The Unquiet Trade

I watched my father snatch his tool belt and torch from the hook by the door. The telephone had rung ten minutes earlier, waking all of us at 02:17, according to the glowing numbers on my bedside clock. It was the third call in a fortnight. Dad had muttered something about a critical electrical failure at the Hargreaves' place before hurrying to pull on his steel-toe-capped work boots.

'Need any help?' I asked, already knowing the answer.

Dad shook his head without looking at me. 'Go back to sleep, Daniel. It's just a routine job.'

There was nothing routine about emergency calls in the middle of the night, especially when they left him looking haunted on his return.

I stood in the hall while he gathered extra equipment from the under-stairs cupboard. He took not only his electrician's tool case and test equipment, but also a spade, which he tucked beneath one arm. That made no sense. What sort of electrical emergency required a spade?

'I'll be back in a few hours,' he said, brushing past me.

The front door closed with a soft click. I went to the sitting-room window and watched his ageing dark-green Ford Ranger reverse off the drive, its headlamps cutting through the darkness. The red tail lights vanished round the corner. When I turned, Mum was standing in the kitchen doorway.

'You should be in bed,' she said, tightening the belt of her dressing gown.

'That's the third emergency in a fortnight. Is everything all right with Dad's business?'

Mum went to the sink and filled a glass with water. 'Your father has loyal customers who know they can count on him at any hour. That's why Mercer Electrical has done so well all these years.'

'But a spade? What does he need that for?'

She took a long drink before answering. 'Sometimes he has to reach buried armoured cable or investigate an earth fault. It's all part of the job, Daniel.'

The explanation sounded reasonable, but something in her voice was false. I had known my mother for all fifteen years of my life. I could tell when she was concealing something.

'Come on, back to bed,' she said, setting the glass in the sink. 'You've got school tomorrow.'

I returned to my room but did not sleep. I lay awake thinking about the late-night calls that had begun a few months earlier. At first they had been rare, perhaps once every couple of months. Dad would receive a call, rush out and return hours later looking tired but otherwise normal.

Now they came more often, and Dad no longer looked normal when he returned. He looked shaken.

The following morning I woke to the sound of the shower. The clock read 06:30. Dad must only just have come home. I pulled on some clothes and went downstairs, where Mum was making coffee in the electric filter machine.

'Is Dad all right?' I asked.

'Just tired. It was a complicated job,' she replied without meeting my eyes.

I poured a bowl of cereal and sat at the kitchen table.

'What was wrong at the Hargreaves' place?'

'You know your father doesn't discuss his clients' problems. It would be unprofessional.'

Dad entered the kitchen twenty minutes later, his hair still damp from the shower. He had changed into clean clothes, but I noticed something brown beneath his fingernails.

Soil, not the dark grime of electrical work.

There were shadows under his eyes, and he moved stiffly, as though every muscle ached.

'Morning,' he mumbled, filling a mug from the glass coffee jug.

'Everything sorted at the Hargreaves'?' I asked.

He paused with the mug halfway to his lips. 'Yes. All taken care of.'

'Must have been difficult fixing it in the dark.'

Dad glanced at Mum before replying. 'I had my work lights. It wasn't too bad.'

I nodded and finished my cereal, watching him from the corner of my eye. His hand trembled slightly as he raised the mug. When he thought I was not looking, he rubbed at a smear of earth on his wrist that he had missed in the shower.

'I need some sleep,' he said, putting his mug in the sink. 'I've got a regular job at the Whitakers' this afternoon.'

After he left the room, I looked at Mum. 'He's covered in soil.'

'Daniel, please. Your father works hard. Sometimes that means getting dirty.'

'Electrical work doesn't usually mean digging holes in the middle of the night.'

Mum sighed and sat opposite me. 'Your father does whatever needs doing to keep his customers happy. That is how we keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Now finish getting ready for school.'

I knew I would get no honest answer from her.

All day at Merewick Secondary School, I struggled to concentrate. My thoughts kept returning to Dad taking the spade, to his trembling hand and the soil beneath his nails.

A week passed without another night call. Dad relaxed and began to look like himself again. Perhaps I had made something out of nothing.

Then, on Saturday evening, the telephone rang as we finished dinner. Dad froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. Mum and Dad exchanged a look I could not interpret.

Dad rose and answered in the hall, speaking too quietly for me to hear. When he returned, his expression had changed. The easy look was gone, replaced by tight lines around his mouth.

'I need to go out,' he said, pushing away his plate. 'Emergency at the old Rudge smallholding.'

'The derelict farmhouse?' I asked. 'Nobody's lived there for years. How can there be an electrical emergency?'

'New owners,' Dad said too quickly. 'They bought it last month and they're trying to do the place up.'

I had lived in Merewick all my life and had heard nothing about the Rudge place being sold. The farmhouse had stood empty since old Mr Rudge died when I was ten.

Dad hurried to fetch his equipment. I heard the under-stairs cupboard open again. When he passed through the kitchen on his way out, he carried the spade and a large holdall I had never seen before.

'Will you be back tonight?' Mum asked.

'Don't wait up,' Dad said without looking at either of us.

The door closed behind him. Mum began clearing the table, her movements sharp and exact. She did not want to discuss it. That much was obvious.

I helped wash the dishes while studying her face. Her jaw was clenched and her eyes were worried.

'Mum, what's really going on with Dad?'

She shook her head. 'Your father has his work, Daniel. That is all you need to know for now.'

'But-'

'That's enough,' she said firmly. 'Some things are private, even within a family.'

Later that night, I heard Mum go to bed at about 23:00. I stayed awake reading, with my bedroom door slightly open so that I would hear Dad return.

At 02:42, headlamps swept across my window.

I got up and peered through the blind as the Ford Ranger turned on to the drive. Dad remained behind the wheel for nearly five minutes before climbing out. Even from upstairs I could see that he was filthy, not only his hands but all his clothes.

He walked slowly, as though every step demanded an effort.

I slipped downstairs and watched from the dark sitting room. Dad entered through the back door and went straight into the utility room beside the garage. A moment later, the washing machine began to turn.

When he emerged, he had stripped down to his vest and boxer shorts. His work clothes were already being washed clean of whatever evidence they carried. He did not see me as he went towards the bathroom. For an instant, light from the open bathroom door illuminated the hall and I saw his face clearly.

He looked frightened. Not tired or stressed, but frightened. Mud coated his arms almost to the elbows.

Dad remained in the shower for a long time. When he finally came out and went upstairs, I retreated to my room and pretended to be asleep. I heard him pause outside my door before continuing to his and Mum's bedroom.

The next morning Dad slept until noon. Mum warned me not to wake him. When he eventually came downstairs, he looked somewhat better, though something remained wrong in his eyes. They darted about more than usual, and he kept glancing through the windows as if checking whether something was outside.

'Did everything go all right last night?' Mum asked quietly when she thought I could not hear.

'Fine,' Dad replied. 'Graham helped. It took longer than I expected.'

Graham Pritchard from the independent ironmonger's and builders' merchant. What did he have to do with Dad's electrical work?

Dad realised I was listening and abruptly changed the subject. 'Lovely day. I think I'll work in the garage for a while.'

I followed him out a little later and watched while he cleaned his tools with methodical care. The spade stood in one corner, freshly washed, although traces of soil remained along the edges of the blade.

'Need something, Daniel?' he asked without turning.

'Just wondered if you wanted any help.'

'Not with this.'

I leant against the workbench. 'The Rudge place is a fair way out. It must have been a serious problem for them to call you in the middle of the night.'

Dad's hands stopped for a moment, then resumed their work. 'Some jobs can't wait till morning.'

'What sort of electrical emergency needs a spade?'

He put down the spanner he was cleaning and finally faced me. 'Daniel, there are parts of my work that are complicated. When you're older, I'll explain more.'

'I'm fifteen, Dad. I'm not a child any more.'

'You're still too young for some things.' He turned back to his tools. 'Go and help your mother with lunch.'

I knew I would get no answers from him either. But I could not ignore what I had seen.

The night calls were becoming more frequent. Dad always took the spade. He always returned dirty and nervous. Now Graham Pritchard was involved as well.

Whatever my father did on those night calls, it was not electrical work. The next time the telephone rang after dark, I intended to discover what it really was.

I waited for my opportunity. Three nights after Dad's visit to the old Rudge smallholding, the telephone rang at 23:38. I had been lying awake, fully dressed beneath my duvet.

Dad's heavy steps sounded in the hall, followed by his low voice as he answered.

'Tonight? Are you certain?' His words carried up the stairs. 'All right. Give me thirty minutes.'

I slipped out of bed and went to the window overlooking the drive. Dad appeared moments later and began loading equipment into the covered bed of the Ranger. He returned indoors briefly, presumably to tell Mum where he was going, then came back carrying the spade and the mysterious holdall.

As soon as his tail lights vanished down the street, I grabbed my coat and torch and crept out through the back door.

Our house was close to High Street. I cut through the Bannisters' garden and took the short route to the main road. Dad always drove slowly when he set out on these jobs, as if trying to postpone whatever awaited him. There was a nearby junction before the A-road, and if I ran I could reach it before he passed.

I arrived with time to spare and crouched behind the Royal Mail postbox beside the closed chemist's frontage.

When Dad's pickup approached, I waited until it had passed before sprinting after it. He stopped at the red traffic lights, giving me just enough time to reach the rear of the Ranger. I pulled myself over the tailgate and crawled beneath the tarpaulin covering his equipment. An old blanket was bunched near the front of the load bed. I pulled it over myself and made certain I was completely concealed.

The pickup moved again. I lay absolutely still, my heart beating so loudly that I was sure Dad would hear it from the cab. The tarpaulin smelt of soil and engine oil. Tools shifted around me as the Ranger turned on to the A-road and gathered speed.

After about fifteen minutes, Dad's mobile rang. He answered through the pickup's hands-free system, allowing me to hear every word.

'I'm on my way,' Dad said. 'About fifteen minutes out.'

'Any change?' asked a voice I recognised as Graham Pritchard's.

'No. The family say it's still there. They heard it again tonight.'

'Same spot as before?'

'Yes. I brought extra equipment this time. We need to be thorough.'

'I'll meet you there,' Graham said. 'I've got everything ready at my end.'

The call ended, and I tried to understand what they had said. What was still there? What had the family heard? Why did Graham need to meet Dad in the middle of the night?

The pickup slowed and turned on to a rutted forestry track. Branches scraped along its sides as we travelled deeper into mixed conifer woodland. After several more minutes of jolting over the rough ground, the vehicle stopped and the engine died.

I held my breath as Dad climbed out and closed the driver's door with a muted thud. His steps came round to the back of the Ranger, and I froze, certain I was about to be discovered. He merely opened a side compartment and removed some equipment without lifting the tarpaulin. His footsteps receded over fallen leaves.

I counted slowly to sixty, then raised one corner of the cover. Clouds obscured the sky, and with no moon visible it was difficult to make out anything. Dad's torchlight bobbed between the trees approximately 45 metres away.

I slipped from beneath the tarpaulin and eased myself over the tailgate. My feet landed on damp ground.

We were in the middle of nowhere. Woodland surrounded us, with no house or other building in sight. The forestry track was scarcely more than two muddy ruts. I switched on my torch but kept its beam trained on the ground so that Dad would not notice it.

His light vanished beyond a low rise. I followed at a distance, placing each foot carefully to avoid breaking twigs or stirring leaves. The woods smelt of wet earth and pine needles. Now and then an owl called above me, or some small creature scurried through the undergrowth.

I crept to the crest of the rise and lowered myself on to my stomach.

A small clearing lay below. Another vehicle was parked there, presumably Graham's. I crawled forwards until I saw Dad's torch join another beam. The two men stood about 27 metres away beside a shallow depression in the ground.

Their voices carried through the still night.

'How long has it been like this?' Dad asked, shining his torch into what I now realised was a partially opened grave.

'It started three days ago,' Graham replied, his normally cheerful shopkeeper's voice grim. 'The family contacted me after hearing sounds during their visits to the plot. I checked it myself yesterday. It's definitely active. Since then they've heard related noises at the farmhouse as well, so they've taken a room at a nearby inn.'

The caller owned the old Rudge smallholding, but this was not beside the farmhouse. The grave lay in a private family burial plot on woodland belonging to the former estate, remote and unmarked.

Dad put down his tool case and removed several objects from the holdall, none of which I could identify from where I lay.

'Same as the Naylor case last year,' he said. 'Worse, perhaps. This one seems more animated.'

A chill passed through me that had nothing to do with the cold night. What did he mean? What could be active inside a grave?

Dad took up the spade from where he had rested it against a tree. 'Let's finish this quickly.'

The two men began digging, taking turns to remove the recently disturbed soil.

I remained flat against the ground at the top of the rise, barely breathing. This was not a municipal burial ground. There were no headstones, only the faint rectangular hollow into which they were digging.

'The family are in pieces over it,' Graham said between thrusts of his spade. 'They thought the burial would put an end to things.'

'It usually does,' Dad replied. 'But sometimes they don't pass all the way.'

'This is the third in a fortnight, Stephen. That's more than we normally see in a year.'

Dad stopped and leant upon the spade handle. 'I know. Something has changed. They're lingering longer somehow.'

My thoughts raced. Who were they? What had failed to pass?

The men resumed their steady digging, heaping earth beside the grave. After about twenty minutes, Dad's spade struck something with a soft thud rather than the scrape of soil.

'Here we are,' he said.

Both men set their spades aside and knelt at the edge of the hole. Dad reached into the holdall and drew out two pairs of heavy gauntlets, inherited equipment that was already worn and darkened with age. He handed one pair to Graham.

'Ready?' Dad asked.

Graham pulled on the gauntlets and nodded. 'Let's make it quick.'

They reached into the grave together and began lifting something wrapped in an old linen shroud.

That was when I heard it.

A muffled noise came from the thing they were raising. It was not an animal sound. It was horribly, unmistakably human.

The bundle moved. It did not merely sway because the men were carrying it. It shifted and writhed between their arms, twisting the linen around the unmistakable shape of a human body.

My stomach lurched. This could not be happening.

They had dug up a person, someone who was somehow still alive despite having been buried. I bit down on my knuckles to stop myself making a sound.

'Careful,' Dad said as they placed the moving bundle beside the grave. 'Don't tear the shroud.'

The figure beneath the linen continued to struggle, making dreadful, strangled noises. They were not quite words, but they sounded desperate enough to raise every hair on my arms.

Dad loosened one end of the shroud just enough to inspect what lay inside. I could not see clearly from the rise, but whatever met his gaze made him cover it again at once.

'Bad?' Graham asked.

'One of the worst,' Dad said, his voice flat. 'The family say it's been down there at least two weeks, but it's still fully active.'

'What do you want to do with it?'

Dad sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. 'We'll have to take it to the disused limestone quarry near the Welsh border. The standard release won't work on this one.'

'Want me to help with the disposal?' Graham asked.

'Yes. Meet me there tomorrow night, around midnight.'

Graham nodded. 'I'll bring everything we need.'

They wrapped the body more securely, using hemp cord from Dad's holdall to bind the shroud tightly around the writhing form. The sounds continued, rising and falling in intensity.

'The family's staying at the inn until this is resolved,' Graham said. 'They couldn't bear the noises any longer.'

Dad nodded. 'We'll deal with it properly this time. After tomorrow night, they won't have anything more to fear.'

My mind struggled to accept the scene below me.

It could not be real. People did not move after burial. They did not make sounds. Their remains did not have to be taken to concealed lime-burning chambers in abandoned quarries.

Yet the evidence was in front of me: my father and Graham Pritchard exhuming a moving body from a woodland grave as though it were part of a familiar duty.

I had to return to the Ranger before they finished. If they caught me spying, I could not imagine what they might do.

With painful slowness, I edged backwards from the crest of the rise, keeping low. Once I was certain I had left their line of sight, I turned and crept through the trees as quietly as possible, avoiding fallen branches and patches of dry leaves. Every few steps I stopped to listen, terrified that I would hear them shouting my name or coming after me.

The pickup seemed impossibly far away.

I kept my torch off and navigated by memory and the faint grey light behind the clouds. My heart hammered so violently that I was sure anyone within 90 metres could hear it.

After what felt like hours, although it could only have been minutes, I saw the Ranger through the trees. I approached with care, checking that Graham's vehicle remained in the clearing and that nobody else was nearby.

Once I was certain I was alone, I hurried to the pickup, climbed over the tailgate and crawled beneath the front portion of the tarpaulin. I dragged the blanket over myself and curled into the smallest shape I could manage. My whole body shook with fear and shock.

I had watched my father dig up a moving, moaning body from an unmarked grave in the woods.

The implications broke over me in terrifying waves. Had Dad killed somebody? Was he concealing murder victims? No, that did not fit what I had heard.

Graham was involved, and they had spoken of families contacting them. Other people knew. They had mentioned the Naylor case and said this was the third incident in a fortnight.

I lay beneath the cover and fought to steady my breathing. The tarpaulin suddenly felt suffocating, the narrow space below it like a grave. I thrust the comparison from my mind. I did not want to think about graves or the things that came out of them.

Time dissolved into racing thoughts and fear. I had no idea how long I had been hiding when footsteps finally approached the Ranger.

The tailgate fell open with a metallic clang. Something heavy was loaded into the bed and secured near the tailgate, leaving me concealed beneath the forward section of tarpaulin. Without looking, I knew it was the shrouded body. Its dreadful muffled sounds came from only a short distance away.

'See you tomorrow night,' Dad said.

'I'll be there,' Graham replied. 'Be careful with that one. It's stronger than most.'

The tailgate slammed. Dad walked round to the cab, opened the driver's door and climbed inside.

The engine started, and we began jolting back along the forestry track. I remained absolutely still beneath the blanket, barely breathing and horribly aware of the bound figure near the tailgate. From time to time it shifted against its restraints or emitted another muffled cry, each sound sending a new wave of terror through me.

The journey seemed endless.

I did not know precisely where the quarry was, but I prayed we were going straight home. At last the rutted track gave way to smooth tarmac, and I recognised the turns leading back into Merewick and towards our street.

When the pickup stopped, Dad got out. The tailgate opened again. The weight behind me shifted as he dragged out whatever, whoever, was inside the shroud. I heard him grunt with effort, followed by the slam of the tailgate.

I did not move, even after his footsteps had faded. Only when I heard the separate external door at the rear of the garage open and close did I dare look out.

The load bed was empty.

Dad had taken the body into the locked workshop at the back of the garage. I knew the room had its own outside entrance, although I had never been allowed into it. I did not yet know that it had inherited restraints fixed to the floor and walls, or that Dad had lined it for soundproofing so that Mum would be protected from whatever he brought home.

Every instinct told me to remain hidden until Dad went to bed, then sneak back into the house and behave as though I had never left. But the knowledge that the moving bundle was inside our garage made waiting unbearable. I had to reach my bedroom without being seen and without letting Dad know what I had witnessed.

I waited another fifteen minutes, then climbed cautiously from the load bed. My legs had stiffened while I lay hidden, and I almost fell when my feet touched the drive.

The house was mostly dark, with only the kitchen light burning. Mum was probably in bed.

I crept round to the back door, the same one through which I had escaped hours before. Mum always left it on the latch while Dad was out, though she had no idea that I had followed him. I took a deep breath and turned the handle as slowly as I could. The door opened.

I slipped inside and closed it almost silently. The house was quiet except for faint noises from the locked workshop beyond the garage.

I did not want to imagine what Dad was doing in there.

Moving like a shadow, I climbed the stairs, avoiding the third tread that always creaked. In my bedroom I stripped off my clothes, pulled on my pyjamas and crawled beneath the duvet, still wearing my socks because I could not stop shaking.

I stared at the ceiling and replayed everything I had seen: the grave, the digging, the writhing shape within the shroud, Dad and Graham discussing its disposal as though it were refuse rather than a person.

None of it made sense. Dead people did not move after burial.

But if they were not dead, why had they been placed in graves? Why was my father the person summoned to deal with them?

I did not know how long I had lain there when Dad's heavy steps sounded on the stairs. He stopped outside my bedroom. I shut my eyes at once and forced my breathing into a slow, regular rhythm.

The door creaked open. I felt him looking at me.

After a long moment, the door closed again and his footsteps continued towards his and Mum's room.

Sleep was impossible. Whenever I shut my eyes, I saw the twisting bundle being raised from the grave. Every noise in the house made me tense. I wondered whether it came from the workshop, whether the thing Dad had brought home was still moving and making those awful, stifled sounds.

By morning, I knew I would have to confront my parents. I could not pretend I had seen nothing. I could not continue living in this house, eating at the same table and talking about ordinary things while knowing what my father did in the middle of the night.

Yet as dawn approached and exhaustion dragged at me, one thought kept circling through my mind.

What if confronting them placed me in danger? What if I learnt something that meant I could never feel safe in my own home again? What if the truth was worse than anything I had imagined?

I did not sleep. Every creak made me flinch, and every shadow seemed to twist like the body in the shroud. By morning my eyes burnt and my head throbbed with exhaustion, but there was no chance of drifting off now.

Mum was already in the kitchen when I went downstairs. She stood at the worktop, measuring coffee grounds into the filter machine, her back towards me. Dad was nowhere in sight.

'Where's Dad?' I asked, my voice cracking.

She turned with a faint smile that disappeared when she saw me. 'Daniel, you look dreadful. Are you ill?'

'Where is he?' I repeated.

'Still asleep. He came back late from a job.' She poured water into the machine and switched it on. 'You should eat something. I can make you some eggs.'

'I followed Dad last night.'

Her hand froze above the glass jug.

She did not turn or speak for several long seconds. When she finally answered, her voice was quiet.

'What do you mean?'

'I hid in the back of his pickup. I saw everything.'

Mum set down the jug with great care and faced me. I expected shock or anger, but saw neither. She looked resigned.

'Tell me what you saw,' she said.

'I saw Dad and Graham Pritchard dig up a body in the woods. It was moving and making noises inside a shroud.' The words came faster as I spoke. 'They talked about taking it to the quarry tonight. They said it was the third one in a fortnight. The family had moved to an inn because they couldn't cope with the sounds.'

Mum pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table. She gestured for me to join her.

'Dad brought it home last night,' I continued, remaining on my feet. 'Whatever it is, he took it into the workshop. What's happening? What is Dad doing with those people?'

'Sit down, Daniel,' she said firmly.

I hesitated, then dropped into the chair opposite her. My hands would not stop trembling.

'What you saw last night was your father doing his job,' Mum said. Her voice was calm and steady. 'His real job. The electrical business is legitimate, but it also gives him cover.'

'Cover for what? Grave robbing? Murder?'

She shook her head. 'No. The opposite, really. He helps people find peace.'

I stared at her. 'That thing in the shroud wasn't at peace, Mum. It was moving. It was making sounds.'

'Yes.' She folded her hands on the table. 'Because sometimes, when people die, they don't leave their bodies completely. Something keeps them tethered here. They remain in a state that resembles life, even after burial.'

My mouth went dry. 'That isn't possible.'

'You saw it with your own eyes, Daniel. You know that it is.'

The filter machine beeped, but neither of us moved towards it. Outside, birds sang and sunlight streamed through the kitchen window as though this were an ordinary morning.

'So all those night calls...' I began.

'They come from families who discover that someone they buried has not passed on fully,' Mum said. 'They hear scratching from a grave or notice the soil and flowers shifting. At a house, they may hear noises associated with the dead or find that something belonging to them has become disturbed. It is terribly traumatic. Imagine burying your mother, your father or your child, only to realise that some part of them is still present.'

I remembered what Dad and Graham had said about the family fleeing to the inn.

'And Dad digs them up.'

Mum nodded. 'He helps the families. When someone reports a situation like that, your father verifies it and works out what kind of tether is involved. Most are bound to the body. Others attach themselves to a possession or a place and must be treated differently.'

'Then he takes the bodies to the quarry?'

'Only in exceptional cases. Most can be released with consecrated water prepared through contact with silver, which he keeps in a pewter flask, and a mixture of rowan, rue and salt. There are prayers and other parts of the rite as well. Dangerously persistent bodily tethers require a harsher method. Those remains are burned in a concealed lime-burning chamber at the disused quarry.'

I tried to absorb what she was telling me. It sounded insane, but I had witnessed the proof.

'Are they conscious?' I asked. 'Those sounds... Do they know what's happening?'

Mum's composure wavered. 'Your father believes the soul is trapped without true awareness, and that the noises are only the body reacting to the tether. But that is his working theory, Daniel. No one can prove what remains inside.'

The uncertainty was worse than any confident answer could have been.

'How long has Dad been doing this?'

'Since before you were born. His father, Arthur Mercer, did it before him, and Arthur's father before that.'

I barely remembered Grandad Arthur, who had died when I was six, but Dad had trained under him for years before I was born.

The realisation struck like a blow. 'It passes through the family.'

Mum met my eyes. 'Yes.'

'So that means I...'

I could not finish.

'Your father intended to teach you when you were ready,' she said. 'But you're still young, Daniel. There is time.'

'I don't want to learn it.' My voice rose despite myself. 'This isn't normal. People will think we're mad if they find out.'

'Which is why nobody can know.' Mum reached across the table and gripped my hand. Her fingers were cold. 'Daniel, you must promise to keep this secret, not merely for our sake, but for the families we help.'

'What about the police? Shouldn't they-'

'The police cannot help with this,' she said, cutting me off. 'Think what would happen if your father walked into a West Mercia Police station and claimed that people were moving in their graves.'

I knew the answer. They would think him delusional or dangerous. Worse, they might investigate and find the bodies.

'There are others who know,' Mum continued. 'Graham, obviously, and a small circle of trusted people who understand what happens and protect the work. Some provide burial records or access to private and municipal plots. Others watch the roads or prevent questions being asked. But if the public learnt the truth...' She shook her head. 'It would place all of us in danger.'

'How?'

'Some people would call your father a grave robber or accuse him of desecration. Others would want to study the bodies and exploit what happens to them. Certain religious groups might call the work evil. The bereaved families would be exposed to public scrutiny at the worst moments of their lives.'

I remembered the bundle Dad and Graham had lifted from the earth, the way it writhed and uttered those terrible sounds. I imagined it confined in a laboratory while strangers examined it.

'I need your promise, Daniel,' Mum said, tightening her grip. 'This stays with us. With the family and the people who support the work.'

The coffee machine gurgled behind her. A floorboard creaked upstairs. Dad was awake, preparing to face the day after whatever he had done in the locked workshop.

'What happened to the person Dad brought home?' I asked.

'It is secured until tonight,' Mum said. 'The workshop is soundproofed and has restraints that belonged to Arthur. It has a separate outside entrance so nothing has to pass through the house. Graham will help your father complete the process at the quarry.'

I wanted to ask what completing it would involve, although she had already told me enough to imagine the fire. Part of me needed to understand. Another part wanted to know nothing more.

'Do you promise, Daniel?' Mum insisted.

I looked at her properly. She was the same woman who had packed my school lunches, dressed my grazed knees and taught me to read. She had known about this throughout her marriage. She had carried the secret while making our lives appear entirely ordinary.

'I promise,' I said at last.

Relief crossed her face. She released my hand, rose and went to pour the coffee.

'Your father will want to speak to you when he wakes. He can explain more than I can.'

'Doesn't it frighten you?' I asked. 'Knowing what Dad does? Knowing that thing is in our garage?'

Mum turned with the glass jug in her hand. 'At first, yes. Over time I came to understand how important it is. Your father helps souls find peace when they are tethered between life and death. It is not something to treat lightly. It deserves respect.'

I was not sure I could ever see it that way. The memory of the strangled noises beneath the linen made my skin crawl.

'Try to rest today,' Mum said. 'Last night was a shock, and you plainly haven't slept.'

'Yes.' I stood, suddenly feeling the full weight of my exhaustion. 'I'll try.'

As I turned towards the stairs, Mum called after me.

'Daniel.'

I stopped at the bottom step.

'Your father is a good man. Remember that.'

I nodded, unable to trust my voice, and climbed to my bedroom.

Through the window I could see the dark-green Ranger parked on the drive, displaying no sign of the horror it had carried through the night. The spade was probably back in the under-stairs cupboard, waiting for another call. The holdall and its strange implements would be locked away until they were needed again.

I lay on my bed fully dressed and stared at the ceiling.

My family had a secret, one that defied everything I believed about life and death. One day, it might become my responsibility.

I closed my eyes, but saw only the grave in the woods. I heard only the awful muffled cries of something that was not dead enough to lie quietly beneath the earth.

For hours I drifted through a restless half-sleep filled with moving bodies and open graves. Sunlight travelled across my room as morning became afternoon. Downstairs, Mum went about her routine, every familiar sound now seeming like a fragile layer of normality spread over something impossible.

Dad's voice occasionally rose through the floorboards. He must have woken while I dozed. I caught fragments of a conversation between my parents, their voices hushed and grave. Mum had plainly told him about our discussion that morning.

By evening I had managed to shower and change, but I could not bring myself to go downstairs for dinner. Mum left a sandwich outside my door without knocking.

I picked at it without appetite. My stomach remained knotted by what I had seen in the woods.

As darkness fell, Dad's heavy footsteps climbed the stairs. He stopped outside my bedroom for several long seconds before knocking.

'Daniel, can we talk?'

I took a deep breath. 'Yes.'

He opened the door slowly. Dad looked tired but composed, as though he had spent the intervening hours preparing for this conversation. He stood in the doorway for a moment, then came in and sat on the chair at my desk, facing the bed.

'Your mum told me what happened,' he said.

I nodded, unsure what to say. The silence stretched between us.

'I owe you an explanation,' Dad continued at last. 'A better one than I've given you before.'

'Mum already told me some of it. About the bodies that don't stay dead.' Even saying it aloud felt ridiculous.

Dad rubbed his face with one hand. 'Did you sleep at all?'

'Not really.'

'Neither did I after my first time.'

He leant forwards, his elbows on his knees. 'I was younger than you. Fourteen. My father took me with him on a call. I didn't hide in the back of a pickup, though.'

There was the faintest hint of a smile, but it quickly disappeared.

'Grandad did this too?'

'Arthur did. And his father before him, and his father before that. It goes back generations in our family.'

I tried to picture Arthur Mercer, whom I barely remembered from before he died when I was six, digging up graves at night. It seemed impossible. Yet I knew Dad was not lying.

'Why our family?' I asked.

Dad shook his head. 'I don't know. My father didn't know either. It has simply always been our responsibility.'

'And Mercer Electrical?'

'That's real. I am a qualified, registered electrician. But yes, the business is also useful as a cover. It gives me the freedom to deal with the other calls when they come.' He looked down at his hands. 'Your mum was right about that.'

I thought of the moving bundle Graham Pritchard and Dad had lifted from the woodland grave.

'What are they, exactly? They're not zombies or anything?'

Dad gave a short laugh. 'No. Nothing like that. They're stuck. When most people die, the spirit leaves the body completely. Sometimes, though, a small part remains tethered to the physical form. Not enough for the person to be truly alive, but enough to prevent a proper death.'

'And you help them rest?'

'Yes.' His expression became solemn. 'It isn't easy work, Daniel, but it is necessary. Those souls are suffering. At least, that is the understanding handed down to us. We cannot know what consciousness remains, if any. We only know that something is trapped between worlds and unable to move on. The families suffer too, knowing that the person they loved is not at peace.'

I remembered what Dad and Graham had said about the family staying at an inn. The old Rudge smallholding belonged to them, but the private burial plot lay on remote woodland that had once formed part of a larger estate. They had heard the noises during repeated visits to the grave. Later, similar scratching had begun inside the derelict farmhouse, and that was when they had fled to a nearby inn.

'How do families know it's happening?'

'In different ways. Sometimes they hear sounds at the grave. Sometimes the soil shifts. Sometimes they notice things at home and simply know that something is wrong.' Dad shifted in the chair. 'There are two broad kinds of case. In most, the tether remains with the body. In others, it catches upon a possession or a place. There are signs for both. Things I'll teach you to recognise.'

The words hung between us.

Teach you. Future tense. An expectation.

'So I'm supposed to take over one day?' I asked, although I already knew the answer.

Dad nodded slowly. 'It is our family's duty. I hoped to wait a few more years before bringing you into it, but...' He made a vague gesture. 'Here we are.'

'What if I don't want to?'

He was silent for a long moment. 'This isn't something we choose, Daniel. It chooses us. I reacted exactly as you are when Arthur told me. I wanted no part of it. In time, I understood how important it was.'

'Important enough to keep it secret from me for fifteen years.'

'I was trying to protect you. To give you a normal childhood for as long as possible. Perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps I should have prepared you sooner.'

I thought of all the nights I had heard him leave and all the mornings when he had returned exhausted and haunted.

'How many other people know, besides Graham?'

'Not many. A small circle of people we trust. Some belong to families like ours, with responsibilities of their own. Others have encountered this personally and decided to help. Graham's brother-in-law failed to pass properly after he died. That is how Graham became involved.'

'And all of them help you dig up bodies in the middle of the night?'

Dad shook his head. 'Most of them deal in information. They hear about cases and pass them to me. Some provide alibis, secure places, equipment or access to records. Graham is one of the few who assists directly with the physical work.'

I thought of the disused limestone quarry near the Welsh border.

'What happens to the bodies after you dig them up? What's at the quarry?'

Dad looked uncomfortable. 'Different cases require different approaches. The standard release is enough in most of them. Consecrated water, prepared through contact with silver and kept in a pewter flask, together with rowan, rue and salt. Other cases require something more permanent.'

He must have seen my expression, because he added quickly, 'We always treat the remains with respect. The purpose is to bring peace, not to cause harm.'

'What about the one from last night? The one you brought into our garage?'

'That was a difficult case. The tether was exceptionally strong, so Graham and I had to secure the remains overnight before taking them to the quarry.'

I pictured the locked workshop at the back of the garage. It had its own outside entrance, soundproofed walls and inherited iron restraints bolted to the floor. Until that morning I had assumed Dad kept only electrical stock and expensive test equipment in there.

'What will happen at the quarry?'

Dad hesitated. 'There is an old lime-burning chamber concealed there. We will use fire.'

The thought made me feel sick.

'Only when it is necessary,' Dad said firmly. 'Only as a last resort, when a bodily tether is so persistent that the standard release will not hold. You must understand that these are no longer living people. They may not be wholly dead either, but they are caught between the two states, and that is a terrible place to remain. Everything we do is intended to help them complete the journey.'

'And this is what you want me to learn?'

'Not straight away. There is a great deal to understand first - how to identify the signs, how to approach families, how to distinguish a bodily tether from an attachment to a possession or place, and how to deal with the physical risks.' He leant towards me. 'I won't ask you to take part until you're ready. But you do need to begin learning.'

I looked through the window at the darkening sky, the same sky that had hung above the woodland while Dad and Graham lifted that struggling shape from the earth.

'Does it ever become easier?' I asked quietly.

Dad remained silent for so long that I thought he might not answer.

'No,' he said at last. 'It doesn't. You learn to carry it. You learn to put it away when you have to and to concentrate on the good you are doing rather than the worst parts.'

'Is that why you always look so shaken when you come home?'

'Yes.' He ran a hand through his hair. 'However often I do it, it never feels normal. It shouldn't feel normal. But it is necessary.'

We sat without speaking. My mind raced as I tried to absorb everything I had learnt in the past twenty-four hours. My understanding of my family, and of life and death themselves, had been overturned.

'What happens now?' I asked.

'For the moment, nothing changes. You carry on at Merewick Secondary School. I carry on with both kinds of work. But I'll teach you gradually, and when you're older, you'll come with me on some of the simpler cases.'

The idea sent a chill through me. 'Like last night?'

'No. Last night was unusually complicated. We would begin with something more straightforward.'

I was not convinced that there could be anything straightforward about opening a grave in the middle of the night, but I did not say so.

'I know this is a lot to take in,' Dad said. 'I don't expect you to feel comfortable with it yet. I didn't.'

He stood. 'Remember what your mum told you. This stays within the family.'

'I promised Mum I wouldn't tell anyone. I meant it.'

Dad nodded. 'Thank you.'

He walked towards the door, then stopped. 'Daniel.'

I looked up.

'I'm proud of the way you're handling this. Most people would have fallen apart after seeing what you saw.'

I was not sure whether to take it as a compliment. 'I'm still trying to understand it.'

'Take whatever time you need. We can talk again when you're ready.' He paused. 'Try to get some proper sleep tonight. It helps.'

After Dad left, I lay back and stared at the ceiling.

My father had inherited a supernatural responsibility from his father. He helped tethered souls find peace. He opened graves after midnight with Graham Pritchard from the independent ironmonger's and builders' merchant. And one day, that work would fall to me.

The thought should have terrified me. Perhaps it still did. Yet beneath the fear was something I had not expected: a growing sense that Dad's work mattered. If souls truly could become trapped between life and death, somebody had to help them. Somebody had to help the families facing an impossible truth they could explain to no one else.

Perhaps it made a strange sort of sense that the burden belonged to the Mercers, handed down through generations alongside the ordinary trade that concealed it.

I closed my eyes, and exhaustion finally overcame the thoughts spinning through my head. As I drifted towards sleep, I wondered which signs Dad would teach me to recognise. I wondered how many families in Merewick and the surrounding border country had rung him over the years, desperate for help.

I wondered whether, many years from now, I would sit opposite a child or some other chosen successor and explain the inheritance in turn.

I passed through Year 10, Year 11 and sixth form without telling another soul what I had seen in the woodland. Life acquired a strange, divided quality. There were ordinary days of lessons, homework and friends, and then there were nights when I heard Dad's ageing dark-green Ford Ranger start in the darkness and knew exactly what sort of work awaited him.

I kept my promise to Mum and Dad. The family secret became like a stone in my pocket, always present and heavy, but hidden from sight.

During the first few months, every late-night call made me jump. Whenever Dad left, I imagined him beside another grave, lifting another moving form out of the earth. I lay awake until the pickup returned, then listened for the shower as he washed away soil and whatever else clung to him after those nocturnal excavations.

Mum noticed my sleeplessness.

'You don't have to worry about him,' she told me one morning over breakfast, after Dad had been out until nearly dawn. 'He's been doing this for decades.'

'I know.' I pushed cereal around my bowl. 'It's just difficult not to think about it.'

In those early days, Dad did not press me to learn more. He seemed relieved that I had not fallen apart, but he maintained his distance where the night work was concerned. We both needed time - he had to become accustomed to my knowing, and I had to become accustomed to the truth.

I began helping at Mercer Electrical after school and at weekends. It was ordinary work: tracing earth faults, replacing failed breakers in consumer units and rewiring old houses. Yet I often caught myself studying him as he worked, watching his capable hands strip cable and connect light fittings. They were the same hands that opened graves at night.

'Watch what I'm doing, not my hands,' he said once, catching me staring. 'You'll electrocute yourself.'

By the time I was sixteen, we had settled into a careful routine. I helped with the electrical jobs and learnt the trade. When a night call came, Dad simply said, 'I need to go out,' and I nodded without asking questions.

It was easier that way. I could pretend the ordinary life and the other one existed side by side, separate and contained.

Things changed during Year 12, when I was seventeen. Dad began speaking more openly about the night work, making small remarks that allowed me to ask questions.

'That one was simple,' he would say after returning from a call and finding me awake. 'Only needed the binding reset.'

I would nod, not fully understanding but grateful for every scrap of information.

One evening, while I helped him organise tools in the locked workshop, he took out a leather-bound volume I had never seen before.

'This is the legacy casebook,' he said. His tone was matter-of-fact, but his eyes watched me closely. 'Arthur began it, and I continued it. Every case, every family and every method that worked.'

He allowed me to turn the pages. They were filled with two distinct hands: Arthur's older, faded writing and Dad's neat, compact script. There were dates, locations, family names and precise accounts of what they had found and done.

Some entries were brief.

Fletcher, P. 7 days post-burial. Minimal movement. Standard release effective. 14/03/1998.

Others contained pages of notes on unusual tethers and specialised techniques.

'You'll need to keep a casebook of your own eventually,' Dad said. 'This one stays as the family record, but every practitioner should record what he learns.'

'Is that what Arthur taught you?'

'Yes. His father taught him the same.'

Dad took the volume back and ran a hand across its worn cover. 'Records allow each generation to learn from the ones before it.'

After that evening, my education began in earnest. Dad still refused to involve me in the physical work, but he taught me the theory, the signs and the proper way to approach a family. We sat at the kitchen table after Mum had gone to bed, speaking quietly while he explained how to recognise a death that had not fully taken hold.

'It isn't only movement in a grave,' he told me. 'There can be earlier signs if you know them. Families sometimes dream repeatedly of the deceased. Personal belongings may shift. Rooms can turn cold around particular objects. With an external attachment, there may be no disturbance at the burial place at all.'

'How do you tell that from ordinary ghost stuff?'

Dad smiled faintly. 'There is no such thing as ordinary ghost stuff, Daniel. Most supposed hauntings are projections from souls that have not wholly departed, whether they remain tethered to the body or caught upon something outside it. They reach out through memory and feeling, perhaps to communicate, perhaps because they cannot do anything else.'

He taught me how to speak to bereaved families, and how to ask the necessary questions without revealing too much.

'Most people do not want to admit they hear scratching beneath a grave,' he explained. 'They ring because they're desperate, but they're ashamed as well. They're frightened that people will think them mad. You must be careful with them.'

We rehearsed conversations in which he pretended to be a caller reporting sounds or disturbed earth. He corrected my wording and tone, teaching me to sound both professional and compassionate.

'Never call them undead or reanimated,' he warned me. 'Those are words from films. We deal with souls caught between states. Always explain it that way.'

After I left sixth form with my A-levels at eighteen, Dad introduced me to more of what he called the trusted circle. I already knew Graham Pritchard, but there were others: Alistair Webb, a funeral director based two market towns away; Mrs Farah Mahmood, a county archivist at the Shropshire Council archives and register office; and the Reverend Owen Price, who assisted when a case involved religious complications.

They greeted me with solemn respect, as though I were being admitted into a secret order. In a sense, I was.

'Daniel is learning the family business,' Dad said by way of introduction.

None of them questioned my age or readiness. They merely nodded and regarded me with knowing eyes.

'Your father has helped a great many people,' Alistair Webb told me. 'And a great many souls. It is important work.'

I asked Dad about the network as we drove home.

'How many people know what we do?'

'Not many, but more than you might imagine. Most have experienced it personally. A relative failed to rest, and someone like us helped them. Others occupy positions that make them valuable allies.'

'Like Alistair?'

Dad nodded. 'He can identify signs before burial and warn us before a situation worsens.'

'And Mrs Mahmood?'

'She can check death registrations, burial records, old estate plans and property ownership without drawing unnecessary attention. She helps us establish who lies where and whether a reported attachment has appeared before.'

The scale of it surprised me. I had imagined Dad and Graham working almost alone, but there was a larger structure behind them, discreet and organised, supporting a need hidden from the ordinary world.

Not long after my eighteenth birthday, Dad announced that I was ready to accompany him.

'Nothing complicated,' he assured me. 'Only the most straightforward cases to begin with.'

The first call came on a Tuesday night in October. The telephone rang at 22:45, and Dad answered it in the kitchen. I was upstairs, but I came down when his voice changed into the calm, professional tone I had learnt to recognise.

He covered the mouthpiece and looked at me. 'Mrs Cartwright reports scratching from her husband's grave. He was buried last week. Do you want to come?'

My heart began to race, but I nodded. This was what all the preparation had been for.

Twenty minutes later, we were driving towards St Bartholomew's Burial Ground on the edge of Merewick. Dad's canvas kit bag, compact grave-spades and inherited restraints were secured beneath the cover over the Ford Ranger's load bed. Martin Cole, the burial-ground keeper, had left a side gate accessible and erected temporary maintenance screens around Plot D. The network had checked the nearby road and the burial records. None of it amounted to legal permission, but it gave us a narrow window in which to work unseen.

I sat silently beside Dad and tried to calm my breathing.

'Remember what I taught you,' he said as we approached the gate. 'These souls are not trying to harm anyone. They're trapped. Our task is to help them pass.'

The burial ground was dark and quiet. We moved between the headstones by torchlight until Dad led me behind the screens to a recent grave, where flowers lay across the loose, turned soil.

'Listen,' he said, motioning for me to kneel.

I held my breath. At first there was only the wind. Then I heard faint scratching beneath the earth, followed by something like a muffled moan.

'What do we do?' I whispered.

Dad gave me one of the compact spades. 'We dig carefully.'

The work was harder than I had expected, even though the soil had been disturbed only a week earlier. We worked methodically, keeping the removed earth on groundsheets so it could be returned without leaving obvious traces. It took nearly an hour to expose the coffin.

My arms ached, and sweat soaked my shirt despite the chill.

When the lid was clear, Dad set down his spade and looked at me. 'Ready?'

I was not, but I nodded.

He raised the lid slowly. An elderly man lay inside in a dark suit, his hands folded across his chest. For a moment there was no movement, and I wondered whether we had made a mistake.

Then Mr Cartwright's fingers twitched. His lips parted, producing a soft sound that was not quite a word.

I stepped back without meaning to. Dad remained steady. He reached into the canvas bag and removed a cloth pouch and a pewter flask.

'Hold the torch.'

I directed the beam while he opened the dead man's jacket and laid the pouch of rowan, rue and salt over his heart. Dad uncapped the flask and scattered consecrated water across his face. Silver had been immersed in it during preparation, he had told me, though it was the blessing and the ritual together that mattered. He murmured words too quietly for me to understand.

The body twitched once, then again, before becoming completely still. The sound ceased.

'What did you do?' I asked.

'Helped him complete the journey. The prepared water severs the last threads of the bodily tether. The herbs draw away what remains.'

'That's all?'

It seemed too simple after everything that had led to that moment.

'Mr Cartwright was only lightly tethered. Other cases are more complicated.' Dad closed the coffin with care. 'Now we replace everything exactly as we found it.'

We refilled the grave and laid the flowers back in their original positions. By the time we finished, every muscle in my body protested, but beneath the exhaustion was an unexpected sense of achievement. We had helped Mr Cartwright and his widow, who would never again hear that terrible scratching beneath his grave.

Over the following months, Dad took me on more calls. Every case differed. Most required only the standard release with consecrated water and the pouch of herbs and salt. Others demanded specialised instruments from his bag and incantations that had to be spoken precisely.

'Where did all this come from?' I asked after one particularly difficult case. 'Who discovered the methods?'

'Trial and error over generations,' Dad said. 'Every Mercer added something to the knowledge. Arthur taught me as I am teaching you, but I've found techniques he never knew. You probably will too.'

The bodies themselves never became ordinary, but they stopped frightening me in quite the same way. They moved and sometimes made sounds, yet they rarely seemed malevolent. They were caught between life and death, unable to finish the passage without assistance.

'They cannot hurt you in the usual sense,' Dad said when I flinched during an early case. 'My working theory is that they have no complete consciousness left, only fragments of memory and energy trapped in flesh. But it is only a theory. Never mistake uncertainty for permission to treat them carelessly.'

By the spring after my eighteenth birthday, I had assisted him on nearly twenty cases. I began a personal casebook, separate from Arthur and Dad's legacy volume, and recorded each family, each sign and every method we tried.

I learnt that activity often intensified around the new moon. I learnt that those who had taken their own lives could form exceptionally powerful tethers. I learnt that children, mercifully, almost always passed cleanly at death, although Dad warned me that rare exceptions existed and were among the most disturbing cases anyone in the network had faced.

I also came to understand more of the people who supported us. Beyond Alistair Webb and Mrs Mahmood, there was Martin Cole, who arranged access to burial grounds and concealed our work behind maintenance screens. A coroner's officer could quietly redirect questions when an unexplained report threatened to expose us. Families from earlier cases provided alibis, storage or warnings when required.

'It has worked this way for generations,' Dad told me as we drove home one night. 'People who understand what we do protect it because they know it is necessary.'

'Has anyone tried to stop you? Report you to West Mercia Police?'

Dad was quiet for a moment. 'Once, about twenty years ago, a newly posted police constable found me in a burial ground. He didn't believe my claim that I had been called out to inspect damaged lighting.'

'What happened?'

'His inspector was part of the network. The inspector's mother had once been a case. He suppressed the report before it went any further.' Dad glanced at me. 'It was close. That is why we are careful and why Mercer Electrical matters as a cover. An electrician can be called to a church, a burial ground, a derelict property or an isolated estate without seeming remarkable.'

I thought of all the people who knew and helped us. 'It sounds like a secret society.'

'More like a community born of necessity,' Dad corrected me. 'None of us chose to know this. The knowledge was forced upon people through experience. We try to make something useful of it.'

As my training continued, I grew more comfortable with the night work. The first horror receded and was replaced by understanding. We provided a service, strange but essential. We helped souls pass and gave families peace.

About a year after my first case, Dad received a call from a family in a neighbouring market town who had heard sounds from their mother's grave. When we reached it, he recognised something that I did not.

'This one is complex,' he said after listening. 'The binding is stronger than usual.'

I followed his instructions as we carefully exhumed the coffin. When we opened it, I understood. The elderly woman moved more forcefully than anyone I had yet seen. Her fingers flexed and released, and her head turned slowly from side to side.

Dad took out instruments he had not used in front of me before: a small silver bowl, candles and a curved iron ritual blade engraved with inherited Welsh markings.

'Stand back,' he said. 'Observe this time.'

He performed a rite more elaborate than any he had taught me, speaking in a language I did not recognise. The woman's movements gradually weakened, then ceased as he completed the final words.

'What language was that?' I asked while we refilled the grave.

'Old Welsh. My grandfather taught Arthur, Arthur taught me, and I will teach you. The intention matters more than the words alone, but tradition has weight in this work.'

'When will I learn it?'

'When you're ready. There are levels to this trade, Daniel. We begin with the foundations and build from there.'

By nineteen, I had encountered most standard cases and learnt the corresponding releases. Dad still dealt with the most dangerous situations himself, but I was becoming a partner rather than an observer.

Our double life no longer seemed strange. By day we were electricians, repairing wiring, replacing sockets and installing extractor fans and light fittings. By night we helped souls complete their passage into whatever waited beyond death. Both services required skill, patience and care.

'You're doing well,' Dad told me one night as we drove home. 'Better than I did at your age. You have a natural aptitude for it.'

I was uncertain how to feel about having a natural aptitude for releasing the not-quite-dead, but I valued his approval.

'Do you ever wonder why it was our family?' I asked. 'Why the Mercers were given this particular trade?'

'Arthur wondered. His father probably did too. I don't know of any answer. It is simply what it is.'

'And we accept it?'

'What is the alternative?' Dad looked across at me. 'Ignore the calls? Leave the souls trapped and the families suffering? Someone must do the work. For whatever reason, it came to us. We do it because it needs doing.'

I could not argue. I had seen the relief on people's faces when we told them their relative was finally at peace. I had witnessed the stillness that settled over the remains after a successful release. Whatever the origin of our inheritance, the work itself mattered.

The network continued to widen as I met more people connected with it. Some came from families burdened with duties of their own: a woman in the neighbouring county who claimed she could see and communicate with tethered souls, a craftsman who made ritual instruments and replaced inherited restraints as they wore out, and a family that maintained concealed disposal sites such as the lime chamber at the quarry.

'It's much larger than I thought,' I told Dad after meeting a solicitor who dealt with legal difficulties arising from the work.

'The world is stranger than most people realise,' he said. 'Those of us who see its true nature tend to find one another eventually.'

As I approached twenty, I became fully immersed in both parts of the family business. Mercer Electrical gave us our cover and ordinary income. The work after dark fulfilled the Mercers' unexplained obligation to the dead and to those left behind.

I still had questions. There were rites Dad had not taught me and circumstances I had yet to encounter. But I understood why he had tried to protect me when I was younger. Knowledge of that kind was a heavy responsibility. In its own way, it was also a privilege.

We helped people when no one else could. We eased suffering that most of the world did not know existed. We maintained a boundary few people realised could fail.

I continued learning and worked beside Dad in daylight and darkness alike, carrying forwards a family tradition that had begun generations before my birth.

The transition towards my taking charge began after seven years in the field, when I was twenty-five. Since leaving sixth form, I had worked full-time at Mercer Electrical. Dad and I had settled into an easy routine, rewiring houses and fitting lights by day, then answering the other calls whenever they came after dark.

'Pass me the wire strippers,' Dad said one afternoon while we worked on a kitchen refurbishment for the Bannisters.

I handed him the tool from my belt and watched his hands move with practised efficiency. Over the years, I had become as competent with electrical work as I was with our other duties. Both required precision, attention to detail and a steady hand. The irony was never lost on me: I spent my days bringing light into homes and my nights helping souls find whatever light waited beyond the world.

'Mrs Bannister wants two more sockets on this wall,' Dad said, marking the plasterboard with a pencil. 'Can you manage those while I finish the lighting?'

I nodded and reached for the pad saw. We worked well together and rarely needed many words. Years of shared labour had made us an efficient team.

On the drive home, Dad rubbed his shoulder and winced.

'It gets harder every year to crawl beneath floorboards,' he said. 'I'm not as young as I was.'

He was fifty-three. His hair was more grey than brown, and the lines around his eyes had deepened since I first discovered the truth. Both trades had taken a physical toll, visible in the stiffness of his movements at the end of a long day.

Two nights later, a call came shortly after midnight. The Serrano family, who lived on the outskirts of Merewick, had heard sounds from their grandmother's grave three days after her burial.

Dad and I drove to the burial ground in silence, our equipment secured in the covered load bed. As we dug through the recent loose soil, I noticed him stopping more frequently and leaning upon his spade while he recovered his breath.

'I can finish it,' I said. 'Take a rest.'

He shook his head. 'We do this together.'

When we reached the coffin, the procedure was routine, one we had performed dozens of times. The elderly woman moved only slightly, and her connection to the world was already weakening. The standard release with consecrated water from the pewter flask was enough to free her.

While we refilled the grave, I took most of the weight and left Dad to direct the final restoration of the surface. Dawn was approaching when we finished. His face looked hollow with exhaustion as we drove home.

'You did well tonight,' he said when we pulled into the drive. 'The Serranos won't hear anything more. Their grandmother is at peace.'

'We did well,' I corrected him.

Dad looked at me for a long moment, then nodded. 'Yes. We did.'

During the following weeks, he became increasingly preoccupied. He stared into the distance during lunch breaks and fell silent while we travelled between jobs.

One evening, after we finished at a client's house, he suggested stopping at the roadside cafe outside Merewick instead of going directly home.

'Your mum's at her reading group,' he said. 'I thought we could have something to eat and talk.'

The cafe was nearly empty. We took a table beside the window, ordered coffee from the electric cafetiere-style filter machine and the steak-and-ale pie special, then sat in familiar silence until our meals arrived.

'I've been thinking,' Dad said at last, pushing a piece of pastry around his plate. 'I'm getting older, Daniel.'

'We all are,' I said, trying to keep my tone light.

He shook his head. 'I'm serious. The night work takes a toll. I've been doing it for nearly forty years, since Arthur first took me out when I was fourteen. Decades of opening graves and helping souls pass.'

I put down my fork, suddenly aware of where the conversation was heading. 'Are you saying what I think you are?'

Dad drew a deep breath. 'It is time for me to retire from leading the night calls. Not tonight, and not all at once. Over the next few months, I want to hand responsibility to you.'

Although I had always known the day would come, hearing him say it made my stomach tighten.

'You think I'm ready?'

'More than ready. You've worked beside me for seven years. You've led cases yourself while I assisted. You know the procedures and the rites, and you've met almost everyone in the network.' He gave a slight smile. 'Besides, my back cannot endure much more digging.'

I stared at my half-eaten pie and tried to understand what it meant. We had shared the burden for years. Soon, I would carry it alone.

'What about Mercer Electrical?'

'We'll still work together there, at least for a while. But the night calls will be yours.' He reached across the table and rested a hand on my arm. 'You're twenty-five. It's time.'

The handover unfolded gradually over the next several months. Dad introduced me to families I had not met and made certain they understood that I would deal with future incidents.

'Daniel has worked with me for years,' he told them. 'He knows everything I know, and in some areas more besides. You can trust him completely.'

Most accepted his word without question. A few seemed doubtful when they saw my age, but Dad's endorsement carried weight among people who knew what he had done.

We also visited every member of the support network. Graham Pritchard was first. We sat in his cramped office behind the ironmonger's and builders' merchant while he studied me with sharp grey eyes.

'I've been expecting this conversation,' he said. 'Are you ready to take full responsibility, Daniel?'

'Yes, Mr Pritchard.'

Graham nodded. 'Good. Your father has earned his rest.'

He opened a desk drawer and brought out a small leather pouch.

'This is for you. Tools of the trade that cannot be bought in an ironmonger's.'

Inside were a carved bone needle, three worn pre-decimal silver shillings scored with ritual marks and a glass phial filled with dark liquid.

'These are for the more difficult cases,' Graham explained. 'Stephen knows how to use them. Make sure he teaches you before he steps back completely.'

One by one, we met the others: Alistair Webb at the independent funeral directors, Mrs Farah Mahmood at the council archives, Martin Cole at St Bartholomew's Burial Ground and the Reverend Owen Price. Each acknowledged my new role with solemn respect. Several passed me a small token, a key, an old record or some detail they believed might help.

'Your father helped my family when no one else could,' Alistair told me as we left his office. 'We won't forget it. Ring me if you need anything, day or night.'

As the handover progressed, I began looking for somewhere of my own. I had remained at home while saving money and learning both trades, but full responsibility for the night work demanded greater independence.

I found a small rented flat on the edge of Merewick, close enough to answer calls quickly but separate enough to give me privacy. Mum helped furnish it with basics from charity shops and a second-hand furniture warehouse. Dad concentrated on what he called the essential equipment.

'You'll need somewhere secure for the tools,' he said as we cleared a cupboard in the flat. 'Something lockable, well away from casual visitors.'

We installed a heavy steel cabinet with a combination lock, bolting it to the floor at the back of the bedroom wardrobe. Inside went the specialised tools of our unquiet trade: the pewter flask of consecrated water prepared through contact with silver, the pouch of rowan, rue and salt, the curved iron ritual blade engraved with inherited Welsh markings, a small silver bowl and dozens of other objects I had learnt to use over the years.

"What about your records?" I asked, thinking of the leather-bound casebook he and Arthur Mercer had kept for decades.

"I'm copying the most important cases," Dad said. "But you've got your own casebook now, and that's better. Your experiences, in your words."

As the handover approached, the calls seemed to increase. Three cases in a fortnight left us both exhausted.

"Unusual to have so many together," Dad remarked as we drove home from a particularly difficult case involving a young man killed in a road traffic collision. His soul had been powerfully tethered to his body, and releasing it had required a complex ritual.

"Do you think it means something?" I asked.

Dad shook his head. "Probably just bad timing. Though Arthur used to say souls grow restless when there's change in the air."

The final phase of the transition began on a cool October evening, seven years after I had first accompanied Dad on a case. I was twenty-five by then, and we sat at the small kitchen table in my rented flat with a bottle of Welsh whisky between us.

"One month from now," Dad said, pouring us each a small measure, "the night work will be fully yours. I'll still advise you if you need me, but the calls will come directly to you."

I nodded, feeling the weight of the moment. "And the families know?"

"All the ones who may need us again. I've updated the contact details throughout the network."

He raised his glass. "To the next generation of Mercer services."

We drank, the whisky burning a warm path down my throat.

"I've something for you," Dad said.

He reached into his jacket and drew out a small wooden box, which he slid across the table. Inside lay an old silver hunter watch, its case tarnished with age. When I opened it, I saw that the face displayed not only the time but the lunar phases, with engraved planetary signs around its edge.

"It belonged to Arthur," Dad explained. "And to his father before him. It's been passed through generations of Mercers who did this work."

I turned the watch in my hand, feeling its weight and history. "Thank you."

"There's more."

Dad stood and collected a large canvas holdall from beside the door, one I had not noticed him bring in.

"The last of the equipment you'll need."

He unpacked it item by item, explaining each purpose. There was a tarnished brass divining compass whose needle reacted to tethered remains, a set of carved wooden markers for the most complicated rituals, and vials of substances I had seen him use but had never handled alone. He laid out three worn pre-decimal silver shillings scored with ritual marks, inherited restraints and several objects whose uses varied according to whether a soul was tethered to its body or attached externally to a possession or place.

"This is everything," he said when the table was covered. "Everything I've used, everything Arthur gave me and everything I've gathered in thirty years of doing the work."

I looked at the tools of my inheritance spread before me and understood more fully why Dad had always seemed so burdened. This was not merely equipment. It was responsibility made physical, tangible proof of an obligation I could no longer avoid.

"I feel as though I ought to say something profound."

Dad laughed quietly. "No need. The work speaks for itself."

He began carefully returning the objects to the holdall.

"We'll put these in your secure cabinet. Keep the watch with you. It's more than a timepiece. You'll understand its other uses when you need them."

After Dad left, I sat alone in the flat, turning the hunter watch over in my hands. The weight of generations seemed to rest in my palm. All the Mercers before me had done this work, carried this watch and helped the dead find their way onwards.

I understood now, in a way I never had as a boy, why Dad had always looked so worn after the night calls. It was not only the physical labour or the late hour. It was the knowledge that you might be the only person capable of helping, the only one standing between a soul's suffering and whatever peace awaited it.

The final handover came with little ceremony. One Sunday evening, while I was having dinner at my parents' house, Dad's mobile rang. The pattern was familiar: a hesitant caller struggling to describe something that could not be discussed openly.

Dad answered and listened, then looked across the sitting room at me.

"Yes, I understand," he told the caller. "But I've retired from that work now. My son Daniel handles those situations."

He gave them my number, assured them I was fully prepared and wished them well. After ending the call, he said, "The Fletchers. Their uncle died three days ago, and they're hearing noises from the study where his personal belongings are stored. It sounds like an external attachment to possessions, rather than a bodily tether."

I nodded, already considering which techniques would be most effective. "I'll ring them after dinner."

Dad smiled, pride and relief mingling on his face. "It's your case now. All yours."

Mum came in from the kitchen carrying a platter of roast beef. She looked from Dad to me, and understanding passed silently between the three of us. The transition was complete.

Later that week, I resolved the Fletcher case. The uncle's spirit had attached itself to a collection of books in his study, and a comparatively simple release severed the connection and allowed him to pass on. When I rang Dad afterwards, his voice held a trace of wistfulness.

"Good work," he said. "Clean release, minimal complications."

"I had a good teacher."

He chuckled. "You did at that."

My flat gradually assumed the character of my divided life. The cupboard near the front door held my electrician's tool case, test equipment and the ordinary gear of my day job. The locked cabinet in the bedroom wardrobe contained everything required for the night work. I kept the inherited hunter watch on my bedside table, where it ticked softly through the quiet hours.

Graham Pritchard became my most frequent collaborator, just as he had been Dad's. The first time I rang him directly for help with a complex case, he arrived precisely when promised, his equipment ready.

"Your father said you'd be calling this week," he told me with a knowing look. "Said this one would be beyond the standard release."

The case concerned a middle-aged woman whose soul remained powerfully tethered both to her body and to her home. It took both of us working through the night to free her. When we finished, Graham studied me as we packed away our tools.

"You handle yourself well," he said. "Different style from your father, but effective."

From a man who seldom offered compliments, I took that as high praise.

The network of supporters transferred its trust to me with remarkable ease. They had been preparing for the transition long before I fully understood it was coming.

"Your father has told us for years that you'd take over eventually," Mrs Farah Mahmood said when I visited the Shropshire Council archives and register office to investigate an old property with a particularly troubled history. "We've watched you grow into the role."

"All of you?" I asked, surprised.

She nodded, her eyes bright behind thick spectacles. "A Mercer handover is something of an event in certain circles. It happens only once in a generation."

The thought that people I scarcely knew had observed and assessed me for years was unsettling, but strangely comforting as well. I was not facing the work alone. A support system stretching back generations stood ready to assist me as it had assisted Dad and Arthur before him. Alistair Webb at the independent funeral directors knew what signs to recognise. Mrs Mahmood could find forgotten burials and histories concealed in official records. Martin Cole, the burial-ground keeper, could arrange locked gates, temporary maintenance screens and quiet access when an authorised municipal grave had to be opened without ordinary legal scrutiny. The Reverend Owen Price prepared what certain rituals required. Others watched roads, diverted questions or ensured that inconvenient records went no further.

Living alone while continuing the family tradition created a peculiar balance. I visited my parents regularly and still worked with Dad on electrical jobs during the day, but the night calls were mine. The physical separation suited the divide between my ordinary life and my inherited responsibility.

Dad seemed lighter after retiring from the night work. The tension he had carried in his shoulders for as long as I could remember gradually eased. He smiled more readily and slept more soundly. Mum said he had even taken up hobbies: woodwork, fishing and other things for which he had never possessed the energy before.

"He's proud of you," she said one afternoon when I called at the house. "Prouder than he says aloud."

"I'm only doing what he taught me."

Mum shook her head. "You're doing more than that. You're making it your own." She squeezed my hand. "And you're giving him the gift of a normal life after thirty years of service. Don't underestimate what that means to him."

Six months into my solo tenure as the Mercer responsible for the unquiet dead, I had settled into the role more comfortably than I expected. Each case taught me something new, and every successful release strengthened my confidence.

One evening Dad invited me into the locked workshop at the back of the garage. According to Mum, he had been working secretly for weeks. When I arrived, he pulled a dust sheet from a workbench and revealed a beautifully made wooden chest, about the size of a small travelling trunk.

"For your equipment," he explained, running a hand over the polished wood. "Proper storage matters in this work."

The chest was lined with velvet and divided into compartments shaped precisely for the tools and ritual objects. Concealed drawers in its sides could hold documents and records. The lid was inlaid with symbols I recognised from the more difficult rites, protective markings disguised as decoration.

"Did you make this?" I asked, astonished by the craftsmanship.

Dad nodded. "Had to do something with my retirement."

He showed me the lock and the catches that hid certain compartments from casual inspection.

"Arthur made one for me when I took over," he said. "It seemed right to continue the tradition."

As I ran my fingers over the smooth wood, I felt connected not only to Dad but to Arthur, whom I barely remembered, and to all the Mercers stretching back beyond him. Each had carried this responsibility. Each had found his own way to bear it.

"Thank you," I said, knowing the words were inadequate.

Dad clasped my shoulder. "You're doing good work, Daniel. The right work."

And I was. Despite the strange hours, the physical demands of opening graves in darkness and the moral weight of dealing with souls caught between states, I had come to understand that our work mattered. We helped those who could not help themselves. We eased suffering most people would never know existed.

My mobile rang at 02:17, jolting me from dreamless sleep. I did not recognise the number, but I knew what the call meant. Although I had already dealt with attachments inside houses, this was the call I had been waiting for since Dad handed over the responsibility: my first unaided exhumation.

"Hello?" I answered, keeping my voice steady despite my racing heart.

"Is that Daniel Mercer?" A woman's voice was taut with strain. "Your father gave me your number. He said you handle situations like this."

I sat upright, fully alert. "That's right. How can I help?"

She hesitated, then the words came in a rush.

"It's my grandfather. He died three days ago. We buried him yesterday, and now there's scratching from the grave. The soil has shifted, and the flowers keep moving as though something underneath is pushing them."

"I understand," I said, using the calm professional tone Dad had taught me. "What's your name?"

"Lucy Harcourt. My grandfather was Edward Harcourt."

I took the notebook from my bedside table and wrote down the details.

"Where is he buried, Miss Harcourt?"

"St Bartholomew's Burial Ground, Plot D, near the old oak." Her voice cracked. "Please hurry. My mother is beside herself."

"I'll be there within the hour. Try to stay calm. It happens more often than people realise. Don't approach the grave again before I arrive."

After ending the call, I sat on the edge of the bed and took several slow breaths. Everything Dad had taught me through a decade of preparation and nearly seven years of fieldwork would now be tested without him beside me.

I dressed quickly in dark, practical clothes: jeans, a black T-shirt and a dark jacket suitable for digging without attracting notice. In the bathroom I splashed cold water over my face and examined myself in the mirror. I looked the same as I had the previous day, but something had changed. Tonight I would step fully into my inheritance.

The secure cabinet opened to a combination I had memorised years earlier. I chose the equipment appropriate to a standard bodily tether: the pewter flask of consecrated water, the pouch of rowan, rue and salt, the curved iron blade engraved with Welsh markings, a small ritual brush and several other essentials. I packed them into the purpose-made holdall, fastening each item into a separate compartment so nothing could strike or contaminate anything else.

Last came two compact grave-spades. Recent soil was easier to shift, but Dad had taught me never to underestimate the labour.

Merewick lay silent as I drove through its empty streets. St Bartholomew's Burial Ground stood on the eastern edge of town behind a low stone wall. I had visited it many times with Dad, but that night I stopped before its wrought-iron gates alone.

I drove to the service entrance beside the groundsman's hut. Martin Cole had already received word through the network. The side gate was unlocked, a maintenance screen concealed the approach to Plot D, and the nearest security camera had developed a temporary fault. None of it amounted to legal authorisation, but it gave me the privacy the work required.

My torch cut through the darkness as I moved between the headstones, the heavy holdall in one hand and the grave-spades in the other. Plot D lay on the eastern side, and I found the Harcourt grave easily. The soil was fresh and loose. The flowers from the previous day's funeral had barely begun to wilt, but several stems had slipped sideways and the earth beneath them was faintly ridged.

I set down my equipment and knelt beside the grave, pressing my ear to the ground. At first I heard only wind stirring the nearby trees. Then it came: a muffled scrape, followed by a low sound that might have been a groan.

A chill passed through me. Years of training could not make this practice. This was real.

I erected a small battery lantern that cast enough light to work without shining beyond the maintenance screen. The first spadeful of soil felt heavy with meaning. This was my case and my responsibility.

The digging was brutal. Sweat soaked my shirt despite the cool night air, but the loose soil and the narrow grave-spade let me establish a rhythm: cut, lift, throw, repeat. My muscles burned. I kept going because whatever lay below needed my help.

At approximately 60 centimetres, the noises became clearer. Scratching, shifting and intermittent moans sounded human, yet subtly wrong. I dug faster, holding professional focus against an instinctive urge to flee.

When the blade of my spade finally struck the wooden coffin, I stopped to catch my breath. Opening it had always been the hardest moment, even with Dad beside me. Now I faced it alone.

I cleared the remaining earth from the lid and wiped my forehead with my sleeve. The silver hunter watch in my jacket pocket pressed against my chest, a tangible connection to the generations of Mercers who had faced the same moment.

"You can do this," I whispered.

I released the coffin fittings carefully, alert to the movement inside. When I raised the lid, the lantern illuminated Edward Harcourt's face. He looked like a recently deceased elderly man, except for the faint twitching of his fingers and the barely perceptible movement of his lips.

I reached into the holdall. Dad had taught me the exact procedure, and I followed it with methodical care. I rested the pouch of rowan, rue and salt over the dead man's heart. Then I uncapped the pewter flask and dipped the ritual brush into the consecrated water prepared through silver contact.

With steady hands, I traced the prescribed patterns over his forehead, throat and hands, the points where spirit and flesh most strongly joined. As I worked, I spoke the words Dad had made me memorise. They were not theatrical spells, but declarations of release, preserved through generations and strengthened by fragments of Old Welsh from our family's border-country past.

"Find your path onwards," I murmured as I completed the final pattern. "Your journey here is finished."

Edward Harcourt's body gave one last, subtle twitch and became still.

I could not prove Dad's theory that the trapped dead possessed no true consciousness, only a desperate residue of will. The sounds and movement always left room for doubt, and that doubt troubled me. But the tether had broken. Whatever remained of Edward Harcourt was free of its physical anchor.

I sat back on my heels, exhausted and relieved. My first solo bodily release was complete.

I closed the coffin carefully and began refilling the grave. This part required no ritual, only strength. Spadeful after spadeful of earth returned to its place. The recent loose soil and years of physical work made the task possible, but by the time I finished my arms trembled and dawn was drawing near.

I restored the flowers exactly as I had found them, smoothing away every trace of my work. Then I packed the equipment and trudged back to the pickup.

I sat behind the wheel for a long moment while the enormity of what I had done settled over me. Then I started the engine and drove home to shower away the burial-ground soil before ringing Lucy Harcourt to tell her that Edward was at peace.

That night marked the true beginning of my tenure as the Mercer charged with the unquiet dead. In the following weeks I received three more calls, each different and each demanding another part of my inherited knowledge.

Dad checked in after every case, not to supervise but to offer support. Our conversations became more equal. We were no longer solely teacher and pupil, but two practitioners of an obscure and necessary art.

"How was the Bellamy situation?" he asked one evening when I went to my parents' house for dinner.

"Complicated," I admitted. "The attachment was stronger than I expected. I had to use the iron-blade rite."

Dad nodded, understanding without requiring details. "You're handling the work well. Better than I did at first."

"I had better training."

That made him smile.

As months lengthened into years, I became the person families approached when confronted by the inexplicable. Word passed through the same quiet channels that had led people to Dad and Arthur before him. Alistair Webb might give my number to relatives who noticed something amiss after a funeral. Martin Cole would ring if a fresh grave showed signs of disturbance after dark. Mrs Mahmood uncovered forgotten family plots, while the Reverend Owen Price answered certain questions no ordinary clergyman would acknowledge.

I maintained Mercer Electrical as my public life. During daylight hours I rewired houses, installed extractor fans and light fittings, replaced damaged sockets and upgraded old consumer units. Customers knew me as a dependable registered electrician who had taken over his father's business. None suspected what I did on certain nights when my mobile rang after midnight.

The duality became ordinary. I kept the electrician's tools and test equipment in the ageing dark-green Ford Ranger during the day, while the specialised implements remained locked away until a call required them. I developed my own systems and refined the techniques Dad had passed down.

Graham remained my closest collaborator, joining me for difficult cases just as he had worked with Dad. Standard releases succeeded most of the time. Only dangerously persistent bodily tethers required the concealed lime-burning chamber at the disused limestone quarry near the Welsh border, and neither Graham nor I ever invoked that method lightly.

"You've developed your own style," he remarked one night as we drove back from a terrible case involving twin brothers killed in the same collision. "Your father followed the casebook. You're more intuitive."

"Is that good or bad?"

Graham considered. "Different. The work gets done either way."

After a pause, he added, "Arthur was like you. He felt his way through difficult cases."

Those glimpses of my family history fascinated me. I began collecting stories about Arthur and my great-grandfather whenever I could, piecing together the lives of the Mercers who had borne the duty before me.

Living in the same market town where I had grown up made secrecy both easier and harder. The people of Merewick knew and trusted the Mercer name, but small towns noticed patterns. I became as careful about my movements as Dad had been. I varied my departure times, used different lanes towards burial grounds and ensured I appeared often enough in ordinary public places that my occasional nocturnal absences did not attract attention.

The emotional toll never disappeared. Every case left me drained, not only from digging or lifting but from the weight of what I witnessed. I learnt to compartmentalise, keeping my daylight self apart from the man who helped the dead complete their passage after dark.

Some cases remained with me longer than others. There was a young woman who had died without warning, her spirit so strongly bound to her body that freeing her required three visits. An elderly man had been buried with an heirloom to which he could not relinquish his hold. The rarest and worst case involved a child. Children almost always passed cleanly, but this girl's parents rang in tears because they could hear her voice beneath the graveyard earth.

After the most difficult releases, I sometimes sat alone in my flat and turned the old hunter watch in my hands, drawing comfort from its connection to everyone who had endured the work before me.

Dad and I continued working together at Mercer Electrical, though he gradually reduced his hours as he moved towards an ordinary retirement. We never discussed night cases while on a job. That was our unspoken rule. Sometimes, however, while driving between customers, he would ask simple questions.

"Sleeping all right?"

"Getting enough rest between calls?"

"Need a hand with anything?"

The concern behind them reminded me that he understood exactly what I was experiencing. He had carried the burden for thirty years before passing it to me.

Mum watched over us both in her quiet way. She kept Dad anchored in normal life now that he had stepped away from the night work, and she checked on me regularly, invited me to meals and made certain I was not isolating myself.

"This work can make you forget how to be with ordinary people," she told me once. "Don't let it do that to you."

I tried to follow her advice. I maintained friendships and occasionally dated, though relationships proved difficult. How could I explain my disappearances after midnight without lying? How could I share a life with someone when half of mine had to remain secret?

As the years passed, I found a rhythm. Mercer Electrical gave me a public identity and a steady income. The night work fulfilled the obligation I had inherited. I recorded every case in my own leather-bound volume, distinct from Arthur and Dad's legacy casebook.

The work remained necessary. If anything, the calls increased slightly. I could not tell whether more souls were failing to pass or whether knowledge of my service had spread further.

Graham and I discussed the change one night after completing a release in a burial ground in the neighbouring county.

"Three in one month," he said as we cleaned the tools. "We used to go months without a call."

"Do you think it means something?" I asked, echoing the question I had once put to Dad.

Graham shrugged. "The world's changing. More people dying alone. More unfinished business. Activity's always worse around the new moon as well."

Perhaps that explained it. Perhaps nothing did. Whatever the cause, I continued answering every call, performing a service few knew existed and fewer still understood. I often remembered what Dad had told me: someone had to do the work, and for reasons lost in our family's history, it had fallen to us.

On the fifth anniversary of my first solo bodily release, I visited Edward Harcourt's grave at St Bartholomew's Burial Ground. It was a bright autumn afternoon, with golden leaves scattered over the clipped grass. I stood before his headstone and remembered the younger man I had been that night, alone before an open coffin and facing his inheritance for the first time.

I placed a small stone on the headstone, a private acknowledgement between us. Edward had been my first unaided exhumation and the beginning of my true tenure as a Mercer.

Since then I had helped dozens of souls complete their journeys, continued a tradition that stretched back for generations and maintained a balance most people never knew required tending. The work was hard, lonely and emotionally punishing. Yet as I looked at the peaceful grave of a man I had helped release, I knew with absolute certainty that it was necessary.

I was Daniel Mercer, electrician by day and helper of troubled souls by night. I carried the secret responsibility as Stephen had before me and Arthur before him. Its weight had shaped me as it had shaped them all.

When my mobile rang that evening, I answered with the calm assurance of experience. Another family needed help. Another soul was caught between states. I gathered my tools and drove into the darkness.

Some weeks later, I wiped soil from my hands as I closed the Moffats' front door behind me. Their daughter had been at peace for a fortnight, and they had insisted I stay for warm apple crumble. I had remained longer than intended, listening as Mrs Moffat described how the house felt normal again. There were no more cold patches and no footsteps crossing the landing at night.

Walking towards the Ford Ranger in the fading light, I thought how closely the encounter resembled scenes I had watched Dad endure hundreds of times: the grateful relatives, the awkward thanks for something they could never properly explain to anyone else and the relief in their faces when they realised ordinary life could resume.

I was thirty now. I had led cases alone for almost five years and had spent nearly a decade in active fieldwork. Dad had stepped back completely, though he still asked careful questions when I visited for Sunday dinner. The calls, the frightened families and the restless dead had become as familiar as my electrician's tools.

As I drove home along the dark border lanes, I thought about the Mercers who had done this work before me. Dad had carried it for thirty years. Arthur had carried it before him, and his father before that. It was a chain of responsibility stretching through generations, each keeper teaching the next a trade that could never be discussed at a school careers fair.

The thought struck me as I turned into my street: one day I would have to choose and train a successor.

It was not a new idea. I had always known the work must continue after me. That night, however, it felt immediate.

I parked outside the flat and sat in the pickup with the engine off. I was unmarried and had no children, no obvious relative waiting to inherit the duty. Perhaps another Mercer would prove suitable. Perhaps I would have to find a carefully vetted outsider. Blood alone could not be enough, and disbelief would be only the first obstacle. The person would need compassion, steadiness and the strength to live between two worlds without being consumed by either.

Inside, I hung my jacket beside the door and went to the kitchen table. Two books rested there. The older was Arthur and Stephen's legacy casebook, its worn pages holding decades of entries in their separate hands. Beside it lay my personal casebook, open at the record of the Moffat release.

I ran my fingers over the cracked leather of the older volume and wondered how many more cases I would record before handing both books to someone else. Twenty-five years? Thirty? My own book might be filled by then, with another begun after it.

The phone rang and startled me from my thoughts. It was not the emergency mobile, only my ordinary line.

"Got your message," Graham said when I answered. His voice had grown raspier with age, but he still wasted no words. "Can meet tomorrow. Tools are ready."

We had been making a new set of specialised restraints for the most dangerous bodily tethers. The inherited set Dad had passed down was finally wearing out, and Graham knew how to reproduce it using the proper materials and blessings.

"Thanks, Graham. The Kershaws may need us next week. Their grandfather isn't showing any signs yet, but before he died he made them promise not to leave him trapped if he tried to return."

"Preventative. Sensible."

I had learnt to interpret Graham's sparse replies. He approved of families who planned ahead and faced the possibility that the dead might remain tethered.

After we ended the call, I sat again and opened the drawer containing my business cards.

"Mercer Electrical - serving Merewick and the Marches for three generations."

The cards made no mention of our other service.

The division in my life had become normal. By day I repaired wiring, installed extractor fans and light fittings, replaced sockets and upgraded consumer units. I discussed rain, football and roadworks with customers, prepared quotations, issued invoices and did everything expected of a small business owner.

Then there were the other calls, arriving after midnight from families with nowhere else to turn. They sent me into darkness carrying consecrated water, rowan, rue, salt and restraints when required. They led me to graveyards, municipal burial grounds, independent funeral directors and houses where something had gone profoundly wrong.

I looked down at my calloused hands. Dad's had looked the same: a tradesman's hands, capable of repairing a faulty socket or freeing a lost soul from whatever bound it to this world.

I wondered what my successor's hands would look like. Would they become as steady as mine? Would they tremble during the first few cases as mine had?

At 08:00 the next morning I was due at the Wilkeses' house to replace their kitchen lighting. Three quotations for rewiring older homes followed later in the week. They were ordinary customers with no idea what other services I provided.

Between those jobs would come the night calls. Mrs Farah Mahmood would send families to me when the archives revealed a hidden burial or a history of disturbance. Martin Cole would ring if he found displaced soil in St Bartholomew's Burial Ground. Alistair Webb might quietly refer bereaved relatives who reported movement at the independent funeral directors. The Reverend Owen Price would prepare what the rites required. The network that had supported Dad would continue supporting me, just as it would one day support whoever followed.

I remembered what Dad had said during the handover: the work was larger than any one person and would continue after both of us were gone. I understood that now in a way I could not have five years earlier.

The work did not belong to us. We belonged to it.

I closed both casebooks and returned them to their secure place. The next day would begin with ordinary electrical work. For the moment, no unquiet soul required my help. But the emergency mobile could ring at any time, and when it did I would answer as Dad had taught me: calmly, professionally and ready to confront a problem most people could not imagine.

The responsibility had settled into my bones. It was part of me now, as natural and inescapable as my height or the colour of my eyes. I would carry it for years, as Stephen had before me, until the time came to pass it on.

When that day arrived, I would choose carefully. Perhaps I would train a relative; perhaps a vetted outsider would prove more worthy. I would teach them how to recognise bodily tethers and external attachments, how to approach frightened families with compassion, how to use the tools and how to release the dead without pretending certainty about what they suffered. I would place the hunter watch in their palm and give them the legacy casebook alongside my own.

For now, however, the work was mine: the nocturnal calls, the desperate families, the souls trapped between states and the hidden balance between life and death.

Then, from the bedroom, the emergency mobile began to ring.

I rose, collected the silver hunter watch and reached for the phone, already preparing to answer the next call while the unresolved question of my successor waited somewhere in the years ahead.