The yawning, hoary necropolis of Belgrade-Mahn’s Cemetery was built on an elevated vista of rolling, green hills, and its faded grave-markers of limestone, or roughly hewn granite for its newer residents, greeted me each morning with a chilled air from the east. Only a hundred yards from the cemetery, the balcony of my third story apartment satisfied both my attraction to the picturesque serenity of nature, and my slant toward the comforting silence that only the dead can provide.
Over the brim of every morning coffee, I would stare out at those slopes that clung to dewy mists from which only the more prominent tombstones, and pair of memorial cenotaphs, erected to honor the founders of Ironton and whose namesakes grace every notable landmark in town, jut outwardly like the fingertips of some unnamed, cyclopean horror, awakening from its den to escort the next batch of souls into the abyss. It was like staring at a Bob Ross painting, commissioned by Death itself, except all the happy little trees were stone monuments, eternally bearing witness to the dreams buried beneath.
Of my speculations regarding Ceely-Beth Nelson’s curious behavior, it would be brazenly dishonest to tell you that I had no amount of shame in secretly watching as she made regular visits to the cemetery.
About the details of Mrs. Nelson’s personal life, I was privy to little, aught save the fact that she was born a mute. Only by written words was she able to communicate and she was never seen outside her home without one of her many pads of paper or collection of ink pens. Stricken by this malady seemed to have no ill-effects on Elizabeth’s social status or gentility, though. She was able to rise to a level of prominent import, hobnobbing with such stiff-necks as the Scheffler’s of Crystal Hill, Margret Rayson, of Rock Road, and Clementine “Mercy” Hurston whose lineage could be traced back to the first days of Ironton and whose prosperity was not the result of hard work, or even inheritance, but rather from the practices of witchcraft where she saddled demoniac leagues of the occult, or so the drunken rumors would have you believe.
I am unsure when it was that Ceely-Beth married Gerald Nelson, as it was well before I took up residence here, but I am quite certain of when she became a widow. Mr. Nelson’s funeral was held on the same morning I moved into my apartment, which was subsequently the same morning I fell in love with my view over Belgrade-Mahn’s. Gerald was interred at the peak of the tallest hill, at the end of the longest pathway, under the grandest of old elms. Sipping my sunrise elixir, I looked out over the grassy sweeps of the cemetery, wondering if the entire population of Ironton was in attendance. I grinned at how their outfits of blacks and grays, from my distance, blurred into an animated storm cloud on the horizon. And, within that mortal tempest was a streak of silver against the darkness, not unlike a fixed bolt of lightning. It wasn’t until the bolt moved that I realized it was a length of braided of hair.
As little as I knew about my fellow Irontonians, I would have had as much luck at guessing the owner of that hair to be Ceely-Beth Nelson as I would have any random name found in the phonebook; however, when she took post in front of a line of funeral-goers, receiving condolences in the form of cliché niceties, handshakes, and hugs, I rationalized that it was her.
Now that I could see her, separate from the herd, it was clear to me that she had taken great care of herself over the many decades - seventy, I presumed. Despite having the entirety of the graveyard, along with Boyd Ave, and Main Street’s only plaza between us, I saw that she was a tall woman – six feet plus, based on the others around her – and under her funerary dress were broad, rounded shoulders that ended with a sharp descent toward her elbows. Thinking back on it, she could have easily been wearing shoulder pads, but that’s neither here nor there.
From within my apartment, a wall of moving boxes dug at my thoughts, assuring me that they weren’t going to unpack themselves and I begrudgingly headed back inside. The final impression that Mrs. Nelson left on me was just how strong and proud she appeared, standing up on that hill; not proud of herself, but pleased at the outpouring of love her and Gerald were being shown that morning. The absence of wiping made clear that, on that morning, Ceely-Beth Nelson was also mute of tears. It would be dishonest to say I shared that luxury as I choked back a sad lump in my throat.
Not a week had passed since Gerald’s burial when I saw Ceely-Beth treading the long pathway toward his grave. She was wearing a pale, blue sundress which complimented her trademark silver braid. I pitied the old woman as she struggled with the sloping hills and broken asphalt. And for all the time it took her to march up the path, she stayed just long enough to place an envelope at her husband’s grave, where stone met earth. It only felt right that she would communicate with him now, the way she did then.
To say that what message slumbered within the envelope drove my wonder and intrigue near to the cliffs of madness would not be exaggeration. Even from such a distance that it appeared to me as just a yellowed speck, it taunted me, as much as folded paper can taunt someone. Icy spiders swarmed my brain as I dazzled on the possibilities of what penned words graced it page, or pages. I felt like I was being excluded from some magnificent secret and I just had to know.
That very night, I relegated myself to the shadows of the tombstones and the trees, cast southwardly upon the graveyard by a fulgent, exposing moon, as I made haste up the broken pathway. That I was going to be apprehended for trespassing was a figment of my cautionary brain because there didn’t seem to be any rules about visiting hours but when, from the deepest shadows, a wretched wind ran chills across my spine, I knew that my grandmother was right when she said, “Nothing good happens after midnight.”
With my destination in sight, I circled the edge where grass gives way to the ancient forest and approached Gerald’s cairn from the north. I didn’t think my stealth would matter much because the flecks of quartz, embedded throughout his granite marker, twinkled in the pale moonlight and, when caught at the right angle, they reflected back at me like a million, blinking eyes. It felt as if the whole of the galaxy was staring me down, awaiting my next move.
Remembering back to where I had last seen the envelope, I blindly reached around to the front of the stone and snatched it, jerking it to my chest the way a starving child might with the last slice of bread. Oh, how I wanted to retreat to my home, kick back with a swallow of whiskey, and read that forbidden manuscript. But knowing that the envelope’s absence would draw unwanted attention or, perhaps, deter Ceely-Beth from future correspondence, Gerald’s tombstone became my chair for the evening. I slid the contents from its paper casket.
Something about the promise of glimpsing behind the curtain of privacy mixed with the audible friction of paper on paper and sent goosebumps down each of my arms. I unfolded the lone sheet, angling it into the moonlight to provide myself and all those quartz eyes a better view. Having no voice from which to draw reference, I heard my own grandmother, Nana Joy, reading the words.
“Dear Gerald, I have seen you in my dreams. I feel your presence at night when I am lonely. I miss you dearly, husband, and I love you, but I am too afraid to go on.
Forever, Ceely.”
“That’s it?” I asked the letter, fully expecting an answer worthy of the trouble I went through to obtain it.
After a quick search of the envelope, which provided no further sentiments or the secrets I had hoped to find, I made my way back down the pathway, caring much less for a clandestine route as before. Regardless of my disappointment, the letter was touching and I wondered if I would ever find someone that loves me as much as Ceely-Beth loved her husband.
The easterly winds were cold and my coffee was hot when I found Mrs. Nelson heading toward her husband’s grave several mornings later. Her back had been to me, so it wasn’t until she was exiting the cemetery that I noticed a sizeable patch of white cloth taped to her forehead, just off-center above her left eye. Off her sequel return to Belgrade-Mahn’s, that morning, I was softened by the last memory I own of Nana Joy.
It was three and a half years ago and Mother Nature was changing wildly from winter to spring. From the edge of the world, menacing clouds peeled across the sky toward us like liquid ash and as the first drops of rain splashed against the windows, Nana Joy looked to me from what turned out to be her deathbed and said the four words I don’t care to ever hear again, “I’ve given up, Isaac.” There was no need for questions – I knew by the tone in her voice to what she was referring.
Her husband of sixty-one years, my Papa Lewis, had died just short of two weeks prior and despite sporting the constitution and complexion of a woman decades her junior, her health declined rapidly. It had been love at first sight when the two met. He had just moved to the Arcadia Valley area and was entering high school while she was preparing for her senior year. He proposed to her on Independence Day of that summer and had hitherto been her entire life for the next six decades. Of their whirlwind courtship, elopement, and life together, she had no reservations in saying, “I gave him my heart that night, so by all rights, they buried it with him.”
She was the strongest person I will ever know, but living a life without him was the one thing she could not endure. Literally and figuratively, the heavens wept for her the night she died. As Doctor Wagner stated, she succumbed peacefully to a ‘significant cardiac event’ in her sleep, but I will forever translate that to her being stolen from us by a broken heart. I only assumed that Mrs. Nelson was succumbing to similar series of events, but much less peacefully, or at least her injuries indicated as much.
By the time the memory of that night faded from my thoughts, and the morning mists returned, Ceely-Beth was gone, having left only a familiar, yellow speck on the horizon. I waited patiently for night to come. Much more prepared with a flask of whiskey and a small blanket, I sat inside a single beam of moonlight with her most recent letter in my lap. That this mysterious message promised a great delve into Ceely’s voiceless emotions, with its multiple pages, soaked front and back with lengthy strings of words and feverish, chaotic kerning, I was elated.
That elation was short-lived, though, because while “I’m sorry, husband” were the first words of the letter, it was also the last phrase I could have hoped to comprehend. The remaining pages were written by a scrawling, febrile hand and consisted of words that seemed to be of middle eastern origin with flairs of, perhaps, Chinese mixed in sporadically. Admittedly, those are just baseless conjectures as I am unable to read any foreign language. For all I knew, it could have been written in a form of English from a thousand years in the future, ten-thousand years in the past. Suffice it to say, the lines and words and archaic pictography, wherein hieroglyphs and sacred geometries of ineffable design were scribed – either for ruse or for ritualistic purposes – were mind-bending.
The few syllables I managed to pronounce made no sense as singular, audible manifestations, or in congruity with any of the others. Then, a still-framed memory flashed in my mind and all I could see was the large bandage on Mrs. Nelson’s forehead. A concussion, I thought to myself. The old bird must have knocked herself silly on something and these rambling, incoherent pages were symptomatic of that. With that logical deduction in place, I returned the letter to its envelope, then back to its resting spot, and made my way home. Of my assumptions, I felt satisfied, albeit with a measurable amount of pity for the woman; however, none of that attributed to the dank, hot nausea growing in my stomach. I needed to lay down.
That my dreams were invaded by horrific constructs of language, amidst hoary realms of depravity, conceivable only in the distempered mind of a madman, I shall only whisper about in silence, lest its power seep into the waking world and destroy me.
For an eternity, it seemed, I lofted about on a putrid swamp that was not explainable as a home to any living thing but was birthed of an evil outside the courts and philosophies taught to, or by, mortal men. Ceely’s mute words were a torrent of brutality as they swirled over my head and rained down on me in verbal plagues. Wandering that landscape of hate and necromancy, I felt a stain growing on my soul from a miasma of phantom beasts, clawing fists, and an infamy which eyes of this world should never see. You will forgive me for relaying those nocturnal terrors with such ambiguity, but I feel wholly ruined by them and, for as long as possible, I will keep them repressed.
Although my sentence in that dreamy abyss seemed immemorial, fully divided from any sense of time, somehow, I knew that I had only been asleep for a few hours when I was awakened by distant, terrified scream.
In a tangle of sheets, I fumbled from my bed in a rush to get to the balcony doors. I threw apart the blinds, my eyes sweeping feverishly, trying to find the source of the tragic cry while my ears still held its fresh echoes. If the saying “Red sky at morning; sailor’s warning” held any truth, then it would not be foolish to think that the cerise brilliance, with which the dawn broke, signaled a brewing annihilation.
It was as if I bore sole witness to the scream from only moments before as I hurried across the plaza’s lot, then Boyd Street, and I noticed that, with no less than stumbling confusion, not one of the storefront gawkers or morning-joggers seemed to have heard what I had. Their ignorance aside, I pushed faster toward the source of the voice: Belgrade-Mahn’s Cemetery. I was filled with some an unexplainable knowing that it had come from beyond its iron gates, regardless of the fact that there was no evidence to prove it.
A swirl of multicolored leaves blew across my path as I drove deeper into the grave menagerie. I felt as if Mother Nature was clearing the way for me, in full agreement with my direction. Amongst the flurry of autumnal browns and yellows, a glimpse of something tattered and lighter in color caught my eye and I leapt, stepping on it before the winds carried it away. It fluttered under foot for a moment, protesting its capture. The notion that the yellowed parchment was foreign to me was simply a matter of bullishly denying the truth.
I plucked Ceely’s envelope from the ground and stood motionless, taking in the wealth of mysteries spread across its many folds and shreds.
There was no letter within the envelope and half of a large, muddy shoeprint creased and ripped its backside where the force of a long stride had been pressed upon it. And, as if designed by a Jackson Pollock devotee, a mist of fresh blood stained the face of envelope. I wiped the tips of my first two fingers across it, then held them before my eyes. It wasn’t until I started rolling the silky liquid between my thumb and fingertips, that reality set in. The envelope fell from my grip and I instinctively called out for Ceely. If she was still in the cemetery, I knew there was only one place that she could be.
I stuck to the pathway, my eyes and lungs burning as I picked up speed with the sharply escalating ground. Over the next ridge, Gerald’s tombstone rose like a dreadful, ashen sun, casting derision upon the grassy dunes at its feet and displaying monolithic power across the whole of the necropolis. I had seen his marker nearly every day for weeks, both up close and at a distance, but that morning it seemed somehow cognizant of my presence. The backdrop of rosy sky gave the tombstone’s chiseled edges a more definite, lustrous sheen and the body of the thing exuded a breathing, hallowed dominance.
When I reached the hilltop, taking a moment to rest my muscles against to the great elm, I was taken aback by a previously unseen mound of fresh dirt adjacent to his tombstone. It had been obscured from view by the hill, but now it was all I could seem to focus on. My eyes travelled up and over the earthen pile until they reached the far edge where it met the ground again. To say that any single thing had ever terrified me more than I what I was presently staring at would be patently untrue. But even that level of terror would soon be overthrown.
My muscles felt instantly severed from communication with my brain and I dropped to my knees. Of the question whether or not bulging profanities flew from my mouth, and my tears fell of their own freewill, I can answer in the affirmative. Eternity passed in the span of but a minute before I had regained my faculties and was able to pull myself to the ragged, irregular hole that stretched out from the base of Mr. Nelson’s tombstone.
Across my nape, the air on the chasm’s ledge blew in crisp, cool waves, urging me to break from my frozen terror and flee, never again to look upon Gerald’s open casket silently mocking me from within the stygian depths, save for its nightmarish countenance that would forever infect my sleep.
A particularly stiff wind kicked up and, all at once, I became aware of the cruel and twisted sense of humor the fates possess when, riding on the breeze, a torn sheet of parchment was tossed into the pit, finally coming to rest on the edge of the casket’s open lid. I dug the tips of my feet into the soil, clutching a fistful of grass in one hand, and reached for it with my other hand. I drew the paper to my chest and, with a great thrust, threw myself onto my back, a few feet from that hellish maw. Once I reigned in my shaking hands, it took very little effort to align the torn halves of the paper in order to read it.
“Gerald, I’m begging you to stop. It was Mercy’s spell that brought you back to this world… and it was with the truest love that I sought your return, but not like this. Never like this. I cannot take anymore, Gerald. Leave me be. I never wanted it this way. Please… stop…
With all my heart, I love y—”
The last word was illegibly smeared across the remainder of the page, but its message was clear. I held the letter over my face, praying the daylight would render forth some unseen writings, but I discovered nothing. I reread the letter a dozen times over the next minute, hoping beyond reason that there would somehow be more to it that I missed in previous readings. Ceely’s words, when added to the open grave at my right, equaled a seemingly logical situation, but it felt simultaneously wrong and abusive to everything I thought to be true. A miasma of belief and anti-reality clouded my mind.
That I was to spend the rest of my life plagued by this shrouded mystery, I was certain and decided that a permanent leave from the graveyard was in my best interest, lest exhaustion take over and I awaken to handcuffs and flashing lights and accusations of grave robbing.
I let my hands and the letter fall away from my face but was not met with refreshing sunshine or playful branches, swaying in the breeze overhead. No, I was engulfed by a shadow of the hulking, heaving, hellish abomination of the formerly dead, Gerald Nelson.
A twist of blood-laced saliva fell from his gaping mouth and landed on my chest. And with the sun at his back, the rest of his face was darkened by a flopping tangle of soiled, gray hair. He became all that I could see. His burial suit drooped from his gaunt form as if on a wire hanger and from its cuffs, embalming fluid leaked out in sticky, acrid lines that followed his movements like broken puppet strings.
A throaty groan rumbled from deep within the silhouette, cementing me to the ground with fear. His breath misted between us in a hot, vaporous cloud that smelled of death and hate. I heard a faint sound like that of wrenching leather as, from the corner of my eye, I saw his hand reach for me. I pleaded for death to take me before this… thing had a chance to. I screamed and kicked at the walking, creaking, groaning corpse, but his inhuman strength kept him from flinching.
All my cries and all my begging fell on mute ears. At the brink of mortality and with my nerves fighting for the last, tenuous ribbon of sanity, I knew that I could take it no longer. Resignation warmed my senses, and I began to calm with the great acceptance of my death. Suddenly, a gunshot tore through the air and my entire being was seized into a cold unconsciousness.
To end this story by telling you that I fought off the hideous beast, damning him back to the briny pits of hell from whence it came, would be a boastful lie. Two days later, I awoke in a solitary room on the fourth floor of the psychiatric wing of Jefferson County Hospital. I spent the following week pouring my story out to anyone that had the patience to listen to my babbling for more than a minute. In the week following that, I sat in uninterrupted, seemingly deserved silence. I was only prompted to put all of this into writing quite recently.
Last night, a letter was slipped under my door and only by the grace of a gibbous moon, through my barred window, was I able to read it.
“Dear Isaac, I am deeply sorry for everything you have gone through; however, your unintentional involvement was of supreme help to me. If you had not shown up that morning, I would be dead… or worse. I fear I would be by Gerald’s side once again. You distracted him long enough for me to escape and arm myself. But you can be sure that Gerald is at peace now.
Thank you, Ceely-Beth Nelson.”
I can only pray that her words are true because when I close my eyes every night, Gerald looms and his eternal abyss beckons me.