Page 23 of Stay Buried

Something glinted in the grass where his horse had been standing, catching her eye. Slowly, carefully, Mini crawled out from the bare bush toward it. She leaned down, wiping the tears from her eyes, and picked up the circular object that gleamed in the moonlight.

It was a gold pocket watch.

ELEVENFRANKIE

March 11, 1919

I pulled out my gold pocket watch. It was nearly seven in the morning. I’d fallen back asleep in my own quarters just after three.

“You didn’t hear anything, Frankie?” Uncle Thomas interrogated me now.

“Nothing.” My voice came out small, tinny. My head was spinning and my heart was banging so loud it was difficult to hear anything else.

“Are you certain he was dead?” Margaret demanded. She was wringing a dish towel in her hands, knuckles white from the effort.

“Of course I’m certain, Margaret!” Uncle Thomas said, his voice too loud, too stern. “The man was cold to the touch, had no heartbeat or sounds of breath. Frankie and Ibothexamined him. You laid your hand on his chest yourself.”

We all stood staring with disbelief at the empty metal table.

The knackerman’s boots and clothes lay in a pile on the floor. But our deceased patient was missing.

“Well, how does a dead man get up and walk out of the house?” Margaret asked. “And without clothing or boots? Out into that weather?”

I glanced out the frost-covered window to see that the sky outside had lightened enough to show that the storm had settled in and was dumping snow outside.

“It’s not possible,” I heard myself say.

I closed my eyes, his voice echoing in my head.Can you hear them?

First a dead man speaks, then he gets up and walks out into a snowstorm?

This was the stuff of stories told by boys around fires on All Hallows’ Eve to scare each other. This was not real. This was not the stuff of reason and science.

I looked to Uncle Thomas, hoping he would offer up some rational explanation, but he only rubbed his temples like a blinding headache was coming on.

“Possible or not, we’ve got to find the poor man,” Margaret pleaded.

“I’ll go look for him,” Thomas told her.

“I’m coming with you,” I quickly added, but what I was thinking was,And God help us if we do find him.

Uncle Thomas and I put on our hats, sturdy boots, and wool coats, readying ourselves to spend the morning searching the whole town for the knackerman. We went door to door, asking only if anyone might have seen him. We dared not tell them the state he was in, nor that it was a man we’d pronounced dead hours before whom we sought. We knew they would think us mad.

I was beginning to wonder if perhaps we were.

We trudged through the deep snow, each of us puzzling over the thing in our minds, doubting what we had seen and heard with our own eyes and ears. We had both been deprived of sleep in recent days. Could we have hallucinated the same thing? The mind, we knew, didstrange things when it was wearied.

No one had seen the knackerman.

His cart was still in town, parked right in front of Loon’s Call Pub, where he’d left it yesterday before following us to the house. The horses that had pulled it were gone; the leather harness holding them to the cart had been chewed through and was soaked with bloody froth. Two more mad animals on the loose.

Had they come to the house? Come and picked up their pale, dead rider?

I shivered the thought away.

The snow was falling in huge flakes that caught on our eyelashes, covered our coats and hats.

We returned home at last to warm ourselves with coffee, taking it into my uncle’s study, where we added liberal splashes of brandy to our cups.