20 - Third Tale of the Japanese Cemetery - The Unnamable Offspring

Miu rose from where she sat, on the steps of the shrine, and walked over to a candle that rested on a particular gravestone.

"Generations. It is what binds past to future. We are all our ancestors. I am reminded of another story that took place in this very graveyard, on this very stone. I call it...

THE UNNAMABLE OFFSPRING

They found Keiko dead on the morning of July 5th. Her body cold, the young woman's strong body still. Doc Grumman was called, his hands shaking as he placed the stethoscope at her breast. His breath still stank of whiskey, his ears rang from the gunpowder loosed during last night's celebration. He shook his grizzled grey head and signed the **** certificate.

Cremation was, and is, the preference for those families that can afford it. In those days, few could. This was a burial ground in truth; bodies were laid out in simple coffin and interred deep. Keiko was stripped, washed, and wrapped in a simple dress. The site of her grave was chosen, where two strong cousins would dig the grave. A wooden post would serve as a temporary marker until a permanent stone could be carved.

Time was critical. The weather was hot. Bodies rotted quickly, in the years before air conditioning or refrigeration. The solution for the small Japanese community was an underground stone vault. Keiko's father and cousins carried the loaded coffin to the dark, dry, cool subterranean chamber. She would keep for the three days it would take to make the arrangements for the simple funeral.

Alone in the dark.

Doc Grumman was a country doctor. He had no formal schooling, but had learned his art as an apprentice in Missouri. He had delivered hundreds of babies, and signed as many **** certificates. With a needle and thread he was a steady hand, and so too with an amputation knife and bonesaw. For medicines, he prescribed everything from brandy to homeopathic medicines, poultices of herbs to the bitter elixirs sold out of Sears & Roebucks catalogs.

He had never seen a real case of epilepsy

When they opened the vault three days later, undoing the lock on the iron chain. They found the coffin in pieces. On the inside lid, which had been nailed down, were the scratches where Keiko, awakening from the cataleptic episode, had sought desperately to escape her prison.

Keiko herself lay on the floor. Her dress in shreds, her body marked by shallow scratches and bites. Neither of her cousins spoke of the smell of sex that pervaded the vault, or the blood that ran down Keiko's thighs.

It was her mother who gently stripped and bathed her daughter that saw where the blood was coming from, and where the filth was concentrated. Notices the bite marks were most prevalent on Keiko's breasts, the scratches mostly on her buttocks. The young woman was numb with the ordeal, but at last tried to put into words something of her experience.

"I was trapped. I screamed. Pounded my fists against the sides of the box, braced myself and kicked with my feet. It was useless. I was too weak. Then I heard it...a sniffling, as of a hog. I cried out and the noise grew closer, closer. Whoever it was, was right outside and I banged as hard as I could—"

Keiko held up her hands. They were bruised, the nails torn. She let them fall back down to her lap.

"He tore the box to pieces. Then he seized me—"

"He?" her mother asked.

"Oh yes," Keiko said, and hung her head low, both hands pressed against her stomach. "Definitely male. I—I tried to fight. He was too strong. Too fast. I tried to bite him as he pierced me but—my teeth were nothing to him. Oh mother, I know you told me about the wedding night, but I never imagined such ****, such...passion."

Keiko's eyes got distant then. She stared in the direction of the graveyard, as though the walls had vanished.

"It hurt at first. I screamed myself ragged. Then...it wasn't trying to be gentle, but itwas relentless. My body felt the pain, but also something else. It was like the times I touched myself, here alone in my room, but so much more intense. I don't know when my screams of pain and outrage became hoarse gasps, but I know that as something warm filled my belly and ran down my thighs—it felt as though I was going to die.

"He left me, for a while. I lay in the dark, sobbing, my cleft burning. Worried I would bleed to ****. He returned with—something. it was meat. Raw. I do not know what kind, but he **** it between my lips, and I was hungry enough I ate, and ate. I let the blood and juices of that uncooked flesh run down my hoarse throat. Then I felt him ready again and I...I...I spread my legs for him. Perhaps it was because I feared more ****, or that I hoped he would leave me be if he had me again, but oh mother, it was different this time, it was...the things he did to me in the dark...what we did together..."

Keiko recovered. Worked the farm. She would take many long walks in the graveyard, in the weeks to come, as her stomach swelled. Officially, they say some vagrant necrophile must have broken into the vault and **** her. But the chain had been locked and intact, as they had left it.

The child that was born was given no name. It did not live long. Those with such deformities rarely do. It was buried with her the following spring, when a carriage ran Keiko down in the road. Mother and unnamable offspring were laid to rest here, in this very grave.

Miu bent down to blow out the candle. And was it some trick of the light, or did the smoke briefly head downward toward the grave itself?