Graveyard Shift Read online

  She meant parks with wide-open spaces, well-tended green grass, and lakes replete with birdlife. But I preferred places where everything grew wild and tangled with thorns and mosses and things half buried. I liked to see what nature did when people didn’t interfere.

  “Just don’t go to the cemetery,” she said. “If you do, I’ll know.”

  She didn’t say how she’d know. And she didn’t say what was so wrong about it, either.

  Morbid curiosity, she called it. But there were entire histories there. You could read the inscriptions and piece together the stories of folks who’d lived and grown old or who’d gone too soon and while they’d lived they may have changed the world in some way. They may have invented something, or written a great book, or painted a famous portrait or posed for one. Or maybe all they’d done was be a good mother or father to the people buried alongside them.

  She knew I liked the kind of stories where flesh-eating creatures came alive underground, pushed up soil and stones and lumbered into the dark. She knew the comics and books and action figures that filled the shelves in my room meant more to me than almost anything. But she didn’t seem to know I knew these things were make-believe.

  “Promise you won’t go,” she said, halfway out the door.

  “I promise.”

  “Do something positive with your day. Don’t waste it. Life’s too short.”

  “How short?”

  “Don’t be smart. You know what I mean.”

  She pulled me toward her, quickly pecked the top of my head, and set off for work.

  I didn’t need to lie because I didn’t think I’d have to go looking in cemeteries for Mr. October. He couldn’t spend all his time in them. After Mum left I went through the phone book, but I couldn’t find anyone with his name. Maybe he was listed in the business section, I reasoned — he’d said he worked as a clerk — but the book only included local businesses and I’d seen him two hundred miles away in Seaborough. He could be anywhere.

  I decided the reference section at the library might help me cast a wider net. I went out and crossed London Fields, which was crammed with early sunbathers setting up barbecues, and turned along Lamb Lane.

  Even in the daylight, the closed workshops and warehouses under the bridge looked like they were hiding something. The sudden crash of corrugated iron shutters made me start and hurry the rest of the way to the thoroughfare. A thick, yeasty smell from a nearby bakery followed me on the air.

  At the end of Lamb Lane, there’s a short alleyway with a bicycle lane just before the pedestrian lights on Mare Street. A man was lying there, flat on his back, belly up. His chest rose and fell with each breath he took, and his stringy hair was peppery gray like his beard. The scruffy clothing he wore looked like it might have something living in it besides him.

  He looked harmless enough, I thought, but passersby took one glance and walked quickly away. Some didn’t glance toward him at all.

  I stood over him, not sure what to do. I was worried he might be sick. I didn’t get too close, though, because of the scent coming off him, sweet and sour like the yeasty smell from the bakery.

  Despite myself, I yelped and stepped back sharply when he opened one eye — a filmy green eye with the tiniest pupil — and looked straight at me.

  “Who are you?” he growled. “What d’you want?”

  It took me a second to find my voice. “Thought you were in trouble, mister. Thought you needed help.”

  “Go away,” he said. “Go on, kid, get lost. Don’t need any help.”

  He closed his eye and drifted away again.

  Something told me I should stay. I’d seen others like him before, broken men with sunken eyes and rank hair sleeping in doorways or hunched up in cardboard beds. I’d seen Mum hurry past them like everyone else, and once she physically dragged me away by my arm. You see this kind of thing every day and it terrifies people, but I don’t know why.

  The man was snoring now, his face beaded with sweat, and the yeasty factory smell seemed worse than ever.

  “Mister,” I said. “Don’t you have somewhere to go? It’s way too hot outside to sleep on concrete. There’s a place across the street for guys like you. They might have a room.”

  The man groaned, covering his face with his hands.

  “You still here?”

  “What are you doing down there?” I said. “What happened to you? Why won’t you let me help?”

  His lungs whistled as he inhaled and exhaled.

  “Are you married?” I said. “Or were you married before? Don’t you have friends and family who might be missing you, wondering where you are?”

  He shifted onto his side, propped himself up on an elbow, and glared at me with his one sleepy green eye. The other eye still rested shut.

  “Now I’ve got a question for you,” he said. “Why don’t you please bugger off?”

  He sat up sharply, faster than I’d imagined he’d be able to move. For the first time I began to feel scared.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything. I was just trying to —”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t eat you alive. But didn’t your mother ever tell you to let sleeping dogs lie, Ben Harvester?”

  “Pardon?”

  I backed up, not sure I’d heard him correctly.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Ben Harvester, turned twelve years old in May. Son of Jim Harvester and Donna Harvester, formerly Williams of the Williamses of Seaborough. How do I know this? I know your entire ancestry, boy. And here’s another lesson your mother and father never taught you: Never poke a dead thing with a stick unless you’re sure it’s dead. Otherwise it might jump up and bite.”

  His second, lazy eye opened and his gaze was suddenly twice as intense. The green irises seemed grayer and shone so brightly, I had to look away for a second. Then his frown faded and he began to grin, the wrinkles and cracks of his face twitching, rearranging themselves into a different shape.

  When he got to his feet, even his clothing seemed to fit differently. These weren’t the same stinky rags he’d had on before. They weren’t fashionable or expensive, either, but more like the kind of grungy, dark clothes you might find at a secondhand stall in Camden.

  I looked around, up and down Mare Street, not sure what was happening to him but hoping someone else might see. The traffic was light, except for the odd vehicle buzzing past like an angry insect. For the moment there were no other pedestrians anywhere in sight.

  It was just him and me.

  “Who are you, mister?” I said.

  “Guess what,” he said. “You’re about to find out.”

  And then the transformation began.

  “Now,” he said, “look, see, and wonder.”

  I’d seen magic shows before — disappearing acts, quick-change artists, death-defying stunts involving fire and water and chain saws — but I’d never seen anything like this. And it was happening right in front of me.

  The man spread out his hands as if to say, See here? Nothing up my sleeves. With bony white fingers he began very slowly to massage his scalp, moving his fingertips in small, regular circles. Then all at once he pressed and pulled sharply downward to his jaw, and the face I’d seen a second ago folded over itself and came away with a dull, wet snap, like surgical gloves being peeled off.

  Underneath was another face, thirty or forty years older, with soft gray eyes, a shiny bald pate, and white-whiskered chops — a face I recognized at once.

  “Gotcha!” he said, nearly choking with laughter.

  “Mr. October!”

  “I knew you were looking for me, young man. Thought I’d save you the trouble.”

  “How did you know?”

  Mr. October just smiled.

  In his left hand he held the remains of the face he’d removed. It hung there limply, wrinkled and expressionless except for the faintest of smiles on its lips. He let it fall to the ground, where it lay for a moment like a snake’s cast-off skin. Then the breeze from
a passing 55 bus swept it up, whipping it through the air until it broke apart into dust and scattered across the street.

  I stared at him, terrified. His features were restless, as if ready to change again. Nervous ticks dragged at the corners of his mouth, pulling his smile out of shape.

  “How . . . how did you do it?” I asked. “What kind of trick was that?”

  “Trick? That was no trick,” he said, again reaching for his face and pulling. “That was who I really am. But so is this, and this!”

  With the swiftest, smallest of movements, Mr. October tore off the old man’s face, and the face beneath that, and the one beneath that. One moment he was a boy not much older than me with mischievous eyes and a lopsided grin, the next a tanned, clean-cut, middle-aged man who might’ve been a lawyer or banker. Then another familiar face, the surly derelict with stringy hair.

  “Oh, I’ve done that one already,” he said and quickly moved on, becoming an actor I recognized from old black-and-white films, then a politician who’d passed away last year. Very briefly I found myself staring into the eyes of a huge-headed snake, scaly and shining dully, with a darting forked tongue.

  Mask after mask came away in his hands, torn free and discarded, blown to dust on the breeze. It was like a living slideshow made of flesh and bone. No two faces were ever the same. None kept their shape for long.

  “This,” he said, ripping and tearing, “is who I was yesterday, and this is who I’ll be tomorrow. Every man has more than one face, Ben, one for every occasion. I just happen to have more than most.”

  “Who are they?” I asked. “Where did you get them?”

  “You’re all questions, Ben Harvester, but I’ll give you a hint. It’s all you’ll be able to understand until I’ve shown you everything else.”

  The slideshow seemed to have stopped. He’d settled on a face that made me think of a pirate’s — long dark hair swept back from a high swarthy forehead, a stud earring in one earlobe, narrow black eyes with bushy eyebrows that nearly met in the middle. A rash of dark stubble covered his neck and jaws, and when he looked at me squarely the lines of his brow formed a capital Y.

  This was still Mr. October, just not the Mr. October I’d expected to find. This one made me more than a little anxious.

  The next time he spoke, it was in a rasping sandpaper voice I didn’t recognize.

  “You can’t expect to understand yet,” he said, “but I’ll tell you this for free: Everyone you meet, everyone you help or who helps you, and everyone you love or hate or who loves or hates you back — they all become part of you, for better or worse. These faces are all the people I’ve ever crossed paths with. Some I’ve crossed swords with too.”

  “And the snake . . . ?”

  Mr. October shrugged. “Sometimes you try to help and get bitten for your trouble. Hence, I’m one percent reptile.”

  He flicked out a forked tongue to prove it.

  “Anyway, Ben, put it there,” he said, offering his hand. “I’m glad to have found you.”

  We shook, and his grip had the same clammy coolness I remembered from the first time.

  “I thought I found you,” I said.

  “Yes, but you wouldn’t have tracked me down in a lifetime if I hadn’t allowed you to.”

  “Suppose not, you being the master of disguise and all.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then why?”

  The Y of his forehead shrank as his features steadied. He smiled, all dull gray teeth except for a single silver front tooth so polished, I could see a tiny version of myself reflected in it.

  “You’re a good kid,” he said. “A born helper. You saw an old man in distress at the cemetery and you made him comfortable and gave him your last drop of water. You saw a homeless guy on the street and didn’t look the other way like everyone else. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Never really looked at it that way,” I said.

  “No, because you didn’t do what you did to score points. You saw someone less fortunate than yourself and tried to lend a hand.”

  I had to stop him there. “Fortunate? I wouldn’t say I was that. Dad’s gone and who knows if he’ll ever come back, Mum’s stressed and too tired to speak to me half the time, we’re broke and in a new place where I don’t know anyone and don’t know what to do with myself.”

  He wasn’t impressed. “That’s not so bad. It’s an ideal situation, if you ask me. No ties, nothing to hold you back, no one to stop you.”

  “Stop me from what?”

  “From finding your destiny,” Mr. October said, black eyes shining. “Your true calling.”

  Across the street, a handful of pedestrians were waiting to cross at the light. In the hazy heat, their features were blurry and melting, as if they were about to change too. A few others walked past us: an arguing couple with a three-wheel stroller, a gang of teenage girls eating pink ice cream. None of them paid us any attention, but they didn’t hurry away like the others had. For a moment I wondered if we were invisible, if everything Mr. October had shown me had taken place in another dimension.

  “Funny old day,” he said, watching the sky. “Look there.”

  Above the baking hot city, above the world, a full moon floated in a cloudless sky, so bright I had to shield my eyes to see it.

  “So what’s my true calling?” I asked. “Are you going to tell me or what?”

  He grinned and stretched out his arms, locking his fingers together until the joints crackled and clicked.

  “My, but you’re hard work,” he said. “Always the questions. But I’m hungry! Let’s take a walk.”

  We set off along Lamb Lane and crossed London Fields through a fog of barbecue smoke. Everywhere in the park, sun lovers were roasting themselves alive in shorts and swimsuits. On Broadway Market, cyclists swarmed in all directions between the chic coffee shops and stalls of brightly colored fruits and vegetables, not slowing or giving way, so we had to duck aside to avoid being clobbered.

  We turned off at the bridge, heading down to the canal. It felt cooler alongside the water, and the pale moon’s reflection on its surface kept pace with us as we went.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said. “You’re no ordinary office clerk, are you?”

  “That’s right,” Mr. October said. “But, then, my office is no ordinary office. Here, have an apple.”

  Wiggling his fingers, he reached up to his right and picked one from the air and handed it to me, rosy and red.

  “Good trick,” I said, “but I bet you stole it from one of the stalls.”

  “If that’s what you’d like to think,” he said, plucking another for himself as if from an invisible tree.

  I was cautious at first about biting into the fruit. If it hadn’t come from a stall, then where? But it tasted delicious, bitter and sweet and crisp. We walked on, munching, not speaking for a while.

  “So what else can you do?” I said. “Read minds? See the future?”

  “Not exactly, not the way you mean, but something tells me if you don’t step this way right now, you’ll regret it.”

  Before I could fathom what he meant, he’d taken my arm, yanking me to his side of the footpath just as a girl cyclist went flying past at top speed exactly where I’d been walking. I caught a glimpse of her scraggy fair hair and wraparound sunglasses as she whisked by.

  “God, how about that?” I stared after the girl as she shrank into the middle distance. “She would’ve flattened me if you hadn’t done that.”

  “Some people have no morals,” he said, a note of anger in his sandpaper voice. “She stole that bike, you know. And the sunglasses too.”

  “How could you know a thing like that?”

  “I saw her leaving a shop back there on the street. Saw the look on her face and knew at once. I pick these things up from people.”

  He was glaring after the bike in the distance when the girl seemed to lose control, as if she’d hit a stone or a crack in the path, and went skewing to her left toward t
he bank. The cycle struck the edge and upended, carrying the girl into the water with an almighty splash.

  “Nothing to do with me,” Mr. October said innocently. “If she hadn’t been thieving, she wouldn’t have been in such a rush, and that would never have happened.”

  We headed to where she and the bike had hit the water. The bike had already sunk without a trace and the girl was splashing frantically a good distance from the bank.

  “Can’t swim,” Mr. October confided. “That’s how it looks to me.”

  “She’s gonna drown,” I said.

  “Not only that, but she’s lost her sunglasses.” He didn’t seem at all concerned. “All that fuss and trouble for nothing.”

  “But aren’t you going to help? Maybe I should go in after her. . . .” I was starting to panic.

  “There you go again: born helper.” He patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry. Someone else will be along in a minute. And besides, she’s not what she seems. She’s not on the list.”

  No sooner had he spoken than a small group of people — two more cyclists, a trio of joggers — appeared in the distance, heading our way. Mr. October set off along the bank, ignoring the girl’s screams and splashes. It took me much longer to drag myself away.

  She vanished below the surface, then shot up again spitting water and thrashing her arms. It wasn’t right to leave her like this, but the others were closer now and had seen what was happening. They would help.

  “It’s OK. You’ll be out of there in no time,” I called to the girl, but I couldn’t be sure she heard. Then what Mr. October had said began to dawn on me, and I set off after him, running.

  “What list?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Everything in its own time and place, Ben. Just like the preacher said.” He stretched through a yawn, wiggling his fingers. “All this excitement is making me hungry again. Fancy a hot dog?”

  The hot dog he plucked from the air for me came with both ketchup and mustard and an extra helping of caramelized onions. We ate in silence for a time, and then Mr. October let out an appreciative burp, which I matched with one of my own. We both laughed.