Jack grunted an affirmation and didn’t stop digging. He had seen them bury the coffin, marked with red paint, a sinister, dripping letter R that the hospital had just started using as the number of those killed by the Roman fever continued to swell.
“It’s a man, like last time,” Jack whispered after he added a hefty pile of dirt to the mound above them and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. “No family, no funeral. Just a pine box from the charity hospital.”
“That’s terrible,” Hazel said.
Jack lifted his head in surprise. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose it is.” It was terrible. He hadn’t even thought about that. He had become so numb to the enormity of death in Edinburgh that his first response had been relief: pine boxes were the easiest to break. Standing so close to Hazel in a grave again, Jack felt the magnetic charge of her skin, could smell the salt of her sweat. He wanted to kiss her, but before he could figure out how, the crack of metal on wood came.
There it was, just as Jack remembered it, a pine box with the top of a letter R peeking out from beneath the soil. “For Roman fever,” he explained quietly. This is the moment, he thought. Kiss her now. But instead, he threw his spade out onto the grass and pulled himself up after it.
Hazel knew what to do this time when Jack lowered the rope. She worked quickly, securing it around the body’s feet and helping Jack as he hoisted the corpse through the hole in the broken casket by touch so she wouldn’t have to look too closely at a face in the process of decomposing.
When the body had made it fully out of the grave, Jack extended his hand down to Hazel. She took it, feeling the calluses beneath her skin, which was raw and blistered from the night’s exertion.
“Did your mum ever mention if wortroot helped with blisters?” she asked, massaging her palms when they were sitting side by side on the inky grass.
“Fraid not.”
Hazel made a mental note to try it anyway.
They sat for a few minutes, catching their breath. Jack wondered if he might be brave enough to try to kiss her, but then said, “I suppose we better undress the poor soul now.”
When she was in the grave, Hazel hadn’t noticed anything unusual about the corpse’s face, but now that they were aboveground, she couldn’t look away. There was something odd about the face, a strange hollowness that made the skin look like putty. The moonlight wasn’t strong enough to allow Hazel to make out the face’s features in any detail. “Do you still have that striker and candle?” Hazel asked.
A small flame crackled into life and illuminated both their faces with an orange glow, and for a moment Hazel forgot where she was, that she was fending off the night chill in a graveyard. The glow of the candle transformed Jack Currer’s face into something beautiful and strange, angles so sharp Hazel felt the urge to run her finger along the edges of his skin, to print his profile on a coin.
And then Hazel looked down at the body, and her blood turned to ice.
The man’s eyes were grotesque sockets, empty caverns stringy with pulp and maggots. But even more horrific: his eyelids had been sewn open. Thin black string in neat Xs that pulled the top lid up to the dead man’s eyebrow, and bottom lid down to his cheek. He was a nightmarish marionette. Nothing natural had befallen this man, and whatever did happen, he had been forced to watch it.
Jack made the sign of the cross. “What is this?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” Hazel said, “but it’s not the Roman fever.”
A noise startled them out of their uneasy trance. The sound of leaves crunching. And then a shadow moving between the trees. A human.
“Get down!” Jack hissed at Hazel, and shoved her into the grave they had only moments before finished digging up. He jumped in after her and lowered his head until they were both out of sight, standing side by side in the narrow pit.
Sweat beaded on Hazel’s forehead. She had a streak of smut along the right side of her face. “Is someone out there?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.”
They waited, their chests pounding. There was silence. And then the crunch of boots across the turf. Footsteps. Someone was walking toward the kirkyard. Hazel and Jack jerked their heads to look at each other, their faces so close Jack could make out the dewy glow of sweat clinging to her brow.
“It’s probably just a groundskeeper,” Jack whispered. “Just a routine inspection.” But even as he said it, his heart sank. Groundskeepers didn’t usually work after midnight.