The Cemetery Diaries
Bad Moon
The rain patters on the shingles, each jutting board striking a different note. The wood sticks out like the frills of an old pinecone, rain-streaked, ragged, and grey and black as the cap and gills of an undergrowth mushroom. The sky is gloomy, crowded with ashen clouds that the lightning cracks like the crust around a volcano. Ideal weather, I declare, and you manage a weak smile. By now, you’ve learned to humour me. Call it a survival tactic. I’ve already parked the motorbike in an abandoned asphalt lot, and now I stand with arms open, inviting the storm.
Get under the shelter of the lich gate, Trixie, and sit on the threshold to the cemetery garden. There are still some things I have to explain to you. Firstly, you may have been mistaken about the thrills of unlife. It’s a half-life we live, until we’ve got no life left. To be a vampire is to always be depleted. You can look forward to being permanently tired from now on. It’s so much more effort to get up out of a metaphorical coffin every night than to awake in a bed. In waking, you have to dislodge much more of the world than can ever be found in dreams.
Secondly, to be a vampire is not automatically to relinquish fear, or to make valiance redundant. There is nothing worse to fear than human minds. Contained in every head is a separate universe. The weight of so many paradigms can be crushing, and the difference between universes is enough to inspire murder, religion and madness against those things that cannot be understood. Our minds are different from those of most people, but that does not make us superior in all things. As a stranger to the minds of most mortals, you also have more to fear. Some will call you evil, and some will call you good. Some will call you conflicted. They may say that overcoming an evil nature is worth more than being born free of sins to conquer. More still will refute the existence of good and evil altogether, and remark on arbitrariness of such measures. But in all philosophies, you will be a focal point, for you are that which ought not to exist. Never forget that.
Sit, and let me brush the wet locks from your face. You look waterlogged, like something that crawled out of a well. Beauty you might have bargained for, but never received. Allure is something you will have to perfect yourself, if you are going to be a hunter. Comb your hair out in the church, sit on the dry pews and let yourself thaw. Com along. I lead you past the rose gardens, where all the clusters of petals have closed for the night, lying in silk as the dead lie in lined coffins. This church and its yard may be ancient, but they are still in use. You will find settlers from the late eighteenth century buried here, alongside the reverends of yesteryear and the lost spouses and children of today. The moon lies equally upon them all, shining on inscriptions new and faded alike, and making silver out of pewter plaques. Like us, in darkness everything is transformed.
Inside , the church smells of pine and dust and resin. Huge beams criss-cross the vaulted ceiling, hung with cobwebs too lofty to attract the attention of cleaners. The floor is cold, ancient stone, worn smooth down the aisles by so many thousands of footsteps. The pews are tiny and cramped, built for shorter generations. Near the exit is a stone basin filled with holy water, a perfectly still circle like a mirror, while up the far end, beneath the stained glass windows, lacquered lecterns and tables are designed to catch sunset’s gold. I lead you down the aisle, my newest bride in shadow, and let the emptiness bless us both. We descent the narrow stairway in the alcove, the one that seems to peer into a basement. The stairs are worn to curves, making the passage like a tunnel. The ceiling is hewn from the foundational rock. Finally, we reach a musty room with scents of damp. We are in the crypt.
I bar the way behind us, sealing the stairway with an iron grate to which only I now have a key. This has been my home for a century, the disused corpse cellar of the oldest graveyard in the country. Rookwood, they call it. Tourists come and go by day, and weddings are still held here in the velvet dusk. The past has been enshrined like a fairy-tale in marble plaques fixed to the church’s insides, describing the donations of prominent families and memorials to young men lost in forgotten wars. Nobody knows that, far beneath the floor, another fairy-tale sleeps.
You’ll sleep with me tonight, dear one, in the shelves of the catacombs, where the dust lies thick as a carpet and the rats scurry. You’d better get used to it. Being dead, I can tell, is not at all what you anticipated. The bad moon watch over us all.
Get under the shelter of the lich gate, Trixie, and sit on the threshold to the cemetery garden. There are still some things I have to explain to you. Firstly, you may have been mistaken about the thrills of unlife. It’s a half-life we live, until we’ve got no life left. To be a vampire is to always be depleted. You can look forward to being permanently tired from now on. It’s so much more effort to get up out of a metaphorical coffin every night than to awake in a bed. In waking, you have to dislodge much more of the world than can ever be found in dreams.
Secondly, to be a vampire is not automatically to relinquish fear, or to make valiance redundant. There is nothing worse to fear than human minds. Contained in every head is a separate universe. The weight of so many paradigms can be crushing, and the difference between universes is enough to inspire murder, religion and madness against those things that cannot be understood. Our minds are different from those of most people, but that does not make us superior in all things. As a stranger to the minds of most mortals, you also have more to fear. Some will call you evil, and some will call you good. Some will call you conflicted. They may say that overcoming an evil nature is worth more than being born free of sins to conquer. More still will refute the existence of good and evil altogether, and remark on arbitrariness of such measures. But in all philosophies, you will be a focal point, for you are that which ought not to exist. Never forget that.
Sit, and let me brush the wet locks from your face. You look waterlogged, like something that crawled out of a well. Beauty you might have bargained for, but never received. Allure is something you will have to perfect yourself, if you are going to be a hunter. Comb your hair out in the church, sit on the dry pews and let yourself thaw. Com along. I lead you past the rose gardens, where all the clusters of petals have closed for the night, lying in silk as the dead lie in lined coffins. This church and its yard may be ancient, but they are still in use. You will find settlers from the late eighteenth century buried here, alongside the reverends of yesteryear and the lost spouses and children of today. The moon lies equally upon them all, shining on inscriptions new and faded alike, and making silver out of pewter plaques. Like us, in darkness everything is transformed.
Inside , the church smells of pine and dust and resin. Huge beams criss-cross the vaulted ceiling, hung with cobwebs too lofty to attract the attention of cleaners. The floor is cold, ancient stone, worn smooth down the aisles by so many thousands of footsteps. The pews are tiny and cramped, built for shorter generations. Near the exit is a stone basin filled with holy water, a perfectly still circle like a mirror, while up the far end, beneath the stained glass windows, lacquered lecterns and tables are designed to catch sunset’s gold. I lead you down the aisle, my newest bride in shadow, and let the emptiness bless us both. We descent the narrow stairway in the alcove, the one that seems to peer into a basement. The stairs are worn to curves, making the passage like a tunnel. The ceiling is hewn from the foundational rock. Finally, we reach a musty room with scents of damp. We are in the crypt.
I bar the way behind us, sealing the stairway with an iron grate to which only I now have a key. This has been my home for a century, the disused corpse cellar of the oldest graveyard in the country. Rookwood, they call it. Tourists come and go by day, and weddings are still held here in the velvet dusk. The past has been enshrined like a fairy-tale in marble plaques fixed to the church’s insides, describing the donations of prominent families and memorials to young men lost in forgotten wars. Nobody knows that, far beneath the floor, another fairy-tale sleeps.
You’ll sleep with me tonight, dear one, in the shelves of the catacombs, where the dust lies thick as a carpet and the rats scurry. You’d better get used to it. Being dead, I can tell, is not at all what you anticipated. The bad moon watch over us all.