In the winter of 1949, the snow in rural Connecticut didn’t fall—it settled. Like dust on forgotten things. My grandfather used to say that the dead slept better when the ground was too frozen to dig. And that year, the cold came early and stayed with a vengeance.
Back then, when a person passed in winter, the cemetery didn’t bury them right away. Hydraulic machines weren’t around, so graves were dug by hand. And once the frost sunk its teeth into the soil, that was the end of any digging until spring. The bodies would be stored in a stone vault near the woods at the edge of the cemetery—rows of silent guests waiting for their final appointment with the earth.
The vault needed guarding. Not from wolves or the cold, but from the living. Body snatchers still roamed then—doctors in need of cadavers, occultists with strange ideas, and other shadows you didn’t speak of in polite company.
The town hired a night watchman. A man named Red Clemens. Red was a veteran, lean as a fence post, with sharp blue eyes and fingers always stained yellow from rolling his own cigarettes. He didn’t say much, but he had a habit of tipping his hat to every coffin he passed, like he was greeting old poker buddies.
Red worked every night through that bitter winter. All alone in that stone vault, just him and the dead.
Red worked every night through that bitter winter. All alone in that stone vault, just him and the dead.
And a deck of cards.
See, Red didn’t care much for silence. Said it made the wind sound too much like whispers. So, to keep himself entertained, he started bringing a folding table into the vault. He'd drag two corpses out of their storage shelves, prop them up in rickety chairs, and deal a hand of poker. One for each of them, and one for him.
At first, it was harmless. Red would mutter their bets, raise the stakes, fold on their behalf, and even let them win now and then. But as the nights got longer, and the whiskey bottles started piling up in the corner, Red got competitive.
And that’s when things got... strange.
When the cemetery manager came to check the vault one morning in February, he noticed something odd—two corpses with purple, almost fresh-looking bruises on their pale faces.
He called Red in immediately. Red stood stiff, offended at the accusation.
“They cheated,” he said flatly.
The manager blinked. “Excuse me?”
“They cheated,” Red repeated. “Been watching ‘em. Old Mr. Hadley had an ace up his sleeve—literally. And Gerald Tusk? Slipped three queens under the table. So I gave ‘em a good slap to remind ‘em this table don’t tolerate cheats.”
“You hit the corpses... because they cheated?”
Red narrowed his eyes, dead serious. “Wouldn’t you?”
The manager didn’t fire him. Not because he believed Red—no one really did—but because there wasn’t a soul in town who wanted to spend twelve hours a night locked in a vault with two dozen frozen dead. Red kept his job, under one condition: no more poker. No more bruises.
He agreed, reluctantly. But folks say if you walk by that cemetery late at night in the dead of winter, you might still hear the faint clink of poker chips, or a low growl of "You lyin' bastard!" carried on the wind.
Red swore the dead never lied again after that winter. But he always kept one hand near his hip flask... and the other close to his deck. Just in case someone decided to bluff.
Because some games… never really end.
*an inspired story written after the article of morticians that found by the author in an online forum.
Comments
Post a Comment