Maura watched her niece at work for several minutes before wandering off. The stillness of the place was calming. Would the Puritan settlers who created this resting ground have shared her friends’ opinions about her interest? Would they, too, have joked mockingly? Perhaps they had superstitiously avoided coming to these places except when there were dead to bury. She wondered. It wasn’t so much a mood of death which she sought from the old cemeteries; she was here to get a feel for the lives of her Colonial ancestors. The symbols, the names, the epitaphs spoke of more than an end to life.
Leaves crackled dryly beneath her steps as acorns pattered sporadically in the surrounding woods. An occasional squirrel darted, brief and gray. Rattlesnake whispers of soon-to-fall leaves rode gently on the sun-warmed air, there was still a snap of chill in the breeze.
The middle-aged woman neared the edge of the graveyard where the grinning giant’s teeth of a crumbling stone wall attempted to hold back the encroaching forest. She noticed a winged cherub on one tilting stone and knelt to read the inscription:
In memory of Mary Warren, beloved wife of Henry. February fourteenth, seventeen seventy-two. Age fifty-five years. Upton, Massachusetts.
Below this information, caked with fingerprints of yellow-green lichen read an unusual epitaph:
Dearest friends, weep for me not, when my cold grave you view and see. As you are now, so once was I. Prepare for death, for you must die.
A large smile came to Maura’s face, her eyes crinkling with excitement. She had variations of this verse in books about gravestones and their sayings, but this was her first personal encounter. Deft hands pulled a piece of paper from a roll. She smoothed it carefully over the impassive winged face…
Rachel rose with a sigh and smoothed back her red hair. She scanned the little graveyard for her companion. Nothing but leaning stones and the trembling shadows of breeze-inspired trees. No Maura.
“Auntie?”
Rachel set down her completed rubbing and moved off through the stones. Salmon-colored leaves crunched while those clinging on a nearby tree fluttered like nervous insect wings.
“Auntie?”
No reply. The edge of the cemetery was close now. Something white suddenly fluttered out from behind a stone and pressed against her legs. Rachel gave a startled gasp, but looking down, saw it only to be a piece of rubbing paper. Then she noticed her aunt’s prone form poking out from behind the grave.
“Oh, Christ! Auntie?”
Heart pounding, Rachel ran over to where the older woman lay. Maura’s eyes and mouth were open, impassive, as though she were stunned. He complexion was no more healthy than that of the silently watching gray cherub.
“Auntie Maura! Auntie… Oh God, no!”
She bent down. Maura’s head flopped listlessly as Rachel shook her by the shoulders. Maura was dead.
It was less than an afterthought, more of a chance gesture when Rachel, in the midst of sobbing, glanced down at the crumbled rubbing Maura had been doing. The stoic cherub was there, and then were words below it, but larger than the finely chiseled script on the stone. They looked as if someone had scrawled them by hand.
Rachel shuddered. The paper read: Maura—help! My children are burning! They are dying!
Another busy day in Westborough. Neatly dressed professionals clogged the center of the once-small town with shiny compact cars. Rachel, wearing a heavy sweater and fluid white skirt, walked from her apartment on South Street to the old building with the sign that read: Past Presents: Antiques, Crafts, and Gifts.
The air inside was filled with scented candles and potpourri. Chairs, tables, spinning wheels, and other expensive clutter took up the major part of the floor. Off to the sides there were displays of candle holders, dolls, pottery, dried flower arrangements, and wreaths of herbs and grapevines. One wall formed an upright cemetery of framed rubbings. Death’s heads and cherubs stared dully, some blurred ghostly by the passage of time and the elements. There were samples of the urn and willow motif, one with a bird, and another of a sailing ship.
Rachel alone now ran the shop she and her aunt had started a year earlier. It wasn’t the same. The antiques seemed saturated with loneliness, the rubbings more dour-faced. Hours passed more slowly.
Sleigh bells on the door rang as a woman in bland business garb came in, hastily leading a child by the hand. Her eyes passed unabsorbingly over the merchandise and fixed on Rachel.
“Can you tell me where Tech-Supply is?”
Rachel smiled politely and pointed toward the front window. “Right across the rotary. On the other side.”
“Thanks.”
The woman yanked her daughter along as she made for the door.
“Mommy—look.” She had spotted the rubbings. “Those are creepy!”
The door banged, leaving the scent of the woman’s synthetic-smelling perfume to hold Rachel’s stomach in an acrid vice.
“Have a nice day,” Rachel said to the door.
She looked over at the grave art. Creepy the little girl had said. Rachel thought so, too, as a child. Then she came to appreciate the stones as relics of ancient American art. Now the blinkless dull eyes, captured there in wax, gave her a feeling that could be accurately labeled as creepy.
It was folded up in the bottom drawer of the counter where the cash register sat. She had tried to forget it, tried not to contemplate it. Trembling fingers eased the drawer open, paused, then lifted it out and gently unfolded it.
Maura—help! My children are burning! They are dying! The words were still there, broken and pitted as if the wax had captured the nuances of aged carvings.
Had her aunt somehow written it in the delirium of her fatal stroke? Would she have had time? There was no way Rachel could be reading it wrong, and the moss on the epitaph could not be blamed for what seemed to be reproduced here. What other explanation could there be?
There were even less leaves on the trees now as Rachel drove through a tunnel of yellow-speckled branches. She passed a farm on the left, the vegetable stand with pumpkins heaped like orange cairns. A cornfield with a scarecrow like a skeletal rag-strewn puppet.
The trees closed in again as she sped past the entrance to the state forest. Farther; faster. There was no gate to announce the graveyard, not even a dirt path. She parked the car by the side of the road and climbed the slope through rasping leaves.
The grave was leaning, as though tired from so many years of standing. The dull stare of the winged head showed no recognition of the approaching woman. Rachel hesitated, all too conscious of the roll of rice paper in her hand. Curiosity overrode her fear.
She taped the thin sheet to the lichen-scabbed surface and a quivering hand moved the black wax over the surface. The relief of the cherub came through, and below that the name Mary Warren, followed by the date of her demise. But when Rachel worked the wax lower, over the cryptic epitaph, large printed letters showed.
Rachel!—it read—Help us!
The woman shrieked. Leaves shivered and danced as a gust of cool breeze whisked the paper away.
“My God—that can’t be! It can’t!”
She pulled off a fresh sheet of paper and repeated the process. This time letters spelled out: please help… I’m so very ill. Fever. Always dying…
Rachel tore off the paper, tossed it aside; didn’t bother taping the next on. The message continued: Rachel, help!
“Where are you? How… can I help?”