Terror in the Shadows Vol. 2: Horror Short Stories Collection with Scary Ghosts, Paranormal & Supernatural Monsters by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: ScareStreet.com
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

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The Mort-Safe

By David Longhorn

Being surrounded by dead people ought to be more fun than this.

Miranda dawdled along at the back of the group. She had never thought until now that she might lose interest in graves. She'd been on this tour for what seemed like hours, though according to her phone it was just over forty minutes. The unseasonably warm September weather was making her sweat under her black clothes, and her feet were hurting in her Doc Marten boots. She wished she's left off a layer when dressing that morning, maybe shunned her velvet jacket.

Global warming hates Goths, she thought fretfully. So unfair.

“And now,” said the guide, “we come to one of Garmouth Cemetery's more unusual residents!”

The guide, a majestic woman with cropped, iron-gray hair, gestured at a badly overgrown plot that at first glance seemed to be enclosed by a small fence. Looking more closely, Miranda realized that the grave was sealed off not only at the sides but also on top. A cage of rusted black metal covered it all. The cage, combined with the unchecked weeds, obscured all but the outline of the tombstone within.

Mysterious!

Miranda's interest was piqued. Maybe this tour would not entirely suck after all. There was something about the neglected grave.

A feeling of delicious doom, of some ancient tragedy. Cool.

“This,” said the guide, “is the only surviving example of a mort-safe in this part of Northern England. Some of you may know of mort-safes, a rather gruesome detail of our island history. The idea was to make it impossible—or at least difficult—for body snatchers to steal a fresh corpse and whisk it to the medical lecturers at Edinburgh University. It cost quite a bit to put a solid cage around the grave, set nice and deep so it can’t be dug out easily. Such was the fear of the body snatchers!”

“Why not just cremate the dead?” asked an older man in a fawn cardigan and rumpled, drawstring-waisted trousers. “I mean, if you didn’t want their corpse to be stolen?”

The guide shook her head.

“Cremation was illegal, at the time. Parliament only permitted it in the late Victorian era. Before then, burial was compulsory, primarily for religious reasons. It was population growth that drove the shift to cremation.”

The woman turned to indicate the burial plot inside the black iron cage.

“Now, what makes this one unusual is that we have no knowledge of who was buried here, as all nineteenth century parish burial records were destroyed in an air raid in 1941. Nobody has opened the mort-safe in living memory, so the weeds have rendered the inscription unreadable. All we can be sure of is that it's roughly two hundred years old. Give or take.”

The guide smiled as the little tour party gathered round to peer at the weedy plot. Most did not seem particularly impressed. Miranda raised her phone to take a picture of the guide standing in front of the caged grave. Things were looking up. Later she would upload the pic to her blog, Lady Doomflower.

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