Procession of the Dead (28 page)

“Why not?”

“That’s desecration. We could end up in prison. Besides, it’s
your
grave. I don’t think I could dig up—”

“But it’s not.” I clutched her hands. “If you’re right, Dee—and I think you must be—that coffin’s empty. We won’t be doing anything wrong, digging up an empty grave.”

“I’m not sure…” She was repulsed by the idea.

“It’s the only way to be certain,” I said. “When we prove that it’s empty, we can deal with this. It’ll have to be brought to the surface eventually—if we don’t do it now, the police will when they find out I’m still alive. Let’s beat them to the punch and use this time to prepare ourselves. Maybe I’ll be able to trace my steps from there. It might jog my memory some more.”

She hesitated before finally, reluctantly, nodding her head. “You’re right. We have to.” She looked out the window. “But we’d better wait till night. These things are easier when it’s dark.” As if she’d been grave-robbing all her life.

The more we discussed it, the more I warmed to Dee’s theory. I’d lost control of my senses and dreamed my year in the city. Like that silly season of
Dallas
years ago, when they wrote off an entire season as a dream. But it had seemed so real. If I’d been prey to sporadic fits, slipping in and out of my constructed reality, like a schizophrenic coming apart at the seams…

But I could account for every day, every character, every meeting. It was a weird world, granted, and I’d acted strangely, but it had been as real as this one. No reality breakdowns. Not until today when the marks of my fight with The Cardinal faded.

I studied Dee, turning the theory on its head. Was she real? Maybe this place was the dream, a trick of the mind. Maybe The Cardinal had hit me harder than I’d thought. I could be lying on his carpet, playing out this scene in my mind as the Troops carted me away to finish the job. That’s the trouble with picking at the threads of reality—the fabric tends to unravel and leave you floundering in a den of infinite threads, not one of which you can trust or cling to.

We spent the day exploring our past. Dee pulled out old photos of a young boy with my face, my parents, us as teenagers, my friends, shots of me in school as both student and teacher. I found touching helped me more than hearing and seeing. When I felt objects—sets of keys, trophies, diplomas, books—I remembered events and feelings associated with them. They reinforced the physical reality of this town, this house, this person—Martin Robinson.

“What if the coffin’s not empty?” I asked.

“Don’t think about it,” Dee replied.

“I have to. What if it’s occupied?”

She stopped sorting through albums. “It has to be empty,” she said. “You can’t be in two places at the same time. I don’t buy any of that ghost or clone crap I was spouting earlier. You didn’t die and weren’t buried.”

Her logic was faultless. “But if there—”

“Martin!” She slammed an album shut and glared. “Don’t talk about it. It won’t happen. Things are tense enough as they are. You’ll drive us both mad if you keep this up. There’ll be no body.”

“I hope you’re right,” I muttered.

“Martin,” she said firmly, “I can’t be wrong.”

We left for the graveyard at ten. The walk to the cemetery was nerve-wracking. The night was black as my memory. We walked apart at first, awkward around each other, not wanting to touch. But after half a mile we closed the gap, drawing warmth from the union. The shovels were heavy, growing heavier with each step. Our breath rose above us and mingled in the air, trailing in our wake. Owls hooted and small creatures scurried to the sides of the road.

We encountered no other people. We didn’t expect to, not at this time of night, so close to the discotheque of the dead. Kids were in bed, parents were dozing in front of televisions, lovers were making the darkness their romantic own. Only vampires, werewolves and grave robbers were at large on a night like this.

“This reminds me of the walks we used to take,” Dee said.

“We strolled out
here
? ”

“No, silly. But we’d often walk around this time, when the weather was good. We liked the solitude, the feeling of being the only humans alive.”

“Where we’re going,” I said, “we will be.”

“Yes.” It was a joke but she didn’t laugh.

The gates were closed, cold metal barriers between the worlds of the living and the dead. Ornamental gargoyles adorned either post and I felt them glaring at us as we scaled the low wall to the side. We jumped into soggy earth which squelched under our shoes, and long wet grass which dampened the hems of our trousers and tickled our ankles unpleasantly, like the caressing fingers of the dead. Slugs were sliding slickly through the grass and every time I accidentally squelched one I shivered. My foot snagged on a stone and I half fell. My hands hit the ground and I snatched them back quickly from the chill earth. I wiped my palms on my trousers, over and over, but they didn’t seem to warm or dry.

Dee’s hand fell softly onto my shoulder and I jumped nervously. I turned and chastised her with a frown. She smiled weakly. “Sorry,” she whispered. “Are you OK?”

I wiped my hands one last time. “I’m fine. Come on. Show me where it is.”

We found one of the many crisscrossing gravel paths and slipped past monuments, headstones, statues. I had the sense that stone heads were swiveling slowly, following us. I heard rustling, though there were no bushes nearby. The clouds parted briefly and all manner of shadows leaped to life. I glanced at Dee. She was trembling but her face was grim and she barely paused before moving on.

“This is it.” Dee stopped at an ordinary headstone. I could have made out the name and dates if I’d bent, but I didn’t. Instead I rolled up my sleeves, spat on my hands and took hold of the shovel. I looked to Dee for approval. She was staring at the headstone. One of her hands reached toward it, but then she yanked it back. She saw I was waiting, let out a shallow breath and nodded.

I drove the shovel into the earth, wincing at the sound it made, the way the earth seemed to suck on the blade. There was resistance all the way. The top layer of soil had been hardened by the long, cold nights. Further down it was stony, the soil full of pebbles and shale. Dee dug with me. It was a joint venture. We said nothing, digging like silent drones. We uprooted worms, slugs and insects of darkness on our way down. They squirmed blindly in the sods we tossed into the air, their world uprooted. Some dropped back into the pit, falling on our hands, in our hair, slithering down our necks. As I shook them off I vowed I’d get cremated when my time arrived.

Dee hit the lid first. The sound of her shovel striking the hard wood will stay with me to the end of my days. Nobody should have to hear that, especially when the coffin in question is (allegedly) their own. We shoveled frantically, wanting the torture to be over. We cleared the earth away, using our hands on the smaller clumps. Again I cursed myself, as I had in Theo’s house, for not bringing a pair of gloves. But I was luckier than Dee—my fingernails were short, whereas hers were long and quickly collected semimoons of the dark, damp soil.

The screws were hard to turn. I spent ages twisting and kicking at them. I cut my hands in several places, licked the blood away and studied the nicks in the thin night light. If my year in the city was a dream, I should carry these marks for the coming week. If, on the other hand, they’d cleared by morning…

In the end the screws yielded to my blows, kicks and curses. I sat back, panting. Dee looked at me. “Scared?”

“Shitless,” I confirmed.

“Me too.” She was shivering. I pulled her close and gave her a hug. “If there’s something there…,” she began.

“There won’t be. You convinced me of that in the cottage, remember?”

“I know. And I believed it then. But out here, with the dead all around and the screws taken off… Martin, what if—”

“Don’t say it. The time for talking and worrying is over.” I took a deep breath but it didn’t help. “Ready?” When she nodded wordlessly, I swung back the upper half of the coffin.

The skeleton inside grinned up at us.

Dee screamed and scrabbled backward. She hit the wall of the freshly dug hole, turned and yanked herself out. I heard her being sick, sobbing, retching, tearing at the grass with her hands.

Having half expected it, I was calmer. I studied the rotting corpse, almost all bone now. The skull wasn’t set as straight as it should have been—there was a crack in the neck. Its hands were crossed serenely across its chest. Scraps of hair clung to its scalp, refusing to accept the finality of the situation. Long, jagged nails. No eyes. Maggots feasting on the leftovers.

I abandoned the grave and stood over the gasping Dee. My face was blank, my hands were steady, my mind was set. Her theory had offered hope of a sane, happy conclusion, but I’d known all along it was pie in the sky.

She looked up, mouth slick with vomit and spit, eyes wild and dark. There was fear in those eyes, confusion and doubt. But mostly hatred for me, the thing with her husband’s face but not her husband. “What are you?” she hissed. “What the fuck
are
you?”

“I don’t know. Come back to the grave.”

“What?” she screeched.

“I want you to verify it.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I need to know for sure. That could be anybody. You’ve got to identify him.”

“It’s Martin’s grave! Martin’s coffin! Who the fuck do you
think
itis?”

“Please, Dee.” I offered her a friendly hand.

She slapped the hand away. “Don’t touch me,” she snarled. “Don’t come near me. You’re not Martin. You’re not even human. You can’t be. You—”

I slapped her hard. I didn’t like it but I couldn’t have her cracking up. I’d been acting the part of Martin Robinson, but whoever I might once have been, I was now Capac Raimi, a gangster, henchman to The Cardinal. And I wanted answers.

She stared at me, horrified. “You never hit me before,” she whispered.

“Things change. I asked nicely. Now I’m telling you. Check the body.”

Wordlessly, holding a hand to her cheek, she crawled across and stared into the grave again. She wept as she did and a couple of drops fell into the empty pits of the corpse’s eyes. “It’s Martin,” she moaned.

“How do you know?”

“On his chest. His hands. He’s wearing his wedding ring.”

“They could have put that on anybody. It doesn’t prove anything.”

“That’s Martin,” she said, hard this time. “And if you ever say that it isn’t”—she stood and glared at me—“I’ll kill you.”

I nodded wearily and sat by the grave, swinging my legs into the space below. I wasn’t fearful or nervous anymore. I was once again the cold, detached, clinical operator who’d killed a pair of men two nights before. Something changed when I exposed the body. The possibility that I was Martin Robinson evaporated and, as if I were an actor quitting a role, I dropped the persona instantly.

“It could be a fake,” I murmured. “If The Cardinal took my body, he’d fill the gap with an impostor. He likes to cover his tracks.”

“The Cardinal? ”

“You know him?” I stared at her.

“I know
of
him.”

“You’ve never met?”

“Of course not.”

“Did I… did Martin ever meet him?”

She shook her head. “Martin was a teacher. That’s all.” She moved back from the grave and circled me. “You really worked for The Cardinal?”

“Yes.”

“Then it was true what you said earlier? About being a gangster?” I nodded sharply. I wanted her to be quiet so I could think. “Did you ever kill anybody?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“I want to know,” she snapped. “You’ve stolen my dead husband’s face. I want to know what you’ve been doing with it.”

“It’s none of your business.” I rose and picked up the shovel. “I’ll leave in the morning. There’s nothing for me here. I thought there’d be answers but all I’ve found are more riddles and questions.” I kicked a clod of earth into the grave and glanced at her. “Are you going to help me fill this in?”

Her eyes were wide with disbelief. “What sort of creature are you? You come to me looking like Martin. You drag me out here and make me desecrate his… my husband’s grave!” Her voice was rising dangerously. “And you think you can just walk away without… like nothing had…”

“What else can I do? I’m sorry I put you through this but I had no choice. I was in the dark and I needed to—”

“You think this is the end of it?” she interrupted. “Think again, mister. I don’t know who or what you are, but I’ll be damned if I let you walk away like it’s some game.”

“What do you want from me?” I sighed. “What can I do to please you?”

“Stop talking like that for a start,” she growled. “We’ve just dug up a grave, damn it! You could at least show some respect for the… the dead.” Her head fell and she sobbed into her chest. I did feel sorry for her. Truly. But inside I was burning. The fire had been building during my year in the city, slowly, gradually. When I killed Vincent and the other man, it flared. It dwindled when I wrestled with the mystery of my former identity but now it was burning fiercely again. Only the truth could quench this fire. Dee couldn’t help me unlock the secrets of my past, so I had no time for her anymore.

“Dee,” I said as patiently as I could, “let’s just fill in the grave and leave. We’ll finish what we started, go home, put on the kettle, get a few hours’ sleep. In the morning I’ll be gone and you can get back to your—”

“You’re going nowhere,” she insisted.

“You want me to stay?” I asked uncertainly.

“Oh, you’re staying,” she chuckled grimly. “And in the morning—no, as soon as we leave here—we’re going to the police.”

“That won’t happen, Dee,” I told her flatly.

“You don’t have a say in this. It’s
my
husband you’re masquerading as. I’m the one who decides. And I say we let the police handle this.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“You can bet your eyes I do.” She was sure of herself now. She had a cause to keep her going. By focusing on that, she wouldn’t have to deal with the wounds I’d reopened. In her head it was straightforward—go to the police, tell them all about me, and they’d sort things out, somehow, some way. Then she’d be happy.