by Adam Dark
“Oh, yeah,” Chase said, but he didn’t turn around to look at either of them. “He’s not coming back.”
“What?” April asked.
Chase opened the door for everyone, and as the last one through, April waited for him to walk next to her. Ben stepped to the side just to watch this odd conversation. “He got picked up for violating his probation.”
April scrunched up her eyes and shook her head. “But that’s from Connecticut,” she said. “He doesn’t have pro—wait. How do you even know…” It seemed to all come together for her even before Chase spread his arms and gave what Ben thought was a horrible attempt at a humble bow.
The guy turned around and walked backward toward his car with his arms still raised. “Told you I’d make a good addition to the team.” He didn’t wait for anyone to say anything before he turned around again and stopped on the other side of the parking lot to unlock his car. The guy even kept up his ‘I have normal amounts of money’ ruse with a Subaru.
April stopped in the parking lot and turned to Ben. “Oh, my god,” she said. “He put Isaac back in jail?”
Ben shrugged, definitely less uncomfortable now with hearing the guy’s name out loud. “Or at least out of Massachusetts.”
“Across state lines, though?” Her attempt to figure out what had actually happened made her grimace. It looked painful. “That’s like… how would Chase do that?”
“Dude’s good at what he does,” Ben replied. That was about all he thought he could safely say without going back on his agreement with the guy. Mouths shut and all that.
“Huh.” April seemed a lot more frustrated that she couldn’t picture Chase’s methods than grateful to hear her stalker ex-boyfriend was at least out of the state. Ben was more than happy to take the win for both of them.
They both followed Peter to his car. “Hey, nice jacket,” Ben said, nodding at his grandfather’s coat maybe two sizes too big for her.
April batted her eyes at him over her shoulder. “Oh, this old thing?”
Laughing, Ben didn’t think much of where they were headed until he found Peter staring at them. “Oh, I’m sorry,” his friend said, all sarcasm. “Did you two want a ride?”
“That okay?” April asked.
Peter just sighed, which turned into a gross, hacking cough. Then he nodded at his car. “Come on.”
Peter also spent almost the entire ride to Forwaithe Cemetery all but hacking up a lung. Ben asked him once if he wanted Ben to drive instead, but Peter just told him to quit nagging. Okay, so Ben understood how easy it was to be a jerk when sickness was involved. But this bordered on reckless endangerment.
It took about twenty-five minutes before they reached a definitely affluent community in Brighton, and if Ben had had any reservations about going to do this in broad daylight, he didn’t now. The place was completely dead.
‘Hey, good one, Mr. Funny.’
They parked next to Chase in the cemetery lot, which was completely empty except for his and Peter’s cars. Everybody got out with a rather businesslike silence, broken only by the crackling hiss of Chase puffing away on his vape. Ben was starting to like the whole transformation from something like Peter’s massive panic attack just a mile from the abandoned mansion in Oakwood Valley. It felt good walking into this with background knowledge about the suicides and the connected family lines all buried here in the same cemetery. Ben finally felt like he knew what he was doing.
‘Only we don’t know why the demon and the spirits are all hanging together,’ Ian reminded him.
Party pooper.
Whatever the reason was, April had been right. They’d have a lot better idea about the spirits once they put the demon away first. And probably a lot more time to figure it out.
They stepped through the huge iron gates to the cemetery, which were clearly unlocked with posted open hours. Well, if they were here for more than eight hours, they’d have to find another way; closing time was at 8:00 p.m. They’d be in and out of here way faster than that.
Chase led them through the rows of headstones like he’d been here before. Most likely, he’d just memorized the way to the coincidental extended-family plot. Which, when they finally reached it, was massive.
Ben looked around, just wanting to be sure they were alone for this. The cemetery was on pretty flat land with a few scattered trees around them. He’d probably be able to see somebody walking along on a stroll through a bunch of dead, buried bodies. As far as he could tell, there was no one else here.
“So all the suicide-connected gravestones are like, in this general area,” Chase said, waving his hand around. “They’re really not that far apart, actually.”
‘Uh, Ben?’ Ian said. ‘I think you should see this.’
“Okay,” April added, turning to Peter. “Wanna open the box, then?”
“I guess now’s—” Another awful round of hacking coughs overwhelmed the guy, and then everything stopped.
Ben felt the pinching blow in his chest of Ian ripping him away to the spirit realm. Then he gasped and found himself staring at the same cemetery, only glowing with that dark, noxious-green hue. And it wasn’t empty anymore.
Peter, Chase, and April weren’t there standing beside him now. Only Ian. But every other grave in front of them for what could have been a mile now had a washed-out gray spirit standing beside it.
“Woah,” Ben whispered.
The ground beneath these spirits pulsed with a deep, glowing purple, almost like rippling on the surface of a pool. The underground-lake analogy hadn’t been that far off. But it didn’t stretch beneath just a few graves or even a dozen, like they’d thought. The purple glow pulsed and flickered beneath hundreds of headstones and hundreds of spirits beside them, all of whom had been related by blood in some way.
Ben turned around briefly to make sure this wasn’t a normal thing for cemeteries, but the purple light beneath the soil stopped just in front of them, and no other graves had spirits hanging around.
“Yeah, it’s a lot more than I thought,” Ian said. He was frowning out at the purple stretch of ground, chewing on his lip. “I didn’t catch it before. Probably because you didn’t come with me. I can only see so much when I… you know. Slip out.”
“Okay,” Ben offered. He still had no clue what was going on.
“But there’s… there’s something not entirely right about all this.” Ian turned to study Ben’s face, then glanced around the cemetery. “Like those weird lines.” He pointed to the closest spirits, none of whom had seemed to notice their presence here at all. Each one of them had a trail of what looked like purple smoke radiating from them, only instead of drifting up into the air, it filtered back down to the glowing purple light beneath the green-tinged soil. “It’s like they’re… chained.” Then Ian took in a sharp breath and stepped back. “Oh, crap.”
Well that was never good. “What?” Ben asked.
“Oh, man. I should have seen this.”
“Ian?”
The expanse of purple ground in front of them flashed once, and it was bright.
“Dude, I’m sorry,” Ian said, his twelve-year-old eyes wide with fear. “I guess I wasn’t thinking we’d come across this right now.”
“Ian! What’s going—”
The ground trembled beneath them, the purple surface flashed again, and then every spirit standing beside their own graves turned at the same time to fix their gazes upon Ian and Ben. Dirt drifted up into the air, sparking purple, and a crumbling roar echoed through this cemetery in the spirit realm.
“This is not yours to undo.” The voice was insanely terrifying, like some growling animal with a thousand voices coming from all around them.
“Yeah, that one knows who you are,” Ian said. “It knows what we came here to do.”
“And?”
“Well it’s right. We messed up.”
The ground shook again. “Ian, what are you talking—”
But Ian had already pushed him back through the
separation between realms and into his own. Before he was fully back, though, a brilliant purple light flashed again, and something that felt remarkably like a searing hand wrapped itself way too tightly around Ben’s throat.
He gasped when he stood in the cemetery of his own world again, but his lungs got no air. And the grip on his throat wouldn’t let go.
Peter was still hacking away into the sleeve of his jacket, Ben fell to his knees, and April shouted, “Ben!”
He tried to tell her to get out of there—for all of them to get out—but his voice didn’t work either. He waved his arm frantically like he was trying to swim, hoping his friends would back away from the graves in front of them and the angry demon below the headstones that didn’t want them here. But the message got misinterpreted. Go figure.
“What’s going on?” April asked, and at the same time, she took a few steps back. Away from Ben’s exaggerating arm-waving and right onto the ring of what had been the demon’s purple circle.
Everything else happened all at once. The ground shuddered. April went flying over Ben’s head like she’d just been launched out of a cannon. Peter gasped for breath between his hacking coughs, and the metal box slipped from his arms. It fell perfectly on the rock at Peter’s feet, meaning the impact was enough to send the box scattering across the ground in three different pieces. The crystal inside it popped from the setting and rolled into the grass. So no demon-catching box for this team.
And still no air for Ben. He tried to turn around to find April, hoping she wasn’t lying broken against more headstones behind him. But the grip tightened around his throat, and his vision was going blurry.
‘Hold on, Ben,’ Ian said, sounding a little faint. ‘I’m trying. Get closer to that grave right inside the demon’s circle.’
Crawling across the cold, dead grass took Ben forever as his mouth worked without air. He heard Peter wheeze, “Inhaler… my car…” Chase took off running back through the cemetery, and Peter doubled over onto the ground, fighting for air just like Ben but definitely still getting more of it.
Ben stretched out his hand and slapped it down on the grass just inside where the ring of purple earth had started in the spirit realm.
‘Okay, I got it,’ Ian said.
Ben’s hand glowed green again with more of that searing heat, which was starting to feel like a gentle bath compared to how fiercely his lungs burned. Almost instantly, the ground beneath him bucked, and the demon’s purple glow released itself from the earth in this world to rise up into one dark, hulking form among the graves. Ben couldn’t really see it very well with everything now blurry and darkening around the edges.
Then somehow, his cheek was on the cold ground, and the world had tilted sideways.
‘Just a little longer!’ Ian shouted, which Ben thought was just about all he had left.
The grass was so close to his eyes. He heard Peter shouting his name, and then a pair of black leather loafers stepped into his view. Ben managed to look up from them to the plain gray slacks, the black pea coat, the black leather briefcase, until he saw the man’s profile from this odd angle on the ground. Dark hair, clean-shaven, thick-rimmed black glasses.
He wanted to tell this apparent businessman, whoever he was, to get the hell out of the cemetery before he found himself on the ground right next to Ben, but then that thought drifted away with even more of his energy.
The man clicked open his briefcase and pulled out something that looked like a really old piece of yellowed parchment. He threw this toward the purple demon thing and shouted something that sounded like ‘rigor mortis’ but couldn’t have been; that made no sense. The parchment burst into flame before it hit the ground, and then the man brandished something Ben thought looked like a candelabra. Probably not. Everything was going black now.
‘Ben!’ Ian shouted.
“Ben!” Peter echoed.
A bright flash of purple light drowned out everything else, and then there was nothing.
24
His chest hurt so much, he couldn’t possibly be dead.
‘You’re not,’ Ian said. ‘Just open your eyes.’
Ben took the suggestion and blinked back the complete blur of images in front of him. Then the black leather loafers in front of his face came into focus, and he managed to prop himself up just enough to put a little distance between himself and the man who now squatted down in front of him.
The stranger had one of the least memorable faces Ben had ever seen—like every normal-looking guy had been tossed in all together to make this one. The man’s brown eyes were huge behind the thick lenses of his glasses, and they flickered over Ben’s body before the man nodded at him. “Some laws just aren’t meant to be broken,” he said.
Ben tried to respond, to ask what this guy was talking about and who he was, but his voice didn’t quite work yet. The man stood from his squat and moved quickly across the cemetery’s cold, dead grass. When he reached Peter, he pulled something from his jacket pocket and tossed it into Peter’s lap. Ben’s friend didn’t stop to ask how or to thank the guy; he fumbled the lid off the emergency inhaler and took two long puffs. Then two more. By the time he’d stopped wheezing and wasn’t looking so blue anymore, the man was already halfway across the expanse of the cemetery that Ben could see from where he sat on the ground.
“Hey!” Ben croaked, his voice returned just enough for only that. The man with the briefcase didn’t stop, and soon, he’d stepped behind a few trees and was gone entirely. “What laws?” he whispered.
‘I didn’t really have any way of knowing before we got here,’ Ian said. ‘Totally my bad, and I’m really, really sorry, Ben. I don’t like almost losing two bodies.’
“You didn’t like it.” Ben rubbed his throat, where he still felt the shadow of what had to be the demon’s grip on him. “What didn’t you figure out in time?”
‘The family that’s buried here did actually make a deal with that demon,’ Ian replied. ‘Signed in blood and everything. Binding everyone to the thing’s service after death until someone in the family made good on their end of the deal.’
“And that guy was part of the family?”
‘No idea. But I think he gave the demon what it wanted. At least for now.’
Yeah, that was very reassuring. Ben sat all the way up and looked at Peter, who just stared at him with wide eyes.
Then Ben scrambled to his knees and stumbled around behind where he’d sat. April.
As if she’d heard him thinking about her, she groaned from somewhere just in front of him, and Ben staggered toward the sound. He found her lying on her back behind two headstones, blinking up at the cold gray sky above them.
“Oh, my god. Are you okay?” Ben dropped beside her and looked frantically over her body for broken bones or blood or anything seriously wrong.
“I’m fine, I think,” she said. She tried to sit up, and Ben reached out with a hand behind her back to help her.
“Just… take it slow, right? Does anything hurt?”
She frowned, let out a sigh, and blinked a few times at him. “I just got tossed across a cemetery by a demon.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Her obvious disorientation melted into a dazed smile. “Never thought I’d say that.”
Ben couldn’t help a little laugh of relief. “I mean, you get points for that for sure.”
“What happened?”
He tried to find the best way to answer that, because he wasn’t exactly sure he knew despite Ian’s explanation. “I think we just missed one really important piece of information.”
April sighed. “Bummer.”
“You guys okay?” Peter called, sounding pretty weak still.
April let Ben help her up off the ground, and they both kind of staggered from around the headstones to make their way toward Peter. He still sat there on the ground, looking completely shell-shocked. His fist clenched around the stranger’s inhaler like he wouldn’t be able to breathe again if he let it go.
“Oh, no,” April said, staring down at the broken pieces of the metal box lying just a few feet from Peter’s outstretched legs.
Peter swung his head slowly to look at his broken demon-catcher, then shrugged. “Easy fix.”
“You okay?” Ben asked.
“Yeah.” Peter craned his neck up at Ben. “That was really close.”
“I know.” Only Ben and Peter had seen the stranger with the briefcase showing up just in time to save all their asses, and a silent agreement passed between them that they could talk about it later.
Hurried footsteps thumped across the dead grass, and Chase was really booking it toward them. He’d almost reached them all when he glanced down at the inhaler in Peter’s hand. Then he slowed to a stop and looked down at the other cannister of medicine he was holding too. “Wait,” he said, taking in their faces and the upturned earth in front of them, which surprisingly hadn’t affected the actual graves where people were buried. “Wait, what did I miss?”
They ended up going back to Peter’s place after that, mostly because he’d offered. The drive was a little tense with the shock of having lived through such a dangerously close call. Just a few wrong moves—Peter’s awful cold, April stepping backward instead of forward, Ben not crawling fast enough across the ground, Ian not having realized in time what they were facing. Small things, maybe, except for that last one, but it had almost been the end of them.
Well, maybe not for Chase. He’d missed all but the very beginning.
The guy seemed really pissed off about that fact when they sat in Peter’s living room, Ben and April on the couch and Peter and Chase in the two sinking armchairs. Ben and Peter had taken turns trying to describe to the other two what had happened. About both of them almost suffocating in their own ways and the totally ordinary stranger who’d just shown up out of nowhere at that exact moment to do what they couldn’t. Peter had been too focused on also not being able to breathe that he didn’t have any more information about the words the man had spoken or the items he’d pulled from his briefcase. So nothing helpful all around.