Berthe had known the burial ground was here, or she’d heard tell of it at least. Her parents always referred to it as ‘the pioneer cemetery’ or ‘the founders’ graves.’ And if the headstones were any indication, these plots were very old indeed. The markers were pale and wind-smoothed, jutting up from the soil like rows of misshapen teeth. The fence of woven wire sagged and was brittle with rust. The grounds themselves were shamefully neglected.

Why then, in a place so obviously lapsed, would there today be a trio of gravehands, wholly engrossed in their labours?

The figures (Male? Female? Berthe could not exactly say) went unwaveringly about their task. One worked the land with a pitchfork, stabbing and turning the soil, their actions more akin to a gardener’s than a gravedigger’s. The other two walked silently in and out of the stout vault that had been built into a hillock at the rear of the grounds.

Berthe’s grandfather had once told her that this vault had long ago been used to store the winter’s dead, when the early villagers had to wait until the spring thaw before they could bury their loved ones. Until that time the cadavers would be wrapped in linen shrouds and piled inside the vault like cut logs in a woodpile. The account had given Berthe nightmares when she was small, ones in which she would find herself trapped inside a cabin whose walls were not logs, but shrouded corpses that wriggled and moaned inside their linen cocoons. But today, standing in the vicinity of the actual vault, whose doors of corroded iron sat open like the covers of a holy book on a pulpit, Berthe experienced a sensation beyond fear. It was something richer. (Later, Berthe would struggle to accurately name this sensation in her diary. The nearest word she could conjure to describe it was ‘fascination.’)

The two gravehands emerged from the vault’s black interior. They carried a body between them. It resembled a great mealworm, until one of its arms slipped out of the ancient shroud, flaunting its humanness, its mortality. The fingernails were black, and the flesh was livid, with blotches of pooled fluids forming a multicoloured map on the surface. The gravehands lugged the corpse toward their partner with the pitchfork. The dead arm swung like a pendulum with their every step. Berthe wondered if the body was waving at her, perhaps even beckoning her.

Berthe’s next motions were drowsily executed. Her head felt foggy. Pins and needles coursed through her arm as she once again gripped the blacksmith’s nail and freed it, holding it up so the gravehands might see it. Though she had no idea the reason, it was very important for her to reveal what she had found.