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The crypt door was open.
It hadn’t been before. Jonah knew that for a fact. He was an observant child, never missed a beat. He came down here often enough to know how it was supposed to look, and the fact was that the crypt door had been closed when he had come in – walking right by this spot, too – and now it was open. He hadn’t had it out of his sight for long. He wasn’t here for any real reason, anyway – he had been bored, and he had wandered this way, because the long days of summer seemed even longer when one was five years old and devoid of any trouble to get into.
So he had come to visit his brother. That was something that he had been taught to do often, and Mother had no issue letting him wander off to the cemetery on his own. It was a route he knew well, and Mother was of the belief that little James would look after him while he was there. Jonah could believe that. He didn’t speak to Mother of this, because such talk often frightened her, but sometimes he saw James. Just a glimpse, over the lower headstones, almost faded in the light. It was better on cloudy days. When everything was grey – the sky, the clouds, the sea, even the very air – James seemed more solid. His hair, which in life had burned deep auburn, like Jonah’s own now it had darkened a little, stood out against the grey backgrounds and was impossible to miss; on sunny days such as this, it could blend in almost entirely. Then Jonah wouldn’t see his brother so much as his brother’s movements, a flash in his peripheral vision that always set his heart racing with excitement. Stumbling over himself, he would race to the spot and look around, but rarely did he spot James again.
Sometimes, though… sometimes he would feel a sharp chill of cold air, in just the spot where his brother had been waving. Even on the warmest of days, he would feel it: the chill of a winter morning, frost crackling on the branches of the trees and snow crunching underfoot, and the sting of that first great breath of air. Jonah kept such things to himself now, at this tender age already too aware of the passions that such topics could bring up: Mother, too upset to even consider the fact, and Father, who was far too stern and studious to even contemplate such a thing. In fact, the one and only time Jonah had mentioned it to Mother, she had told Father, and Jonah had received a smacking. He didn’t quite understand his crime – from his father’s mouth, it had sounded to him something like blass-feemee – but he understood it was bad and that it went against God. Father had also followed up with a lecture about what happened when one died, and that was if they were bad they went to Hell, and if they were good they went to Heaven. James had been a child, and a baptised child at that, so he had gone straight to Heaven. Father said that nobody lingered on the Earth, and that the idea of lingering was something called Popery, which Jonah also didn’t understand, but knew to be bad and also blass-feemee.
All in all it was very confusing, but Jonah knew he did not like being smacked, and he did not like making Mother cry. Therefore, James had remained his own little secret, and already at five years old, Jonah was learning all about how delicious it was to have secrets.
Back to the matter at hand, though: the crypt. Jonah stood there, a small, copper-headed, freckled boy in shorts and a light shirt, knobbly knees scabbed and scratched from days spent clambering over the rocks at the seafront. The space where the door should have been was gaping and black, and after the light of the summer day, Jonah’s eyes could not penetrate even an inch into the darkness. He stood on the lip of the grass, and below him was a three-foot drop. The stairs to the crypt ran along its side and curved to the door. The crypt was an odd one, the only one of its kind in this place – buried entirely underground, it was covered by a dome that in turn was covered with grass. The stacked rocks it was constructed out of made it look more like a cairn from some angles, but no. Here was the door, and there were the stairs. It was a crypt alright, and it breathed icy air onto him even where he stood in the warm sunshine. It rushed out like a steady breeze.
Jonah frowned. The only time he felt air like that on a day like this was when James came out to play, but James wasn’t here right now. Besides, that air stayed still. This air moved. Jonah knew enough to work out that it would be colder down there anyway, because it was out of sight of the sun and in fact, the sun had never shone in there, not since they put the roof on. Why was it moving, though? He wished Alexander was here with him. His brother was good with such things; Father said the boy could read God’s moods with the best of them, and there might be a sea captain in him yet. Alexander would probably be able to tell Jonah why the air moved like this, but Alexander wasn’t there, so Jonah supposed he would have to work it out for himself.
“James?” he asked, just to make sure. He knew it wasn’t right as soon as he had heard it – James never came over here anyway.
Now that he thought about it, he could see no dedication on this crypt; not even a name was carved over the door. Jonah frowned, and in a moment of sudden decision he walked around to the side of the crypt and followed the stairs down into the stone-lined gap before the door. The lip of the grass was above him now, and it was already much cooler. Jonah looked up, and the rectangle of blue sky high above him seemed impossibly distant. The first flicker of fear burst to life in the pit of his stomach, but he dampened it quickly down. He was no longer an infant. He didn’t need somebody to hold his hand. If he wanted to find out who had opened the door, he would.
“Hello?” he called. “Is anyone there?”
His small voice echoed down into the earth, magnified by the echo. Jonah smiled, delighted to hear his voice bounce part of the way back to him, but no other reply followed it. He stepped up to the doorway and paused, realising once again how dark it was in there. With a sudden, dizzying rush, he remembered how he could see well at night – when he’d had his eyes closed for so long, it wasn’t difficult to find his way around the room in the dark. He closed his eyes tight, pressing his hands over them to keep even the slightest bit of daylight out.
Don’t look.
Jonah gave a start, opening his eyes too soon. Annoyed with himself, he had almost closed them again before the realisation caught up to him: somebody had spoken. Somebody had told him not to look.
“Why not?” he demanded. “Who’s there?”
Even as he spoke, it occurred to him that the voice – if that was indeed what it had been – had come from inside his own mind. It hadn’t been his voice, though, definitely not – it had been a grown-up, of that he was certain, but now that he thought about it, he couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman, or if they had been angry or worried or something else entirely. He simply had the memory of being told, rather than the words themselves, and after a moment of confusion he supposed he must have imagined it.
Jonah closed his eyes, tight, his hands once again pressed over them. He remained like that for as long as his impatience would allow him, which was longer than most who knew him would expect. Jonah had a reputation for being rather a demanding child, always wanting something then and there and not a moment later, but he could be very, very patient when it came to things he really wanted. He had once overheard Mother remarking to Father that it was something to watch out for – that when the choice was his, he was content to wait, and it might yet serve him well. Father had muttered something about not being very impressed by Jonah’s demands to eat dinner backwards – sweets before the main event – and that he hoped this trait manifested itself in more economic ways before he was of age, but Jonah hadn’t quite worked out what was meant by economic ways yet, and besides, he still saw absolutely nothing wrong with wanting sweets first. Why wait until the end of the meal for the best part?
Well, he was putting that quality of his into action for something very different now, and he remained quite still, eyes closed, skin prickling in the cold, for almost two minutes. That was a decent amount of time for a five-year-old, and he would have been mightily unimpressed if it had all been for nothing, but to his delight when he cautiously opened his eyes again, he realised that the passageway had taken on some shapes and textures. He quickly stepped forward, one neat step so he was underneath the door, ensuring that the sunlight wouldn’t poison his vision. Then he stood again, blinking, focusing more on the outer edge of his vision where he could so easily see James.
He could see the rough, uneven stone of the walls, and the smoother flagstones on the ground. He was in a passageway so narrow that he could stretch out his arms and feel his fingers brush the wall on other side, and this encouraged him to edge forward, keeping himself steady by the feel of the rough stone under his fingertips. After a dozen steps the passageway opened out, and here some light filtered through a small hole high above, providing Jonah’s adjusted eyes with more than enough light to make out the circular room with its shelves at odd angles along the curving walls.
Don’t look!
This time the voice was louder, more urgent, right at his ear. Jonah jumped in fright, turning his head, but of course nothing was there. Unlike last time, the voice lingered now, and Jonah found himself feeling uneasy. Before, he had assumed it was a person speaking, even if it had come from inside his own head. That in itself was nothing to worry about, was it? He heard his own voice in his head all the time, and sometimes he might hear Mother or Father saying something – usually admonishing, when he was on the cusp of doing something he knew he shouldn’t. When he dreamt, he heard lots of voices, some of which he didn’t recognise at all. It didn’t seem so much of a big deal to him, but that had been when he was outside, in the light, and not down here in the dark where it had suddenly occurred to him that the voice sounded like a cheap imitation.
One of the house staff could do voice imitations very well. His name was Stuart and he looked after the horses; he amused the children by copying the whinnying and neighing, and sometimes the horses themselves seemed confused. They would turn their heads and look at Stuart with something that looked so much like confusion or alarm that it would send Jonah and his brother and sister into peals of laughter; the horses knew the sound, but at the same time, they must know that it wasn’t another horse. It just didn’t sound enough like a horse. It was the same when Stuart copied the voices of the other servants, or the children, or – when he was feeling especially daring, and had been drinking out of the special bottles he and the stable boys kept hidden in the hay – Father. On the surface it sounded flawless, but there was always something in the back of Jonah’s mind that remained confused, knowing that it wasn’t the real thing.
He felt that now. There was something about the voice that was false, just something trying to sound like something else, but that meant
(something in here is trying to be a human)
there was somebody in here with him. That was the only option. Jonah did not know where the other thought had come from but he shook it away now, trying to convince himself he was being ridiculous.
“Hello?” he asked. His voice now seemed pathetically small. He turned around, moving his whole body so the edges of his vision could scan the room. “Why are you telling me not to look? I’m not doing anything wrong. The door was left open.”
Another sound then, this time like hundreds of dry leaves skittering across a stone floor, blown by the wind. Jonah automatically looked down, but he couldn’t make out anything that would cause the sound. There were no leaves down here, nothing at all but cold stone.
Don’t look!
Jonah started again, but this time he was annoyed. He whirled around, facing roughly where he thought the voice had come from, and of course found nobody waiting for him; no answers.
“Tell me why, or go away!” he said angrily. “I don’t like you trying to scare me.”
There was no response, neither repetition nor explanation. Jonah supposed that meant whatever it was had gone away. He edged forward again, now standing close to the centre of the room, and turned around on the spot. The light from above was brightest in the centre of the room; in the shadows he could make out the shelving, and in the deepest shadows – the room must be slightly uneven, because on one side the shadows went deeper than on the other – he thought he could make out something on the shelves. Jonah moved closer, creeping cautiously now he knew he definitely wasn’t supposed to be in here. He couldn’t think why not, because there wasn’t much down here at all, but he was of an age now where he was beginning to truly understand that adults could be very, very strange about the weirdest things.
As he walked closer, he realised with a sudden drop of his stomach that he was looking at a coffin. His mouth went dry and he stopped, only a couple of steps away. Yes, it was definitely a coffin, and God help him, the top half of it was open. It was propped open, just like how it would be before a funeral, when people would line up to touch the dead person’s hand or kiss them a final time. That had never bothered Jonah, but for some reason this did. He was quite positive – quite positive – that the coffin was closed before it was buried, even if it was going to be buried not in soil but in a crypt. Why would they leave it open? The dead were supposed to rest, and it would be like trying to sleep in the winter with the covers thrown right off.
There was something else, though – a deeper kind of terror that was disproportionate to seeing that open coffin lid. It sunk into Jonah’s very bones, briefly paralysing him, his breath frozen in his chest. He heard an odd rushing in his ears and his legs felt suddenly weak; there came the sudden, clear thought that he must be dreaming.
Something moved.
Jonah was certain of it. Something in the coffin had moved. He had heard the rustle; he had seen the coffin shake, just a slight tremble, but undeniable. Jonah’s breath came back to him but it was short and shallow and too loud; he swallowed hard, trying to quieten himself, trying to listen. For the longest moment there was nothing at all, no movement, no sound, and then there was a hollow thud and the coffin jumped towards him by a fraction. Jonah jumped as well, taking a half-step backwards, wide eyes fixed on the coffin.
After another brief silence there came the steady rush of sliding cloth. Jonah’s eyes managed to widen even further as he made out the shape of something beginning to rise from the coffin, though what it was he could not yet tell. It was pale, draped in a burial shroud which rendered it formless, and the rushing in Jonah’s ears grew loud again.
DON’T LOOK!!!
This time the words were a scream, ragged around the edges, the loudest thing that Jonah had ever heard. He cried out, clamping his hands over his ears, but he did not heed the advice. He didn’t think he could. His eyes remained fixed on that thing rising from the coffin, and while it remained formless he saw movement at the top of the shroud, heard the grind and crack of old bones as it turned its head and stared back. He could feel its eyes on him, raking over him, realising he was not supposed to be there. He could feel its anger, its contempt, the depth of the emotion too much for his child’s mind to fathom. He had never felt anything like it before, this hard, bitter emotion that made him hate, and hate, and hate. It poured into him, overflowing, so much that it ached, until only one screaming thought managed to raise itself up into Jonah’s consciousness and make itself heard
(it hates me because i’m alive it hates me because i’m alive)
but it made no sense. Jonah tried to move, but his feet refused to obey him; on the lip of the coffin there now appeared a hand, grey and shrunken and skeletal, and Jonah could smell it now, smell death, the cloying sweetness of rot, the chalky dust of decay. It filled his mouth and clogged his nose and he was certain that he would somehow drown in it, that there was no longer any air in here, that his throat was filling up with putrefied flesh and now the thing was heaving itself out of the coffin and soon it would tumble to the ground, crawl towards him
DON’T LOOK!!!
and then God only knew what it would do to him then, nothing good he was sure, he was certain, but there was nothing he could do about it and oh God oh James please help me and why shouldn’t he look? Why should he close his eyes? It was coming for him not matter what he did and in that moment Jonah had a sudden thought, not a child’s thought but an adult’s, one that would come to him again and again over the years that in that moment he sincerely did not think he would live to see.
If I’m going to be killed I want to look what does it in the eye.
There were no thoughts after that, only the deepest terror Jonah had ever felt in his life. The thing succeeded in pulling itself half out of the coffin, one leg swinging over and the whole thing rattling, about to pitch to the ground, and—
“Hey!”
A voice, a real voice, coming from the end of the passageway.
“Oi! Bairn! A can see you in thair.”
The man’s voice seemed to break the spell. The creature stilled, and then collapsed back into its coffin with a shower of dust. Jonah’s limbs unstuck themselves, and he almost slumped to the ground; only the memory of that clawed hand enabled him to remain on his feet, trying to navigate the process of stepping towards the door.
“Dinnae make me come down thair,” the man said warningly. “Come on up, laddie. You’re no supposed tae be in thair.”
Stumbling on legs that felt like wood, Jonah backed up to the passageway, not daring to take his eyes from the coffin for a moment. He remained walking backwards even as he entered the passage, his eyes still wide, prickly from how long he had gone without blinking. His shoes reappeared in increasing detail as he moved closer to the crypt’s entrance, and then a large hand suddenly grabbed him by the back of his shirt and he screamed. It was a sudden, piercing scream coming from somewhere deep inside of him, coiled where it had been waiting for so long to get out and now erupting with a force that managed to frighten him even more. He had never made a sound like that in his life, and evidently it had scared the daylights out of the man, too. The hand let go abruptly, and Jonah vaguely heard a stumbling step, the thud of a body hitting the stone walls lining the base of the crypt’s stairs.
“Awrite, awrite, calm yersel! Am no gonnae hurt you!”
Jonah would have kept screaming, if it hadn’t been for the sudden cough that had overcome him. There had been dust down there, alright, and it irritated him now, making him cough until his eyes streamed. The man tried again, this time pulling Jonah back from the door and marching him back up the stairs; Jonah stumbled several times, pushing himself back up with grazed palms, and then gratefully collapsed onto the grass at the top.
Staring down at him was one of the groundskeepers, his clothing grass-stained and worn at the knees. He pushed his hat back and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead, seeming relieved to be out of the crypt’s shadow; adjusting his cap again, he peered at Jonah more closely as the boy finally managed to gasp in a lungful of clean air.
“Yer one of Rabbie Magnus’s bairns, eh?” he asked, and Jonah managed a nod. “Aye, the wee one. Jonah.”
Jonah coughed again. “Yes.”
“Well, wit were you daein down in that auld hole?” the groundskeeper demanded. “No place for a lad down thair. Wit if you got yersel locked in?”
“I didn’t see a door,” Jonah said, suddenly bewildered. Where had the door gone?
“You didnae see a door?” the groundskeeper repeated. “Wit do you mean, you didnae see a door? You walked right past it coming oot, did you not?”
Jonah couldn’t actually remember.
“Well, either way,” the groundskeeper continued, when Jonah remained silent. “Nae mair. I don’t want you going in that place again, you hear? It’s no safe. Ah’ll be having a word with Johnny about leaving that door open.”
“Why was he in there?” Jonah asked suddenly.
“Wit?”
“Johnny,” Jonah said. “Why was he in there? There were no new coffins. There hasn’t been a burial. Has somebody died?”
“Not tae my knowledge,” the groundskeeper said. He looked over his shoulder, back down the stairs, and Jonah realised he looked uneasy.
He doesn’t know why Johnny left it open, he thought, suddenly excited. He knows something else opened it.
“Well, he must’ve,” the groundskeeper eventually said. “Naebody else did it, did they?”
Jonah thought about telling him about the voice he had heard down there, about the movement in the coffin. It was on the tip of his tongue, and then it was like a shutter came down in his mind; he suddenly lost the urge. It occurred to him then that this man would not believe him, that nobody would believe him, and that it wasn’t because of the fact that it was supposed to be impossible – they wouldn’t think he was lying, or mad. In fact, they would be scared that he was telling the truth.
The thought occurred to him so clearly and so cleanly, with such depth of understanding, that Jonah would return to it time and time again as he grew, each time picking it apart in new ways and understanding it on a deeper level. As an adult he realised that it had been that moment when he had realised, truly realised, that there were things out there beyond the understanding of most people. Sitting on the grass, still chilled from the crypt, tasting death and dust on his tongue, he realised on some level that he had already experienced more in the last ten minutes that this groundskeeper had experienced in his whole life. In his five years on this earth, he had already seen things that no adult could ever hope to even imagine – his brother James’s bright hair darting over the low headstones, the thing that had tried to pull itself from the crypt
(but it didn’t get me oh no it didn’t)
because it couldn’t stand the fact that it was dead and Jonah still lived. He understood then that some people were simply not cut out to see such things, and they could never understand them, and – most unfathomably to Jonah, then as it always remained – that most people didn’t want to understand it. They wanted to look away, they wanted to pretend, and they would sooner call him a liar or a madman than admit, even for a moment, that he was telling the truth.
The initial fear had faded in the sudden sunlight, and it would take several hours to creep back. When it did it would be permanent, a mark on him that he would never shake, and Jonah would eventually grow used to waking up short of breath, the scent of rot in his nose, his throat thick with rotting flesh, the memory of the dream – the coffin around him, his own flesh liquifying, that burning anger and hatred, the knowledge that he lay dead while others lived on – stuck at the front of his mind until the sun finally showed itself above the horizon. In that moment he was free from it all; sitting in the sun with the burden not yet settled on him, Jonah was focused only on the other defining realisation of that day: not that he too would have to one day die, but the fact that he knew more than this grown man still watching him sternly; he knew more than so many others, that he dared where others flinched.
There were places where one was not meant to look; dark places where no light shone, where no eyes should ever disturb. Jonah had disobeyed the rules, and what he had discovered had been irreplaceable. Even at five years old, he understood the value of what he had just discovered.
Even at five years old, he knew he wanted more.