The Funeral

Jack walked nervously up the dark green grassy hill behind St John's Church. His childhood sweetheart from Senior school, Claire, stood already with her family, wiping tears from her eyes, her makeup already slightly messy. 

Her husband, Pete, and his only real friend; had died after having a fit, coming home from a quiet drink with him the other night. 

Jack was jealous of the large crowd who had turned out for Pete's funeral, doubting that anyone but Claire would probably turn up for his own. 

He joined the group of mourners who all stood solemnly at the side of the freshly dug grave. 

Claire looked up and made eye contact with him for more than a glance, as she stood with her fellow crying mourners, family members, and friends Jack didn't even know. 

They all stood in a perfect rectangle around the freshly dug grave. Dressed in suits, dark skirts, and fine but gloomy dark treds.

Jack clasped his hands together inside his long grey trench coat and prayed to whatever god it was that had granted his wish, that it would stay true. He crossed his fingers as the coffin of Claire's ex was lowered into the grave and the Vicar started speaking.

Pete on the other hand was coming too from what seemed like a horrible hangover. He was in the dark literally, and figuratively, trying to sit up, only to find his head hitting a solid roof only a few inches above. He was stuck. Stuck in a box, a coffin to be in fact and there was no bell from the Middle Ages on a string to pull to tell the people above he was still alive. 

The knock of his head on the box was noticeable enough to be heard by a few of the mourners including Jack. However, as he looked around in panic he convinced himself they all believed they had misheard the noise, and he reassured himself that if Pete had just woken from his Zombified sleep the expensive and thick oak coffin he had helped Claire buy would drown out the sound of any cries.

Pete was a dead man, dead but still alive, and he wasn't going to be saved by the bell today he thought. He patted down his body to find nothing. There was no mobile phone or anything useful, inside any pocket that would help him get out of this tiny prison. A panic attack set in but he had no pills available to take to calm him down. 

Shit, he was going to die by being buried alive, one of his worst-ever nightmares. Something only seen in Hollywood films and he couldn't work out why. 

The last he could remember was that he had gone for a drink with Claire's old school friend Jack to cheer him up, now that his wife had left him along with his kids, in a horrible divorce breakup. 

Jack was lonely and although not a real buddy type friend, Claire had pushed him hard to go out that night with him for some reason. 

It had been a wet dribbling night down the Crown and Cushion pub to watch the West Ham, Fulham game, with someone he didn't know very well. A night of small talk, football, and nothing much else was spoken about. However, seeing as it was Claire's friend he'd let her push him into going out with Jack as a favour to her. 

Pete could remember feeling a bit queasy after the last round of beers Jack had bought, and on the way home he hard-passed the donor Kebab that was on offer from the loner he had been out with.

He remembered opening the front door when he finally got home to see a distant blurry wife sitting on the sofa staring at him as his last memory. 

Pete scraped frantically with his fingers, and with a scared and increasingly breathless purpose at the side of the wooden box. He wasted breath calling out for help but soon there would be 6ft of freshly packed mud on top of his cries.

Some mourners thought they could hear Pete's voice at the funeral but were projecting their wishes onto bird cries, or other noises, at the graveside they convinced themselves. 

One old lady who looked more like a witch than a mourner standing next to Jack was convinced she could sense that the spirit of Pete was not yet free and he was still alive.

Jack had to keep telling her that the tapping sound she insisted she could hear from beneath the ground were actually bird pecks, and he wished the ceremony would end so he could get out of this place.

Jack hopped gently from foot to foot waiting impatiently for the funeral to finish and the vicar to get on welcoming his still alive, new customer to his field of the decrepit and decayed.

Jack's cocktail of voodoo juice, made from the famed Puffer fish and Vodka, gained after weeks of searching online, seemed to have worked as intended. 

Now he and Claire could be together. Helped along by a recent increase in the size of her deceased spouse's insurance policy.

Jack held her shoulder as they left the grave giving each other nervous looks as the mourners made their way past her paying pathetic platitudes, sympathetic sighs, and comical comments on their way out towards the church car park. 

Jack itched his hands nervously as he finally got to follow Claire out of the churches grounds. She seemed upset but he had no idea why and went up to and whispered into her left ear. 

"Cheer up babe, all our problems are now below us, just think of that huge life insurance payout coming soon, we'll be set for life." 

Claire turned to Jack and tried to smile but her lips wouldn't form one for her. 

"Are we bad people for doing this to Pete?" she asked, seemingly wanting a truthful answer from her secret lover. 

Could Jack lie to such an obvious question? No, he couldn't. She needed to know the truth, so they were both fully invested in their crime. 

"Of course we are", Jack responded with an evil smirk on his face and to the shock of Claire. 

"But so what! We did what we had to, and soon we can be together spending all that lovely life insurance money that we 'bad people' have earned from what we did. We killed Pete for love and in the end, who cares?", he gently grabbed Claire's hand and stroked it like he used to when they were going out together at school. 

He loved her so much and would do anything, and had done anything, to be with her. Nothing was stopping them now. 

At the roadside, cameras in a van clicked, as photos of this loving embrace took place and DC Bradshaw spoke into a microphone recorder. 

"Primary suspect A is holding suspect B's hand, the wife of the deceased near the Church graveyard's entrance". She spoke clearly and matter-of-factly into the machine. 

She was the only cop who had suspected Peter's death to be an act of murder for love since she had first seen the reports. 

Other members of the force saw this as a simple shut and close case of a drunk man having a fall and fit after a night out drinking. To DC Bradshaw, Jack and Claire's obvious sexual tension at the funeral of her rich stockbroker husband, only double-stamped her conviction that she was onto something. 

It was only a matter of time before the love cheats made a mistake and she would be proved right and ready to pounce. 

There was something about this couple that needed investigating and she would follow every lose lead until the end. No one was getting away with this perceived murder mystery.

However, this interest in his death by the Police could not help Pete out now as he screamed and shouted frantically using up precious air inside his buried coffin. The sound of mud being laid on top of his tomb only increased his panic and primal desire to escape his fate. 

A loose lead could literally be a godsend right now. Something to pull on and help get him out of this mud-encased prison. 

His hands scratched at the inside of his new eternal tomb, getting more and more out of breath with each, dark, and scared attempt at gaining an impossible freedom. 

He was a dead man and it was only a matter of time before he was a fitting buried member of the community of skeletons and decaying corpses that littered St John's Church's graveyard. 

No interest by the police in his soon-to-be death by suffocation would help him now, and he lay back down to think about who could have killed him. 

It could only have been Jack on that night down the pub with some kind of voodoo magic poison that had somehow comatised him so well it had convinced ambulance men, doctors, and even police alike that he was dead and not in a deep sleep. 

Breathing so slowly and infrequently that no pulse could be detected. He had read about voodoo deaths in books before but had never believed they were possible. No one could save him now he thought as he lay down and accepted his fate. 

Jack and Claire on the other hand were already raising suspicions amongst the other funeral attendees with their close-up body contact and odd whispering into each other's ears. 

It was just a shame that anything done now wouldn't have any outcome on his fate. Pete consumed his last gasps of air like shots of tequila, and he slowly felt the coffin prison fully encase him into the hallowed ground. He would soon no longer be a man, just a name on a joint bank account, for his cheating wife to abuse.

As Claire and Jack walked out of the church yard, DC Bradshaw could not help herself but introduce herself to the pair. She walked up to them in her prim M&S black skirt and blazer and as the two noticed her approach from the road she neatly flicked her Police badge open to make them aware of who she was without anyone else seeing.

"Hi there, I thought I'd introduce myself. I'm DC Bradshaw and I'm looking into the case of your husband Claire" She said quietly not wanting to make a spectacle of herself, or embarrass the widow in front of other passing mourners making their way out of the Church.

"I thought the case was closed?" Claire asked startled by her presence.

"Well I still have some doubts on the case", she said, her smug expression telling the two that she was going to be a pain in the arse for a while. 

"We may be getting the body exhumed to do a full autopsy to find out the exact cause of death", she added, making Jack's sphincter tighten as the words echoed around his head. However, he had been assured by a "How to do Voodoo" web page that Puffer fish toxins would have left the body by the time any court order could be made.

Jack decided to protect Claire, and by doing so he may have given her ex-husband that life line he so needed to pull himself up from six feet under.

"I think that will depend", he said, putting his hand across Claire and guarding her against the cop before pushing her in the back so that they carried on walking down the road.

As DC Bradshaw looked at the two walk off towards the car park the words Jack had said to her echoed around her brain, and as they got into their car and drove off her head snapped quickly 180 degrees back towards the grave diggers dropping spade after spade full of mud onto the open pit where Pete's body now laid.

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