Old age is a pain in the backside. It’s also a pain in the knees, the hips, the neck. Pretty much everywhere hurts, to be honest, now I’m in my eighties.
And everything happens slowly when you get to my age – or at least it does for me.
Combine the two, the pain and the pace, and many things are a challenge.
Even something as simple as making a hot drink, and often by the time I’m sat back down with my coffee it has already cooled too much for me to really enjoy.
But I sit there and sip it. Slowly.
The only thing that seems to be in a hurry is my bladder. The race to the toilet feels more like a marathon that a sprint, but I’m still getting there in time.
That’s important to me. I still have my pride, and I mean to hold onto that with every ounce of determination in my increasingly frail body.
I don’t have much else. My beautiful wife of more than sixty years passed away last fall and I miss her with an ache that will never ease.
We were never blessed with children, and now it is just me, moving slowly around this threadbare but tidy house.
We moved here to this house, my wife and I, in the summer of 1979. I had just turned forty years old and, according to my wife, I was still the impulsive dreamer she had married nineteen years before.
She meant it as a compliment by this point in our marriage. I think at first, in the early days of our lives together, she had intentions to try and change me. Certainly, there were suggestions that I should not give up my steady job at the insurance company for one at the theatre that would only last for three months. There were comments that writing a play was a noble endeavour, but it wasn’t paying the bills. But she never outright put her foot down and said no to me following my dreams.
The house when we moved into it was what an optimist would call a ‘doer-upper’.
It was at the tail end of a road shaped like a lowercase letter y, one produced with a cursive flourish that never appears on a typed page.
South of us, sited in open land just a few minutes stroll away, was the chapel, next to which was a small graveyard where the residents of the town were laid to rest.
Heading north, back towards the top of the imaginary y, the road forked left towards the school.
If you followed the right fork, dead ahead would be main street and its handful of shops. The undoubted king of these was the bargain store – a wonderland of canned goods, hardware, bandages and sticking plasters, buckets, garden rakes and so much more.
Laid out in a semi-circle north of here was a development of newer houses. We looked at one of these first when we were making arrangements to move here, but they were outside our budget.
We had moved because my wife had got a job teaching in the town school.
The idea of a fresh start had energised me.
This was a perfect place for someone like me who was easily distracted. City life, with its coffee shops and half price matinees at the local flea pit and free exhibitions and talks and parks, was constantly dragging me away from my many half-completed projects.
By contrast, it was so quiet in this town. And isolated as well. The next town along was around a hundred miles away.
We were living in a pocket of sleepiness a long way from anywhere.
As summer turned into fall and I was left alone while my wife taught, and I had nothing to tempt me away from my desk, the words did start to come. Slowly, but they were there.
The leaves fell and the weather turned over the weeks that followed and life was good – until the accident.
Our next-door neighbours were about our age but they had a son who was turning eighteen. We had been invited to a barbecue in their yard. It was a fine but cold day and we and stood there wrapped up in warm coats toasting him with glasses of sparkling wine while the burgers cooked on the grill.
I’d never been much of a drinker and spent the rest of the day lying on the couch feeling washed out.
I must have fallen asleep at some point because I woke with a start. I had no idea why until someone out in the street starred to scream.
I ran outside.
It was dusk and the streetlamps had just started to flicker on. One of the lamps was bent double where a car had crashed into it. The body of our neighbour’s son lay on the ground nearby. He must have not been wearing a seatbelt and been thrown through the front windshield.
His face was speckled with blood. A gash ran the length of one of his cheeks and a flap of skin hung grotesquely open. A shard of glass had pierced one of his eyes and more blood flowed from this wound like crimson tears.
His mother knelt next to him cradling him in her lap. His blood also stained her face and her hands. Some had got in her hair.
I thought how it would be later tonight that she would realise this.
I don’t know why I focused on this one terrible detail in this horrific and tragic scene, but I did.
The father stood to one side, staring silently down, and more neighbours were emerging from their houses.
I felt my wife’s arms envelop me and her quiet voice saying, “Let’s go inside, there is nothing we can do.”
There was one policeman in the town and one doctor. Over the hours that followed, they supervised as the body of the poor boy was wrapped in tarpaulin and placed in the police car, and the crashed car was towed away by a truck from the local garage.
Neither my wife or I could sleep, even though it was well past midnight. We sat in the kitchen drinking hot chocolate.
My wife sighed and stared out into the now empty road.
I waited for her to share whatever was on her mind.
Eventually she looked at me and said, “He was a troubled young man. He had been a disruptive pupil and had started getting into trouble outside of school. I’d heard gossip that he been drinking and taking cars for joyrides. His parents were trying to deal with it privately, without involving people they didn’t know.”
I sipped my chocolate and said, “It looks like they still are, with the help of the other townsfolk.”
She nodded sadly. “They’re taking care of things themselves. That’s their way round here.”
I found this strange – back then, when I was still a newcomer to the town – but I accepted it.
I topped up both our mugs and asked, “Where will his body be now?”
“There’s a room at the chapel that’s used before burials,” she replied. “I went once when the former principal of the school passed and we all went to pay our respects. I guess he’ll be there.”
And then she began to cry. “I’m sorry I asked,” I told her and reached out and took her hand.
Dawn broke a few hours later, bringing that sleepless night to an end. We cleaned the saucepan the milk for the hot chocolate had been boiled in and our cups. It was still pretty dark outside, with clouds that looked heavy with rain filling the sky. My wife started getting ready to go to work and I sat at my desk even though I already knew I would not be able to write anything. I felt sad and empty.
My wife called out, “Have you seen the car keys? I’m going to drive.”
The school was only a fifteen-minute walk away and most days she walked, but with the weather threatening rain, taking the car was a sensible idea.
“Have you looked in the bowl above the fireplace,” I called back as the clouds started to make good on their threat and the first drops of rain struck the window.
That was how the great storm began. It was a deuce of a thing. Within minutes of those first droplets hitting, the rain was falling with violent speed. The lighting started hot on the heels of the rain, with an initial arc of light which was so powerful and unexpected, I jumped in my seat as if I had actually been electrocuted.
I did not even have chance to count to One Mississippi before the thunder rumbled.
I head my wife gasp and turned to see her standing in the doorway. She had found the car keys and had her coat on.
“I don’t think you should go out in this,” I said.
A new bolt of lighting cut through the sky before she could reply, and when she did speak, I could not hear her because the thunder was too loud.
It was eight am and I figured the storm would pass – and the day would be allowed to start. The pupils and their teachers would make it to school, the bargain store would open its doors, the boy at rest in a room at the chapel would have his first visitors.
But by nine that morning, the intensity of the storm seemed to be worsening. The rain had turned to hail and I was seriously worried the windows would break.
The lights in the house had gone off and back on twice already. Just before ten they went off and stayed that way.
When they did, my wife went over to the telephone and lifted the handset to her ear. “The line’s down,” she said.
The TV and the radio reception were reduced to static as well.
I lit a candle and we sat in the kitchen. I did not want to admit to myself I was frightened by the power of the storm. I was a rational, modern man, not some primitive living in a cave who is scared of elemental forces beyond their understanding.
But my nerves sure were tingling and I wished the storm would exhaust itself and move on.
It kept on relentlessly though and, by early afternoon, in a weird kind of way, it was hard to remember what the world had been like before the storm possessed it and made us prisoners in our own home.
Then, at four-twelve pm – according to the wind-up clock on the kitchen wall – the storm ended. There was no more lightning, no more thunder, and the rain stopped.
The silence this brought felt strange.
I could hear my own breaths, the clock ticking. “Do you think it’s over?” my wife asked.
I did not reply because I had spotted someone walking past the window.
I swallowed – or at least I tried to, but my throat felt as if it had constricted. Waves of coldness were passing through me and I guess I must have turned a shade of unhealthy pale because my wife’s eyes were widening with alarm at my obvious distress.
She had not seen what was outside or else she would not have asked me, “What’s wrong?”
The blood had been washed from his face. The flap of skin which had been torn open had been sown down. The shard of glass had been removed, leaving a dark wound that bisected his eye.
He was stumbling rather than walking but he was almost at our neighbour’s front door now.
My wife had come alongside me and had rested one hand on my shoulder, and now she had seen as well, and was saying over and over, “No. No. No.”
As if by an incantation she could make this waking nightmare, this hideous vision, disappear.
But he remained and now he was slapping the door. His hand hung limply from his wrist as he struck the door with it, and a part of my mind which was still able to think rationally, told me that this was because he must have broken his wrist when he was killed in the car crash.
More than broke it. He had snapped so many bones his hand flopped helplessly unsupported as it knocked on the door.
And now the door was opening.
I wanted to look away. I wanted to curl up in a corner like a frightened child and when I opened my eyes again everything would have been made alright.
A dead boy would not have returned home.
The early winter night was falling by now and though the storm had ended, neither the streetlamps nor the power in our house had returned.
I could still see clear enough though when our neighbour appeared in the doorway – to come face-to-face with his son who he had left in a sleep that should have been eternal.
I could not see his lady wife inside their house but I heard her cry out – an anguished, sickening howl.
My wife’s grip on my shoulder tightened. I winced because her fingernails cut into my skin.
“Look,” she said, and pointed towards the graveyard.
There were people gathered there. They were reduced to silhouettes by the failing light. My guts tightened.
There was something wrong about them
Something very wrong.
I hurried over to one of the kitchen drawers and rummaged around till I found my battery powered torch.
My hands were shaking so badly by now it took me three goes to turn it on. Its beam was sterile compared to the flickering light of the candle, but steady and bright enough for what I needed.
I threw my coat on and headed towards the door.
“Don’t,” my wife said.
I took a deep breath before telling her, “I don’t know what’s happening, but I mean to find out.”
She looked at me then shook her head and disappeared into the spare room and returned a moment later holding an old baseball bat.
“At least take this with you,” she said.
I kissed her on the forehead and went out, torch in one hand, bat in the other.
There was no sign of anyone now on the doorstep of our neighbour’s house, and no sounds coming from within.
My heart pounding in my chest, I decided to check them out first.
As I walked towards the still open door, I instinctively raised the bat. Reaching the threshold, I pointed the torch into the waiting darkness.
Fear gripped me, and a horror unlike any I had ever known before.
The son, the boy who had returned, was knelt over two prone bodies on the floor. As the torchlight swept over their faces, I recognised his father and his mother – even with their hideous injuries.
The torchlight touched the son’s face as well, and he looked up – it looked up, at me.
Its eyes burnt with hate.
Its skin was sickly pale.
Its lips shone with blood and half consumed flesh hung from its open mouth.
A scream began to form inside me.
It rose slowly to its feet and began to advance on me.
I turned and I ran – and saw that it was not alone.
The figures I had seen in the graveyard were stumbling towards me. They had once been ordinary men and women – before they had been committed to the grave.
Before they had returned, and now stood in my way.
The flesh of some had almost completely decayed away, leaving bone exposed beneath the rags of their burial clothes.
Others were more complete, except in places such as their eyes, which had already provided a feast for the insects deep underground.
They had no blood on them – not yet.
I must have been the first living person they had encountered.
I dropped the torch and grasped the bat with both hands.
“Come on you S.O.Bs,” I yelled.
I did not know how these corpses were walking the earth – unless it was the great storm that had raised them somehow – but I knew they were bad to the bone.
There was madness there as well, I could see, raging inside them.
And from the way their mouths were hanging open as they came closer, I got the feeling they were mighty hungry.
For flesh.
For me.
I got ready to attack, to go out fighting – when a voice behind me yelled:
“Police! Back off or I will fire.”
Without turning, I called back, “I don’t think you need worry about reading them their rights.”
A volley followed seconds later.
One of the things, which was hit dead centre in its forehead, fell to its knees. Other shots which hit elsewhere made them pause but nothing more.
An old movie I’d seen, came back to me.
“The brain,” I shouted. “We need to strike there.”
I glanced back then. The local cop was there, and half a dozen townsfolk I recognised, including the owner of the bargain store.
He was wielding a big, old garden rake.
He shouted and raced forwards, swinging the rake, and plunged it deep into the forehead of one of the things.
Shock froze its repulsive features and then it toppled backwards.
We defended our homes that night, our town, and by first light the dead were back where they belonged – in their graves.
The young man who had not even made it beyond the chapel’s resting place before he was called back, and his parents, were buried before noon.
What happened was never shared beyond the confines of the town – until now. In this old man’s final testament.
We were scared and we were ashamed.
As best we could we returned to our old lives, but nothing was ever the same again.
The darkness that had come to our town lingered in our memories and created an atmosphere of fear that was tangible.
If any strangers happened to visit, they did not stay. No one new moved here either.
The town and its people were left to slowly wither and die.
Now, more than forty years later, there’s no one left in the town but me, moving slowly around my house.
And my time is almost here.
My grave is dug.
Making that hole in the ground took me six months and sure caused me a lot of pain, I can tell you. But it is done. And now I have made a record of what happened after the storm of 1979, I am ready to go lie down in it and fall into that long sleep.
Until the next great storm.
Until the dead once more walk the earth, ravenous and insane.