The Earth Moves

Edwin Brown sat guard over his sister’s grave. The night was at its deepest, the moon non-existent in the cloudless, New England sky. He had time to consider as he sat, hunched against a tree beneath his well-worn duster coat, whether he was more afraid of what the townsfolk might do to the grave, or what might come from it.
Edwin Brown had good reason to fear, but he fought it with the resolution of a rational man. Well educated and well-travelled, Edwin had returned from Europe to find his home town much changed. When he had left Exeter, a decade before, it had been a thriving township of farmers but many had since fled the stony ground of Rhode Island for the softer living to be had in the west. Farms stood empty, decaying, like ghosts of the thriving enterprises they once were.
It wasn’t just opportunity that had preyed on the good people of Exeter; disease had also taken its toll. Edwin had learnt of the deaths of his mother and sister, Mary, by letter but the loss of his youngest sister Lena had been a surprising and bitter blow. Edwin had retained fond memories of the three-year-old Lena he had left behind, and had enjoyed corresponding with her during his absence.
His father had urged Edwin to marry, and marry quickly, as he had stifled the tell-tale cough that was the beginning of consumption. Henry Brown had wanted more assurance than a single heir, for his legacy.
Edwin understood; it was the reason he had returned to America, after all. As compelling as his studies in the old world had been, he had felt the tug of blood, the need to ensure that land hard won and held through war and disease would not fall back to the savagery that had held it before the Pilgrim Fathers had founded the nation.
What had surprised him, though, was how primitive this brave new world now seemed when compared to the learned environments of London, and even Boston. Out here, on the borders, surrounded by derelict farms and plagued by disease the people clung hard to the old superstitions. It had not mattered how he told the town fathers that students of natural philosophy in London considered that Consumption was now caused by tuberculosis germs, they were more swayed by the stories from neighbouring settlements, where the dead had returned from the grave to feast on the living.
His father had noted how, when Lena was at her weakest, she would call out for her mother and Mary and this was taken as proof positive that they had been sucking the life from her. Poor Mary had complained of a weight on her chest; the presence of the undead, it was decided.
Edwin had argued bitterly with his father, but had been unable to persuade the gathered men of their ignorance. It was the Preacher who had finally silenced him by asking, ‘What kind of a man would refuse to take steps to preserve his own father, his only living relative?’
Edwin had ridden angrily out into the countryside on the day they had desecrated the graves of his mother and younger sister. He could not remove the image from his mind just from the describing of it, and was certain that had he been present it was something he would never have recovered from. To dig up your mother’s coffin, remove her corpse, behead it and pierce the breast he had clung to for comfort to tear out her heart? He could not have done it. His father had watched, he knew, and taken a tincture of the ash of the organ that had loved him in life in the hope of a cure from what ailed him.
Yet still he coughed, the kerchief stained with blood now when he drew it back from his mouth. His frame, once lean and strong began to look like the neighbouring farms; a skeletal shadow of its former self. Edwin feared for his father’s life, but held fast to his belief in science. At least until he had heard his father, wheezing and gasping for breath, calling out Lena’s name in terror. Bursting into the sick room, he had seen a wisp of something white by the open window; he told himself it was just the drape, but as he stared out into the blackness beyond the pane, a fear began to grow.
When the preacher approached him with the notion that it was perhaps sweet Lena who returned from the grave to feast on his father, Edwin argue against it. He could not see her defiled. His memories of the girl with eyes the colour of a stormy sky and hair like honeyed wheat where a decade old, but greatly cherished. She had been the most perfect thing he had known, and he could not revise that image.
The Preacher told him of a different Lena, a girl who had been noisy in church, who refused Sunday school, and who had shown herself capable of lewd behaviour with one of the neighbour’s boys. The Preacher spoke persuasively; what harm, Edwin, to take her from the grave and look. We need do nothing, if all is well, but if there is any sign that she lives on after death…
Edwin had begged for one night. One night where he would sit and watch over his sister’s grave. The Preacher had promised him that, but Edwin had seen the glances exchanged by men full of fear; he didn’t trust them not to come and disturb her all the same.
Buried in winter, the grass had not yet spread itself like a green blanket over her in her slumber; hard frosts had kept the ground dark and barren. Edwin leaned his head against the trunk of the tree and sighed, his breath fogging the air before him and adding to the mist that was slowly rising from the ground.
Get a grip on yourself, Brown. He whispered, fighting his own primitive response to the night, and this place given over to the memory of the dead. He was a rational man, he knew what made a mist; he was at a loss to explain, though, why the swirl and eddy of it should circle over the mound that was his sister’s grave.
Rational men do not give in to fear, they enquire, and so it was that Edwin Brown stood and left the shelter given by the tree to walk towards the mist. He would know an answer, he thought, even as his most primitive instincts told him he already knew all he needed to.
Staring into the darkness, Edwin let his gaze pierce the mist, to see the clods of dirt below. His breath caught in his throat as his eyes took in motion; the earth moved. From beneath it, slow tendrils of white haze danced, coming together to form a figure. A woman. She slid from the ground towards him as he stood, paralysed with the reality of her, and passed a most un-sisterly kiss from her icy lips to his.
‘Mercy?’ whispered Edwin, falling to the use of her pet name, not uttered for so many years.
Falling to his knees, Edwin began to cough. When he had recovered his breath, she was gone along with the brume that had made her.

Edwin Brown watched as the grave diggers disinterred his sister. There was no surprise on his face as they opened her coffin, he could not echo the gasp of horror from the hardened men who had come to perform the task. He knew that Mercy was untouched, beneath the coffin lid. Her skin was bleached to white, her lips a scarlet promise of death held open in a sickening grimace. She was as ethereal, perfect and horrifying as she had been the night before. Edwin would not allow science to cloud his judgement now; neither would he shirk his duty.
Edwin Brown hefted the axe he would use to dismember his sister’s corpse and whispered one last word.
‘Mercy.’