Chapter 52
Bogdan has been digging for a long time.
Why not? Might as well be getting something done.
He started at the very top of the Garden of Eternal Rest, where the earliest graves are now permanently under the shadow of the wide branches of the trees behind the wall.
The ground is softer, having seen no sunlight in many years, and Bogdan knows that the older, grander coffins here will be intact.
They will be solid oak. They won’t be split or rotten.
There will be no skulls staring up at him, hollow and eaten and hopeful.
He hears the odd bit of excitement from down the hill, but still no rumble of the low-loader, and so he keeps digging.
One of the machines could uncover a whole row of graves in minutes, especially if not much care is taken, which Bogdan knows will be the case.
So he chooses to be neat and tidy, for as long as it is just him and his shovel.
The next grave he chooses to tackle is tucked tightly in the top corner of the graveyard.
As he digs, he is thinking about Marina, the woman he met on his way up here.
He has seen her before in the village, but mainly people don’t talk to him; they don’t even notice him, and that’s okay.
He doesn’t suppose you are allowed to visit people here, but maybe one day if he bumped into her again, then that would be okay. He misses his mother some days.
Bogdan’s shovel finally strikes something solid, but it is not the lid of the coffin.
There are many stones and tree roots, which make the job harder, but more fun, for Bogdan.
He reaches down and clears thick earth off the obstruction.
It is pure white. Beautiful, in fact, thinks Bogdan, in the moment before he realizes what it is.
This was not part of his plan. The very point of digging here was that there would be no rotten coffins and no bones. And yet here they were. So even 150 years ago they were cutting corners? Cheap coffins—who would ever find out?
Should he just fill the grave back in? Pretend it never happened and wait for the diggers?
Something about that makes him feel uncomfortable.
Bogdan has uncovered a bone, and that makes him the guardian.
He has no smaller tool than the shovel with him, so he kneels down on the compacted earth and starts to work with his hands alone.
He is as gentle as he can be. He shifts his kneeling weight to get a better angle to clear away more dirt, and as he does so he realizes he is not kneeling on compacted dirt, but on something much more solid.
He is kneeling on the solid oak lid of a solid oak coffin.
Which can’t be. A body can’t escape from a coffin.
Bogdan tries to force out a horrific thought.
That someone had been buried alive? Had managed to somehow clamber out of the coffin, but no farther?
Bogdan works quickly, with no room for ceremony or superstition.
There are many bones, and then a skull, though he tries not to disturb it.
He uncovers enough of the coffin to jam the blade of his shovel under the lid.
After considerable effort he breaks open the lower third. Inside is another skeleton.
Two skeletons. One inside the coffin, and one outside. One small, one big. One gray and yellow, one cloud-white.
What to do? Somebody should take a look at it, that was fairly certain.
Though that would take a long time. They would dig with tiny trowels; Bogdan had seen it on TV.
And they wouldn’t just be digging into this grave; they would be digging into all of them.
And Bogdan knows it will end up being nothing.
It will just be how they used to bury people in this country, or one year there was a disease and they buried people together, or a million other possibilities.
Meanwhile the development will be delayed and he will be waiting to work. So, the question remains. What to do?
Bogdan needs thinking time. But unfortunately he doesn’t have that luxury.
In the distance he hears a siren. He waits a moment and the siren comes closer.
It sounds like an ambulance to Bogdan, but he knows, logically, that it must be the police.
Which means the barricade will be clear soon enough and the circus will begin.
He hauls himself out of the grave and starts to fill it in once more.
Ian will tell me what to do, he thinks, as the siren reaches the bottom of the path.