A Grave Misunderstanding

The Man who had dug him up was a scientist, Colin decided eventually. It had been unclear at first, as all things would be unclear through seeping dirt and worms falling into his face. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he became conscious again—or perhaps if he never stopped—but what he remembered with startling clarity was the popping sound as the nails holding his coffin closed gave way, and the crazed expression of The Man (who was, as Colin now knew, The Scientist) appeared above him for the very first time. 

A creaky, old voice, “Good enough, lad?”

“Ay, I’ll make do,” said The Man, who was not a lad but seemed perfectly content with being addressed as such. “How much do you want for him?”

This, expectedly, made Colin very nervous. Notwithstanding the way he was hauled out of his coffin over The Man’s shoulders and subsequently onto a screaky old hackney—or the fact of his sudden consciousness despite his clear memory of a flu-induced death—being sold had nothing if not horrible, most likely illegal, connotations.

The hackney jostled, and the foul cloth which covered him plastered itself over his mouth. His skin was unpleasantly damp, and everything smelt like mud, like dirt, rot, and the awfully familiar musk of London smog. If only he could move a finger, if he could turn his head to remove the filthy cloth and look upon the streets to see where he was, deduce a little of what was coming. But his mind was locked in a broken body, and there was nothing but the steady thump of hooves and the stark, stark dryness in his opened eyes.

The Man lived in a quiet street, in a flat on the fifty-fourth step. Colin knew this, because it was quite easy to count the thumps of his limp form as he had been tugged upstairs among the strained grunts of The Man, the many tightenings of the bruising grip on Colin’s torso. 

Eventually, the grip broke. This must have been by accident—judging by the colourful repertoir of curses from The Man’s mouth—and Colin fell in a heap of limb and cloth on a carpeted floor. 

“Cursed, bloody cold,” muttered The Man through gritted teeth. “Fingers’ll fall off sooner than…”

Colin did not get to know what would happen after The Man’s fingers had fallen off, as the words were swallowed by another terrible grunt. He was heaved, centimetre by centimetre, upwards, upon something hard and sturdy. Just as the live hands finally left him and a door shut with a definite click of the lock, Colin realised that he was laid out on a table, quite at a mercy to whatever The Man was intending to do.

Colin was no fool, and he knew several reasons why men would dig up an unmarked grave in the middle of the night. Considering his acute state of not having remained in said grave, a mere robbery was out of the question. His sapphire ring remained, and so did his watch and his teeth. The notion of teeth was more worrying, considering the horror stories of black markets Colin had heard in the university’s medical circles, just how much human organs were worth. Worrying were the other horror stories, and those were the ones which etched onto his mind in the darkness: of sick men and mortuaries, their necrophilic, leering stares—his classmates grinning to soothe the unease, “I just cannot imagine being so desperate, you know?”

The cloth began to shift, and Colin’s dread caught, suspended in mid-air as it was removed. The Man looked upon him for some time, his coat lost, sleeve cuffs undone, glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He was bigger than Colin had thought initially, and something frantic in him spiked at a staccato pace, his panicked breaths imprisoned somewhere between the reality of his consciousness and the stillness of his dead body.

Finally, The Man reached out and took hold of Colin’s wrist.

This was when The Man became The Scientist, and some of Colin’s mounting horror was smothered to nothingness. 

The Scientist did nothing to his wrist, nor with his hand. He gazed upon Colin’s sapphire ring. He prodded the lace cuff of Colin’s shirt with his fingertips, opened Colin’s mouth, and counted the teeth, muttering numbers and strange pieces of thought to himself, leaving and returning multiple times, always with more ink splotches on his hands and shirt. 

It was embarrassing. Colin was crushed under a wave of absurd relief.

“Now,” said The Scientist. “Who might you be, hm?”

Colin would be glad to answer this. Regretfully, he was dead. 

The Scientist, unperturbed by Colin’s lack of reply, lit a paraffin lamp and—equally unperturbed by Colin’s uncovered eyes—shone straight into his face. It stung. His tear ducts were painfully dry, and his inability to shut his eyes or at the very least shield himself from the light left him feeling particularly strange. 

A door creaked; a cold gust of air. There was a moment of stillness before a new voice spoke.

“Another puzzle, I see,” it said, rising from the silence like the shot of a bullet. A woman stuck her head above him, her skin stretching over strict cheekbones, a handkerchief to her nose. She glanced at Colin closely, sighed, and then her sharp footsteps ceased a little way off. “But alas, not Helen.”

The Scientist did not look at her. He continued staring into Colin’s face, barely blinking.

”No,” he agreed in a manner that sounded much as though he had not heard the woman speak at all. 

“I’m only reminding you,” said she. “It seemed like you needed it.”

“Why are you here?”

“Paul saw you tonight loitering about the cemetery again.” There was a tap of a cane on the floor, and Colin realised that the woman was limping. Her presence outside his scope of vision unnerved him, and he attempted in vain to turn his eyes to her.

She said, “We need to talk.”

The Scientist grunted.

The woman said nothing for a long while, during which The Scientist took a strand of Colin’s hair and rubbed it between two fingers. Then he unbuttoned his collar and examined his neck, fingers pressing into his jugular, and the back of his head. It was a grotesque mirror of intimacy that brought bile to the root of Colin’s dead tongue, and he lamented his inability to shake the fumbling hands off. 

“This will not bring her back,” said the woman at last. Her voice sounded quieter than before, her consonants dulled. “Please.”

“Go home, Catherine.” The Scientist’s voice was low and dangerous, implacable like iron bars with a lost key. Colin found his terror building anew, The Scientist’s gaze becoming even more unwelcome and burning on his skin.

He did not want to be left alone with him, but there was nothing he could do when the woman’s clothes rustled as she went, her cane tapping rhythmically against the wooden floor, slowly but inevitably nearing the door. Once the door would close behind her, Colin knew instinctively that no one else would come. No one else would come, and he would stay there and turn into a piece of rotting flesh, and preferably that was all his body would become. But he knew it was not all his body would become. Because The Scientist was there with him. 

The door closed.

A moment of silence followed, and The Scientist did not move. Then, finally, he breathed out. “Won’t bring her…”

He walked away.

A sharp crash of metal echoed in the room, the sound of something delicate breaking. 

Colin laid there and trembled inside himself. 

Some time had passed before The Scientist returned, his eyes red. His breath was heavy as he bent over Colin, reeking of whisky and hunger. A pendant slipped from under his shirt, and, opened, it dangled in Colin’s face. 

“Well,” The Scientist croaked. “Maybe I can bring you back to your folks, ey? Or a lover? Yer young enough, hm? Found out who they are, have a proper burial, like. An unmarked grave is not the way to go. Let me just see… how’d you die…”

Colin would take great joy in thwarting The Scientist’s optimism just as he had ruined Colin’s hope for a peaceful, eternal sleep by explaining to him just how much his parents had no desire to ever see him again, but this little victory, too, was taken from him. 

Then The Scientist cut into him, and Colin could not take joy in anything at all.

He had not noticed his clothes being unbuttoned, but they must have been, and the knife dug into his flesh and caught on his ribs. Pain. Colin did not think the word did justice to what he felt, to what this was. He felt his tendons give way, the sound of muscle being split open, skin pulsing hotly with the millions of nerves, the little aches which constituted him whole now, because there was nothing else, and he could not scream, or protest, or pull away.

When finally there was something else again, it was The Scientist’s frown.

Please, tried Colin desperately. Anyone. Don’t let him do this to me.

He caught his reflection in The Scientist’s glasses, but his face was white and still, his hair ashen and plastered neatly around his ears, his neck. His eyes were dark and dead. And his mouth was not moving. 

“Don’t worry,” The Scientist said. “I’ll get you home.”