Callaghan has a minion!

Bo the Digger

Every night they came at the stroke of midnight. It hadn’t started that way, the groundskeeping job at the local cemetery had simply been a peaceful graveyard shift where Cal could sit and think away the troubles of his day. He would sit on one of the cold, stone benches and stare up into the dark sky, listening to the rustling of the leaves around him, the stars twinkling overhead. It had been good.

And then, it happened.

One night, while making his rounds, he had seen the dirt of one of his graves was disturbed. He hadn’t thought much of it, and had quickly smoothed it over. But it had happened again, night after night, and eventually it seemed he was fixing every grave each night. That had been the easy part.

As he was smoothing over one of the graves, he’d hit something with his shovel. He’d bent down to see what it was and recoiled once he’s realized it was a hand. And it was moving. The dead weren’t dead and certainly weren’t at rest anymore. Cal watched the hand, grasping and trying to push the dirt aside. He wasn’t really afraid, just curious. When the first light of dawn hit, the hand stopped moving.

Eventually the dead began escaping their graves. At first, he’d hidden from them, not sure what to expect. He hoped he wasn’t dealing with a zombie apocalypse or something, but he’d wanted to be prepared, so he’d packed his groundskeeper shack with several knives, guns and various bludgeoning tools. Luckily, they didn’t seem aggressive, they would just stand around and stare at the sky until dawn. It was eerie seeing them all facing the same direction, staring upwards- even the ones who didn’t have eyeballs anymore.

Cal had eventually taken to watching them when he’d realized that they seemed safe. He made sure that none wandered off or made too much of a fuss. After dawn, once they had all gone back to being dead, he would grab his shovel and bury them all back in their graves. It was slimy work that sometimes ended in corpses missing an arm or a leg, and sometimes ended in him covered in bits of flesh and blood, but it seemed to him as if it was his duty to the dead to make sure they had proper burials night after night. He never told anyone about this part of his job, and luckily no one ever questioned why he sometimes came home covered in dirt and gore.

overlay: Wereniss
profile: Arie
story: Trithie