"Aye." The old man accurately tossed tea bags into two-pint pots. "They're working up the top-side. Look." He pointed a yellow-brown nicotine stained finger. Through a grimy, cobwebbed window two men could be seen digging in the graveyard. "That's where they're going to plant James Hudson, the old Mayor. Top-side, you see, is where all your nobs are — doctors, solicitors, aldermen. Bottom-side is for your working folk and paupers."

"And that's where the new road's going through." The young man returned to work, prising at cables with a screwdriver.

"Aye… that's where they all had to be dug up." The gravedigger licked his lips. "Disinterred, aye." Taking the kettle from a solitary electric ring, he limped to the freezer top to fill the mugs with boiling water, and then he paused, staring thoughtfully at the rising steam. "Aye, a bad business this disinterring. You see some things so bad it makes you fair poorly. You know in some of the older graves, well, we opened coffins and found that they…"

The electrician's eyes opened wide.

"Well. They'd moved."

"Moved? The bodies had moved?"

"Well sometimes, years ago, people were buried alive. Not deliberately of course. 'Spect some were in comas so deep they were certified dead. They buried them. Course, then they woke up." He glanced at the electrician to see if he appreciated its full significance. "No air, no light. They'd be suffocating, trying to fight their way out. But six feet down. No one would ever hear 'em. There they screamed, fought, clawed at the lid, breathed up all the oxygen and then… well, they died."

"What did they look like?"

"Oh… terrible. You see, natural salts in the soil preserve 'em, only turns 'em bright yellow. Apart from that they looked the same as the day they died. Like this." Eyes wide open; his face the distillation of pure terror, panic, and the gravedigger hooked his brown fingers into talons and contorted his body as if twisted by unendurable agony. "They just froze like that, like statues."