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03/12/2004: "David Parker's Journal: 13"

It was my kind of cemetery.

Graveyards are like cities: each one has its on character, its own – I’m tempted to use the word “charm,” which it seems inappropriate for a place where the dead are laid to rest, yet there is some ill-defined thing about cemeteries that imbues them with sad charm.

My grandparents are buried in a suburban utterly devoid of character. There are no tombstones, only flat bronze nameplates flush with the ground that make it easier – and cheaper – to cut the grass. If you want to wait Judgment Day in the midst of what looks like a golf course, it’s a great place to be buried.

Oak Knoll Cemetery is the other sort of cemetery – a graveyard with character, with charm.

I entered through a pair of tall gateposts, past wrought-iron gates swung open during daylight hours and chained shut at night. The topography is hilly, with the tallest of the landscaped terraces rising high in the middle, like a fortress a strategic promontory. The hills are heavily wooded with oaks, as one would expect of a cemetery called Oak Knoll.

The trees, bare of leaves in winter, stretched out skeletal arms and fingers over a collection of tombstones that changed with the fashion of the time. From the entry drive, I looked across the memorials and easily saw the oldest sections, with 19th century tombstones of white stone bleached bone-white by more than a century of standing at attention beneath the sun and moon, season after season, year after year.

Oak Knoll had a good selection of mausoleums, fin de siecle masterpieces that could have been miniature Greek temples teleported from the Acropolis to the Midwest.

I drove slowly around the pond, where in n summer swans glided, the surface now choppy from the wind, the water reflecting only the dull gray light of an overcast sky. The rose garden was a litter of dead leaves and withered vegetation. The dead earth was awaiting its resurrection when the sun returned from the nether regions.

At the far side of the pond, following the drive’s arc around a stand of evergreens, I caught my first glimpse of the startling tomb I knew could only belong to William Benton.

Benton died in 1925, which would have been right for the mausoleum’s style – a bizarre cross between the art deco and ancient Egyptian that, against all odds, was a design that worked.

The walls angled inward as they went upward, like hands folded in prayer. The walls made appeared built of unpolished white marble that remained egg-shell white after more than seventy-five years of weather, though without the shiny, almost prissy gleam stone gets when buffed until the surface is no longer porous but smooth and glassy.

At first glace the tomb seemed appeared to be more plain that it really was, but as I pulled to a stop below the stairs leading to the entry, I noted the ornate cornices. The pillars framing the entry were inscribed with ankhs and other Egyptian symbols. The bronze door – turned a deep hue of green from years of wind and rain – led the eye toward a winged sun bracketed by two cobras carved above a simple one-word inscription, “Benton.” A smaller version of the same icon was repeated immediately above the door.

I sat with my foot on the brake, thinking about what an eccentric old Benton must have been. Where his contemporaries offended at the strange design, seeing how it clashed with the bland neo-Classicism of the other mausoleums in Oak Knoll Cemetery? Or did they respect Benton as a visionary industrialist who had his own unique style? Knowing people (the God-damned human race, as Twain bitterly called us – or should I say “them”?), my guess was the former.

The tomb was interesting, mainly due to my affinity for the offbeat and weird, but not especially helpful in my quest to figure out whatever message Tatiana had been trying to deliver when her psychic-projection directed me to the antique store and old book from Benton’s library, with its bookplate decorated with ornate Masonic images.

I took my foot off the brake. The Audi began to roll forward when something caught my eye. For a brief moment the bronze door began to shine. I looked over my shoulder, thinking the sun had broken through the clouds, but there was no opening in thick blanket of steel-colored overcast.

Glancing back at the door, I saw it again – a distinct glow that grew brighter and more translucent, until it was as if I were looking at an emerald held up to a candle.

I turned off the engine and was up the stairs in a shot. The strange light had disappeared, but it had already done its summoning work.

There was dirt and pine needles wedged against the bottom of the door. The crypt probably hadn’t been opened since Benton’s funeral in 1925. I put my hand on the metal handle, feeling the cold of a winter’s day against my bare flesh. I sensed the stiff gears within the lock mechanism, frozen not from the temperature but years of disuse.

Though there isn’t a shred of vandal in my soul, I had become tired of the game I’d been drawn into, against my will. Feeling the anger well up inside, I jammed the handle sharply downward without thinking. Much to my surprise the handle broke free, the entire mechanism failing.

I didn’t know my own strength – not a good thing in a vampire.

I pushed against the door.

It opened an inch or two and shuddered to a stop with the groaning scrape of metal against stone. Putting my shoulder in it, I forced the door open and steeped into the crypt, utterly surprised at what I found there.