Tales From Valleyview Cemetery Read online

  It wasn’t long before the whole neighborhood found out. Peter and Shirley had been having an affair and they'd run off together.

  Ted Elliott and Maggie Reynolds were often seen walking the neighborhood. Most folks assumed they were just helping each other cope with the betrayal of their spouses. They always avoided Valleyview Cemetery, though. And who could blame them? What would make good people want to walk through a foul place like that?

  OTHER VOICES, OTHER TOMBS

  The backyard of Jeff’s parents’ house met the pointed iron fence of the cemetery. In childhood, he experienced an unnamed dread as he looked out of his bedroom window at the jagged stone rows and the new graves as they opened and closed. He always had a general uneasiness that he never really expressed to his family about his daily view. Eventually, he became an adult and the cemetery faded into his subconscious. His youthful trepidation buried by all of his worldly worries and grown-up responsibilities.

  His parents were dead ten years when he moved his daughter home. He thought it odd how he lay in his parents’ old room and still thought of it as their house. He made a nursery for his daughter, Georgia, in his childhood bedroom. It was just the two of them, all alone on Richard Street.

  August was warmer than usual and Jeff had no air conditioning. He was constantly worried about Georgia overheating at night. He kept her window open for most of the summer, and they would often sit in the rocker after he got home from work and stare out at the graveyard. There was a particular group of stone angels he liked to meditate on during those long afternoons and evenings.

  The traffic during the day was constant. All weekend and most nights he would listen to the Little League baseball announcers in the nearby park as they read the young boys’ names, many the sons of long-lost school chums. But after ten, closer to midnight, it was dead silent and completely relaxing—though often lonely with just the baby for company. His friends all had families and they were often out of touch.

  Late one night, when Georgia was sound asleep and he was starting to drift off in his own bed, he began hearing parts of conversations over the baby monitor.

  “Speak to the Russian.”

  “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.”

  “Slavs, the lot of you. Frick is rolling a big cigar, laughing.”

  It seemed like multiple male voices, each one distinct. It was obviously not coming from Georgia’s room. He had messed with walkie-talkies, various electronic hand-helds since he was a kid, and remembered picking up what seemed like phone conversations from time to time. They would come in clear for a few seconds then fade.

  “When the grave has been made, we will make it still better.” This was strange because the feed was not fizzling and the speech seemed to be getting louder.

  “We will adorn it, and cover it with moss.”

  “We will do this, we three brothers.” The way the final line was said in unison made Jeff shiver. He heard nothing more that night.

  Early the next morning Jeff’s brother, Arnold, stopped by with his daughter to visit.

  “She’s getting big, Jeff.” Arnold sat in the rocker in the nursery with his four year-old in his lap. He had a huge house up on the hill, a gorgeous wife and he owned a successful surveying company.

  “It’s tough, man,” said Jeff. Arnold nodded and stared out at the cemetery.

  “Hey, I heard some bizarre conversation over the baby monitor last night.” His brother smirked. Jeff continued, “It sounded like a bunch of the old guys down at Charlie’s Pub shit-talking, but they were going on about making graves. It was pretty creepy.”

  Arnold laughed. “Remember when we played hide and seek out there.” He pointed at the group of mausoleums farther up the cemetery hill. Jeff nodded, recalling when he fell and broke his leg and all the trouble they got in.

  “Once in a while I’ll see kids sitting up on that one,” said Jeff.

  Arnold chuckled. “They’re still doing that?” Jeff nodded.

  In high school, he, Arnold and their buddies were messing around in the cemetery, late at night. Jeff broke his leg when he fell from the roof of one of the older mausoleums.

  “I swear someone pushed me.” They both laughed. Word spread that Jeff was attacked by a ghost. So, for years, teenagers came down and sat on that same mausoleum to see if they could meet the supernatural themselves.

  “Anyway, I heard a name in that conversation last night: Frick.”

  “So what?”

  “Grandpa Frick...Mom’s dad, right?”

  Arnold looked puzzled. “Jeff, last I checked there are no more Fricks in town.”

  Jeff dropped the subject and visited with his brother and niece until dark.

  It was an incredibly humid night; heat lightning lit up the sky and thunder rolled in from a distance. Jeff lay over his sticky sheets thinking about the conversation he had overheard the previous evening.

  As he began to doze, the voices returned from the static of the monitor. The first voice seemed to be speaking German; he listened but couldn’t make out any of the words. The second voice he thought he could make out: “Frick’s up there rolling a fat cigar for Lester, and they’re both laughing.”

  There was more jumbled conversation, but it was unintelligible and Georgia was stirring, likely due to the intermittent thunder. Jeff tended to his daughter and slept the rest of the night without incident.

  The next morning, he dropped Georgia off with her mother’s grandmother and visited the public library.

  “Sir, can I help you find something?” asked the librarian. Jeff was digging through the microfiche cabinet in the town’s history section, trying to find some information on the names ‘Frick’ and ‘Lester’. He vaguely remembered hearing about them during elementary school lessons about the local factories.

  “Yes, I’m searching for a man named ‘Frick’ who was associated with the Lester factory?” The librarian raised an eyebrow and nodded.

  “Ah, I see. Francis Frick?” Jeff nodded. The woman went right to the Sun Newspaper file, pulled a microfiche and took him over to the reading machine.

  “Francis Frick was the foreman that many of the tannery workers blamed for the fire of aught five.” She scrolled to the newspaper article about the fire. He was surprised it was a small back-page notice and not a headline story.

  “Is this it? Wasn’t this big news?”

  The librarian smirked. “Harry Lester not only owned the factory that burnt, he owned the newspapers, mills, stores, and he even built this library. He buried any investigation into whether or not Frick was culpable.”

  Jeff felt ashamed; he was pretty sure he was somehow related to this Frick guy. His mother’s family had left the area long before she came back to study at the local university, where she had met his father.

  “So, what actually happened?” asked Jeff.

  “Alright, there’s history as told by the people who’ve experienced it, and then there’s the official town history that I’m paid to record and preserve,” said the librarian. Jeff looked at her dumbly.

  “Frick was one of Lester’s factory foremen. He would lock the doors of the tannery during work hours. He himself paced the roof, chomping on cigars, while the men put in their ten to twelve hours in that hot stench below. A tannery in summer is possibly the worst smell a worker will ever experience.” She paused, studying his face.

  “Go on, please.”

  “Anyway, there was a fire and six men died. Those are facts; whether or not the doors were locked at the time is ‘officially’ disputed. There were enough exits, they were just locked…”

  “So why did only six die?”

  “Three brothers managed to pry two of the narrow windows open and are likely the reason why hundreds didn’t die that day. Most of the men climbed out and were given enough time to do so by the trio, as well as three other workers who pulled men from tannery pits in the smoke.”

  Jeff’s eyes went wide at the mention of three brothe
rs. “So, Frick was protected by the owner and this was all swept under the rug?”

  She nodded. “That wasn’t the worst of it, either. Apparently, Frick was also charged with burying the bodies. They were immigrants and had no one to bury them, and he may have dumped them all in the same unmarked grave.” Jeff bristled at the injustice of it all. The librarian continued, “Of course that last bit is pure speculation. There’s no evidence of any of it after the facts that there was a factory fire, six men perished, and the doors were probably—more than likely—locked on orders from Frick.”

  “Is there any idea where they were buried?”

  She seemed hesitant to continue beyond her role as professional historian. “Well, Lester owned the land that would become Valleyview Cemetery. If I were to guess, I’d say it’s as good a spot as any.”

  Jeff thanked the woman and headed back home. He was really disturbed by the idea that there might be a mass grave in his figurative, or literal, backyard.

  Days passed. Jeff took care of his daughter, went to work at his delivery job, and at night listened for voices over the monitor. After a week of nothing, he was frustrated and went to visit his brother.

  “How you been, Jeff?” Jeff looked tired, Arnold was worried about him.

  “Same old.”

  “You look like shit, man. What’s up?”

  Jeff screwed his lips, debating whether or not to tell Arnold that he had been investigating the voices he heard those two nights over his baby monitor. “Can I ask a favor?”

  “Sure, Jeff.” Arnold figured his brother was finally going to give in and come work for him.

  “Can we use your GPR to search my backyard?” Arnold was incredulous. Jeff was asking to use his incredibly expensive ground-penetrating radar system.

  “Fuck, no… Why?”

  “I really think the grave of those workers who died in that factory fire might be in mom and dad’s backyard.”

  Arnold shook his head. “I don’t have the time, bro. Why would you even think that? And even if it were true, what are the chances it’s in our little patch when the cemetery itself is so big?”

  “Arnold, mom and dad’s house is over 100 years old. It was given to them by mom’s family…”

  “So what?” Arnold asked.

  “I think that guy Frick was the one who built it and lived in it.”

  “Jeff, sure, we are related in some way to that old story; sure, the house was a gift from the Fricks who live in Pennsylvania—but why would this guy bury bodies in his own backyard?”

  Jeff did not have an answer for his brother. “I don’t know—and I know this sounds more than crazy. But the baby monitor—it only has a range of about ninety feet and that cemetery fence is more than ninety feet away.”

  Arnold sighed, all too used to his brother’s whims.

  “Please, bro?”

  “Shit. I guess I could bring the GPR over sometime this week. If only to show you, you’re fucking crazy and need a girlfriend and/or a psychiatrist.”

  It was not quite 3 a.m. when Jeff was awakened by voices over the baby monitor.

  “When Frick’s grave has been made, we will make it still better.”

  “Cigar roller, butcher of men!” The voices seemed different to Jeff, much angrier.

  “He lies with his fat wife above, laughing.” All of the voices seemed to merge into one incomprehensible garble, while Jeff distinctly detected the stench of burnt hair. He had never been as frightened, save for the night he fell and broke his leg. He thought of how he lay in the cemetery propped up against a headstone, gritting his teeth in agony until his pals finally discovered him.

  He got up and searched the house for the burning smell but came up short. It eventually faded and he was satisfied it was nothing to worry about.

  Days and nights passed. Jeff had trouble sleeping but heard no more conversation among the dead. Finally, Arnold called him and said he would be over with the GPR. Jeff dropped his daughter off with the sitter and waited for his brother to arrive.

  “Come out here and help me with this thing; it’s heavy as hell.” Arnold was at the front door. Jeff leapt from the couch and went out to help him lug the machine to the backyard.

  “I hope you know this machine isn’t going to give us a picture underground. We’re not going to be able to see skeletons grinning back at us.” Jeff nodded.

  It was slow going. Arnold inched the machine along the ground for an hour before he said much of anything. Finally, he decided it was calibrated right to look for depressions within six to eight feet of the surface.

  “As far as I know, there’s only the one gas line back here, so that’ll appear fairly often and be a good marker.” The two men dragged the machine across the yard, back and forth, for hours. It was getting dark when Arnold decided they had collected enough information to analyze.

  “Let’s go inside and get a drink. The computer will take a few minutes to get us our radargram.” They went in and set up shop on the kitchen table. Fifteen minutes passed before Arnold was able to study the information they had gathered the preceding hours.

  “So, this is where that old tree stump was, here is the gas line, like I said, and… Oh, there’s something.”

  Jeff grew anxious. “What, Arn?!”

  Arnold grinned at him. “See these diffractors all grouped right here?” Jeff nodded. Arnold continued, “It looks like a big hole that was dug and filled in.”

  “That’s it, then!” Jeff practically jumped out of his chair.

  “Hold on. It just means that at some point a hole was dug there. I’d guess it was four feet deep and eight feet wide.” They talked about it for a while. Arnold brushed off his brother’s insistence that it was the mass grave of the tannery workers who died a century before.

  “I can get us a backhoe. Let’s dig it up and see.”

  Arnold shook his head. “Ha. Try getting a permit for that!” They went back and forth; Arnold was completely against digging.

  “Tomorrow morning, I’m digging.”

  Arnold was worried about his brother’s obsession. He left him to his thoughts and returned to his family.

  That evening, after he put his daughter to bed, Jeff began digging by hand. He placed the baby monitor next to his electric lantern, on a wheelbarrow, so he could listen to his daughter’s light breathing. He dug into the dirt at the spot his brother begrudgingly revealed to him before leaving.

  Jeff dug for hours before he heard the voices over the monitor. He was sweating profusely and sat down in his shallow hole to listen.

  “We won’t mourn in the darkness.” A second voice continued the thought, “while Frick sleeps sound above.”

  “Call the roller of big cigars. Frick, then Lester!” The German said his piece next but Jeff couldn’t understand a thing, save for the angry, spiteful tone.

  “We three brothers will make their graves.” Jeff sat propped up against his dirt pile, and as he listened to the static, he nodded off into the warm August night.

  Arnold rushed down the hill to his brother’s house after receiving a call mid-morning at his office. Jeff hadn’t dropped Georgia off at her grandmother’s house and wasn’t answering his home phone. She told him she had contacted the police.

  When Arnold arrived, he rushed into the house and immediately heard the baby crying. He went to Georgia’s room, picked her up, then looked for his brother throughout the house. Nothing. He returned to the baby’s room to change her and grabbed an instant bottle of formula from the nursery cupboard. While he fed her, the sun’s glint off the shovel in the backyard caught his eye. He saw Jeff’s lantern next to the shovel and a smooth patch of dirt.

  Arnold hurried out back with the baby and saw the monitor resting in the grass. He set the baby down as he grabbed the shovel and vigorously began digging at the grave. Minutes later, two police officers entered the backyard and yelled for Arnold to get on the ground. He kept digging until one officer tackled and handcuffed him, while the other grabbe
d the baby.

  “My brother!” Arnold screamed at the cop to let him go so he could save Jeff. They put him in the squad car and gave Georgia to her grandmother when she arrived soon after. Arnold convinced the police to dig up the patch. They kept him in the car while they contacted the caretaker from the cemetery to help them remove the dirt.

  Jeff died of asphyxiation in a shallow grave. His brother was not charged and was let go after hours of interrogation and a number of witnesses emerged to place Arnold at home or work during the preceding hours.

  After Jeff was properly buried in the expanded northern parcel of Valleyview, well out of sight of the family home and backyard where he had been buried alive, Arnold paid for further excavation of the site by forensic anthropologists from the local university.

  They spent days digging, plotting and planning before they found a mass grave about four feet below where Jeff had met his end. They could identify five to six different adult males. DNA testing showed that three of the unknowns were closely related. A memorial was erected in their honor and each was given a proper burial.

  For more information on Frick and Lester, see Appendix A.

  THE CARETAKER

  Zeke Taylor slammed the door to his mom's rusty double-wide and ran off into the dusky December evening.

  "Get back here, you little shit!" yelled Todd, his mom’s boyfriend, as Zeke trucked it down the block. Todd was a mechanic at Barker Auto down on Harrison Drive. He had greasy, black hands, and had no problem using them to do realignment work on Zeke’s face. His mother was always too hopped up on Oxy to notice.

  Zeke ran and ran—out of Lestershire's dingy south side and into the well-manicured north. Todd would never look for him there; the bastard was too drunk to walk even fifty yards. He turned onto Memorial Drive and stopped in front of Valleyview Cemetery. He was sure no one would bother him there.