Et lux perplexua luceat eis

 Your heart is an unopened bill.

You know what you’ll find inside.

So there on the sideboard it sits.

I came to the village of Potrastredi shortly before evening on a bracing day in November. The rumours surrounding the village being well known to me, I had resolved a week prior to travel thither and satisfy my curiosity whether the tales were true. But curiosity alone could not account for what drove as much as drew me. The Sácac-Quinaux family fortunes having dwindled nearly away, and all my prior endeavours in both business and belles-lettres coming to wrack, I was desirous of exempting myself from town society; by a paradoxical operation of the heart, the savourlessness of life made of itself a motive, spurring me to flee the familiar.

Discovering, on the outskirts of Potrastredi, an inn which, though in a state of indifferent repair, would serve my purpose for a bed and hot meals, I stabled my horse, then proceeded on foot into the village. The many-storied, steep-roofed houses showed the same evidence of neglect as the inn: slatted shutters hung at angles from bent hinges; patches of missing tile freckled the rooftops; paint peeled from weather-beaten walls; the gnarled brown remains of flowers long dead drooped forlornly from window planters. It had manifestly been years agone since the denizens had possessed the vigour of life needful to the maintenance of their abodes.

Upon my turning into the square, my senses at once confirmed the truth of all I had heard rumoured. For as many dingy and mournsome-faced villagers walking or loitering on the cobbled square, there were as many, if not more, ghosts.

Villagers prosecuting their daily business were harried at every turn by spectres of varied description. I observed a woman of middle years bearing a sack of flour across the square, behind whom a translucent form, the shade of a youth whose face bore the ravages of pestilence, appeared and snatched a shawl the woman wore against the chill. ’Tis mine, moaned the youth repeatedly, drawing away from the woman, who gave half-hearted chase with a listlessness as remarkable as the behaviour of her ghostly harasser.

Not far off, a ghost of vengeful mien, in life doubtless an elder of the village, harangued the living most injuriously. Rot in hell, ye scoundrels! Ye rogues! A young mother leading two children by the hand shrank from him, lowering her head and hastening past. Another spirit stood near the defunct fountain in the centre of the square and battered herself viciously, beating her own head with her fists so roughly that, more than once, she stumbled and fell.

I resolved to cross the square and enter a public house hard by. Scarcely had I gone a few paces when the shade of a young woman, clad in a tattered, waterlogged wedding dress, materialised before me, sobbing, I was murthered. He murthered me. Interest piqued, I attempted to question the ghost, but to each enquiry, be it on the circumstances of her demise, the particulars of her life, or the facts of the world after ours, she only whimpered, He murthered me.

With so many spirits afoot even before sundown, I reflected, the nighttime pervasion would indeed be fearsome.

Within the public house, once my eyes had acclimated to the dimness, I found travellers and local Potrastreditans murmuring over flagons of ale at a number of oaken tables as logs smouldered in the hearth. Not a few spirits wandered the floor, passing through walls and furniture; though many a drinker blenched at their approach, none acknowledged their presence. I called for a drink and settled onto a bench beside a man of stoical demeanour.

“You’re not from here,” he commented. Everyone in this village must have known one another.

A boy thumped a flagon before me as I introduced myself. “Bellatrix Sácac-Quinaux. I am come from the township Borperdi.”

“Quite a hike, that. You’ll want to move along soon,” continued the local man. “As would I, had I the means.”

“Your village has—a remarkable ghostly presence.” Even as I offered this, a shrill wail filled the public house. I cast my gaze about in alarm. The spectre of a thin, hunched woman flitted betwixt the tables, crying out in terror at every face she met. I heard a man nearby mutter, “Must she yowl ever so?” His companion hushed him, laying her hand on his.

My fellow drinker, when again I faced him, replied, “A presence. Aye, that we have.” He tilted his head and darted his eyes to the side. “We’ve her to thank for that.”

I turned to look. In the act of leaving the public house was a sallow woman of middle years, heavily built. “She is?”

“Our gravekeeper.”

Having made haste to settle my score, I emerged into the square and, searching for the gravekeeper, spied her vanishing into a small street. I hurried after but was unable to overtake her until she had neared the village graveyard, situated at a remove amidst stretches of swidden. Drawing abreast, I asked without preamble, “Why do so many ghosts walk here?”

It was as though the gravekeeper did not hear me. Only after I had posed my question thrice did she croak, in dialect as archaic as the spirits’, “Thou blamest me.”

“I wish to know.” I took no interest in censuring the woman, though surely the locals laid the onus for the ghostly infestation upon her. All through this land, not excepting my own town, ghosts rose to terrorise the living when bodies were given improper burial. Every township and hamlet had its gravekeeper to see to the rites. When a ghost did rise, a gravekeeper’s duty was to exhume and rebury its body with all due honours. Only then would the shade rest.

A filmy rain had begun to fall, and the woman passed a thick, calloused hand over her face. “Blame not where thou knowest not the cause.”

Before I could make a rejoinder, in the road appeared the form of a corpulent man in a dressing gown. Whither goest thou? I like thee not, rind nor pith. What time of day? The gravekeeper passed directly through him and continued to walk, but I could not bring myself to imitate her. However I manoeuvred, the ghost dogged me, so that I could not get past him; and still his questions and declarations came one on another. In my youth I went a-soldiering. What trade dost thou profess? ’Twill be a bleak winter.

By the time I rejoined the gravekeeper, she had attained the graveyard. “Night cometh,” she commented. “Thou hadst best get to thine inn.” She wended amongst the gravestones, her destination a hut on the far side, and I followed. Seeing I would not be denied an audience, she turned at the entrance to her hovel to regard me, no small impatience evident in her bearing.

“Why do you not put these spirits to rest?” I asked, my tone not hectoring but curious. “Spare these villagers such nightly terror.”

The gravekeeper waved her hand as though driving off a gadfly. “Just today did I finish one. Taketh a full week, dost thou know? To exhume and reinter, following all due custom, is not the work of an hour.”

“So you are assiduous in your duties?”

The gravekeeper coughed a humourless laugh. “Mayhap God knoweth why I trouble myself, for I know not.”

The hair rose at the back of my neck, and I turned involuntarily. Not three paces off stood the shade of a small boy with sable hair, facing me. His eyes did not move, nor the muscles of his face, nor his limbs. In those empty eyes dwelt a power of mesmerism that threatened to palsy my very will.

“Thou art a stranger here.” The gravekeeper’s harsh voice recalled me to myself, and I turned again to her. “Dost thou know,” she continued, “if a gravekeeper herself be not buried with honours, those honours she hath paid to the reburied are sullied withal? Nay, but they become as nought. All ghosts she hath quelled will walk again.”

“This I have heard.”

“Well, then surely thou hast also heard of the auld custom in these parts: that no gravekeeper may be buried with due honours who hath not finished her work afore she dieth.”

This I had not known. But villages in the hinter often maintained ancient practices neglected in the towns. “If you cannot lay all these ghosts to rest, then one day you must join their number.”

“’Tis so. As must mine apprentice, and hers in turn.” The gravekeeper listlessly waved her fingers as though counting on them. “Dost thou hear? I work without rest, but can only lay in peace half an hundred ghosts in a year.”

A few thousand ghosts in a lifetime, I reflected. Surely not an insurmountable number. “How many wander your graveyard?”

For the first time in our interview, the gravekeeper met my eyes directly, turning upon me a gaze as spellbinding as that of the uncanny sable-haired boy I had seen. “Tens of thousands.” The despair in her voice seemed to issue from some dry and frigid subterranean cavern, some desolate place with no hope of life. “Tens upon tens of thousands.”

She said no further word, but took herself within and eased shut the door. For a moment, I absently regarded this weatherworn door, insensible of the sharpening chill, cognisant only of a qualmishness not unlike that of having stumbled into desecrated ground. When I turned to regard the graveyard that I would be obliged to recross en route to the village and inn, I saw, in the gloaming of the day, ghost after ghost rising to greet the onset of night.

***

Dale Stromberg grew up not far from Sacramento before moving to Tokyo, where he had a brief music career. Now he lives near Kuala Lumpur and makes ends meet as an editor and translator. His work has been published here and there.