Or to give it the correct name: a nightmare.
It’s the same one I get at least once a week, and it would be comfortably familiar were it not so terrifying in its content. It always starts the same. The limp feet scraping across the foliage of the woodland floor. I can hear heavy breathing, but it doesn’t belong to the person being dragged. It belongs to me. I can never see myself in the nightmare, but I know that I am the person moving the body.
I know that because this isn’t just a nightmare.
It’s a vivid memory from my past.
After the feet, it’s always the belt buckle that I notice next. It catches the moonlight from overhead and shimmers, sending a wave of nausea rushing through me as I imagine somebody on the main road spotting it and entering the woods to investigate. Even though I know how this nightmare ends, I always feel like it will change the next time I have it.
But once again, nobody spots the shiny belt buckle, and I remain alone in the woods, or at least as alone as one can be with a dead body for company.
Moving my eyes up the corpse, I see the white t-shirt of the victim. It is now covered in two things that have blemished its appearance.
90% soil.
10% blood.
I always wish I could skip this next part and move on to the arms, which are currently hanging in front of me as I hold on to the hands and pull as hard as I can. But it’s impossible to see the arms without also getting a good look at the victim’s face.
The eyes are always open. But surprisingly, that’s not the worst part about his features. That would be the mouth.
It’s hanging open widely, giving the man a grotesque appearance, almost as if he is trying to scream, but he can’t summon the sound.
Of course he can’t. Without the capacity to get air into his lungs, he isn’t able to make a sound. Instead, the mouth gapes open uselessly, like a window into his soul, but the soul isn’t home.
I tend not to spend too long looking at the face if I can help it. What I usually do at this part of the nightmare is look behind me and see how far I have left to go before I reach the grave.
It’s always further than it looks.
Even though the nightmare begins with me dragging the body through the woods, I know that I first had to take it out of the boot of my car to get to this part. That would be the car that is parked about a hundred yards away from where I am now. That was as close as I could get it before the tree stumps became so numerous that it was impassable, leaving me to have to exert myself much more than I would have liked to get the body from the boot to the hole I just spent an hour digging.
Another quick check over my shoulder confirms that I am getting closer now, but as I already knew, another minute goes by, and I don’t seem to be any nearer. Everything is warped in a dream. Time. Distance. The whole fabric of society. It’s exhausting, both physically and mentally, and I long to wake up and release myself from this agony of an alternate universe. But I never wake up at this part, no matter how much I would like to.
I only wake up once the body is in the ground.
But now, here I am. I’ve finally made it.
I’m at the grave.
It’s important to take a breather at this point before one last push. Sucking air into my lungs, I can feel the cold hitting the inside of my body. It was a cold night when this happened in the real world, but it’s always colder in the nightmare.
With my last bit of energy restored, I crouch down and kneel by the body, placing both my hands on the dirty white t-shirt and feeling the man’s ribs as I do. Soon, there will be no flesh covering those bones, the decomposition of the skin meaning that this male who once looked quite pleasing on the eye will now just look like everybody else who has been dead for a while.
A pale, white skeleton.
Without further ado, I get it over with. A groan and a strong push are all it takes to send the body tumbling down into the four-foot hole before me.
The corpse hits the bottom of the grave with a sickening thud, and I always wonder what it was that made that noise. The skull cracking as it hit the ground? A hip bone smashing as it slams into the hard soil? Or maybe that’s just the sound that every body would make if pushed into a deep hole without anything underneath it to cushion the fall.
Somehow, the spade always appears in my hands at this point, and I’m digging before I know it. I can hear the soil hitting the body behind me, but I never turn around to check on my progress until I have reduced the pile of disturbed earth by at least half. That way, I know I am closer to finishing.
When I do turn around and check, there’s always an arresting sight waiting for me. The white t-shirt is now completely submerged, covered entirely with dark and dirty soil. The same goes for the legs and the arms. The only thing I can see at this point that reminds me that there is a body in this hole are the two white trainers sticking up and the ghastly pale face still watching me as I work.
I rush through the rest of the soil and make sure not to look again until I am certain the body is completely buried. Then all that is left to
