I leant back against the cold brick wall of the greenroom where we had our drama class, my eyes fixed on the definitely illegal recording of a play we’d be studying next year. It wasn’t bad. It was a dramatisation of the Salem witch trials, which I always found fascinating, but the sound kept dipping out and we could hear the endless rustling and whispering of the audience.

I was pretty certain that Mrs Martell had recorded it herself. I’m sure I heard her shush someone at some point. She seemed like the type who would do that. I’m not sure what it was but she just had that energy about her.

I let my head fall back as another annoying burst of whispers tore out of the speakers, blocking out whatever the actors were saying. It was so hard to pay attention when I could barely hear what was going on.

With a wave of dizziness, colour washed across my vision. Flashes of rolling green fields, hills topped with lusciously full trees and the faintest glimpse of the ocean in the distance, danced just beyond my awareness. It was dark and stormy, nothing like the sea I’d been on in the boat with Mitch before.

Finally, the flashes of colour solidified, slowing down until I was staring at a slightly disappointing looking church. It was shorter than I thought it would be with no spire. I always preferred churches with spires, they looked so much cooler.

The stained glass was pretty cool though.

I blinked roughly and sat up straighter.

I didn’t want to zone out. Not in Drama class, I enjoyed it too much. But… we were just watching a play and we’d probably watch it again at the beginning of next term so it didn’t matter too much if I stopped paying attention.

“What do you think, kid?” I heard Mitch ask distantly.

I hesitated, torn between my fantasy world and the real world.

“It’s not what I expected,” I replied after a pause.

“No? Were you expecting some grand, Notre Dame-type cathedral?” he asked with a grin.

“A little, yeah. I mean, I’ve been to Edinburgh a couple of times now and the rest of the buildings are so nice and old looking. This looks weirdly modern, you know?” I said staring up at it.

“Well, that makes sense. It is. The church was destroyed a good few times,” Mitch explained. “There was a revolution and multiple fires. They ended up restoring it in the nineteen-hundreds, that’s probably why it looks so new.”

I cocked my head and stared up at it.

“It would look cooler if it had a spire,” I said finally.

“There used to be one!”

I looked at him in surprise but he was staring up at the church, waiting patiently for the chattering tour group to move past us.

They did, slowly, and I wanted to hurry them along but I forced myself to wait.

“Oh yeah,” he started up again as if he hadn’t even stopped. “Back before it was renovated, it had a tower and everything but they made a mistake.”

“What happened?” I asked, fascinated.

History class was never this interesting. If it was, I would have paid more attention.

“An explosion. They used to use the tower as a gunpowder store.”

“What?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s fairly safe, as far as explosives go. Decomposes pretty slow and it can be stored for a long period of time, if you store it correctly in a nice and dry place but… clearly, they didn’t.”

There was a little too much understanding in his voice.

“Wait,” I said as realisation hit me. “Have you used gunpowder before?”

Mitch laughed loudly but his eyes darted around at the people who were now staring at us.

“Of course, kid! You know I work in special effects!” he lied easily and just loudly enough for the people around us to stop staring quite so worriedly.

“Sorry,” I muttered as soon as they’d moved on.

“That’s alright, I think we covered it pretty well. Shall we do a quick lap of the graveyard and then we’ll go find a spa or something to dump some of our clothes and get cleaned up?”

“Sure,” I said quickly, my eyes darting around the surprisingly large graveyard, actually paying attention to it for the first time.

The small path we were standing on reached the church before splitting in two to circle the building. Small offshoots of the path, cracked by tree roots and from age, stretched out towards the grand gravestones. We started down one of the offshoots, looking at the graves.

There weren’t as many as I expected on this side of the church but they were much bigger than the tombstones in my nearby church back home. The grass was bright and well maintained too. Someone clearly cared for the land and the people buried there, even if they were long gone.

“See those ones built into the wall?” Mitch pointed towards the back wall with his head.

I followed his gesture, my eyes widening as I noticed the incredible things built into the side walls. I couldn’t quite call them tombstones. They were giant, even taller and longer than I was. They looked like a strange combination or cross between a grave and a monument.

I walked towards them without really even noticing.

Daisies had appeared on the grass before them, leftover offerings from long-dead families, but I didn’t pay them much attention. I was too captivated by the decorations on the tombs. Some had lions, family crests or just plaques, written in Latin, but one in particular called to me.

The base was fairly plain. Made of bricks that had been worn and darkened by the rain, all details on the base had been destroyed but along the top, a smaller slab somehow had not been as damaged by the weather.

Latin words were etched into the far sides but I understood very few of them. One stood out though.

‘Mortal’.

“Why is there a skull and crossbones on this grave?” I asked quietly, aware of the people wandering around behind us.

I didn’t want to speak too loudly, just in case it was relevant to the mission. I didn’t want to be the one to ruin everything.

“It’s actually not what you think!” Mitch explained cheerfully. “The symbol was used a very long time ago, back in the Roman empire, but it stopped being used over time and then it had a resurgence in popularity, not actually by pirates at first but by the Catholic church. More specifically, it was the Knights Templar which actually makes sense because they were heavily linked to piracy.”

“Really?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

I’d never heard that the church was linked to piracy before and it sounded so strange but Mitch sounded confident. I completely trusted that he was telling the truth.

“Listen to the nice man, Janey,” a woman beside me said, crouching down beside her toddler and pointing up at Mitch.

Mitch hesitated for only a moment before launching right back into his lesson.

“So, once the order of the Templars had been disbanded, a lot of them were very skilled mariners and they started using the skull and crossbones as their flag.”

I felt my eyebrows draw together.

That didn’t feel like a full explanation.

“Why though?” I asked after a pause where Mitch looked cagily at the woman and the toddler standing next to us.

He sighed.

“I don’t think this is the best story for your kid to hear,” he said to her finally.

“She’ll be fine,” the woman said snootily. “Janey is very gifted and mature for her age.”

Mitch raised one eyebrow slightly.

“If you say so. There are two different stories as to how the symbol began being used for pirates. The first one is that after the Templar was disbanded, the Grand Master, who was the person in charge of them, was burnt alive by the rest of the Catholic church. Some of the surviving Templars went looking for his body but only found the femurs and his skull and, because they were mariners, they basically fled. They became pirates and what was left of the Grand Master became their flag.”

The woman beside me quickly ushered her kid away, shooting Mitch dark looks.

“You sure you don’t want to stay? The next story is even better!” Mitch called after her before chuckling. “Ah, that was mean but I tried to warn her!”

“What’s the next story?” I asked with a grin.

“The next one is actually more interesting, if you ask me. There was a Lord of Sidon, who was alive back in the Templar days and he was actually a Templar himself. He got married but she died when she was pretty young still but this was back in the day so it was pretty common. Anyway, he ordered the Templars to help him find her body on the evening of the burial and dig her up. I know, pretty nasty but it does get worse. When he was excavating the grave, he reported hearing God telling him to bury her again and return in nine months because she was going to have his son.”

“What?” I cried. “But she was dead? How could she have his kid?”

“Exactly! She couldn’t, she was a corpse. But, he made them bury her again and they returned in nine months, just like the voice told him, and when they dug her up again… there was a skull resting on his bride’s leg bones!”

“Really?”

“According to the legend! Apparently, this time, the voice said to him that he had to look after the skull and it would protect him in all his ventures!”

“Was he a pirate then?” I asked, trying to connect the stories.

Mitch cocked his head.

“Well… that isn’t part of the legend but the port of Sidon was known across the globe as a haven for pirates so it’s a little uncertain if they’re connected or if the Lord became a pirate or if the Templars that became pirates took his good luck charm to watch over them too. It was hundreds of years ago though so the facts are a little spotty.”

“That’s so interesting!” I said honestly, staring at the tombstones again.

“Isn’t it?” he said earnestly.

“So, why are they on these graves?” I looked around surreptitiously. “Are they pirates?”

“Eh, not necessarily. Sometimes it’s used just to symbolise death, like the ones that say that.”

He pointed at some words that were etched into the bottom of a tombstone a few along from us.

I walked towards them, reading as the words came into focus.

“Memento mori? What does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s an old Latin saying. It means ‘remember you must die’.”

A shudder went through me.

“It sounds like a threat,” I said, very aware of the hairs on my arms standing on edge.

“Eh,” Mitch said with a shrug. “Less of a threat and more of a reminder. The saying and thought exists across a lot of cultures and religions but I think it mostly boils down to making sure you’re living a good life and one worth living, you know?”

I nodded but ice slithered down my spine.

I wasn’t living a good life. I wasn’t doing anything particularly good with it. I was just existing. I knew that I was just a kid but surely, I could be doing something better.

What was I doing with my life? I was spending my time zoning out, not paying any attention in class, and barely doing any work or homework. I was doing nothing. I would be nothing. My teacher had said for years that the work we were doing that year laid the foundation for what we did in the future, what we became. If we slacked now, we would become nothing.

I was limiting myself, spending my days hiding in fantasies and daydreams just because the real world wasn’t enough for me.

“Oh crap,” Mitch said suddenly, glancing at his watch.

A faint hint of vertigo hit me and I focused on him again, my surroundings swimming ever so slightly as I came back from wherever I’d been.

“We need to get to the other side to have a look at where we have to dig tonight and then we have to get back to the car. I only put an hour on the parking!” he said, turning and starting across the grass towards the path.

I hurried after him, trying to push the thoughts out of my mind.

I’d worked hard for my GCSEs. I could slack a little bit. The next week barely mattered and it would be the summer holidays soon. Some people weren’t even coming to class… I’d start paying attention again at the beginning of the new year.

“What’s that?” I said, slowing as we passed a weird flat metal cage with a slab of stone on top.

“That?” Mitch asked, pointing at it. “That’s a mortsafe.”

He continued walking and I raced after him.

“What’s a mortsafe?”

“They were invented to stop grave robbers. They’d put a body in there and drive a spike through the head before locking it up and putting the slab on top so that people couldn’t steal it.”

My mouth dropped open.

“How long did they keep the body in there? Like, was it a permanent thing? It seems kind of gross to keep a body out in the open for so long. Wouldn’t it smell?” I asked, glancing back at the grim contraption.

“I assume so, they normally do,” Mitch said with a shrug. “But they usually weren’t kept in there for too long. Only six weeks or so for them to get nice and decayed so that no one wanted them anymore. Okay, come have a look at this.”

I look at the monument, taking in the snake in the centre. It was wrapped around a pot or an urn of some kind but it stared out towards me, its beady eyes seeming to look directly at me.

I tore my gaze away from it and looked at the words on the plinth it rested on.

“Non omnis moriar?” I tried to read.

“Not bad pronunciation,” Mitch said kindly but I felt like he was lying. “Do you know what it means?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t even begin to guess.

“That’s okay, we’ll add Latin to the rotation of classes. I think I probably still have some of the lessons that Zaq studied somewhere, I’ll fish them out. It means ‘not all of me will die’.”

“That’s… ominous,” I said finally as Mitch began leading me across the graveyard again. “Is it a clue or something?”

“It’s a quote. From a poet way back in Roman times. I don’t reckon it’s a clue, just something interesting. This, however…”

He came to a stop on the dry mud path and looked into one of the mausoleums with a grin on his face.

Confusion flared within me.

“This?” I asked.

“This.”

I looked at the strange building. It looked so shockingly ordinary. Nothing about it stood out. It was short and stout with absolutely no decorations or grandeur. There was an empty archway rather than a door, anyone could just walk in.

“Are you sure you don’t mean that one?” I asked, pointing at the much more elaborate one next to it.

The building was rounded with a fancy crest above the dark grey doors. It even had a dome! I mean, there might have been weeds and plants growing out of the top of it and between some of the bricks, but it looked so much more like something that would be hiding pirate treasure.

“George MacKenzie’s tomb?” he asked, looking scandalised.

I shrugged.

“Maybe?”

“No! He had nothing to do with anything fun. Sure, he was a real bad guy but that grave has been desecrated too many times to have anything of use. This, this is the one we want.”

He marched inside past the metal gate that had been propped in the doorway, not doing anything to block people from entering.

I slipped in after him, glancing back at the tour group who were coming up along the path outside.

Mitch was turning slowly, scanning the walls, floor and finally, the metal bars that blocked out some of the sunlight.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Signs that people have been here recently. Have a look at the floor, can you see anything suspicious?”

I looked down immediately at the dark pebbles, examining them for any traces of footprints or scuffs.

I wanted to say ‘no’ immediately but I could feel Mitch's gaze on me. I needed to do better. I had to find something, whatever he’d noticed. I stopped, mid-turn, something catching my attention. It wasn’t really anything, just something a little… different.

“Are you here on a field trip?” a loud voice asked.

I whipped around, staring at the smiling man in a white shirt that loudly pronounced he was a tour guide.

“Kind of. I homeschool my daughter and you know what it’s like. It’s always better to show someone a place you’re trying to teach them about,” Mitch said in a jovial tone.

“Ah, of course,” the guide said. “But if you’re looking for the tomb of Bloody MacKenzie, I’m afraid you’ve overshot just a bit. You know, I can give you the tour for just nineteen pounds each!”

He grinned at us hopefully.

“Well, that does sound lovely!” Mitch cried with a smile. “You know, I got so mixed up there, I thought this was his tomb! I was going to say, it was nothing like what I expected!”

Mitch grinned at me but he widened his eyes slightly.

He wanted me to do something, to get us out of it. It was a test.

“Oh, that sounds so interesting! Hey, do you know anything about the mortsafes?” I asked, making a show of how fascinated I was. “That is what you said they were called, right, dad?”

“That’s right! See, I knew taking you here would help! Trust me, I tried to teach her this stuff at home but it went in one ear and out the other! I think it’s because she’s always glued to that phone of hers,” he said and I slipped it from my pocket, pretending to be outraged.

“Hey, I am not! I’ve paid attention all the way around this place!” I cried, waiting for him to pull his wallet out, a plan forming in my mind.

“You have, you have,” he grumbled with a roll of his eyes.

“Ah,” the tour guide chuckled. “Well, hopefully, I can make the tour more interesting than whatever is on your phone! That’ll be thirty-eight pounds, please.”

Mitch started to pull out his wallet to pay him and I brought my phone up, pretending to just be checking my texts.

“Wait, did you get the parking for one hour or two?” I asked, arranging my features into a look of confusion.

“One. Why, kiddo? What time is it?” he asked, looking at me.

“Dad! It’s almost four!”

Mitch gasped, looking appropriately shocked.

“Oh, no! We need to get back to the car! If I get one more ticket, your mom is going to kill me! Let’s go!” he cried before looking at the disappointed guide. “I am so sorry, we’ll have to come back another day! Alex, come on!”

He rushed towards the door of the mausoleum as the tour guide stepped out the way sadly.

“You always do this!” I chided him, feeling bad. “I wanted to go on that tour! Can we come back next week?”

The tour guide perked up slightly at my words even as we rushed past him and started across the grass.

“We’ll have to see what your mom says! Which way did we park? Was it down here?” he asked, keeping the charade up.

“Yeah, come on!”

We rushed over the grass and out the gates of the graveyard, still in character. It wasn’t until we were halfway down the street that Mitch started to slow.

“That was pretty good, kid,” he said with a grin.

“Thanks! But, you called me Alex, why?” I asked.

A tiny bit of fear nibbled at my stomach. I was worried that he’d forgotten my name. Maybe Alex was some other kid he’d looked after before, like Zaq.

“Well, I couldn’t exactly use your real name, could I?” he said with a laugh. “It’s always better to use fake names with people you don’t know or trust. Then, it’s harder for them to trace you. I mean, sure, they still can give physical descriptions but we can change that up when needed. So, what did you see, Grace?”

I smiled at his use of my name even though part of me thought he’d done it just because he knew what I was worried about.

“Well, it could be nothing…” I started unsurely. “But did you see the back wall? Under all the weeds and plants.”

A small grin started on his face.

“Why, yes, I did. Wanna see what’s under that plastering tonight?”