All the tiny realizations of changes and transitions seemed to be floating, objects on the sea.
But like the prayer book, the fish and carrion and scrolls and salt-stained pieces of the holy Ark began to sink; and Nathan was left staring into the empty green-hazed depths, as if he were looking once again into the green stone of Solomon.
The sea was like a mirror, so still and perfect that it seemed to harden into emerald. It was time itself, and in it he could see his own reflection.
If only Nathan could pass through its face.
He could see himself.
He could see….
Nathan sat with the other men in the small prayer-room of the synagogue and felt the divine presence. The ancient kabbalists called it the Shekhinah, the bride of God.
It was 6:40 in the morning, and Nathan couldn't discern what was different, but he felt something. The morning light was like blue smoke diffusing through the high, narrow stained-glass windows. Dust motes danced in the air, shivering in the air-conditioned morning. Nathan put on his tallit and phylacteries and recited the blessing and the Akeidah and the Shema and other supplications. The other men sat beside him and behind him and prayed as they did every morning. Their smells and clothes were the same, and the prayers were almost hypnotic in their monotonous intonation. A young man hummed nasally, as was his habit, throughout the prayers. One of the three professors who taught Hebrew Studies at the university was at the bema, leading the prayers. His voice intoned the Hebrew and Aramaic words.
And Nathan felt the presence of his dead son and wife sitting beside him.
He couldn't see them, not with the same eyes that stared straight ahead at the red satin curtains of the Holy Ark; but he sensed their presence nevertheless. As he prayed, he could hear Michael's voice… his own voice.
Young men of Michael's age paced nervously around the room; they were wrapped protectively in their prayer-shawls, and the light seemed to cling to them.
Perhaps they sensed the Shekhinah, too.
Helen leaned against him. She was a shadow, barely palpable, but Nathan knew it was his wife.
Her body was the silk of his prayer shawl, her breath was Sabbath spices, and her fingers were as cool as the leather frontlets on his arm and forehead. As she whispered to him, his past became as concentrated as old liquors.
His life became an instant of unbearable fire, blinding him. But she released him, freed him from his immolating guilt, as the prayers for the dead drifted and curled through the morning light like smoke, then fell to rest like ashes.
Then the service was over and the Shekhinah evaporated, its holy presence melting like snow in the furnace of another Florida morning. The congregants, seemingly deaf and blind to the miracle that had swept past them, hurriedly folded their prayer-shawls and wound the leather straps around their phylacteries, for it was 7:45, and they had to get to work.
Nathan left the synagogue with the other men. He had an early-morning appointment with an old client. As he drove his Mercedes coupe down A1A, which was the more picturesque and less direct route to his office in downtown Fort Lauderdale, he passed the resorts and grand hotels, the restaurants and seedy diners, and the endless lots of kitsch motels with neon signs in their plate glass windows and hosts of plastic pink flamingos on their lawns.
He gazed out at the ocean. It was an expanse of emerald and tourmaline. Except for the whitecaps, which were long fingers gently pulling at the sand, the sea was quiet. Nathan turned off the air-conditioner and pressed the toggles on his armrest to open all the windows.
The humidity rushed in with the pungent smell of brine, and Nathan felt his face grow wet with perspiration and tears.
Then he detoured back to the highway.
The electric windows glided up, shutting out the world; the hum of the air-conditioner muffled the honking of the early morning rush hour combatants; and the news announcer on the radio reported on the rescue of a businessman naked and adrift on a speedboat near Miami.
But even now, Nathan could sense the Shekhinah.
He could hear his son's voice and feel the cool, gentle touch of Helen's fingers upon his arms and perspiring forehead.
Yet in the reflection of the curving, tinted windshield, he could still see himself burning on the sea.
The Gravedigger's Tale
by SIMON CLARK
Born on 10, 1958 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire Clark earlier appeared in The Year's Best Horror Stories: XIV with a story reprinted from the obscure British small press magazine, Back, Brain Recluse. This same publisher has recently brought out a collection of Clark's stories, Blood & Grit, and Clark claims that his «discovery» in The Year's Best Horror Stories is responsible for opening other doors in the publishing world, with magazine sales to Fear, Stygian Dreamhouse, Works, and Aklo. Think I'll ask for a commission.
The inspiration for this story lies in dark's passion for graveyards, which, he maintains, never seem to him to be morbid places. Among earliest memories are those of his schoolmaster father taking him to view mountain cemeteries where subsidence had torn open the graves to reveal skeletons that had been turned banana yellow by salts in the soil.
Clark is married with one son and lives in the Yorkshire village of Adwick-le-street, within a skull's throw of a graveyard that contains the tomb of an ancestor of George Washington. This sixteenth century tomb bears a Stars and Stripes design in the coat of arms and will almost certainly figure in another of his stories.
"Jesus!" exclaimed the electrician as he levered the back off the big one hundred cubic foot chest freezer. "What did you have to dig them back up for?"
Weathered brown, whip-lean, sixty-plus, half-Smoked cigarette behind one ear, the gravedigger grinned, displaying an uneven row of yellow chips that had once been teeth; he leaned forward, bare wrinkled elbows resting oh the freezer lid.
"The new by-pass. It's going to take half the graveyard yonder, so before they lay the road, we have to lift 'em and plant 'em in the new municipal ground up
Borough Road."
Pulling a face, the electrician wipe the palms of his hands on his overalls. "There must have been some… some sights. Well, they've been dead years."
"Aye. First one were interred in 1836. So… most of the coffins were well rotted. Soon as you tried to lift 'em," — he made a wet crackling sound — " they just
folded — just folded like wet cardboard boxes. And everything — everything spilled out into a heap." The gravedigger waited for the young man's reaction.
"Jesus." He wiped his mouth as if something small but extremely unpleasant had just buzzed into it. "You must have a strong stomach."
The gravedigger recognized the infection in the young man's voice. Disquiet, distaste, unease. He eyed the electrician up and down. I floppy white hat, slack mouth and wide-eyed gormless look signaled, here was a lad who'd believe anything; the kind that cropped up on every factory floor, in every shop and office, who, when asked, would conscientiously hurry to the storeman to ask for the long-wait, or the jar of elbow-grease, or packet of Featherlite. The gravedigger had been steeling himself for a dull afternoon of ten Woodbines, five cups of tea and a solo darts tournament, but a faulty freezer in the cemetery store-cum-restroom, and fate, had brought entertainment in the shape of the young electrician who was, realized the gravedigger, as green as he was cabbage-looking. "I'm just brewing up. You'll want a wet when you've done."