Dark Gothic, Tome 5: Seduced by a Stranger

Chapter 1

Marlow, Buckinghamshire, October 1812

At the age of eleven, Catherine Weston was buried alive in a shallow, wet grave.

Two months before that, she had stood in the cemetery beside the ancient stone church, clutching her mother’s hand as the tiny coffin containing her brother’s remains was lowered into the ground. All four of her infant brothers had been buried this way. Sent to the warmth and light of Heaven, her mother said.

But now, on this miserable, gray October day, as the damp earth weighed impossibly heavy on her chest and forced her to struggle for every breath, Catherine realized her mother had lied. There was no light or warmth. There was only the cold, pungent mud and the choking terror that made her heart beat so hard she was certain it would burst.

She wondered how long it would be until someone missed her. Too long, for though she had been at Browning School for Girls for nearly a month, she had not formed any close friendships. No one would note her absence with any alacrity. She was the only child of two only children, and she had spent the first decade of her life entertaining herself while her parents grieved for their four infant sons and grew distant and tired and old before their time. Solitude was a state she knew best. The constant noise and hubbub at Browning unnerved her. As she lay panting in her grave, she thought with bitter regret that her preference for solitude had come with a terrible price.

The morning had been stormy, the rain pounding, the boom of thunder loud and near. By the afternoon, the downpour abated and as soon as lessons were over, Catherine left the school and sneaked off to gather smooth, cool stones like the ones she and her mother took to her brothers’ graves and left there to mark the fact that they had come and gone. In the spring and summer, they left flowers. In the autumn and winter, stones. There was a welcome familiarity to the task.

The large pocket at the front of her pinafore was already heavy with a dozen small rocks when she bent at the edge of a low embankment to pick up one more. Without warning or sound, the earth gave way beneath her feet. One moment she stood on wet ground, the next, she slipped down to the muddy riverbank and sank in the fetid mire as a good chunk of the embankment came sliding down atop her.

And there she was. Buried as her brothers were buried, though they were dead and she was not. Not yet.

Numb, she lay there at an odd incline, her head closer to the surface than her feet. The first thought that came to her mind was that she would die here and her mother would cry a river of tears and her father would have cried if she had been a son, but since she was a daughter he would remain stoically silent. Then all thoughts were swept aside by a roaring, surging panic.

Seized by horror and fear, Catherine tried to scream, but the weight of the earth did not let her put any force in the sound, and the effort robbed her of what little breath she could summon.

The more she cried and wriggled, the deeper she sank, the muck taking on a sucking, greedy life of its own, pulling her in. Beneath her, the slime parted and oozed to make her grave more secure, cold and dark and so foul that she retched and gagged. Above her, the weight of the fallen embankment pressed down and down, growing heavier by the moment.

She was dying.