Decay Inevitable

The tide was out: the dark edge of water, periodically creaming into the shore, was only just distinguishable against the salt-and-pepper beach. The stones were smooth and uniform in size and myriad in colour. Some kind of coral provided relief for the eye, a friable, greyish species that poked from the stones like tiny signposts. A little further along, when he came across the bleached skull of a cat, he realised that the coral was not coral after all. He tried hard not to study the beach after that, and would have returned to the lane were it not for the fact that it petered out, swallowed by more acres of shingle. There was little to break up the skyline apart from the spire of a church that looked as if it should be in a children’s fairy tale: crooked and black, it made an arthritic gesture to the heavens. For want of something better to do, Will angled towards it, fingering the strange puckered mark that had risen on his forehead.

The church sat in the centre of a poorly tended graveyard. Bloated insects he couldn’t identify buzzed drunkenly by him. The trees here were stunted, purposefully it seemed, their heads lopped off before they could reach a certain height. Their boughs were famished affairs, the branches leeched of colour and as brittle as the bones on the beach, as if the stuff that lay in the ground was sucking the life from them. Will strayed off the path and tried to study some of the headstones, though time and neglect and the weather had conspired to polish the headstones almost clean of their inscriptions. This one, though:

Here lies Evelyn Marley, beloved wife of Hector. She died when the knife of a robber split her heart open. Humble Street, where it happened, knows her blood.

And this:

Beneath this stone are the mortal remains of Gregory Phipps who died, aged sixteen, brained by a stone wielded by his father. Ten days he took to die.

And this:

The bodies of Robert and Jessica Bunce feed the worms here. Fire took their sleeping forms and gave them eternal rest.

IT WAS A well-stocked graveyard. The stones encroached on each other’s plots and leaned into each other like poor teeth. Will was about to leave the cemetery when he heard a gritty noise rise up from the bottom of the churchyard. He stealthily padded among the stones until he saw its author: a woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, hacking at the gravelly soil with a trowel.

“Hello?” Will said, grateful to see another soul in this strange wilderness. The woman raised her head and Will was struck with a frustrating sense of recognition which would not reveal itself. “I know you, don’t I?” he asked, approaching.

The woman straightened and searched his face. “I’m afraid you’re at an advantage,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before in my life.”

“What’s your name?”

“Alice.”

“Alice. No, I don’t know an Alice. But you look like someone I know.”

They stood awkwardly, regarding each other among the bastard cabbage.

“Interesting graveyard,” Will said.

“Isn’t it?”

“But crowded.”

Alice nodded. “Yes, it is a little densely populated. But the beach is a fine overspill.”

“Isn’t that a health hazard?”

“For whom, exactly? The dead?”

Will laughed shrilly, and clammed up. It didn’t feel right. None of it.

“Well, I need to get on,” Alice said, waving her trowel at the weeds. It seemed a pointless chore when so much of the graveyard had already been conquered by yarrow, milfoil and fleabane.

“Don’t let me stop you,” Will said, jollily. “I just wondered if you could tell me where...” The question ran out of steam when he realised how odd he was going to seem when he finished with the hell I am? Without too much of a pause, he diverted to: “...I can find the nearest train station?”

“Oh, trains, they don’t come out this far. What is it? Are you lost?”

“I think so,” Will said. Despite their uncanny conversation, the woman made him feel comfortable. He felt that he could confide in her without embarrassing himself. “I can’t remember where I was about an hour ago. I woke up and I was on a beach. Empty houses.” It sounded so ridiculous when out in the open. “Parrots.”

Alice seemed unimpressed. “There’s a little village, a bit further along the beach, called Gloat Market. You might be able to find somebody to help you there. There’s a pharmacist’s. And a taxi service. They might be able to ride you out to Sud, or Howling Mile, or Mash This. Fair distances, but you’ll find trains there.”