The Body That Would Not Stay Buried

The metal scraping grew louder.

Iris stood in the tunnel with her father between her and the sound. Up close, he smelled of cold stone, antiseptic, and the stale wool of a coat worn too long. His eyes went to the evidence box under her arm.

“You brought that out,” he said.

“You hid it.”

“I hid it from the people who are coming.”

“People?” Ruth asked. She had one hand on Mercer’s shoulder and the other near her pistol. “You said people were coming?”

Her father looked past them toward the service room. “No. I said they were coming.”

The thing dragged itself around the bend.

It wore a funeral shroud, or what had once been one. The white fabric was black with mud and stiff with something darker. One arm reached ahead of it, fingers scraping grooves into the concrete. The other arm hung at an angle no living elbow could tolerate. Its face was hidden beneath a plastic mortuary hood.

Mercer made a sound that was almost a prayer.

Iris did not recognize the body. She recognized the shoes.

Brown leather. A crescent of white polish missing from the left toe. Her father had worn them on the night of his supposed death.

Her father seized Iris by the wrist. His grip was still strong enough to hurt.

“Back through the door.”

“You said you were dead.”

“I was trying to remain that way.”

The hooded body lifted its head. Plastic stretched over the contours of a face. Something tapped against the inside of the hood, once, twice, as though the dead were asking to be let out.

Ruth drew her pistol. “What is that?”

“My mistake,” her father said.

The body lurched forward.

Ruth fired.

The shot struck the tunnel wall beside its head. Stone burst across the shroud. The body did not stop. It dragged itself faster, its nails clattering over the concrete.

“Shoot it again!” Mercer shouted.

“I’m trying to determine where to shoot!” Ruth snapped.

Iris saw the problem. The thing moved like a body, but not like an injured person. Its weight shifted in abrupt, mechanical increments. Beneath the shroud, something clicked each time it pulled itself forward.

Her father shoved her toward the hidden door. “The latch.”

“What latch?”

“On the left frame. Pull it down.”

Iris found a metal lever concealed beneath the rust. She pulled. A section of the tunnel ceiling dropped behind them with a thunderous crash, sealing the passage between the body and the doorway.

The hooded thing struck the fallen slab from the other side.

Once.

Twice.

Then it began to scrape.

Her father turned to Iris. “It will take six minutes to open that again.”

“You built a door that counts minutes?”

“I built a door that buys them.”

“Why does it have your shoes?”

He looked at the concrete between them. “Because the body in your father’s coffin was mine.”

The statement landed with less force than it should have. Iris had already known the cremation was false. She had seen the empty urn, read the warning, watched her father step from the tunnel. But knowledge acquired through evidence did not resemble knowledge spoken aloud.

“You substituted yourself,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Who did you bury?”

“A man who had no family left to ask questions.”

Mercer laughed hoarsely from the doorway. “He was a volunteer.”

Her father’s expression hardened. “He was dying.”

“You bought him,” Mercer said. “You bought his body and called it mercy.”

“I gave his sister enough money to leave the county.”

“And then you abandoned the rest of us to clean up what you’d found.”

Ruth kept her pistol trained on Mercer. “Both of you can argue ethics after we’re out of the underground murder passage.”

Iris held up the transfer-record box. “What’s in this?”

“The proof.”

“Of the substitution?”

“Of the photographs.”

Her father reached for it. Iris did not give it to him.

The scraping behind the stone changed rhythm. Three quick pulls. A pause. Three quick pulls.

Her father heard it too. “We have less time than I thought.”

“Tell me who takes the pictures.”

“I don’t know.”

She almost laughed. “You hid underground for a year, faked your death, imprisoned Mercer, and built a door in a cemetery wall. You don’t get to say you don’t know.”

“I know who profits from them. I know who keeps the records. I know what happens when someone tries to prevent the death shown in a photograph.” He looked at the Polaroid camera in her hand. “But I have never seen the photographer.”

The answer was infuriating because it sounded like fear rather than evasion.

He continued, “The first image appears when a death has been fixed. Not scheduled. Fixed. A decision has been made, a method prepared, a person selected. The photograph is the record of that decision.”

“Then someone is trying to kill me.”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Tomorrow’s picture may tell us.”

“Tomorrow is not an answer.”

“No. It is a deadline.”

Mercer pushed himself upright. His injured leg trembled, but he kept his weight against the shelves. “He’s lying by omission. The camera doesn’t only show what will happen. It shows what has been arranged. Your father changed his death, and the camera showed the correction.”

Iris looked at him. “The correction?”

“The October thirteenth image. The hand in the grave.” Mercer’s face had gone pale. “That wasn’t your father sending a warning. That was the camera proving the body had been moved.”

Her father’s eyes flashed toward him.

“You knew,” Iris said.

“I suspected.”

“You knew.”

“I knew enough to be afraid.”

The Polaroid camera clicked in her hand.

Iris froze.

A white square slid from the slot and landed on top of the transfer-record box. No one had touched the shutter. Ruth stepped closer, her face tight with dread.

The photograph developed slowly.

It showed the tunnel from the far end. The stone barrier had not yet fallen. The hooded body crawled toward them. Iris stood beside her father, one hand raised. Ruth was kneeling. Mercer lay facedown on the concrete.

At the bottom, the date surfaced.

OCTOBER 13.

Iris stared at Mercer. “You’re dead in this.”

Mercer looked at the image and began to shake his head. “No.”

Her father snatched the photograph from her hand. His face changed as he read the scene.

“What?” Iris demanded.

He turned the image over.

On the back, in black ink, someone had written four words.

ONE OF YOU IS ALREADY DEAD.

The stone barrier groaned. A crack opened from floor to ceiling.

Her father shoved the evidence box back against Iris’s chest. “Take Ruth and go through the records room.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to hold the door.”

“That is a poor plan.”

“It is the only one that leaves you alive.”

She caught his coat before he could turn away. The chipped wedding ring pressed coldly against her knuckles.

“You left me with a grave,” she said. “You left me to mourn you.”

For the first time, his composure broke. Not dramatically. His mouth tightened, and his gaze dropped to her hand on his coat.

“I thought grief would keep you away from the truth.”

“It kept me alone.”

The crack widened. Dust sifted down between them.

Her father touched her cheek with two dirty fingers, a gesture so familiar that it hurt worse than his confession. “Then don’t be alone now.”

He pulled free and stepped toward the barrier.

Iris could have followed him. She could have stayed and demanded every answer he had withheld. Instead she looked at the photograph again.

Mercer was facedown in the image, but the body behind him was not the hooded thing. A second figure stood at the far end of the tunnel, just outside the edge of the light.

It held a camera.

Iris grabbed Ruth’s sleeve. “We’re taking him with us.”

Ruth understood at once. She hauled Mercer toward the hidden door while Iris kept the photograph and the box. Behind them, her father braced both hands against the stone slab.

The first impact threw him to one knee.

“Go!” he shouted.

Iris crossed the doorway, then turned back. “Tomorrow, you tell me everything.”

Her father looked at the photograph in her hand.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “you may not be the one asking.”

Ruth slammed the concealed door shut. The latch engaged. From the other side came a roar of metal, a single gunshot, and then silence.

In the service room, the shelves stood exactly as they had before. The trapdoor gaped open. The yellow bulb swung overhead.

Iris set the transfer box on the table and opened it.

Inside were crematory forms, payment ledgers, and seven Polaroid photographs arranged in a descending row.

The first six showed deaths she had already seen.

The seventh was blank.

On its white border, a date had been stamped by hand.

OCTOBER 14.

Tomorrow’s photograph had not developed yet. But someone had already decided where it would be taken.