THE CEMETERY’S REFLECTION

THE CEMETERY’S REFLECTION
by Rory Say

On a wet mid-November morning in his ninth year, an immensely traumatic event occurred in the young life of Aidan Ross. It happened in the cemetery through which he walked each weekday to and from school, and it concerned the man he began to notice there, the one who sat on the same bench at the same time each morning.

Aidan first encountered the man some two months before any words passed between them. He had only just begun walking to school by himself, clutching in one hand the bagged lunch his mother had prepared for him. Upon entering the cemetery from the west, he’d kept to the main path until he was roughly midway through, at which point he planned to leave it and make for the north-eastern gate by weaving his own way between the skewed headstones, trees, and gated mausoleums.

It was just before he diverged that he noticed the man on the bench up ahead. He stopped in his tracks, swaying where he stood like a drunk while his mind reeled. What had happened was this: for the first time in his life, Aidan experienced something like déjà vu; at the instant he laid eyes on the seated man ahead, he felt certain he was looking at someone he knew and had always known, while at the same time another part of his mind recognized that he had never seen that someone before.

This same sensation struck Aidan every subsequent time he saw the man, which was every weekday morning. Soon he adjusted his route, abandoning his shortcut so he could walk directly past the bench and gain a closer glimpse of the one who sat there.

Though he appeared a decade shy of elderly, the man’s face was rough and wrinkled, most of it covered by silvery whiskers. The eyes, dark and downcast, looked shiftily at the nearby ground instead of at the brilliant ocean view spread beyond the cemetery’s southern border. Aidan always strained to hear a snatch of words from the man’s muttering lips as he walked by, but all he ever caught was silence.

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To begin with, nothing unusual happened on the day that changed everything. After rising, eating, and getting dressed, Aidan hugged his mother goodbye and set out for school at ten minutes to eight. He paused at the foot of the steps to his house, glanced briefly overhead, and softly felt a transparent scrim of sea-smelling moisture on his face before starting his downhill trek.

As was often the case at this time of morning, silence seemed to greet Aidan as he entered the grounds just after the hour. It was as though the trees lining the perimeter—leafless and skeletal this late in the year—somehow functioned as a barrier that banished sound from the outside world. Aidan could never decide whether this muted ambience was eerie or serene, but what he had decided was that it wanted to be maintained, and so he always took care to keep his own noise to a minimum as he made his way from one end of the cemetery to the other.

On this particular morning, no one else could be seen walking the network of winding paths spread before him. Ahead and slightly to the left, two deer lay beneath a blighted oak tree, their stillness so perfect that in his peripheral Aidan took them for decorative headstones until their necks craned in unison and their eyes froze him to the pavement.

One was a fawn roughly the size of his own black lab at home, but the other was full-grown, and he knew it well for its one dead eye, a milky white marble. Aidan had no idea about the lifespan of deer, but he imagined this to be an ancient creature, one that had stood this ground long before bodies were buried beneath it. Its coat was pale and mottled as birchbark, while its ashen antlers looked hewn from primordial stone.

Whatever thoughts had been turning in his mind quickly fled, and for a few moments that lasted forever, all that existed were those eyes on his own: three brown, one white. He stood there on the path as if suspended, not hearing the steady plash of rain on the pavement and scattered wet leaves at his feet.

Finally, the tableau was shattered when the fawn transferred its gaze to some point between them, as if what it had seen in the boy was of total disinterest. A fraction of an instant later its forebear did the same, and once those mismatched eyes broke from him, Aidan was able to turn away and stumble in a daze down the path toward disaster.

For less than a minute later the man could be seen through a faint film of misty drizzle. From a distance he could have been anyone, but Aidan knew it was him because it was never anyone else. As he trudged along the rain-darkened path—one hand gripping the damp paper bag containing his lunch, the other hidden warmly in a jacket pocket—Aidan felt his mind grow shadowed by that sickening sense of recognition.

There was no planning involved in what happened next.

Aidan’s pace slowed as he approached the man, whose eyes were downcast as usual, the lips moving to form unspoken words.

“Excuse me,” Aidan said, coming to a stop directly in front of the bench.

The effect of his voice was immediate. The man’s mouth clamped shut as he frowned into the pavement, as if wrestling with some troubling thought. But still he did not look up to the boy.

“Excuse me,” Aidan said again, and this time he was shocked at the sound of his own voice, shocked that he had broken the silence that seemed sacred to this place.

Just as he meant to tear himself from where his feet were planted, he noticed the man at last begin to register his presence. The eyes moved slowly from the ground upwards, coming to rest upon the face of the frightened boy. They blinked and squinted to clarify what they saw, and finally widened in horrified disbelief.

“I’m sorry,” Aidan blurted.

The man’s mouth fell open, his eyes still wide.

“I’m sorry,” Aidan said again, taking a step back. “I didn’t mean to—”

He turned and bolted down the path.

A voice shouted at his back. Aidan looked over his shoulder and nearly screamed when he saw the man coming after him; it was a shock merely to see him off the bench, but the sight of his crazed face and shambling form in hot pursuit was an image torn from a nightmare. Aidan flung his lunch bag blindly behind him and bore down the path with all the strength in his skinny legs.

The voice shouted again, sounding gruff and rarely used. Aidan ignored it and kept running, once almost slipping on the wet leaves strewn about the pavement. As he scrambled to recover, he stole another glance behind him and this time did scream when he saw the man barely an arm’s reach from his back.

Veering from the path, he found himself sprinting between the stone slabs and marble crosses marking where the dead lay. He had no idea where he was going, but looking ahead he could see through the sinuous branches of naked trees the calm grey expanse of the Pacific Ocean, and in that moment, he decided that if he could make it to the beach across the road from the cemetery, he would be safe.

“Stop!”

Aidan could hear the voice clearly now, but he did not heed it. He kept running, his eyes fixed to that dull grey infinity of water. He was close now, closing in on the line of trees separating him from safety.

The voice called again. It sounded tired and distant, but Aidan did not sacrifice another second to look back. He was almost at the trees now, and as he began to realize that he was going to make it, the panic pulsing through his brain ebbed and the absurdity of his situation settled in.

Some hysterical sound—a loud laughing shriek—escaped his mouth as he burst from the trees and ran without looking onto the road, where at once he was paralyzed to a stand-still. His head jerked just in time to see a monster barreling toward him, blaring a deafening roar.

Time did not stop, only he did.

But what struck Aidan in the next instant was not the five-ton delivery truck that he expected to strike him. Suddenly he heard a grunt in his left ear and felt a rough impact on his left shoulder. Then he was gliding sideways toward the sidewalk to his right. All of this seemed to happen very slowly, so that as he traveled through the air, he was able to watch the juggernaut of a truck pass him by bare inches.

Hitting the pavement with a thud that winded him, he heard—almost felt—a louder thud that shook him back into the moment. He sat up and looked to the road, the truck screaming to a halt.

When the wheels finally stopped, Aidan found himself staring transfixed at the image that would visit him on a daily and nightly basis for as long as his mind remained intact. Directly behind the truck, lumped in a mangled heap, was the broken body of the man who had just saved his life, the same man whom Aidan was lately convinced meant him grave harm.

Though the body lay crushed and twisted, the face was horribly unscathed, and, by some awful chance, the eyes pointed themselves directly at the motionless boy. Aidan, unable to help himself, returned the dead man’s gaze, and for a few moments that lasted forever, all that existed were those lifeless eyes on his own, at once expressionless and imploring.

A part of Aidan wanted to go to the man and ask him why—why had he chased him? Why was he lying dead in the road while Aidan still drew breath a few feet away—while another part of him recognized that he would never learn the answers to these questions.

Then the driver’s door to the truck opened, and the stark sound tore Aidan from his trance and sent him on a dead run.

He ran back across the road, through the trees, and back into the cemetery. He ran to get away, to put it all behind him as though that were any means of escape. And as he ran through the rain—now a pelting downpour—back over the grassy plots and past grazing deer, he ruminated for the first of countless times on what had just happened, wondering with bafflement at the mystery of it all.

But equally mysterious as the incident itself, Aidan would soon discover, was the apparent lack of any information pertaining to it. He had anticipated with dread the hysteria that the awful thing he had witnessed would bring to his close-knit community; he expected newspaper articles accompanied by graphic or ominous photos to circulate town; he tried to mentally prepare himself for a special assembly to be held at his school, regarding the fatal accident that had taken place only a few blocks away; most of all he waited for his mother to sit him down in order to very seriously discuss the traumatic event that Aidan Ross would never be able to discuss with anybody.

Because, to his bewilderment, none of these things came to pass. There were no sensations in the newspaper, no solemn announcements at school, no serious discussions with his mother. Nothing at all changed in the wake of what Aidan had experienced, except that the bench he walked past on his way to school each morning was now empty.

Otherwise the incident only seemed to exist in his memory, which itself only seemed to exist as a torment.

For better or worse, however, there would not be much else worth remembering in the life that Aidan Ross went on to lead. He finished school but did not finish college, largely on account of the care his mother required toward the end. After he watched her buried, he continued living by himself in the house he had grown up in, shifting between meagre jobs, never seeming able to hold one long enough to move forward.

He was forty-six when he first heard the voices—similar ones, presumably, that began speaking to his mother at nearly the same age. They came at first from the crawlspace above his closet, though before long they followed him everywhere, like strangers that would not leave him alone. From then on, he spent the rest of his waking life afloat in the fluctuating tides of sedative medications, which, as well as quieting the voices, also dissolved even his most vivid memories.

At fifty his house was sold on his behalf and he was moved to an assisted-living complex not far away. During the three hours he was permitted to venture outside by himself each morning, he invariably wandered to the nearby cemetery, a place that reminded him of something from his past, something about who he was before who he became. He was drawn in particular to a certain bench near the cemetery’s centre. It seemed when he sat there that he was upholding his side of some pact he had made with someone he could not quite recall.

He was thus seated when on a wet mid-November morning in his fifty-fourth year a voice spoke to him that was louder and more distinct than the other voices chattering incessantly in the muddle of his mind. “Excuse me,” it said, and the words and the sound of the words caused a faint light to flicker in the murk of Aidan’s thoughts. He stared into the ground, frowning, waiting to hear what the voice might say next. “Excuse me,” it said again, louder and more clearly.

Aidan’s eyes moved to where the voice seemed to emanate, coming to rest upon the face of a frightened boy. They blinked and squinted to clarify what they saw, and finally widened in horrified disbelief.

Fiction © Copyright Rory Say
Original Base Image by d_yk_ from Pixabay