Horror

Gravediggers

It was a cold autumn night. A dense fog had rolled

across London, it was impossible to see anything

more than five feet ahead of you. The mist reduced

people to vague, ghostly figures, or disembodied

voices.

In short, it was the perfect Halloween night.

Fifteen year old Michael Blake shivered as he

walked through the fog with his best friend, John.

On John's insistence, he'd managed to give his

parents the slip so that they could perform that

time-honored Halloween ritual- to walk through a

deserted cemetery in the middle of the night.

Conveniently, there was a supposedly haunted

neighborhood cemetery nearby.

Trust John to come up with an idea like this ,

thought Michael. But he wasn't going to complain.

One of John's ideas had once saved his life.

Somehow, John always seemed to know the right

thing to do, even if it seemed absurd at the time.

And then, out of the fog, the cemetery gates

suddenly appeared before them-old and disused.

The iron had rusted to brown so that they looked

like twisted pieces of wood that had been bound

together. In fact the entire cemetery was in

disrepair, the authorities weren't bothered about it

and the relatives of the people in the cemetery didn't

complain. The cemetery is abandoned and unloved,

thought Michael, perhaps just like the souls of its

residents. Then he chided himself. Why did he let

such weird thoughts enter his head?

John kicked the cemetery gates, which swung open

with a loud groan of protest. Michael looked around

nervously, but nobody seemed to have heard them.

As they entered the cemetery, John suddenly

stopped.

"I almost forgot," he said casually. "We'll have to

watch out for gravediggers."

"Gravediggers?"

"The poorest of London's poor. They're usually

homeless and jobless. They go about stealing from

the dead. They rob graves of glasses, watches, even

the clothes worn by the corpse, if they're desperate.

And most of them are armed with knives."

Nice of him to tell me now. Michael shivered. But

once again, he didn't complain, and followed John

into the cemetery.

This is so cliché , Michael thought to himself. Two