A Child of God

Have you ever heard something that wasn’t there?

When you are home alone and the door closes or the stairs creak. Do you swear that you left a window open or maybe it’s just the house settling because of the cold outside?

I personally love those moments.

The ones where your heart stops and you become completely aware of your surroundings. Where your eyes are fixed on the ajar door and you stare as if it were to fly open - but then your self-serving brain jumps to “oh, silly me! I’d left the kitchen window open, and the breeze flew straight in - obviously! What did I think was going to happen?” Then, you smirk to yourself and physically feel your pulse slowdown in your chest.

It’s one of the most natural feelings, relief, once you realise you caused your own torment.

So, then what justification would you give yourself if you heard something completely inexplicable? Something for which there could be absolutely no reason? Maybe you hear the stairs creak but realise you live in a bungalow, or you swear you heard the click of someone turning the oven on but the bloody thing broke months ago and you live all alone. Then what?

What exactly would you do if you had to dive straight into accepting the impossible?

Where something else caused your torment entirely.

******************

The noise I heard wasn’t heard at my home, or any real home for that matter, it was at a funeral home. The term ‘funeral home’ was always a little ironic to me, since it was essentially the least homely of homes. I mean there’s nothing quite like the smell of formaldehyde and the company of heavily made-up corpses to truly relax you. Though I find it relaxing that you do get interrupted a lot less there than you do elsewhere.

I’ll admit though, having basically spent all my summers at my uncles’ funeral home until I was fourteen – it’s likely a lot homelier to me than most, so I don’t tend to scare easy.

That was until I stopped going.

One thing you must remember is that, like with anything, you become desensitised after long enough around something. It’s one of the arguments around why left-handed people in the 1970s now use their right hand after being forced to in school or otherwise caned; things just tend to become second nature after a while and as humans, we just have to roll with it.

I knew early on that spending time in a house of funerals was slightly odd and that my comfort around the dead was an unfamiliar quality to most. I grew up around adults who always reminded me that “the living are much scarier than the dead”, so if anything, I’d spent more time dreading being at school or on the bus home where people were constantly unpredictable; their actions influenced by a billion other factors I couldn’t control.

On this particular day, the 26th November 2011, the incident which led to my continuous torment occurred. I was helping with the filing in the back office when the staff started whizzing around me, in a sort of ‘all hands-on deck’ kind of approach. I knew this only ever happened with tragic accidents, usually the death of small children or the discovery of a kidnapped teenage girl whose body had been found in pieces somewhere. In cases such as this, once the call comes in and the hearse leaves everyone takes on a responsibility or ritual of their own.

The embalmer, John, diligently works to re-sanitise all tables and surfaces in their room, as if they’re expecting a hot date with severe OCD. John gets the equipment ready and plays hymns, which broadcast to outside the embalming room door, echoing through the viewing room and into the chapel.

The cleaners typically start to pray and burn sage outside, which to them means that once the body arrives it is coming into a safe and sacred space.

Even my Uncle Tom in these particularly difficult cases goes down the road and gives £10 and a meal to the homeless man on the corner. He never admits it but I think this is his way of promising himself good karma, just in case anything unsavoury were to happen. The homeless man by now knows the drill and always wants to refuse the gesture so as to not be complicit in this cowboy approach of ensuring good karma – he never has though.

I think it’s safe to say that most of these rituals are for each of their peace of mind, especially since I now know unequivocally that they don’t work.

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Me being fourteen never really crossed anyone’s mind, nor should it have – most of the staff had been around the funeral home themselves for decades and my uncle started shadowing his father in the family business when he was just 10.

As we all waited outside for the hearse to arrive, I began to hear whispered rumours.

“I heard he was just a boy, no older than thirteen”.

“I heard he fell onto the alter”.

“I heard he landed on and impaled himself on the statue of Jesus at the altar, the one with the rays around Him”.

Uncle Tom simply raised his hand to stop the muttering and we all stood up straight as the hearse pulled into the driveway. The cleaners looked hopeful that their sage from earlier would protect us all. I knew no better and silently thanked them for their protection.

As the body was extracted, we couldn’t see anything under the sheet, save for a dark bloody spot where the face looked to be. I was already quite good at noticing subtleties. For example, I could see that the body beneath the sheet was small, likely under 5 foot and based on how the heavier, bloody soaked section of the sheet dipped into the face, I was 70% sure he was missing an eye and his mouth was open. That won’t be fun to fix with our friend rigor mortis, but John’s always loved a challenge.

 Although my uncle was very lax about me going wherever in the funeral home, he was very strict in forbidding me from entering the embalming room, whether there was a body in there or not. Something to do with the toxicity of the chemicals and discarded waste.

Yet my curiosity always got the better of me and a year before, I’d found a small carboard panel which I could slide to one side to get a perfect view of inside the embalming room. It only ever worked if there was one body, otherwise I likely couldn’t see over the others given the tables were all arranged side by side but on this day, it was just the altar boy and John in his overalls and mask. Whilst everyone scrambled to get away, I pulled up an upside-down bucket and perched, only breathing when I had to, to avoid the chemical smell from burning my nose.

John moved the sheet down to the boy’s neck and I could see that my earlier predictions were only mostly true. The boy was definitely under 5 foot, his mouth was wide open, in terror it seemed, but his eye wasn’t missing. John had to adjust the corpse to move the sheet trapped under it and rolled it to stare straight at me, that’s when I saw the eye had been pushed straight back into its socket, just leaving a gaping hole with a heavily bruised rim. I remember wondering if the boy had held his nose and breathed out, like you do when you’re trying to pop your ears on an airplane, whether his eye would have popped back into place.

I saw John’s face. As much as he loved a challenge, he had two thirteen-year-old twin boys at home who he would not be able to look at again without seeing a snapshot of this poor lifeless boy splayed in front of him.

He took a minute to gather himself and I saw he’d gone to put on a different hymn CD, one which I remember he told me was his father’s favourite years before.

As he played the music, he turned back and froze. The sheet was pulled back up, covering the boy’s entire face again. I always think about what John’s thoughts would have been in this moment. Perhaps he did what I mentioned at the beginning of this story and just convinced himself he’d never actually pulled it down, the only other person who knew he did was me and I wasn’t even supposed to be there.

John edged back to the body, looked around and pulled the sheet back down to expose the same horror that had been there before. In a way he seemed relaxed that it was the same gruesomeness he had remembered.

He then removed the sheet entirely and as soon as he did the music skipped for a second.

“Bloody old cd”, I could hear John saying to himself, whilst the sweat on his forehead started to slick his sideburns down, betraying his stoic demeanour. He took the sheet, folded it and discarded it.

The altar boy was frozen on the table. I remember thinking how much like Hermione he reminded me of, when she’d been petrified in the “Chamber of Secrets”. His body language was feeble, with his hands clasped into fists straight by his side and his neck recoiled back as if he’d been escaping a kiss. The boy’s legs were hard to see, given he was wearing what I now know to be a white Alb; basically, a long dress stained with the events of the day and no shoes but socks with Power Rangers on them worn out at the bottom. Clearly a favourite.

John adjusted the mask over his own nose and mouth again and started to very carefully remove the alter boy’s robe, which he folded and placed in an evidence bag before carrying out the sign of the cross for the fourth time.

Under the robe, the boy had carefully co-ordinated his outfit, donning a t-shirt with Tommy on it and a pair of black jeans with the Power Rangers logo stitched on the side. Based on John’s reaction, I assume his boys were also die-hard fans as he leant on the table behind him and rested his head on his hands. I’d never seen such a big and seemingly fearless man look so afraid and broken. I’m certain he went home that evening and slept with his wife on their sons’ bedroom floor, as he realised how rich he was to have the opportunity.

I remember thinking I should look away. This seemed to be a very personal thing to witness and despite my morbid curiosity, I should have allowed John to proceed with this tragic process in private. Just as I was about to excuse myself, the cd started playing something else, something I wish I’d never have heard.

The words “I am a Child of God” started playing over and over again, with the voice gradually becoming juvenile, angrier, screaming.

“I am a Child of God”

“I am a Child of God”

“I am a Child of God”

“I AM A CHILD of God”

“I AM A CHILD!”

“I AM A CHILD!”

“I WAS JUST A CHILD!”

All noise stopped but the lyrics started to sound as though they were playing backwards. The words didn’t sound English but the background music seemed unchanged.

I stared so intently at the stereo system, careful not to blink or breathe too hard, in case I’d pulled a Matilda and made it combust or fly across the room. After what felt like an age, my gaze averted back to John. I could only see his eyes full of horror and his face sunken in pure anguish. Had it not been for him hyperventilating, I’d have thought he was petrified too. Yet, he wasn’t looking at the stereo like I’d been, he was looking at the boy, the boy who was now looking at the stereo.

The boy’s body remained the same, perfectly still, feeble, hands clenched, legs splayed – hard like a statue. Yet, his neck had shot up at a 90-degree angle, which if anyone living would have tried, theirs would have snapped in a moment. The boy’s expression seemed strained, with his mouth wider than before and the skin around it stretched so far it looked almost transparent, so much so I could see the dead, black veins in his cheek with the help of the spotlight on the other side. His mouth, although wider seemed more intentionally shaped, with the muscles in the neck looking as though they were tensed. It was like he was trying his hardest to say something.

The ordinary person in me for a split second thought the Church and coroner made a mistake; he was still alive – just look at him! Yet the realist saw how the blood which had pooled had not moved and gotten black in the freezing room. How the rigor mortis which stiffened his body had kept the rest of him crumpled and agonisingly still as his head propped itself up. Worst of all, you could hear the cracking of his neck and shoulders as he stared up to see the stereo which would not stop playing. The boy was not alive, and he’d surpassed being dead into something else entirely.

I don’t recall when, but the lyrics reverted to normal and played the same line on repeat, with the same child’s voice screaming.

“I WAS JUST A CHILD!”

“I WAS JUST A CHILD!”

As my focus steadied on this contorted body in front of me, I heard the room door close. John had left and a few minutes later I could see both him and Uncle Tom gathered at the room window, staring inside.

Scared they’d see me and suddenly feeling as though I’d committed a crime, I ducked down and scurried upstairs into the office.

Within 20 minutes, a priest had arrived with some holy water and there’d grown to be an audience of staff and some other civilians, most of whom were visiting their loved ones for some peace before their funerals. I don’t think they got it.

Uncle Tom switched off the electricity to the entire building, in the hopes the radio would stop – it didn’t. The music had grown louder and based on what I heard whilst I waited for my parents to come that evening, the altar boy was basically sat upright leaning forward to the stereo by the time evening came. Apparently, despite the condition they’d arrived in, his eyes were now bulging outside his head as he leered at the stereo. I also heard that his arms had cracked entirely, as if he’d been trying to reach out. The dark, decaying bone poking out his shoulder, surrounded by congealed blood that looked like tar from the forced movement against the decomposition in the freezing room.

Eventually the boy was moved to the funeral home’s chapel, wheeled as is with a sheet draped over him like an exhibit waiting to be unveiled, with no one willing to look for fear of being cursed if the sheet fell.

Uncle Tom reported that upon entering the chapel, the boy immediately collapsed back, flat on the table and the funeral home descended into silence as the music came to an abrupt halt. The altar boy was never embalmed; he’d been buried quickly the next morning.

As years went on, no one came forward to claim the altar boy.

The Church had no information about his family or friends and the priest who visited earlier claimed to have never seen him before, not even at mass. The altar boy was buried on the Church grounds, next to the chapel in an unmarked grave, just the title of his seemingly favourite hymn, “I am a Child of God” embossed on the stone.

My father told me recently that the police, who’d been investigating a missing child cold case had to exhume the body. It had been suspected that the altar boy was kidnapped the week before the incident took place, though they were still confirming who did what. Rumour has it a home had been invaded about 2-hours away. The parents of a young boy and their three cats all sliced open, hollowed and hung using Power Ranger bed sheets, strung up like marionettes. The boy, Marcus, hadn’t been found.

My father told me that after they exhumed the altar boy’s body and opened the casket – the body remained in the same condition as it had in the funeral home. This body which was not embalmed, or treated, twelve years later looked the exact same, except the mouth and eyes had closed, as if the chapel had provided peace to the torment of this poor child.

Unsurprisingly to me, the altar boy was very quickly reburied the same day as his exhumation, just within a few hours of leaving the chapel. The examiner has refused to say why, though I think it’s pretty obvious that the boy wanted his peace back, especially since there was reportedly a song that wouldn’t stop playing on repeat on a radio that wasn’t supposed to work.

************

The day of that tragic accident I knew I wasn’t going back to my Uncle Tom’s funeral home. My parents knew too.

I mean after all, I was just a child. A child just like Marcus.