Chapter Nine: Grave Robbing

“Hello Doctor Baldwin, it’s Amanda.”
She was using her mobile in her room after school, the TV set on and the sound turned down low, keeping her voice quiet in case her father was listening.
The voice of the doctor at the other end seemed surprised but pleased. “I thought I was never going to hear from you or your father. What can I do for you?”
“Well, I want to help you.”
“I would love some help, but you’re under age. I am going ahead with the exhuming of the body of Sir William anyway. I think I can just about do it on my own. Any information I get I will pass on.”
“You’re going to need a look-out at least, I can then give you some warning if anyone passes by,” Amanda suggested. “I might even be able to get someone else to help, you know Paul, the guy who witnessed my initiation in the library.”
“That’s an excellent idea, but I would be in serious trouble if anything went wrong.” There was a silence at the other end of the phone as if Doctor Baldwin was considering Amanda’s suggestion. “If you manage to get Paul interested” he said at last, “give me a call and I might accept your offer.”
Without any delay Amanda dialled Paul’s house-she had found the number by contacting Darkcore Records the evening before. A woman picked up the phone and it was a few minutes before Paul came on the line and when he did, to Amanda’s surprise, there was a hint of relief in his voice.
Pacing to one side of her room to the next, she attempted to explain the meeting with Doctor Baldwin and his proposal to rob the dead. She was surprised to find that it was not difficult to persuade him.
“I have been doing a lot of thinking since the party,” Paul said. “I haven’t been sleeping and I don’t think I can ignore what I saw that night, it will drive me mad. I am going to have to take some kind of action.”
“Great, my thoughts exactly,” Amanda said and then apologised for calling him a snitch. They did not talk long after that and she promised to get back to him as soon as possible.
Feeling pleased with herself she sat on the bed, allowing Jones the cat to climb onto her lap and rang the doctor back, but the line was engaged. Perspiration was falling profusely from her forehead and she wiped it off with the back of her hand. It was very warm, unusually so for this time of year. All day at school it had been cool, a thin drizzle of rain coming from grey skies, but once within the grounds of Ashbury Manor, the rise in temperature had been noticeable. The window in her bedroom was open but no cooling breezes entered to alleviate the heat.
Opening the door to allow the ginger tom to leave, she gazed around her room. It was only 7 in the evening and a whole expanse of empty time stretched ahead of her. She had no friends here to phone up or visit and the usual solitary pastimes like watching movies, listening to music or reading no longer appealed.
Looking at the garish covers of her goth and metal CD’s, her selection of horror videos and books resting in ordered piles against the walls, awaiting shelves to be put up, she was suddenly repelled by their gothic exaggeration and violent imagery. Her enthusiasm for the dark side had seemingly been taken from her, but there was an emptiness inside of her as if an important part of her psyche had been severed or a close friend had been spirited away.
The house too appeared even more constricting but at the same time the shadowed corners of her room had, if only in her imagination, expanded out to infinities of blackness. The heat was getting oppressive and Amanda decided she had to go for a long walk to escape the enclosure of the time-worn walls.
Meeting her father on the stairs she told him she was going for a walk. Jonathan was distracted and had an air of fretfulness about him, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, but he immediately focused on his daughter.
Amanda could not help but notice that he clutched a cigarette in his hand and he had not shaved this morning. At seeing her father like this she felt a wave of unhappiness overwhelm her. Her sadness was so strong she almost flung herself at her dad so she could burst into tears in his arms, but she controlled herself.
“Please tell me, Amanda if you’re hiding anything from me,” Jonathan said, abruptly and loudly.
“I’m not hiding anything. I’ve told you everything but you don’t believe me,” she said in a slightly raised voice rather taken aback by her dad’s outburst.
Calming down her father said resignedly, “Yeah I know. Bye the way I’ve booked you to see a very good counsellor, a friend of Moonbeam’s, a week from today.”
“Dad, I’ll see you later.” She moved past him towards the main entrance.
“Don’t be too long,” he said anxiously.
When she stepped onto the driveway in the gathering twilight, the gravel crunching underfoot, it was like walking out on a balmy evening in the tropics. Frogs with iridescent leathery skins of many colours hoped at her feet and she wondered at their strange markings, not having seen anything like them before except in nature programmes. The large beetle-like insects that flew in the air above her head were even more alien and reminded her of the bugs she had seen in her dreams, which swarmed in the cavernous spaces existing beyond the looking-glass.
They made her skin crawl and she quickened her pace making for the gate, but before she could reach it, one of the flying creepy-crawlies got caught in her hair. Frantically extracting it, she let it fall to the ground and fascinated despite herself with this odd life-form, she stooped low to get a closer look.
The creature moved weakly on its six legs and its transparent wings unfolded from its dazzlingly beautiful carapace; but its constantly moving mandibles and wavering antennae were repulsive and she felt the sting in her scalp where the thing had bit her. In an excess of revulsion she stamped it under her foot and ran from the grounds.
Once she had left the temperature dropped considerably. It was still warm, but this warmth was only the normal heat of an English evening at the end of summer. The drizzle that had dominated the daytime had ceased and it made for a comfortable stroll towards the river past the pub. Amanda realised she was walking aimlessly, making her way to the path beside the Thames purely as a means of escaping the Manor. She had no destination, no friends to visit, nothing. Always at the back of her mind was the beckoning presence of the old house, summoning her as if it had consciously allowed for this brief moment of freedom, knowing full well she had to return.
Now standing alone staring at the darkening river, the line of low bungalow’s on the other side and the vivid colours of the sunset staining the clouds, she had the idea of making an impromptu call on Doctor Baldwin. He was somebody she could talk to. Rapidly making her mind up, she set off in the direction of his house.
When she arrived there it was a few minutes before the doctor opened the door. He seemed a little startled if not annoyed, as if she had disturbed something, but he soon allowed her to enter, directing her to the living room. The room was surprisingly neat considering the clutter of the hall and the study upstairs, consisting of a battered old sofa, a rather plush armchair, and an old TV attached to an ancient VCR player. There was only one bookshelf, which held modern paperbacks and some hardbacks on its shelves, instead of the leather bound manuscripts dominating his study.
But on entering the living room, her eyes were drawn to a video case lying near the recorder. The kitsch image of the well muscled, naked man on the case contrasted so radically with the plain décor of the room that at first she was unable to look away. As Dr Baldwin swiftly kicked the tape under the stand the TV stood on, she was suffused with embarrassment.
There was a moment of silence you could cut with a knife but eventually it was broken by Dr Baldwin speaking in a hesitant voice, offering her a cup of tea. She accepted and propped herself on the edge of the sofa, trying to avoid gazing too intently at a box of tissues resting on the floor near the TV.
“Paul’s agreed to help us,” she said when the doctor had passed her a cup and saucer and he had sat in the armchair.
“I’m so glad,” he said, his voice less hesitant, suddenly turning all his attention to Amanda. “We will begin the digging at two in the morning next Tuesday to avoid detection. Is that alright with you?”
“Yes, although I have to go to school the next day. I suppose at the weekend there could be more people around.”
“That’s correct. I would like to do it sooner but I need to prepare. The longer you stay at Ashbury Manor the more at risk you and your father will be. But you do know what you’re getting into, don’t you,” he said, suddenly very serious and stern. “This whole thing is very dangerous, extremely dangerous and I don’t just mean the possibility of getting caught grave robbing. Maybe it would be for the best if you fled or at least moved elsewhere temporally. We are dealing with forces of evil that transcend the everyday. Your very soul might be in jeopardy.”
“I think it already is, Doctor Baldwin. I am in great danger. I am very frightened. That’s why I want to help you.”
“Sure, but you must never confide in your father. His natural inclinations will want to protect you because he considers me, well…odd. He will go to the police and have me arrested.”
“And another thing…” Getting up from his chair, resting his tea on the armrest and gesturing to Amanda, he went to the kitchen which overlooked the road.
Pointing out the window to a red Volkswagen Golf underneath a streetlight, he said, “I’m under surveillance. If you look closer you will see a man in the car. He’s been there all day.”
“Who’s watching you?”
“The Order of the Arboreal Orb. They’ve found out you have made contact with me, which makes the situation even more awkward. Our grave robbing expedition is going to be that little bit more perilous.”
Amanda did not wish to return to the Manor but it was important her dad did not become suspicious. She promised she would meet the doctor at 2am at St Mary’s church and she left for home, glancing back at the car beneath the streetlight.
At that moment the car’s engine started and the vehicle moved off in the opposite direction. She quickened her pace and shivered even though the night was warm.

Sleep was as allusive as a wisp of smoke that Monday evening and in the end the alarm clock Amanda had set for half-past one was not needed. The long tiring day at school tomorrow worried her as she arose from her disturbed bed and put on her clothes, but she was getting used to tiredness and anyway lack of sleep paled into insignificance when she thought what else could arise in the next few hours.
Since her meeting with Doctor Baldwin the previous week everything seemed to have been leading up to this moment. She had nothing to do with the preparations, so she carried on with her life as normally as she could. Her father had called the police on Thursday, but they were very perfunctory in their investigations, merely making notes while they talked to Jonathan for half an hour and then with her for fifteen minutes. They left promising to follow up the enquiry but it was obvious they considered the case a domestic problem.
After that her father had withdrawn further into himself, spending a lot of time in his studio annex. Amanda went to school and did her homework, so her dad would not get any suspicions, but she found it hard.
Shutting her bedroom door very quietly behind her she moved downstairs almost on tiptoe. Her father, suffering in the last two weeks the same insomnia as herself, had a tendency to pop up unexpectedly like a red eyed dishevelled ghost, but she reached the front door without incident.
Outside the atmosphere was as strangely sultry as ever, the night noises more akin to a rainforest then an English late summer, but she left the grounds at a fast pace, the heat and the sounds ceasing as soon as she passed through the gate, as if they had been switched off. In there place the dark stillness and the eerie quiet of early morning descended like a thick curtain and she moved almost running to the main entrance of St Mary’s churchyard.
The doctor was not there and she agitatedly glanced at her wristwatch beneath a fitfully glowing streetlight, her heart skipping a beat when she realised that she was late. The isolation of the deserted street, the darkened cavity of the church and the blunt silhouettes of the gravestones made her feel vulnerable.
A feeling of weakness, of irresolution crept up on her. Amanda began to wonder what she was doing out here, meeting a creepy middle-aged man with a dangerous obsession. Their attempt at digging up a grave in the dead of night suddenly felt insane to her.
Taking one last look around her, staring into the menacing shadows of the churchyard and glancing up and down Abbey Street, she took a step across the pavement, meaning to walk home. Tomorrow she would talk to her dad, pursued him to sell the Manor and in the meantime they would fly back to America and stay in a luxury hotel, until they bought another house. But before she could take another step she was grabbed roughly by the arm and spun around to face the surly features of Doctor Baldwin.
“You’re late,” he hissed, dragging her brusquely behind the wall.
“Get away from me, you creep,” she shouted, extracting herself from his weak grip. Trying to calm her beating heart she leant with one arm on the rough flaky brick of the wall, her right foot sinking into the damp soil of the flower beds. Shut off from the streetlights, it was very dark, the heavy foliage of a yew tree making it even darker. The smell of stale sweat told her that the doctor was standing close and she tried to escape by moving sideways, holding onto the uneven bricks as a guide.
“Where is your friend? He’s bloody late as well,” he whispered, griping her arm again and pulling her away from the wall and closer to him, his odour making Amanda heave. “This is not some teenage escapade when you can turn up when you want, you know. Now where is he? I’m going to need to dig up the grave, before sunrise.”
“I don’t know,” she stammered, trying to hold back the tears that were about to slip down her face, desperately thinking of ways to avoid this situation.
There was movement from behind and both Amanda and Doctor Baldwin turned to confront whatever it was.
She gave a sigh of relief when she saw the dim form of Paul standing in the pale illumination coming from the street. “Sorry I’m late,” he said innocently. “I was delayed.”
“Thank god you’re here anyway,” the doctor said and Amanda noticed that, when he switched on a bulky torch, he was shaking all over and perspiring heavily. “Help me with this bag will you.”
Doctor Baldwin, directing the torch into the church yard, lit up the leaning gravestones with their markings of remorse and death, as well as the large carry-all. Paul, without saying anything, came over and picked up the carry-all with both arms, the bag clanking metallically. A night-bird hooted in the distance.
“Follow me,” the doctor said. “We will go the back way into the New Cemetery. We haven’t a moment to lose.”
Amanda decided to follow Doctor Baldwin and face the hazards. Running away was an option and if Paul had not arrived she would have done so, easily out-manoeuvring the awkward doctor. She was out of her depth. Her drives, compulsions, her confidence had gone since the ceremony in the library, but she still felt responsible for the young guitarist. If it had not been for her he would not be here in a graveyard with the intention to rob the dead. With trepidation, faint with fear, she paced after the retreating torch beam wavering on the church wall and the graves.
Catching up with the struggling Paul, she took hold of one of the bag straps and both of them hauled the heavy carry-all through the gate into the Old Cemetery at the back of St Mary’s, moving onwards after the retreating arc of torch light, the sound of clattering metal disturbing the eerie early morning silence. The table tombs, broken angelic statues and moss scared markers of the dead were revealed fitfully by the beam which came to rest next to the entrance to the New Cemetery. They gratefully lowered the canvas bag to the ground and caught their breath, but Doctor Baldwin urged them on.
It was not long before they reached Sir William Barrett’s small and horizontal gravestone, tucked away in the forgotten corner of the cemetery. Immediately the doctor unzipped the carry-all now resting on the damp grass and extracted two spades, a crowbar, and an electric lamp. He passed one of the spades to Paul and kept hold of the other.
“Right, lets start digging, the quicker we do this the better,” he said and then pointed down the middle pathway that could just be discerned in the gloom. “Amanda, go to the entrance, over there. If you see anything suspicious call me on my mobile, the ring tone will warn us, now go!” After handing her a scrap of paper with the number on it, he began to dig into the resistant grassy earth.Obeying his commands she paced off down the path, holding the torch rigidly in both hands and keeping the beam still so as to light the path only. She did not want to see the looming gravestones on either side. When she reached the second entrance into the New Cemetery, fronting the road with its row of darkened terraced houses on the other side, she switched off the torch and crept into the uncertain shelter of the threadbare hedge that bordered the graveyard.

After a while she began to relax, listening to the distant sounds of digging coming from behind. A few cars went by even at this late hour, and once a police vehicle drove past, but was away before she could become concerned. But just as she was becoming bored, she was jolted out of her lethargy when she saw a Volkswagen Golf parking directly opposite. A man got out on the driver’s side and walked leisurely across the deserted road.
Acting quickly she rang Dr Baldwin’s mobile, letting it ring three times, her heart in her mouth, hoping desperately that she had not been seen by the owner of the vehicle.

Slowly and carefully he extracted from the inside pocket of his coat a matchbox. Placing it gingerly on the hard surface he carefully began to push the matchbox open with a pair of tweezers, an intense look of concentration on his face. A frantic buzzing sound emanated from the box, loud enough to be audible from where Amanda lay in the hedge. Then the object contained in the matchbox was set lose; a flying insect as big as a baby’s hand.
The man in the long coat as soon as the bug was released ran back across the road, climbed into his car and with a screech of the Golf’s tires drove off. The insect flew above Amanda’s hiding place to where Doctor Baldwin and Paul were working.
It all happened so fast that she did not have time to get a close look at the creature, but something about it made her skin crawl. Except for its transparent wings, the insect seemed to be composed of tiny interlocking filaments similar to the thing that had attacked Lucius Peake, but on a smaller scale. Again, she felt the impulse to run away, leave the doctor and Paul to their fate, but her feelings of responsibility towards the man and the boy got the better of her.
Creeping stealthily, the terror of coming across the insect making her throw the torch beam wildly around, exposing the leering faces of angels and cracked headstones, she moved gradually back to the grave.
It was open, a high mound of soil to one side, two spades lying near the lip of the six foot hole, the lamp turned off, but no sign of the doctor or the young guitarist. She agitatedly shone the torch light into dark corners, revealing the rusty railings of the fence and the unkempt undergrowth growing thickly in this part of the New Cemetery, wanting to shout out to Doctor Baldwin and Paul but too intimated to do so.
Unable to resist looking into the opened grave, Amanda directed the shaft of illumination into the black pit, immediately exposing the rotting wood of the coffin. The decayed lid had been prised up and rested against the uneven walls of the cavity and inside the man-sized box were the yellowed and dishevelled remains of Sir William Barrett. But as if seeds from the tropics had seeped into the restricted spaces of the coffin, plant growth had sprung up, wrapping the skeleton in a thin shroud of foliage.
It was as if this vegetation had grotesquely fed off the dead body, sprouting purple and blood-red tropical
fruits that pulsated with the putrefying ooze of decomposition, swimming with liquefied flesh from the corpse, beneath their exotic rinds. The skull grinned back at her through its mask of clinging greenery, the tendrils having shoot up through the empty eye sockets and covering an ancient looking book that leaned against the rib cage, clutched by the skeletal hands.
But it was not the book that had caught her eye, but the bug that crawled on its black leather surface, the same insect that had been released from the matchbox. Without warning the creature unfurled its wings and flew into the air, disturbed by the torch beam.
A few seconds went by as Amanda held her breath, hoping that the thing had flown away, but then, quickly stifling a scream, she heard the buzzing very close and then the sensation of many legs moving up her arm at the same moment the sound ceased.
Her first reaction was to violently sweep it from her arm and another split second and she would have done so, her other arm raised. But unbidden, an image of Lucius Peake and his dreadful fate came into her mind and her arm stalled. She remained frozen in complete thrall to her terror. Now she could not move even if she had wanted too.
Gradually, without any hurry, the insect perambulated upwards, clinging to the thick surface of her leather jacket, making its way to her shoulder. She had time to notice in the dim light of pre-dawn the composite nature of the animal. Made of hundreds of worm like strands that weaved in and out, they undulated constantly, except for the bony carapace that hid the enfolded wings and with a sickening lurch of her whole being, she saw a miniature version of the three tubular extensions that had wavered on the blunt head of the monster that had attacked the owner of Darkcore Records.
The creature was on her neck now, crawling stealthily and finally reached her cheek, feeling the movement of its legs on her skin. It did not stop there but continued towards her tightly closed eyes. A ghastly thought of the thing getting into her mouth and burrowing upwards into her brain made her clamp her lips together, almost making her flick the tiny beast from her face.
Inside she was silently screaming, ready to brush it off, once it got too near to her eyes. On and on it came, relentlessly, but just as she was about to swipe, it unfolded its wings and flow to the ground.
Amanda acted without thinking. Still holding the torch in her right hand she looked downwards, saw the insect in the grass and with one blow crushed the foul thing under her Doc Martin boots, making a satisfying plopping sound.
Shinning the beam at the splattered mess, she noticed that some parts of the insect were still alive. Many of the fibrous tendrils that made up its body and had not been flattened had detached themselves, wriggling away in all directions, eventually disappearing into the damp soil.
Overcome, she collapsed, not caring about the wet grass, sobbing uncontrollable, taking huge gulps of air into her lungs. Shortly she felt rather then saw two presences near her, bending over her. A young man’s voice could be heard but at first she could not make out what was being said. A hand touched her shoulder then and she looked up.
It was Paul and behind him the tall bony figure of the doctor, Paul with an anxious look on his face. It was Doctor Baldwin who spoke first, brushing the boy out of the way and gripping her shoulder roughly.
“What’s happened? Has someone taken the book!”
“Screw your book,” Paul said, pushing the doctor easily out of the way and helping Amanda to her feet.
Her distress ebbing away, she swept damp earth from her clothes and said in a wavering voice, “I almost had my brain sucked by a very big bug, but other then that not much has happened.”
Both of them heard movement coming from the pit, the sound of bones being displaced by the scrambling of feet. The doctor’s face then rose above the lip of the hole, a wide grin animating his features and his hair more of a mess then usual, a reanimated corpse arising from the grave.
“Thank Christ, it’s still here,” he shouted wildly as he held the book, now carefully wrapped in a transparent folder, above his head.Obviously she had not been detected because the man ignored the hedge and crouched low on the pavement, outside the cemetery entrance. He was so near to where she huddled in the shadows that Amanda could see him clearly. Although it was a warm night, he was wearing a woollen coat which reached to his ankles, unbuttoned and opened, revealing a pair of smart trousers and a white shirt.