Cemetery

I never understood why we lived in Cathstone. It was this small suburban town, if you could even call it that, on the outskirts of the nearby city Atton. So few people knew of it that it was easier to just say you lived in Atton, and most people did. My mom worked at a fifties style dinner whose pancakes made just enough to cover the bills and my dad still hadn’t come back from getting milk at the corner store.

Before Cathstone, we had lived in a town out in the country, but that had been a while ago. It was after my five year old self told my mom that I thought the neighbors had wings that we moved. Ever since then we had lived here in a tiny house in a forgotten town.

The high school I went to was sketchy at best. Teachers would occasionally be replaced for no apparent reason and a clique of bullies seemed to run everything. Not that I cared. I tended to pretend they didn’t exist which irritated them to no end. That was probably how I ended up here on Halloween night outside the town’s only cemetery that just so happened to be haunted.

“Go on,” the ringleader, Eric, said as he shoved my shoulder. “We don’t have all night.”

“What, you got some kids to terrorize after this?” I grumbled, taking a couple steps toward the gate they had managed to pick the lock of.

“None of your damn business,” he replied.

One of his cronies gave a small bow as he held the gate open. “Ladies first.” I scowled back as I walked into the cemetery. The gate clanged shut behind me and I heard the lock click back into place.

“We’ll be back after midnight to let you out!”One called as they began to walk away.

“Yeah right,” another muttered, the group cackling as they walked away, no doubt going to steal some candy from unsuspecting kids. I shook my head, shoving my hands into my pockets as I turned back to head deeper into the cemetery. I didn’t doubt that they wouldn’t bother coming back to unlock the gate.

I didn’t believe in ghosts, and with the full moon illuminating everything, wandering about the cemetery for a while honestly didn’t seem that bad. Anyways, I didn’t feel like attempting to scale the gate just yet. Other than the park, this was the only place where nature was left mostly undisturbed. The grass was untamed, creepers covered the older gravestones, and crooked trees covered dirt and cobblestone paths.

I glanced at the gravestones as wandered, looking for funny deaths or Darwin Awards. It had been over an hour before I came across the strangest gravestone in the cemetery. It was in the far back, an ancient tree growing around the large slab. The words were in a dialect so old that it was unrecognizable, the runic scrawl embedded into the stone with silver. I stared at the gravestone for a while, spacing out as I tried to make some sense of the runes.

“A bit late for a stroll among the dead.” The voice startled me out of my stupor and I glanced up to see a teenage boy leaning against the tree. He seemed to have just come from a party as he was dressed up in fancy medieval garb with the hood of his cloak pulled up over his head.

“Is there ever a good time?” I asked, looking at him suspiciously.

“True enough,” he chuckled, pushing off the tree and strolling over. “But here, now? It’s almost midnight.”

“You scared of a few ghosts? You don’t actually believe that it’s haunted.” I squinted upward at him, frowning slightly at his words. It wasn’t eight when I entered the cemetery, and I couldn’t have been wandering for more than an hour. How could it be midnight?

“Ghosts, haunted?” No,” he scoffed, wandering around to the other side of me. “But you really should be going.”

I shook my head. Some people are weird. “Whatever, it’s not like you’re doing the same exact thing,” I muttered as I started heading back toward the gate. Before I had made it very far, I heard the clock tower bells chime midnight and a glowing silver light came from behind me. I turned and saw the runes on the gravestone glowing brightly in the moonlight. “What the-”

“Go!” The boy shouted, a hand pressed over his eyes as he leaned heavily against the tree. “Run.”

I stood frozen for a moment before turning around and sprinting toward the gate. I had been wandering around the cemetery for longer than I expected and couldn’t see the wall. The ground rumbled beneath my feet as I stumbled along trying not to trip over twisting roots. When I glanced over my shoulder, the glowing gravestone had been covered by the trees and the light was just barely visible between branches and other gravestones. I don’t know how, but the number of trees had somehow doubled since I first arrived. A dark shadow chased me between the branches and roots and gravestones.

Then, all at once, the trees around me disappeared and the open gate loomed ahead. But that couldn’t be right. It hadn’t seemed like it had been long enough to make it back to the gates. Shaking my head, I kept running, not wondering why the gate was unlocked and open, and only stopped after I had made it out of the cemetery. Panting, I looked back through the open gate. The moon hung a little lower in the sky while the inside looked almost undisturbed, the same sparse, twisted trees as had been there when I first entered. I frowned, but shrugged it off. It was probably just my imagination or Eric’s cronies were trying extra hard to scare me.

Brushing dirt off of my clothes, I turned back around and started to head home, wanting the day to finally be over. From the gates of the cemetery, a shadowed figure watched unbeknown to me.