Hammersmith Cemetery is the burial place of Joanna Southcote and the setting of the secret exhumation that removes her remains for Ignacio Narbondo’s work. The cemetery’s significance lies in the collision of two purposes attached to the same grave: Shiloh sees it as the place from which his mother might be restored, while Willis Pule and his companion treat it as a source of material to be carried away.

Setting and Appearance

The cemetery is presented at night, obscured by fog and bounded by a wall containing scattered crypts. Gaslamps set into the wall offer little illumination, and old yews and alders shade the grounds. The darkness makes the graveyard difficult to navigate and helps conceal the work taking place there.

The particular grave is marked by a broken, partly obscured headstone. Its remaining fragment bears the letters COTE, the number 8, and part of a carved skeleton. The damaged marker gives the burial place a specific physical identity even as age and neglect have made the inscription incomplete.

Joanna Southcote and Shiloh

Joanna Southcote’s body lies beneath the cemetery’s soil. Shiloh’s attention returns to that burial because he believes that a hunchback might be able to resurrect his mother. The possibility overwhelms him: he regards her restoration as more valuable than the many reanimated corpses produced by Narbondo, whose usefulness he nevertheless recognizes.

The grave therefore holds a private hope as well as a practical objective. Shiloh’s religious conviction that his mother bore the Messiah gives the remains a meaning the other characters do not share. To Pule, one ruined skeleton is much like another; to Shiloh, the same burial is bound up with his belief about his mother and his desire to see her restored.

The Exhumation

Pule and a companion dig at the grave with spades. The work is physically difficult, and Pule resents having to take part, believing that if they are discovered Narbondo will escape while he is left to answer to the authorities. When the digging reaches the coffin, the men uncover and lift it from the earth.

The coffin gives way during the extraction. Pule’s companion leaves the graveyard, while Pule remains to retrieve the shrouded remains, wrap them in a tarpaulin, and drag them across the wet grass toward the road. The abandoned hole and the fading light of the lantern mark the grave’s change from a place of burial into the point of departure for a clandestine removal.

Removal and Narrative Significance

The remains are subsequently seen in Narbondo’s laboratory, connecting the cemetery’s secret excavation to his experiments. Their removal makes the graveyard more than an atmospheric setting: it is the threshold between Joanna’s burial and the attempt to use her remains beyond the cemetery.

That transition sharpens the contrast between the characters’ aims. Shiloh imagines his mother’s restoration as a singular event, while Narbondo’s reanimation work produces useful but limited results. The cemetery preserves the physical fact of Joanna’s burial, but the competing meanings assigned to her grave drive the effort to disturb it.