THE EMPTY COFFIN

Another dark tale that asks more questions than it answers

He lurked in the shadows, partly hidden by an ancient yew tree, watching.

He made sure that he was invisible. Instead of his favoured cavalry twill trousers he was wearing cotton shorts, dark green ones that clung a little too tight for comfort. He hated wearing shorts. They made him feel like the schoolboy he’d been too many years ago when the other boys had mocked him because of his knees and the way he stained his grey shorts in the toilet as the last few drops always mischievously wet them. “Pissy Pants” they’d called him and long afterwards three of the wretches had taken their own lives for fear of him claiming what they owed him.

But right now he had to be invisible, and should anyone catch a glimpse of him he had to be anonymous. That was the way he’d lived his life. He had a public persons of course, a signature, a personality, but this wasn’t it.

All around him the crumbling remains of gravestones stood like broken mementos of a distant past He tried to ignore them, but they were almost reminders of his own mortality, though the barely discernible names were none of his. And over the years he had used plenty of names. He’d had to, in his line, anonymity was preferable to publicity. A lot more preferable. It kept him alive.

He scratched his shorts where a mischievous thistle had somehow managed to penetrate to his flesh and cursed inwardly. It had to be inwardly because anything else might have given him away.

Then something started to happen: a movement at the gates, and a parade of black suited men walked into the graveyard soberly bearing their burden, an ornate coffin designed to show how great, how rich, how powerful, the body inside it must be.

He sighed. So this was what came after death: the celebratory disposal of one who had been great in life and greater in memory. For some reason, he couldn’t quite fathom why, a sudden pressure meant he needed to wee. And here he was, cowering in the shadows and nowhere near a public toilet. He found a curse rising up inside him, but he quashed it before it came out.

He wanted to watch that coffin as it was lowered slowly into the space prepared for it. He needed to know that whoever lay inside it was gone for good. But the pressure was unremitting and he had to piss against the yew tree that he’d been lurking behind. The sound of that steaming urine splashing against the tree’s knobbly trunk was deafening. It would give him away and then the world would know that even a great man needs to sometimes relieve himself.

He adjusted his shorts and a splodge of darker green showed where he had inadvertently wet them. He noticed it, and shuddered. Men like him never wet their pants. It was unheard of, like saying that a king wiped his own bottom or a young queen had periods.

He returned his attention to the solemn procession and the coffinbeing carried like a precious thing, the six bearers in perfect unison. On top of it, resting for eternity, was the late lamented’s trademark bowler hat and cricket bat.

That hat had graced the richest parties on Earth, where luxurious comestibles beyond the dreams of ordinary folk, were consumed in copious quantities, served by smiling naked waitresses, all of them with hair that teased their n*****s as it cascaded from fragrant heads, and whose smiles never faded no matter what happened around them. And the cricket bat? Rumoured to be pure gold, it was testament to the immeasurable wealth of the man who wielded it, using it to smash royal treasures to tiny smithereens whilst billionaires looked on, grieving for the destruction of so much wealth that would never be theirs.

The coffin moved its sedate way towards the land prepared for it. He sighed behind his tree, and pissed again. This, then is how the wealthiest man on Earth had chosen to escape the prison of his notoriety and became a normal man. Not in the gutter, but normal anyway, his alter-ego dead and buried.

His green patch on those hated shorts grew as he readjusted his clothing, but nobody could see. He’d made sure of his privacy. It was as if he was alone on the planet with no eyes open to see him, and it must stay that way. The plan was his.

A sudden gust of wind might dry the moist shorts. But no, instead it grasped the bowler hat that rested on the coffin and tossed it in the air, carrying it several yards before dropping it onto the ground beyond the grieving mourners. One of them, a lad in his early teens, ran out and picked it up and did the worst thing he could possibly do.

He placed that hat on his own head and tried to mimic the corpse in its coffin, for which he received a slap on his head and a thump in his back. Then the hat was replaced on the coffin, and the little drama was over. Such was the power of the deceased even in death.

The shadow in the shadows watched as a man in the clerical cloth of the pretentious started speaking. He was reciting words prepared for him to read, special words that would only ever be used in the commemoration of this deceased man. He knew those words, for hadn’t he composed them with Rosie in her torment?

And then we die… Rosie had whispered those words, and she had died. But it had all been years ago and best forgotten until the anniversary of her death, when he paused to remember it. Like he must, because the memory had been for Rosie.

As he stared at the funeral service being enacted a hundred or so yards away from where he lurked, a tear found its way out of his cold heart and somehow found its way down a weathered cheek, and he was never known to weep, such outward emotion was alien to him.

Then it was time for the coffin to be lowered into the space prepared for it. He watched and knew that Ivan would be weeping because Ivan always wept at funerals, not they they went to many despite their ages and the way their circle of friends was shrinking. But Ivan had been his comfort once Rosie was gone. It had been a shame about her, but quite necessary when he realised just how much he loved Ivan…

It was Ivan holding one of the straps that supported the coffin.

He’d insisted. Of course he had! He was the only friend that the deceased had left to him, and now he, too was alone. Time to say goodbye, then. There’s nothing like loneliness to drive a wedge into broken hearts…

Then Ivan cried out and staggered. Even at this distance the man in the shadows heard the sound and it almost broke his heart. Almost, but not quite. Nothing did that, not these days, when remaining firm was essential.

Then Ivan stumbled.

One of the other bearers tried to grab him before he fell and the coffin, that wonderful, polished, oak coffin, that cost the Earth, almost, and its precious contents, slipped and crashed into the deep hole prepared for it.

And splintered.

He in the shadows had guessed it would splinter. He had known his secret would become public knowledge when they saw the body in its fractured case.

For the coffin was empty.

The shadow in his pee-stained shorts could have wept, but instead he silently, like shadows do, made his exit from the graveyard while the large funeral crowd gasped and oohed and aahed when they saw how empty his coffin was.

He was furious.

He’d have to think of another way of disappearing from the myriad of enemies who wanted him for so many little traps and tricks he’d laid for them to crash into. And, so, deep in thought and ashamed of his tight green shorts he didn’t notice the number 93 bus that stole his life when he stepped onto the road in exactly the same spot as its wheels had taken a fancy to.

He wasn’t even comforted by the fact there was a slightly damaged coffin with his name on it only yards away.

© Peter Rogerson 18.09.22

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