Epitaph (12 page)

It was useless.

The lid of the coffin wouldn’t budge. No matter how much pressure Paul Crane exerted on it from below, it didn’t move one single inch.

That’s it. Finished.

He could feel the sweat on his face and chest from his exertions.

‘Game over, man.’

That was a line from a film, wasn’t it?

No, fuck that. Don’t start that shit again.

He lay there gasping, using up his precious oxygen but not caring for a moment. He was defeated. Beaten down. There was nothing else.

Paul tried to focus his mind once again. He attempted to cling to that shred of hope that he’d held earlier. He forced himself to think logically despite the voices that kept buzzing at his consciousness like angry wasps.

The lid of the coffin is sealed but you might still be
above ground. What if you’re still in the chapel of rest or at the graveside? There might be people around to hear you. Taking heart momentarily from this thought he began to kick and pound at the sides and lid of the coffin, using reserves of strength he didn’t know he had.

For what felt like a full minute he kept up this tirade, shouting at the top of his voice as well until finally he stopped and lay helpless on the satin, gasping for air.

No, that’s it. You’re under the ground. You’re finished. If you were still above it someone would have heard that by now. Someone would have come.

‘Jesus, Jesus,’ he panted, wiping his eyes angrily when he felt the salty sweat stinging them.

Gradually he managed to bring his breathing under control and he felt his heart slowing down a little. He had to keep calm, mainly so that he didn’t use up his remaining oxygen any quicker than he had to. Shouting and screaming would simply hasten the end.

Paul used both hands to wipe the sweat from his face then he lay perfectly still with his eyes closed.

What now? Just lie here and wait to die. What else can you do? You had a go. You failed. That’s it. End of story.

What would Amy say when she found out? What would his mum say? He jerked his eyes open at the thought, not that it made any difference because he was still bathed in blackness. He saw a vision of Amy in his mind, standing at the grave crying. She had an arm around his mum who was also crying. His mum would say something about it not being right. That it should be her in the coffin, not her son.

No parent should have to bury their child.

That was a line of dialogue, too, wasn’t it?

Every word circulating inside his head, he decided, was probably from some line of dialogue from some film or other that he’d seen. It didn’t make any difference one way or the other, did it? Not any more.

No. It makes no difference to you, sunshine. You’re worm food now. Ha, ha, ha.

Worm food. The very words made him shudder. An image filled his mind of his own face, the skin hanging off, the mouth filled with twisting, writhing shapes. Worms. It was the same in the holes where his eyes once were. Each socket was stuffed to bursting with slippery, engorged worms slithering over each other as they feasted on him. There were thousands to every square metre of earth, weren’t there, and, even now, he could visualise them seething around the coffin, waiting to penetrate the wood when it rotted, eager to reach their feast within. And didn’t slugs eat carrion, too? Big, black, bloated, slime-covered slugs that looked like lumps of cancerous excrement as they slid along on the trails of silvery slime that they exuded like noxious, gleaming phlegm. They would feast on him, too. Just like they did on people in horror books. Paul cursed his own vivid imagination and tried to drive the images away but, even as he did, another and far more terrifying one filled his mind and took root with alarming speed and determination.

He had read a story when he was younger called
The Graveyard Rats
. He couldn’t remember who’d written it but it had given him nightmares for a week. It had been about some old guy who’d been a grave digger in a cemetery and who stole from the freshly buried corpses. He’d returned that night to remove a ring from one particular body and found
that the large rats that inhabited the cemetery had stolen the body and dragged it off into their tunnels to eat. Instead of just leaving it, the stupid bastard had crawled in after them and ended up being devoured by them. Paul could remember the story with far greater clarity than he would have liked considering his predicament, but more worrying was the fact that rats did live in graveyards. Normal rats. Not huge, mutant ones the size of cats or oversized ones in cheap paperbacks, but just ordinary rats. The kind that burrowed into coffins and ate the soft parts of newly buried corpses.

The soft parts.

The eyes. The internal organs. The tongue and the brain.

He felt sick.

If he’d have been standing above ground with the sun on his face he’d have dismissed flesh-eating graveyard rats as the stuff of horror stories but now, stuck here in this coffin below ground, the idea seemed more horrifyingly plausible than most. What if they came for him now? While he was still alive.

Fresh meat. Fresh, sweating, screaming, writhing, blood-filled meat.

‘No, no,’ he panted, unable to banish this particular nightmarish vision.

He could hear them outside the coffin now. Gnawing eagerly through the wood, desperate to get at the fresh meat that they could smell inside. If they came through the bottom of the coffin then they’d eat his feet first, he told himself. However, if they came through the lid they could drop straight on to him. On to his face. Paul shuddered uncontrollably at the thought of their rank, furry bodies scurrying over his bare flesh. They would bite him immediately and they would be so happy when they saw
blood jetting from the wounds. They’d probably fight over his eyes, desperate to be the first to bite into the bulging orbs. Would his eyes simply pop like overfilled balloons when they were punctured? Would he be able to hear the soft liquid sound as they were chewed or would the agony be so unbearable that he would pass out before he could suffer the supreme horror of being eaten alive?

The prospect of suffocation or a heart attack suddenly seemed quite pleasant in comparison to the fate he might suffer at the claws and teeth of the graveyard rats.

That was a story, nothing more. There’s no proof to support the fact that rats eat into coffins. Nothing concrete. When bodies are exhumed they’re not found eaten, are they?

Perhaps the warmth of his body would bring them running, he thought, unable to dislodge the nightmarish visions. All they ever had to eat normally was long-dead, cold flesh; perhaps that was why they only ate it as a last resort. But he was alive. He was fresh. He had warm blood coursing through his veins. They would want him.

You’re a fucking delicacy, sunshine.

‘Shut up, shut up,’ he screamed, both hands clasped to his head.

But the images wouldn’t fade this time and, now, the rats that were eating their way into his stomach, boring through his belly to reach his intestines, had been joined by the worms twisting and writhing in his eyes, one of which had burst as they ate it while several thick, stinking black slugs devoured his tongue and clogged his mouth with their slime and their bloated bodies.

Paul felt his stomach churning and he felt, for one terrifying second, that he was actually going to vomit.
He struggled to control himself, imagining what the consequences of such an action would be. He tried not to consider what would happen if he should throw up in such a confined space where the air was already beginning to smell sour and where the stink of his own rancid and acrid sweat was already becoming intolerable.

He clenched his jaws tightly together, praying that the spasms would pass and that his stomach would stop somersaulting. He felt hot then cold, as if he was suffering from some sort of fever. The sensations built then slowly faded away and he swallowed hard, relieved that he no longer wanted to be sick.

The thought of being a feast for all manner of creatures living in the earth of the graveyard, however, was one that persisted and he lay there for what seemed like an eternity, listening for any sounds of movement outside the coffin that might signal the onslaught.

He heard nothing.

It was silent.

As quiet as the grave in fact.

Oh, what a fucking comedian. The next stage leaves in half an hour, be under it. Ha, ha, ha.

Paul let out a long, almost painful breath. He lay still for a moment, his head motionless against the satin beneath. His lips moved slowly as if he were mouthing silent words. His breathing had slowed completely.

Have you accepted your fate? You know you can’t do anything about it now.

Not now. Not ever.

A single tear welled up in his right eye and ran down his face.

Laura couldn’t see the creature but she could hear it.

It was behind her somewhere, she was sure of that. She didn’t need to be able to turn to watch it. She could hear it breathing as it moved about, preparing itself. For what she couldn’t begin to imagine.

She didn’t want to know what it was doing. She just wanted to go home.

Her mum had told her that if she was really scared in any situation singing to herself was a good idea. Pick a song that she liked and sing it until she didn’t feel as frightened.

Now, as she heard the thing behind her moving about, Laura tried to think of a song that she could sing that would help her. She closed her eyes tightly, trying to think, screwing the lids together so hard that she wondered if she’d ever be able to open them again.

No songs came to mind. No catchy or comforting melodies that would soothe her and see her through this terrible time.

She tried again but still nothing would come. No words or
tune that she could hum (she couldn’t sing, she told herself, because her mouth was still taped shut).

Laura wriggled her fingers. Her hands were starting to feel numb where she was bound. Her legs too were aching from where she was secured so tightly to the chair that the thing had put her on. She had stopped crying purely and simply because she didn’t think that she had any more tears inside her to force out. Instead, she sniffed loudly, irritated by the two streams of mucus that were running from her nostrils and down over the masking tape that had been fastened around her lower jaw.

The thing had wound it around the back of her head, sticking her hair to the back of her neck in several places and Laura thought how painful that would be when it was removed. Like when she cut herself and her mum took the plaster off when the cut was healed. Her mum always said that it was best to pull the plaster off quickly, in one sharp tug. If you did it slowly then it would pull your skin and all the little hairs there would be torn out and it would hurt. So, it was best to just grab it and pull.

Laura wondered if the thing would remove the sticky tape around her mouth and jaw. Would it pull it quickly or would it take its time? Either way it was going to hurt. Laura didn’t care about that, though. She didn’t care if it hurt a lot. As long as the thing let her go afterwards then she didn’t mind. However, the more she thought about it, the less likely that seemed.

Why had it taken her prisoner in the first place? What was it going to do with her?

One part of her mind, a large portion, didn’t want to know at all.

In her mind she began to sing.

‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’

It was all she could think of.

‘If I should die before I wake.’

Laura suddenly didn’t like that rhyme. She didn’t like the word die. Not at this moment. It frightened her.

She tried to think of another song.

Behind her she heard another sound above the breathing of the thing. It sounded like a zipper being undone. A long, rasping noise that seemed to fill the room and Laura’s ears.

Then she heard the sound of the metal on metal once more and, despite herself, she began to cry again. She surprised herself at how many tears she managed to produce. Perhaps, she thought, if the creature saw how upset she was it might let her go. It might go and get another little girl instead of her.

Laura knew that was selfish and cruel but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to be in this place with this monster, whatever it was. She didn’t care who it took and who it strapped to a chair as long as it wasn’t her. Or one of her friends, of course. She wouldn’t want any of her friends to be in this position either. She wouldn’t wish this on anyone, not even her worst enemy.

But she wanted so badly to be out of here and home with her mum and dad.

She heard the creature moving closer to her and she stopped crying for a moment.

When it stepped back in front of her again she saw what it was holding and, despite the tape that sealed her mouth, she tried to scream.