The Grave Rubbers

By: Bellamy Elliott
September 11, 2008

Van didn’t believe in ghosts.

It’s not that he was our group leader or anything, but let’s face it. Van had the van, Van had the license, and Van was older than us. Being sixteen was close to godliness in our eyes. So maybe it was the hero worship, maybe it was his pimply face beaming up from the plastic government-issued card that made Van think he was now a man.

“How come?” I asked him. “How come you don’t believe in them?” I glanced at Keith, whose slumped shoulders told me this conversation would prove fruitless. We were sitting on a bench, waiting for the Plymouth to get out of the shop. We would have followed him anywhere just to have his sole attention.

Van shrugged. “Why should I?”

That was a good comeback. I’d never thought about why I should believe—I’d just naturally fell into it. Kinda like religion—you don’t really have a choice when you’re thirteen years old, or sixteen like Van. Well, maybe you could by sixteen. Maybe that was why…

“Don’t you believe in God?” Keith’s eyes were puppy dog wide and glassy.

An uncalculated response seemed to be on Van’s lips, but he paused and gnawed at the giant wad of gum in his mouth instead. “Well, God’s different.”

“Yeah, how?”

“You ever met Him?”

Keith looked at his shoes.

“Well, if you believe in God, then you have to believe in the Holy Ghost and all that, right?”

“It’s all just stories. You guys are gonna have to realize one day that everything you read isn’t necessarily true.”

“I get it. You’ve got the devil on your side.”

“Seriously. You pussies would believe anything you saw on Unsolved Mysteries.”

“But Van, it’s the Bible,” Keith emphasized, if that should end the discussion.

“So why do you like going to the cemeteries, then? If you don’t even believe in ghosts.”

“We’re not looking for ghosts, Sully, we’re looking for whichever poor bastard died first so we can rub crayon all over his name.”

“Yeah, but doesn’t running past all those dead people give you the creeps? Like, you don’t picture some zombie hand popping out and grabbing your ankle?”

Van snorted and punched me so hard that Keith went flying off the end of the bench. As his little brother ate gravel off the asphalt, Van sucked a bubble flat against his lips. He suddenly looked at me without that mocking glint in his eyes, and I stopped laughing.

“No, man. Running past all those graves makes me feel more alive.”



Grave rubbing was the name of our game. The sport of nerds. We accepted that. Not Van, he threatened us never to tell anyone he was escorting his 12-year-old brother and friend across the county to find old cemeteries. It was a hobby Keith and I adopted after reading loads of ghost books, and then stumbling onto an online message board dedicated to grave rubbings. As our adolescent lives centered on scaring the bejesus out of each other, we naturally took to the thrill, focusing our hunts in reputedly haunted cemeteries. A year and a half and 300 grave rubbings later, we were obsessed. Van didn’t get swept away in our craze until he got his license six months ago. At first he loathed taking us anywhere. But Keith and his older brother made a deal; if he would take us to at least one graveyard a month, Van wouldn’t have to drop him off at school every morning. This was, of course, an inconvenience to Keith, but it made Van insanely happy and gave me someone to sit with on the school bus.

I can’t really say why he started driving us to the graveyards. Maybe it was our stories, or the sheer competition. But by the end of the first night, we knew he was hooked. By chance, Van beat us to the oldest grave, and his victory sealed our threesome forever.

He became the stuff of legends. We were convinced someday there’d be movies made about him. He never hesitated to charge headlong into the darkest graveyard, was undeterred by the silent eyes of sentries standing watch over the fields of dead.

We often admired him from behind wrought iron bars, preparing our memoirs of our brush with greatness.

Bravery escaped Keith and I due in part to our incessant diet of ghost books and scary movies. We liked to remind each other of the kind of stories that crept into the catacombs of our imaginations and followed us to bed. I didn’t sleep much during this period of my life.

Barely a night slipped by without my bedcovers lifted over my nose, my eyes trying not to concoct humanoid shapes out of shadows on my bedroom wall. It became an everyday thing to wake up with the armpits and back of my pajamas soaked in a soggy letter “T.”

Scary stories never bothered me in the telling. Usually I’d sit goggle-eyed and leaning in, the first to laugh when the tale was finished. But they left an impression. Oh, yes. When it was time for bed, and the lamp snapped off, that’s when the fear caught up with me.

There were memorable ones: the two-headed swamp monster who supposedly ascended from Rubio Woods, the green lady (with bloodshot eyes and hair crusted to her guacamole face) who was locked in the bathroom, the gangster (there were a number of them, always in a trench coat and hat) who stuck a gun in my face and drooled black slime after his burial at pond, and spooky little kids always gave me the creeps. And then there was the fateful time I saw Resurrection Mary pry through the crack around my bedroom door.

She pulled herself between the wood, bowing it with her long white fingers, and then she stepped to the foot of my bed in her mud-streaked ball gown. She was really beautiful, and once she was standing there, I wasn’t afraid of her. I think I even sat up in bed, mesmerized by the ringlets of gold clumping against her bare neck and collarbone. I have to admit, and I would never say this to any of my friends in confidence, that this was when I got my first boner. This dead chick who crawled through my wall, who wasn’t more than a concoction of the workings of my own mind, gave me the biggest surprise of my young life. But the moment she turned her back to me, exposing a trail of dark blood spoiling her ivory gown, my moment of manhood came to a screeching halt, and the sweat and panic wiped out all feelings of euphoria. I must have let out a shriek, because my dad and mom were at my door in seconds, their faces creased with worry, demanding to know what was the matter.

Much to my horror, they instantly noticed the telltale tent in my pajama bottoms and diverted their eyes, then made for the door like they had a much more traumatizing matter to deal with outside my room. I have been unable to look my mother straight in the eye since, making family dinnertime extremely tricky.

The day following that fateful night, I went to school with a private feeling of accomplishment carrying me throughout the halls. I had passed the bar, it seemed, into teenhood. I pictured Res Mary in her white dress with her cascading hair in all sorts of suggestive positions; swooning over the teacher’s desk, batting her lashes at me while I strained to compute long division, lounging in the windowsill in homeroom, the heat register billowing her skirt like a bloodstained Marilyn Monroe.

These random bursts of ecstasy had to end abruptly, as the tent began to appear in broad daylight—not just appearing, but lingering, staying pitched for entire periods of class. My attention was also diverted from my friends, who wouldn’t stand for being ignored. It was damnable to deny fascination with a newly uncovered ghost story, especially one which happened to take place in our own hometown. A year after I first encountered Mary, one such conversation arose with Keith in the school cafeteria.

“Sully! You’re not gonna believe this! Did you know we have an old abandoned cemetery right here in Lake Forest?!” Keith’s face was obstructed by his copy of Chicagoland Spooks, the cover replacing his round, infantile features with an illustration of a ghoul rising over the Water Tower.

“Really?”

Mary was currently coiling her body around a post in the lunchroom like one of those dancers in Dad’s movies. I knew this because I used to crawl to the end of the hallway to watch when he wasn’t looking. One arm suspended freely in the air, the neckline of her dress stretched dangerously below her bare collarbone and her milky, rounded—

“Hey, did you hear me?” Keith slapped his book down on the table and glared at me behind his glasses. He had just got them last week and was constantly fumbling them. He picked up the part resting on his left ear and smoothed back his tan hair. “Sully, what’s your problem? You’ve been acting loopy all day.”

“Loopy is as loopy does…” I grinned.

“Shut up. You’re lame.” He looked down at the open pages again. “So anyway. We should go to this place. I’ll bet there are some really old gravestones here, maybe even some are two hundred years old!”

“You’re full of it. Chicago hasn’t even been here two hundred years, brainiac.”

“Good, now that I have your attention…”

“Okay, okay, sure. We’ll go Saturday. Is Van going to be around?” I turned my focus to Keith, attempting to banish the voluptuous Mary from the corner of my eye.

He was grinning, which seemed to make the freckles on his cheeks pop out in 3-D. “Yeah, he owes me one. He’ll have to take us.”



But when I got to Keith’s house Saturday morning, Van had flown the coop. It perturbed me that I had actually made the effort to arrive before noon, which counted as a major accomplishment for any boy my age. We decided to wait it out—Van had to come back to the house sometime, and when he did, we would be there, lying in wait; for once, he would be at our mercy. A day spent at a friend’s house was one surefire way to annoy the crap out of a couple of parents, and Keith and Van’s parents would demand he take us away from the house. It was the perfect plan. Besides, he hadn’t taken us to a cemetery all month, and our escort was past due according to the school bus clause.

When Van finally pulled up in his blue Plymouth, after Keith and I spent the day retelling cemetery stories, watching Nightmare on Elm Street for the fiftieth time, and playing a grudge match round of Monopoly (Keith’s parents, for some reason, didn’t allow him any video games, but let him watch mild horror movies that sometimes made him wet the bed at night), we were prepared to pounce.

“I just got home, nerds. Why don’t you go build sandcastles?” was his immediate response, his brown curly hair sagging over his brooding eyes.

Like a cuckoo clock, Van’s mom popped her head into the room. “Van, you’re driving them out. They’ve been waiting to go ALL-DAY-LONG. You wanted this responsibility, remember?”

Van’s mouth dropped open and his eyes bulged in protest. “Mom! That’s so unfair!”

She pointed to the door and Van turned to his brother with a murderous glare.

“But Van, we’ll go someplace really cool, I promise!” Keith’s voice squeaked as he clutched his book tightly to his chest, ready to shield off the gaze should he feel himself turning to stone. “Besides… we haven’t gone all month.”

He sighed and grumbled, “This better be good.” Throwing open the front door, he tromped out to the Plymouth in his new Chuck Taylors.

***

“Old Lake Forest Cemetery, now an unkempt, weed-infested portion of land, broke ground with the burial of Arnold Dwayne Moffet. A wealthy trader and self-proclaimed game hunter, Moffet settled in the area before the Town of Chicago was established in 1833—Holy shit, Sully! You’re not going to believe this!”

I turned in my seat, to ogle back at Keith. He rarely ever cursed, and I began to feel a little guilty for my influence in his virginal downfall. Van had quickly passed his snarky language to me, and now Keith’s innocence was succumbing to the pressure of the both of us.

“Moffet died in 1799! 1799! That’s over 200 years ago! Ha-ha! Suck that!”

Van also seemed disturbed, as if he was noticing for the first time his little brother had grown up right under his nose. “Keith, cut out the gangsta talk. Who do you think you are?”

I piped up, “Yeah, you think you’re Van or something?”

Van shot me a dirty look, which quickly broke into an approving smirk. I will never forget how that smirk made me feel so accepted. It was the first time I felt truly cool.

“That’s gonna be mine, kids. You watch. I’ve got Moffet’s number.”

“Not if we beat you first, preppy.”

***

After an hour of two middle school kids trying to navigate one pissy 16-year-old driver in the semi-right direction, we stumbled upon the forest preserve where our graveyard awaited.

“Is it marked?” Van asked, his hands wrenched tightly around the steering wheel, his imagination no doubt casting our necks between his fists.

“These things never say. Sometimes I think the writers aren’t even the ones who’ve been to these places.”

“So, let’s hear why it’s haunted, man.” Man. That was a word Keith did not get called often enough, as could be read from the huge grin spreading subsequently across his face.

“Well, it’s the usual… ghost lights, orbs, a disappearing house, eyes watching you from the woods, you know…” Keith’s shoulders sagged a bit. He was anticipating his brother’s next words.

Not one to disappoint, Van exclaimed, “Ghost lights and phantoms and orbs! Oh my! It’s like a ghost hunter’s greatest hits!”

“More than one cemetery can have ghost lights, Andy.”

“First of all, never call me ‘Andy.’ Second, how many times have we heard those stories? That’s all bullshit and you know it. They just needed to fill the other 100 pages after their good ideas ran out. Those books are written by hippies who smoke too much weed, and when the weed fries their brains, they start recycling the same old stories over and over again.”

Keith and I looked at each other. It was becoming more and more clear that Van could be right about the books, though we would never admit it to him. Our last graveyard run had produced a third reported swamp creature story, though there were no swamps in the area, and that kind of made you question the credibility of those writers. The lack of original haunts and monsters was beginning to cramp the creep factor of our trips.

The only road in the forest preserve wound up a slightly inclined hillside, and took us past several ancient hiking trails and one big parking lot before sliding us back to the entrance.

“What the fuck, chicks?!”

Keith pleaded from the backseat, “Go back, we must have missed it.”

“No, there was no marker—we didn’t miss a sign—” Van was creeping the Plymouth back down the tree-lined road to the highway.

“Come on, Van, let’s just go look one more time, please!”

“It wasn’t there! Did you see anything marking a graveyard?”

“No…”

“…just another made-up story. See, now they have to start making up places, too—”

It was then, as we were coasting down the pothole-ridden road, that I noticed a place in the trees that seemed to recede from the rest of the tree line. As we drove closer, the trees fell back further into a long gash, leading out of sight. Standing in the middle of the gap was Mary, in all her erotic glory. The pale light sinking out of the sky lit up her thin white dress in a heavenly glow, silhouetting the shape of her bare body. She looked straight at me and winked, then sashayed through the shadowy indentation in the forest. As I watched her hips swing out of sight, I cried out, “Guys! Whoa, stop the van!”

“What?” Van screeched to a stop, spraying gravel into the nearby grass.

“There’s a road back there!” My revelation became a craze. I pointed out the window, to the break in the trees just beyond the Plymouth.

Van pulled in front of the indentation. He and Keith craned their necks and examined the path.

“Whoa, how did we miss that?”

“Sully, you’re the shit. I never thought it would be out here…”

“Neither did I.”

Pulling the Plymouth off the road, our leader cut the van between the trees. It just fit, like the path had been carved out especially for us. The path curved to the left and the gravelly road disappeared behind us. A roadblock sprung up immediately; erected ages ago, a rusty wire cable strung between two posts from either side. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched in thirty years.

Van parked. “Hold on.”

He opened his door and jumped out, walking to the back of the vehicle. We heard him open the back doors and rattle through a bunch of heavy-sounding objects before pulling out what he was looking for. The doors slammed shut.

I watched as he strode to the post with the padlock, carrying a gigantic pair of bolt cutters. The smell of exhaust from the idling van coiled around my guts.

“Van!” Keith squeaked behind me. We always spoke of evading the police(trespassing after sundown, you know), but we had never actually destroyed any property before. Besides grave rubbing, which was really only frowned upon by cemetery caretakers, we had kept relatively clean. This was a new low for us.

“We’re so dead!” Keith whispered. “If the cops come by, they’ll bust us for real this time!”

“When’s the last time you think this place has seen any cops? As long as we hide the van, no one will notice we’re here.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt immediate guilt slap my face. I had never snapped at Keith like that before; but he was acting like a baby.

Keith hesitated, watching Van return with a wide grin on his face before closing the bolt cutters back into the vault of secret delinquent toys. He hopped back in the driver’s seat.

He has to be loving every minute of this, I thought.

Van shifted into drive and sneered. “Let’s go, kittens.”

The Plymouth ran over the cable and mashed it into the soggy earth. Rain had been drizzling off and on all day, and it created a haze in the thick undergrowth as the van pushed through overgrown weeds, saplings, and fallen branches. The trees grew thicker as the path wore on, and bony branches clawed and snapped loose on the Plymouth, like the fingers of an ancient witch fondling her soon-to-be victims.

I studied the surrounding woods. My mind conjured up dark figures walking through the trees like stiff, lumbering zombies, or Bigfoot. I shuddered at the thought of coming upon that hairy beast in the woods. What if it mistook you for a She-foot? What if his penis was proportionate, like an elephant’s? I tried to conjure Mary to block out the images of Bigfoot’s massive worm from my mind, but my concentration was broken by Keith’s voice.

“There it is!”

A clearing opened before us, a hiccup in the dense surrounding woods. My eyes shifted to the small gray stones poking out of the tangle of weeds. When the book said “unkempt,” it had not been exaggerating. It looked like a drawing out of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Light from the gray skies held steady over the shadowless stones. It was like looking through a fogged-up bathroom mirror. Vines clung to the featureless faces of eroded angles. Broken crosses leaned back against canopies of twiggy brush, the stone bases lost to time. Other headstones were engulfed in wreaths of foliage, barely able to peek above the weeds. Trees had grown up through graves, coiling like arthritic hands under pressure from the dark sky. I had to wonder if any of those trees had severed any skeletons along the way. My eyes searched the limbs overhead for skulls, femurs, or pearl necklaces.

Finding Moffet’s grave was not going to be a snap. I determined to try all the largest, grandest markers first, which as I soon discovered, was the popular decision among the three of us.

There was no fence separating the living from the dead. Van pulled the vehicle to a stop about ten feet from the closest headstone.

“Gentlemen! Choose your colors!” I held out a fistful of Crayolas between us.

Van slapped his brother’s hand in mid-reach and snatched up Red and Forest Green. Deflated, Keith pushed up his glasses and reached out to pick Blue-Violet and Red-Orange. I chose Steel Gray and Cerulean. I then turned to my backpack, pulling out a stack of blank paper and passing it around. When everyone was fully stocked and ready, we paused to examine each other’s hungry expressions.

“Catch you later, pussies!” Van leaped from the Plymouth and Keith and I tumbled out after him. Our sneakers lit onto crisp, damp crass. Faraway calls and laughter fell upon deaf trees. Damp Fruit-of-the-Loom T-shirts clung to cool skin. Mud droplets splattered holy jeans. Gray stones held their breath, anticipating. We went straight to it, running and stooping, peeling away tall weeds to press paper flat against the rough, dewy headstones. The last moments of our innocence.

Something darted near the edge of the clearing; I saw it out of the corner of my eye. Briefly, I wondered if Van was going to take to jumping out from behind trees and such to scare us, but as I looked to my left, I spotted him standing near a bush, his gaze scanning the outermost edge of the clearing, too. Probably a deer. I dashed from headstone to headstone, filling up my blank sheets of paper with grainy impressions of names, dates, and designs. One grave I came across was a stack of logs chiseled from marble. I knelt in front of the large block of stone. “Man,” I gasped. “When I die, I want a cool headstone like this one.”

It was there, when I was bent over the log headstone, that I heard it—the rustle of the grass mashing underfoot in a quick, hurried burst. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large, dark figure dash between two headstones to my left. My heart leapt to my throat and I swallowed hard. It was stooped over, whatever it was. Surely it was nothing. A coyote, maybe? A coyote wouldn’t attack a group of humans, would it?

On quivering legs I slowly raised my body to look over the graves nearby. Not a creature in sight. Just to be sure, I called over to Keith. “Hey, did you see a coyote run through here?”

“A what? I- I didn’t see anything… just a bunch of graves.” Keith gave me an unsettled look and took off his glasses to smooth back his hair.

“Probably just a stupid squirrel or something—,” I said quickly. I decided to move to a different part of the graveyard to escape the demons in my head. That was one huge fucking squirrel.

About that time, Van’s voice called out to us. It seemed distant and hollow, “Hey!! There’re more graves back here!”

I looked around, but didn’t see Van. “Where are you?!” I yelled back.

“Back here, in the woods!”

Keith and I exchanged glances from across the graveyard and ran to join Van. That’s where Moffet was probably buried, and each of us knew that. I cursed under my breath as I figured Van had already found Moffet’s resting place. Inexplicably, Van had some kind of freaky radar which never failed to hone in on all the oldest headstones. We hated him for it, and the result was often an embarrassing struggle to take him down while either Keith or I would strain to rub the headstone first.

Keith made it to the woods before I could, his short stature dashing under low hanging tree limbs and avoiding the spider webs that smacked me in the face. By the time I caught up to the others, I felt like a wet hen. I hated spiders. Finding one skittering down my arm made me scream like a little girl, and I saw by the looks on Keith and Van’s faces they had heard.

The graves were scattered in a peculiar line leading out of the cemetery. It was like the woods were eating up the gravestones one by one, and we were in the belly. I looked at Van. “Find Moffet?”

“No, but I bet the bastard is around here somewhere!”

I heard a snort behind me, and I expected to find Keith laughing. When I turned, the kid wasn’t paying any attention to us. He was crouching low, rubbing his Red-Orange crayon over a paper-faced headstone. I heard a different noise then. While staring at Keith, who was intent on his grave rubbing, I heard a low whimper from behind me. I looked. Nothing was there, of course.

“Did you hear that noise?”

Keith looked up at me with that pale face. “You’re just trying to scare me, Sully.”

“Keith! I’m not kidding you!” I stared at him, a terror rising in me. “Did you hear it?”

Van came back from his lone jaunt in the woods, “This is as far back as it goes. Moffet’s grave must be up here somewhere. But what are these graves, then? Funny.” His shoe scuffed against one of the headstones, a puny block sticking up from the ground, no bigger than a box of Cheez-Its. As a matter of fact, all the headstones we’d seen trailing from the clearing were that size, and they were identical in shape with a different intricate letter carved on each. I was further creeped-out. Something about the place just felt wrong.

“What are you two gawking at?”

Another noise. Louder. Lingering. What the hell?

Panting. It was panting. And whimpering, almost groaning. Before I could utter a word, I heard the same sound multiply. Now it was coming from my left and my right. I looked at Keith, and he was frozen on the ground, huddled near the tiny headstone.

“What the fuck,” Van whispered.

Van heard it too. Shit, now we are in trouble.

The sound circled us, coming from all sides. Louder and louder, heavy and hollow. The panting reminded me of the stories I’d heard of cults chanting in hooded circles, sacrificing animals while fires raged. My heart felt like it would explode. The panting was deafening, a series of yelps, whimpers, and howls that caught in my eardrums. The sun seemed to have dropped from the sky, the darkness filling in what little patches of gray light remained.

That’s when they came. I didn’t see them at first. They looked like dark shadows stepping out of the trees. The panting grew louder, and I realized I wasn’t hallucinating. They were huge dogs, bigger than wolves. Their fur hung like seaweed from gangly limbs. Wolfhounds the color of sod, with empty eye sockets. They smelled like dead fish and rotten meat.

I couldn’t move. The closer they came, the more I could make out, and I could not move. That’s how I saw the slimy fragments dripping from the dogs. But it wasn’t water, or even blood. My eyes adjusted to the blackness. It was worms. In the dark caverns where eyes should be, I could see them writhing and crawling. I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran.

Van was already running. Keith was just beside me and we dashed after him as fast as our legs could carry us. The mud protested my every step, pulling on my sneakers like the ground had morphed into a bog. Branches swatted me in the face as I tore through the forest, groping for the clearing. Keith had darted ahead. The hounds, the earth-colored hounds with worms for eyes, snapped at our heels. They should have been able to grab me, I was certain, but I was always just out of reach. I kept wondering if they were playing with us, like a cat with a mouse before it makes its final death-pounce and rips off the head.

Scared witless, I tore out of the forest and ran across the cemetery, following Keith. The cries of the hounds softened, and I stole a glance over my shoulder. Big mistake. I ran right into a headstone and flipped over, knocking out all my breath. I lay in shock for a moment, when a hand dove over the headstone. I was certain it was the hand of Death, but it yanked me to my feet and propelled me into running. Van had saved me at the last moment.

He dragged me all the way to the van, my T-shirt sleeve gripped tightly in his left hand, his grave rubbings in his right hand. He hurled me forward just before we got to the van, where Keith was waiting for us. We slammed the doors behind us and locked them when we were safe inside, and I screamed, “Step on it!!”

Van was about to oblige in that beat of utter silence that followed, but before he could turn the ignition, the vehicle began to rock back and forth. My face fell into the window, and my eyes searched the empty grass outside. The snarling, huffing noise that drowned my thoughts and rocked the vehicle was being created by thin air. Keith was screaming in shotgun while Van gesticulated wildly. After a few seconds of chaos, both the rocking and growling stopped.

I’m not sure how long I sat in silence, unmoving from my position where I lay half-fallen on the floor. Van didn’t move, either. Keith was still in his seat, but he was crying. My gaze floated from the floor, where the mess of spilled crayons and strewn blank paper stuck to my hands and feet. The hounds were gone. We were safe. We needed to leave.

“Van, let’s get out of here,” I pleaded. I couldn’t help the tears from squeezing out of my eyes.

Keith began to wail.

“Hey, buddy, it’s okay. It’s over now,” I said softly.

“No! Nooooooo…” Keith sobbed.

“What?” I asked. I sat up and leaned between the front seats.

First I saw Keith’s horrified face, his red, swollen puffy cheeks blistered with tears. He had lost his glasses. I turned to Van. There was no face, save for a bloody pulp. It had been literally ripped off, like he had been kissed by a bear. His body was covered with wet, red gashes. Van was dead. He was still clutching his grave rubbings in his right hand. On top was a sheet hastily rubbed over in Red:

Arnold Dwayne Moffet

1740-1799

May he rest in the company of his angels.