Cemeteries aren’t really scary at night.
When you’re a kid, every tombstone has a dark spirit behind it. Every burial plot has a vengeful undead ghoul ready to grab at passing ankles. At least, that’s how it seems at first. Once you get accustomed to the surroundings, you start noticed everything else. The lush, green grass fed on rich fertilizer. The beautiful bouquets of flowers left by grieving families. The rustle of the breeze through ancient trees that look less like gnarled hands with each passing night.
When I was fifteen years old, the “Graveyard Club” was formed. It was just me, my friend Nicky, his friend Bill, and the weird girl everyone called Rat. We had united over a shared interest in counter-culture… that is to say, we were outcasts who convinced ourselves it was by choice. The Graveyard Club was essentially our own little after-school activity. It amounted to meeting with the others at our local cemetery and hanging out until it got to chilly out to continue.
Campfire stories were told around the glow of a flashlight. We were edgy creeps, but not enough to start an actual fire on someone’s private property. Trespassing was enough. Meetings were held by the tombstone of one “Agatha Raven”, 1840 – 1910. We had no idea who she was, and her grave received only the most minor upkeep, but the name worked for us.
Of course, it wasn’t long until word of our little club spread to the other kids at school. I know it wasn’t Rat, because she hated pretty much everyone and only came out from behind the black bangs to tell creepy stories. The crazy-eyes really sold it. Nicky and Bill were both likely sources of the information leak. They each wanted to be respected by their peers… or at least to be safe from being stuffed into their own lockers.
Less than ten sessions in, our club had expanded to eight kids. The chubby nerd I knew from 3rd period creative writing class, two popular girls who assumed (correctly) they could get cigarettes and beer from us, and Neil, the erratic problem student who had supposedly slapped a teacher at his last school. It didn’t really feel as special anymore, and Rat outright called them “invaders” to their faces, but truth be told it felt a little less cold in a group like that.
They were all there on the night we met the kid.
Rat was in the middle of one of her stories, and was just getting to the most gruesome part, when we heard a quiet rustling nearby. Naturally, the newer “members” were spooked. Nicky, Bill, and I figured it was just a random possum as per usual. Rat was too enthralled with her own narration to even notice everyone had gotten quiet.
The rustling moved closer to us. In the dull light of a quarter moon, there was no telling what direction it came from. Soon, we could tell it wasn’t the rustling of grass or leaves. It was the distinct sound of cloth, mixed with slight, purposeful footsteps.
“Rat,” I whispered, “Shut up.”
Suddenly, there was only silence. Not even a breeze broke the quiet stillness. The only movement came from the eyes and faces of eight teenagers who suddenly realized they weren’t very cool or fearless at all.
One of the popular girls gasped, then quickly covered her mouth in shock, her wide eyes starting to water. Slowly, with a trembling finger, she pointed to unexpected guest who had seated himself among us without so much as a word.
It was a boy, much younger than any of us. He was slight and pale, with a single lock of dark hair spilling out of a gray baseball cap. The rustling of cloth had come from the bulky insulated pants that matched his warm coat. Unlike us, he was definitely dressed for the cold. Clasped in his hands was a haphazard bouquet of ghostly white flowers.
He looked to each of us quizzically, and I’m sure we looked at him with the same amount of confusion.
“Wh-where did you come from?” Nicky finally croaked.
“I’m not supposed to talk to anyone.” the kid replied quietly.
Rat’s grin was as wide and as white as the moon above as she leaned forward and let the flashlight dance across the little bot. “Hey. What’s your name?” She asked, displaying a macabre interest that was surprising, even for her.
“I can’t let anyone know you saw me.” the boy wiped his nose with his sleeve, then added, “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“We won’t say a word.” Rat nodded, those crazy-eyes now locked on him. “We’re the Graveyard Club, and keeping secrets is, like, all we do.”
“Can I be in the club?” the kid asked, perking up with interest.
“You gotta tell us why you’re here, first.”
The kid looked over his shoulder, into the darkness, then cupped his hand to his mouth as if whispering a secret. “My daddy brought me here.”
“Who’s your dad?” I chimed in, immediately reassured that it must just be a groundskeeper.
Another look over his shoulder. Another, even quieter whisper, this time with a heavy sense of reverence. “My daddy is bones.”
“He’s saying his dad is dead…” one of the popular girls barely whispered to the other. I’m not sure if she was the one who had spotted him, as they were pretty much interchangeable.
The 3rd period creative writing nerd instantly started sobbing.
I think Neil was trying to get close to Rat, seeing as she was the only girl in the group who was unattached and in no danger of being attached in the near future. He sat himself right next to her and, mimicking her interest in the kid, inducted him into the club.
That’s right, one of the interlopers had simply appointed himself to membership director.
“Welcome to the Graveyard Club, dude. We’re telling scary stories if you have any.”
The little boy sat and thought for a moment, looking down at the flowers as he turned them over in his hands. His brow knitted up as if he was worried about what to say, and whether or not he should say it.
“Let’s just keep going with the one you were telling.” I said nervously, gesturing to Rat with a numb, limp hand. It felt like all of the blood had drained out of my body and into the immobile stone bricks that had replaced my feet.
“No!” the boy looked up with a worried expression, “I have scary stories. I can do it.”
So, for the next half hour or more, we listened to the boy’s stories.
“There were three really bad people who went into a place they shouldn’t…” began one story. “There was a guy who saw bad things…” went another. “Someone made daddy really mad…” showed up in a couple tales.
The endings were all the same. “Then, daddy pulled out all of the man’s guts. He pulled off his head and his arms and is legs.” The climax of each story was followed by a twisted, gross-out facial expression. Tongue extended, eyes rolled back, head tilted as a “bleeehh!” escaped his mouth.
While the stories were gruesome, our growing familiarity with the kid made him seem less off-putting, just like we had grown accustomed to the cemetery. So, when he was done with the third story, we couldn’t do much other than nod and compliment him on giving us a really good fright.
Our comfort was ripped away again as a sound echoed in the distance.
A scream. A shrill, gut-wrenching, agonized scream of terror.
Then, there came a groan… a deep, loud, resonating groan that almost sounded like a name we couldn’t place. It was a man’s voice, traveling through the morbidly still night air. It repeated twice, then three times.
“I gotta go.” the boy jumped up, dropping a few flowers. “Daddy’s calling me back.”
We didn’t say anything. Not even a goodbye. The kid sprinted about ten feet, then turned and waved to us before taking off again.
“It’s real…” mumbled the popular girls in unison.
Bill turned to them and, put off by their simultaneous utterance, let out a deep, fearful groan. With that, he got up and walked away, in the opposite direction of the kid. Nicky called for him to wait up and quickly followed.
Neil, seeing an opportunity, stood with the popular girls, threw an arm aroud each of them, and swore to protect them all the way back to their homes. The sound of their weeping, coupled with Neil’s empty reassurance, trailed off into the night.
The nerd from 3rd period looked at me, then to Rat, and shook his head. He let out a profanity before climbing awkwardly to his feet and stumbling jelly-legged after the others.
“You don’t believe all that, right?” I asked. I believed it. I wanted Rat to not believe it, and for her to laugh at me for believing it. Anything to prove to myself that I was wrong for being scared.
Rat smiled again, stuck her tongue out through her teeth, and hissed at me.
That was probably as comforting as Rat could manage to be.
There were no more meetings after that. I still hung out with Nicky and Bill, but we stayed indoors and played video games. At least those monsters were trapped in the screen. I saw the others at school from time to time, but none of us spoke about what happened. The closed I came was when I asked Neil if he ever bragged to anyone about what had happened. He said no, and asked me if I was insane.
It wasn’t until years later that they found the body.
He was a local businessman who owed a lot of money to some bad people. He was exhumed from a grave in the cemetery, after being buried on top of someone else’s coffin. That was the scream we had heard that night.
The Police knew where to find the body because of information received from a hired killer they had arrested. Johnny “Bones” Demiro.
The boy was telling the truth. His daddy was “Bones”. Johnny Demiro had sent his son off to collect all the white flowers he could find. It was a way to send the boy away and distract him while the businessman was questioned and killed. The hit was done on short notice, so a babysitter was out of the question.
The weirdest part of all is the local urban legend that rose out of this. The boy had been questioned about his father’s work after the arrest. He told the police all the same stories, about guts being spilled, bodies being decapitated, and so on.
However, there was one new story to tell. The one about a group of mysterious kids that kept a young child safe while he was scared and alone among the tombstones in the dead of night.
The legend of the Graveyard Club.
(Author’s Note: Yes, I’ve heard of it! 🙂 This story, released both as “The Graveyard Club” on YouTube and “The Skeleton’s Child” on Patreon, was released in 2019, pre-dating the R.L. Stine graphic novel of the same name and themes.)
