I wanted to write about an encounter in an especially spoopy cemetery… the story wound up being something very different from the one I thought I was going to write, but I’m a little fond of it. Something about telling your darkest secret to a stranger in a graveyard… something about never being sure if one or both of you are out of time… something about waiting to see if the folk tales are true.
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He spots a bobbing light, from the cemetery gates, freezes stock still until he sees the girl with the flashlight. It’s the flashlight that really settles him. She’s wearing a white dress, but it’s not really ‘ghostly nightgown’ so much as it is ‘boho chic seventies throwback that should have cost next to nothing or come out of your mama’s closet but instead you went into the city and paid three hundred bucks for it at a store with weird window displays’. There’s a stain on the front, but again, not like… blood or anything. But it’s the flashlight that really brings her fully into the realm of the living for him, that makes him sure she’s not a ghost.
He assumes she’s a girl, anyway — which is to say, younger than him, until he gets close, and she’s maybe about his age or even a little older.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” He says, and she startles for a moment at seeing someone else, but then she laughs.
“Bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Well, don’t meet too many hanging around the ol’ boneyard.”
“You from here?”
“From here?” He looks around them. “I didn’t think anyone was from here.”
“More a place you wind up by accident?” She laughs again. It’s not a flirty laugh — it’s sweet and safe. “I meant the town.”
“Didn’t think anyone was from there either.”
She perches up on a big block of stone, some kind of monument to someone. It’s still not flirtation, when her foot pokes at his leg, when she pulls a face.
“I’m from about half an hour away.” She offers. “Well… ‘from’. I lived there for a while, I guess, when I was married. I was an army brat growing up.”
“I used to live… fifteen minutes back east of here.” He nods. “But not for very long. I was… My old man was, I mean, um… Same boat. And now I’m… I dunno. I got a place I’m actually gonna stay and I got it in my head I had to go back and see where I was born. Took a wrong turn in the dark. Figured I’d just drive until I hit a landmark I could figure my way back from, and you know… found the most ominous one. Then I saw a light, and…”
“Thought you’d ask a ghost for directions?”
“Or a groundskeeper, if I was lucky. I’m not a lucky man. But… you don’t seem like a ghost.”
He reaches over and pokes her arm. She feels solid, but soft. Alive and human-like. Cold, sure, but it’s the middle of the night and she’s not wearing a jacket. It’s late March, probably warm when she set out.
“You an expert?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He sits beside her. “I have poked the quick and the dead and I can tell the difference.”
“You’re real cute.” She tells him this with no flirtation in her voice still. He likes that about her. “You wanna know something?”
He nods, watches as she turns the beam of her flashlight up from below her face, shadows warping the sweetly impish smile into something he finds he doesn’t want to look at.
It’s not that he thinks he’d be scared of her even if she was a ghost — though he’s never heard of a ghost carrying a flashlight — and he doesn’t think it’s even right to say he’s scared of her when he turns away from looking at her face. There’s just this ghoulish yellow flicker that changes the shape of her mouth, strips the softness from her cheek. She holds the light too far back and her eyes are swallowed by darkness. It’s a startling transformation, for a moment her face could be that of an old friend and then just as suddenly it’s ghastly.
Fear isn’t really the word for what he feels, no — discomfort, though, intense and prickly.
“You remind me of my husband.”
“You gonna tell me he buried you here exactly fifteen years ago today?”
She laughs so hard he imagines she throws her head back, but he doesn’t turn back.
“He died a couple years back. He was… a good man, mostly. A good man. Wanted to buy me a house with a picket fence, where we’d have a couple of kids. I could work if I wanted, or I could stay home. He drove a Thunderbird. Guy I was in love with wasn’t ever gonna ask me, so… I was half convinced I’d regret it, when I said yes, but you know what? I didn’t. Never knew how to feel about that.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because his whole life I never told him, or the other guy, or my own mother, my best friend, nobody. I don’t know if the worst part of the story is I didn’t love him when I married him, or if the worst part is I loved him after. Or I loved him enough. Maybe the worst part is getting old enough to figure out that life is like that, you find someone steadier than you used to know, and you say yes, and you love them enough not to regret it, but it’s not what you always dreamed about love being like. But I never told him. You look a little like him, when you smile, if the light hits you sideways. And I just thought to myself… a thing like that. It’s a hell of a secret to take to the grave. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“You ever been in love?”
He thinks of a motel room in a town he’s half forgotten, in a life he can’t shake off. He thinks of piercing eyes, and a man who stood far too close for casual conversation.
“Nope.” He pops the ‘p’, exaggerated. He doesn’t look at her. “Never have.”
“I’m waiting here to meet the devil.” She tells him. Just says it with absolutely no lead-up.
“You sure you want to?”
“Oh, I’m sure. You want to stick around?”
“No, ma’am. If the devil wants to catch me, I intend to make him work for it. I don’t think he’s someone I want to run into in a dark… cemetery.”
“Then you best head up that road until you hit the interstate.”
She’s all demure, when he looks back at her, her hands folded, the flashlight aiming a faint yellow path back to the gates. Her ankles crossed, heel of one bare foot resting against the stone — when had she slipped out of her shoes? Kicked them off into the dark while they were talking, he supposes, she can’t have been without them long. And she looks off into the distance, placid in her anticipation.
“You sure you…?” He begins. Going to meet the devil in the cemetery sounds like something a group of high school kids does with a bottle of stolen booze, or maybe college kids. Not the occupation of a clear-headed, if painfully bougie, adult woman. But she doesn’t talk about it the way kids do, like it’s fun.
“I’m sure.”
“What do you think you’ll do to him if he shows?”
“He will, tonight. Intend to make him listen.”
He hesitates, a moment. She sits there, this soft and pretty thing, hair pale gold under the moon, the glow of her dirtied white dress in the darkness… she sits there like she could be waiting on anything or nothing, but she sounds too certain, too steely. She sounds like she’s prepared, for this, and whatever’s gonna happen, she’s prepared for that, too.
“Ma’am?” He asks, and his voice comes out a little soft and shy, and an octave up from its usual, comes out a little boy’s voice. Little boy who’s taken a walk through the graveyard and come to regret it. But he doesn’t think he does — he’s had enough regrets to know the difference.
“Change your mind?” She asks him.
“I fell in love once. I let him go… I thought it was better that way. And I never told a soul.” He sits back down beside her, and tries to settle. “I didn’t even tell him. Hell of a secret to take to the grave, right?”
She nods, and reaches over and covers his hand with her own. “You don’t have to stick around, honey.”
“Reckon if the devil’s coming, I got a few things of my own to cuss him out for. I’ll stick around.”
