I told Mr. Ewing I heard strange noises coming from inside the graves, over in the section of the cemetery where the people from that weird church built the new mausoleum. He just laughed at me and said it was probably gophers. And I told him I couldn't imagine gophers making noises like this. But he just laughed again and said, "Don't let your imagination get the best of you, Benjy my boy!" I hated it when he called me Benjy (or even worse, "Mr. Hawkins") — my name is Ben. And he said, "They're just bags of dirt and bones and rotting meat." I also hated it when he talked that way about the people buried here, though that wasn't the worst thing I've heard him say. Though now I think about it, I wonder if he didn't joke about the dead that way because he was nervous.

Since I'd started hearing the noises, I hated mowing the lawn in that section. It gave me the creeps. So I only mowed it at mid-day, and I would try to mow the whole section without ever turning off the mower so there wouldn't be any chance of me hearing them. But one day I was mowing the lawn over there, and Mr. Ewing just happened to be checking the sprinklers near by, so I stopped the mower and ran over to him and said, "Come and listen!" He chuckled, and said, "I'm busy, Mis-ter Hawkins." But he could see I was serious, so he guffawed a bit more and said, "OK, let's go listen to the gophers." And he made fun of me and he laughed at me the whole way, right up until we arrived at one of the graves just across from the new mausoleum. And all of a sudden, he stopped, right in mid-chuckle and stared at the grave. Because at that moment we both heard something that sounded like a groan, and then "ache, ache, ache," like a chewing noise, and then a deep belching sound and more groaning. He looked at me, and I looked at him. The sun was shining high in the sky, the breeze was rustling the branches of a nearby willow, and it hardly seemed like the kind of day when you could be dreaming or imagining something so horrifying. Mr. Ewing sputtered, "It sounds like . . . eating!"

Mr. Ewing didn't say anything about it again, except the next morning when he snorted at me, "I want you to double-check that section for gopher burrows." But I noticed that after that he stopped checking the sprinklers there, and if he had business in another part of the cemetery that might normally require him to go by the new mausoleum, he took a longer route all the way around, keeping as much distance as possible between himself and it.

It was when Mr. Ewing told to me to double-check for gopher burrows that I decided to start keeping track of any strange happenings in a journal, just in case there were ever some bizarre mishap and Mr. Ewing decided he wanted to blame me for it.

Like the night after the church that built the new mausoleum held a special "grave dedication ceremony" at the plot they had built it on. I remember when their pastor, a man they referred to as "Brother John," and two of his assistants, a "Brother William" and a "Brother James," came to ask special permission to hold the ceremony after hours. Brother John was pale and awkward looking. I thought he was some kind of televangelist, in his sky blue suit, blue dyed leather shoes, and white shirt and tie. Brother William did most of the talking, explaining that, because of their peculiar beliefs about the resurrection, this ordinance had tremendous religious significance and was required to be performed after dark. Mr. Ewing sputtered something about how "we treat everybody the same, regardless of religious beliefs." "All that's required," he added, "is the extra fee to keep the cemetery open late, um, three-hundred and, um, fifty dollars." Mr. Ewing patted me on the back and said, "Mis-ter Benjy Hawkins here, he's our custodian and he'll be letting you in and helping you out in any way you need." Brother John nodded at me and smiled, while Brother James pulled out a check book and wrote Mr. Ewing a check right on the spot. "See you next week then, Ben," said Brother John, as he shook my hand. As he turned and walked away, I remember thinking what a cold handshake it was.

After they left, I said to Mr. Ewing, "Isn't the usual after-hours fee one hundred dollars?"

Mr. Ewing turned slightly red in the face and blurted, "In case you hadn't noticed, the brothers grim there are floating up to the gills in money. And I've heard there's no lying, cheating, or stealing their cult members won't stoop to, to keep their Brother John rolling in dough. Anyway, if those holy rollers are going to be up at all hours disturbing the dead with their voodoo ceremonies, they're going to have to pay the ‘special' corporate rates." I could tell there was to be no more discussion of the after-hours fees.

The night of the ceremony, a Saturday, Mr. Ewing told me before he left, "Keep a count, and just be sure that the same number goes out as came in. I don't want any of those mumbo jumbos hanging around here, if you know what I mean. And stay clear of their little ‘ceremony.' They told me it was only for ‘believers.'"

He didn't have to worry on that account; I wasn't interested in their grave dedication. On the way in, however, Brother John stopped to mention that "our Sunday morning worship services are open to all — come join us tomorrow, if you'd like."

During the ceremony, I waited at the little house by the front gate, studying for my American History exam by the dim light of the gate lamp. Shortly after midnight, I was relieved to hear the cars in the cemetery parking lot revving up. Soon they were filing out the front gate. I thought, "That has to have been one of the longest grave-side ceremonies in history." I counted carefully, keeping a tally of how many were in each car as they slowed down for the speed bump under the light of the front gate. One hundred forty-four people had come in, and I had counted one hundred forty-two when a grey Volvo crept down the road toward the gate at almost one o'clock. "There'll be two more in this car, and then that's the last of them and I can lock up," I sighed. I thought it odd that the driver of the Volvo seemed bundled up in the middle of August, with a scarf wrapped around his face and a coat with a tall, thick collar. And he was wearing sunglasses at one in the morning. But what really surprised me was when I counted one, two, three, four people in the car. One hundred forty-six? I must have done the tally wrong, I figured.

I locked the front gate and started going over the tally again, when the beep of a car horn from inside the gate caused me to leap out of my skin. I spun around to see a white Cadillac stopped in front of the gatehouse. The shaded window on the driver's side of the Cadillac slowly opened to reveal the face of Brother William. Through the window, I could see Brother James on the passenger side of the front seat, and I caught a glimpse of Brother John on the back seat in his sky blue suit, holding a fancy cane on his lap, and two more passengers, bundled up and wearing sunglasses like the driver of the Volvo. "That's the last of us," said Brother William, "You can lock up as soon as you let us out." Brother John smiled wanly and nodded at me, "See you Sunday, Ben?" The shaded window slowly closed again, until all I could see was my own pale reflection in it.

As I unlocked the gate and watched the white Cadillac pull out and take off at high speed down 36th Street, I did a count in my head: one hundred forty-four had come in and one hundred fifty-one had gone out. After locking up, I went back to my apartment and went over the tally again and again, but the math was still the same.

I tried to sleep after that, but I couldn't get my mind off the two strange passengers in the Cadillac and the driver of the Volvo. I turned everything over in my mind. I had been very careful to count every one who entered the cemetery earlier that evening, but perhaps I missed a car or two. Or maybe as people were leaving, I had not seen very clearly and miscounted in the dim light of the gatehouse. Though how, in the dark, I could count more and not less was a mystery. It must have been around three in the morning when I finally dozed off.

That night I dreamed I was inside a grave, buried in the moist, black soil, stifling in the pitch dark, trying to scream but having the scream come out as a groan. In my dream I heard a muffled tap, tapping above me, like someone banging a walking stick or a staff on a tombstone. Then I woke with a jolt, to a tap, tapping on my bedroom window.

I stared into the darkness. I heard a husky gasping, like something choking. "Mr. Ewing, is that you?" I shouted. There was no answer, just a shuffling sound.

It was mid-August, but the room was frigid. I wondered if I should call the police. When he hired me Mr. Ewing had told me, "Should there be a situation, do not try to handle it yourself. Call the police." But I thought, What if I only dreamed it? I trembled uncontrollably. I grabbed the flashlight under my bed, pulled on a jacket, and cracked open the front door of the apartment. I peered around, shining the beam of the flashlight at an ominous clump of bushes, then up and down the road that led from the main gate into the heart of the sanctuary.

The darkness was thick, threatening to smother the lamps above the door of my apartment and in front of the gatehouse. No moonlight shone through the clouds. A warm breeze stirred the bushes. I pulled the door shut and locked and bolted it. I lay down and wrapped myself in the covers, still shivering, but couldn't sleep the rest of the night. In the thin hours when the night seems longest, again there came, no louder than the wind, the sound of heavy footsteps under my window and a tap, tap, tapping. It stopped about an hour before the sun rose, but after that night, the strange noises were no longer confined to the graves near the new mausoleum.

After that strange night when Brother John and his followers held their grave dedication; after I started to hear raspy breathing behind the rose bushes during the day and footsteps under my window at night, and strange growling noises coming from the graves both day and night; after I started to notice crooked footprints in the mud by the duck pond and shadowy figures hiding behind the willow trees at dusk, I thought about quitting. But then I thought about the fact that without a scholarship, and without rich parents to pay my tuition, no job meant no school, while being a graveyard custodian meant rent-free housing and easy hours. So, in my own best interest I convinced myself that everything I saw and heard out of the ordinary were the products of too many late night horror shows and an overactive imagination (just what Mr. Ewing would have told me). I still wrote them carefully down in my journal, just to be on the safe side.

"It's your duty, Mis-ter Hawkins," Mr. Ewing had told me my first day on the job, "to lock the gates promptly at six o'clock p.m., not a minute before and not a minute after, and then to make the rounds of the cemetery to make sure everybody is out and everything is in order." When I had started working at Lakewood Cemetery in early June, the sun was still high in the sky at six p.m., and it didn't set for another three hours or so, leaving two hours of sunlight after I finished my rounds at seven p.m. But by late September, the sun was setting just as I was finishing my rounds. And in late October, the sun set right around six o'clock, leaving me to do my rounds in the growing dusk.

On October 28th, I breathed a sigh of relief, arriving at my apartment just as the last glimmer of a maroon sunset faded into darkness.

The next day, a Sunday, there was a burial scheduled, so I reported to the cemetery office for the usual pre-funeral conference with Mr. Ewing, where he briefed me on any special arrangements that might require additional preparation of the grounds. But when I arrived at the office I found it locked, and no sign of Mr. Ewing. I figured he must just be running a bit late, though he was usually extremely prompt when it came to funeral preparations. I unlocked the office door, slipped inside, and sat down and waited.

As I sat sprawled on the couch under a narrow arched window in the reception area, I watched wild, steely clouds slowly drift across the sky, gradually blotting out the sun. I waited ten, twenty, forty minutes. The air was thick and ominous, and as the morning wore on the heavens grew darker, not lighter. After forty-five minutes he walked nonchalantly into the office.

"Miss-ter Hawkins!" he grinned, "You're unusually early. Either you are especially eager this morning, or you forgot to set your clock back last night at the end of daylight savings time."

"Set my clock back," I muttered, nonplused.

"Spring forward, fall back!" he laughed, extremely amused.

I stared at my watch, counting the hours out in my head, calculating the implications of the passing of daylight savings time. "It'll be dark an hour early tonight!" I exclaimed.

"That's right, Benjy my boy. Better set your watch now. We can't have you locking up and doing your rounds at five p.m."

The rain held off throughout the funeral, but after the mourners left, as I disassembled the casket lowering apparatus, folded the chairs, and loaded everything onto the truck, a light but persistent drizzle came down. The backhoe driver arrived to move most of the earth back into the grave, and the drizzle turned into a cold rain. I was left to clean up with a shovel and place fresh sod over the grave site. By the time I was finally free to return to my apartment, the rain had hardened into a squall, and a jagged wind was pommeling the rose bushes and flailing the willow trees wildly, like marionettes under a mad puppeteer. It was only three o'clock, but the air was already dusky. As I glanced toward the center of the cemetery, furthest from Dupont and King's Highway, from the gatehouse and the street lamps, it was already swathed in impenetrable shadows, as though night had prematurely descended there.

At almost six, I put on a heavy overcoat and a poncho, and armed myself with an umbrella, my heavy duty flashlight, and the small black cell phone I always carried with me on my rounds. I put on my little CD player/headset so as not to hear any unseemly noises, which were, after all, — I repeated to myself — nothing but my imagination anyway. This was not the first time I had had to lock up and do the rounds in the rain. It will feel good, I told myself, once this is all over, to come back to my apartment, to listen to the radio while taking a steaming hot bath, and then to wrap myself in blankets and sip hot cocoa while reclining in my beanbag chair. I decided to leave all the lights in my apartment on and turn up the radio before I left, so I could imagine a warm, dry, light-filled place to return to. Then I turned on my flashlight, opened the front door, and stepped out into the sooty, sleety night.

I focused on the crooning of Garth Brooks filling my ears from the headset, and the concentric circles of light from my flashlight illuminating the ground just ahead of me as I walked down toward the front gate. I turned my key in the little box that activated the gate closing mechanism, watched the gates slowly shut, and thought, "This isn't so bad. I can do this." Then I turned around and started down the path that led toward the new mausoleum. The sky wasn't completely pitch black. I could see a faint amber aura of reflected city lights against the clouds. But everything below was inky and impermeable.

As I walked, looking forward into the dark it was hard to tell how far I had gone, so I periodically glanced back at the lights glimmering from the gatehouse and the apartment. Eventually I approached the brow of a small hill surrounded by a clump of willow trees that would block the gatehouse from my view once I had passed, and I knew I was close to the new mausoleum now. It was perhaps thirty yards past the hill, to my right. I turned one last time to look back and that is when I saw him, just ten feet behind me. He wore a broad-brimmed white hat that looked dingy and gray in the dark, but the rest of his body blended into the shadows. I screamed and dropped my flashlight, and heard it clunk as it hit the pavement and sputtered out, leaving us in the dark. The man in the white hat was slowly walking toward me, his feet spat, spatting on the wet pavement.

I yanked the headset from my ears, though the music continued to jingle around my neck.

"Y-you scared me," I said. "Y-you're not supposed to be here. It's after hours. C-can I show you the way out?" My voice sounded pathetic and small in the wind.

He rasped, his voice slurred as though he were speaking without a tongue, "I am supposed to be here. You're the one who's not supposed to be here."

"I-is that a th-threat?" I stammered. There was a violent blast of lightning and a deafening crack of thunder, and for a frozen flash I could see as if at mid-day the forest of grey and white tombstones, statues, and mausoleums and the gaunt man with a blotchy pale face and a long grey coat, and around us the wind-whipped trees dancing crazily. "I have a cell ph-phone, right here. I c-can call the p-police if I n-need to."

He continued to walk, spat, spat, and I turned to get away, but where to I was not sure, because there were no longer any street lights and no gatehouse light, and I could see nothing in any direction. I tore the headset and CD player from around my neck and tossed it away, and stumbled down the road as far as my feet continued to hit firm pavement, turning away if my feet sank into grass or mud. I jogged, thinking perhaps I could follow the road this way to the back entrance and unlock the service gate and escape. The spat, spat of the man in the white hat was growing more distant. And just as I felt confident I could evade him, I plunged backwards, the wind knocked out of me, after running headlong into someone or something else in the dark.

I heard someone choking and cursing right next to me, so I crawled as quickly as I could in the opposite direction, through slimy, spongy grass where mud and water welled up under the weight of my hands and knees. I felt my way around the grave markers and the roots of trees, occasionally grazing my shoulder or bumping my head against stone or metal or bark, until I finally came up against something massive, a stone wall. I groped my way along the wall until I found some steps, and then crawled up them through a doorway into a shelter. Stinging rain lashed the steps and the walls outside, and an occasional gust of wind sprayed me. But I was mostly sheltered and it was much more quiet in here than outside in the storm, and I could hear my own pulse pounding in my ears so loudly I feared my pursuer would hear it too. I heard no footfalls nearby, no movement other than my own labored breathing, no sound other than the pelting rain and the wind.

The cell phone was dead when I pulled it out of my soaked pocket. I was sure I had no hope of finding the road again. I had no idea where I was any more. And who knew how many of them there were out there? I pulled my knees up against my chin, and tried to control my shivering, the chattering of my teeth and my loud, uneven breathing. "They will find me for sure," I thought, "They must know where I am even now."

I sat inside the doorway of the crypt, for minutes and then hours. I lost any sense of time and consciousness, perhaps drifting in and out of wakefulness. But eventually I heard a voice from just outside, the raspy, tongueless voice of the stranger I had first met on the road, and then other voices as well.

"When is he coming back for us?"

"Why didn't he take us with the others?"

"I've told you a hundred times: we have to stay here until the next ones are ready."

"I wonder if the next ones are gnawing their own tongues and chewing their own arms off, like we did?"

"He will give us new tongues and new arms."

"I'm hungry."

"You only think you're hungry. I doubt you could digest much with what's left of your gut. And even if you could, you don't need to."

"I want to kill that hellion. The one who runs the infernal lawnmower and plays his infernal radio and is always making a hellish racket in the afternoon while we're trying to sleep."

"You only think you need sleep. We have all slept as much as we will ever need sleep, for the rest of eternity."

"The hellion's here."

"I know."

"What if he tells somebody about us?"

"Maybe we should kill him. Make it look like an accident."

"Perhaps we should. Perhaps, perhaps. But perhaps he will be angry if we do."

"Maybe you're right. The hellion could be useful to us."

"We should take something from him. Something to keep him quiet."

"Yes, he would like that."

I was paralyzed with terror. I heard the voices approaching. Then, the chilling wind which had been gusting through the doorway was blocked, though I could still hear it whistling outside, hear the rain drenching the earth and the stones and the trees. There were squishy footsteps around me inside the crypt, and something brushed my leg, then my face. I was overpowered by a stale, bitter smell. Their voices were right in front of me, around me.

"What should we take? Not his walky-talky phone!"

"No, something more precious."

"A finger? A toe? A hand!"

"No."

"Perhaps something from his pretty face. His nose or his eye?"

"I want his kidney."

"No, no. Something better."

There was a long, brilliant, dancing flash of lightning, an earth-shaking rumble of thunder, and I could see them, two in silhouette between me and the doorway, one with his head crumpled in, one missing his arms, one in front of me with a hole in his chest and ribs showing under a tattered shirt, and two on the other side of me, their hideous faces lit by the lightning, one with empty sockets for eyes, and the one I had run into on the road, the one with the white hat, looking like he was grinning because his lips were eaten away. And in the hands of the one with the white hat, I saw a knife gleaming in the lightning. And I don't remember what happened next.

Mr. Ewing said they came searching for me Monday after he found me missing from my apartment, with the radio and all the lights on. He said they found me in the new mausoleum, but I don't remember. All I remember is darkness and cold and smothering, and the sound of someone knocking on stone with a cane.

I still keep the grounds and lock the gate and walk the rounds. I'm still breathing, I'm still alive. But something is crazy, like a nightmare I can't wake up from. I believed what happened to me in the graveyard was a dream, and then I undressed and saw the ugly, livid scar stretching from my left nipple to my sternum. Then I noticed how quiet it was inside my head, and I wondered if the stillness inside me was because the noise of my heart beating and my blood rushing through every artery in my body had ceased. I still press my hands to my chest to see if I can find a heart beat, even a faint one. But it's gone. And I wonder, What can they have done to me?