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There was something wrong with the shed. Jim knew the moment he saw it.

It was an innocuous little building that sat against the far cemetery wall. Jim kept his tools there, along with his work clothes, the ride-on mower and anything else he needed for groundskeeping.

Yesterday, Cundle had requisitioned it for all his fancy equipment. Jim had moved most of the tools into the bungalow where he lived, on the outskirts of the cemetery. There were a few things he still needed to pick up, and he was curious to see what sort of mess Cundle had made of the place, with all his seismological apparatus.

The first thing Jim noticed, as he drew nearer, was the amount of flies buzzing around the shed. They hovered in a cloud and the noise they made was like a distant engine.

The door was open, creaking on its rusty hinges. There was a thick smell in the air that grew stronger the closer Jim got. It reminded Jim of his father’s overalls when he worked at the abattoir.

Jim had no idea what Cundle was doing in the shed but it was time to put a stop to it. He didn’t care how high up he was at the university, or how much of an expert he was supposed to be, he was up to no good. Jim wasn’t going to let him get away with it, not in his shed.

The cloying smell, and the drone of the flies, increased as Jim reached the door. He put his hand over his nose and mouth as he pulled the door open. A wave of flies swarmed out and Jim waved them away with his free hand.

The dim bulb that hung from the ceiling had been shattered and it took Jim a while to see through the gloom inside the shed. When his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, his brain took a while to process what he was seeing.

Every piece of equipment in the whole shed had been destroyed. The camp table Cundle brought had been knocked aside and bent out of shape. His laptops and seismological apparatus lay in pieces in the corners of the shed.

A stray electric cable, with its torn wires exposed, lay crackling in a pool of water. Except the liquid was too thick to be water, and it was the wrong colour. It was dark crimson and covered the entire floor of the shed. Its surface was beginning to congeal as Jim waded into the shed looking for Cundle. It began to seep into Jim’s new trainers.

That’s when Jim saw Cundle, and wished he hadn’t.

Cundle lay face down with his knees pulled up underneath him. His back was arched. What remained of his head was thrown back and his posterior was in the air. His trousers were torn to shreds and Jim clearly saw the foot-thick column of compacted earth that appeared to have burst up through the boards of the floor and buried itself in Cundle’s impossibly distended rectum.

Cundle’s buttocks were pushed so far apart to accommodate the shaft of soil, that the flesh around his anus was torn and ruptured. The earth had forced itself so hard and so deep into Cundle’s behind it seemed to have pushed every one of his internal organs out the opposite end.

Cundle’s mouth had been thrown wide open by the expulsion. His jaw was not only dislocated but the bones had cracked and come apart entirely. The glistening pink tubes of Cundle’s lower colon protruded from his torn and ragged lips, spilling out into the lake of blood and bile in front of him. Jim saw what he thought was a liver and a pair of lungs among the coils of dripping innards and the crawling flies.

This couldn’t be happening. Jim’s mind just couldn’t make sense of the scene before him. Who could have done this? How was such a thing possible?

Only this morning Cundle had been fussing around the graves and bossing Jim about as though he was Cundle’s lackey. Looking down his nose at Jim the whole time. Now he was reduced to this.

Jim felt a wave of revulsion, then a deep, terrible pity. He hadn’t liked Cundle while he was alive. He’d found the man to be pompous and condescending. Jim’s menial job left him beneath Cundle’s consideration. All the same, he’d been a human being, capable of thought and compassion. He didn’t deserve a fate like this.

Jim wondered what Cundle had been thinking in the final moments, as the fear gripped him and the agony of the violation became unbearable? Did he call out for his mother, or his children, if he had any? Did he long for the touch of an old flame, or just pray it would end quickly so the pain would finally stop?

It didn’t make any sense. How had the ground just risen up and punched a hole through the floor like that? How had it impaled Cundle and filled him so full of earth that every one of his internal organs had been expelled? Things had been getting weird around the cemetery lately, but this was off the scale.

Jim felt his stomach turn over. Not from the sight of Cundle but from a new smell that invaded the shed. It was growing stronger by the second. He’d thought it was coming from Cundle, but it was too cloying and putrid. It reeked of decay and rotting matter, so rancid it was almost fertile. A shameful sort of fertility, like the mould that grows on dead things. The smell not only grew, it began to envelop him, as though it were alive—another presence in the shed with him.

The floor shook and something beneath the wooden boards rumbled, as though it were moving through the earth directly below the shed. It might even be the thing that had killed Cundle.

Jim’s breathing got heavier and his skin went cold all over, even as the sweat broke out on the back of his neck. He realised he was in great danger, not just of death, but the same slow, hideous torture that Cundle would have suffered.

He had to leave the shed right now and put as much distance possible between himself and whatever was under it. Jim turned on his heel and fled into the cemetery.