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There were some things the Undertaker knew with certainty. With dread.
My name used to be Mark Callaway, but it isn’t anymore. That hadn’t been his name in practice for seven years running, hadn’t been his name in spirit since he gave himself to the Darkness as a child.
The end is not the end unless I say it is. His first death had been at the age of seventeen when he “accidentally” stepped into the path of an oncoming school bus on the anniversary of the fire. It would’ve been his last death, too, but then there had been that voice, crying and shrieking for him to wake up, and he swore, he swore, that it was his mother, and his only thought had been that he couldn’t leave her like that. So he’d forced himself to wake up and was only moderately heartbroken to discover that the voice he’d been hearing had been that of his foster mother, Marie Strand, not Susanna Callaway. He’d gone to the hospital and gotten treated for two broken ribs and a cracked ulna, and he’d been silent as the grave as the doctors marveled at how the hell he’d managed to lift himself into the ambulance without so much as a helping hand.
I am alone. With Paul, or without him. With David and Marie, or without them. The Undertaker’s favorite flower was lavender. It represented solitude. Knowing that no one could possibly understand the things he had done to get himself to this point, he comforted himself with the thought that being alone was better than being surrounded by ignorant fools anyway. Paul got close to understanding, and David and Marie—bless them, they tried, but in the end, the Undertaker was alone. It was safer that way, anyhow. For everyone.
Now, though… now, though…
Now the Undertaker was questioning some of the things he’d thought he’d known.
My family is dead. They died some time between the afternoon and the evening of May 19, 1978. Mark—not yet the Undertaker—had been twelve, and still when he dreamt he felt the unholy heat of chemical-fueled flames on his smooth baby cheeks.
My family is dead because I killed them. Rage, humiliation, a smarting sense of justice, a subconscious desire to make everything disappear so he could move on to greener pastures—then heat, electricity. Lightning had struck out of a clear blue sky, lighting the wooden frame of an old Victorian with a wrap-around porch, filling the windows with guttering flame, which licked its way downstairs to the embalming room where it gorged itself on formaldehyde and ethanol until it exploded. Inside—Susanna Callaway, 33; Randall Callaway, 39; Kane Callaway, 3. Outside—Mark Callaway, 12; Paul Bearer, 24.
And yet… and yet…
And yet, there was Kane.
Or the thing that claimed to be Kane, anyway.
There were some things the Undertaker knew with certainty. With dread.
The thing in the red mask was my baby brother. He knew that. He knew that.
And yet…
He had to check.
He didn’t bother booking a flight. Plane fare and carry-ons were unnecessary burdens when you were the Undertaker.
Instead he went deep into the bowels of the arena, down into the darkest reaches of the boiler room, where the heat stuck to his skin in sweat beads and the roar of machinery was never far. He crammed himself into a shadowy corner, where the darkness was so deep he could barely see his own hand in front of his face, and he slid down the wall into a crouch as his temples reverberated with pain from being subjected to his own finisher.
The thing in the red mask had been strong enough to pick him up and turn him upside down as if he weighed little more than a child.
Kane, his baby brother, had not been so strong. But then, how could he have been? Kane, his baby brother, died when he was three years old. The Undertaker knew this with certainty. With dread.
And yet…
The Undertaker folded himself like an accordion into the darkest corner of the boiler room, closed his eyes, concentrated, and disappeared.
He opened his eyes to a different darkness—one that was just as all-consuming but not quite as oppressive. The air was fresher here, easier to breathe. Crickets chirped carefree melodies, and somewhere in the treetops above his head, an owl hooted as if asking his identity.
I am the Undertaker, he could’ve said, but it wouldn’t have been quite true. I am Mark Callaway—but that wouldn’t have been quite true, either. Now, in this moment, he was somewhere in between, straddling the razor-wire between worlds and personhoods, unwilling to let the Darkness take the edge off his pain and uncertainty, unable to completely inhabit his childhood flesh.
He was a dead man walking.
The thing in the red mask had been a dead man walking, too—if Paul Bearer was to be believed, which he wasn’t.
The thing in the red mask was my baby brother. Somewhere deep down, he knew this. He already knew what he’d find when he got to his destination. But he had to see.
He started drifting toward the edge of the woods. In fall and winter, the ground in this place turned into nothing so much as a muddy, swampy soup, which threatened to swallow any foolish enough to tread on it. In the summer, the soil was so dry it’d make your lips hurt just to look at it. This place, too, was one of the in-between—the both, the neither.
The Undertaker crossed into open space. If he went to the left, he’d soon come across acres upon acres of crumbling graves. They’d been well tended, once. But the family that had cared for them was long gone now, and for that, they had only the Undertaker to blame.
He angled his body toward the right and continued to drift. He’d envisioned himself marching to his destination—eating up the distance with long, powerful strides, fueled by anger if nothing else. But now—now, his legs felt like molasses, and it was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do just to make himself keep walking. So he drifted, as if he were on a pleasant, ambling stroll, as if he had nowhere in particular in mind. He knew exactly where he was going, though, of course.
This was something the Undertaker knew with certainty. With dread.
Stars twinkled in the vaulted heavens overhead. The Undertaker knew all about stars. They could be useful—if unwitting—accomplices in certain rituals. And the thing about them is that they were always there, even in the middle of the day when they couldn’t be seen, so they saw everything. They saw Mark/the Undertaker burn his house down with his family still inside. And they saw the Undertaker/Mark drifting toward that same spot now, as if he really believed when he got there that that old Victorian with the wrap-around porch would still be standing in the shade of oak trees.
But that house was gone. Only graves remained. Three, to be exact.
It was the third the Undertaker was interested in tonight.
He felt them before he saw them. Bones. His grandmother had called it bone-sense, but none of Mark’s frantic research in the local library had ever turned up such a term. That old bat had had her own names for everything—bone-sense, dumb speech. Not official terms, by any means, if there even were such a thing as official terms for abilities so poorly understood. Parapsychology was an infantile field, as of yet.
But in any case, he sensed them. Bones. Two skeletons bare of sinew, marrow long dried to bloody crust. In the fall and winter, the rains seeped into the earth, and the damp sunk into the bones, but it never reached the marrow. There were some things in this world that existed entirely outside the sane, sensible cycles of nature.
The Undertaker had seen many such things. He counted himself among them.
The thing in the red mask was one of them, too.
Kane, his baby brother.
The third grave was smaller than the other two. A miniature headstone to mark a miniature casket. Once, as a child, Mark had looked at the smallest caskets in the basement of the funeral home and realized for the first time that even creatures with their whole lives ahead of them could die. It had not occurred to him to include himself in that observation. To his own knowledge, nothing could ever kill him.
How right he’d been, unknowingly so, in his youthful arrogance. And how wrong.
The thing in the red mask had wanted him dead. The Undertaker could sense it, looking into its eyes. The Undertaker had no doubt the creature would get what it wanted.
He was a dead man walking.
And the third grave—the smallest grave—had no bones.
He knew this. He’d known that.
And yet…
The Undertaker fell to his knees before the smallest grave and began to dig with his bare hands.
Maybe he just couldn’t sense the bones. The bones of Kane, his baby brother. They were too small. Too young when they were laid to rest. They were nothing like the weary creaking of the woman to his left. Nothing like the angry hollows of the man to his right.
Kane, his baby brother, had not had time to grow into his skeleton on this earth.
So the Undertaker dug. Because maybe… maybe…
Maybe Paul was a liar this time. Like so many times before.
An owl—maybe the same one as before—hooted reproachfully as the Undertaker broke through the first layer of topsoil. Who do you think you are, it seemed to ask, to defile such sacred grounds?
He was the man standing in the ring, face to face with a demon of his own making. He was the boy being held back by the firefighters as he fought to run into the flaming house. The boy in the hospital, with his head in Uncle Paul’s lap, wailing and groaning like a dying animal because his family. was. dead.
The Undertaker. Mark Callaway.
They called him the Deadman, not understanding just how true that was.
He’d been dead since he was twelve years old. He believed he would live to be much deader in the future.
His nails scraped painfully against something solid. A splinter caught in his fingertip. The casket. Kane’s casket.
Still he sensed no bones, though he was so close to them now.
The casket lid. It was the casket lid blocking his bone-sense. That was it. All he had to do was… pry it open and…
…
In hindsight, the worst part was not that the Undertaker was shocked. It was that he wasn’t.
The casket was empty.
No bones.
No Kane.
He’d known that. He’d known that. But…
Red lights—blood and fire. An inhuman visage. Wrath. Hatred. The thing in the red mask was not his Kane.
And yet, those eyes. One blue. One brown.
And alive—so, so alive.
The thing in the red mask was not his Kane, but it was Kane.
The Undertaker knew this with certainty. With dread. With fury. With anguish.
And, buried somewhere far beneath it all—buried, yes, not like a corpse, but like a seed—with hope.
The Undertaker lifted his eyes to his Kane’s headstone.
A poem was inscribed there.
Do not stand at my grave and weep—
I am not there; I do not sleep.
Paul had chosen the inscription.
I am the thousand winds that blow;
I am the diamond glints in snow—
He had been a figure of uncertainty to Mark then: one night the man who held him as he wailed and groaned, the next the man who showed him his mother’s burned husk of a corpse and told him something he already knew but didn’t want to hear—that it was all his fault.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain;
I am the gentle autumn rain.
Mark had hated the inscription. It felt like spit in his gaping wounds. A mockery. Cruelty.
As you awake with morning’s hush,
I am the swift, upflinging rush—
Now, though… now, though…
Of quiet birds in circling flight;
I am the day transcending night.
Now, though, the Undertaker thought that perhaps it was the last kind thing Paul had ever done for him.
There were some things the Undertaker knew with certainty. With dread.
The thing in the red mask was Kane, his baby brother.
And the Devil had finally come home.
The owl’s next plaintive call was not answered. The Undertaker had left this place behind, again.
As the Darkness enveloped him, the last echoing tolls of the inscription washed over him like a funeral dirge.
Do not stand at my grave and cry—
Like the hymns his mother used to sing.
I am not there; I did not die.
The end