Chapter #21The Sexton's Scarecrow, Concluded by: Seuzz   Probably it was after this that people started paying a little closer attention to what was going on around the graveyard. At least, they paid attention when the mother of a boy named Bert died. His father had gone to sea and never come back, so he had no one else in the world when she died. No one was too surprised that he seemed to linger around the church yard an awful lot, though some eyebrows might have shot up when he said he'd seen some lights there at night, as though from a lantern. And then he complained that the earth over her grave seemed to have been disturbed.
It was someone's ill luck that there was a stranger in the village at this time, and so when someone uttered the dread word "resurrectionist" there was a rush over to the hostel to confront this fellow. It turned out he was just a lawyer who had business with the hostel's owner, but the alarm had already been raised, and rooms and shacks and lean-tos all got searched and ransacked. It was the parish priest—who, if it wasn't the same fellow I mentioned earlier, had just as good a head on his shoulders—finally suggested opening the grave, arguing that there was no point making a hue and bother if Bert's mother were resting peacefully where she should be. He went off to find the sexton.
It took him awhile to run him down, and the sexton proved to be in a fair state when he found him. He grumbled at the silliness of it all, and uttered a lot of black names against the men who'd been stirring up trouble, and insisted on waiting until morning, to which the priest was agreeable. It was foggy when dawn broke, but there was a still a crowd around the grave that the sexton had to force his way through, and he didn't bother to keep his curses under his breath as he dug away at a mound of dirt he'd put in place only a few days before. It took awhile before his spade tapped on the top of the coffin, and it took longer to clear enough away that they could open it up, and there was Bert's mother inside, just like she was supposed to be. All the air seemed to go out of everyone. And then someone noticed that there was dirt inside the coffin with her.
Well, I can only say it's a good thing that lawyer fellow had cleared out during the night, or there probably would have been murder done. As it was, someone had to get the blame, and the sexton got it in the end. He was sacked on the spot, though he had to be rehired in the end when no one else would step up to take his place, but it ruined his temper for good. A regular watch was put on the church yard, at least until word could spread that no funny business would be tolerated on sacred ground. Bert, naturally, was one of the first to volunteer. He didn't last, though. One evening, not long after, he went to take his turn keeping watch, and the next morning he was nowhere to be found. It was assumed that he'd cracked and wandered off and probably done away with himself on the moor or in the wood.
As I said, the business about Bert's mother and her brush with the resurrectionist hadn't done the sexton any good, and he took to drinking more than before. For a long time nobody minded particularly, since no one liked him, and there was a nice healthy run of years when no one had to have any business with him because there was no demand for his church yard services. But then the bad things started happening. There was a terrible drought one summer, the worst anyone could remember, and cattle started coming up lame—something was getting loose in the pasture and biting at their ankles. The hostel owner, while out riding one night, nearly got his neck broke when his horse shied from something in the dark. Stories about old times, about how the worst times in the village always followed on the best times, began to be told in the public houses. The sexton, when he was around, would simply glower into his beer and mutter that it wasn't his fault, that he'd done his duty as best he could with the hand he'd been dealt. No one knew what he meant, and no one saw fit to reply, for most people had concluded that the sexton was losing his mind to whiskey. But his own crops were in as bad a state as everyone else's, so insofar as they assumed anything, they assumed he was referring to them.
Then the girl disappeared. She was a simple thing, maybe twenty years old, sweet and stupid though she could hardly talk, and everyone helped her mother take care of her, entertaining her and keeping her out of trouble. It wasn't like her to be out of sight and out of company—
[Here a page was ripped out.]
At first they thought she was just wound up in a black blanket with a shroud over her face, but then they looked closer and saw her legs had been bundled up in old black trousers and her torso wrapped in an old black coat, and what they thought was a shroud was actually a dirty burlap sack pulled over her head, on which someone had painted a crude parody of a human face.
Well, no one had to say nothing after they saw that. They left the sexton there with a couple of strong men and went out to his corn field, where they cut down the old upside-down scarecrow. Bones fell out when it hit the ground, and they weren't white either, but black, like they'd been in a fire. Again, no one had to say anything, they just started digging around the old post. They gave up pretty quickly, though they'd turned over a lot more bones before they stopped. But the ground underneath was soft and loamy, and a horrible smell, like from an abattoir, went up from it. Then the flies, big black buzzing things, showed up and covered everything. The men wound up setting fire to the whole field.
They took a wagon with them back to the sexton's cottage, and they threw a rope around his neck and put him in the back. He didn't fight or argue with them. He just got very grumpy and said he hadn't done anything his father hadn't taught him to do, and his father before him. They took him outside the village to a stout tree, and even after they had the other end of the rope over a branch and had his arms tied behind him he just grumbled that he didn't understand.
By a kind of common consent no one really talked about it all, and then they had other problems. A few weeks later a great cloud of locusts appeared and settled on all the crops. Bad for the crops but good for the birds, who gorged on the grasshoppers and then kept eating right past them and into the corn and barley, until there weren't two full cobs you could rub together. People were so wrapped up in that that they didn't notice the church had begun to shift off its foundations until one of walls fell over and part of the roof fell in. They found an old tomb in the wreckage, a big stone box that had been built into the collapsed wall. It was empty, but its insides looked like they'd been scorched. After that, no one would go outside at night if they could help it, on account of the weird yowling noises that started coming out of the fields and the woods, and some said they'd seen a thing with big red eyes scrabbling around in the dirt and looking back at them malignantly. One morning someone found one of their neighbors in the road, all bloody with scratches and claw marks on this face and neck, but even after they got him cleaned up and roused with spirits he couldn't account for what happened.
I suppose it was a blessing to the village that some of the new mines and mills had begun opening in the larger towns not far away, so a lot of the able-bodied folk were able to go off to them and earn a living, so no one starved. The strange sights and sounds gradually faded away, either because the thing spent itself or it just went off to a new situation. A hundred years later some history and archeology fellows showed up and made a study of what was left of the church. Apparently there wasn't much to be said about it or the old tomb, though someone made a note of the shoddy workmanship that had gone into the old stone lid, because the cross inscribed on its inner surface had been carved upside down.
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