” Mildred said, and narrowed her eyes at the bloodthirsty ghoul. One of them squelched out of her nostril, and she paused to jam it back up into her head. “I might’ve known it would be your son, Mrs. Ramble!”
Sir Wilbur wished it was the day after All Saints.
“At least my son has the tenacity to make a suggestion!” Mrs. Ramble, a batty woman with a cloud of white hair, retaliated. “I didn’t hear you coming out with better ideas. But then I suppose that’s only to be expected - you’re full of hot air.”
“I am not!”
“Actually,” Sir Wilbur said thoughtfully, “it is common for corpses to continue having flatulence after burial. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Worse than doing it in a lift!” someone called out and a few of the Dead tittered.
Mildred rounded on him. “Whose side are you on?”
“I’m standing on your left.”
“You…are impossible!”
Wilbur smiled. “That’s why you married me.”
“Well you can talk. You never bothered cutting your toenails when we were Living on Inkley Drive and now look at them - they’re even worse! Six inches long in some places! You could fence!”
Wilbur’s smile was all teeth, rotten gaps and no mirth. “Not in company, dearest.”
Rob rapped once more and rang the doorbell. Eventually someone - someone Living! - on the inside opened the door and looked at him. It was a young woman, quite pretty, with a long straight nose and hazel eyes.
“What took you so long?” she asked. “You’re very late.”
Rob cleared his throat and croaked.
She frowned. “You OK?”
He nodded, spat a brown gobbet into the bushes. “Sorry. Ah, I couldn’t find the house. Someone gave me the wrong directions.” This, he reckoned, was a feasible enough excuse.
The girl let him in. “I’m Mina. You one of George’s lot? I don’t remember meeting you.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. I’ve, er, been away.” Now the door between himself and the outside world was shut, Rob was starting to get worried. His knee joints felt worryingly loose for someone who turned twenty-two three months ago. Did his wrists always bend that way?
Mina was leading him down a long, narrow hall into a room filled with the Living, bone-juddering techno and colourful flashing lights. All of a sudden it made Rob think of an entrance into Hell.
“So what’s your name?” Mina asked.
Time to lie a little. “Bertie. I’m George’s second cousin three times removed or something. I forget.”
She paused and regarded him thoughtfully in the doorway. “Sure you’re all right? You look really wishy-washy.”
“Like I said, I was away. Feel a bit beyond the pale. Jet lag.”
Now he was in the throng he felt fragile. He had planned on dancing like a crazy thing and possibly snogging somebody before the night was out, but now he was in the thick of it all Rob wanted to do was sit down out of the way, before somebody clumsy on the dance floor tore off his leg.
Mina smiled. “Why don’t we sit down somewhere?” She had the precise method of enunciation used by the only very slightly bladdered.
“Why not?” Rob grinned and remembered to hide his teeth at the last minute. He didn’t want to go scaring her. He’d come here to forget about being Dead.
“So,” Councillor Knight said wearily. “If you’ve all finished insulting each other - and me - as well as playing Frisbee with Mr. God-awful’s head - yes, don’t think I haven’t noticed, Ramble - perhaps we can get to business. Who’s taking the minutes?”
“Erm, well, I was…” said Mr. God-awful.
“Don’t bother. It’s all nonsense and kerfuffle. Now then -”
“Wait a minute,” Mildred piped up. The urgency in her tone silenced the mob. “Where’s Rob? Where’s our Gatekeeper?”
Heads bobbed, some on necks, some in the air. Voices susurrated. Rob was nowhere to be seen or heard.
“That settles it then,” Mildred announced firmly. “They’ve taken him. Or he’s run off to find out what they think they’re doing raising the Dead with blaring noise at this hour. Either way someone will have to go after him. Wilbur can go and fetch him.”
“However, dearest, I cannot. We are zombies. We’re falling apart. More so in my case than yours. If anything, you should go, you were the one who thought of it.”
Mildred huffed. “Ladies do not Get Involved with Riff-Raff.”
“Now who’s the snob?”
“All RIGHT,” Councillor Knight roared.
“Keeeeeeel the -”
“Ramble, SHUT. UP.”
Silence descended. A cricket chirruped and was smeared into oblivion by the poltergeist Councillor’s stare.
“Here is the plan,” he said.
The Dead crowded forward to listen.
Meanwhile, Rob was starting to have a nice time. He had had four glasses of wine, a tot of vodka and some sort of gin-based cocktail. Alcohol, he had discovered, didn’t have such a bad effect on a Dead body. Admittedly, he was drunk, but it seemed to have pickled him.
Mina had warned him to stay away from the Reverend Jones. He was trouble when drunk, she said. Naturally, Rob found himself gravitating towards the man and soon they were sitting in a corner sipping and having an intriguing conversation about religion and the afterlife.
“S’ all rubbish,” Rob decided.
“Wha’?”
“That thing you jush said about being in three parts. Thingy.”
“Yeah?”
“I know people who’re in more parts than that! Hah!”
The two of them dissolved into laughter, though at the back of the Reverend’s mind, he didn’t understand what was so hilarious, and at the back of Rob’s mind, he didn’t understand what he was doing getting all chummy with a man who probably buried him not so long ago.
“Hold me drink, yeah?” the Reverend asked. “Goin’ for a whiz.”
Rob sat in contented silence, letting the music vibrate his joints and shake some of the cobwebs away.
Mina slid into the seat next to him. “Busy?” she asked slyly.
“M’ all right.”
“Fancy a walk?”
It was tempting. He hadn’t felt a Living girl next to him for months. On the other hand, he was drunk and his bones were rotten.
“When whatshisname gets back.” On the other other hand, he was drunk.
She leaned over and kissed him, right smack on the lips. He kept his tongue in, just in case - didn’t want to lose it - but the sensation brought an icy stab of reality. This girl didn’t know he was Dead. She was kissing a carcase. But there was no way he could tell her that now, not now she’d vaulted herself at him.
“Is this really a good idea?” Mrs. Ramble was querulous as Councillor Knight hammered at the front door of the old vicarage with his mind. A delegation of perhaps twenty-five Dead, children and limbless not included, to march up to the front porch and - what?
“What do we do when they answer the door?” someone else - a squat, bald phantom - said. “They won’t salt us, will they? Or stake us?”
“You idiot, that’s vampires!” someone shouted.
“I am a vampire.”
“Oh. Sorry!”
Councillor Knight turned around. “When -” he began, but just then the door was opened by a middle-aged Living man with white teeth, a full head of hair and eyes that flashed fire. Several there assembled felt their knees go weak with dread mixed with envy. A few kneecaps even snapped.
“Yes?” the Living man said. “You’re a big lot. I didn’t see you at the wedding.”
Councillor Knight floundered for only a second, then took control. “We were unable to attend the wedding. We are Dead, you see, and setting foot in a church would kill some of us. Again.”
The man boggled, then burst out laughing. “Oh! What an idea, you came in Fancy Dress! I’d almost forgotten it was Halloween. Why don’t you come on in?”
So saying, the Living man turned and lurched up the hallway, leaving the door open behind him.
Councillor Knight looked at the other Dead, Mildred and Wilbur included. He shrugged. “All of these people are full of spirits!” he said. “We may as well do as the man says, find Robert and get out of here as fast as we can. Sunrise would be a bad time.”
Rob looked up in dismay as members of the Evergreen Cemetery shuffled into the room, narrowly avoiding the press of bodies ranging around the dance floor.
Mina glanced over. “Friends of yours?”
“A couple of them.”
“Why don’t you introduce me?”
“Er, because they’re Dead. Boring. Er, they’re dead boring. Yeah.”
Mina giggled. “You’re funny.”
Just as she was honing in for another kiss, Wilbur caught his eye. Rob widened his in a ‘help me’ face. Sir Wilbur understood what was happening but only smiled. Rob was on his own with this one.
It was a complete disaster.
Perhaps it was when Eddie, one of the slightly fresher zombies, decided to impress everyone present by demonstrating a break dancing routine so violent it propelled a couple of his limbs across the room, when the Living realised they were partying with the Dead.
Or perhaps it was when Rob’s hand accidentally tore off, still attached to the glass he’d been trying to lift. Mina’s screams would surely have alerted everyone else to the situation.
But in Sir Wilbur’s opinion, the real trouble started when Fran drifted too close to a speaker stack and was blown into a current of particles, which further complicated matters by being inhaled through the Reverend Jones’s nose. It was certainly surprising, to say the least, when the Right Honorable man leapt up with a squawk and began shouting things like “Why am I so tall and solid?” “What’s that bumping in my chest?” “Oh my God, I’m a man!” and “HELP! IT’S ME, FRAN! HELP!” in the voice of a hysterical woman. It took them ten minutes to stop her/him flapping and running about like a demented banshee.
The Living were screaming at the Dead, the Dead were billowing around, falling to bits and screaming at the Living; it was a mess. Forced to kidnap the Reverend’s body with Fran still inside it, they had to grab Rob and beat a hasty retreat.
Just in time, too. No sooner than when the Wilberforces lowered themselves into their coffin, with the help of One-Handed Rob, the sun began to rise.
“Another year of stony sleep,” Mildred mumbled in his ear cavity. “Or whatever the poet said. You know, dear, I actually had rather a nice time. Do you suppose Fran will be all right? I can’t wait for next year. Next time I think we should do that again. Don’t you?”
“Perhaps,” Sir Wilbur replied as the rigor mortis set in. “Perhaps.”
George’s head ached.
Susan’s head ached.
“What time is it?” she groaned.
“Does it matter?” he asked, and put an arm around her.
She frowned. “Is that someone yelling outside?”
George forced himself into a vertical position and squinted out of the window. The bedroom faced onto the back garden, and beyond that, the graveyard. A man was jumping up and down in it like a mad firework and screaming for attention in a curiously high-pitched voice, but he was facing away from the house.
“It’s just your father,” George said eventually, once the amusement began to fade. “Think he’s still drunk.”
“Weird really,” Susan said. “He’s never done impressions when he’s drunk too much before. How long d’you think it’ll be before he calls it a day?”
George shrugged. “I’d better try to coax him back in.” Against his dearest wishes to sleep for a week, he yanked the window open and stuck his head out. “Oi!”
Jonesie continued to jump. “IT’S ME!” he cried to no one at all. “FRAN! PLEASE, TAKE ME WITH YOU! HELP! CAN YOU HEAR? IT’S FRAN!”
“Who the hell is Fran?” Susan grumbled.
“No idea,” George said, then paused. There was something…something about a boy’s hand falling off. Some stupid, childish prank, obviously. He let the window fall shut, but his father-in-law could still be heard.
“FRAAAAAAAN!”