Chapter VI (83) Summary: The Funeral and the Shower
⚠️ Spoiler Notice
This page reveals major plot developments from Chapter VI (Chapter 83) of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, including a character death. Read on only if you have finished this chapter.
Summary
Chapter VI unfolds across two scenes united by water and grief. In the first, Alice attends the funeral of her sister Catty in Scotland. A violent rain pummels the cemetery as the family stands at the fresh grave beside their mother's plot. The tombstone reads CATHERINE ABIGAIL MOORE — a name Catty disliked, now permanent and wrong. Alice's father whispers "Daft girl" while Granddad grips his shoulder and El holds Alice and Finn. Alice, however, grips only her umbrella, knuckles white, boots sinking into mud as if trying to root herself in place.
Afterward, the townspeople gather at Granddad's pub speaking in hushed, careful tones. The brittle atmosphere makes Alice want to shatter everything, so she walks out into the downpour. The cold shocks her, then releases something inside. Arms spread, eyes closed, she imagines Catty's fingers lacing through her own.
The scene cuts to the present. Alice stands in a steaming shower, waiting. She hears Sabine shed a lace dress and chain mail. Sabine joins her, arms wrapping around Alice from behind, necklaces pressing against bare shoulder blades. In that embrace, Alice remembers: the cold weight holding her to the bed, hair winding like weeds around her throat, the scent of iron and wet earth and dead flowers, the sound of her own heart failing.
Alice turns, looks into Sabine's eyes, and drives a jagged shard of slate — broken earlier from the bathroom sink — between Sabine's ribs. Sabine does not scream. She frowns, bemused, and crumbles into ash and rot, five centuries collapsing in an instant. Only her talismanic necklaces remain on the tile. Alice dries off, dresses, and collapses onto the sofa, waiting to feel alive again as water drips from her hair with the steady rhythm of a heart.
Key Events
- Catty's rain-soaked funeral: The family buries Catherine Abigail Moore beside her mother in a Scottish cemetery. Alice holds herself apart, gripping her umbrella rather than another person.
- The wake at Granddad's pub: Well-meaning mourners speak in hushed, glass-like tones. Alice flees the suffocating room.
- Alice's communion with the rain: Outside, she spreads her arms and lets the downpour soak her, imagining she can feel Catty's fingers in hers. For the first time since the death, she can breathe.
- Sabine joins Alice in the shower: Alice waits as Sabine undresses and steps into the steam. Sabine does not notice the cracked sink counter where a hand-length shard of slate has been broken free.
- Memory floods back: As Sabine's arms encircle her, Alice recalls the full sensory reality of Sabine's attack — the suffocating hair, the scent of decay, her heart stopping.
- Alice kills Sabine: She turns and stabs the slate shard into Sabine's heart. Sabine crumbles instantly into ash and rot.
- Aftermath: The necklaces pool on the shower floor. Alice dries off and collapses onto the sofa, her breath shuddering as she waits to feel alive.
Character Development
Alice
This chapter crystallizes Alice's transformation from grief-paralyzed survivor to active agent. The funeral memory establishes the depth of her loss — she is the family member who cannot hold on, who stands apart, boots sinking into mud, barely anchored. Her escape into the rain and her fantasy of Catty's touch reveal a character seeking connection beyond death. In the present timeline, that longing transmutes into cold premeditation. Alice did not improvise the slate weapon; she deliberately broke the sink counter beforehand, planning Sabine's death while luring her into vulnerability. The final image — Alice collapsed on the sofa, waiting for her heartbeat to feel real again — suggests she is navigating the emotional aftermath of killing, however justified.
Sabine
Sabine's death scene strips away any remaining ambiguity about her nature. She enters the shower shedding garments of lace and chain mail, a layered image evoking both seduction and ancient warfare. When stabbed, she does not fight, scream, or plead. Her bemused frown suggests genuine incomprehension — perhaps at being outmaneuvered, perhaps at mortality itself after five hundred years. Her disintegration into "ash and rot and whatever's left after five hundred years" confirms she was sustained by supernatural means. The necklaces she leaves behind are the only enduring artifacts of her existence.
Catty (Catherine Abigail Moore)
Though absent in life, Catty's presence shapes every emotional beat. The tombstone engraving of a name she disliked underscores the finality of death and the way it fixes identity against the living person's wishes. The father's whispered "Daft girl" captures the family's complicated grief. Alice's rain-soaked fantasy of holding her sister's hand provides the chapter's emotional bridge between past trauma and present action.
The Moore Family
Brief but telling appearances: the father who mutters under his breath, Granddad steadying his son, El anchoring both Alice and Finn. They are a family clinging together, except for Alice, whose isolation within the group is physically enacted when she walks alone into the storm.
Themes, Symbols, or Motifs
Water as Death and Rebirth
Water saturates both halves of the chapter. The Scottish rain "rages," pummels, and beats its fists — an antagonistic force that nonetheless gives Alice her first full breath since Catty died. The shower steam is thick enough to conceal the broken sink. Both immersions precede a crossing: from grief to catharsis in the funeral memory, from victimhood to lethal action in the present. The final image — water dripping from Alice's hair "with the steady rhythm of a heart" — fuses the motif with the literal heartbeat she is waiting to feel, binding water to the question of whether she is truly alive.
The Heart (Literal and Symbolic)
Hearts fail and are pierced in this chapter. Alice remembers "the sound her heart made when it failed inside her chest," a visceral detail of her near-death. She retaliates by driving slate into Sabine's heart. The chapter ends with water mimicking a heartbeat. The heart operates as both vulnerable organ and symbolic seat of life, grief, and love — Alice's lost sister, Alice's own stopped heart, and Sabine's destroyed heart form a triangle of loss and reclamation.
Stone and Permanence
Catty's name carved in a tombstone, the slate shard broken from the bathroom counter, the necklaces left behind after Sabine's body disintegrates — stone and mineral endure where flesh fails. The slate is particularly resonant: a piece of domestic architecture, fractured and repurposed as a weapon, linking the ordinary world of showers and sinks to the ancient violence Alice commits.
Tokens on Weathered Chains
Sabine's necklaces survive her body. These "dozen tokens on weathered chains" are physical objects that outlast five centuries of existence. They represent whatever power or history Sabine carried, now unmoored from their owner and pooled on the shower floor for Alice to claim or discard.
Why This Chapter Matters
Chapter VI is the hinge where grief becomes action. The funeral flashback does not merely provide backstory; it supplies the emotional logic for Alice's killing of Sabine. Having lost Catty to forces beyond her control, Alice refuses to remain passive in the face of another mortal threat. The chapter's structure argues that her capacity for violence is born directly from her experience of loss — the rain that soaks her at the grave is the same element that later conceals her weapon.
The chapter also resolves the immediate threat Sabine poses while raising new questions. Sabine's disintegration into ash and rot, leaving only her necklaces, confirms her as something ancient and inhuman. But her bemusement as she dies hints that she did not expect to be vulnerable. Whether Sabine is permanently gone or whether the tokens enable some form of persistence remains uncertain. Alice's final posture — collapsed, waiting, heartbeats measured in dripping water — suggests that victory is not the same as survival, and that killing Sabine may have consequences yet to unfold.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does the funeral scene prepare the reader for Alice's killing of Sabine?
The funeral establishes Alice as someone who processes grief through physical sensation rather than social ritual. She cannot tolerate the "brittle" condolences at the pub; instead, she walks into the rain and lets it batter her. That same willingness to endure physical extremity reappears in the shower, where she stands waiting, knowing exactly what she intends to do. The fantasy of Catty's fingers closing around hers also suggests that Alice draws strength from her dead — a pattern that may extend to whatever she does with Sabine's surviving necklaces.
2. What evidence in the chapter shows that Alice planned Sabine's murder?
The clearest evidence is the description of the bathroom sink: "the jagged line where a slice of slate the length of a hand has been shaved off. Broken free." The phrasing indicates deliberate, recent damage — a shard the size of a hand is not an accidental chip. Alice waits in the shower while Sabine undresses, and Sabine "doesn't see" the broken counter because the steam is thick. Alice has weaponized the domestic space and used the steam as cover, demonstrating forethought.
3. Why might Sabine's necklaces remain after her body disintegrates?
The necklaces are described as "tokens on weathered chains," objects that have presumably existed as long as Sabine herself. Their survival while her body turns to ash suggests they are either the source of her longevity, the anchors of her power, or simply artifacts too old and magically imbued to decay. They may function similarly to talismans or phylacteries in folklore — external vessels that preserve a being beyond natural death. Alice now has access to them, which may prove significant in later chapters.