I haven't posted on here since the end of last year and feel an urgent need to resurrect this blog with a graveyard tale.
So, if you're housebound this Halloween, hiding from those pesky short door-to-door sugar fiends, then why not settle in with this unconventional ghost story?
Come one, come all. Gather round, gather round...
The headstone read:
HERE LIES VERNON COSSETT,
PURVEYOR OF MERRIMENT.
BORN 31ST MARCH 1924
DIED 1ST NOVEMBER 1999
Born a day before April Fool's Day
and the day after Halloween. This made sense.
Vernon Cossett had run a small but
successful joke shop called Just Cossett
Is which his son had since inherited.
Patrick Cossett was now stood at his
father's graveside, a squat man with a prominent bottom row of teeth and a ginger
widow's peak. I gave him my ticket.
"You're the first," he
told me, "Usually there are a few Goth types that get in early but maybe
the wind blew their big black jackets away."
He laughed. I didn't.
He looked me up and down. "I
didn't see you last year."
` He wouldn't have. Though I was aware
of the spectacles surrounding Vernon Cossett's grave I was among those who had found them tacky and a deliberate ploy to pull in tourists.
Patrick's eyes squinted as he gave a
toothy grin. "You've heard the stories though, eh? Everyone's heard
them." And yet he went on anyway.
"Dad loved his pranks and
japes. It became an integral part of my rearing, our household. He liked to
make people laugh well enough but there was something far more worthwhile to him than
that.
"You know that short, sharp
intake of breath you get when someone startles you? Dad was addicted to hearing
that. The way he saw it, a laugh could be faked but not that, not a breath. And
if everyone was smiling by the end of it then why should it be a bad
thing?" Patrick's laugh had a
wet crackle to it, the kind that comes straight from the back of the throat. He saw how I was looking at him, suddenly seemed hurt.
"He didn't want to be
forgotten. No-one does. He was the only one to visit granddad's grave after he
died. Sad but common enough. Dad didn't want that for himself." A glint
came to Patrick's big wet eyes. "So he used his unique position as a 'purveyor of merriment' to prepare for his death. He made
sure that no-one would forget about him, that he would still have visitors long
after he passed."
Patrick patted the headstone. It was
indeed worn with age.
"I didn't know about it at
first. When this thing started bleeding in 2000, I was as shocked as everyone.
I was overseas but the news coverage brought me back home soon enough.
"No bugger would get close
other than me. Blood is blood, after all. Still I had a hunch: the old
man always had a love of fake blood. And fake it was: tiny capsules
implanted in the deepest indentation at the top here. I reached inside and
found a device; a timed trap, I suppose, rigged to crush the capsules around this time
on the first Halloween of the 21st Century.
"I admired his ingenuity. I
knew of it but never realised how far he would actually go for this."
Patrick grinned again. "It inspired me. I dug through his records and
found a letter addressed to me with implicit instructions which I followed
though not without some slight improvements.
"The 'spectacles', as he called them, had to be done every three
years. Dad knew that three would set off the supernaturally-minded folks and
make it like a proper haunting. It gave me plenty of time to get the resources
ready. My favourites were the light pads beneath the top soil, the sound
deterrents set between here and the entrance, even the worm charming if it
hadn't been a bitch trying to get them into a half-decent circle."
Patrick stared down at the soil
which he had so often disturbed.
"Seventeen years now," he
muttered, "And I'm still at it. I must be crazy. To be honest I'm thinking
of capping it off in 2020, sort of a foresight joke, eh? Nah. It's a lot of
work."
I asked him what it would be this
year. He looked the most amused that I'd seen him all night.
"I can't tell you that, mate.
That comes after. Then again," he said, looking behind me, "I don't
know where everyone else is. The media tend to come in all-weather if no-one
else."
I told him they wouldn't be coming
yet.
"Why not?"
I had stopped them from coming. All
of them.
"How?"
I told him that I couldn't tell him
that. I didn't mention anything about there being an 'after'.
I heard it then, what his father had
been talking about. That short, sharp intake of breath.
Patrick forced a smile. "So
it's come to this, eh? The last prank is that there is no last prank? There
won't be anyone around to see it."
I said that depends. Does anyone
know that he is here?
"Of course."
Then there would always be someone
to put on a show for.
After that I checked for the latest
graveside deception. Noise boxes in each of the surrounding trees. They made ghostly groans. He had been
running out of ideas, after all.
I took them all down, knowing they
would be too much.
The son half-buried in his father's
grave would be surprise enough.
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