Blood Diamonds

Chapter 16

The Birth of Gertrude—1860

"Are you scared?" the boy mocked as he trudged through the tall grass that sprouted between the crumbling headstones. A thick mist snaked around the eerie graves and the moon was shrouded in grey clouds, offering little light to illuminate their path.

"No, I'm not afraid of anything," his companion replied. She did not know why she had agreed to do it in the first place. Why had she agreed to that ridiculous dare at all? Walking through the graveyard in the dead of a starless night hardly seemed sane. It was mostly pride—to prove to her smug cohort that she was just as tough and as fearless as any boy. "Daniel! Don't wander too far ahead!" she cried out, lifting the lantern high above her head to brighten up a wider area of the ominous surroundings. She just caught a glimpse of the boy's back winding among the decrepit, weed-ridden graves, not too far ahead and yet uncomfortably distant. She shivered in the frosty air and hugged her nightgown tighter around her arms to soothe away the goose bumps on her skin.

"Constance, come on," her friend yelled back and waited for her to catch up. "The deal was to the edge of the marshes. I heard a mad old witch lives in those marshes, and she catches unsuspecting children to feed her rotting ghouls," he teased in a spooky whisper. "In fact, I heard the ghouls come out of these very graves on dark nights such as these."

"That's not funny, Daniel," she quipped, trying to sound brave and not at all perturbed, but her voice broke slightly as a result of her quivering lip. She was indeed afraid; her skin crawled with ominous apprehension. The boy had disappeared ahead of her again. "Daniel? Where are you?" She had completely lost sight of him. He was way out of her circle of dim light. "Daniel? This isn't funny! Come out this moment!" There was no reply from her mischievous friend. Her chest constricted from worry and the uncertain apprehension changed to outright fear. "Daniel?" she called yet again, utterly distressed; not even trying to hide her shrill voice that resonated with absolute trepidation. "Daniel!" She spotted him standing a few paces ahead of her, just as she thought she was going to faint from the fear. She stomped briskly towards him in anger, ready to sternly reprimand him for causing her such unnecessary distress.

Daniel stood completely still and silent, with his back to her, probably trying to scare her again. "Daniel, you snivelling little bastard! I'm going to murder you!" Constance cursed in a rage as she crept beside him. He remained still and silent, holding his own lamp low in front of him and observing something on the ground.

"What are you looking at? Come on, this isn't amusing at all," she shouted, and punched his shoulder once she reached him. He didn't budge. Instead he continued standing frozen still. She looked down to see what had mesmerized him so and her eyes bulged as they glazed over the finding for a few seconds, then she shrieked once her brain had comprehended the scene. The shrill sound of her voice stunned the boy out of his genuinely frightened reverie and the terrified pair fled, screaming towards home, in the opposite direction to the grotesque sight they had witnessed.

Lying on its back between the mossy headstones and weeds was the lifeless corpse of a completely naked woman. The body lay horrifically stiff and distorted, smeared in coagulated blood and dirt, with a large gaping hole in the belly through which a collection of bugs and maggots crawled. The sight was disturbing enough to scare off a grown man, let alone a pair of bored children. As if that weren't gross enough, the dead woman's eyes were missing, replaced by two ugly and scarred hollow dents in her decomposing head.

* * * *

The news that followed, after the grim findings of that night, shocked and mortified the entire village. The murdered woman was identified as a local prostitute and opportunistic con artist of sorts. She was a tramp, that was a given, but no one deserved to die in that ghastly manner. Alright, she had no family or close friends to miss her, and she dangerously worked as a whore in dark alleys next to the grimy docks, but she had a new born child to fend for. That poor babe now remained motherless, never seeing the face of her father either (the villagers all doubted that the ma'am knew the father herself).

That poor child, everyone thought, orphaned by an atrocious crime of Satan himself, and dumped in a dingy orphanage.

Not long after the graveyard findings, almost exactly a year later, a wealthy family adopted the young child of two years. The adoption was front-page news at the time— "Darling Gertrude Adopted by Wealthy Family". There was actually hope in the dark, cold world after all.