by Tim Waggoner
The trees—you’re not sure what they are, oak, elm—seem to droop in the heat, their leaves limp and dry. The treetops sway in a breeze which doesn’t reach down this far. Or maybe there isn’t a breeze and the trees are swaying all by themselves, your imagination whispers. You half expect to feel a tingle along your spine at the idea, as you would have when you were a child. But you feel nothing. From somewhere off in the distance comes the lazy thrum of cicadas.
You continue toward the building, careful to avoid stepping on any graves, not wishing to give someone in the past a shiver, you tell yourself jokingly. The building is a simple structure, four walls and a sloping roof, constructed from rough, weather-beaten logs. There are two windows, unadorned, no curtains, plain white-painted wood for frames. The left has a crack in one of its panes. All you can see through the glass is blackness, as if the building were filled with solid shadow. But you know it’s just a trick of the light.
The wood of the featureless gray door is beginning to come apart in tiny threads, as if it were woven of some sort of strange cloth. Another historical marker here, this one affixed to the side of the building. 1804 Quaker Meeting House.
To commemorate the first church erected in Baker Township, Poss County, OH. This log replica was constructed in 1972 by the Baker Township 4-H Club and the Greenfield area Camp Fire Girls.
This sign you have read before. You read it aloud to your twin nephews the first time you brought them here, over twenty years ago. They couldn’t have been more than four, and both were scared of going into the meetinghouse, so you went in first, to check for ghosts, you said. The boys looked at you, eyes wide with equal measures of fear and delight. And after you came out and pronounced “No ghosts,” in a solemn voice, they repeated the phrase in awe and wonder. They walked around the rest of the day saying “No ghosts” to everyone they saw.
The boys graduated college a while back, and you don’t get to see them that much, mostly just during special occasions, like today. They looked so grown up this morning, you barely recognized them. You know it’s a cliché, but you still can’t help wondering where the time got to. Maybe it came here, you think. After all, time has to go somewhere when it dies. Why not here?
You grip the rusty metal handle and shove open the door. It doesn’t give easily, and you know it’s been a long time since anyone’s been in here. You step inside the meetinghouse—no, the replica—and find that despite the heat outside, the stale air in here is almost cool.
There’s enough light filtering in from the windows to see by, not that there’s much to look at. A half dozen crude benches made of split logs for seats and lengths of two by fours for legs. A lectern up front. The floor is covered with a scattering of dust, dirt and twigs. You look upward, half expecting to see a bat or two hanging from the crossbeams, but you don’t. Just a small black paper wasps’ nest, dry and fragile.
You wonder if anyone has actually ever used this meeting hall to hold a service, or if it’s nothing more than a kind of graveyard tourist attraction. Perhaps the spirits who used to attend church across the street now come here to worship, or whatever it is the dead do. Or perhaps this isn’t really a replica at all. Perhaps this is the hall from across the street. Perhaps this is where it came after it was no longer needed.
Your imagination again. This is just a project some 4-H kids thought up, or more likely some adult in charge of them. So what if the shadows huddled in the corners seem too thick, too dark? They’re just shadows. You walk outside and pull the door closed behind you.
You step around to the side of the building, and there, next to the chain link fence that serves as a rear wall for the burial ground is an old tree—an oak? And resting at the base of the tree, propped against the trunk, are three small headstones, their surfaces smooth and blurred by time and the elements, whatever legends they once contained lost forever. The stones are a bright green; moss, perhaps, or some sort of mildew.
You wonder why the headstones are here. Were they placed out of the way by whoever—or whatever, your imagination whispers—takes care of the burial ground? Did they fall naturally, or were they knocked over by kids? You and your friends never pushed over any of the stones during the times you played here. You always thought it was because your parents taught you it was wrong to vandalize property. Now you wonder if it wasn’t simply because you were afraid.
Maybe, your imagination supplies, the bodies whose resting place the stones marked had gone to dust. And with no one to stand over, the stones fell, their purpose gone. Maybe the tree is some sort of marker itself, a monument to the headstones’ decades, perhaps centuries, of watchful service.
And maybe it’s just a tree. You move on, walking along the fence, not ready to look at the graves just yet. Less than two dozen feet from the meetinghouse, the grass gives way to a circle of bare earth. Another broken headstone lies face down in the circle, and you realize that it’s been jammed into a hole, one big enough for a good-sized dog to go down. A groundhog hole, most likely. You’ve seen groundhogs in here before. One of your childhood friends, Eric Groves, used to say the groundhogs fed on the bodies buried here. You were always too smart to believe him, but every now and then you couldn’t help wondering.
You ask yourself why didn’t whoever it is that keeps the grass trimmed so neatly fill in the hole with dirt rather than block it with a headstone? The latter action seems completely out of character for someone who otherwise takes such good care of the place. Probably some kid’s idea of a joke. You consider removing the stone and placing it over against the tree with the others, but you decide against it, telling yourself it’s too damn hot.
You walk past the hole, thinking of the fun Eric Groves would have had making up stories about it to scare everyone. You wonder where Eric is now. Last you heard, he was a chemical engineer living in Texas. But that was years ago.
You think of all the things you and your friends used to do here. You would race weaving in and out among the gravestones, tell ghost stories to try to scare one another, and when it was dark—or rather dusk, for none of you would dare stay here once the sun was all the way down—you’d catch lightning bugs or better yet, play ghost in the graveyard.
You’re not even sure you can remember the rules of the game. It was some version of tag, except the person who was it was the ghost, and whenever the ghost touched someone, that kid had to fall down and lie still, eyes closed. The last person to be touched was the new ghost. Or something like that. It was really fun to play in full darkness, you recall, because it was harder to tag people, plus you ran the risk of tripping over the “dead” bodies. But playing in a real graveyard gave the game a special thrill that more than made up for playing at dusk.
At the time you used to wonder if the spirits in the graves you ran laughing and shouting over were angry at the disturbance. Now you think they probably miss it. You know you sure do.
Jesus, but you feel old.
You stop beneath a tree—an elm?—and wipe your forehead again, but all you do is smear sweat around. You gave up smoking when you were twenty-one, but you wish you had a cigarette now, even though smoking would probably just make you feel hotter. You wished you had a cigarette this morning, too, when you watched your father’s coffin being lowered into a grave in a much larger and nicer cemetery on the other side of town. You tell yourself Dad’s death was a blessing, that at least it freed him from the cancer. And even though you feel selfish for this—after all, it’s your father you should be mourning—you can’t help feeling that your childhood was buried along with him.
Your mother died six years ago of congestive heart failure, and now your father’s gone too. You are officially, and irrevocably an adult now. An aging adult with an ex-wife, no kids, and nothing really standing between you and the long descent into the same sort of hole that your father was planted in today.
Is that why you came here after the reception at your sister’s place? To say good-bye to your childhood? Maybe.
&n
bsp; You step out of the shade and walk toward the nearest row of gravestones. You begin reading names and dates. John Hoover 1760-1813, Sarah Burkett (Beloved Wife and Mother) 1767-1843, Absalom Mast 1869-1908. Well, at least you stand a good chance of living longer than these folk. That’s something to feel good about, isn’t it?
You move on a few rows. The headstones here are smaller and made out of chalk-white stone. The legends are at once simpler and more ornate: Wm. S. Pearson, died 1871, 5 Mon., 12 Day, Aged 37 Y. Another row over and the faces of the stones are soft and blank, scoured by year after year of wind, rain and snow. You know just how they feel.
Despite the fact that you’re wearing dress slacks, you lower yourself to the neatly trimmed grass and sit cross-legged on the hot ground, facing the blank stones.
You wonder if some years hence—not as many as you’d like—your nephews will come here after your funeral to say good-bye to a piece of their childhood. You wish you’d made more time for them when they were young, done more things with them.
But it’s too late now.
As you sit and sweat, you fancy you see letters forming on the blank gray-white face of the stone in front of you, as if rising upward through murky water. Letters that form a familiar name. But it’s just your imagination again. There are no letters, no name. Just featureless stone.
You stand, your knees protesting in a way they wouldn’t have ten years ago.
Time to leave. You’ve got a long drive back to the city, back to an empty condo and a boring job. Back to what passes for your life.
And as you start to go, you feel a cold breeze brush the back of your neck, its sigh a dry whisper in your ear which seems to say, Tag, you’re it.
And the hell of it is, you know you are.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shirley Jackson Award–nominated author Tim Waggoner has published over thirty novels and three short story collections in the horror and urban fantasy genres. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction program. Visit him on the web at: www.timwaggoner.com.
About the Publisher
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.
Table of Contents
BROKEN SHADOWS
Connect With Us
Other Books by Author
When God Opens a Door
Zombie Dreams
Portrait of a Horror Writer
Waters Dark and Deep
Met a Pilgrim Shadow
Open House
Extern
’Til Voices Drown Us
Knock, Knock
Outside the Lines
Provider
Broken Glass and Gasoline
The Tongue is the Sweetest Meat
Ghost in the Graveyard
About the Author
