Billy's Experiment

By Jonathan Dunne

On the night of a blood moon eclipse, park ranger Bill Steward saves a newborn baby on the misty moors of Old Castle's national park.

Seven autumns later, Bill and his wife, Dorothy, discover a ghastly experiment in a treehouse and a mysterious medical prescription written in a childish scribble. 

Bill realises what he'd observed on the moors seven autumns ago wasn't what it seemed. Who was saving who, exactly? 

Just as Bill's eclipse is beginning, so, too, is Billy's.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Dunne
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798227421005

Jonathan Dunne

Admittedly, Jonathan has done things arseways most of his life, from completing a BA in Literature in his thirties to fitting teeth brackets (30's, porcelain). During this general confusion, Jonathan has had various short stories published. Jonathan suffers from photophobia though has a tendency towards fireworks. Originally from Limerick, Ireland, he now lives the reclusive life in Toledo, Spain, as a bearded hermit, with his wife and three daughters. He is known to be found in the local cemetery at the weekend during daylight hours, though for goodness sake, don’t sneak up on him.  

Book preview

Prologue

Night Nurse

THE NIGHT NURSE, THAT angel of death, was yet to come to room 1402 — the same room where Bill and Dorothy Steward sat vigil at their child’s bedside.

‘Where is your god now, Dor, hmm?’ Bill Steward was furious with Mother Nature and her whimsical devil-may-care attitude, giving birth to babies and killing those infants with the same wave of her bitter-sweet magic wand. Talk about a tough break. ‘Where is any god when you want one? They keep saying he’s a terminal patient. Don’t they realise how horribly cold that sounds? Terminal? Nothing is terminal. Terminal only happens when we think we know where the end is.’ Even Bill didn’t understand his own words, but deep down somewhere, he knew it made sense. He said in defiance, ‘They just accept he’s terminal because they can’t cure him.’

‘We’re all just passing through,’ Dorothy answered in distant, monotone cadence, ‘some of us faster than others. Once we shed the trappings of our physical bodies, our souls become—’

‘Bullshit!’ Bill snapped, immediately regretting it. ‘I’m not talking about souls and reincarnation, Dor. Stop trying to twist this. You know where I stand...where I’ve always stood.’

‘Bill, God works in mysterious w—’

‘Please, let’s just leave it there.’

Dorothy averted Bill’s eyes. Instead, she kept her gaze on the tips of her shoes. Bill observed how his wife rubbed at a spot on the tip of her right loafer, as if she couldn’t accept it was a scuff mark and not something stuck to her shoe. She rubbed and rubbed until it looked a lot like a metaphor for her denial of this nightmare situation they have found themselves in.

Unable to remain sitting, Bill got up and peered out the window. A heavy mist was falling and twilight had succumbed to night. Day and night were mixed into one over the last couple of weeks. These forever-fluorescent hallways didn’t have a night and day. Unless one of them glanced out the ward window, they wouldn’t realise there was a world outside these hospital walls. Down below, Bill viewed ambulances come and go. Life carried on. He searched deep within himself to understand his wife’s chilling detachment. He knew this was her way of coping with their son’s terminal cancer; trying to understand something that wasn’t understandable, searching for a reason their three-year-old son was knocking on death’s door tonight. They shared this tacit understanding. Bill got why his wife preferred to study her footwear rather than bring herself to look at her emaciated living-dead son lying in the bed.

Bill opined, ‘This isn’t supposed to happen. I’m supposed to go first, and my son after me; that’s the natural law. I’d gladly swap places.’

‘Oh, now you’re being silly.’ Dorothy wasn’t having any of it.

But Bill Steward’s words would come back to haunt him in the future.

The worm of panic wriggled in Bill’s insides and he did everything in his power to stay sitting in his warped plastic seat in that oncology department, in a concrete construction, with kids dying around him and nobody seemed panicked. It was Mother Nature’s genocide — natural selection — and humanity sat back and enjoyed the horror-show from ringside seats. Bill couldn’t figure out how society could distance itself simply because a patient was ‘terminal’. Something on a primordial level had gone wrong somewhere along the line. His son was lying in the oncology paediatric department painted with Disney characters whose smiles didn’t quite reach their eyes; Mickey Mouse, Donald, Goofy, and even Ariel were all in on this cover-up.

Instead of demanding his wife to produce God from the magic top-hat he always seemed to hide in, he took his wife’s hand in his. ‘You go home. I’ll take tonight’s watch.’

Dorothy considered her husband. ‘But you did last night.’

‘Go,’ he told her with a smile. ‘You look rough.’

‘Oh, thank you for the compliment.’

She hadn’t lost her caustic sense of humour and that was a godsend in these dark times. ‘You’re welcome.’ He kissed his wife on the cheek. ‘I’ll call you with any news.’

They both knew what that announcement would be. They had been on tenterhooks waiting for that statement for the past fortnight. For now, no news is such sweet, good news.

Dorothy got up and kissed her son on the cheek. Bill was aware it could be the last time she would kiss their child. Somewhere along the way, they had become numb to all of this. That was the only consolation they had. His wife had remained in the denial phase. She could not accept, which is why she kept up this cold, tough exterior of defiance.

Bill watched his wife recede down the hallway. Jesus, she was only a bag of bones, unable to find her appetite these days. He knew a moment would come when Dorothy would re-find herself and scream. He would be there for her when it came.

Bill moved back inside room 1402 and took the hip flask of neat Jameson whiskey from the pocket of his jacket hanging on the back of the plastic chair. Bill took a healthy swig to take the edge off. It was purely medicinal, and he knew where his boundaries lay. What have I done to deserve this? he asked himself, but scolding himself just as fast for being so fucking greedy-guts. What had his boy done to deserve this? That was the real question here. Bring on your gods! For the first time in his life, Bill Steward talked — not prayed — to Jesus. He figured a little chat, man-to-man, couldn’t hurt. Maybe even beg JC for intervention, divine or otherwise. He gazed at his ill son, a tiny figure in the bed, nothing more than an emaciated, jaundiced, balding-walking-talking skeleton. The mummified child Pharaoh he’d seen in the Valley of the Kings as a part of their Nile honeymoon didn’t look all that different. That tour turned out to be real gimmicky. As the whiskey hit and numbed all the right nerve-endings in his system, a smile kindled on Bill’s face as he recalled that beautiful cloudless morning when Dorothy and himself took a balloon ride over the Nile. It had been a sort of romantic encounter until Bill felt that first gut-bubble. He had eaten something that didn’t agree with him and he felt the onset of severe diarrhoea in a basket with 15 other tourists, two thousand feet over the sparkling Nile river. He had nightmarish visions of cocking his bare ass over the rim of the basket to relieve himself into the Nile river below. Talk about making your mark. Ah, happy days.

His son’s silly hospital gown, far too baggy for him, had slipped down around his shoulders, revealing the heart-shaped birthmark on the lower right side of his neck. The more Bill looked at his son, the more anxiety he felt. Heart palpitations knocked inside his chest for the first time in his life.

Afraid for himself, he walked down the hallway to the nurse’s station to ask for some kind of sedative, anything to help him calm down and relieve the tension.

The nurses outright refused.

Bill Steward was walking back to his son’s room when a nurse strode ahead of him and made a point of leaving a small paper cup of water and a little white pill on one windowsill. She flashed him a surreptitious glance. He thanked her before she skipped away on her rounds.

Bill took himself to his child’s bedside and downed the tablet, not with the paper cup of water but with a heavy triple slug of whiskey. Mixing alcohol and medication was a big no-no, but he was desperate. He stuck his earpods in his ears and listened to the haunting triplet sequence of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on an eternal loop — kind of like how he felt. He liked to switch on this piano lullaby to ease himself into sleep on nights when the land of Nod was just too far away. Tonight, he was especially desperate for that sweet, numbing cloak. Bill’s erratic sleeping pattern only began six months ago when they first found out about their three-year-old’s illness. Bill found that focusing on one corner of his bedroom ceiling helped to induce him into some kind of pre-sleep state. He did the same now, focusing on a small damp patch above him in the ceiling’s corner. The spot was so far back he had to rest his head on the back of his chair. Soon, Bill was wallowing in one of the deepest narcotic sleeps of his life and he didn’t care if he never woke up.

That was when she appeared. The night nurse slipped into the stuffy room 1402.

Bill, under the influence of the sedative washed down with whiskey, was numb. So insensate he’d only been vaguely aware of that surreal creeping visitor. In his dreamlike state, he perceived a slithering and dragging from somewhere about him, blending in with Beethoven’s piano. In his befuddled mind, he thought he was listening to the sweep of the cleaner’s mop. A dark silhouette was standing at the foot of his son’s bed now. The room was dim and Bill was seeing everything through the haze of the something-to-take-the-edge-off sedative. One of the night nurses was doing her rounds, but in his feverish delirium, the figure appeared to stretch up to the ceiling. He forced his eyelids open a little more to drag himself from this lucid dream. It was a nurse, with her back to him, but her uniform looked wrong, old-fashioned? Nurses don’t wear a nurse’s cap anymore...or do they? This nurse dressed like a time traveller, trying to fit in but out of touch. Now Bill could see her side profile as she stood over the boy. She was wearing a face mask. The area of her face above the mask remained in the shadows.

And all the while, ‘Moonlight Sonata’ played softly in Bill’s ears. It seemed a fitting tune in this sedative-induced dreamy dream.

The night nurse grew two...three metres tall. Bill, through a dribbling fuzzy mist, saw the nurse’s head and cap touch the ceiling.

In complete silence, she turned to Bill and signalled him to be quiet, holding her index finger to her face mask.

There was something off about the colour of her skin, exceedingly pale and blemished, as if she had suffered from severe acne as a teenager. Bill could make out her pitted skin in the light as the happy, fuzzy feeling filled him. Through his altered state of consciousness, Bill assumed the nurse was telling him to be quiet because the child was sleeping. He didn’t question the night nurse’s abnormally long index finger held to her face mask. A dizzy cocktail of sleep deprivation and the pollutants in his system kept Bill groggy, and he was more than happy to go along on this surreal ride.

The night nurse studied the child, looking him over like he was a specimen in a cage in a backstreet black market. With her back to Bill, she did something with the boy.

From his plastic chair, Bill watched her from behind; regarded her spindly elbows and arms move mechanically over the three-year-old, as if fashioning yarn from wool. What was she doing to the boy in this feverish nightmare? He was sure he caught the glint of glass in her hands. Her hands? Yes, spindly and pockmarked, and possessed that morbid ivory only the dead take on.

What are you doing?

No matter how hard he tried, Bill couldn’t make that transition from inside his head to outside it. He wasn’t sure if he had spoken those words or they still remained inside his head. Bill gagged when he saw the night nurse spit into a glass jar of darkish liquid held in her deformed grey hands. What kind of medical practice was this?

She turned towards Bill. From behind her face mask, she croaked in a raspy whisper, ‘The child has left...’

In his groggy stupor, Bill witnessed the nurse lower her face mask and plant a tender kiss on the boy’s forehead, then fix her mask once again. She then crossed to Bill, lowered her face protection, bent down, and kissed his cheek with glacial lips. He caught the ghost of an odour. Earthy mouldiness came from the night nurse’s breath as she leaned over him.

Bill would recall that musty aroma later, pulling it from the filing system of memories.

Through the layers of happy-drowsy time, the cold meatiness of the nurses’s lips pricked his conscience and his skin. Her harmless peck on the cheek graduated into a painful sucking love bite. He was sure she had spoken a couple of soft words drowned out by Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ lullaby, but they had morphed into the tinkle of piano keys by the time they were in Bill’s head.

As ‘she’ drew away from Bill, he glimpsed her face before she replaced the mask, and what he saw would stay with him indefinitely. The cadaverous face of the night nurse wasn’t a nurse at all but a mouldering angel of death, spun from the stuff of nightmares. Bill drowned in the ruminative convulsive workings of her face. He was floating now. His eyelids became heavy, and he floundered in the surging wave of sleep that washed over him. As he whirled on the sedative-alcohol merry-go-round, he heard that same slithering shuffle rise behind him.

By the time it had dawned on Bill Steward to turn around, dawn had arrived. It was Friday, Halloween, October 31, 2014.

Damp

All Shook Up

BILL STEWARD WAS ON his way back to the office. He had already driven by two or three individuals lurking in the undergrowth, had made eye contact with them without even knowing it. On the radio, Elvis was singing ‘All Shook Up’. Bill was singing along with The King in his Mitsubishi 4x4 he nicknamed Mitsi. Bill admired the twilit view as he bounced along the forest trail on that Saturday evening, October 31, 2015. Halloween had come around again. From up here, on the crest of Black Valley, he could see everything stretch out before him in inky blue. The predicted blood moon hung low over the trees in the eastern sky, suspended between the towering peak silhouettes of Mag Reek Mountain. Tonight was the night of the ultra-rare blood moon eclipse. Several TV and radio networks had advertised it. Being an amateur astronomer, Bill had been counting down the nights to tonight. He had his fancy-pants binoculars resting on the passenger seat next to him. A nightly mist had crept up out of the valley from the lake below. Soon, it would shroud the mountainside in its ethereal white cloak. Just as well Bill Steward knew Old Castle national park like the back of his hand. Once or twice a year, the mist left the uninitiated lost and afraid. Whatever about lost tourists, Bill was hoping the mist wouldn’t obscure his view of the eclipse tonight.

‘Bill, you there, darlin’?’

The voice filled the 4x4, startling Bill, who had been away in his own little world. He picked up the CB receiver from its cradle on the dash and executed his finest Elvis impression. ‘Uh huh uh,... Over.’

‘Oh,’ the woman answered, ‘Elvis, sorry to bother you. This is Lucy Devereaux. Could you put me onto Bill Steward, please? I need to speak to him about some delinquents.’

Bill thanked Elvis for the message, adding, ‘Yes, Lucy? Over.’

From the ramshackle prefab office, thirteen kilometres from where Bill was at that moment, Lucy Devereaux informed the ranger, ‘More people have called in about that band of Halloween hooligans hanging around the entrance to the park, done up in spooky costumes and playing chicken with oncoming traffic. They’ve caused a bottleneck back along the new line as far as town.’ Locals still called the stretch of road between the national park and Old Castle the new line, even though the road had existed since the 50s.

‘Lucy, it’s Halloween. Cut people a little slack. What disturbance are we talking about? Over.’

‘Loitering.’

‘Hmm, so the evidence is building — Halloween costumes and loitering? Over.’

‘There’s already been a couple of near-misses tonight, Bill. They have spotted the creeps near the park and...oh wait, you’re being sarcastic? Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Didn’t your mommy ever tell you that?’

‘Look, there’s only one creep in this park right now and you’re talking to him. Over,’ joked Bill. ‘The road is Big Tom’s jurisdiction. I’m the park ranger and what goes on inside the gates of this place is my jurisdiction, and until that happens, I’m not getting involved. Over.’

‘Do you take anything seriously?’

Bill paused. ‘Lucy, after what Dorothy and I went through this very day last year, I take nothing seriously. It was the scariest Halloween of my life. Over.’ And for a second, Bill Steward melted inside. He willed back the tears. The park ranger was overcome with a terrible desire to weep. Even a year on, he was still standing at the precipice of grief, his toes peeping out over the edge of oblivion. Unlike his wife, Dorothy, Bill had learned to assimilate and accommodate the grief because it would never go away, just hide, and it was bigger than he was. He had learned to control these urges and surges, which came at the most inopportune of moments.

A lull came on the transmission waves as Lucy Devereaux was trying to figure what had happened a year ago. Bill had caught her off guard. ‘Oh my god, one year?’ she reflected. ‘Time flies.’

A year had passed since Bill’s son died.

Lucy added, ‘I’m happy for you. Should I even say that? What I’m trying to say is that I admire your outlook on life. You are sanguine...is that the word? Another person might sink.’

‘I’m staying afloat. Over.’ Bill could’ve delved deeper into that metaphor, but over the CB was not the moment.

Lucy answered back with joy in her voice, ‘And good for you, Bill Steward, good for you.’

‘Y’know why, Lucy? Because horror has taught me how to appreciate every moment. Over.’

‘And Dorothy? Is she feeling any better these days?’

Bill couldn’t lie to Lucy. ‘Tough going. Sometimes I think she’s getting over her depression and wants to leave the house, but it’s usually a false alarm. She just doesn’t have much interest in life, whereas I see life as a precious gift since we lost him. Strange how death affects the living. Over.’

An awkward silence bloomed on the radio waves.

‘So, what about those hooligans?’ Lucy inquired, falling back into her lovable old doggedness. ‘Donny McCoy said he saw them loitering around the gates, down by the public car park. Too close for my liking,’ she added with an ominous air. ‘Donny said they were: ...all done up in creepy Halloween costumes.’

‘Don is kind of creepy, don’t you think? Over.’

‘You know what I think, Bill Steward? I think you’re being deliberately dumb because you want to go home for the night.’

‘Don’t be silly. You know I’m not deliberately dumb.’

Lucy snorted laughter down the line. ‘Mike Hannifin rang in...’

‘Of course he did. Mike has nothing else to do with his time besides waste ours. And what had he to say for himself?’

‘I quote...’

‘Oh, you’re not paraphrasing this time? Impressive. Over.’

‘I spotted a bunch of weirdos during my power-walk along the new line this evening.’ Lucy cleared her throat and imitated Mike Hannifin’s gruff cadence. ‘Howling, grunting, and getting up to all kinds of devilment.’

‘Wow, you do a good Mike Hannifin. Have you seen Mike on one of his power walks? He’s got those ridiculous ski poles and a headband. It’s the stuff of legend.’ Bill suggested, ‘It’ll be a bunch of morons letting off some steam. Y’know this new craze where men — or should I say males — head out into the wilds and be hunter-gatherers again; remembering what it was to be a caveman. Gimme Netflix, a bowl of popcorn, a pedicure, and I’ll feel man enough. Over.’

Lucy Devereaux sniggered at this notion.

Bill opined, ‘Perhaps people are staying at the guest lodges? Over.’

‘I spoke to Cindy McNamara,’ started Lucy.

The ranger interrupted, ‘Cindy and her cat minions? Over.’

‘Oh, Bill, all those staring cats give me the heebie-jeebies. There’s just something about cats. They’re privy to something we’re not. I’m convinced they’re planning a sly rebellion, and someday, we’ll all be back praying to the ancient goddess Bastet.’

‘Profound Lucy, but who prays to a basket? Over.’

‘Anyway, I called Cindy out of curiosity, and she says nobody should be up there at the lodges tonight because the cold up there would freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I’m just the messenger. Would you mind taking one run up there to the cabins? Pretty please? Cindy’s afraid of her life squatters might move in. It’s on your way back to the office, anyway.’

‘Well, that’s not true. It’s a good bit out of my way. But you said pretty please. Over.’ He took a right where the trail branched off into two smaller tracks. ‘By the way, there’s an eclipse tonight — a blood moon on Halloween night. It doesn’t get much better than that. Will you watch it? It’s about to happen. Thought I might get a bird’s-eye view from up around Mag Reek, but the mist is gathering. Over.’

Lucy answered, ‘Nope. No interest in the moon.’

‘Lucy, try taking a peek out that window every now and again. Over.’

‘If I hear one more word about that bloody moon eclipse...’

Bill howled, ‘Blood moon. Over.’

‘I prefer to read a book at night rather than gawp at the boring moon — it doesn’t do anything.’

The park ranger didn’t have any comeback for that and wouldn’t bother if he had.

‘I’m reading a creepy novel now called Hotel Miramar. It’s about this vacant, rundown hotel in a forgotten seaside town. Only the hotel isn’t vacant and the guests aren’t guests.’

The park ranger had stopped listening to Lucy because it was at this point of his nocturnal route when he thought he clocked something from the corner of his eye. The individual was standing on the left-hand side of the trail, far enough into the undergrowth that Bill had only sensed it on a subliminal level.

‘I’m going to knock off for the evening,’ said Lucy. ‘Have a good weekend — what’s left of it. Tell Dorothy I was asking for her.’

‘It’s bingo night, right? Over.’

The secretary chimed, ‘Two fat ladies, eighty-eight!’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,’ chided Bill. ‘Just a little thick around the ankle, but if you’re telling me 1988 is the year you were born, then I just might believe you. Over.’

‘Bill Steward, you’re hilarious,’ droned Lucy. ‘Patti and myself were just saying the other day that you’re such a...’

Bill Steward didn’t hear the rest of Lucy’s humorous dig as he slammed on the brakes, letting out a heartfelt, ‘Jesus Christ!’

The Scaretaker

EARLIER THAT SAME HALLOWEEN Saturday, Old Man was filling in a fresh grave, or better said, Mike Devine was doing the filling-in.

It was about two hours before the park ranger, Bill Steward, engaged in his last conversation with Lucy Devereaux.

The cemetery caretaker and his gravedigger apprentice had spent the earlier part of the day tending to the graves. Mike listened to Old Man engage in mumbling small-talk with the dead as he shuffled around the four-hundred-and-something-year-old cemetery, pulling weeds and tidying up haggard wreaths. As the cemetery caretaker doddered around the headstones, he collected any insects he found along the way, woodlice, ladybirds, centipedes. Millipedes were the most common find while he considered caterpillars and worms the major prize. His apprentice never asked what he wanted with these invertebrates but Old Man could see how young Devine found it repulsive every time he dropped the wriggling mass of creepy crawlies into the front pockets of his weathered donkey jacket he never took off no matter what the weather said. That repulsion he saw in his assistant’s face brought the ghost of a smile to his cracked lips. He promised the gravedigger a day off if he could catch him a frog, which was a catch-22 because Mike would only end up having double the amount of work the following day. It had happened once or twice. Old Man wasn’t interested in dry-skinned toads. The caretaker was only interested in amphibians that glisten, maybe even a newt or two. Mike Devine had once asked him why toads didn’t make the cut, but the caretaker just answered, ‘Toads don’t work, son,’ and left it at that. He didn’t want young Devine snooping around and seeing things he shouldn’t see, especially in the basement.

‘I don’t take my work lightly,’ groaned Old Man, leaning on his shovel as he watched his assistant backfill the fresh grave with considerable gusto.

Mike murmured, ‘Lightly? You sure about that?’ as he sweated over the grave, puffing and panting.

‘What’s that, boy?’

Despite his incredible age, Old Man knew the young gravedigger was aware of his apparent deafness and should, for his own sake and safety, use a hearing aid, maybe a couple of them. His apprentice once made the mistake of mentioning it and Old Man barked back, ‘I hear what I hear, son.’ And that was the truth.

‘I was just saying I love my work,’ the apprentice answered.

‘Hmm, great to see a gravedigger take such pride in his profession. But you should slow down, lad,’ the old caretaker advised. ‘You’re filling in that grave as if young Fallon’s going to make one last run for it. That young man isn’t going anywhere fast. Poor devil, struck down in his prime.’

What was once Josh Fallon, now full of chemicals, face blush, and reconstructive wires, was lying at the bottom of the grave thanks to his 1500cc Kawasaki — one cc too many for old Joshie. Josh Fallon came from the richest family in Old Castle. They, and the last of the funeral-goers, had just left the boneyard.

As the gravedigger lobbed the last few shovelfuls of earth into the grave, Mike Devine commented, ‘It’s sad.’

‘What is?’

‘They’re all gone home, leaving him here on his own in the cold, wet ground. That’s it, he’s finished. Useless in the ground.’

To many — and Old Man would say the younger the better — Fallon’s body was a pointless mass in the ground, but the cemetery caretaker would beg to differ. The kamikaze chicken wasn’t only worm fodder. Josh’s body fed a lot more than worms. His body, along with the rest of the bodies in this cemetery, provided unending beneficial mycorrhizal fungi that help with the decomposition process. He was the caretaker on so many levels; a symbiotic relationship any funeral-goer would never understand and wouldn’t want to understand. It was all about the fungi — the mould, to be more exact. The mould. You are what you eat.

Old Man asked Mike, ‘Were you acquainted with young Fallon?’

‘Knew of him,’ the gravedigger answered. ‘He liked to play chicken with oncoming traffic.’

‘Chicken, hmm.’ The caretaker stared at the mucky ground, shaking his head in despair at humanity and chickens. Old Man cast a glance up at the weeping willow tree growing from a plot of land next to the cemetery. The majestic tree leaned in far over the burial ground, weeping for the souls of the dearly departed. Crows were up there in the branches, making an all-merciful racket this late afternoon. The treetop cacophony started up around this time of the evening as the birds hustled for branch space and settled daily scores. Old Man often imagined he was one of those crows, perched in the branches at night, watching over the empty cemetery below, observing how the shadows of the weeping branches danced over Jesus-on-a-cross effigies and the cats prowling amongst the tombstones, those guardians of the dead. The cemetery caretaker feared what the night might bring.

‘The hardest work in a cemetery isn’t carving out a six-foot hole in the ground...’ started Old Man...

In a muted voice, Devine muttered, ‘Especially if you dug it by yourself,’ with his back to the cemetery caretaker.

‘What’s that, son?’ He’d heard the gravedigger with crystal clarity, but he was playing a role so long now he’d become that role. All that was about to change.

‘I was just saying you’re right and experience alone can only tell you that.’ Mike didn’t break his momentum, shovelling fresh earth onto the speed demon’s fancy, glossy mahogany casket in the cold ground. Fallon’s mausoleum (a work in progress) was a grandiose affair, to the point of being tacky, with aluminium winged cherubs and rushing chariots. The solar-powered jukebox playing Christy Moore’s rendition of ‘Ride On’ (which is a song about riding a horse, not a 1500cc Kawasaki) on a loop, and night sky lasers would be added later. This sepulchre was as big as the caretaker’s moderate dwellings over on the other side of the cemetery — the visible part of his house, that is.

Before Mike filled in the grave, the old man signalled young Devine to step aside while he lobbed a couple of symbolic shovelfuls of earth into the grave and said a few complimentary words, as was his custom. ‘God bless you, Josh,’ huffed the humpbacked caretaker as he scraped up the last of the fresh earth. ‘Even your guardian angel can get it wrong sometimes, son. He turns his back—’

Mike interrupted, ‘Or she...her back.’

‘—for a split second and...’ he clapped his hands, dropping his shovel, ‘lights out, John...’

‘Josh.’

‘John,’ the old man continued, ‘your guardian angel didn’t watch over you in life, but he might check in on you every now and again, now that you’re, well, easier to keep an eye on. Amen.’ Old Man put his hands in the front pockets of his grubby donkey jacket and played with the eclectic selection of multi-limbed arthropods and lumbricidae. The slimy sensation of the worming, wriggling, and crawling in the palms of his hands brought him unending comfort. It was his cup of tea.

Mike asked, ‘What kind of family buries family on Halloween?’

‘A superstitious one, boy,’ answered the cemetery caretaker. ‘You may think mediaeval superstition is a thing of the past, but lurking just under the surface,’ Old Man wriggled his gnarled fingers for effect, ‘it still exists and influences bankers, doctors, jailers, bakers, gravediggers, and vagabonds