Short Story Saturdays - The Gravestone

MAY, 1936

The phonograph fizzled out music in the corner. A grainy female voice bloomed from the brass flower of the machine. Hodges slumped in the smooth leather high-backed chair, tossing peanuts into the orange hearth.

The dark brown door quietly creaked open, and Hodges’ father poked his head into the spacious room, with a pleasant smile on his face.

“All right. Mother and I are leaving,” said his father. “Be good. Smith will be there if you need anything. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” Hodges replied, putting on a lethargically pleasant smile. Behind his back his hand clenched the leather of the chair in anxiety. He couldn’t wait for his parents to be gone.

Hodges’ father nodded and shut the door. Hodges sat up at once and looked to the fire. He got up and stopped the phonograph. He put out the fire and used the light of the moon to cross over toward the window.

The night was clouded but only partially, and the full moon shone down through the glass of the window like the radiance of the sun into the hidden ocean depths. Water droplets split and streamed down the pane. It was only lightly sprinkling, but it had been for the whole evening. The ground would be muddy, but there was no lightning tonight.

That was good.

Hodges hopped over the windowsill, his strategically picked boots splashing into the mud below. He quickly pulled the window shut before too much rain could blow inside.

Hodges made his way across the muddy grass, stalking low in the bright moonlight. If Smith saw him sneaking out like this, then he would be thrown out of the house for sure. A fifteen-year-old boy should not be sneaking out into the forest at night when his parents were not home.

Hodges made it to the other side of the house, where the huge shadow of his home’s gigantic silhouette made it easier for him to cross in darkness. A light was on inside the house, though, and Hodges thought he could see Smith chatting with his mum’s maid Courtney. Hodges stayed out of the glowing orange cast through the window glass.

Was it his imagination, or was the rain falling harder now? It wasn’t his imagination. The rain all of a sudden began to pour and pelt, and a crack of lightning broke the sky into a million little pieces. A shattering orchestral thunderclap followed soon afterward. No way that Hodges could take the horse.

But tonight...the full moon… There was no way Hodges would get lucky enough to do this the next month. Now or never.

Hodges crept across the field, hopping the wood fence and sloshing into the misty darkened forest beyond. The moonlight lanced through the trees at a compelling and mystical angle that reminded Hodges of exactly what this place was. It was magic.

The trees did little to stop the torrents of rain slashing down in an onslaught upon the earth. Hodges was still just as soaked as ever, standing there in his leather jacket and his riding boots, standing there on the edge of a frontier in the middle of England.

The forest was alive, if he listened close enough.

Hodges forged on into the thicket. The moonlight was enough, and he found his way without the use of a flashlight.

The trees loomed like dark monsters tonight, but Hodges knew that there was no imminent harm that could become of their presence. People are not who they appear to be; trees, doubly so.

So Hodges quickly trudged through the pouring rain in the middle of the moonlit forest, and as he walked the moon’s benevolent light was abruptly extinguished by a passing cloud.

Hodges was plunged into darkness. He stopped in midstride and pulled out his clunky flashlight, a gift from years ago. The yellow flickered and split the darkness, cleaving it in two. Hodges kept walking through the trees toward the real presence, the real heart of the magic.

The magic was a twisted magic, both good and evil, a melancholy magic, both glad and sad. Hodges did not know what to make of the feeling he had. He only knew to delve deeper, to find the root and ascertain its nature. Until he did this, the magic in his head would never cease to call, to beckon to him, yearning for release or a proper burial or vengeance.

The forest beckoned to him and once he had come it drew him farther inward until he would be swallowed by the magic. He had imagined this night as something quite different, more silent and less crowded with the atmosphere of a storm. The sound and the feel of the wetness destroyed his images of faint apparitions in the curling mist, of silhouettes hanging from the ghostlike trees. The storm disrupted the mood with its fiery lightning and its rolling noise that rippled across the world like an explosion.

But that was life. Hodges could not change the weather. He was not in control here, really. If the magic frightened him or swallowed him, he could do nothing about that. If it ignored him, he would never find its root. If it greeted him happily, he would never escape its enthralling spell.

But Hodges did not know this, fully. He only knew a fragment of this, imparted in his elders’ wisdom. He did not know that he would find the root of the magic in the next great War, where it would be raining heavily like this, and where he would not be in control of the guns’ fiery shells and the zipping bullets and the freezing pain of cold Fate’s grip.

But for now Hodges was only a boy, and he was on an adventure. He followed his flashlight into the trees. He thought of the forest not as void darkness, but rather as a kind of birthplace--or deathplace, it was hard to tell. Was he searching for a sweet flower-laden tomb or an abandoned shattered cradle?

Hodges went farther into the forest, farther than he would ever go in daylight hours. But tonight he was possessed by the urge, the greatest urge he had ever known--the urge to explore. He wanted to find, to discover, to learn the ways of reality, of its many intertwining strands and their mysterious functions. He wanted to know the oceans’ depths, every crevice and chasm, every nook and cranny. He wanted to know the names of the world and all the creatures within it. But most of all he wanted to find something at the end of this trail.

Hodges climbed up a slowly rising slope, his boots losing traction with every step. The trees seemed to crowd around him and to thicken, and soon he did not know where he was. He did not know what direction was North. He did not know the way home anymore. All he knew was the strenuous journey to attain the thing that drew him closer. As he walked, he slipped, shivering, and tumbled down the steepening slope. His whole body was soaked with cold rain and with slimy mud. This would be difficult to explain to Smith, or to his parents for that matter. He was supposed to be reading quietly by the hearth, or sleeping in his bed, or drawing or writing. Composition was very important to his mother, so he had taken up the art of the short story. He had even been published in various magazines in London. His parents did not know of that, though. He hadn’t bothered to tell them.

Hodges suddenly remembered his father reading one of his son’s stories unwittingly in the drawing room. It had been an electrifying experience to hear what his father had thought, without all the bias of familiarity. There had been high praise, but many criticisms, and Hodges knew that he had significantly benefited from that.

The writer needs to stay away from those adverbs. Hodges grinned as he wiped himself off, shivering in the rain. He was chattering with cold, but his heart was warmed by memory and joy. Far too many weak verbs. And how could the culprit have attacked him with a penknife if he could simply hide in the closet?

Hodges clambered up the hill, clutching at any handhold to heave himself up step by step, his boots slipping but his teeth gritted in determination. Whatever he was looking for, it was just up ahead.

At last he got to the top of the hill and into a sudden clearing of trees. The whole ground was devoid of the arboreal towers, but in their place grew bushes and thickets and vines and brambles. But Hodges saw what he needed to uncover, and so he waded forward into the thick of it all. There was some sort of thing, in the middle of the clearing, neglected and long forgotten.

It was a stone, protruding from the ground, and as Hodges squinted at it through the slicing rain he felt a distinct feeling of dread. It looked exactly like a gravestone. A grave marker. He had seen them like this, before. It looked almost like a military grave.

Hodges hesitated as the rain and the wind drove into him, whipped at him. He realized that the weather was warning him: Go back! While you still can!

But Hodges ignored this realization. Was this his grandfather’s grave? He had perished in World War One, but no one knew where he had been buried in secret, except that he had been buried in secret. His name had been Patrick Hodges Eppett. He had been named after his grandfather.

There wasn’t enough visibility. Hodges was curious, despite the warnings of the storm. I need to stay, he thought, slowly walking forward toward the stone in the ground. It was covered in moss and ivy, so he put his hands forward and tore at it. His hands were clammy and soaked like prunes, filled with rainwater. They were cold and almost numb, and he had stiff fingers, but he still tugged at the ivy, ripping it off of his grandfather’s grave with all of his bedraggled strength. He struggled to clear the ivy for who knew how long, and finally it was mostly clear, and he rubbed his sore hands. He did not dare to look at the grave. Not yet. He was waiting. Would the storm abate now? Had it yet given up?

Hodges couldn’t tell, but there was some deep gut feeling that said that he should just turn around and walk back to the house. It told him that he should never ever come here again until…

He did not know. What? Something told him he would come back here. He couldn’t tell when, or why. He had to look, this had been beckoning to him, but maybe it was beckoning wrongly?

The storm raged. A sudden deafening blindness struck Hodges, flinging him back. There was no sight, and no hearing except for a persistent ringing in his ears, and he groped at the ground. He hurt, he ached. He seemed to ooze with too much energy, as if he had been burnt but ten times over. He felt pain flood his body until he didn’t know what was pain or what was comfort.

Lightning. His vision slowly returned, but he couldn’t move. He saw a blurry moving image of the darkness above him, and an involuntary groan escaped his lips in the echoes of the thunder.

Hodges felt the searing pain subside until it was a ringing and an intense burning ache, and he could move again because he was not weighted down by the excruciating sensation. He slowly got up from the mud and staggered over to the gravestone, where the air reeked of ozone. The ground was obviously scorched, and flickering flames whispered in the weeds but were snuffed out by the howling winds.

A sudden light filled the sky, brightening everything blue. Hodges looked up and saw the moon. And then, at last, despite the terrible warnings that he should walk away, he turned his head. He looked at the stone. In the light of the moon, he made out the cleared text, engraved in the stone as if it had been yesterday. It was new, maybe even too new, as if it was not yet ready to be new. There was a clarity to this stone that he had never seen. It was not worn by time at all. It was as if it had just appeared yesterday, underneath the ivy, pushing it upward. It had hidden under the cover of nature, pretending to be ancient and old.

Because of this the chiseled name was even more frightening, even more fresh and horrifying, because its time had not yet come.

Hodges saw the Royal Airforce insignia at the top (his grandfather had served in the Army) and then his eyes brought the utter doom that he had not been meant to see, the cause for which nature had nearly struck him dead:

FLIGHT LIEUTENANT

H.A.W. FORTON

PILOT

ROYAL AIRFORCE

29TH JUNE 1943

✞

Flight Lieutenant Hodges Aaron Wesley Forton, Pilot in the Royal Airforce, died June 29th, 1943.

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All right, that's it! Hope you enjoyed the story. So, what do you think of it in general, what do you think of the ending? Any suggestions for next time? Whatever it is, comment below, and don't forget to give suggestions for next Mad Monday.