The Gravedigger’s Siren
A Birmingham Gothic Story
Cedar Gap, Alabama. October 1985.
Nineteen-year-old Clay Ashby works the graveyard shift at WCGP, a thousand-watt AM station that used to be a funeral home. At 4:32 one morning, the minute he was born, the request line blinks. Nobody has used that phone since 1979.
A woman’s voice asks for a song he has never heard and tells him where to find it: an unlabeled acetate hidden behind the Lawrence Welk records in the old embalming room. Every time Clay plays it, the lacquer wears thinner. Every time, the song changes.
His father is the preacher leading the town’s Halloween record burning. His grandmother has played the church organ for fifty-four years. And down the hill, under the cedars, something is waiting for somebody to play it backwards.
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MON 10·21·85 · 4:32 A
When a call came in, the bulb blinked.
A small red heartbeat in the dark.
I’d worked there for seven months and I had never seen it blink.
At 4:32 that morning, it did.
I picked up for the first time in seven months.
“WCGP, request line.”
For a second there was nothing.
Not a dial tone.
Not breathing.
Something under both of those, like the sound inside a seashell, if the seashell was a long way off and full of rain.
Then a woman said, “Hey there, Claybird.”
Nobody called me that.
Still in the ground
More Birmingham Gothic is on the way.
- What the Furnaces Left
- Where I Left Her
Follow along on Instagram at @rocknrollsunset.