Decay Inevitable

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.”

“Gloat Market,” Will said. He didn’t know the place, or the others that Alice had mentioned, but he felt more confident now that he had a few locations to refer to. “Are we in Suffolk?” he asked, but shook his head when she regarded him with bewilderment. “Never mind. Thanks a lot. You’ve been a great help.”

“That’s okay, Will. Travel safe, now.” She reached out and touched his arm.

He waved and tramped towards the cemetery gates. At the threshold he stopped, trying to remember something. He turned back. Sixty feet away, her figure was bent over and earnestly engaged with the trowel, the edge of the blade tearing at the earth.

“How did you know–” he began.

She reared up and he took a reflexive step away. Her eyes glowered at him. The tool dangled from her grip, dribbling what looked like blood into the soft, gritty earth. He was smitten with the impression that she had been able to control who she really was while he talked to her, but that now, with contact broken, she had rediscovered her true form. Will pursed his lips to finish his question, but his mouth had drained of spit. She seemed to lean towards him, but she took off in the opposite direction at speed, moving to the blind side of the church before he could think about pursuing her. Half of her face seemed to be hanging off, a badly knitted balaclava that refused to hug the contours of her head. He hurried back to the beach and tried to calm himself down by reciting the name of the village, Gloat Market, over and over again.

GLOAT MARKET ROSE out of the shingle like an elephant’s graveyard. Great vertical twists of bone formed an ivory wall, protecting the village from the winds that steamed in off the sea, smelling of oil and dead fish. As Will passed through the postern gate at the edge of the village environs, he was again assaulted by the belief that there were others here, as real as he, capering just beyond the confines of what he was aware of. He saw flashes of movement, swatches of clothing; heard snippets of sound that were gone almost before they arrived. A brief smell of frying sausages, of dog shit, of soap. Yet there was nothing, in truth, for the village stretched out in front of him, as animated as the graveyard he had left behind an hour or so earlier. Didn’t it mean you were brain damaged, if you entertained the illusion of sensory input?

The bone shield seemed a little grand for the tiny web of streets it contained. A cross-roads at the village centre was marked with a stone flower. Some of the houses that flanked the lanes greeted his passing them by with open mouths; their doors swung rustily on tired, oil-shy hinges. The parrots, at least, had followed him. They sat on washing lines like scraps of filthy linen and heckled him remorselessly.

“Fuckhead!” they screeched. “Minging cock-gobbler! You piss shit! You piss shit! You do! You do!”

Above it all, a constant loop, a soughing as of summer breezes. It was there always, but he had only become conscious of it when the parrots provided their anti-rhythms.

He ignored the parrots and turned onto a lane that appeared to be more densely populated by buildings. It turned out to be called Humble Street. Will wondered if it was the same Humble Street that had seen Evelyn Marley’s final fall. He found the pharmacist that Alice had referred to, but it was closed. Rather, it was open, but unstaffed. Huge glass orbs sat on the shelves gathering dust. They were filled with powders and liquids of extravagant hue and even more alien names: Grivellage Salts, one was called. Dandiprat’s Tincture, was another. A phial of bleached green crystals bearing the label Paleshrikes found its way into his pocket, mainly because he liked the sound of the name, but also because he needed to have something real to put his fingers on. Too much of what he saw here seemed without substance or anchor. He felt that, once his back was turned on it, it would all dissolve to dust, or fly away into the sky.

Further along the lane he saw a trap without a pony and a pack of thin dogs conferring by a pond. They looked at him without interest as he walked by. As he drew alongside the gates of what appeared to be a salvage yard, filled with cracked, claw-footed bathtubs, radiators, steel buckets, and propellers, a voice cried out to him from an upstairs window in the building that backed onto the yard.

Will stopped and peered through the wooden slats of the gate.

“You, boy!” the voice called. “Give us a hand, won’t you?”

He saw a face at the window, and a hand waggling impatiently at him. Will pushed the gates open and jogged through the yard to the back door. Inside was a kitchen that smelled of suet and overcooked cabbage. Puddings wrapped in muslin were cooling on a windowsill. A recipe book was open and floury fingerprints spoilt a colour plate displaying a hollowed rabbit that was ready for the oven.