Graveyard shift, p.1
Graveyard Shift, page 1
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About the Author
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For my own midnight group text:
Alley Cat, Marge, Paigey, and Hex
Author’s Note
Insomnia has been my constant companion since childhood. I had night terrors as a toddler, spent most nights in elementary school reading in my closet past my bedtime, was writing novels by lamplight by middle school, and lived a largely nocturnal existence for most of my twelve years in higher education. You could call me an authority on the nightside of life, where the borders between the real and the illusory dissolve. Graveyard Shift lived in my head a long time before my publisher approached me about a novella. I liked the idea of a story about sleep and sleeplessness that could unfold over only one evening, like a shady, troubled dream. It’s frighteningly easy to get lost in your own subconscious; any place you think you know is different after dark.
I’ve always been preoccupied with the intersections of art and science, and especially the effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive (mal)function. Tellingly, the most arresting odes to slumber are spoken by those who can’t have it. Consider Macbeth, doomed to sleep no more: slumber is the “balm of hurt minds,” “sore labor’s bath,” a doting seamstress who “knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care.” Insomnia unravels a person without mercy. The mystery at the heart of Graveyard Shift is as much about what keeps us up at night as it is about what’s buried in the cemetery. Of course, I have also been a lurker in churchyards; the proximity of somebody’s final resting place can be a strange comfort when you can’t find any rest of your own. When I was in college, the tiny plot of plots behind my dormitory was a favorite place I rarely had to share. But I did occasionally encounter other insomniacs there, running down the long, dark hours until morning.
So Graveyard Shift took shape, borrowing from a number of literary traditions as well as my own life experience. My academic research sits squarely in the medical humanities; small wonder that this has infiltrated my creative writing. The necessary disclaimer is that while I am a species of researcher, like Tamar I am not a scientist, and so must beg forgiveness for any errors in the following pages. Fiction is, after all, not a clinical trial. But this is not to say its findings are not statistically significant. During my PhD, I taught a science fiction course to college students, and saw firsthand how Cat’s Cradle, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, and even Jurassic Park encouraged them to consider the potential ramifications of new technologies for humans and the planet we inhabit—not just profit margins. Writing a novel is never so purely didactic, but I hope the following pages provide not just a good story to suit the dead hours between midnight and morning but also an invitation to ask probing questions and get your hands dirty digging down under the surface of things.
Sweet dreams.
12:00 AMEdie
They met in the cemetery every night at midnight. Not on purpose, exactly, but not quite by accident either. University policy prohibited smoking within a hundred feet of any campus building, and on the west side of campus, where the borders between the medical school and the broader community were especially porous, the only place a person gasping for a cigarette could safely stand was in the unkempt graveyard behind the Church of Saint Anthony the Anchorite.
Most of the names on most of the gravestones had been scrubbed out by time or teenage vandals; the church itself had been boarded up and was so overgrown with vines and moss and mold that the DANGER, KEEP OUT sign nailed across the doors was decidedly redundant. Since its designation as a local historic landmark, it was protected from the bulldozers and wrecking balls that had razed everything else south of Azalea Street to make way for more patients, more parking, more gift shops and dining halls. While the medical school constructed, Saint Anthony the Anchorite deconstructed—one brick, one beam at a time. Nobody in their right mind would loiter in its long shadow in the middle of the night, but nobody in their right mind still smoked these days anyway.
So Edie Wu told herself as she trudged across campus from the offices of the Belltower Times. She was always the last to clock out—her grim duty as editor-in-chief to lash herself to the masthead, go down with the ship—but lately she didn’t clock out so much as take five. Take a break. Take a walk. Tell herself one cigarette a night was not a habit, just a way to take the edge off when she was, well, on edge. And when was she not? Yes, it was a student paper, but a six-time Pacemaker Award–winning student paper circulating to ten thousand readers. Her predecessor had graduated and gone on to the Nation but still cast a long shadow across Edie’s desk. Some nights she wished for catastrophe to strike just so she’d have a big story to break, which only made her feel worse in the morning, because she still had no story, but she did have a fresh black bruise on her conscience.
The bigger problem was The Lump. Since its first appearance two weeks ago, everything had felt hugely, horribly urgent. She pulled her coat a little closer and hurried toward the ramshackle shadow of the Anchorite, a rockbound black mass rudely eclipsing the sickly sickle moon.
She was huffing and puffing by the time she crested the hill and slipped through the gate, which refused to stay latched anymore. Like the KEEP OUT sign, the gate was redundant. Nobody wanted to huddle in a moldering churchyard after midnight because there was nowhere else to smoke. But huddle they did. Misery loved company and made strange bedfellows.
Two of the others had beaten her there. She knew them by their shadows: Tuck, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, was always first. Beside him stood Hannah, who put her hood up at the first rustle of autumn and didn’t take it down again until May. Oddly, though, they weren’t talking. They stared down at the ground in stony imitation of the graveyard angels, without the blank unblinking eyes or patchy beards of lichen. When they heard Edie’s footsteps round the Drewalt obelisk, they looked up and she looked down and realized that what they were actually staring at was a hole in the ground.
Edie stared, too. “The fuck is that?”
Hannah took a long drag. “The fuck do you think?” The hood cast her narrow face in shadow, blacked out both her eyes. Of the other Anchorites, Edie liked her least. She turned to Tuck instead, already fumbling to light his second smoke.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”
“It wasn’t here last night,” Edie said.
“Duh.” Hannah let her mouth hang open, smoke spilling out. She lifted one foot and knocked the peak off the little mountain of dirt at the edge of the hole. Edie peered down into the darkness. Hairy, gnarled roots poked out of damp earth cobwebbed with white threads of mycelia.
“Who was the last to leave?”
“Ask the rector.” Hannah steepled her hands in a mockery of prayer and bowed toward Tuck. He pinched the cigarette against his lips.
“Me,” he said. Not actually a rector in any official capacity, but he might as well have been. Always the first to arrive, always the last to leave. Edie sometimes wondered what he was avoiding. She had trouble checking the impulse to pry into everything. The Lump throbbed reproachfully. It did that now, when her journalistic ambitions got the better of her. She knew she was probably imagining it, but that—like the many statistics arguing in favor of its being entirely benign—did not comfort her much.
“Did you see anything weird?”
“Is this your first time here?” Hannah said. “Everything about this place is weird.”
The Anchorite did seem oddly lost in time and space. It had stood on the same spot for two hundred years while the town and the college exploded around it. On one side, a parking garage cast a murky orange light, as if the night outside had oxidized. Glaring red letters spelled out EMERGENCY in the black sky southward. The west wall opened into an alley behind the Calhoun Center for Behavioral Psychiatry, and the north wall followed a narrow road that eventually crossed paths with the modest nightlife flitting up and down Azalea Street. The light of the streetlamps encroached only so far, held at bay by a wall of ivy that had filled in the gaps between the bars of the fence. Within its crooked boundaries, angels wept elegantly over headstones while swinish gargoyles grinned and leered from their perches on either side of the church doors. Weeds grew without restraint. An oak tree even older than the church squatted in one corner, dropping acorns and orange leaves every October until the branches were bare and jack-o’-lantern mushrooms took up residence among the roots. Some had sprouted already, glowing eerily in the dark.
“I mean did you see anything man-made weird,” Edie said. The hole clearly wasn’t the work of an animal—the lines and angles too regular for paws and claws. “Tuck?”
He shook his head. “Nothing weirder than usual,” he said. “No … hole.”
Nobody wanted to call it what it obviously was, including E die. She tugged her own pack of smokes from her pocket and struggled to get one lit. A cold breeze nipped at the tip of her nose and blew the flame out every time she spun the spark wheel.
“Here.” Tuck opened his coat to offer temporary shelter from the elements.
“Thanks.” She inhaled, exhaled, watched the smoke unfurl. “So, what do we do?”
“Do?” Tuck looked from her to Hannah. “Who says we have to do anything?”
“Do anything about what?”
They turned together toward the Drewalt obelisk, less startled than they might have been because they knew the voice.
“Tamar,” Edie said, and breathed a little easier. Tamar was the oldest of the Anchorites, a sobering presence to counterbalance Tuck’s twitchy agitation, Hannah’s extravagant indifference.
“Hey,” she said, emerging slowly from under the oak, cheeks dewy from her walk across campus from the Health Sciences Library. “How’s ev— What’s with the hole?”
“The very conundrum we were just contemplating,” Hannah said, with a wry little smile.
Tamar looked her way, but Hannah only inhaled, exhaled, in Holmesian condescension. “Maybe there’s a funeral this weekend,” Tamar said, with a sigh, resigned to playing Watson for the moment. “Don’t they dig beforehand if the ground is hard?”
Tuck shook his head. “Nobody’s been buried here in a hundred years.”
“And wouldn’t you need a backhoe for that?” Edie asked. “I don’t think they dig the old-fashioned way anymore.”
“Maybe they do if they’re trying to keep it real quiet,” Hannah said, with ghoulish gravitas.
“Or,” said Tamar, cooler head prevailing, “maybe somebody’s just been disinterred.”
“What for?” Tuck asked.
She shrugged. “Historical interest, maybe. It’s an old church.”
“Or dissection,” Hannah suggested. “Don’t they work on cadavers at the med school?”
“Yeah,” Edie said. It was one of the few schools in the county to let premed students work on human bodies—a point of some controversy in her first year muckraking for the Times. Certain parents seemed to think it grotesque. “But I think they prefer them to be, uh, fresh.”
Hannah flicked her first butt into the hole. They all leaned toward the center of the circle, watched it disappear. “Maybe,” she said, “it’s for somebody who’s not dead yet.”
“THE DARK LORD DEMANDS BLOOD SACRIFICE!”
Only Hannah was unsurprised. Tuck swore a blue streak; Tamar gasped and clutched her chest; Edie almost bit her tongue in half and dropped her cigarette in the dirt. She turned in fury toward the whispering oak. Theo Pavlopoulos came swashbuckling out of the shadows, but his laugh, like his name, preceded him—that deep, roguish chuckle that topped off every drink he poured at the Rocker Box Bar. They hear his name and just start drooling, or so the saying went. Wavy brown hair and black-coffee eyes, muscled like Michelangelo’s David. A textbook tall drink of your poison of choice.
“I think the Friar jumped right out of his robe,” he observed, flashing his straight white teeth at Tuck. “Who’s not dead yet?”
“You’re lucky not to be,” Tamar said darkly.
“Nine lives,” Theo said, lighting up with the Zippo in his pocket. “And at least three left.”
“Better start guarding them carefully,” said Hannah. “Heard you had an ‘Incident’ in the Box.” She angled a glance at Edie, who had, of course, supervised the coverage.
“Don’t remind me.”
“Who was it this time?” Tuck asked.
Edie already knew, but Edie listened. Wanting the story straight from the horse’s mouth. She fished her cigarette out of the dirt, brushed off the filter, and pulled hard enough to keep the ember burning. The Times’s series on the Hostile Incidents afflicting the community since August had, so far, gone nowhere. Unless you counted going in circles. None of the Belligerents had anything in common. But at least the Times could claim credit for coining the terminology. Because nobody knew what it was or what to call it, they’d been forced to decide for themselves and spent most of a pitch meeting arguing over semantics.
Unbothered by such considerations, Theo shook his head, talked around the cigarette. He alone seemed immune to the cold inevitable after dark this deep into the year. Bareheaded and barehanded, he made no attempt to warm himself while the rest of them scuffed their feet and stuffed their fingers in their armpits. “Only knew him by sight. He hung out with the B-school crowd. Pretty buttoned-up until last night.” The Rocker Box was the favored haunt of west campus, patronized mostly by the professional schools and undergraduates who had abandoned the dormitories for that drunken pastel blood sport known as Greek life. After the six years it took to work his way up to general manager, Theo knew enough dirty secrets to blackmail every department chair on campus and half the city council besides. Every night Edie barely resisted the temptation to pump him for information. It wouldn’t have worked anyway; he treated the brass rail like a confessional, any admissions made there somehow sacrosanct. “Never knew him to have more than two drinks. Never even saw him drunk.”
“Stone-cold sober to stone-cold crazy just like that, huh?” Hannah asked The Hole. She lit another cigarette, not with a lighter but with an old-fashioned matchbook. She flicked her wrist and the match went out, dragging a wisp of smoke behind it like a comet’s tail.
“Well, I didn’t have eyes on him all night.” Theo took another pensive drag, barrel chest inflating like a bellows before he exhaled again. “But one minute he’s drinking his Guinness, quiet as a mouse”—he smiled, inexplicably, at Tuck—“the next he’s ranting and raving and smashing his head against the mirror in the men’s room.”
“That where you got the shiner?” asked Tamar. Edie squinted through the gloom, and the shadow under Theo’s left eye resolved itself into a swollen black bruise.
“He put up a hell of a fight for a guy who wears a tie.” As GM of the Rocker Box, Theo was one part bartender, one part business manager, one part one-man goon squad.
“I heard you crushed his trachea with your rippling biceps,” Hannah said. She had a special talent for making a compliment sound like an insult. Theo redirected the grin across the open grave at her, unfazed.
“Nothing like a little light asphyxiation to calm a body down.” The Pavlovian Chokehold had been deployed to such terrific effect over the years that nobody looking to keep their head attached to their neck got up to no good in the Box. Like the Pavlovian Charm, it tended to provoke excessive drooling.
“Watch what you say in front of Little Miss Woodward and Bernstein”—Hannah’s eyes fastened on Edie—“or you’ll find yourself on the front page tomorrow with all that suffocation and blood sacrifice taken out of context.”
“Hey,” Tamar said. “What happens in the graveyard stays in the graveyard.”
“Sure about that?” Theo asked. He leaned over the side of The Hole. “Looks like there might be a dead man up and walking around somewhere.”
“Or dead woman,” Edie said, thinly. “Hannah looks a bit pale.” So pale and gaunt she was downright cadaverous. Circles almost as dark as Theo’s shiner hung under both her eyes.
“Me-yow,” he said, and blew a smoke ring.
“Cut it out,” said Tamar. “You all are worse than the students sometimes, honestly.”
“I am a student,” Edie reminded her.
“What did I do?” Tuck asked. Puffing and fidgeting, puffing and fidgeting.
“Did you dig The Hole?” Theo asked. “It’s always the quiet ones.”
“No, I did not dig The Hole.” Tuck pulled his beanie a little lower over his ears. Embarrassed or annoyed or both. Tuck’s every emotion manifested as a kind of nervous tic.
“So, who did?”
“We were just wondering that,” Tamar said. “Before you interrupted.” She turned back to Hannah. “What did you mean, it might be for somebody who’s not dead yet?”
“Where better to bury the evidence? Nobody goes looking for a murder victim at the cemetery,” she said. “If I were planning the perfect crime, I’d pick the plot beforehand, wouldn’t you?”
