the earth. Most of them were sealed up with iron doors and bolts, but one had a gate that stood just enough ajar for a small, malnourished girl to wriggle through.
Holding her breath against the damp musk, Tabby plunged inside. Without any sort of light, she had to painstakingly feel her way down the crude stone steps. Lower into the earth she descended until she reached the burial chamber.
Don’t invite them in. As she groped around in the dark for a resting place, Tabby tried to remember what her mother had always told her. Memories of her mother were few and far between, but her words concerning Tabby’s ability remained as sharp in her mind as words etched with a diamond upon glass. The dead won’t bother you if you don’t give them permission, if you don’t make yourself a willing receptacle for their messages. At least, that was how it was supposed to work.
The only other thing she had learned regarding her gift was that she should never, ever tell anyone of it, and the lesson had been a hard one. She couldn’t have been more than six, because her parents had still been alive and had sent her out to the orchard to collect the fallen apples for cider. Their neighbor, little Beth Bunn, had been there, picking wild asters, but she hadn’t been alone; there was a little boy Tabby had never seen before, watching the girls with serious eyes from a branch in an apple tree. Tabby had asked Beth who he was, but Beth insisted she didn’t know what Tabby was talking about. Certain that Beth was playing some sort of trick on her, Tabby grew upset and nearly started crying as she described the little boy with blond hair and big green eyes. “Oh,” Beth said, looking at her askance. “Do you mean to say you see Ollie Pickett? He used to live here, but he’s been dead for three years.” That was how Tabby learned that not everyone saw the people she saw around her. A week later she had been playing in the churchyard and noticed that all the other children were clustered at the far end, whispering and pointing at her. “Curious Tabby,” they had called her. And that was how Tabby learned that she could never tell a soul about her strange and frightening ability.
But even in a place so filled with death, the dead did not bother Tabby that night. With a dirt floor for her bed and the skittering of insects for her lullaby, Tabby pulled her knees up to her chest and allowed the tears she’d held in all day to finally pour out. She was lost, scared, and without her sister, utterly alone in the world.
* * *
After the first night, it was too dreadful to sleep in the tomb once the sun had gone down. Bugs crawled over her and rats gnawed on the rotten wood of coffins, and on the bones inside them. The shadow of a spirit, thin and almost entirely transparent, had drifted by her in a cloud of incoherent moans and laments. But Tabby had held her breath, watching it pass by, and it had taken no heed of her. Now she slept during the day, coming out at night to look for the church, and to forage amongst the shuttered stalls of the market for dropped vegetables and crumbs.
She had lost count of the days since Alice had left her, and the gnawing thought that she had forsaken Tabby on the church steps on purpose was never far from the surface of her mind. Had that been Alice’s plan all along, to abandon Tabby? In her twelve years Tabby had learned that you couldn’t trust people, even family. But Alice was different. Alice had taken care of her, looked out for her after their parents died and their aunt and uncle took them in. Alice had suffered alongside Tabby from the interest their relatives showed in the sisters’ rare abilities. No, Alice would not leave Tabby, not unless something terrible had happened.
One night, as dusk fell thick and dreary, Tabby watched as the caretaker shuffled about the grounds, picking up the rotted bouquets left on the graves. A tall, lean, dark-skinned man with graying hair and a pronounced limp, he made an appearance every few days to pluck at some of the more aggressive weeds and ensure that the gates were padlocked at night. It didn’t seem to be a