View from the Grave

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With competing feelings of revenge, anger and pity I looked down every night on the sleeping figure of my friend, Gary, as he tossed and turned in his sleep. You would think that, after working long hours as a caretaker in the disturbing confines of our village’s graveyard, he would have no trouble escaping his dreary existence and entering into a deep and restful peace.

During the night though, every time he moved on his bed, a loud crunching sound echoed through his bedroom. As I looked closer I could see human bones crushed all over his sheets. After a while, Gary got up and began sleepwalking around his home, then suddenly returned to his sleep. The following morning the bones had disappeared. Where had the bones come from?

I hold one of the keys to the mystery. Those bones belong to me, Boyd. I am where I am because of something Gary and I participated in many years ago as young adolescents growing up together. More on this episode later.

In any event, to salvage his sanity from the daily nightmare, my friend could not avoid thinking about the strange puzzles that surged through his brain every night. I have decided to let him solve these puzzles himself.

A partial answer lies within the walls of the cemetery.

As I look down on Gary I hear him say to his uncle, Walter, the superintendent of the graveyard and his boss, “Please stay after your shift tonight.”

After unburdening himself about the nightly disturbances, the nephew has a request. “With your permission, I will sleep in the superintendent’s cottage and see if I sleepwalk there, and, more importantly, why?”

Walter reluctantly agreed, but hesitated, because he feared the creepy things that could happen overnight in a graveyard.

They didn’t realize that they, like me, also held the key to a family secret that, if revealed, could have dire consequences for both of them.

The nephew had long ago pushed these events to the back of his subconscious and kept them locked away. He also knew he had to keep a close watch on his uncle so that his knowledge of the events that happened many years before did not come pouring out because of Gary’s nightly hiking trips into the unknown.

As darkness enveloped the area the two men watched a number of late night television shows. The nephew eventually lapsed into unconsciousness, while Walter stayed alert to watch for Gary to begin his nocturnal excursion.

After a half hour the sheets shifted as the young man started to emerge from his bed. With his eyes open, but with a blank expression on his face, he arose and began walking into the kitchen of the small cottage. He opened a door on the front hall closet and removed a large shovel.

Walter quietly followed as his nephew opened the cottage door and began walking into the eerie darkness of the graveyard. They continued down one row of graves and then another and another until they stopped in front of the freshly-dug grave of Walter’s father, Gary’s grandfather. They saw, piled next to the grave, the bones that had mysteriously appeared in his nephew’s bed several nights ago.

Walter then halted in his tracks. Gary began digging into the soil and throwing the bones into the grave. He then opened his eyes and cried out, “What am I doing burying bones in my grandfather’s final resting place? Am I trying to cover up something which should remain covered?”

The nephew, then fully awake, realized that if his uncle continued to observe him, the whole story that had remained hidden for so long would come out, so he decided his best interest dictated that the bones and the mystery that went with them should remain buried.

You see, 10 years ago my friend and I found a loaded gun in his grandfather’s closet. As we played cops and robbers in this graveyard Gary pointed the gun at me and it accidentally discharged, killing me. Panicked, my friend stuffed rocks into my pockets and dragged my body into the lake near the family grave sites. He didn’t think anyone saw what happened. Although the guilt has subconsciously eaten him up alive for the past decade, he has buried it deep in his mind until recently.

The nephew did not know that two men had seen him dump something in the lake the decade before.

Over the years, Walter and the grandfather had never pursued what they saw at the lake since, at first, they thought they had observed their young relative throwing something harmless into the body of water and, second, they probably didn’t want to know if Gary had done something horrible.

The grandfather had died six months before and the family had buried him in the family grave site.

Gary thought the secret of that night many years ago had died with his grandfather. That is, until the nightmares and sleepwalking began.

Fate had other plans. Torrential winds and rains during a hurricane about a month before had caused the lake to overflow and my body to wash up on the shore next to the family grave site.

While working alone in the graveyard one night Gary had discovered what remained of my decaying corpse and planned to rebury it before his Uncle Walter showed up. My friend had hurriedly covered my remains in a temporary grave.

His uncle knew that, once again, he had seen Gary burying something suspicious, but, unsure of what he had seen, had put it out of his conscious mind.

Yet, the incident continued to play on Gary’s subconscious. It also led to repeated nightmares and made his sleepwalking more frequent.

Gary, now staying with his uncle, feared Walter would add things up and finally turn him in. He returned to the temporary gravesite and continued finishing off my temporary resting place. Following his nephew, the uncle crept up behind, trying to wrest the shovel out of the young man’s hands.

The pair struggled and the uncle managed to turn the tables and knock the nephew out.

Walter then put Gary over his shoulder and carried him back to the cottage. When his nephew woke up, Walter told him that it was time to end the sordid tale. He called the local sheriff and went over the whole story for him.

A month later, a jury convicted Gary of improperly disposing of human remains. The jurists ruled out murder or manslaughter since he had been a juvenile at the time of the incident and he had not deliberately shot me.