For twenty-three years I had watched the cemetery.
People often imagined my job was exciting. They pictured moonlit duels with grave robbers, desperate chases through the fog, cursed relics and hungry ghouls clawing their way out of the earth.
In truth, grave thieves were cowards.
They came with lanterns hastily wrapped in cloth and eyes fixed not on the dead, but on what the dead had been buried with. Gold rings, silver lockets, sometimes a jeweled, dully-glinting sword if the family had been wealthy enough. They never looked at the names carved into the stones, never wondered who lay beneath them. It was the highest form of disrespect.
Thankfully, I always stopped them before they finished. Some nights all I had to do was cough as I approached them; other nights I had to introduce them to the flat side of my shovel.
Either way, by sunrise the cemetery belonged to the dead again.
The mourners were easier to understand.
You spend enough years among graves and you begin to recognize grief before a person opens their mouth. There was the old widower who visited every Thursday with fresh daisies, trimming the grass around his wife's marker before talking to her about the weather. There was the mother who had outlived her son by nearly forty years and still tucked little stuffed animals beside his headstone every birthday. There were children who cried openly, soldiers who refused to cry at all, and young lovers who promised each other forever while carrying flowers for someone who had once made that very same promise.
Grief wore a thousand faces, and I thought I had seen every one of them until the scratching began.
It came just after midnight: not the frantic clawing of an animal, not the careful scrape of a thief. I wouldâve recognized it by now. Instead this sound was slow; persistent.
Immediately apprehensive, I took my lantern and shovel and followed the sound toward the oldest corner of the cemetery, where the stones had withered with age and the names of those buried there were barely intelligible.
The scratching never stopped as I approached, my cloak sweeping gently across the grass. Usually it would have. This told me it was not the hurried work of a thief trying to beat the dawn, nor the frantic scrabbling of a fox after rabbits. Whoever â or whatever â made that sound wasn't trying to be quiet.
My boots sank into damp earth as I moved between the graves. Every instinct told me to turn back and fetch the constable, but the cemetery was my responsibility. If someone was digging into a grave, I would meet them first.
The sound only grew louder with each step.
I rounded a weathered marble angel statue, and it was then that I caught sight of someone kneeling at a grave.
For a brief, almost comforting moment, I thought it was another mourner, hunched over the headstone with both hands fisted in the dirt. I'd seen stranger things from the grieving. Men who slept beside fresh graves. Mothers who refused to leave until they were carried home by their loved ones. Love had a way of making the living forget themselves, after all.
I opened my mouth to tell the poor soul the cemetery was closed â
â then it looked up, my lantern light caught what remained of its face, and I gasped before I could help myself.
Its face had long ago surrendered to rot. What little skin remained hung limply from the skull, almost like damp, gray ribbons, and beetles disappeared into the hollows beneath its cheekbones. One eye had collapsed entirely, leaving a black socket packed with wet earth and writhing pale worms, while the other still clung stubbornly to the face â a clouded eyeball that rolled aimlessly beneath a half-rotted lid.
Its every movement loosened something. Clumps of dirt tumbled from its open mouth. The air around it smelled of rain-soaked soil, stagnant water, and the sweet, unmistakable perfume of something that should have stayed buried.
I looked down at the hands fisted into the dirt. Its hands were scarcely hands anymore, as the fingers were stripped nearly clean to bone, every scrape across the hard-packed earth shaving away another fragment, and yet the thing never hesitated. It simply dragged its ruined hands back and began again, as though pain had long ago ceased to matter. Every attempt to dig cost it another piece of itself, and still it scraped. All the while mumbling something repeatedly that I had to strain to hear over the wind â
I finally heard it, and the word made my heart sink.
There was a kind of dull desperation to it. Almost as though the word alone were enough to keep the body moving.
Gulping, I tightened my grip on the shovel, unsure of my next move. The old stories said the dead rose with hatred in their hearts. They hungered, they killed, and yet this one barely seemed to notice I existed.
"Wife," it grunted again, one hand untangling itself from the dirt to touch the headstone with astonishing gentleness. Its fingertips lingered on the carved letters as though it already knew every curve.
I lifted my lantern to squint at the words. The inscription had almost disappeared beneath centuries of weather.
Eleanor Ashcombe. Beloved Wife. Died eighty-one years earlier.
The thing in front of me gave a tiny, frustrated scrape at the earth.
Then another. And another.
I⌠don't know why I did it.
Perhaps because I had spent so long guarding the dead that I had forgotten they once belonged to someone. Perhaps because after all those years I recognized grief, no matter what shape it took on.
Without a word, I stepped beside it.
The zombie looked at me, then at the shovel, then back at me.
Deciding all at once, I drove the blade into the earth.
The first scoop landed beside the grave with a heavy thud, and the creature froze and stared at me. With my mouth grimly flat, I stared back. I did not know if the thing was capable of understanding.
Then, slowly, it turned back to the grave and resumed scratching with renewed determination, as though we had silently agreed to share the work.
Neither of us spoke again. The moon crossed half the sky while we dug.
The soil grew harder to break the deeper we went. My shoulders burned, my hands blistered, and still we continued until the hollow knock of iron against oak echoed from below:
The zombie made a sound then: not a growl, or a howl, but a breath that trembled so violently it could only have been relief.
Together we cleared away the remaining dirt and stared at the womanâs resting place below.
The coffin had collapsed in places, softened by decades underground. Maybe I shouldâve felt like I was doing something wrong at the moment. I did not.
Steeling myself, I pried the lid open with the edge of my shovel. Inside lay only bones wrapped in what little remained of a faded dress, and the zombie immediately dropped to its knees.
With hands that had once belonged to a living man, it reached into the coffin.
It did not disturb the skeleton. It merely took her hand.
For a very long time nothing happened.
I donât know what I expected to happen, but there was no magic, no resurrection, no miracle. Whatever happened to the thing before me was not going to happen to the wife. There was only silence.
When he finally spoke, the word was almost too quiet to hear.
He leaned forward until his forehead rested against her hand, and it was then that he stopped moving completely.
The strange force that had held him together for all those years seemed to slip away like a sigh. His fingers loosened. His spine sagged. Bone separated from bone until, little by little, there was nothing left beside the coffin but another skeleton resting peacefully against hers.
As though death had only been waiting for him to let go.
The sun was beginning to rise when I buried them again.
I carved a new marker before I left.
