ELIZABETH RISING

It was a hilly graveyard. That was the thing.

Dean trudged up a flight of stone steps set into the central hill, the stones pitched and slanted by decades of frost heaves, tainted green by a century of having been steeped in the rich dark soil of Elysium Fields Cemetery.

The steps paused at an earthen landing of sorts before the next rising swell. He stopped here a moment. To either side the narrow landing trailed off down the hill as a path, bordered by evenly spaced and similarly twisted trees. The tree closest to Dean had an empty bottle of Canadian Club wedged in its crotch at about Dean’s crotch level.

Jerks, he thought. No reverence for the dead. But what did he expect when so many people didn’t even have a reverence for the living?

Perhaps Dean would have thought himself morbid for exploring the graveyards of New England had he not been chased, so to speak, into these quiet places on the outskirts of towns by those who lived within such towns. This was a refuge for him. The only kind of place, it often seemed, where he could feel at peace amongst his fellow beings.

That was why the bottle dismayed him. Sometimes those of the race of tormentors found their way into these sanctuaries. From atop the first tier of the hill Dean gazed out across the sprawling graveyard below for signs of others. But there were no others here this early summer evening. No children riding bikes, no old people tending to the boring neat ranks of newer graves on the boring flat section cleared and leveled in recent times. Good. They might not be tormentors themselves but they would make him feel self-conscious. They must all be home with their families, preparing suppers, Saturday cook-outs. Good. That left Dean here with his family.

Had one come up the granite steps then they might have thought that dappled shadow from the line of trees had fallen across Dean’s face. Until he moved, and the shadow went with him. The purple birthmark covered half his face, making a living yin and yang of it. In contemplating this stain, this anomaly, this blight on him, Dean had thought of himself as a mere portrait of a person, half his face painted in a shadow he could never walk out of.

But this was a place for shadows. See? The lowering sun was already drawing long shadows like taffy out of the silhouetted grave stones. Early evening or night was the time to come, except in those cemeteries so given over to night partiers that he had had to forsake them. He came in the very early morning, and rainy or snowy days were good. Beautiful in such a melancholy way. Though he had only been to this graveyard once before, they were all magically linked. They were all the necropolis he called his home town.

Dean continued up the next section of steps.

He regretted not having his camera this evening, but now that he had discovered this wonderful new place only a few towns over from his, he could come back here any time. His apartment above an elderly couple was decorated with framed enlargements of photos he had taken of interesting monuments, and statues whose white eyes glowed at him without judgment.

He reached the broad level summit of the hill. Here, phallic monuments thrust at the deepening sky, smaller stones clustered around these looming leaders. The stones themselves in graveyards seemed like beings to Dean, quiet but sentient things. Had the people below them known Dean in life, they too might have mocked him, but death makes people benign. Now, transformed, they were his friends and he studied their lettered faces, touched their pitted skins.

On its far side, the plateau dropped off fairly steeply toward a pond ringed by dark woods, this body of water so perfectly round it was almost startling. Dean’s first impression, gazing down at it, was that at some long distant time a meteor had crashed here. Some heavenly object. This was Elysium Fields, after all. He imagined that a dense migration of souls had failed to escape earthly gravity, and come plummeting back in a comet trail of flaming ectoplasm to bury themselves again in the ground...leaving this bowl to fill with the tears of their fellows on high, who had witnessed the ethereal tragedy.

Dean glanced over his shoulder to confirm his solitude, and then started down the slope.

Somehow there were graves along the slope, most of the stones leaning as if to topple down toward the pond. Dean imagined that the coffins must be buried almost at an angle. Maybe space had been scarce at that time, before the cemetery’s expansion.

But there were more numbered disks in the ground than there were full markers, and Dean had seen enough potter’s fields in his day to know one when he was in it. No wonder they were hidden over here on the dark side of the hill. Even in this haven for outcasts, there were outcasts. This was the stained half of the hill’s face.

Most of the disks were nearly grown over. Who knew how many were fully covered? Dean wondered if he himself would become a disk. An anonymous number. Did it make a difference?

He was drawn, however, to a full-sized marker of greenish-stained white stone down almost at the water’s edge.

The pond was still, its surface a flat scummed expanse like a floor of murky green glass Dean imagined he could almost walk out across. A dragonfly or two bobbed along the vast corrupt skin. He had never seen a body of water so uniformly and thickly filmed in scum, but looking back up the hill, he wondered if it had to do with those cheap potter’s field coffins buried in the slope. Coffins rotted away through the years. Releasing their putrefied contents...their liquefied freight...to stream down through the soil of the hill slowly but inevitably into the waters of the pond.

There were old candy wrappers down here at the shore. A tangle of fishing line in a low branch from a bad cast. The worm at the end of it had long since been eaten away by insects. Dean saw the ripped corner of a rubber’s wrapper. This grave had had company over the years, however hidden. In fact, it had been given another epitaph of sorts on its blank side. “Ricky and Rhonda,” it read, in an amorous spray of black paint, contained in the outline of a black heart. All sorts of offerings, then. Everything but flowers.

Dean moved around the stone to read its actual inscription, which faced out upon the pond.

It read:

Elizabeth Rising

“Pretty Betty”

1865-1890

Erected by her friends at

Bluedale State Hospital

“Pretty Betty,” Dean repeated to himself in a whisper. And then, “Elizabeth Rising.”

A prick at the back of his neck. He slapped at it, looked into his hand. A mosquito smashed there in a stain of his own blood.

*     *     *

Dean had never before been to the Bluedale Library, but libraries were a secondary refuge for him. Though they attracted live people, they were quiet enough and he had learned which were the least occupied times of the day.

Dean waited until no one else was at the desk before he approached the librarian, who was the only male librarian he had ever seen, an elderly man who didn’t look threatening.

“Excuse me, ah, do you have microfilm or records or something of the Bluedale Gazette for 1890?”

“I have a niece with a wine birthmark,” the old man smiled, arching his brows over the rims of his glasses. “It covers most of her thigh. She doesn’t wear shorts. Always wears black hose. I’m sure her husband has seen it, though. Up close. I’m sure he doesn’t mind, either. I wouldn’t mind; she’s a very pretty girl.”

Dean was so horrified by these casual revelations that for a moment he was struck dumb. He considered turning away and walking out but he was too meek a person to be rude. “It’s hard, I know. I’d wear black hose over my head if I could.” Trying to joke.

The old man liked the joke, chuckled. “Well, Gorby has helped us get used to those things, right? At least he still serves that purpose.”

“Yeah, I guess, huh? Um, the Bluedale Gazette...”

“No, no. We lost all our old papers and a lot of our older books in the fire of ‘27. You’d be better off going to the Gazette’s office. Know where that is? You’re not from town; I’d recognize you.”

“Especially with my face, huh?” Dean joked. His laugh trembled a little.

“Right. Uh, what was it happened in 1890 that you wanted to look up? I’m a walking encyclopedia on Bluedale. Often thought of writing a town history like they’ve published for Eastborough. Nice book like that.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t know. A mental patient died that year. She’s buried over in Elysium Fields...”

“Pretty Betty,” the man said, with strange fondness, as if he had known her personally. “Yeah, she’s buried in Elysium Fields. She was also killed in Elysium Fields. In fact, almost right there where her grave is.”

Dean was too fascinated now to be resentful toward the man. “She was killed? Murdered, you mean?”

“They found her floating at the water’s edge. Face down, naked. She’d been drowned. Of course they couldn’t test a body then like they can now, but it was clear enough she’d been raped. She’d been punched a few times and all.”

“God...that’s terrible.”

“She was always escaping from the hospital. As often as not she’d return on her own. But it’s funny that someone would’ve raped Betty, because she’d give herself to you readily enough. They say half the young men in Bluedale had her at one time or another. She gave the clap to half of the ones she went with, too. I’ve never seen a picture of her, if there ever was one, but they say she had the face of an angel.”

“No killer was ever found?”

“A drunk, maybe. Some boys who got too rough. Someone out for revenge because he’d already caught the clap off her. We’ll never know. You sure aren’t from Bluedale, my boy, not to have heard about the Green Ghost.”

“Green...”

“The kids say they’ve seen a ghost in the graveyard at night. Supposed to be Pretty Betty, waiting for all her dead lovers to rise up and join her. Or maybe looking for more young men to seduce amongst the living.” The old man was grinning. “If she’s still as pretty as they said, I’d go down there and wait for her myself.”

“Wow. That’s really interesting. Thanks. I saw the grave and I was curious...”

“You like exploring graveyards, huh?”

“Well...sometimes.”

“Well, if you ever run into Betty down there, give her my regards.”

*     *     *

That night, as he often did, Dean lay watching his television for hours. It was the only light in his apartment, its bluish colors flickering on the glass of his framed headstone photographs.

He was watching an insipid soft-core movie on Cinemax, foreign and poorly dubbed. A portly man was chasing a giggling blond around and around a bed until the film kicked into comical high speed, so that the bouncing of her profound bosom became freakish. The film then went to slow motion, the flopping of her great orbs even more surreal.

But however fast or slow they moved, Dean kept his glassy eyes on them. Dean had only ever seen breasts like this or in magazines; in the second dimension. He had never felt the pliant weight of breasts such as these, their warmth, the silkiness of their skin and the greater silkiness of their aureoles.

There was a faint scratching at the mesh of his window screen. A rose chapper or Japanese beetle, no doubt, plucking at the wire like the strings of a harp...but it was too dark out there for him to see anything on the screen.

A very slight breeze stirred the sultry air, stirred his gauzy curtains, and brushed the skin of his face.

*     *     *

It was eleven at night, and Dean was mounting the steps of the hill at the heart of Elysium Fields...as though he were climbing the stairs of his church, his temple. As if there would be some ritual in that church tonight. A wedding, or a funeral.

And Dean was as nervous as a groom. He looked to left and right as he mounted the stone flight, expecting to see some apparition standing off amongst the stones, its green glow reflected softly on marble. Or some furtive green figure ducking behind a monument. She needn’t be afraid of him. He only wanted what she wanted. To haunt this lonely place, free of tormentors. They were kindred spirits.

Some said ghosts wouldn’t linger in graveyards because they had no personal attachments to such spots, and the husks of their bodies contained therein were of no more importance to them. They were more apt to haunt the places where they’d lived or died. Well, Pretty Betty had died here. And she had imprinted her life here, in the gasp of orgasm. For Dean knew intuitively that this was where she had brought most of her admirers. Down by the water.

He reached the top of the plateau. Already mosquitoes bred of the marshy pond were buzzing around his head, but he didn’t resent them. Their life in this dead place was oddly comforting. It was like they were excitedly greeting him.

And now he reached the point where the slope angled down toward the pond, which was a black expanse through its border of trees, like a crater filled not with water but with nothingness. A void.

Dean had half expected to see her there, down by the water. Down by her marker. The Green Ghost. Pretty Betty. Elizabeth. But she wasn’t there. Both disappointed and relieved, he started down the slope nonetheless.

Had he really expected to find her here? Had he really believed that she haunted this place...or that somehow she had summoned him here tonight? Summoned him to this cemetery in the first place?

He squatted by the grave, stared at the inscription there until he could begin to make it out. Carven words filled with green stain. These symbols were all that was left of her sad life. They could not portray the loveliness of her face. The torment of her heart.

Whatever lay below the headstone had rotted, or drained into the pond as had the others ranked unevenly along the slope. Fertilizer for mosquito eggs...nourishment for the dark things which lived in that water beneath its noxious green skin.

He was a fool. A pathetic fool, he thought. Crouching here at a gravestone, mooning over some insane woman who had died a hundred years ago. What was he doing here? Could he really blame others for driving him to this humiliation, or was it all some flaw, some deficiency in his own being? How sane could he himself be?

She hadn’t summoned him. There was no kindred spirit or any other kind of spirit here, but for those minute and mindless souls of the mosquitoes. He was alone. Ever alone. How could he have thought it would be otherwise, tonight? Or any other night to come?

Heavy tears of self-pity and self-loathing wound down his face, fell to the overgrown, matted grass of her plot.

He could see her inscription more clearly now, even through his tears. The green stain in the letters seemed more vivid; the stone seemed to be reflecting the glow of the moon...

But tonight there was but the thinnest white smile of a moon.

Still hunkered low to the ground, Dean turned around to look out on the water, one hand curled in the grass and the other holding onto Elizabeth’s stone for support. Both hands tightened their grip when he had turned himself fully.

There was the hum of thousands of voices in the air. Low, and yet terrifying for their multitudes...as if all the souls in this graveyard were moaning softly in unison. And yet this sound was subliminal, a background for what Dean was seeing.

The scum of the pond was swelling upwards, ballooning at its center, as if a great bubble were forming there. And the sick green matter which composed that skin was giving off a luminosity even more sickly green in color, a glow so subtle it almost didn’t exist. But undeniable, also.

Dean was flushed cold with fear. And awe. Gas from the decomposing dead, he told himself, swamp gas rising up. That huge bubble would burst, any moment now. He told himself this. But he knew better. And when the head came clear of the pond, and the shoulders followed, he could no longer deny what he was seeing.

The Green Ghost rose to her full height from the pond. She towered there in the night.

She was so faint, she would no doubt not be seen by anyone outside the graveyard’s borders, despite her great size. One driving by the front of the cemetery might see a vague mist against the black sky. It was good that the phosphorescence was so dim, considering her immensity.

The rim of the pond formed the hem of her gown. She loomed above Dean, who felt tiny huddled by her grave, fragile compared to the apparition despite his more fleshy existence. Vulnerable, so near to the edge of the pond, from which she had drawn the elements of her manifestation.

The scum of the pond was her skin, and her gently blowing garment. Was it water or a mist of moisture inside that green skin, supporting it? Air, or swamp gas? She had sculpted herself of all these things. Her hair blew sideways in the air, like seaweed rippling in a current. Her features were indistinct. He could still not discern her loveliness, despite her majestic efforts, but her breasts were distinct swells. Huge, maternal, those of a fertility goddess.

Why had she made herself so great? Was it her insanity, obliterating perspective? Was she glutted on the liquefied souls of those drained into the pond, the fetid semen of her many buried lovers? Was she showing him the enormity of her power?

She was a vision. A goddess of nature.

Her arms lifted higher, as if to embrace the sky. Her soft blur of a face inclined down toward him more...and he could see a darkness there lengthening. It was her mouth, he realized. Opening wide.

The humming grew louder, and a dark exhalation came from her mouth. A black cloud of humming souls.

“Elizabeth,” Dean breathed. Tears were running down his face again. He was too frightened to let go of her grave and the grass of her plot, too humbled to rise to his feet. He began to sob. And yet he was smiling.

The cloud of mosquitoes drifted down at him. Became a thick mass around his head, a living nimbus. They settled thickly on his face, and covered the stain there in a mask of their bodies. They covered the white half of his face as well. They had made him a new face. Dean did not brush them away.

He was, like a saint, transfigured.

*     *     *

There are some teenagers who are not dissuaded by even the creepiest local legends, and yet there are still few who care to party at night in the graveyard called Elysium Fields. Fewer now even than there were before, when there was much talk of the Green Ghost. The story of the man found dead in Elysium Fields last summer is still too fresh in their minds. This man died only a year ago, not a hundred. And yet, his body was found in the same place Elizabeth Rising’s body was found all those years ago; floating face down in the water at the edge of the green-scummed pond.

Most of the people of Bluedale don’t know whether it is true or merely the embellishment of legend, that somehow the man was drained of most of his blood, and his features nibbled away by fish or whatever else lives in those dark waters, so that he was rendered unrecognizable.

And yet however disfigured, when they fished the corpse out, it’s said that he was smiling in that mysterious and knowing way that corpses seem to smile.

But who can believe these stories, these folktales in the making? Stories related by those few drunken teenagers brave enough to venture into that place at night? Stories such as the twin greenish will-o’-the-wisps that are said to flit along the surface of the pond, as if chasing one-another? Stories such as the two greenish figures who are said to mount the granite steps at the center of Elysium Fields nightly, walking hand-in-hand?