The Whispering Dead (Gravekeeper #1) - Darcy Coates Page 0,84
must have something keeping you here,” Keira pressed. “Maybe I can help.”
The spirit’s head lowered as she turned away. In a heartbeat she was gone, evaporated into the fog as though she’d never existed at all.
Keira let out a ragged breath. She pulled on the muscle behind her eyes to open her second sight again. It was sore from over-use, and a low, throbbing headache set up as Keira pushed it harder. It made no difference. Marianne was gone.
Keira let her sight relax slightly as she turned away. Chills ran along her skin, the hairs rising, as she sensed something else watching her.
Or, rather, many eyes watching her.
The graveyard held dozens of spirits. Some were so faint that Keira could barely make out flickers of movement between the gravestones. Others were so strong that they seemed to glow.
The sun must have risen, but it barely touched Blighty’s cemetery. The area was shrouded in a conflicting twilight, dampened further by the mist that never seemed to fully evaporate, and the tall, leafless trees that stretched dark branches into the sky.
A man stood barely ten paces behind Keira. Grizzled and with sunken cheeks, his dead eyes met hers for a heartbeat before a cloud of fog rolled between them, obscuring him. When it passed, he was gone.
Keira cleared her throat. She’d ventured into the graveyard to meet its spirits, learn their names, and hopefully understand their situations a little better, but had strayed deeper than she’d meant to. The groundskeeper’s cottage—her temporary home—felt miles away. She couldn’t even remember which direction it was in. She took a step forward, her boots crunching over layers of frost, and stopped again.
Something small and dark whisked through the tall grass. Keira squinted to follow the liquid shadow, then smiled. Daisy, her black cat, hunted insects. Her tail lashed as she spotted some new prey, then she vanished again, swallowed by the gloom.
At least someone was having a good time.
Keira hunched her shoulders and kept moving, her eyes scanning her surroundings, picking out the monuments and cracked tombstones in her path.
A low, creaking noise came from her right. Just the trees groaning. They strained under their own weight, as though each new morning brought further discomfort.
That meant she was closer to the forest’s edge than she’d thought. The tombstones continued into the trees. Keira had tried to find the graveyard’s end, once, before encountering a presence that forced her to turn back.
Her head throbbed. Figures blinked in and out of view as she strode between the stones. She moved carefully as she tried to avoid stepping on the burial mounds, but the cemetery was chaotic, and some of the graves were so old that their only remaining evidence was a glimpse of fractured slate between thick grass.
She didn’t think it was her imagination that the spirits of Blighty Cemetery were avoiding her. They watched from a distance, sometimes, but almost all vanished when she turned towards them.
Condensed mist trickled down Keira’s back like an otherworldly finger tracing her spine. She shuddered, hunching her shoulders further. She thought she must be nearing the groundskeeper’s cottage. Some of the markers looked familiar.
Keira circled a tree, running her hand across the damp, cracked bark as she passed it. Her view ahead momentarily cleared and she glimpsed an elderly woman in elaborate Victorian dress. Keira dipped her head politely as she approached. “Hello!”
Unlike Marianne, this spirit was crisp and bright. She seemed to glow like a light through the fog. Her wrinkled, angular face didn’t even turn towards Keira, but her eyes narrowed as she lifted her cane and strode through a magnificent headstone. She didn’t come out the other side.
“All right, cool, we’ll catch up another time.” Keira rubbed wet palms on her jeans. Am I imagining it, or are these ghosts being kind of… picky? I mean, I know I’m new at this, but it’s not like spirit mediums come through here every week.
Then, ahead, she caught a flash of motion. A spirit’s hand waved at her. Keira’s heart lifted and a smile grew as she lengthened her gait. “Good morning—”
A beaming man emerged from between two headstones. He was plump, middle-aged, mostly bald, and completely naked.
“Oh. Okay.” Keira cleared her throat and held up a hand to block her view of his lower half. “Well, hi, it’s nice to meet you?”
Dimples puckered his cheeks as he waved both hands. Unlike Keira, he had no compunctions about his state of dress. He was friendly, at least, so Keira kept her eyes fixed on his face as she moved nearer. “Which grave’s yours?”
He patted the top of a waist-height slab. Flakes of frost spread over the stone where he touched it. Keira leaned forward to read the epigraph. “Tony Lobell, huh? Nice to meet you.”
The stone said he’d passed away in 1998, age fifty-two, making him the most recent ghost she’d met. Even though he was recent, his grave was untended, with weeds growing over the mound. A small metal holder had been attached to the headstone, but if it had ever held flowers, they’d long decayed. That struck Keira as deeply melancholy, but the grave’s state wasn’t unusual. Only a handful showed any sign of human care.
Keira tried to keep the sadness out of her voice. “Do you have unfinished business keeping you here?”
Tony shrugged. The motion jiggled his belly, revealing more than Keira would have liked. She quickly repositioned her hand. “You’re not sure?”
He tapped the side of his head and gave her a what-can-you-do kind of smile.
“Oh, you can’t remember?”
A shake.
“Right. I’ll see if there’s anything I can do to help, anyway. I’d better keep moving, but thanks for talking with me, Tony.”
He beamed and waved, and Keira couldn’t help but match his infectious smile as she shuffled past him.
The strain of keeping the ghosts in sight created a throbbing headache that radiated through her skull. The skill seemed to get easier with practice, but she didn’t think she could hold onto the second sight for much longer.
One more introduction, then I’ll call it a day.
A pale spirit stood near the forest’s edge, not far from her cottage. His old, well-mended travelling coat moved in a breeze Keira couldn’t feel. He faced away from Keira, staring into the trees.
“Hi,” she said as she neared him. “I don’t know if you heard me earlier, but my name’s Keira.”
The spectre didn’t respond. His arms hung limp at his sides. He seemed to sway lightly, but it was hard to be sure when his form was so heavily disguised by the flowing fog. He stood on a grave—his grave, Keira guessed—with a small, discreet headstone at his side.
Keira kept her distance as she circled him. “How long have you been—?”
Her words died as she stopped ahead of the man. He wore old, tattered clothes that looked at least a hundred years old. Weeds grew high around his legs, their tips white with frost. And his face…
He didn’t have a face. The space between his temples and his chin had been carved away, hollowed out, as though it had been hacked at with an axe. No eyes, no mouth, just a gaping hole that extended deep into his head. Keira swallowed and abruptly looked away. She felt as though if she stared into that pit of flesh for too long, she would be in danger of falling into the chasm.
“Okay. Sorry, I didn’t expect…” She swallowed again and hazarded another look. “Um, can you hear me? Can you raise your hand if you understand me?”
The faceless spirit didn’t move except to sway, his patched coat twisting around his ankles, his hair floating as though weightless. His ears were still intact, Keira saw, half-buried in hair that was overdue for a cut. He should be able to hear her. He just wasn’t responding.
She looked at the stone at his side. There was no name, only a date: November 15th, 1891. Keira frowned. “That’s strange. I’ve never seen a stone without a name before.”
The spirit seemed to shiver, then his form melted away like an illusion, leaving Keira standing alone beside the gravesite.
Continue reading in Gravekeeper Book 2: The Ravenous Dead