Missing Bones (roughly 3000 words - should take 10 minutes)

--- from www.uzzell.co.uk ---

Joe hated living next door to a graveyard. He’d never actually seen a ghost but that was only because he was so careful not to. He’d rather eat his own toenails than risk upsetting them. He never played noisy games outside after dark, never kicked his ball over the hedge, never let Shadow, his dog, foul their grass and never, ever read the epitaphs on their headstones (even though he could make them out from his bedroom window.)
He was, as I say, very careful not to disturb whatever spirits lingered with their mortal remains, next door. It was a pain, having to be so cautious all the time. Sometimes, friends didn’t understand. Sometimes his mum and dad got frustrated with him. But it was worth it. After all, he’d never seen a ghost, even though he lived next door to a big, old, city graveyard.
Joe was otherwise quite a normal boy. He had his ups and downs like anyone else. He got fed up with his teachers when they said ghosts were ‘Stuff and nonsense.’ He got picked on by kids in other classes when he talked about ghosts in assembly but for the most part, he got on with people just fine.
It was when he was alone his obsession with ghosts really became a problem. Over time, he began to doubt whether the careful measures he took were enough to guarantee his safety. Just in case, he started making a personal inspection of all the doors and windows in his house, every night. Curtains had to be fully drawn, keys had to be left in locks (to block the keyholes.) He never liked his dad leaving the outside light on either. ‘Ghosts probably like it nice and dark,’ he always told him.
He took great care never to sleep with a foot or a hand over the edge of the bed. They’d love that wouldn’t they, those rotten ghosts. And he never let anything show outside his duvet besides his head and a tiny bit of neck. He took extra care on the 18th day of any month (he believed that day was unlucky because 6 and 6 and 6 made 18!) and on the 13th of any month and on Sundays and on Halloween. He would never fall asleep without crossing himself at least twice either.
He also had half a dozen mantras he said to himself whenever he felt threatened, like ‘I am safe, God and Spiderman will protect me,’ and ‘The aliens are my friends. Come near me at your own risk.’ He’d say these little prayers a lot in the summer when it was too hot to seal off the house completely.
Yet, if you met Joe, you’d never know any of this was going on in his head. He was a polite, friendly, charming little boy. In his own way, Joe did a good job of dealing with the simple challenge of living right next door to a graveyard. Never far from death, always worried its dark fingers were about to close around his neck, he staved off disaster with every trick in the book. And staved it off quite successfully, thank you very much…
Then, one fine day not long after his twelfth birthday, he was dealt a mighty blow. The council approved an application for some building work. The request was made by a local builder who wanted to develop a half-acre plot of land in the centre of town into a clutch of smart new homes for the executive market. Now when I say, a half-acre plot of land in the centre of town, of course I actually mean, Joe’s graveyard!
Joe was struck dumb with fear when he heard of the proposed development. The ghosts would be furious! They’d terrorise the neighbourhood for years. They’d not rest until everyone (including Joe) had paid a terrible price. Bones would rattle in the jaws of heavy machinery, curses would fall like confetti on the local community, and souls would roam the streets after dark in search of revenge.
‘God and Aliens and Gandalf and Spiderman protect me!’ shouted Joe miserably. What on earth was he going to do? He worried and waited and waited and worried until the black day finally came. Heavy rain clouds rolled in from the west as work began clearing the graveyard.
First, high fencing went up around the site. Then, three great yellow skips arrived in the street. A sign was put up ‘K. J. GLINROW Contractors,’ it said. And workmen arrived in hardhats and overalls. They began cautiously enough, lifting gravestones one at a time, stacking them carefully on pallets. Then they took all the turf up, rolling it onto the back of a flatbed truck. On day three, two diggers materialised but they were only used to scrape a foot or so of top soil away. It was as if the building contractors themselves were scared to dig any deeper, to dig up the past.
But, on day six, the bucket of a great big yellow JCB finally bit deep into the clay soil of the cemetery. Undisturbed for more than four centuries, layers of sanctified soil were turned on their heads in a matter of minutes.
Joe shivered as he watched the driver in his cab, pushing and pulling great black levers this way and that, the scoop on the front of the digger tearing up the ground in front of it. Morbidly, Joe’s eyes searched the sticky earth pile it left in its wake for flecks of ivory white bone. He didn’t find any, they simply weren’t there. He should have been happy but he couldn’t relax. When the workmen finished, he went home and hid in his wardrobe.
At midnight, he crept back outside with a lump in his throat and butterflies in his stomach and stood at the green-diamond fence to speak directly to the city’s ancestors.
‘Sorry,’ he said, wiping his runny nose on his sleeve. ‘I er… that is to say, we er… we don’t want any trouble. We just want to park a few new houses on top of you. Nothing serious… I’m sure there’ll be very nice people living there…’
‘Who was going to live in these new homes?’ Joe couldn’t imagine. ‘Fancy knowing you’re living room was sat over the site of someone’s grave.’ He was sure Mr. K. J. Glinrow was making a terrible mistake. He told the site foreman he thought as much the next day but he laughed at him. ‘They’ll sell like hotcakes!’ he said. ‘Mark my words.’
Despite the foreman’s belief in the project, work stopped completely on day eight. Joe asked a man in a Mercedes who was always hanging around what was wrong. He only said they’d been asked to ‘Delay their progress’ until a specialist could be brought in.
‘Oh God,’ thought Joe. ‘A specialist in what, exorcism?’
Day after day, he came home from school to find the site deserted. He phoned the council but no one there seemed to know anything. He contacted the regional headquarters of K. J. Glinrow but they said they couldn’t comment on the future of their ‘Stratford development.’ Eventually, it was Joe’s dad that cast some light on the subject.
He’d read an article in a journal at work, something about a graveyard within the central London Borough that had recently been excavated. The funny thing was, the contractors hadn’t found any bones. None at all. Not a fibula or a tibia, a tarsal or a metatarsal. Let alone something as concrete as a coffin or a skull or a bit of cloth-covered spine. Nothing was found, in fact, to suggest the site had ever been a burial ground of any kind. Except, of course, all the headstones they’d taken away on the first day.
Joe didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Could it be, was it possible, that his home didn’t border a graveyard at all? There were no ghosts, there never had been, just headstones, chiselled lumps of old granite. He wasn’t afraid of them!
He let out a whoop of joy and hugged his mum and dad for all he was worth. This, he thought, could very well be the best day of his life. That night, he slept with his shoulders above the top of his duvet for the first time in… well for as long as he could remember.
The next day, the builders were back on site but what did that matter? If there were no bodies, there were no ghosts and if there were no ghosts, there was no reason to worry about the builders upsetting them. Joe waved to the foreman on his way to the bus stop. The foreman looked thoroughly taken aback. He was sure the boy from number 11 hated him. Never mind, perhaps his parents had had a word with him. He waved back.
‘Get the foundations laid this mornin’,’ he said confidently. ‘Hard to believe we’ll get fifteen detached homes on this little plot isn’t it but we will. They’ll look nice enough by the time we’re finished too…’
Joe grinned from ear to ear at the thought of some nice neighbours living next door in some nice new houses. It had to be better than a creepy old graveyard! His delirious mood lasted all day and the next day, and the next day. It came to a crashing end over tea on Friday though. That was when is mum made a thoughtless comment about the lost bodies as she passed him the salt.
‘I wonder where they all are?’ she said, before she could stop herself.
Joe’s face paled. He seemed to wither under the harsh glare of the kitchen spotlights. Where were the bodies? Each headstone must have had a body associated with it at one time. If they weren’t buried under several feet of consecrated ground between numbers 11 and 15 of Scudamore Road, where the hell were they?
Joe’s immediate response was to step up security to an all-time high. No superhero went without a prayer that night but it was no good, he didn’t sleep a wink. Thoughts went round and round in his head like clothes in a washing machine. He imagined a queue of grizzly ghouls at the door to his room.
‘Excuse us,’ said the first, striding up to his bed. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where we’re supposed to be buried would you?’
Other people, people in authority, seemed to be asking that very same question. Council inspectors were seen in the street over the next few days. They went knocking, door-to-door, asking if anyone had photos of the graveyard, old photos that might explain the mystery of the missing bodies. The people of Scudamore Road were very helpful. They turned up old aerial photos, photos of the jubilee, photos of the Second World War and even the First World War but it seemed Scudamore Road had always had a big, old city graveyard in the middle of it. Nothing about it had changed. It was what it was, right where it had always been…
The buildings on Steeple Close were finished to a very high standard and, as the foreman had confidently predicted, they sold like hot cakes. The new residents moved in. Nothing looked amiss in Scudamore Road. But Joe knew something was wrong. Somewhere in the area, probably where you’d least expect to find them, there were a hundred or so unmarked graves. He couldn’t ignore that simple fact.
He began to scrutinize library books, old newspapers and computer databases for information on his street. And he certainly turned up some interesting facts. He discovered, for instance, that a church had once stood beside the graveyard, more or less where number 15 stood today. It appeared to have been demolished in the eighteenth century though he wasn’t sure why.
He also read an interesting article on the English Civil War. There appeared to have been several skirmishes between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads nearby. Nothing seemed to explain a load of missing corpses though. In the end, it was Shadow, his dog, that found his biggest clue. He chased a stick behind the cricket pavilion in the park and came back with a bone. A human bone, as it turned out!
Joe reported finding the bone to the local police. He felt he had to see this thing through to the bitter end now, whether it meant upsetting spirits and being haunted by ghosts forever or not! The police visited the park and cordoned off an area with orange tape. Other government bodies came and went. Joe bumped into someone from the British Museum one afternoon in the small, local library. He was poring over microfiche in the Local Studies section.
‘I wonder,’ said the man from the Museum, throwing open an enormous reference book, ‘if the lead in their coffins was what they were after.’ His index finger flashed across a few lines of text. ‘Ah ha!’ he tapped a particular paragraph several times. ‘Just as I suspected.’
‘I found them,’ Joe said simply.
‘Good afternoon,’ the man looked up. ‘I’m, sorry. Found what exactly?’
‘Found the misplaced remains you’re interested in. You are investigating the mystery of the empty graveyard in Scudamore Road aren’t you?’
‘I am,’ the man confirmed.
‘Well I live next door,’ Joe explained. ‘To the graveyard I mean. Next door to the field that everyone used to think was a graveyard anyway.’
‘Really?’ The man sounded interested. ‘Would that be number 11 or number 15?’
‘Number 11.’
‘Oh,’ the man from the Museum suddenly looked worried.
‘Is that bad?’ Joe couldn’t see how it could be. The church had been on the other side of the cemetery. The bones had been found in the park. What could possibly be wrong with living at number 11?
The man from the Museum tilted his head slightly and grimaced.
‘Why? It can’t be,’ insisted Joe. ‘The church was at number 15. The bodies are in the park…’
‘What bodies?’
‘The bodies that should have been buried beneath the headstones in the cemetery,’ Joe was indignant. ‘They’re obviously dotted all over the park.’
The man was shaking his head now, left and right like the pendulum in an old grandfather clock. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘Only one body’s been found in the park and that’s of a Cavalier officer.’
‘But I thought…’
‘You thought you’d found the ‘real’ cemetery?’ The man shook his head brusquely now. ‘You found an ancient battlefield and one dead soldier. The remains missing from the graveyard will be even older than these.’ He let Joe glimpse a broken piece of skull in his bag.
‘Oh,’ Joe peered in. ‘Tell me the bad news then. What do you know about number 11?’
‘Well,’ the man from the Museum raised himself up a little, ‘I think it may be that soldiers on the battlefield were not only running out of food and fresh water but were also running out of bullets for their muskets. And I think they ended up making their own.’
‘Could they do that? Make their own bullets? How and from what?’
‘From the lead-lined coffins in your graveyard.’
‘What? You mean, the Cavalier soldiers retreated to the Scudamore Road Graveyard, raised all the coffins, broke them open and made musket balls from the lead inside?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And what are you suggesting they did with the bodies?’
‘Ahhhh. Now, that’s where you come in, or rather number 11 comes in I’m afraid.’
‘You don’t mean? You’re not suggesting?’
‘That they dumped the bodies in a mass grave underneath your living room? Well, it's certainly a possibility.’
Joe crossed himself without thinking. The room started to spin so he sat down.
‘Oh my God,’ he crossed himself again. ‘They’re under MY garden. Under MY lounge. Under MY pillow!’
The man from the Museum just shrugged. ‘Of course, we won’t know for certain without doing some tests,’ he said.
‘I never knew,’ Joe replied. ‘I can’t believe, I never knew.’
‘How could you?’ the man folded down the corner of a page in his book and closed it. ‘It’s not as if their ghosts stalk the rooms and corridors of your house is it? Never believed in any of that stuff and I guess I was right not to.’
‘Eh?' Joe looked at him, confused. 'How do you mean, right not to? I don’t quite see where you're coming from. How all this proves ghosts don’t exist...’
‘Mmm. You said you never knew you were living on top of an unconsecrated, seventeenth century, mass grave,' replied the man, stroking his trim beard. 'Isn’t that right?’
‘Well, I guess so,’ Joe rubbed his eyes.
‘And if ever a house was going to be haunted,' the man went on, 'it's going to be yours isn't it? One built on top of such a big grave would be right at the top of my list anyway.’
Joe felt his mouth go dry. He opened and closed his mouth like a parched fish.
‘They’re only dead people,’ the man from the museum smiled broadly. ‘Only bodies no one’s using anymore. Look on the bright side.’
Joe looked very doubtful.
‘You could get your picture in the paper. I dare say the national press will be interested too. The National Army Museum in Chelsea might want to talk to you. Ever thought of a career in archaeology?’
Joe didn’t know what to say. ‘Why didn’t they put the bodies back in the holes they’d dug?' He almost choked on his words. 'They must have dug holes, to get the coffins out in the first place. Lots of holes.'
‘Who knows?' The man was putting away his things now, tidying up his workspace. 'Perhaps there was no time. The Roundheads may have been closing in on their position. Maybe they were just lazy...’ he shrugged.
‘I can’t…’ Joe wailed. ‘I can’t have been living on top of them all this time. I’m terrified of ghosts. I’d have gone mad!’
‘What makes you so sure you didn’t? You are about thirteen aren’t you?' The man tried to size Joe up. 'You look about thirteen,' he said, struggling to remember himself at thirteen. 'And you are in the Local Studies section of the library on a Saturday afternoon in July are you not?' He winked. 'Now that all sounds pretty mad to me. All the best archaeologists are a bit mad though, I wouldn’t worry about it.’
It was Joe’s turn to shrug his shoulders this time. ‘What did these muskets look like then?’ he asked and the man from the Museum showed him.
Later that afternoon, Joe took a spade from his dad’s garden shed. Standing in the middle of their rose bed with it, he looked a bit like an archeologist, or a navvy. ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!’ he told himself as he started to dig. ‘Who knows, perhaps a career in archaeology isn’t such a bad idea after all.’
Joe’s spade dug deep into the clay soil. Layers of earth that could very well have lain undisturbed for four centuries were turned on their heads.
‘May God and Spiderman let me find a bit of ivory-white bone,’ he whispered excitedly. And do you know what, they did.
In the end, they let him find fibulas, tibias, tarsals and metatarsals galore. An entire skeleton in fact with a hole, the size and shape of a musket ball, in its aged skull.
It didn’t frighten Joe as much as he thought it would, despite its empty gaze and its lipless grin. He held it upside down, its empty eye sockets facing his chest, its upper jaw facing the sky and shook it gently from side to side. By the sounds of things, the lead musket ball (perhaps it was made from the Scudamore Road coffins!) was still inside.
He tipped it out of the skull’s pinched, nasal cavity into his palm. The man from the Museum would want to see it. But for now, it was his reward for a lifetime of living on top of the dead...

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