I think about how that conversation between David and Henry went, and decide it would have started badly and only got worse.
I can only assume he was David’s first kill. I wonder what he thought, how he felt, and I wonder if in that we are similar. I felt nothing after killing Quentin James. I certainly felt no desire to do it again, even though I have done. I wonder if killing Henry Martins was like scratching an itch for David, or whether it was an experience that created an urge.
I reach the church. There is nobody around. No cars. No sign of life. But eight hours ago things were different. Eight hours ago all the crime scene tape was pulled away from the chapel and the pews were full of people. Father Julian came back to the church for one final time for one final service. Friends and family and his parishioners prayed over him. They sang, they shed tears and told stories, and they put tokens and photos on his coffin. Some would have felt relief. None of them truly knew the man they were burying.
I make my way inside the same way I did the other night, and walk through the chapel and to the front of the church, my torch leading the way. The place still feels like it has a presence — maybe it’s Father Julian. I scan through the registry and find it’s already been updated with the Sunday funeral of the priest.
I study the map of the grounds and figure out the location.
I carry the small Maglite with me as I walk among the dead, and the images of what happens in horror movies when people like me walk through places like this suddenly seem real. Hands digging up through the ground, the rotting dead back to some semblance of life with bony fingers as they claw their way from the dirt that has kept them captive. I shake the images away and they’re replaced with David Harding, a man far scarier and far more real.
It takes me ten minutes to reach the other side of the cemetery.
Running through the gravestones and the trees is like running around in a maze. There could be a dozen other people in here and I’d completely miss them. Given the amount of time I’ve spent in the cemetery lately I ought to know the place like my own backyard, because that’s what it’s become. Maybe if I started drinking it’d all come back to me. The rain starts to ease up again, and the soft ground sucks at my feet. When I get to the section of plots I want, I don’t even know for sure that I’m in the right place. Everything looks the same.
I start scanning the headstones. Names and dates start flashing by as I begin running between them, hardly slowing down as the torch lights up the inscriptions. Birthdays, death-days, messages from the dead, from the living, beloved by all, by some, by few — they blend into one as I move between them, my feet threatening to slip on the grass with every step. I start looking for freshly turned earth.
There are thousands of graves out here. But only one of interest.
It doesn’t take long to understand that I’m lost. Dark trees and dark graves, and nothing to help me get my bearings. Even when I start to backtrack my steps, I don’t know where they are. The grave I want could be anywhere. The church could be anywhere.
Then the world rushes up as my feet drop away, and suddenly I’m falling. I get my arms halfway up my body, but not all the way, and my face hits the opposite edge of the grave wall; my head snaps back, my shoulder smacks into the edge of the coffin lid, one leg goes into the coffin, and the other is shunted against the dirt wall. For a few moments I can’t move as the darkness settles in around me. I have no idea what has happened. The world has gone dark and my mind is spinning.
Slowly this land six feet down from the rest of the world shifts into place and it isn’t pretty. I can feel a hand beneath me, pressing into my chest. My face is wedged up against the side of the coffin.
I manage to roll onto my side, and suddenly the light appears again as my body shifts off the torch. I pick it up.