They buried you at sunset. As the dying sun bled its last attempts at light into the hazy pink sky, your coffin was lowered into the ground. The red glare from the sky painted the shining wood and it glowed briefly, an ember in the earth, before the effect was ruined with a handful of dirt. I was the one who threw that dirt; the sound of it hitting the lid of the coffin made me think of fists banging on wood and I shivered in the growing darkness.

The priest said words. Many words that blended together into a comforting mix that somehow excluded me. The cross around his neck seemed to glow against his robes - the power of his belief echoed from him like a type of heat. I turned away, scalded by his devoutness, and faced the darkening East. Stars were starting to appear. Shining for me and me alone. Never for you again.

The other mourners evaporated into the darkness, leaving in ones and twos: a pat on the arm, a murmured condolence. Some started towards me but retreated when words failed them. What did you say to someone who had lost everything? I was set apart, isolated in my role as chief mourner and they drifted away to return to their brightly lit homes, to put on the tv, eat the casserole they’d left warming in the oven, take a bath and move on with their lives.

For me, the grave beckoned. I’d watched them fill it, from a respectful distance of course. They’d used a digger which seemed gruesome in some way I couldn’t explain. As I watched them fill the void with load after load of earth, I’d had the strangest sense that you weren’t in there after all. I knew you were though, I’d seen your corpse - waxen and icy. I’d chosen your suit - the grey one you were wearing the night you came home late, an apologetic bunch of flowers in your arms and a faraway smile on your face. Your favourite tie - the one you said you’d bought yourself, although you never bought clothes - lay on your chest and I’d reached down and straightened the wedding ring on your finger before placing your phone into your blazer pocket.

It was your phone of course that had given you away. A cliche of course - the wrong message at the wrong time, seen by the wrong eyes. Or the right eyes - it was all a matter of perspective. Your death was a matter of perspective too. You hadn’t known what had hit you - metaphorically of course. I was much too subtle for that.

The moon had risen now, pale and large like a great unblinking eye. Your eyes had looked like that, wide and round in surprise, at the moment of your death. The hint of accusation shadowing the blue that I’d first fallen in love with. This had just made me angry. How dare you accuse me? Who did you think you… were?

Silence now in the graveyard. Just the whispering of the wind sighing through the leaves in the trees. I tore my eyes away from the darker patch of dark that was your grave and turned to leave and that’s when the idea occured to me. An idea that was at once both terrible and strangely compelling. I could call you and hear your phone ringing beneath the ground. I could wait for the answer machine and leave you a final message - telling you that I may have ended your life but you’d ended mine first. You’d destroyed me in a far worse way than I’d destroyed you. A terrible idea but my phone was already in my hand, following the familiar pattern of your number…

It rang once, twice… then silence.

A click. My phone was pressed to my ear and I listened, straining to hear whatever lay down there beneath the dirt… or was it the sound of after… of beyond? A silence that was filled with the terror of waiting, with the idea of grave worms and rot and the stench of decomposition. A hungry silence that grew and became a world in which I was frozen in a fear more eternal than one human could bear. A fear that promised to stretch and reach into all existence and beyond…

Then a voice. No. Your voice. The words that snapped the final thread of my sanity and sent me tumbling, like a leaf in a hurricane, into the swirling darkness of madness.

“I know what you did.”