The Red Gate of St. Dymphna

For thirty-one years, I’ve laid the dead to rest in the quiet hollows of the Missouri Ozarks. I’ve seen things that would curdle a preacher’s blood, but nothing like the summer of ’97 at St. Dymphna’s, a lonely Catholic cemetery perched on a bluff above the Meramec River. The cemetery is a postage stamp of green surrounded by a rusted iron fence, its only entrance a creaking red gate that faces the old mission church, a quarter mile down a gravel lane. The headstones are flat, flush with the ground, so no one could hide behind them if they tried.

That August, I buried a man named Harold Voss, a farmer who’d lived his whole life in those hills. The service was in the church, and the heat was suffocating, even for the Ozarks. The air was thick with the smell of lilies and sweat. After the final amen, I asked the family to return to the church basement for refreshments while the grave was prepared. They shuffled out, the women dabbing their eyes, the men in their dark suits looking relieved to escape the sun. I watched the last of them, a young girl with pigtails, step through the church’s heavy oak door, and then I gave the signal.

The burial crew – old Calvin and his son, Toby – started their work. They’d dug the hole that morning, and now they set about lowering the vault. I stood near the gate, fanning myself with a funeral home pamphlet, when I heard it: a low, rhythmic thumping, like a fist pounding against wood. It came from inside the steel vault, from Harold’s casket. I froze. Calvin stopped cranking the winch and looked at me, his face pale. ‘You hear that?’ he whispered. I nodded, my heart hammering.

The thumping grew louder, more frantic. ‘He was buried alive?’ Toby stammered, backing away. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I checked the pulse myself. He was gone.’ But the sound continued, and then a voice, muffled but clear, rose from the grave: ‘Let me out! It’s not my time!’ My blood ran cold. I’ve heard death rattles, even a corpse’s groan, but this was a living voice.

Calvin crossed himself – a Methodist, but he crossed himself – and said, ‘We gotta open it.’ I shook my head. ‘The family is inside. If we open it, they’ll see. There’s no coming back from that.’ But the pounding didn’t stop, and the voice grew more desperate: ‘Please! You’re burying me with her!’

I looked at Calvin, confusion in my eyes. ‘Her?’ He shrugged. That’s when I noticed something in the dirt near the grave. A small locket, tarnished, half-buried. I picked it up and opened it. Inside was a faded photograph of a woman, and on the other side an inscription: ‘My dearest Harold, forever yours.’ But Harold was an old bachelor; he’d never mentioned a wife. And in the background of the photo, I could see a figure – a woman in a white dress, her face blurred, but her eyes black, bottomless.

Suddenly, the pounding stopped. A profound silence fell, broken only by the cicadas’ drone. Calvin and I stared at the vault. Then a different sound came: a faint scratching, like nails on metal, sliding from the casket to the side of the vault, then to the grave wall, and up, toward the surface. I stumbled back, my boots catching a tangle of roots. ‘What the hell is that?’ Toby cried.

As we watched, a thin, dirt-stained hand burst through the fresh soil, followed by another, and then a head – the girl with pigtails from the church, her face white as chalk, her eyes milky, her mouth open in a silent scream. She clawed her way out of the grave, rising like a nightmare, her dress torn, caked in mud. She stood there, swaying, her head tilted at an unnatural angle, and whispered, ‘He’s not in there anymore. He’s coming.’

I turned to run, but my legs were rooted. Calvin fell to his knees, clutching his heart. Toby fled, screaming, toward the church. The girl walked past us, as if in a trance, toward the red gate. She unlocked it, swung it open, and disappeared down the lane toward the church. A moment later, I heard the church door creak open, then a collective gasp, then screams that curdled the air.

I never saw Harold again. They found his casket empty, but the vault was sealed from the inside. The girl – her name was Emily – was found in the church basement, curled in a corner, reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards. She couldn’t remember what happened. The family moved away, and St. Dymphna’s was abandoned. But sometimes, at dusk, if you stand at the red gate, you can hear a faint pounding from below the ground, and a voice calling, ‘Let me out. It’s my time now.’