by Greg Herren
And I was crazy in love with Marc.
And we shared our first kiss last summer.
Everyone was thrown forward suddenly when Logan slammed on the brakes without warning.
“Jesus, Logan!” Teresa snapped. “Pay attention!”
“Sorry,” Logan said as he shifted the vehicle into park. “I almost missed the turn. It just kind of snuck up on me.”
The SUV had stopped just past the gravel road with Cemetery Road on the signpost. Logan shifted into reverse and backed up. We sat there for a moment, the headlights lighting up the woods on either side of the road.
I looked out the back window. The red glow of the taillights seemed to be swallowed up in the thick blackness.
“I wasn’t even going that fast,” Logan said defensively. He shifted the car back into drive and began slowly creeping along the road. “But this is Cemetery Road. Keep an eye out for the cemetery.”
Nobody said anything as the car moved down the road, the only sounds Nicki Minaj on the stereo and the tires crunching the gravel. Teresa squeezed my leg, and when I looked at her, she smiled. I smiled back at her.
The car went around a curve in the road and there was an opening in the trees on the right, just ahead.
“Looks like we found it,” Logan said as he slowed down even more.
There was an iron fence running alongside the road, maybe about six yards away, on the other side of a ditch. I turned my head and could see the entry road to the cemetery and a big gate. Logan carefully turned the SUV off the road, and in the headlights we could see, written in wrought-iron letters across the top of the big iron gate: NORTH HOLLOW CEMETERY.
The gates were open.
Shouldn’t they be closed? A chill went down my spine. Maybe we shouldn’t go in here.
I had a really bad feeling.
But I didn’t say anything.
“Awesome!” Carson was practically bouncing up and down in his seat with excitement.
“Okay, here we go,” Logan said and drove into the cemetery.
Chapter Three
The car rolled to a stop about twenty yards inside the gate.
Logan turned the engine off, and we sat there in a hushed silence.
The only sounds were the tick of the cooling engine and our breathing on the inside—and the windshield started fogging up.
I felt uncomfortable, like something was just not right. I shifted in my seat. I opened my mouth to suggest we leave but stopped myself. It was weird, but I felt anxious, like something was about to happen and the only way to keep it from happening was for us to back up and get the hell away from the North Hollow cemetery. As each second ticked past, the anxiety continued to grow stronger. I swallowed because my mouth and my throat were dry. Teresa gave me an odd look and handed me her bottle of water. I took a big drink and handed it back to her. She gave me a reassuring smile. She gently patted my leg. “It’ll be okay,” she mouthed at me.
I just smiled back at her and swallowed again, closing my eyes and trying to control my growing anxiety. I felt like I’d walked into a class to discover I’d forgotten we were having a midterm and hadn’t studied at all. I shook my head slightly, trying to get a grip on myself. It’s not like I’d never been to a cemetery before. Granted, this was the first time I’d ever been to one at night, but there were no such things as ghosts—no matter how badly Carson wanted to believe they existed. It was no different than being here during the day, I reminded myself.
But it was still pretty dark out there.
I shifted a bit in my seat again. I inhaled sharply. On my left, Rachel looked away from her phone long enough to give me a weird look, her eyebrows raised. She leaned in close to me and whispered, “Dad’s TV show is a bunch of bullshit, you know, for idiots who want to believe in this kind of stupid shit.” She rolled her eyes. “And Carson’s the biggest idiot of them all.” She looked back at her phone and grinned. “Oh my God!” She squealed loudly, holding the phone up so I could see it. “Look! Bars!”
“I knew I should have brought my phone,” Logan said from the front seat. “Who knew the cemetery would be the only place up here you can get a signal?” He laughed. “All right, then.” Logan turned to look at us in the backseat. “What’s the plan, yo? We just gonna sit in the car all night, or are we going to find some ghosts?” He reached over and high-fived Carson.
“Let’s go!” Carson said, his voice excited as he opened his door and the dome light came on. He slid down out of his seat and leaned back inside the car. He pushed his glasses up and waved at the backseat. “Come on, you guys, let’s get a move on.” Without another word he slammed his door shut and started walking down the dirt road. I could clearly see him in the headlights. Logan followed suit, slamming his door and hurrying to catch up to him. Rachel opened her door with a sigh and shoved her phone into her shorts pocket.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The feeling was still there and was getting stronger. My stomach felt like it was knotting and my heart was beating fast. I felt like I might throw up. This isn’t right, this isn’t right, this isn’t right kept running through my head.
“Aren’t you coming?” Teresa asked, putting her hand on my shoulder. “Or are you just going to sit in the car? You know, that’s not such a bad idea.” She made a face. “There’re probably mosquitoes and bugs everywhere around here. And snakes.” She shuddered. “I hate snakes.”
“I don’t think snakes are nocturnal,” I said, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath. I let it out. “All right, I’m coming.” I undid the buckle of my seat belt.
But I didn’t want to get out of the car.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so afraid in my life.
I shook my head. “You’re being an idiot,” I said to myself under my breath. “What is there to be afraid of? It’s all in your head.” I forced a smile on my face for Teresa’s benefit and slid across the seat. I stepped down out of the SUV, my feet sinking into the soft dirt on the side of the road.
And as soon as my feet touched the ground, the anxiety disappeared like it had never existed in the first place.
I actually felt a rush of joy so intense I couldn’t stop myself from grinning from ear to ear and almost laughed out loud. I rose up on my toes and turned my head up to look at the stars blinking in the dark purple sky. I felt alive, like I could fly, so happy and free—
But just as quickly as it had come, the feeling drained out of me.
And I felt weirdly empty.
Weird, I thought to myself as I took a look around. I rubbed my bare arms. Goose bumps were rising on my skin, and I shivered a little bit.
The cemetery was longer than it was wide, stretching maybe thirty yards on either side of the dirt road in the center to where the tree line started again. I could barely make out the wooden fence in the darkness as I shut the door behind me. It looked to be, from the entry gate to where the gradually downward sloping cemetery ended at the fence and the forest, maybe two or three hundred yards long. It looked like there was a big drop-off just on the other side of the fence at the end because the headlights were shining into the tops of pine trees. The moon came out from behind some clouds, and I shivered again. The air was moist and sticky, but it felt colder than it had when we’d gotten into the car. There was a slight fog rising from the ground, and in the beam of the car’s headlights I could see that some of the graves had small American flags planted on them, just in front of the headstones.
“I wonder what’s the deal with the flags?” Teresa asked, wrapping her arms around herself, her voice hushed. “Look at them all. They look relatively new, don’t they?”
“Doesn’t the VFW put flags on the graves of vets on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day?” I whispered back to her, stepping off into the ankle-high grass alongside the road. The tall grass was a little damp, and I itched where it brushed against my legs. Teresa walked around to the front of the car, but I didn’t go with her. The temperature was dropping, and dropping fast. I rubb
ed my arms just as more goose bumps came out of my skin—the hairs on my forearms were standing straight up. I rubbed my forearms, trying to get warmer, and my teeth started chattering.
Teresa and Rachel hurried to catch up to Logan and Carson, who were talking in hushed voices I could barely hear—all I heard was some mumbling. The cold was getting even more intense, which didn’t make any sense. I blew into my hands, trying to get them warmer. All of the hair on my arms was now standing up, and when I put my hand on the back of my neck, my skin felt like ice. They’d probably make fun of me for not going with them, but I didn’t want to—and I didn’t care if they did tease me or call me a fraidy cat or something equally stupid.
I was starting to feel uncomfortable again, and when the moon went behind some clouds, it took all of my self-control to not open the car door and climb back inside.
I wished I’d grabbed a sweatshirt. I should have known the temperature would drop.
But what I really wanted was for us to just get back into the SUV and head back up to the lodge, where it was warm and—
Safe.
You’re really losing your mind, aren’t you? I chided myself. Like Rachel had said, it was just a graveyard, and there were no such things as ghosts. I took another deep, calming breath like Mom always told me to do whenever I was nervous and about to panic, and cleared my mind.
When I opened my eyes, I felt a lot better and started looking around. I was still cold, but it wasn’t that bad.
The cemetery was unlike any other I’d ever seen before—not that I had a lot of experience with them. My dad was originally from rural Virginia, in the far western part of the state near the Kentucky state line, and whenever we went there to visit my paternal grandmother, we always made a pilgrimage to visit my grandfather’s grave at Four Corners Cemetery by the Baptist church. That cemetery was different than this one. At Four Corners, the graves were all lined up in neat rows so you could walk around without ever worrying about stepping on a grave by mistake. Here, the graves weren’t placed in even rows—it didn’t look like any thought had been put into placing them at all. They were scattered everywhere haphazardly, like when someone died they just picked an empty space regardless of where the other graves were placed. There was no rhyme or reason to it at all. In some places, the headstones were no more than a few feet away from the side of the road. The headstones themselves were an odd mix of shapes and sizes.
It felt like it was getting even colder, and the fog rising from the ground was getting thicker around my ankles, with little wisps floating up into the air and dissipating. I looked over at my friends. They’d stopped walking about twenty yards down the road and had gathered around a massive headstone about fifteen yards from the side of the road. I bit my lower lip. I wondered what they were doing and if I should join them, but somehow I couldn’t make myself walk down there.
You’re safer here—it’s better not to go down there. Stay close to the car.
I shook my head. Maybe I was losing my mind.
I stepped back up out of the grass and leaned with my back against the SUV. There was a large old headstone not ten feet from where I was standing.
It won’t hurt you to go take a look at it, now would it? What are you so afraid of, really? It’s just a headstone.
I walked through the ankle-high grass until I was standing next to the headstone. It was remarkably large, so big it seemed like it should have more than one name carved it into, like a married couple’s or maybe even an entire family’s. The ones this size at Four Corners in Virginia usually did.
But the carving on the face of this one simply read:
ALBERT TYLER
June 10, 1890–August 20, 1907
“How sad,” I said without thinking about it, “he was only seventeen.” And we have the same birthday.
As I knelt next to the tombstone, an overwhelming sense of sadness swept over me.
It was so intense I felt tears swimming up in my eyes.
My heart was breaking, and I had to stifle a sob.
How awful to die so young, I thought, wiping at my eyes and looking over to the next headstone. It was slightly larger, and Tyler was also carved into it, close to the top. Underneath, there were two gray boxes with names carved inside. The one on the left said Abram with the dates March 7, 1858–September 12, 1920 underneath. The right read Sarah, and the dates of her life were April 2, 1866–January 3, 1965.
Another tear ran down the side of my face and I swiped at it. “You poor thing,” I murmured. “You outlived your son by almost fifty-eight years. How awful for you that must have been. Did you ever get over it, Mrs. Tyler? Can you get over something like that?”
The sadness—the sorrow—swept over me again, and as my eyes filled with more tears, I couldn’t help feeling a little confused. Why do I feel so bad for these people I don’t even know? What’s wrong with me? Why is this affecting me so strongly?
Almost the moment I thought that, I remembered the day when I was thirteen when Mom and Dad had to have my cocker spaniel, Skipper, put to sleep. I remembered my mother herding him into his kennel and my dad carrying it out to the car—they wouldn’t let me go with, so I’d already had to say good-bye to him, he had cancer and it wasn’t curable, and Mom had wiped her own tears away as I buried my face in his neck and cried, it wasn’t fair, he was a good dog—
I caught my breath as I forced down a sob.
I hadn’t thought about Skipper in years. Why now? Why here, of all places?
And Marc flashed into my head, saying good-bye to him last night, and the sad look on his face as we hugged at my front door, and how he’d said I don’t know, I’m just afraid I’ll never see you again before he walked down the driveway and down the street to his own house, and how weird that had been, but I’d felt sad, lonely, and empty. It had taken me a long time to fall asleep.
I shivered a little as the moon went behind a cloud again. My back now felt so cold it was like it had turned to ice, just like my arms and shoulders and the back of my neck, and I wished again I’d brought a sweatshirt with me.
I took another deep breath and touched the tombstone for a moment, tracing the name with my index finger.
“I wonder what you died from, Albert,” I said out loud. Of course, in 1907 it could have been anything—the flu, measles—back then, any number of diseases that nowadays were just nuisances were often fatal—
What is wrong with me?
—and the sorrow, that overwhelming sadness, was growing stronger and seemed to be seeping into every corner of my consciousness. I shivered again.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that everyone else had gathered around yet another tombstone closer to where I was kneeling next to Albert’s grave. Teresa was waving at me frantically, so with one last glance at Albert’s headstone, I stood up and walked down the slight slope, carefully avoiding stepping on graves.
The sadness started fading away but I was still cold.
“What’s—” I started to say, but Carson shushed me.
“Look at the flags,” Carson whispered. He pointed.
I turned my head in the direction they were all staring. Illuminated inside the vast swath of light cast by the headlights of the car were several graves with small American flags planted on them, a few feet from their headstones. There were five or six graves in close proximity, and all the flags hung limply except for one that was waving wildly in a nonexistent breeze.
And it was directly in the center of the grouping of graves.
“That’s not possible,” I heard myself saying in a low voice. “How can the other flags not be moving?”
“There’s not any wind,” Rachel said, her voice shaking a little. “No wind at all.”
“Do you believe now?” Carson whispered triumphantly. “How else could that flag be moving if a ghost wasn’t trying to get our attention?”
We stood there in silence for a few moments that seemed like hours, watching the little flag waving. Finally, Carson
pulled a recording device out of his shirt pocket. “Come on,” he whispered and started walking toward the grave. Logan and Teresa followed, but Rachel and I hung back.
“Creepy, huh?” Rachel kept her voice low. “Do you think it’s a ghost?”
“I thought you said there was no such thing,” I whispered back to her, unable to take my eyes away from the waving flag. “But what other explanation can there be?” I shivered again.
“Well, it’s certainly not the wind.” She shook her head. “Carson’s going to be impossible to live with now.” She sounded annoyed, as though a ghost had started moving the flag specifically to irritate her.
I didn’t answer her and turned back to look back toward Albert’s grave.
I could feel the sadness creeping back into me again, growing stronger with each second until I felt like all I wanted to do was curl up into a ball and just sob.
“Are you okay?” I heard Rachel asking in a strange tone. Her voice sounded hollow and distant, like she was standing a good distance away rather than right next to me.
I didn’t answer her. Instead, I started walking back to Albert’s grave, and vaguely I was aware of her following me, the sound of her feet swishing through the damp grass.
I felt numb and forced myself to swallow. The cold was getting more intense the closer I got to Albert’s grave.
Isn’t cold a sign of a haunting, didn’t you read that in a book somewhere, that ghosts always bring cold with them?
I shook my head. There’s no such thing as ghosts. It’s just getting colder out here, that’s all.
But the sadness—why was I feeling so sad?
I closed my eyes—