The cemetery was behaving itself. It was midnight, the witching hour, and precisely nothing was happening. There was no ethereal mist, no unearthly glows, no furtive scurrying figures and definitely no stirring from the dead who currently resided there. All in all it was a pretty normal state of affairs.
The cemetery was an old fashioned Northern affair, walled in dark red brick with a pair of heavy wrought iron gates at the front. One or two mausoleums dotted the ground, showing off outrageously amongst the more humble gravestones like a footballer down his local showing off his latest expensive purchase.
The peacefulness of the night was interrupted by the noisy passage of three lads down the high road. The familiar outline of three semi-professional lager drinkers was just about visible in the glow of the sodium street lighting.
Lurching in a practised way that kept too much pressure from being placed on his worn out left shoe, Harry eased the overfilled carrier bag from one hand to the other. The plastic was beginning to stretch alarmingly under the weight of inexpensive lager. The task completed without major catastrophe, Harry then proceeded to flex his cramped fingers mightily.
“There is indeed much money to be made from the invention of a carrier bag that has handles that don’t turn into cheese wire the second you put anything heavier than a tin of baked beans in them.” said the injured youth.
“I believe some chap at the Nasa jet propulsion lab is working on just that issue, even as we speak. A PhD thesis on the subject, no less!” said Loz, not entirely addressing the issue but having a fairly good stab at it.
Alex’s brow wrinkled for a moment as he sought to work out the time difference between soggy England and sunny California in order to see if the chap was actually likely to be in the lab working on the problem at that precise moment and not, for example, asleep in bed. He then gave up, remembering that America was decidedly odd and students often worked hard and couldn’t drink until they were old enough to graduate.
“A pox on them and all their things!” exclaimed Alex, having had quite enough of the idea of an alcohol free university. He refused to elaborate further though, leading to a confused silence amongst the lads.
The silence continued unabated for a while and then subtly changed in nature. The cone of silence around Loz shifted from puzzlement, to contentment to deep thought. Thoughts of the cemetery, of spades, of shovels and arcane experiments raced through his head only to be interrupted by a post box.
“Ouch!” exclaimed the ginger lad, finding that man always comes out worse in a one on one with a large inanimate object. The moment was gone, the spell broken and insane and dangerous thoughts fled his mind to be replaced by ones involving lager, the need to go to the loo and a strong desire to wreak dire vengeance on the postal service for this latest injustice.
Comments are disabled for this post