Read Online More Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse by Joel Arnold - Free Book Online

keep away
potential vandals or body thieves, and listen for the ringing of
the coffin bell. He’d been on the job a month already, and none of
these things had happened, yet. Every once in a while local youths
would sneak in, trying to scare each other, and once he caught
Frode Wangen and Jacobine Overland embracing fervently on the edge
of the cemetery. Frode was only a year older than Amund, and
Jacobine was the wife of Gunnar. Amund scared the kids away, but he
let Frode and Jacobine keep doing what they were doing without
announcing his presence. He watched them from behind a gravestone,
the moonlight shining on their exposed bodies, and he wished he was
Frode in those moments.
    The town’s undertaker, Morten Ruen, started
selling the coffin bells the previous summer. “What could be worse
than burying your loved one alive?” he’d ask the relatives of the
recently deceased. “This way, if by some miracle, they awoke, they
have a way of letting us know.” He’d lower his voice to a whisper.
“It has happened, you know. Coffins have been dug up for whatever
reason, and the evidence of their struggle was clear as day. The
fingernail scratchings on the coffin lid, the look of terror frozen
on their faces...”
    Mayor Espe warned Ruen to cut out the scare
tactics, and he finally did, but only because in May of that year,
1890, one of the coffin bells rang. Luckily, it happened during the
day, while people strolled in the cemetery visiting loved ones. At
first they were confused at the tinny-sounding ring, wondering
where it came from. When they realized it was a coffin bell, the
women rang the large church bell to signal the townfolk, while the
men took off their coats and grabbed shovels.
    It was the Halvarson boy, ten-years old,
whom they believed dead of influenza. When they got to the casket
and pried it open, there he was – blue in the face, gasping for
air, but very much alive. His mother fainted, and his father vowed
to tithe that year. “A miracle,” he said.
    Later, when the Halvarson boy talked about
his ordeal, he said that it was as if something had awoken him. He
opened his eyes in the darkness of the grave to the sound of
scraping against the coffin’s wood. Doctor Ulland explained how
one’s senses became more attuned at times of panic, and it could
have been something as simple as a snake or beetles exploring the
wooden exterior.
    People wondered, What if the bell had
rung in the middle of the night when no one was around? They
had barely gotten to the boy in the nick of time; he’d been close
to suffocating. But if no one was around to hear the bell?
    Undertaker Ruen suggested Amund to Pastor
Blom, and he was hired within the week.
    For the next two months, the dead stayed
dead and the coffin bells stayed silent. The nights were warm, if
not hot, and the weather had been dryer than usual. Tonight,
however, a light rain arrived, and Amund sat under the eaves of the
church instead of lounging on the soft cemetery grass. The candle
in his lantern sputtered as he practiced his aim at marbles on the
flat, stone surface of the walkway at the rear of the church. A
half-whittled stick lay next to him.
    In the distance, lightening arched across
the black sky. Amund counted to ten before the low rumble of
thunder came. He went back to his marbles. No Frode and Jacobine
making love in the cemetery tonight. Amund hardened slightly at the
thought of them. Jacobine’s soft moans, her skirt pulled up around
her waist, her breasts exposed to the night air…
    Amund slid his hand down the front of his
trousers. Was he the only one who knew about their affair? He
closed his eyes to better imagine them. Her naked flesh under
the moonlight .
    Something rang softly nearby. A bell.
    Amund took his hands from his pants and
stood. Had he really heard it? A bell? The only burial lately had
been of the widow Ingebretson two days earlier. She was in her late
eighties; impossible that she was still alive even if she had