These days, you might hear folks might call it a “Cemetery Worker” or perhaps even a “Burial Grounds Custodian”. I suppose they’re trying to invest the job with dignity or maybe shed some of the negative connotations accumulated through the ages.

Maybe I’m simple, but I always figured there was no point in beating around the bush. I was a gravedigger. And the negative connotation—that every last one of us ends up an all-you-can-eat worm buffet, usually in a hole somebody’s paid to dig—ain’t going away any time soon.

Was it the greatest job in the world? Probably not. But if you can look past the obvious, it wasn’t half-bad. Fresh air. Peace and quiet. Nobody looking over your shoulder.

Rowan Wood Cemetery, where I worked, was nearly 500 acres of rolling hills, smack dab in the middle of the city. The place was historic, one of the oldest continuously operating cemeteries in the state. I was continuing a proud tradition of laying the dead to rest that started way back in 1838.

I mostly worked in the newer sections, where we packed the dearly departed, like so many sardines, into smaller and smaller plots of the cemetery’s dwindling real estate. But the older graves were what gave the place its character (and what brought the occasional European tourist.) Most of Rowan Wood was a vast and melancholy sea of mausoleums, family plots, and 19th Century monuments to the most famous, important, successful people you’ve never heard of.

Behind the cemetery walls was a world unto itself; a hushed city of the dead. Most people found it creepy. Not me, though. I liked the trees and the flowers. I liked hearing the birds sing. To me Rowan Wood was just an extra quiet park with a bunch of bones in the ground.

I honestly didn’t think about death much. Never been the morbid type. When you’re gone you’re gone. And Rowan Wood Cemetery seemed as nice a place as any to turn into dirt.

One day Clem and I were digging a grave. The plot was a tiny strip on the side of a steep hill, squeezed between Josiah Aslop (born 1799 died 1868) and Margeret Boyd Baldwin (21 Sep 1857 - 15 May 1904). In terms of real estate, I’d call it less than ideal. I couldn’t imagine an elderly widow hiking all the way up here to lay any flowers. But space in Rowan Wood is at a premium and if you can bury somebody somewhere, they’ll give it a shot. Heck, they probably charged the bereaved extra to wedge ‘em between a pair of “historic” stiffs.

Anyway, your mental image of a gravedigger is probably some pasty freak, cackling as he shovels away in the rain. I won’t presume to editorialize about my physical appearance, but we don’t work in inclement weather, and these days we use a backhoe. Digging a grave takes about an hour.

Or it should take an hour, if you’re sober. Clem wasn’t. I guess that’s another perk of being a gravedigger: you can drink on the job if you like. I didn’t do it, but Clem certainly took full advantage. He was drunk at work about half the time. Fine by me, ‘cause when he was sober, the guy was even more annoying.

“What the hell?” yelled Clem from inside the backhoe's cab. A second later I heard a hollow crunch. And then I smelled it. A stench of decay so putrid that I gagged.

I quickly covered my nose and mouth with a bandana to keep from throwing up. Clem was cussing and banging on the levers. I turned to see that the bucket of the backhoe seemed to be… stuck in the grave.

I shook my head. “Aw man, what’d you do this time?”

“Nothing! I’m just digging where they said to dig!” cried Clem.

“Move over,” I said, taking the seat in the cab.

Clem climbed out and cracked a warm Coors Light out of nervous habit.

Not to toot my own horn, but I was a pretty good gravedigger. With some careful finessing of the backhoe I was able to yank to pull the arm loose. As it came free, I heard a hollow thunk that seemed to reverberate down into the earth.

Immediately the rancid smell got worse. It was so bad Clem put his beer down on a nearby headstone. He couldn’t stand to finish it.

When you work in an old cemetery that keeps on stacking bodies upon bodies, accidents occasionally do occur. Maybe you start digging a few feet in the wrong direction and you just so happen to hit an old grave that lost its headstone a hundred years back.

If the deceased bit the dust so long ago that nobody cares? Well, then, no harm, no foul. Usually you cover the hole back up with a scoop of dirt and that’s the end of it. Still, it’s never your most pleasant workday.

The rotten smell that now filled the air told me this wasn’t going to be my most pleasant workday.

My eyes watered as I crept closer to look into the open grave. I expected to see the shards of a coffin from a century ago, perhaps a few moldy bones gleaming in the dirt.

Instead I saw a hole. An empty black void that plunged straight down into the ground. Like a cave. Or a tunnel.

“Help me,” came a quiet voice from inside the hole.

I turned to Clem who was standing about twenty feet away, holding his nose.

“You hear that?” I asked.

“Hear what?” asked Clem.

You can be a lot of things as a gravedigger: a loner, a drunk, kind of an asshole. But the one thing you cannot be is superstitious. No sir. Nothing will ruin your reputation quicker.

“Nothing,” I said.

Rowan Wood was isolated from the city that had grown up around it, but occasionally the sounds of urban life drifted over its walls. Peculiar echoes. Maybe some kids out on the street playing a game?

“Look at that.” I pointed to the hole inside the hole.

“Whoa. What the hell?” said Clem, pinching his nostrils closed. “Is that, like, a cave?”

“I dunno,” I said.

“Help me.”

I heard it again. It was a whisper. Or the faint echo of someone far away screaming at the top of their lungs. The voice sounded familiar somehow. I looked at Clem. He was pinching his nostrils shut and watching videos on his phone.

“I think I’m gonna take a look inside,” I said.

Clem’s eyes got wide. “Dude, seriously?”

“What?” I grinned. “You aren’t scared are you, buddy?”

Clem scowled. “Fuck off.”

“It’s OK, I’ll protect you.” I grabbed a shovel out of the back of the truck (OK, we do need them occasionally). “If I see any ghosts or goblins, I’ll smack ‘em with this.”

I lowered myself down into the grave and stood on the lip of the hole. A hot, moist breeze blew up from inside, like an exhalation of breath. The stink was unbearable.

I turned my iPhone flashlight on and shined it down into the hole. I couldn’t see much, but it looked like stonework down there. Not a cave. Manmade.

I listened for the voice. Nothing.

“I think we accidentally hit an old mausoleum or something,” I said.

Just then, my phone slipped out of my hand and fell into the hole. It dropped about fifteen feet before clattering to a rest on the floor of the chamber below.

“Goddammit,” I said.

From the edge of the grave I heard Clem laughing. “Smooth move, genius.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Help me.”

There it was again. I stared down into the hole. Black as pitch, except for the pinprick of light from my phone’s flashlight. As I stared, the flashlight winked out. A second later it reappeared. It was like something had moved through the darkness below.

I climbed out of the grave.

“Hey, you remember what curiosity did to the cat?” asked Clem. “Ask him, if you see him at the Verizon store?”

“I’m gonna get my phone back,” I said.

Clem suddenly got serious. “Whoa. C’mon man, you’re not thinking of actually, you know”—his voice dropped to a whisper—”going down in there. Are you?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s… it’s not safe,” said Clem.

“Why is it not safe?” I asked, my eyes narrowing.

“It’s… there’s, like…Isn’t there methane gas in caves?” said Clem weakly.

“It’s not a cave,” I said. “Wait here while I go get the ladder.”

Clem looked around and swallowed. “Wait here… alone?”

“Yeah, alone,” I said.

I walked the winding paths of Rowan Wood Cemetery toward our tastefully hidden maintenance shed (gravediggers and their crude implements are supposed to be invisible to the grieving). It was late summer and the afternoon sun was making the leaves of the trees sparkle. I heard the hum of cicadas and the faint white noise of distant traffic I couldn’t see. I watched a big black and yellow butterfly light on a thistle bush and slowly flex its wings. When I made it to the shed, I even cracked a roll of quarters I’d gotten for the laundromat and bought myself a grape soda out of the old vending machine they had in there.

By the time I got back to the gravesite with the ladder, I was almost in a good mood again.

Clem was gone.

Maybe he was taking a piss? Except… the truck was still here. The employee bathrooms were a good half-mile away and Clem hated walking. I’d seen the guy get in his car to drive across the street. No way he hoofed it all the way to the pisser.

So maybe he’d decided to relieve himself somewhere closer? Look, I won’t sugar coat it: when it’s the middle of a weekday and the cemetery is empty and you gotta go, well, you might just find a secluded spot between two tall headstones and answer nature’s call. Respectful to the dead? No. Convenient? Very.

I waited about fifteen minutes and Clem didn’t come back. It was starting to seem like he’d gotten scared and run off. I would’ve texted him but, well, you know…

“Fucking coward,” I said, as I dragged the ladder toward the grave.

I lowered it down into the hole until I heard the metallic clunk of its feet against stone. The stink from the hole was so rank and powerful, I almost decided to give up on my phone then and there.

But I didn’t. Can’t be a gravedigger with a weak stomach. Instead I grabbed the shovel, just in case, and climbed down into the darkness.

As I passed beneath the earth, I couldn’t see much but I had the immediate sensation that the chamber was much bigger than it seemed from above. I reached the bottom rung and my boots touched the slick surface of solid stone.

I stood now, in the little island of sunlight cast from the opening above, completely surrounded by inky blackness. The hairs on my arm and on the back of my neck started to rise as I had the sensation that something was watching me from the darkness.

“Hello?” I said, a little too loudly.

And I heard my voice echo away from me and disappear. No answer. Thank God.

I crouched and quickly groped toward my phone on the ground a few feet away. I snatched it up and used the flashlight to look around.

The chamber was huge. This was no mausoleum. I stood in a stone room, about 30 feet across, built in an archaic style I couldn’t quite place. Gothic? Classical? There was a door made of rotten timber in the wall ahead. It hung open, revealing a strip of darker darkness beyond.

I took a step toward the door and my boot sent a chunk of old stone skittering away.

I saw now that broken statues lay strewn across the floor. They’d toppled from their pedestals so long ago it was impossible to tell who or what it depicted. I nudged one of the chunks with my toe. It was part of a face. An eye and half of the lower jaw, its mouth twisted in agony or perhaps a smile. The teeth looked strangely pointed. I flipped it back over.

The walls glistened with moisture and creeping slime mold. But the more I looked at them, the more it seemed that underneath the spiderweb tendrils of the fungal growth, the masonry was covered in graffiti.

I put the phone light right up next to the wall. Sure enough, fading charcoal scratches, barely darker than the stone around them, covered almost every inch. The writing was in languages I couldn’t read. Here and there, I recognized letters. Was that Latin? Or Greek? Sanskrit? I saw a strip of writing that appeared to be a series of tiny triangles in different orientations. Or perhaps it was only the natural weathering of the stone.

What was this place? Why was it here? The open door yawned open before me, threatening to answer that question. I crept forward and shined the flashlight through the threshold. Beyond was a narrow tunnel snaking its way forward and down, no end in sight.

“Help me.”

I heard the familiar voice now, coming from somewhere down the corridor.

“How do I help you?” I asked.

“Help me!”

The voice was urgent now. I recognized it.

“Clem?”

“Please, man! You gotta help me!” he wailed. “Please! Please! They…”

As he screamed, his ragged voice seemed to grow more distant and muffled, as though he were being dragged away.

“Alright, I’m coming!” I yelled.

I charged down the hallway, shovel in one hand, phone in the other. The swinging flashlight cast strange, dancing shadows that disoriented me as I ran.

The tunnel was damp and fetid, sloping downward at a barely perceptible grade. Dark, moist tendrils—roots or fungus—dangled from the ceiling. They brushed my hair and shoulders as I ran.I came to an intersection, where this corridor met another.

I listened and thought I heard another faint scream. Was it coming from the right? I wasn’t sure, but that’s the direction I turned.

I ran down another hallway, almost identical to the first, and came to yet another intersection. I listened again. This time I could only hear the sound of my own breathing. I felt something brush against the back of my leg. Looked down, and saw nothing.

I turned and ran on through the dark labyrinth not toward anything now, but away from something. I could feel it in the darkness behind me, pressing, matching my pace. I heard its feet softly padding behind me. I knew I could never outrun it. It would catch me in the end.

I stopped dead and spun, swinging the shovel behind me. With an ear-splitting clang, it struck the masonry, smashing a hole in the brittle old stone wall.

There was nothing following me. For some reason, I started to laugh.

“Jesus Christ, man,” I said to myself as I doubled over and tried to catch my breath. “You’re losing it.”

But I stopped laughing as I saw a viscous, black substance begin to drip from the hole I’d made in the wall. The drip became a dribble, and the stuff started to pool at the base of the wall. More pieces of shattered stone flaked away and black ichor was gushing now, like blood from an arterial wound. The pool was spreading across the floor, bubbling toward me. I jerked my foot back, not wanting even my filthy work boot to touch the black stuff. It somehow stank worse than the air around it. Like bile and rancid honey.

I scrambled backward until I bumped into a rotten door at the end of the hallway.

I wrenched it open and stepped through, then slammed it shut behind me. The noise reverberated through the largest chamber I’d found yet. As the echo faded, I heard the quiet lapping of waves. I could sense that I was on the edge of some underground body of water.

I took a step across the loose uneven terrain and felt something crunch underfoot. Another step. Another crunch.

I looked down and saw bones. Human bones. The ground here was carpeted with them. Some shone white. Others were so old they were a dark ochre, almost black. The remains of hundreds of people. Thousands. Tens of thousands. If there was ground below them I didn’t see it. Bones upon bones upon bones. They formed a beach on the edge of a vast underground lake, the shore of which stretched on as far as I could see.

“Help me.”

The voice was right next to me now. Tickling my ear. Or was it inside my head?

“Help me.”

It no longer sounded like Clem, though. It sounded like a stranger, desperate and cruel.

“Help me.”

No, it sounded like my mother. No, it sounded like my friend Petey, who died in a car accident when he was 19. No, it sounded like the dumb bastard who jumped off the bridge and fucked up my morning commute last Thursday.

“Help me.”

“Help me.”

“Help me.”

The whispers were a cacophony now. I screamed and clapped my hands over my ears. Still I heard them. Moaning. Pleading. Demanding. Shrieking.

I heard a splash way out in the water. I turned and saw a black shape moving across the surface of the lake.

Splash. It was a boat. Cutting through the water toward me. I couldn’t see who was rowing. Only a hunched silhouette, pulling the oars.

The voices became frantic now. “Help me!” they wailed.

A bony hand grabbed at my ankle. I swung the shovel, shattering it.

I saw a face emerge from the bones, a skull with a few ragged strips of desiccated flesh still clinging to it.

“Help me,” said the thing said, as it pulled itself free from the loose bones around it.

“No!” I screamed.

It lunged at me and I dodged out of the way. But there was another one behind me. It bit at my foot. I kicked at it but I tripped, and went down hard.

I was on my back surrounded by them now. Skeletal hands grabbed my clothes. Rotting fingers clawed at my flesh, tore at my hair.

Splash. The boat was drawing closer now.

“Help me!” they roared, their voices filled with rage and terror. They scratched and squeezed and choked. The dead would tear me apart.

“I can’t!” I screamed.

And with all my remaining strength I pulled myself free of them, ripping my shirt and jeans in the process. As I scrambled away, the roll of quarters, still jangling in my pocket, spilled free.

Immediately, the dead things forgot all about me. The crawling and lurching figures dove for the shiny coins. They were fighting each other for them, now. In a frenzy, ripping themselves apart to get at them.

Splash. A final stroke of the oar brought the boat to shore. The hunched figure slowly turned.

I ran.

I don’t know if I ran for a minute or an hour. But I ran as hard as I could, through the endless maze of tunnels until, at last, I gave up all hope of ever escaping that dark place beneath the ground.

That’s when I spotted it. A pool of golden light in the distance. Sunlight from above. I’d somehow made my way back to the room where I’d entered. I looked up and saw a patch of blue sky through the hole in the ceiling of the chamber.

I felt a glimmer of hope, but then my heart immediately sank. The ladder was gone. The hole was fifteen feet above me. In a gesture of utter futility, I jumped as high as I could. I was easily still seven feet short.

I had nothing to climb with. Nothing to stand on top of. I was stuck down here. There was no way out. There was no way out.

I put my hands on my knees and I started to cry.

And that’s when I heard them again. Dragging, uneven footsteps and down the hallway I’d just come from. Bone and putrid flesh scraping on stone. Faint but getting louder.

“Help me,” they whispered, a growing chorus.

There must have been a dozen of them. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. They would be here any second.

“Help me!” I screamed up at the hole.

Nothing.

“Help me,” I sobbed to myself.

And then I saw Clem’s face, peeking over the edge and peering down.

“Dude, what the hell?” he said.

Clem lowered the ladder and I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

I sat on the grass in silence for a good ten minutes, staring at the hole, while Clem drank a beer with a concerned look on his face. I felt the warm sun on my skin. A late summer breeze blew through my hair.

“Where did you go?” I managed to say, at last.

“I was taking a piss,” said Clem, with a shrug.

We never spoke of that day again. But I’ll never forget what I found there in the ground. And I must admit: I think about death a lot more now.

I’ll always remember that day for another reason too. It was the only time I ever saw Clem work late. Both of us figured it was best to make sure we filled up that hole before we went home.

Hopefully, nobody else ever finds it.