Some ten to fifteen men stood underneath the chalky sun, in the wide clearing of grey sky. Some of them were yet boys barely embracing the responsibility of their manhood, but they were all tough men, forged from the many untold hardships of their environments. They had wiry bodies like the moorland plants, and hard hands more familiar with the heavy tools they were carrying than any idle plaything. Yet in spite of every painful experience they had had to endure to survive, even their hardened faces winced to learn of the grisly task they were to undertake.

‘...Are you sure we are doing this?’ asked the priest not for the first time, his tone deeply hesitant.

The exorcist, however, was unmoved, the expression upon his scholarly face now as hard as any of the young men before him.

‘We have to’, he said with finality.

With a reluctant shout from the old priest, the men all picked up their instruments, and marched to their instructed places, before wooden, makeshift crosses sticking out of the ground.

Metal tools glinting in their grips, they awaited their final order.

The old priest looked to his side one last time, before sighing resignedly.

‘...Dig!’

With that one command, a dozen or so picks and spades and hoes descended into the hard face of the earth, ploughing ripe scars through her barren skin.

They had begun exhuming the graves in the backwoods of Mystvale, graves from the period of the seven deadly years.

The exorcist squinted over the slow progress of the work, and consulted with the diagrams in his hands again. They were drawings he had extracted from the chapel’s administrative records, collecting details as to who was buried where. This had become especially important at the time, when most couldn’t afford either the time or money for coffins or headstones, and many had been buried by the bulk.

He scanned the anonymous crosses they had stabbed into the earth, and wondered what they might uncover.

The old priest had told him what Father Edmund had done with the witch’s corpse: bury it twice. But he couldn’t tell him what the good Father had not told anybody else: where he had buried her. This he had kept a secret, just like all the other secrets he had kept from the world.

This would’ve led into a dead-end to the investigation, if not for the fantastic reason the Father had given for his wild stance. He looked over to the old dramatist by his side; he still recalled the amazing way in which he had related the controversial decision. Assuming for the very first time the manner of a serious pastor, he had said the following words:

‘ “For all souls are to be judged equally in Death, when they are brought before the Lord, for the things they have done in Life.” ’

This was the egalitarian scriptural excerpt the charismatic reverend had cited for the purpose of deterring the angry mob from further mutilation of the corpse, and convincing them to entrust the ensuing funerary processes into the hands of him and his few disciples.

He lifted his attention from the abstract blots of ink, and placed it onto the neighboring section of the burial grounds, with proper tombstones all, and a singular monument rising above all the others. Egalitarian.

Short of turning stones to bread, he didn’t believe that even Father Edmund could have converted such a vengeful mob, so whatever preparations they had had for the corpse, they had been able to quietly manage it between themselves. They couldn’t simply slip out and bury her somewhere remote in the middle of the woods—someone would have surely followed. They had to be inconspicuous…

… and where is a corpse more commonplace than in a graveyard?

He cast a look around again at the progress in the other sites, a flicker of impatience rising within his chest. In spite of all the research and thought he had poured into the problem, everything he had to work with were merely hypotheses, surmises, even guesses. He wanted something more concrete, something to help him confirm his theories. Something he could use against the ghost.

But no one would tell him what he needed to hear.

‘You there!’ he called out to one who seemed youngest and most exhausted with the work. ‘Switch with me and rest a little.’

He took up his shovel, and stepped into the hole they had dug.

No one would tell him.

So he had to see for himself.

•••

The old priest’s spirits were bright in spite of the pit they were steadily holing themselves into. ‘Honestly, I had thought of you as more of the bookish sort.’

The exorcist and the young men had tried to persuade him against joining, on grounds of his old age, but he had stubbornly insisted that he was a Mystvale man too.

The exorcist smiled between scooping the dirt over their heads. ‘So have I.’

‘Well, anybody would!’ the old man laughed. ‘Just look at the way you freeze up over a book or any piece of paper!’

The exorcist scowled. ‘...Your point?’

The priest stabbed the pick into the ground beneath them. ‘My point is bookish sorts aren’t so eager to get their hands dirty as you do.’

The shovel stopped.

The thing was, he wasn’t so eager. The work was unfamiliar to him, and he was more used to shivering than sweating when he was rolling around in the dirt. But as sandy dirt was preferable to grimy filth, how they treated the pages they came into contact with; anything was preferable to the ectoplasm of an angry spirit. The way the ghost had singled him out last night suggested that it possessed a surprising degree of intelligence. Normally the undead would appear mostly reptilian, almost vegetative in their behaviour, but this one, even without its head, had exhibited the problem-solving capabilities of an animal. Now that wouldn’t sound impressive once put into words, but any experienced hunter knew just how difficult it could be to deal with a thinking brute, when it possessed the inhuman power to act upon its ideas.

It was a race now, for each to corner the other, and determine which one was predator, and the other prey. And now that he’d been marked, it wouldn’t merely be a matter of pulling out of the game anymore.

‘You’d be surprised’, he jocularly replied to the priest, ‘just how hard the body has to work, to keep the head held up high.’

‘I wouldn’t know!’ the priest grinned and hunched over. They both continued working, in the site that the other men had reserved for them, for reasons ranging from age to workspeed to being an outsider.

‘You never said what it was you were writing’, said the priest suddenly in a chipper tone. ‘Back at the damn mayor’s.’

‘Ah, that.’ The exorcist thought it quickest to show him, and produced the little note from under his sleeve.

‘...Myst...well?’ the old eyes squinted and read incredulously. ‘I thought you were the bookish sort.’

The exorcist smiled at his humorous reaction. ‘...It’s a combination I happened to run into with the broken pieces of signboard, and I thought it could have made an equally suitable name for the town.’

The priest stared at him. This had been the reason he had not deigned to join the negotiations. ‘We have no wells for which we are famous here.’

‘It’s not so straightforward’, the exorcist laughed and tried to explain. ‘ “Well” refers to springs and streams in old language, things present in Mystvale—and even if you left that out, the general symbolism of an oasis in the middle of the barren wasteland should also have its appeal.’

The old priest understood less and less. ‘What difference does it make?’

‘A hint, I suppose. In northern cultures, springs and wells are tied to mystic phenomena, being sacred connections between the surface world and its hidden depths.’

The exorcist smiled and looked around at the ground swallowing them almost to the shoulders now.

‘...They are related to haunting and guardian spirits in particular’, he thoughtfully mused.

The old priest was certainly not interested in such ominous naming sense. ‘I prefer Mystvale’, he said grumpily, and the exorcist was content to let the matter rest.

Although the day was never particularly heated in the approach of winter, the thorough workout had made the sun’s glare more perceptible to his skin, and as the exorcist peered out of his newly constructed horizon of earth and sand, it occurred to him how similar Mystvale was to a desert, once you’d taken water out of the equation.

He wondered if it was because of what he was thinking, or because he had sweated so much, but he thought he could hear the sound of a stream. It was… a familiar sound.

He turned around to the old priest. He had been softly whistling.

‘...What song is this?’

The priest halted his work in a little surprise. ‘Oh this?’ he smiled fondly. ‘This is Father Edmund’s song.’

‘... Father Edmund’s song?’

The old man set his instrument aside for a moment, and took in a couple deep breaths. Then he resumed his whistling, in more audible volume this time. Soon enough, the men from the other holes all heard him, and they were all humming and whistling along.

They all went on working like that, and it had felt like the barren graveyard had transformed into the pebbly banks of a stream, in the middle of a beautiful forest.

Then there was the sound of children laughing and running around.

It took the children popping their little heads into the hole he was in for the exorcist to realize they were real and not just part of the scenery of the music.

‘Look!’ one pointed at him. ‘It’s the grubby outsider!’ And then they all joined in with their variously unfavourable childish remarks. ‘Bird’s nest! Hair’s mess!’ ‘Black man!’ ‘Witch-man!’ ‘Potato-priester!’

‘Stop that this instant! That’s enough rudeness out of all of you!’

A young lady quickly appeared to rail them in, and her appearance scattered them, presumably to the other sites.

‘I’m very sorry’, she said kindly, peeking in.

The priest recognized her. ‘Bertha!’

‘I’m here to bring you your food’, she explained. ‘ I couldn’t do anything about the kids tagging along.’

‘That’s quite alright, child!’ the priest understandably nodded, and half-climbed out of the hole he had dug. ‘Listen here ye little devils!’ he shouted. ‘We’re doing some very important work here, and ye should all go make ruckus somewhere else!’

The children’s voices replied to him, giggling. ‘We know that!’ ‘You’re going to kill the witch right?’ ‘Ooh, me, me! I wanna kill the witch too!’ ‘Me too! Me too!’ ‘I wanna!’ ‘Kill the witch and rip her guts out!’ ‘Put her head on a steak!’ ‘Body on a steak!’

The young lady turned pale at what they were all saying, and then livid as she reprimanded them. She chased them all and rounded them up, and thoroughly gave them a piece of her mind, before bowing farewell to the priest and exorcist again, having done what she had come to do.

The exorcist was genuinely glad to have met her. She was by far one of the few good impressions that he had had of the place.

‘That Bertha!’ He could hear the local young men discussing about her themselves, from their different sites.

‘I get so sick of her sometimes!’ ‘She’s the worst!’ ‘Never wanna have her as my wife!’

His eyebrows shot up and he stared at the old priest beside him. The old man nodded and began clearing his throat, prepared to assume the voice of elderly counsel.

‘What is the matter, boys? Isn’t Bertha a very smart and handsome girl?’

The exorcist privately nodded. Even by his metropolitan standards, she was a very comely young woman.

‘But she never shuts up!’ ‘Always nags at me!’ ‘Goes on and on about how crops ought to be grown.’ ‘Thinks she’s so much better than us!’

‘Sometimes I just want to jam a potato into her mouth!’ At this they all laughed uproariously.

The old man turned an innocently helpless face back into his hole, and shrugged. The exorcist sighed, and they all returned to their work.

•••

It was some time later that the first group had reached their target depth.

‘We hit it!’

The slow-worker pair climbed up their burrowing site at the notice, and immediately scuttled over.

There were skeletons. Several of them.

The exorcist bent down, gently but quickly brushing away the attaching earth.

‘So what are we looking for?’ asked the priest, not knowing how to contribute. ‘The head, right? The body’s obviously flying around wreaking havoc every night.’

‘We look at the neck’, corrected the exorcist without turning aside, fingers feeling around the dead material. ‘This one’s intact. So is this one. This one’s only cracked. All died of causes other than decapitation. It’s not in this grave.’

It was at that moment that several other sites announced they had found something as well, and he quickly came to assess them.

‘Fill it up and mark it, then start digging at this site next’, the priest instructed the men. Meanwhile, the exorcist was busy investigating the exhumed graves.

'Not this one…'

'Not this grave…'

'Not this corpse...'

The men all cycled between digging and refreshing themselves, and digging again, and by the time the sun was setting, they had entirely excavated the seven years’ boneyard.

‘It can’t be…’

There was nothing to see.