Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,43

shoulder and she whirled, crouching to the ground to defend herself. A burst of rushing air made her skin crawl as a black shape flew over her and then landed in a tree.

She looked around her. And then she saw them. First one, and then another. They were surrounding her. The hoarse croaking sounds came from a conspiracy of thirteen ravens moving through the branches of the trees, calling to one another, speaking in their ancient codes. But the ravens weren’t just conversing with each other—they were looking at her, flying around her, trying to communicate with her. As if frustrated by her lack of understanding, several of the ravens began diving at her with their claws. Were they attacking her or were they warning her? She didn’t know.

“Leave me alone!” she shouted. She covered her head with her arms and ran to escape them. She dove into a thicket of brush, where the large birds couldn’t fly. Driven by fear, she just kept running.

When she finally stopped to catch her breath, she looked behind her to see if they were still following. She found herself standing on something hard—some sort of flat surface. She looked down and saw a long, straight edge of gray stone. Now what? she thought.

It was half buried, but she knelt on the ground and wiped away the dirt and leaves to expose the smooth, flat granite underneath.

Serafina read the words that someone had etched in blocky letters into the stone:

HERE LIES BLOOD, AND LET IT LIE,

SPEECHLESS STILL, AND NEVER CRY.

She felt a cold sweat pass over her. She looked around. There was another flat gray stone just a few feet away. She pulled the brush aside and read:

COME HITHER, COME HITHER, AND LAY WITH ME.

WE’LL MURDER THE MAN WHO MURDERED ME.

CLOVEN SMITH 1797–1843

All right, I don’t like this place at all. These are graves.…

She wiped her clammy hands on her shirt, then she took a few more steps, finding more graves beneath the undergrowth of the forest. The graveyard seemed like it went on and on. There were graves as far as she could see, most of them overgrown with vines and trees.

Many of the headstones were so close together that they couldn’t possibly have bodies beneath them, just like the stories she’d heard. It was as if people had gone missing, their bodies never found, and these were but markers of the lost.

But as she delved deeper into the oldest parts of the abandoned cemetery, she saw mounds where bodies had definitely been buried, and other graves that were empty holes, as if the coffins had been plundered or the dead had crawled out of the ground on their own.

She swallowed hard and tried to keep moving despite the trembling in her limbs.

In some places, the layers of earth appeared as if they had shifted, exposing broken, rotting coffins to the air. Some of the coffins jutted up out of the earth or were tangled beneath gnarled tree roots. She kept walking and reading the stones. A hundred years of old people, young people, brothers and sisters, friends and enemies, husbands and wives.

She had heard stories about this old cemetery, filled with hundreds of gravestones and monuments, even though no one alive could remember burying the people. Many of the local mountain folk wondered where all the dead people in this cemetery had come from. Whole families seemed to have perished in short spans of time.

There were tall tales that the mountain folk no longer used this cemetery because burying your loved ones here didn’t necessarily guarantee that they would stay. The coffins shifted in the unstable earth. The bodies went missing. Your dead loved ones were seen wandering their old homes and streets, as if searching for a place to rest.

There were tales, too, of human beings shifting into the shape of wild animals, of sorcerers and witches with surpassing power, and horrible, disfigured creatures crawling through the forest.

She came upon two small mounds so close together, side by side, that they were nearly a single grave. One tombstone identified the two young sisters within:

OUR BED IS LOVELY, DARK, AND SWEET.

COME JOIN US NOW AND WE SHALL MEET.

MARY HEMLOCK AND MARGARET HEMLOCK

1782–1791 REST IN PEACE AND DON’T RETURN

When she read the words don’t return, the hairs on the back of her neck tingled. What kind of strange place was this?

She had come in search of an old village, but all she’d found was its cemetery. She had a feeling that this was