Short Story by Judy Darley

Whenever the chance arose, Lorna volunteered to work nights, because it allowed her to run in the cemetery during the day. It was her pay-off for all the junk food consumed during her paramedic shifts – she told her flat-mate Charlotte that the runs were her ‘health insurance’ against all the rubbish she filled her body with, stalling off boredom and smothering stress.

Picture Taken by Dave Napier

At 7am she’d arrive home, sleep till 3, then begin her run at 4, giving her plenty of time to race along the rough and crooked paths before the gates were locked at 5. In winter, when the gates closed at 4.30pm she got up half an hour earlier in order to maintain her routine.

“You’re crazy,” said Charlotte, a paediatric nurse. “In my time away from the hospital I want to surround myself with life, not death – go to playgrounds, shopping centres, anywhere there’ll be kids running, shouting, laughing – I need to remind myself that not all children are ill. The cemetery’s the last place I’d want to go.”

“But that’s what you don’t get.” Lorna smiled. “That old place is full of life – all those trees! Not to mention the birds and squirrels skittering through their branches. Nowhere else in the city quite like it.”

One day she was running along a path where the poplar trees sang. Pausing to listen to the sound of the narrow trunks ringing together in the breeze, she saw a bearded man coming towards her, leading a large yellow dog. The man’s beard was so magnificent she couldn’t stop staring until he locked eyes with her and grinned.

“Have you seen the deer yet?” he asked, as though they were already mid-conversation.

“Deer?” she echoed, surprised. “Here in the cemetery? No!”

“Keep looking and you will soon enough,” he said confidently, leaving her staring after him in amazement.

She told Charlotte about it that night, but her flat-mate just laughed. “Oh, that old bloke with the golden retriever? I was in the Cop op the other day and overheard him telling a group of kids about it – he tells everyone that.” She cackled. “How would a city centre cemetery end up with deer in it? How would they get there? Hitchhike?”

Lorna had to agree, it did sound a bit mad.

Still, something about the man’s sense of conviction made her wonder, and as she ran she imagined creatures in the thick woods surrounding her, watching but unseen. Sometimes as she glanced into the foliage she thought she saw eyes glinting back at her, but the moment she slowed they disappeared into the shadows.

Night was falling earlier and earlier so that soon she was running through the long fingers of dusk as soon as she set off. She no longer glanced up when she heard tiny footsteps scrabbling overhead, focusing instead on not tripping over some raised root or fallen branch. The tombs and memorials seemed to gain new significance in the half light, and she found herself seeing many as though for the first time, especially the memorial to William Budd, the 19th century doctor who’d put two and two together and realised that filthy water contributed to the spread of cholera. It was miraculous, life-saving leaps of logic like this that, Lorna reminded herself, had made medicine a field she wanted to work in. Being a paramedic had seemed a heroic profession, the front line of a bloody war, stretching out a reassuring hand to the injured and afraid. But so much of the job now involved rolling belligerent drunks onto stretchers, and washing their stinking vomit from her uniform. It wasn’t quite the role, or the life, she’d envisaged for herself.

It was a dull, overcast afternoon when she finally saw it. The sky was swollen and grey, threatening to rain or sleet or worse. The dog-walkers were all tucked away in their homes. Even the squirrels had taken a break from bouncing from tree to tree. It felt like she was the only living creature in the cemetery, hers the only breath daring to disturb the thick damp air that had been lying motionless all day, if not forever.

Then she saw it step onto the path ahead of her, a tawny brown rump higher off the ground that a dog’s, the elegant tapering neck and a pair of golden eyes that stared deep into her own. She stopped dead, trying desperately to calm her breathing, but the deer blinked and was gone, hurtling silently into the dense forest surrounding them. She sped after it, hungry for another glimpse, but it was gone, swallowed up by the air and dreams and shadows. Distantly she thought she heard a faint laugh, shrill and brittle in the stillness of the cemetery.

As she ran through the inky shadows a few days later she suddenly heard the gruff bark of a dog, and spied a golden retriever rushing around a corner far ahead. She ran towards it, guessing this must be the dog belonging to the extravagantly bearded man, but as she turned the corner she saw he was on all fours, struggling to rise. He made it onto his knees as she watched, one hand twitching anxiously as though trying to shed pins and needles, the other clutching his chest.

“Cough,” she shouted, as loud as she could, and he squinted at her, scared and bewildered. “Cough for me, won’t you? It will force air into your lungs and keep your blood circulating.”

She waited with him until the on-duty paramedics arrived, keeping both him and the dog calm. As they loaded him into ambulance he grasped her hand.

“The deer,” he croaked, a strange, pearly light in his eyes. “Did you see it?”

“I did!” she exclaimed, pleased to be telling someone who actually cared.

“Shining like the moon, it was,” he murmured, smiling. “Don’t be afraid of it. You think you’re too young, but if it wants you, there must be a good reason.”

Puzzled, she watched the vehicle drive away, and wondered if there might be more to rumours of his unsound mind than his sightings of roe deer.

As winter set in, she began to try to wake sooner, before the daylight grew thready and weak. Shorter sleeps soon had their effect, and she knew she wasn’t concentrating at work. Frequently now she found herself stumbling as she ran, and each time she almost fell it was as though the cemetery held its breath in anticipation – a sudden, chilling hush in the rustling and snickering that usually followed her thudding footsteps, echoing against the rigid path.

One particularly bleak afternoon something in the sound of clambering, climbing, bounding movements above her made Lorna glance upwards for once, expecting to see the grey squirrels she’d been picturing throughout every run. But the animals above her weren’t neat-nosed and tousle-tailed – they were flared-nostriled, fiery-eyed, lizard–tailed – with swollen-lipped mouths that looked as though they should be spouting water from church roofs. They laughed as they saw her staring, and she flinched away in shock, then tripped on a tree truck or a slyly protruding scaly foot. She fell backwards onto a grave that silently gave way beneath her, plunging her into the frozen ground with an impact that shocked the breath from her body. Gasping for air, she registered that something deep inside felt wrong, broken, possibly leaking darkly.

Gasping for air, a silvery light caught her attention and hope fluttered in her heart. As she turned her head inch by excruciating inch, she saw the deer gazing down at her, not the shy, reddish brown doe she’d met previously, but a glimmering, luminescent creature whose limpid eyes glowed with compassion.

At last she understood that for all the life she loved to see in the cemetery, there was one thing she had almost forgotten about, and that was the death.