On All Souls' Day, My Family Grave Suddenly Grew Bigger

On All Souls' Day I came back to my hometown to tend the family graves, and found the plot had grown a whole size bigger.

The ground all around it had been repaired and rebuilt too, the offering table piled high, and underneath it all hung a faint stench.

I almost thought I'd come to the wrong place. When I asked my mother what was going on, all I got was a scolding.

"Look at how well your cousin Blake Emerson's done for himself. Two years out in the world and he strikes it rich, and the first thing he does when he comes home is honor the family."

My heart sank. Something was very wrong. I told my mother to call the police, fast.

"Mom, hurry, call the police!"

"The police? What in the world would I call the police for?"

"I think Blake hid a body in the family grave!"

"..."

"Don't you dare say things like that!"

My mother flinched at my words and clapped a hand over my mouth.

She glanced around, terrified someone might have overheard, mortified at the thought of anything smearing Blake's good name.

"You, you, how can you talk such nonsense? Your cousin gets rich and that's a bad thing? You just have to drag his name through the mud?"

"I'm not dragging his name through anything, it's true, we have to call the police! The smell is wrong, can't you smell it?"

My mother sniffed hard, then shook her head and insisted she didn't smell anything.

But I could.

There was the stench of a corpse coming from the family grave.

It felt like the smell was still releasing slowly, not yet very strong, which meant the body was very "fresh."

But this grave had been here for years. There was no way it should smell like that.

And if it were an animal carcass, it wouldn't smell like that either.

Besides, my mother didn't know that two years ago, when I filled out my college applications, I'd secretly changed them to a mortuary science major.

By now I'd studied funeral services for two years, and I'd dealt with bodies plenty of times.

So there was no way I was smelling it wrong.

"Mom, trust me, hurry and call the police."

"Oh, would you stop this fuss, child. It's All Souls' Day, we're tending the graves. What would I be calling the police for?"

My mother looked at me with worry, like I'd seen a ghost, stroking my back over and over and trying to pluck a few strands of my hair so she could call my soul back home later.

She thought I'd been frightened, the way I used to be as a child, and she bowed toward the grave again, begging the ancestors to protect me.

She was driving me half out of my mind. I went to pull out my phone and call the police myself, but she snatched it away.

"Enough! Sydney Emerson, quit acting up!"

My mother raised her voice at me, trying to scare off whatever "unclean thing" had latched onto me.

I saw there was no arguing with her, so I decided to ask when Blake had gotten back. Before the question was even out, a chilly voice came from behind me.

"Sis, you're back!"

A cold dread ran up my spine. I turned and there was Blake, come out of nowhere.

He'd lost a lot of weight, and his skin had gone dark. The scratches on his face stood out, and there were more on his neck and his arms.

"Blake? You're back too?"

I forced out a stiff smile, uneasy inside. Had he heard what I'd said just now?

But what I cared about more were the scratches on him.

"Blake, how'd you get hurt?"

He tugged awkwardly at his clothes. In heat like this he still wore long sleeves and long pants, and he'd made a point of putting on a hat and a sun scarf, as if he were deliberately covering those scratches.

"Oh, it's nothing. You know I got a cat? It went wild a few days ago and clawed me up, the cuts still haven't healed. Don't worry, I already got the shots."

A cat?

It sure didn't look like it.

Since when were a cat's claws that wide?

If anything, they looked like scratches from a person. But I didn't dare say so.

I acted like nothing was wrong and, half on purpose, steered the talk toward Blake and marriage.

Because Blake had had a hard life. His parents divorced when he was little, his mother walked out and left him behind, and he'd grown up on the wrong end of a lot of cold looks.

His father didn't take much care of him either. The two of them scraped by, and even when he liked a girl he never dared to get close.

But not long ago I'd heard Blake had fallen in love, and the two of them were already talking marriage.

So why had he come back alone this time?

"Blake, why didn't you bring your girlfriend home for All Souls' Day this year? It would've been the perfect chance for us to meet her."

Unease crawled through me, and my mind had already started running toward ugly possibilities.

"Ah, I did mean to bring her back to meet all of you, but we broke up half a month ago. Her family didn't approve, and we lived in different cities, so we ended it."

Blake said it with a helpless tone, his smile a little awkward. Clearly he didn't want to talk about it any further.

But the more I thought about it, the more panic set in, and a few more questions later my mother cut me off.

"What is wrong with you? Why are you so tactless? Your cousin doesn't want to talk about it, and you just keep pushing."

Blake gave another awkward laugh and suggested we go honor the graves and burn the offerings, then head off to eat.

He said he'd booked a whole table at the country lodge in the village and wanted us all to come.

I nodded and walked over to tend the graves. Burned the paper, bowed, offered incense, circled the family plot twice.

I paced off the grave's footprint with my feet, and sure enough it was bigger than before.

The number of steps was more than a little off from what I remembered walking around it as a child.

And at the spot behind the grave, the stench of decay was especially thick.

The back of the grave had been sealed with concrete. The concrete hadn't fully set yet, and one poke of a bamboo stick broke through it.

So I kept working the stick down deeper, wanting to see what was at the very bottom.

Just as I got the stick all the way in and was about to pull it back out, Blake came over without a word, his eyes fixed on me like burning torches, his voice several degrees colder.

"What are you doing, cousin?"

He looked angry, his stare locked on the bamboo stick in my hand.

Then he snatched it away.

"Ah"

I let out a small cry. The stick had cut my hand.

"It's nothing. I just saw there was a hole here and figured I'd check how deep it went, whether it needed filling in."

Blake was tense, and unhappy too. He snapped the stick in half, turned, and threw it into the fire pot where the paper money was burning.

"I understand. I'll get someone to patch it up in a bit. Cousin, please stop touching things."

He ignored my injured hand and instead grew even more anxious, checking around the whole grave, then called then and there to order more than a dozen bags of concrete to seal on another layer.

"Cousin, I speak bluntly, so don't take it to heart, but don't disturb a single grain of sand on this grave again. I had a professional master lay out the feng shui for it, and it cost a lot of money."

"The master said the women of the family aren't to go touching the grave. Otherwise it ruins the fortune and the feng shui, and it'll hurt my luck with money and career."

"Cousin, don't act up like you did when we were kids. If I lose my temper here, it won't be good for either of our families."

The moment my mother heard I'd caused trouble, she didn't dare say much, quickly dragging me over to apologize to Blake.

The longer I looked, the more it turned my stomach, and I was even more certain now that Blake had a body hidden in the family grave.

To avoid tipping him off, I could only apologize for now, planning to sneak back that night to take a look.

Later we went to the country lodge to eat. Blake never showed up, but he'd covered the food and the drinks.

One table ran to several thousand, everything gourmet game and country delicacies, the liquor top-shelf, and he'd even left several cartons of good cigarettes on the table to honor the elders.

The elders couldn't help praising him. Blake had really made something of himself this time.

Uncle Gerald, though, gave a cold snort. He kept eating what Blake had paid for, cursing him all the while.

"Him, make a fortune? Not a chance in hell. He stuttered when he was a kid, and now two years out in the world and he strikes it rich?"

"You don't know, but I do. He's just got a decent face, latched onto some rich girlfriend out there, and bled her dry a long time ago."

Everyone was gasping and murmuring, and even I found myself straining to listen.

"What? How would you know? He never told anyone, did he?"

"Right! He won't say a word about what he does out there. None of us have any idea."

Uncle Gerald Emerson gave a cold laugh, looking thoroughly pleased with himself, tossed down his chopsticks, and started telling the story.

"My son told me. Ran into him once by chance out there. Said Blake was all dressed up like somebody important, with a real pretty girlfriend on his arm, everything designer, a handbag on her shoulder that had to start at a hundred grand."

"And that's not all. That girlfriend of his drives a nice car, lives in a mansion, so of course she treats him well. She even bought him a watch worth over two hundred grand for his birthday. Pocket change to a woman like that."

"Blake looks like he's living the high life, but behind closed doors he fawns over that girl like a dog, does every dirty, thankless job for her. Word is her parents never had a son, so he figured he'd just live off her, be a kept man!"

Uncle Gerald's words were downright vicious, plainly looking down on Blake.

Still, putting it all together, everything Blake had now really had come too easily.

Never mind two years of grinding it out. Even two years of cheating and swindling couldn't have gotten him this far.

Just as we sat there puzzled, Uncle Gerald dropped his voice and let slip a secret that shook me even more.

"I'm telling you, Blake had to be doing dirty work for that girl's family. Otherwise there's no way he'd come into that kind of money and come straight home showing off, fixing up the whole family grave the second he's back."

"And there's something buried under that grave! He says he put it there to set up some feng shui thing, but that night I knew something was off. I saw him dragging something over in a suitcase. Black, and heavy, really heavy!"

"Midnight, when nobody was watching, Blake buried that thing under the family grave all by himself, sneaking around! I was hiding right there in the bushes and saw it with my own eyes."

The second those words left his mouth, I caught something out of the corner of my eye that scared me half to death.

Blake was here!

Standing not far off, staring straight at our table, and all I could do was quickly kick Uncle Gerald under it.

But the man was too thick to feel it. He still hadn't caught on, still hadn't noticed how dark Blake's face had gone, and he just kept right on talking.

"It's the honest truth, I saw it plain as day. A black suitcase, and afterward Blake filled it with stones and threw it in the river. I followed him the whole way. I saw all of it."

"I could take you to the exact spot where he dumped it right now! If he wanted to get rid of it, fine, but why fill it with stones first? There's something fishy in that suitcase, mark my words."

Watching Uncle Gerald build toward flat-out accusing Blake of something shameful, I hurried to cough a few times and called out Blake's name on purpose to break the awful moment.

"Blake, you're here? Come eat something if you're hungry!"

Everyone gave a start and clamped their mouths shut.

Blake walked over coldly, stopped right in front of Uncle Gerald, and held out a cigarette to him.

"Uncle Gerald, there's something I want to ask your advice on. About fixing up the family grave. You're the one in this family whose word carries weight and who knows how these things are done. I really have to come to you."

Uncle Gerald flinched, thrown into a panic too.

He couldn't refuse. All he could do was follow Blake outside.

That was the last anyone saw of Uncle Gerald.

The next day he didn't come to the family dinner either. Said he'd suddenly taken ill, that he was laid up in bed groaning and couldn't so much as stand.

Three days later, Uncle Gerald vanished.

We'd already gone back to the city after tending the graves. Three days later Aunt Doreen Emerson called, and we rushed straight back, the whole extended family pitching in to search for him.

Aunt Doreen had cried herself hoarse, and even so she was out in the yard, propping Uncle Gerald's clothes on bamboo poles.

I knew what she was doing. A soul-calling ritual, trying to call him home.

"It's cursed, I tell you. The day you all came back from the graves, he wouldn't touch his lunch. Came home and lay right down, kept saying his legs ached, that he couldn't walk. No life in him at all, like he'd had a bad fright."

"I figured I'd take him to get looked at once I finished the farm work. Then I get up this morning and he's gone. Didn't take a thing with him. Didn't even put his shoes on. Just gone."

"I looked high and low, not a trace of him anywhere. No idea where he went, no way to file a report, no way to even know if he's really missing. All I could do was call you all back."

My skin crawled at that.

That day, Blake had spoken to Uncle Gerald alone, and Uncle Gerald had taken ill and not shown his face since.

And now, three days later, he'd disappeared?

I looked around for Blake without thinking, but he was nowhere in sight.

"Where's Blake? Something this big, how is he not here? Where is he?"

"I called him an hour ago. He said he was repairing the family grave. Said the storm on All Souls' Day washed a hole into it, and he's out there overseeing the work."

Something dropped in my chest, and I bolted for the grave.

It had been raining for days. The next village over was already flooded. Repairing the grave now was pointless.

But Blake was still guarding it, working nonstop to fix it, and that made me feel worse.

By the time I finally reached the grave, I was gasping for breath.

From way off I could see the workers about to pour another layer of concrete over it, and it sent me into a frantic shout.

"Stop! Don't touch it! Stop, I've called the police, don't move anything!"

Hearing me, Blake stepped in front of me first, blocking me from getting near the grave.

"What's this nonsense now?"

"Nonsense? Blake, what are you actually doing?"

Standing beside the grave, the stench of decay was thicker, laced now with the smell of blood.

And the grave had grown by a whole ring wider.

Like something else had been hidden inside it.

"What could I be doing? Is repairing the family grave a crime? Somehow it feels like you've come back this time with a lot of hatred for me."

"Stop lying to me, Blake. I can smell it."

"Smell what?"

"A body. The stench of rot. The smell of a body that hasn't been dead long, coming out of our family grave."

Blake stiffened, his face gone hard, his eyes carrying something murderous now.

He kept staring at me, as if already working out in his head how to kill me, how to bury me in that grave too.

But it had come to this. There was nothing else I could do.

"Blake, I've already called the police. The station's men are on their way. Don't add one wrong to another."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't play dumb. Blake, did you kill someone? And hide the body in our family grave?"

The words landed, and the workers froze in terror.

The others scattered back too.

Blake laughed coldly, his expression deeply unnatural, still forcing his way through it.

"Have you lost your mind? You see me come home rich, bringing honor to the family, and it eats at you? So you make up something like this to slander me?"

"Whether it's slander or not, we'll settle that when the police get here."

The sirens grew closer, and the rain came down harder.

The relatives came running at the noise, all of them crowding around the grave.

When the workers dug it open, the officers leaned in for a look and jerked back, startled.

"There's... there's something in the grave!"