The Girl in the Night

 

It was simple. Either her body would be there, or it wouldn’t. As Ralph dug, he considered which one would fill him with more dread. If Jenny was there, then he would have to see her face again, and that would be painful. Except it wouldn’t be her face, of course. Not quite. 

Ralph slung a clod of earth behind him. Across from him, on the other side of the grave, James Mayhew and Ernie Tamms worked with their spades, dark silhouettes in the dance of torchlight. Ralph stabbed at the soil before him. 

How long had she been underground? Five weeks? What happened to a face in five weeks, he wondered. When they opened the coffin would they see a face they knew: pale, blue and still, but recognisably the young woman who they used to pass in the street? A face that might, in a moment, come back to smiling life, eyes dancing with light. Or was five weeks enough that her skin would have started to tighten and melt away, the skull beneath revealing itself in cruel, cold lines?

There was a clunk and Ernie Tamms stopped dead. Ralph and James stopped too. He had hit the coffin lid. The men breathed for a moment, then, slower and more carefully, went back at it. 

Seeing Jenny would be horrible. But worse, much worse, was the other possibility. What if they opened the coffin, the final resting place of this warm, vibrant girl, and found not the rotting remains of her once beautiful face, but instead… nothing. An empty chamber, whose solitary inhabitant was not currently at home.

The three men cleared the last of the soil. They looked expectantly at one another, half drawn charcoal sketches in the murk of night. Perhaps they could stop now. Leave the coffin lid as it was and the mystery unsolved. Like that experiment with the box and the cat inside, neither dead nor alive until you looked. They could move the earth back right now and the coffin wouldn’t be empty, or full of horrors… they just wouldn’t know. 

Except Ralph had a feeling that they would know, sooner or later. That one night soon there’d be a tap on the bedroom window. That he’d wake up to see those dancing eyes and that smiling face, half lit by the moon. That the next day there’d be another person missing, in a town that had seen too much tragedy in this last month. Looking at James and Ernie, he could see the same thought on their faces too. 

He clicked off his torch and knelt down. The light from the other men’s torches swayed over the wood and brass and dirt, searchlights over no-man’s land. He grasped the lid. Noticed that his hands were trembling, as if they, being closer, knew more than he did. He pushed the lid up, sliding it back across the coffin. The torchlight flicked down, casting his giant looping shadow against the pit they had cleared, past him, into the black abyss of the coffin. 

For a long moment Ralph was still, his eyes fixed on what he saw. Of course. What else had he been expecting? He let out a long breath.

A muffled sound came from above him. One of the torches flickered out. Then the other. 

Ralph crouched in the darkness, waiting for what came next. He felt a sick, unwanted smile crawl up his face.

At least, now, he knew.