The Backyard of December

I was eight when we moved into the old carriage house behind the Cutler Funeral Home. It wasn’t a place for kids, not really. The building was three stories of red brick, with the bottom floor given over to the embalming rooms and the chapel, and the top two floors split into our apartment and another family’s. The whole place smelled of lilies and formaldehyde, a combination that clung to your clothes and hair no matter how much you washed.

The funeral home sat on a quiet street in the middle of our small town, but the real problem was the backyard. It was a long, narrow strip of land that ended at a chain-link fence separating us from the old cemetery. The graves were so close I could read the headstones from our kitchen window. Most were so weathered the names were unreadable, but a few stood out—dates from the 1800s, names like Hiram and Adelaide.

My best friend that autumn was a boy named Leo. He lived two streets over, and we’d discovered we were both obsessed with maps and old stories. We’d spend hours in my room, tracing the town’s history through old books I’d found in the attic. One day, Leo found a reference to a potter’s field behind the funeral home, where paupers and the unnamed dead were buried. ‘It’s right where the cemetery is now,’ he said, his eyes wide.

I remember the first time we snuck out there. It was late October, and the leaves were rotting on the ground, making everything smell like decay. We crawled under the fence and stood among the crooked headstones. Leo pointed to a marker with no name, just a number: 1887. ‘They didn’t even get names,’ he whispered. A chill ran up my spine, but I laughed it off.

That night, I had a dream. I was walking through the cemetery, and the ground was soft and wet. I heard a faint scraping sound, like a shovel biting into dirt. I saw a figure—a woman in a long black dress—kneeling beside a fresh grave. She turned to me, and her face was smooth like a doll’s, with no eyes, just empty sockets. She opened her mouth, and a single word came out: ‘Mine.’ I woke up screaming, but my parents said it was just a nightmare.

The next week, I started hearing things in the walls. Not mice or pipes, but a low humming, like a lullaby coming from the basement. I told Leo, and he said he heard it too when he slept over. We decided to investigate. The funeral home’s basement was off-limits, but there was a coal chute that led down from the backyard. One Saturday, we pried it open and climbed down.

The basement was freezing. It wasn’t the embalming room—that was on the other side. This part was old, with dirt floors and stone walls. We found a locked door with a key in the lock. Leo turned it, and we entered a small room. In the center was a child’s coffin, small and white, with a glass top. Inside was the body of a little girl, maybe six years old, dressed in a white gown. Her eyes were closed, and she looked peaceful, but something was wrong. Her hands were folded over her chest, and she was holding a piece of paper. Leo read it aloud: ‘She was never buried. She was never buried. She was never buried.’

We ran out of there so fast we left the key in the lock. But that night, the humming in the walls was louder, and I could swear I heard a child crying.

A week later, Leo stopped answering my calls. I went to his house, but his mother said he was at the funeral home, helping his uncle who worked there. I was confused. Leo’s uncle was a caretaker, not a mourner. I went to find him. I found Leo in the embalming room, washing the body of an old man. But Leo wasn’t Leo. His eyes were glassy, and he was humming—the same tune from the walls. When he saw me, he smiled, but it was wrong, too wide. ‘She wants you to play,’ he said in a voice that wasn’t his.

I backed away, but he grabbed my wrist. His grip was ice cold. ‘You have to take her place,’ he said. ‘She’s lonely.’ I pulled free and ran out of the funeral home, all the way back to my apartment, and locked my door.

The next day, my parents got a call. Leo had died in his sleep. They said it was sudden, a heart condition nobody knew about. At the funeral, I stood in the back, watching as they lowered his coffin into the ground. As they shoveled dirt, I heard the humming again. It was coming from the coffin.

I never told anyone. I lived in that apartment for two more years, and every night, I heard the humming. And every night, from my window, I saw the little girl standing among the headstones, her face like a doll’s, her hand reaching out for me. On the last night before we moved, she finally spoke, but it wasn’t from outside. It was right next to my ear, in a voice that was both soft and terrible:

‘You’ll come back. They always do.’

We moved across the country, and I tried to forget. But last week, I found my old sketchbook, and in it were drawings I’d never made. Pages and pages of a cemetery, and in every one, a small, white coffin. And at the back, a final drawing: me, older, standing beside a grave. The headstone read my name. And underneath, the date was next year.

I closed the book, and from my new home, hundreds of miles away, I heard a faint humming. It was coming from the basement.

And I know it’s waiting for me.