The grass was wet. That was the first thing I noticed when I arrived in 1564. The second thing I noticed was the wailing. I was in a graveyard—where else in the year half of London’s population was wiped out?—and I was lying so close to a grave that I could reach out and dig my fingers into the freshly piled dirt upon it.
My cheek rested on dew-damp blades of grass, my eyelashes collecting cool droplets like diamonds. And I was cold.
“Are you one of them?” a child’s voice startled me.
I pushed myself up with my palms and found myself face to face with a girl, no older than eight, wearing a grey pinafore and a messy braid.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Are you one of them?” she repeated.
This time, I saw the wideness of her eyes, the tremble of her lower lip, the unsteadiness of her hands as she pinched the pleats of her skirt.
“One of who?” I asked, but before my words had trailed away, I noticed the distant wailing for a second time. And I knew.
“The dead.”
I pulled my knees close to my chest in an effort to get warm. My fingers were like ice—it was true. But dead? I didn’t think so. Still, I couldn’t be sure enough to answer. In theory, I hadn’t yet been born. So what did that make me? Not alive, certainly.
The silence between us had stretched on for too long, and I knew I had to say something. “Are you?”
She stretched both hands out before her, inspecting the backs, then the palms. They were pale. No, not pale. Purple. Like her flesh was rotting, dying before her brain was. She swallowed hard. Her voice wavered when she spoke, “I think so.”
It wasn’t the playful denial I had expected. I found myself even more at a loss for words than before. Why was this child, this innocent, out in the graveyard when she should be in bed? “You should go home,” I said.
“I can’t,” she shrieked suddenly, her face crumpling.
“I just meant…” I began, prepared to defend myself, but realizing the possibilities of her situation, I stopped. This wasn’t 2026. There were no child protection laws, no social services. Who was I to assume her home life? “I thought perhaps they could take care of you. You don’t have to.”
“Take care of me?” she echoed. “What is there to take care of anymore? They can do nothing but cry, and I will not watch them cry.”
We were silent again. The wailing persisted.
Her family’s tears—that’s what she was so afraid of. I thought of comforting her then, telling her she wasn’t dead, not yet. But what use was it? She would be soon. She was weak. It was a miracle she was standing.
“Sit down,” I instructed her.
She didn’t recline so much as collapse opposite me. There was a pile of rocks beneath her, broken shards of an unfortunate soul’s gravestone, but she made no effort to avoid them. In fact, she stared at them, hard, as if searching for something.
“Do we stay out here forever?” she asked timidly.
It occurred to me that I had started a conversation I could not finish and invited questions I could not answer. I didn’t know how to evade them now.
“What do you mean?”
“Do our souls stay out here?” she continued. “Or do we have to go where they put us?” Her eyes remained locked on the shards of gravestone, and I understood what she was asking. Would she experience being buried? Being nailed into a coffin, dropped into the ground, enveloped by dirt, and left to rot until nothing was left of her.
I did the thing I’d do if I was God. I gave her mercy.
“If you want to stay out here,” I said, “then you can.”
She looked around then, taking in the sea of stones, the bony trees, the distant figures crouched over bodies paler than her own and she clawed the earth, grabbing a clump of grass and dirt and rocks. “It is a little cold, but I think I would prefer it.”
The wind stirred the hair that had come loose from her braid. I considered reaching out to tuck it behind her ear—a maternal instinct. Unlike me. But how could I not? She was a child, someone’s daughter, and I’d accidently convinced her she was dead. If I owed anyone a gentle touch, it was her. But before my emotions could get the better of me, logic took over. She was sick. Morbidly contagious. And all the 21st century vaccines in the world couldn’t prepare me for this unknown strain. I did not wish to catch it, to become her, shivering in the wind of the graveyard with purple fingers, to die for real.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said the words as I thought them.
The girl laughed—a surprising sound. I started to join in, then thought myself particularly cruel and looked away.
“Do the dead always say that to each other?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “It’s my first time.”
“Yes. I suppose we all die once.”
I did laugh then. She looked at me strangely, of course, not knowing why. I decided to be honest. “Actually, I’m here for a reason.”
She leaned in to whisper, “Are you an angel?”
“No,” I spluttered. “I’m no angel.”
“Oh.” She leaned back again, pouting. “Who else would be here for a reason?”
I didn’t answer. That was the part of my story I was forbidden to tell. For as “dead” as she was, the treetop crows would overhear.
“Why are you here, then?” she asked finally.
“I’m supposed to study something,” I explained, pulling a notepad and pencil out from the folds of my coat.
She eyed them suspiciously, then turned her attention back to me. “Study what?”
“The illness.”
I flipped my notebook open to a new page. Out of all the things I’d said and done in the mere minutes I’d been in 1564, this small act felt the cruelest. To be clinical towards a girl who was dying. To prioritize research over this flicker of a human life that mattered. I was a monster. But it had to be done.
“What about it?”
“Perhaps you can tell me,” I nudged her. “Start with when you got sick. Then what happened.”
She crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap, slouching with the effort of remaining upright. “I got sick four days ago. Mama said I had a fever, and I should go to bed. After that, no one was allowed to come in.”
“No one cared for you?” I scribbled her words on my modern notepaper, transcribing her tragedy in neat cursive with my HB grade pencil. Journalism had never felt so trivial.
“My older sister did,” she answered, nodding, “when she got sick too.”
“Were her symptoms the same?”
“A little worse,” she told me. I looked up at her and saw a dark trail of blood running from her nose to her upper lip. “Oh. Sorry,” she said weakly, wiping it away with the back of her hand. The red should have been more noticeable than it was on her colorful skin. “Her legs swelled up. She couldn’t move them at the end.”
It was hard to keep my hand moving across the page as my knuckles seized with cold. “She’s dead already?”
“Oh yes.”
I hesitated, not sure what to write, not sure what to ask.
She found a question first. “Why did it take me so long to die?”
For a split second, I considered making something up. How would continuing the ruse harm the world, the future? But I reminded myself that, in the absence of rules, there were still morals. This child, however old, however dead, however easily forgotten, was real. Was deserving of the little I could give her. Even if all I could give her was the truth.
“Why do you think you are dead?”
She blinked at me. She looked at the shards of stone beneath her and mouthed something. It looked like, Please. “I don’t know.”
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
She tucked her chin into her chest. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you think I was dead?”
“Because you are on top of a grave.” She pointed to it. “But I don’t think that anymore.”
“You don’t?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I think you have come from Hell.”
Someone new had discovered a body of their loved one and with that realization came a fresh wave of wailing. It permeated the air heavier than any storm.
The girl was really shivering now. Her eyes flickered from one of mine to the other and her teeth chattered. Still, she did not move.
“I’m not from Hell,” I reassured her. “But if you believed I was, why would you stay sitting here?”
“Because I have no energy to move,” she admitted, falling a little further into her slouch. “If you are not from Hell, then where are you from?”
“Here.”
“I don’t believe you,” she replied weakly.
“Well, it’s true,” I said. Then I sighed. “But the ‘here’ I am from has no illness.”
She nodded slowly. I got the sense that I could tell her I was an alien in disguise, and she’d have the same tired response.
“Take me there,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
I licked my lips. One gust of wind and they were drier than before. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
There were a hundred reasons. I settled on the simplest one. “You are too sick to cure.”
She sighed inwards. “You know, it sounds silly,” she said, looking up at the sky, “but I had actually hoped I was dead. That this was over.”
Tears pricked the back of my eyes. It will be soon, I thought, but how was that any comfort? “I shouldn’t be here,” I said, but not to her, to myself.
“Maybe it is you who should go home,” the little girl said coldly.
“You’re right.” I closed my notepad, tucked my pencil away. All I needed was to press a button on the inside of my shirt collar. But the moment I did, there would be no coming back. I felt for it and held my finger over it for a moment, questioning my decision.
“You really are dead,” the girl said, “aren’t you?”
“Will you be buried here?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What name will they put on your gravestone?”
“Freida Owen,” she told me. She phrased it like a question, but again it was a question I wouldn’t answer.
“I will look for you,” I promised.
She sighed—outwardly this time. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
That was the last thing I heard in 1564. And the last time I’d see Freida Owen. I never did find her gravestone.
Deborah Rose is the Managing Editor for Hey! Young Writer and assisted in starting this amazing blog but now spends most of her time helping our founder, Alee Anderson, with her ghostwriting business. She is the author of two middle-grade, fantasy novels and a fan of all things history related! You can follow her on Instagram at @deborahroseintheforest or visit her website, deborahrosegreen.co.uk to read more of her writing.
Featured image by Sandra Seitamaa on Unsplash.
