Dead Man's Hand
It was nine o’clock on a Friday night, the library was shutting and I was making my way back to St. Andrew’s Gardens. I went down Maryland Street and turned right on to the corner of Rodney Street. I remember, at the corner a fly-poster for ‘Pitchshifter’ had replaced the one for Glenn Matlock, another concert I’d missed. As I was turning the corner, I saw a weak glow from the abandoned churchyard. In the middle of the little graveyard, there is a pyramid. Not a big, old pharaoh’s tomb but a smallish (by pyramid standards) monument about ten feet to a side. I’d been at John Moores for a few months and would walk down this road most days. Nowadays I walk down Hope Street to my lectures.
In the front of the pyramid is a tiny door, no more than a couple of feet square, usually this is bricked up, but that night, the bricks lay strewn about the thin grass. The light was actually coming from within the tomb.
Intrigued, I crept closer and was almost knocked down by a man who had scrabbled across the grass. He was dressed in a black tuxedo, with a top hat and cape, obviously well dressed- if a little out of touch. He wore a mask of absolute terror on his face as he ran, full tilt, across the road. After he had passed me, curiosity took hold and I looked inside the ‘grave.’ Inside there was a table and two chairs, set up to play cards. I couldn’t tell where the light was coming from, it seemed to permeate the stones on the inside.
But stranger and stranger, inside, floating in the air were a hand of cards, a pair of immaculate white gloves and a set of burning eyes. In front of the eyes and hands stood a huge pile of chips. On the far side of these, stood four eights and the ace of spades in an ornate cardholder. I only saw this briefly but it will haunt me till the day I die, because when those eyes looked at me, I ran as fast as the other man, I ran for my very soul.
Now, I did a bit of research the next day in the library, when I went to finish my revision. There was a book by a guy off of Radio City that mentioned something similar to what I had seen and offered a bit of an explanation. The pyramid was apparently the tomb of a Mr. Mackenzie, a tobacco merchant and railways investor- who was also something of a gambling man, and was buried sat at a card table with a winning hand.
This is a fairly old story I wrote while in Uni. While it is not a true story, it is based entirely on fact.
The pyramid is there and while I've never seen McKenzie's ghost, others have.
