by Ray Garton
“Talk to me of pages and places most secret,” the stranger said.
“P-pages? I-I-I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re referring to.”
The stranger slowly knelt beside Joyce and placed his hand on her full, round belly.
“No,” Stuart breathed, feeling sick.
“I can feel them.”
“Them?” Joyce whispered. “How . . . could you know?”
“A boy child and a girl. Both shall be born well-favored.” He leaned forward, and eyes upon Stuart, whispered into Joyce’s ear, “Provided he tells me what I must hear.”
The fear in Joyce’s eyes became more vivid as she said, “Tell him, Stuart.”
The man stood, grinning. “Tell me, Stuart. Lest your children be born slugs of cold flesh, tell me now.”
“A place . . . a graveyard . . . on the other side of the bay. They’ve gone there. The Old . . . it’s called the Old Burying Point.”
The stranger suddenly gave them an expansive gentlemanly bow and said, “I bid you both goodnight,” and quickly left by the front door.
The pastor and his wife sat facing one another for long silent seconds, then he bounded to her side as she began to sob.
“It’ll be all right now, honey,” he cooed, holding her. “We’ll call the police. They’ll find him. It’s over, love, he’s gone. He’s—”
“No, Stuart, it’s not that,” she cried.
He pulled away and looked into her eyes.
“The babies,” she sobbed. “I can’t feel them, they’re dead. I know it, Stuart . . . they’re dead . . .”
24
Matters Most Grave
The plaque over the graveyard’s wrought iron gate read:
THE OLD BURYING POINT–1637
Beneath bare, skeletal tree branches, a grim but impressive assortment of headstones and tombs grew from the leaf-strewn ground. A full moon spilled a bluish glow over the markers, casting black liquid shadows.
Behind the graveyard, a bank declined into the bay; the only sound was water lapping gently at the shore.
Leaves and twigs crackled and snapped like small bones beneath Kassandra’s feet as she followed Redferne into the graveyard.
“How’ll we know if the ground is hallowed?” Kassandra whispered.
“We’ll know.” Redferne prodded the ground with one foot, hefting the weathervane before him.
“Oh. So there’s a reason you’ve been dragging that thing all over the country?”
He found a soft spot and turned the weathervane so the sharp, bloodied end pointed downward. Lifting it high, he brought the vane down hard and plunged it into the ground.
A gout of steam immediately hissed from the ground and they both stepped back quickly.
“The ground has been consecrated,” Redferne said, pulling the weathervane from the ground.
The steam subsided.
“Then we can just shake this place,” Kassandra said. “I mean, that’s it, right? The pages are safe.”
“Should they still be here.” Redferne scanned the graveyard, clouds of vapor puffing from his mouth. “The pastor. He spoke of a tomb carved with a hex mark.”
“Redferne, I’m freezing out here . . .”
“Should they be elsewhere, he may be able to find them. We must check.”
Kassandra rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay. But I don’t know what it is with you guys and your hex marks. If they worked, you wouldn’t be here.”
She slowly headed deeper into the graveyard with Redferne at her side. One at a time, they checked the time worn carvings on the grave markers and tombstones, scraping away leaves and caked earth.
They found hourglasses and cherubim, skeletons and crucifixes, harvest scenes and crucifixion scenes, and a carving of the Grim Reaper brandishing a scythe.
Not far away, the bay slapped the shore with a sleepy rhythm.
In her search, Kassandra came to a stone wall, part of which had been torn away. There were more graves on the other side and she passed through the jagged gap.
Beyond the wall, Kassandra found a tomb with a small slate door in the front. There were two locks on the door, both rusted and ancient. She scraped away the debris on top of the tomb and found indistinguishable letters carved in the granite. Above them was a faint but unmistakable carving of a circle with a pentagram inside.
“Hey, Redferne. Like this?”
He joined her and looked over her shoulder in the moonlight, whispering, “Like this.”
As he tested the locks, Kassandra squinted at the name carved above the pentagram. When it finally came into focus, she breathed, “Holy shit.”
“The locks are sound,” Redferne said confidently. “There’s been no meddling in all this while.”
“So . . . we’re not gonna open it?”
“Nay. We’ll leave it as we found it.”
“Good call. Because I don’t think . . . well, trust me. You don’t wanna open this one unless you really, really have to.” She pointed to the name on the tomb.
GILES REDFERNE
Redferne’s face became darker than the night as he stared down at his name. He took a clumsy step backward, hugging the weathervane, and looked at Kassandra with confused horror.
She instantly regretted showing him; she could have kept it to herself and it would have made no difference. She wanted to do or say something to make him feel better.
“I . . . I think Giles is a nice name,” she whispered.
He turned and walked away from her numbly.
“What, you expected to live forever?”
He kept moving.
“Hey, it’s not like we had to open it. I mean, we didn’t have to look at your putrified corpse, or—oh, shit, I mean—” She gave up. It was doing no good.
Kassandra went to his side, but Redferne walked away from her.
She followed him, saying, “C’mon, Redferne,” but he kept moving away.
They came to a patchwork of open empty graves, freshly dug with mounds of loose earth piled beside them.
Kassandra moved up behind Redferne and gently placed a hand on his back, whispering, “Redferne, there’s really no reason to be so shaken up, y’know? I mean, it’s only—”
She froze.
The moonlight was suddenly gone, blocked by something . . .
Something big that towered over them, hunched in the dark.
Kassandra spun with a gasp and looked up at—
—a bulldozer standing, motionless and abandoned, a couple yards away.
Beyond it was a backhoe, still as sleep.
Piles of dirt surrounded the equipment.
Construction was under way.
“Hey,” Kassandra muttered to herself, “what’s the deal, here?”
Among the dirt and equipment stood a sign facing away from her. She slowly walked around it and looked up at the bold black letters that screamed in the night:
GRAVE RELOCATION PROJECT
There was smaller print below and she read it quickly as she screamed, “Redferne, get the fuck over here!” When he was at her side, she pointed to the sign and said, “They’re movin’ graves! The sign says something about a landfill, something about condos. But they’re movin’ graves from that side of the wall to this side.”
“And?”
“So I had this pretty awful thought. What if this side of the wall isn’t part of the real graveyard?”
As he thought it over, Redferne came from his preoccupied haze. He suddenly dropped to one knee, turned the weathervane over, and stabbed it into the ground.
They waited.
Nothing happened.
“Oh, Christ,” Kassandra whispered.
Redferne rushed by her back to his tomb, lifted the iron weathervane, and brought it down on the tomb’s locks with a tremendous clank.
Again . . .
. . . again . . .
They cracked and, a few strikes later, fell to the ground. The slate door cracked, too, and with some pulling it fell away.
Kassandra and Redferne moved the door’s pieces aside and peered into the tomb, then cautiously reached in and dragged out the old rotted wooden casket.
The nails were rusted and loosened in the frail wood; Kassandra pulled a few out and tossed them aside.
“You know,” Kassandra said, unable to conceal the tremble in her voice, “I bet you aren’t even in there.”
“Are you daft? ’Tis mine own casket.”
“Yeah, but you’re not dead. You’re right here!” As she continued, she tried to sound convincing, for her own sake as well as Redferne’s. “I bet when you disappeared in sixteen ninety-one, they figured you were a goner, so they gave you a tomb. To, like, honor your passing, y’know?”
Redferne stared at the casket with dread.
“Guess we find out the hard way,” Kassandra said, leaning toward the casket.
Redferne joined her hesitantly and together they pulled on the lid. It fell apart in their hands and collapsed into the box on top of—
—the dusty, rotten remains of a human body.
Empty eyesockets stared at the sky.
A jawless mouth yawned endlessly, displaying only a few crumbling upper teeth.
The clothes had long since turned to dust and the body was on its way.
But the pages were intact:
They were tied together with a cord and fingers of bone clutched them tightly to a decaying ribcage.
Redferne turned his back on the remains, sucking in a horrified breath, staggering away.
“So I was wrong,” Kassandra said, her words garbled by the hand over her mouth. “I . . . I got a D minus in time travel my sophomore year, so sue me.”
Redferne kept his back to the casket; his voice was raw when he spoke. “The pages. Take them. Hurry.”
“Me?”
He didn’t respond.
“O-okay, okay. I’ll . . . yeah. I’ll get ’em.”
The inside of her mouth turned to moist felt and her hands quaked as she reached for the pages. Her stomach churned and a smell entered her nostrils; it was faint, made impotent by the centuries that had passed, but there nonetheless. It smelled sweet at first, like old caked sugar. But the sweetness gave way to the dark, cloying odor of rot.
Kassandra had to force her hands into the casket; her fingers curled around the pages and pulled, but—
—the black-boned hands rose with them, holding firm.
She shook them.
Skinless arms rattled sickly, but the hands would not let go.
“Damn,” Kassandra sighed, realizing she would have to touch the hands.
Making a guttural sound of disgust, she clutched one of the skeletal fingers, gritted her teeth, and pulled back.
The finger broke off with a thick, brittle snap.
Redferne turned and groaned, “What do you do?”
Snap . . .
“Getting the pages,” Kassandra said through her teeth.
Snap . . .
With a mournful voice, Redferne said, “Hurry . . . I beg you.”
Snap . . .
“Almost done, Redferne,” she said like a doctor to her patient.
Snap . . .
“Just a few more . . .”
Snap . . .
“Doesn’t hurt a bit, now . . .”
Snap . . .
The pages came free.
Kassandra pulled them from the casket and hurried to Redferne’s side, anxious to get away from the rotting corpse.
He stood with his back to her. At first, she was afraid he was crying and she cautiously touched his shoulder. She remembered what Chas had told her a hundred years ago last Friday and echoed his words.
“It happens, Redferne. We all get old and die.”
“ ’Tis true.”
“And this means you’ll go back to your home . . . your time. Right? Go back and die there? Makes sense to me, huh? That means the warlock won’t kill you while you’re here. That’s something, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
Holding the pages to her breasts, Kassandra frowned, realizing that, once Redferne was gone, she would have no one. Chas was her only true friend and he was dead. She would be alone.
“I . . . I’m gonna miss you, Redferne,” she whispered, taking his hand. “This kinda stuff . . . y’know, warlocks and spellbooks, shit like that, it . . . well, it sorta bonds people together, y’know? I mean, I’ve never—”
The pages moved.
Kassandra yelped and dropped them to the ground as tree branches rustled above them.
“Pray, what is it?” Redferne asked, gathering the pages up in his hands.
Beneath the strange words written on skin-like sheets, veins began to pulse furiously.
“They . . .” Kassandra tried to moisten her lips with her tongue. “They . . . mov—”
“Fascinating.”
They both looked up.
The warlock sat high in a tree, his eyes deeply shadowed, moonlight glinting off his teeth as he grinned.
He chuckled. “A man can actually die twice.”
He came to the ground slowly, his feet gently setting down toes first.
Then he bounded forward . . .
25
The Pages of Sin
Redferne raised the weathervane and heaved it through the air toward the warlock.
He stopped, waved an arm, and the weathervane clanged against empty air a foot from his chest, falling to the ground.
“A more stubborn and persistent man I’ve never met,” the warlock said, moving forward again, but slowly now, one lazy step at a time.
Clutching the pages to his chest, Redferne glanced at Kassandra; she stood rooted to the ground, staring in horror at the warlock as he advanced. The warlock was obviously not concerned with her, however; he was after the pages. Redferne instantly decided how to divert him.
“Kassandra!” he called.
She gasped and turned to him, babbling, “Redferne, please, please don’t let him—”
“Behind me!”
When she dashed toward him, Redferne handed her half of the pages, whispering, “Take these and flee when I say.”
The warlock lifted his hands as he came closer. Something viscous dripped from them, plopping to the ground. Redferne realized it was the substance the warlock had thrown at him in the farmhouse attic.
The warlock said, “ ’Tis a pity your stubbornness and persistence are wasted on God.”
With a jerk of his arms, two bolts of phlegmy liquid shot at them like comets and Redferne shoved Kassandra away from him, ducking as he shouted, “Go! Go!”
They both ran in different directions, dodging the bolts, which hissed into the night. To Redferne’s horror, Kassandra headed away from the wall . . . away from the safety of hallowed ground.
Momentarily torn, the warlock looked from Kassandra to Redferne as—
—Redferne hurdled the torn-down wall. He stumbled on the other side, then righted himself and turned in time to see the warlock rise from the ground and fly through the air after Kassandra.
“God be with you,” he whispered . . .
Kassandra realized her mistake.
In the direction she was headed, Kassandra was unprotected, naked to the warlock.
She was running into a mercilessly dark patch of trees, hugging the pages in her arms. A moment after she took them from Redferne and ran, the pages pulsed and squirmed in her arms, as if trying to escape her grasp. She wanted so much to throw them down and run away from them, but didn’t dare.
There were no footsteps behind her, no voices. Only the lapping of the water . . .
The warlock dropped to the ground before her, arms spread to embrace her.
Kassandra screamed and backpedaled.
For a moment, they engaged one another in a tense, silent staring match, then he stepped toward her.
Desperately hoping to distract him, Kassandra clutched a handful of the pages and flung them to her right.
The pages rustled over
the ground, slapping against one another.
“Silly girl,” the warlock chuckled, holding out a hand.
The pages flew to him like a stream of magician’s cards as Kassandra doubled back in the direction she’d come, running almost blindly, screaming, “Redferne, Redferne, where are—”
Her foot struck a rock and she dove forward through the air. When she hit the ground, the breath burst from her lungs and—
—the pages scattered in every direction.
“Gawd!” Kassandra blurted, rising on hands and knees, groping for the pages hopelessly. She started to scream for Redferne’s help, but bit her lip instead when she heard brittle leaves crunching.
The warlock was slowly making his way toward her.
Kassandra looked over her shoulder but couldn’t see him yet. Hoping he couldn’t see her, either, she began crawling away from the footsteps, holding her breath until she saw—
—Redferne’s tomb.
The broken casket lay a few feet away and, beside it, her shoulder bag. Feet first, Kassandra crawled into the tomb out of sight.
A moment later, she saw his feet. As he walked along slowly, he snatched up page after page from the ground without bending over once, then, in front of the tomb, he stopped, bent down, and smiled into the tomb, beckoning Kassandra with a crooked finger . . .
Redferne leaned against a monument in the old graveyard, sick with helplessness. He could hear Kassandra screaming for help, but didn’t dare step off the graveyard’s consecrated ground. If the warlock had Kassandra, he also had the pages she carried; if he should get hold of the stack Redferne held, all would be lost.
“Come out, Redferne,” the warlock called above Kassandra’s cries.
Grinding his teeth, too frustrated to even utter a prayer, Redferne did not budge.
“Show yourself, witch hunter!”
Holding the pages tight, Redferne peered around the corner of the narrow monument toward the wall.
Just beyond the stone wall, the warlock held Kassandra upside down by her ankles with one big hand; her face was pressed to the ground, muffling her cries, with the warlock’s foot resting on her head.
He smiled at Redferne and lifted his free hand.
