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Chapter 8
A Mourner
I was on top of the world as I
drove away from the restaurant. It was hard to process the wide range of
emotions I had experienced over the last twenty-four hours. I went from haunted
to heartbroken to happy. Amazing.
Despite my assurances to the
contrary, I was already imagining what it would be like to date Teri, but I had
no illusions. I would never violate our agreement by asking her out
romantically unless she sent some very strong signals in my direction. I learned
the hard way during my thirty-six-years that dating wasn’t my strong suit. Friendship
was a reassuringly open-ended thing. Dating wasn’t. Every date was a pass/fail audition.
I wouldn’t risk a promising open-ended friendship with an attractive,
like-minded woman for an uncertain romantic future. Still, I was already hoping
that Teri would come to Gina’s wedding with me. Going to her wedding alone,
provided I was actually invited, was too pathetic for me to even consider.
My thoughts were so focused on Teri
that I didn’t put too much active thought to where I was driving. I planned to
head straight home, so I was surprised when Eternal Faith came into sight as I
crested a hill. I felt an instant pang of fear, as if some alien hand reached
deep inside of me and twisted my intestines. I took a deep breath and closed my
eyes for as long as my position in traffic allowed. When I opened my eyes, I
took solace in the bright sunlight. It dispelled the evil. There were no ghosts
or spirits. No undead. No haunting. No supernatural. Once again, my rational
pride took over. I refused to become a victim of superstition. I decided to
face my fear head on.
I turned into the cemetery. There were
few cars in sight. Sunday was a big day for visiting the dead, but most people
made their appearances after church services. It was three-thirty now. The rush
was over. People had left their flowers and returned to the places of the
living.
“What am I doing here?” I asked
myself but quickly dismissed the thought. I had every right to be here. After
all, one day, this place was going to be my permanent home.
The road took me past the rise
where my immediate family was buried, but I tried to ignore them. My Catholic
upbringing was to blame. I always remembered the lesson old Father Isidore gave
us before our first confession. People who died with mortal sins on their souls,
like suicide, were damned to hell. Although I turned my back on mother church
decades ago, those words still haunted me, especially after the death of my
brother. What cruelty! Lenny never had a chance in this world, and, if Father
Isidore was right, he was damned to hell in the next one. The fate of my mother
was even crueler. She lost a husband and a son and had to deal with cancer too.
Now she was damned to hell because of one decision she made in a moment of
weakness? A God who would do that was no God at all—even if He did exist.
Father Isidore’s words got my blood
boiling again, but I couldn’t deal with those emotions now. I kept driving on
the main road past the office. It was closed, but the mausoleum remained open
until five o’clock. I often wondered about that. Did one of the employees
actually drive into the cemetery and lock the large glass doors at five
o’clock? I doubted it. I suspected that
they only posted the warning signs to discourage curiosity seekers or possible
vandals.
“What if they really locked it?” I
asked myself aloud.
I shuddered at the possibility of
getting locked inside the mausoleum overnight. I imagined hearing the click of the
lock and racing toward the door to see Jose Garcia, the groundskeeper, driving
away. That would be a true nightmare. With the mausoleum looming ahead of me, I
quickly checked my watch again. Three-thirty-two. Still plenty of time for a
quick visit.
But whom was I visiting? Why had I even driven there? This was definitely
not something I planned to do. I drove those questions out of my head. Once
again, my rational mind pushed back against my superstitious fears. There was
no rational explanation for why I had driven to the cemetery, but I refused to
turn away. Nothing in that mausoleum could hurt me. The dead were dead.
I should have invited Teri, I suddenly thought to myself. “No,” I immediately answered
myself aloud.
Why would I think that? That was crazy. I had no desire to involve
her in this madness. I had even stopped her from looking at the Kostek memorial
online.
I calmed considerably when a brown,
four-door Mercedes sedan parked in front of the mausoleum. At least I wouldn’t
be alone inside. I didn’t think I could face that prospect now, even in the
bright light of day. I parked behind the Mercedes, grabbed my camera, and hurried
over to the large, swinging glass doors of the mausoleum. I saw the other
visitor, an elderly white man, walking slowly toward the Kostek vault.
I stepped inside as quietly as
possible. I kept my distance, feigning interest in the other vaults as I slowly
followed behind the old man. The same palatable sense of gloom that I felt the
day before still filled the place, despite the fact that most of the dead
flowers had been safely swept away. New flowers, recently placed by mourners in
the decorative bronze vases alongside the vaults today, were already withering.
They clearly wouldn’t last the afternoon.
I discreetly returned my attention
to the mourner. He was balding, but a few uncombed gray hairs made their
presence known. He wore a bushy moustache and an old, navy blue suit. His overcoat
might have seemed out of season, but it was quite appropriate in this
marble-lined refrigerator. It made me wish I had worn a jacket. Goose pimples rose
on my arms.
The man walked up to the Kostek
vault and stood silently for a moment before he knelt briefly and placed a
small bouquet of roses on the floor in front of it. Standing up, he quickly
turned around before I had the chance to look away. We made eye contact. I’m
not sure exactly what I saw in his eyes—indifference or disdain as he pointedly
turned away and kept walking toward the door in a path that would bring him
alongside me. It was unavoidable.
Over the course of the hundreds of
hours I spent in cemeteries, I made it a point never to disturb a mourner. Often
mourners asked me to help them find a grave, but I never approached someone on
my own. I knew I had to break my rule this time. I needed to speak with someone
who actually knew Elisabetta Kostek—and who could explain her strange hold over
me.
As I started toward him, the old man
pointedly turned his face further away from me. He veered toward the opposite
wall, but there was no way for him to leave without passing me.
“Excuse me,” I said. “May I ask you
a question?”
No response. No eye contact. But he
was passing me.
“Sir, may I talk to you for a
second?”
Without even giving me a glance, the
old man unexpectedly slapped my camera out of my hands. It hit the marble floor
with an expensive-sounding crack. I raced after it as it skidded awkwardly
across the floor in the direction of Kostek memorial. When I finally caught it,
I noticed a large crack in my fifty-millimeter lens. There was no fixing that. The
body of the camera seemed unscathed, and I still had my expensive telephoto
lens in the case.
I looked up from my wounded camera
to find Elisabetta staring at me from the photo on her vault. Her smile was
smug, as if she had been expecting me.
“Who are you?” I asked aloud.
She didn’t answer, of course. She
just continued to smile.
I turned away. The mausoleum was now
empty. The old man was gone. For a moment, I was tempted to check and see if he
left any kind of note with his flowers, but I was afraid to go any closer to the
vault. No, the door was the safer option. I started walking.
In a strange bout of paranoia, I
thought I could hear movement in the vaults alongside me. It was a gentle
rustling at first as the dead rose from their supposedly eternal sleep. Then
they began struggling when they realized they were trapped. They banged the
lids of their coffins against the roof of the vaults as their anger grew. As
the glass doors loomed before me, I imagined the dead would soon break their
coffins to pieces and then batter themselves against the vault doors until they
were free. By then, their anger would be unquenchable.
-->
My eyes remained glued to the door.
I was afraid what I would see if I turned either right or left. Suddenly
consumed by an additional fear that the old man had locked the door while I was
inside, I began to run. I knew I needed to get the hell out of that mausoleum—or
I would die.
Other Chapters:
Prologue - My Mother
Chapter 1 - RestingPlace.com
Chapter 2 - Elisabetta
Chapter 3 - The Upload
Chapter 4 - The Kobayashi Maru
Chapter 5 - Gina
Chapter 6 - Tombstone Teri
Chapter 7 - The Holy Redeemer Lonely Hearts Club
Chapter 8 - A Mourner
Chapter 9 - War Is Declared
Chapter 10 - The Motorcycle
Chapter 11 - Suspended
Chapter 12 - The Harbor
Chapter 13 - Bad News Betty
Learn more about the book Here.
While you're waiting for the next chapter of Chapel Street, feel free to read my memoir:
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