Death Itself!

By Fred L Taulbee Jr

       I walked to the Second Street Cemetery looking for Ed’s grave. I heard he was asking for me. He never asked for me. I looked the tough guy part and kept up the appearance of the private detective as much as it was my job, but I sometimes showed a soft spot for friends and good people. When the grapevine told me Ed was looking for me, I acquiesced.

       I knocked on his coffin lid. Clouds blanketed the night sky, overcast as usual, the clouds a little darker than yesternight. I looked at the dead leaves, the wilting flowers, the dead trees—nothing was amiss. I smelled the rot in the air—everything was normal.

       Ed opened his coffin lid slowly and struggled to lean up. He came out only to complain. He didn't like being with people. Kept to himself. He died forty years old from a tumor in his brain. It made him irrational, delusional, and moody. I dealt with all personality types in my work, so I dredged up some patience and prepared myself for a long, drawn out confusing conversation.

       “What’s up, Ed?”

       “It's Madeline.” Ed pointed behind him. “She dies two rows back, three to the right. Younger woman. Died of asphyxiation.”

       Asphyxiation—blue complexion and bloodshot eyes which is a very attractive look if that was your type.

       “Yeah, what about her?”

       “She's gone. She disappeared last day.”

       “So? Some people go away, visit relatives at their own graves. We don’t always die close to the ones we love. She’s got a brother somewhere right?”

       “She never leaves and would never visit her brother.”

       Ed looked at me with his wide stark eyes. I waited for them to blink but they never did. I knew there was more to it by the look, and I wasn’t going to like it one bit. “What else?”

       “Last day—.” He stopped and looked me in the eyes, his brow furrowing.

       “What is it, Ed?”

       “I smelled something,” he whispered.

       “What did you smell? What was it?”

       “I smelled Life.” He looked away to see if anybody else was around to hear and turned his head back to me. “I smelled Life. No rot, no putrefaction, no sickly-sweetness. I smelt Life for a second. It was like what some say flowers smell like before they die in rot.”

       “Come on, man. There is no such thing as Life. There is no pre-death. We are dead and that is it.” Something clicked in my head. “Wait, you smelled Life and she disappeared right?”

       “Yes, exactly.”

       “There’s no connection between the two incidents, Ed. It’s just a coincidence. Life doesn't take people. There is no Life. It's a myth. Death is forever.”

       “I swear I heard my heart beat last day. I swear it. I heard Life too. Walking around up here in the middle of the day. You think I want to be seen as the crazy one in the neighborhood? Well, I don't. I'm telling you this happened. And you can take it or leave it. Life was here. Life walked upon the earth. And Life took Madeline.”

       And with that he slammed his coffin lid shut. It took him a long time to open that lid, so shutting it that hard took some anger. I kneeled there for a bit more and hoped he would open up again without my knocking, but he didn't.

       I scratched through my clothes at the wound near my heart. I died in my mid-forties by murder, a .38 caliber bullet wedged in my heart. Some say we die different ways for a reason, but I never believed that one bit. No more meaning than a birthmark, I used to say. Not so sure now.

       I walked the paths between the graves to Madeline’s. I knelt down and knocked on her coffin. Nothing. I glanced around at the names on the headstones looking for someone easy to talk to—people who died young or old or died as a priest or a cop. They were always easy to talk to and get information from. No luck. I knocked again and nothing again. No noise came from the coffin. I heard someone shift a few coffins away. I was bothering the neighbors. I needed to be quiet.

       I tried the lid. It was stuck. I tried it with a little wiggle. Older coffin lids sometimes stick in high humidity. I opened my pocketknife, quietly slid it between the lid and the base, and opened it, taking about a million years. A coffin lid isn’t worth a thing if it doesn’t creak. What I saw inside changed everything, for I saw nothing. Madeline, who died of asphyxiation, had disappeared.

       I looked around for footprints but found none. Right near my foot however, in the dirt around the rotting grass and rotten clovers was a thing I could only describe as bright. A small glowing leaf, the size of my pinky nail, its stem curling out of the ground. It was plump, moist, and a color I had never seen before. It wasn’t brown, black, or gray. It wasn’t clotted red, gangrenous green, or asphyxiation blue. It wasn’t even bruised purple. It looked gangrenous green, but different, bright. It blinded me with its brilliance as if more light than possible was reflecting from it. As if it were—alive.

       Some people who believe in the pre-death claim that blood, which is black or a dried and clotted maroon, is actually a bright red before we die. This leaf was that kind of bright. I was staring at a color that did not exist in my world, only in old wives’ tales and myths of the pre-death. The bullet wound in my chest burned, and I knew this wasn't good. I looked around and rubbed the leaf out till it was dead and the same color as everything else.

       It did no good, for I found another a foot and a half away and another a foot and a half away from that one. The space between them was about the average length of someone’s stride. I followed. I could only scrape each one once or my footwork would appear suspicious, and the sounds would echo through the neighborhood below. I needed to make it sound like normal footsteps.

       I followed the trail from the Second Street Cemetery into the streets where I was safe to make more noise, but I couldn’t rub the plants out. There were too many people out who would see. Some people lived in their graves, and some people lived where they died. It’s the way of things. A man with a knife in his heart on the sidewalk, a hit-and-run victim in the middle of the street, a family of five in their burnt-out car. Others walked around visiting friends and family or wandering around enjoying the night, so dead with death. Nobody else noticed the plants, at least yet.

       The trail of life led me to another neighborhood, Memory Gardens Cemetery, not the newer section but the older part cut off by the road. The coffins are surrounded by partial sarcophagi made of brick rising half a foot from the ground with a concrete slab over them. This is so nobody has a change of address because of the local water table. I followed the path of life to a grave with a headstone, first name Herbert. The last name had faded from erosion.

       There was no way to lift the concrete slab without the neighbors hearing. I sat there for half an hour trying to figure it out, while I scraped away the living plants near Herbert’s grave and saw that they not only led to his grave, but away from his grave. I looked around from where I was kneeling at the nearby headstones for someone receptive to questions, and as I was doing so, I heard a coffin lid creak open inside a nearby sarcophagus, one I had not looked at yet. Then the concrete slab shifted. As it was budged more and more open, I looked at the gravestone. It was someone else in the business--a police detective named Knight. Not everybody was lucky enough to die near a cop, and I suspected he wasn't just checking out the neighborhood. He knew I was here. He knew I wasn’t visiting anyone. And he knew I had been here too long for someone just shuffling by.

       I waited patiently for the slab to open further. I didn't want to be presumptuous and open it for him. Some people hated that. And I was sure Detective Knight would hate that. The slab tilted like a seesaw on its brick sarcophagus, fingers clenched the edge of it. Detective Knight presented himself. He must have been in his late but spry seventies when he died.

       He looked at me and said, “Hello, stranger,” loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Then, with a wag of a finger, he bade me approach so I did.

       That’s when I remembered the name as well as the man. He had died naturally with no violence whatsoever. Pretty lucky for a cop or just a really good cop. And he was clad splendidly in his dress blues. He even pulled his hat out from his coffin and put it on as if it were official business, and I had an inkling that he at least thought it was official.

       “How can we help you around these parts?” he continued loudly.

       “My name is Miles.” I spoke loudly like him. “Looking for an old friend. Pretty sure I got the wrong neighborhood, officer. Maybe you can help me.”

       He waved me closer and asked “What's up?” so only I could hear. I sensed that he knew exactly what was up, but he was bouncing it in my court.  

       I pointed to the grave, a stopping point in the path of my mystery. “Herbert over there. Has he been missing?”

       “Why do you want to know?” he whispered.

       “Someone else is missing in a nearby neighborhood.”

       “But something led you here, partner. What could possibly lead you here to our neighborhood from that neighborhood based on the simple fact that someone was missing?”

       I smiled. It was the same basic deductive reasoning I used on Ed when I told him that the missing Madeline and the smell he smelled were not necessarily related. Coming from Knight it was a classic revelation—he knew exactly what had led me here, so I nodded and said, “A curious trail, sir.”

       “Curious indeed, gumshoe.”

       I was sure he had noticed the trail of life in his own neighborhood and had followed it. I didn't need to tell him what the trail was made of. He knew and didn't want to say it out loud any more than I. He knew what evidence was, and he knew what incontrovertible evidence was.

       “The guy I'm looking for is named Ralph,” I lied loudly for the neighbors to hear. It was the only name I could think of quickly.

       He thumbed towards Herbert’s grave and continued speaking softly enough for only us to hear. “He disappeared last day, maybe the day before. I was about to rub the trail out myself.” And then he said loudly, “There's no Ralph here, but I can point you in the right direction.”

       He stood up from his coffin slow enough to count in hours. He looked around, pointed to the newer part of the cemetery cut off by the road, and said loudly, “He's probably over there.” He pointed down the road and whispered, “The trail leads that way. Follow it and good luck, gumshoe. I will wipe out the trail here. It will be less suspicious if I do it, and I should probably hang outside a bit to make the neighbors feel comfortable.”

       “One more thing, if I may, sir,” I requested quietly.

       He nodded.

       “Did you see anything? Or maybe smell anything? Something strange, otherworldly?”

       Detective Knight said nothing. His eyes watered up. There was fear in those old cop eyes.

       “You should go.”

       I didn't know what to say except, “Thank you, officer” loudly, and “Thank you, sir,” quietly. I really wanted to talk about it, but I knew he didn't want to. I stayed in tough guy mode and hid the plain and not-so-simple fact that I too was scared to life of what I would find. I rubbed the aching wound in my chest.

       I moved on from cemetery to cemetery with a few mausoleums in between, from pleasantly sterile cemeteries with metal plaques flat on the ground to family graveyards beautifully unkempt and creepy. I stopped and talked to people I normally talked to and found a few leads that way. It was the same story from the nosy neighbor to the young and naive, anybody I could talk around carefully, even an occasional cop, but none as sharp as Detective Knight, nor as helpful. And it was all the same. Nearly a hundred people had disappeared from the safety and sanctity of their own damn graves. It sounded like a beginning-of-the-world story, and there is nothing I despise more than beginning-of-the-world stories.

       As I walked the moonlit streets, I saw everything in a different light. This was our world. This was our death. In the annals of history there was no precedent, only in hearsay, conspiracy theories, and myths. I read something long ago somewhere and always tried to live up to it. Tonight was a night to live up to it: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” There was more to it, but it wasn’t a time for dwelling on quotes. It was a time for action. 

       I found my way home, slept on it for about ten minutes, and thought about it the rest of the day until I fooled myself into thinking I too smelled Life outside my own coffin. I opened the lid, looked outside, and immediately shut the lid.

Outside my coffin, right near my eyeline—and the reason I had shut the lid—was a tiny curling sprout with no leaves yet, alive with Life, like the ones outside of Madeline's and Herbert's. Life had been outside my coffin this very night. I thought I literally heard my heart beat.

       I kept a mirror on the inside lid of my coffin. I moved it down toward my chest and pulled out a lighter. Slowly, very slowly, I unbuttoned my overcoat, my suit jacket, my button-up shirt, and pulled my t-shirt up. Eons passed as I did so.

I flicked on the lighter and looked in the mirror. The flesh near the bullet hole, which had been the same since I was born, was losing its necrosis. It looked like what some claim is healing.

       It was nearing evening and promised to be a pleasantly chilly and dark night. Soon, people would rise from their graves and meander about, doing what people do. I couldn't help but think that somewhere in some other parallel universe, alternate reality—or if you want to say it you can call it Life. Maybe in that world Madeline, Herbert, and all the others were alive, as if taken from death. It's beyond comprehension. What is Life? What do you do there? Do you remember your death?

          I have found missing people, cheating spouses, missing jewelry stolen by graverobbers. I have worked as security and shadowed more people than I even know. I could call in a million favors, but who would believe my story? This might be happening in our own little city or all over the world. Maybe others were already fighting Life. I had to join them or kill this monster myself. I put my clothes back together, readied my gun, stepped out of my coffin, and followed the trail.

The End

Fred L. Taulbee Jr. published “A-Haunting We Will Go” in Bete Noire, “Six Bullets to Kill” in Innisfree, and “The last Tree” in Child Life Magazine. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he works at a used book store.