Reclaimed, part 1

Burton Hallwill wasn’t always obsessed with the cemetery. For years, he didn’t pay it any attention at all. It was just something to drive past on many trips up and down Lake Road, on the way to school or church or Boy Scouts or work. He lived his whole life in Bay Village, it was his entire world, and that this world contained a half-acre cemetery on a piece of prime lakefront property never mattered much to Burton until one day it was the only thing that mattered at all.

It gripped him suddenly, the desire to live on the lake. There were other lakefront lots for sale, of course. Burton knew this, grew tired of hearing it from other people, resented hearing it from people, people whose opinions didn’t count. They can’t even afford to buy lakefront property, what do they know about it. Burton knew these thoughts were uncharitable and it was true that at one time, the time before he couldn’t stop thinking about the cemetery, he probably would not have thought this way. But he wanted that property, that specific lot, so badly, it changed everything about him.

When Burton wanted things, he usually got them, and on the rare occasions that he didn’t (occasions he counted among his few personal failures), he simply flipped the script and decided that the thing wasn’t worth having. It gave him permission to move on, to get over it! as so many people had told him, hissed at him, shouted at him over the years. Burton knew he could be persistent to the point of alienation, turning people off, pushing them away; it had ended friendships and business partnerships and more than one relationship. Ultimately, though, Burton just loved pursuit. He loved to be the only person who could figure out how to get things that most people assumed were ungettable.

His wife Monica had been one of those things. A fancy East Coast import to Burton’s dime-a-dozen Midwest college, Monica Fox was a girl unlike any of the girls Burton pursued at Bay High School. For one thing, she was rich. When she talked she sounded like Jacqueline Kennedy giving a tour of the White House. She wore cashmere sweaters and penny loafers. She had a car at school, a 1982 BMW 320i, silver-blue. Burton was almost as interested in the car as in the girl driving it. He worked on getting the girl, because she came with the car.

That Monica ended up at a poky liberal arts school in Ohio was simply down to nobody in her life really giving a shit – she was the third child and youngest daughter, and none too bright. Her father was only interested in gin and horses; her mother, mostly just gin. Monica’s older sister Clothilde was a great beauty as well as the brains of the family and her brother Bunky (who even knew his real name, was it Bradford, maybe?) was a boy. They had all they needed to get by in their world. Monica, on the other hand, would just need a husband more or less immediately.

Monica arrived on the planet ten years after Clothilde, eight years post-Bunky, an afterthought child. What college? Where even is Ohio? Nobody worried too much about Monica, including Monica, she was free of any troubles. She was good-natured, self-assured in the way of very wealthy people who have never had to concern themselves about quotidian matters. Wherever she went, her company was welcomed and even desired. Burton especially found her company desirable, and he simply made himself a fixture until Monica could not deny that he was useful and even entertaining. 

They married at Monica’s house in Connecticut the summer after graduating college, Burton barely passing muster with the grumpy father and the drunk mother. They went back to Ohio with the BMW packed full of beautiful, useless silver and crystal wedding gifts, plus a large check from Monica’s father tucked into the pocket of Burton’s windbreaker. Thank you, son, he’d said to Burton, not take care of my little girl or come back and see us soon. 

In fact, Burton never saw them again. Monica had no great affection for the family compound, her childhood friends, her siblings, or the East Coast in general. In Bay Village, she was special and exotic. They used some of the money from her father to buy property, a brick colonial on Bay Lane, nice enough for a start. And investment property – a small apartment building in Westlake, duplexes in Lakewood. Burton also found work with a real estate developer and discovered that his relentlessness allowed him to excel in an industry where a heightened sense of acquisitiveness was really the only thing you needed. When the developer needed to get that last piece of land, that last parcel standing in the way of a multimillion-dollar condo development, and on that parcel was a disintegrating old Cape Cod, and in that Cape Cod was a widow who’d moved in on her wedding day and never spent a single night anywhere else, Burton was the one they sent.

He was never mean. He never threatened. He was just persistent. Did people like him enough to keep talking to him, until they came around to see his way of things, or did they dislike him enough to give in, even when they didn’t want to? Burton knew how these people felt, how it was to have a thing, to possess it, and to hold it just out of reach of anyone else who wanted it. The thing might not be special, but it was powerful to deny it to someone else. So he sympathized and empathized and cajoled and listened but he also never, ever, ever stopped calling or just showing up. He enjoyed talking to people, liked to fill up the air around them with words, to talk and talk and talk until his words took up the whole room, until people were breathing his words into their lungs and exhaling them out again, swirling around their faces and back into their ears. It’s possible that many people gave Burton what he wanted just so they never again had to hear him talk. 

After a while Burton and Monica traded up, selling the house on Bay Lane in favor of a big white one with columns across the street from the lake. People – mostly people who worked with and for Burton, they didn’t have many friends – assumed the couple intended to fill the house with children. But Monica had never mentioned children, and the idea had honestly not occurred to Burton, who felt like he’d always been an adult. So, they didn’t have any. Monica looked after the house. She liked buying things for it, liked rearranging the beautiful and useless wedding gifts behind glass-fronted cabinets in the butler’s pantry. 

When people asked Burton if he had children, he gave them a blank look. He thought for a minute: Did he have any? Everything in Burton’s life existed as a line item, an entry on a spreadsheet that existed in his mind. No, no children. Children couldn’t be owned or kept, only managed, and they needed love. There was very little that Burton loved, outside of wanting and getting things. If pressed, he would admit that he loved Monica. It was true that he loved how she looked in their house, her pretty blond head bowed over a novel, a glass of wine close at hand, her wedding diamonds catching the light from the gas-log fireplace and throwing it back out into the room. He loved how she tended everything, kept the household functioning. Burton was the one who worked, but Monica managed everything else, the lawn service, the housekeepers, the dry cleaning, the food shopping. Did Monica cook? He couldn’t say for sure. He knew there were a great many containers, perhaps they were prepared food containers, now that he thought about it, in the recycling that Monica put in a bin behind the garage. A man in a tiny truck drove up their driveway each Tuesday and took the bin away along with the garbage. The man in the truck returned, placed the bin back where he’d collected it. Burton liked living in such a polite, orderly, functional place.

Reclaimed, part 2

Sometimes people wondered what had happened to Burton growing up that made him the way he was. The answer was simple: nothing. Nothing had happened to him, nothing bad and nothing especially good. He grew up in a brand-new ranch home on a road that had, in his lifetime, still been farmland. His father went to work each day, downtown, something about insurance. His mother stayed home and looked after Burton. He couldn’t ever remember anyone being sad or angry. Home was tranquil and calm, or at least it was for Burton. Did his parents scream at each other while he was at school or camping with the Boy Scouts? Did his father sleep with other women, take them out to nightclubs, drink too much at lunch? Did his mother spend her afternoons laying on a couch at a psychiatrist’s office, talking about her problems, collecting a small bottle of pills at the pharmacy each month? If these things happened, Burton never knew. He went to school, asked for model kits, asked for games and a telescope and a watch and a set of encyclopedias and and and and. All of things appeared in due time. If they didn’t, he just continued to ask. And ask. And ask. Eventually, he would get what he asked for, and everything would continue to be fine.

***

Burton and Monica had lived in the big white house on Lake Road for several years when Burton noticed the cemetery. He must have driven past it hundreds, maybe thousands of times in his life, yet now it loomed large in his daily life. Why had he noticed it one day? For some reason he’d begun to feel that the big white house was not quite right. What was the point of living so close to the lake without being able to own the view? Right now he had to borrow a view, out the third-floor window, his growing middle-aged bulk wedged into a dormer, peering out over the tops of the houses across the street to catch a glimpse of the water. It was unsatisfying.

It seemed crazy to move again, but Burton could feel the itch of want growing deep within him and knew it was pointless to fight it. He wanted to live on the lake, not just near it. He perused the available lakefront property listings. Dilapidated cottages, now worth millions for the land alone. Dated contemporary mansions, cold and barn-like, with weathered wood exteriors that hadn’t looked good since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Rambling Tudors that smelled of water-damaged plaster. Burton wanted none of them. He wanted the half-acre lot that sloped gently down to a low cliff over the lake, hundred-year-old oaks huddled close to the shore. And, inconveniently, 40 or so graves marked by weathered headstones that pitched this way and that. They looked like crooked teeth.

He drove past the cemetery one day, headed home after a meeting downtown, and saw the cemetery out of the corner of his eye and felt a dull purple rage grow in his chest. How frustrating, how ridiculous that an entire half-acre of prime lakefront property could never be developed. That it would just sit there rotting – literally! – for generations. Do cemeteries ever go out of business? It seemed like a dumb question, but surely some cemeteries were built over, surely the dead could not hold dominion over the living in the face of so much demand for new construction. Burton had become rich on this demand, the need some people had to live in a place where no one else had ever lived or used an oven or sat on a toilet or fought or vomited or died. 

At home that night Burton sat in his office and googled. He refined his query a few times and eventually found that it was, in fact, common for developers to move cemeteries. Burton felt energized. 

***

Later that week, Burton went to the library and asked for as much information as he could get on the old cemetery. He had been annoyed earlier that day to see a man in the cemetery mowing; he had been hoping it was truly abandoned and uncared for by anybody living, or at least by anybody would stand in the way of what he wanted to do, which was to buy the cemetery and dig up all the dead and put them somewhere else. He knew it sounded bizarre. But in the weeks between his late-night googling and his visit to the library, the cemetery’s occupants had become like any living person he dealt with: obstacles that just needed a bit of encouragement to give him what he wanted, what he had come to believe he deserved.

Unfortunately for Burton, the cemetery had “history.” The first people buried there were a young woman and her baby who had died in a boat accident very near their final resting place. Burton was somewhat taken aback at this notion: had people at one point just been buried near where they died, willy-nilly? In any event, this grave was two hundred years old. Certainly no one who cared about this woman and her baby was around to register any objection. Just because the cemetery was old did not make it worth preserving, surely?

He did more research and found more bad news. A number of prominent locals – prominent enough to have nearby roads and parks named after them, anyway – were buried in this tatty cemetery, which had shifted in and out of relevance over the years, with some civic-minded person occasionally trying to establish the land as a community landmark. Efforts were made to erect a historical marker or raise money to tidy the headstones and add some benches. These had been met with varying degrees of success, but the fact remained that the place was not singularly important to anyone except Burton.

His fixation grew along with his sense of entitlement. These were dead people. They had no agency, no claim. Burton considered them hapless, laughable even; the trouble would be the living. There were always people who objected to things like this, to progress, to the rights of an individual to improve his lot and his life. Rather than flagging, Burton rallied. He did exhaustive research and acted accordingly, methodically. He established an LLC, found a piece of land the prescribed distance outside the city. When he told his attorney what he was doing, she’d blanched but did as she was asked. Not having previously worked with a client who wanted to open a private cemetery, she too spent time at the library and with Google. Death was a grim business, but a business nonetheless.

Eventually the matter became public. There was opposition. Technically, officially, Burton needed to get permission from any surviving relatives before he could move the graves, even if he owned the land. So these would be the first obstacles to be cleared. Fortunately, there were not many among the living who could be connected to the interfering dead. Those who objected became targets of Burton’s relentlessness. If that failed, Burton made a final offer. Would you feel better if I offered you a sum of money? Consider it a tribute, in honor of your great-great-great-great aunt Sarah Jane who died of an ague or whatever. 

They all gave in, eventually.

The civic-minded community members were another matter, though, and Burton finally felt he might have met his match, found people who could fill a room with as many words as he was capable of producing. They showed up at city council meetings to make impassioned statements about the sanctity of the grave or the importance of history or similar hogwash. Burton stopped paying attention to them. There were hard feelings from every corner, even Monica questioned him, which had never happened, not one time in twenty-six years, and while it gave him pause it did not stop him. His partner in the real-estate development business thought it would be better if they parted ways. Burton didn’t mind. He was very rich, or more accurately he was relatively rich and Monica was very rich, having achieved her inheritance after her mother’s pickled heart and her father’s hardened one finally gave out, conveniently within months of one another. And Burton was now singularly focused on evicting, or rather relocating, the cemetery’s residents, and building his dream home on the lake, and after that he wouldn’t need anyone or anything else.

He did win, eventually. He talked and called and emailed and wrote and filed motions and sued and persuaded until everyone got tired enough of him and gave in. Privately, the city was happy to sell Burton the land for a large sum. Burton hired the company that would disinter the graves, probably just piles of bones and coffin parts by now, they told him, put the remains in new boxes, and transport and bury the boxes at the new private cemetery Burton had established. He’d hired a caretaker to set the headstones, mow the grass, keep it tidy. No one had any reason to complain, least of all the mostly long-forgotten dead.

Reclaimed, part 3

Burton began to see them almost immediately after breaking ground for the house. They always appeared as a group, looking like extras in a zombie movie, except of course much worse because only Burton seemed to be able to see them and it wasn’t a movie. There were about 40 of them, always standing down close to the lake, next to the treeline separating Burton and Monica’s hard-won property from the neighbor’s yard. They stood and watched, or whatever passes for watching when you don’t have eyes. Their clothes were rags. White bone glinted in the sun. Whenever they appeared, Burton could smell them. Not decomposing flesh, but dust. The inside of a long-closed box.

Always in the front of the group was the drowned woman with her baby, or what he guessed was once her baby. She clutched a cloth bundle to what was left of her chest.

Burton did not know what they wanted, or told himself he did not know. He thought of them as he thought of every obstacle in his life: something to get out of the way. In his office at the big white house he googled things like restless spirits and disturbed grave apparitions but this never led him anywhere sensible, just a jumble of old badly coded websites about haunted houses and urban legends. Burton shook his head, irritated. He either needed them to go away or to be explained. Maybe they would leave when the house was finished? Were they confused? Burton pictured himself walking out to their position near the treeline, explaining what had happened, them jostling their partially exposed skulls to show they understood before shuffling off to the outskirts of town and laying down in their new graves. 

One day, finally, it was all done. The house was remarkable, even among other castles built by other millionaires. It looked like a sea captain’s house: cedar shake, a turret, a widow’s walk along the very top, laced with wrought iron. Every detail thrilled Burton, and if Monica seemed underwhelmed, Burton didn’t think much of it. He could rest at last, having achieved this pinnacle thing, the great dream of his life, the big house with the lake view that everyone wanted and that he’d fought so hard to win.

After they moved in, though, Burton was not able to rest. The people, or what remained of them anyway, had not gone away. They still appeared to him, day and night now, and unless Burton was really losing his mind they seemed to be growing impatient. They were no longer content to huddle by the treeline near the shore. Sometimes they were as close as the deck around the pool. Burton started to feel afraid, because he recognized something in them, rolling off them like that dusty stench: they wanted something.

***

Monica succumbed almost right away. Burton hadn’t been paying much attention to her, all his time had been spent fighting with people and then dealing with the architect and the contractor and the landscapers. One night he finished up some work in his office, a heavily paneled room with a fireplace and expansive view of the lake, and went upstairs with two glasses of wine, looking for his wife. Monica was curled on the settee in their master bedroom, an open book turned face down on her lap, her hand curled over it as if she’d stopped to gaze out at the lake. He called to her, said he’d brought wine, but she continued staring straight ahead, and Burton really looked at her for the first time in months. She waved away the wine, her eyes dull, skin dry and loose.

Over the next week, Monica worsened quickly. She cried, mournfully, and seemed in the grip of a despair that she could not articulate. She didn’t want to see a doctor, didn’t want to eat or shop or read. Burton began to notice the smell. He wondered if she was sick, if something was eating her from the inside out, because some part of her, it must be said, seemed to be rotting. He felt panic, possibly for the first time in his life. Monica was frightened, too, and then purely terrified, unable even to sleep.

One morning, Burton woke up and realized that Monica was not in bed next to him. At first, he hoped this was a good sign, that she was feeling better and had gotten up for a shower or some tea, or just to read in the settee with the beautiful view, a favorite pastime of hers. He got out of bed and found her there, on the settee, sitting slumped over to one side, staring blankly at nothing and quite dead.

She looked terrible, as though she’d been dead for some time. Had she? Been dead for a while? Burton’s thoughts ran around madly inside his head. He looked again at Monica, her eyes fixed and glassy. Burton despaired at the thought of touching her, but he desperately wanted her to stop looking at him, so he reached out a trembling hand to close her eyelids as he’d seen in movies. 

What could he do? If he called an ambulance, what would he say? My wife seems to have died in the night. Well, that was putting it mildly. She had clearly been dead for days, Burton had been living with a zombie, which he absolutely could not tell anyone and be taken seriously. There would be questions. Interruptions. People would interfere, want him to answer questions he could not. He thought of waiting until night, carrying her outside, dropping her into the lake, but she’d be found. He could bury her somewhere? He did, after all, own a cemetery. But that would be noticed, him in his private cemetery late at night, digging. He wouldn’t let himself google anything. Too risky, don’t do anything that could be used as evidence, even though he hadn’t done anything, not really. 

After dark, Burton opened the extra-long sliding door on the back of the house, the one that was meant to provide the joys of indoor-outdoor living. He needed air, but instead of a fresh lake breeze, he smelled them: dust. He looked out to the tree line, could see them massed in their usual spot. Wordlessly Burton went back in the house, gathered his wife’s body up in the comforter he’d draped over her, and carried her outside. He placed her in the yard, a few feet off the patio, and backed away slowly. They stood motionless, watching. Once inside, Burton locked the door and turned off the outdoor lights, scampering upstairs and hiding in the master bathroom like a child. He stayed there until dawn, when he finally allowed himself to look out the window over the backyard. 

The dead, and his wife, were gone.

***

Burton didn’t want to go outside anymore, they were always there now, the dead people, which now included his wife among their number. This was all the more terrifying because she looked worse, more decomposed, each time, and he was embarrassed for her in some way. He stayed in the house and barely attended his income properties, offloading responsibilities to a property manager. He tried to get a hold of the man he’d hired to tend the new cemetery, but the phone always went unanswered; a few minutes of googling during a fitful night turned up his obituary. Burton found the man’s family, called them, inquired about the death. They did not seem to want to discuss it. It was a sudden illness, a woman whispered sorrowfully before a man took the phone and barked that Burton was upsetting his wife. Burton hoped the caretaker had at least been properly buried and not carried away in the night by a gaggle of persistent zombies.

Over the next several days it felt to Burton that the dead were always near. Sometimes it seemed as though they had been in the house. Had Monica told them how to get in? He was insane. He knew he should leave, he should evict a tenant from one of his prosaic Lakewood side-by-sides and move in. But this was his house, his lakefront palace, it had cost him so much. The more frightened he became, the more angry he felt. The tables were turned and these dead people were trying to take something from him.

How to get rid of them? He wondered if it was like on television, if he had to shoot them in the head or hack them apart to get them to stop, were they really zombies? Again, he was insane. One morning he woke up and immediately smelled their dusty old bones and knew they’d been in the house, in his room, while he slept. Had they all come in, watched him, standing there silent and horrible like they did at the treeline? Or was it just the drowned woman and her terrible unseen baby? The night before he’d looked outside and they were standing at the edge of the patio, and she almost seemed to gesture to the bundle, like she wanted to show it to him. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want anything to do with them, he’d bought the land fair and square. It was his. They’d been evicted.

Burton had avoided looking at himself in the mirror once he noticed how dry his skin was getting, how spotted his hands had become. He knew what was happening. Who could he call? What would he say? I’m dying. I’ve died. The dead have come to claim their land, and I’m a zombie now, please send someone. He had to laugh. He wondered how it would happen. Would he slip away in his sleep, as Monica had, and continue to decompose there in the beautiful master bedroom with the tray ceiling and the fireplace and the settee facing the lake. Would the dead move in, throw him into the lake as he’d considered doing with his wife, would they pay the property taxes, put the garbage in the bin for the man in the tiny truck to take away each week? What could they possibly want with the house? 

He felt himself getting closer to the end of whatever was happening to him, whatever process had been inflicted on him by the dead people in his yard. He was very tired, always cold, he smelled bad. He felt sadness, he cried, both for himself and for Monica, realizing what she must have gone through. He was, he’d decided – admitted, really – already dead. He lay down in bed, drew the sheets up over himself, waited, smelled old dust.

***

His lawyer had been the one to call the police. She couldn’t get a hold of Burton for days and found the house empty, the patio door slid open, the bedding on the master bedroom floor looking as if someone had been dragged off of it. Did it seem that way, or was she imagining things? Maybe Burton had been about to make the bed, it didn’t mean anything sinister necessarily, but the house didn’t give her a good feeling. It never had, being built on top of a graveyard, sorry, a former graveyard, but it still seemed a bad business to her, it had all along.

When Burton wasn’t found – no trace of him or Monica, not anywhere, for months and then a year and then two – the house went on the market. Plenty of people came and looked, mostly out of curiosity, Did you hear, the guy that dug up the graveyard, he disappeared, no one ever heard from him again. But no one made an offer. Once people got inside, the house felt all wrong.

Burton’s private cemetery, being untended and largely forgotten, became overgrown, then unrecognizable. Weeds and grasses consumed the old re-set headstones, trees deformed and swallowed the fence, the sign fell off. All around it, things came to life, a shopping plaza and a gas station and a chicken restaurant. The abandoned cemetery started to make the rest of the neighborhood look bad and few people remembered the crazy man who’d dug up dead people to build a house on the lake. 

Business owners became annoyed, it was infuriating to think that perfectly good land was just sitting there because of a bunch of dead people nobody knew or even remembered. How many graves were there? 40 or so? There were no records, it was a private cemetery. And certainly no one noticed, when the diggers and the flatbed trucks came to move the graves again, the two unmarked and more recent graves. The woman and the man had been interred without coffins or even the bare courtesy of a box, less buried than reclaimed by the earth, or by something else entirely.