“ARE YOU sure we should be doing this?” He didn’t want to sound like a chicken, but cemeteries were creepy in daylight. Skulking around one in the middle of the night just made them worse. It didn’t matter that the nearly full moon gave enough light that it wasn’t completely dark. The pale light bouncing off the headstones and statues only made them that much more creepy, and he couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched, even if every eye in the place save for his and Geoff’s was carved in stone.
“Oh, come on, Jesse, don’t be a scaredy-cat,” fourteen-year-old Geoff Meyers hissed over his shoulder, throwing in a derisive look for good measure. The white light of the moon didn’t soften that at all either. “It’s not like we’re walking on live people or anything.”
Yeah, but walking on dead people wasn’t much better. Not that Jesse would say that out loud, and not that it would keep Jesse from following Geoff past the scattering of silent stone monuments. Geoff’s taunting would only grow worse if he stopped.
Geoff Meyers was only a year older than Jesse Ellis, but he might as well have been a hundred years older the way he seemed to always take charge when it came to dragging Jesse into all sorts of schemes and mischief. Nothing too bad, though; only little things like turning the books in the library upside down or moving Old Man Carter’s garden gnomes from his garden to his porch. But this was something new. Jesse felt his skin prickling as they made their way deeper into the cemetery, and he cringed at the crunch of dead winter growth under his feet.
Dead… just like the people. Jesse shivered from more than the cold.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Geoff went on tauntingly. “And even if there was, J.P. wouldn’t have the power to do anything in the real world.” His steps weren’t hesitant at all, and his feet crushed the brittle fallen leaves rather than shuffled through them like Jesse’s did. “He’s not going to come up out of his grave and cut out our hearts or anything. Stop being a wimp.”
Jacob Palmer. That was the J.P. that Geoff was talking about. Jesse had heard the stories about him, and none of them were good. He had been a forty-two-year-old schoolteacher who went crazy one day and killed his own parents and the milkman, and then wounded a deputy in the standoff that followed as he fired his gun through the window of his parents’ house. He had died when he turned the gun on himself, and it was only after the police stormed the house that they had learned that he had also killed his grandmother and two cousins. Only the little dog his parents had owned had been spared the bloodbath. That had been nearly sixty years ago, and the graves of both the family and the milkman were among the hundreds of others he and Geoff were walking through.
But Jacob Palmer’s wasn’t here.
His grave was outside the property at the back, or so they said, on land owned by the state but not designated for burial. Hidden and nearly forgotten—until a news story two days ago had marked the sixtieth anniversary of the slaughter. That the date was still a week away didn’t seem to matter. People always talked about it this time of year.
Only this year, Geoffrey Meyers got the idea to do more than talk.
Geoff had decided to find the grave himself.
“So what are we going to do if we do find it?” Jesse pressed, keeping his voice quiet. Talking at anything above a whisper in a cemetery just seemed wrong, even if no one was around to hear him.
“Dig him up and piss on his corpse,” Geoff answered immediately. “My grandpa told me the story of how J.P. killed his family, and we’re only going to give him a little bit of what he deserves.”
“Then shouldn’t we have brought a shovel?” They hadn’t actually brought anything with them, and it was too cold for digging anyway, as far as Jesse was concerned. Not that he would tell Geoff that. And not to mention his own parents would kill him if they ever got wind of what they were doing. But they would kill him anyway if they knew how he had snuck out of the house an hour ago to meet Geoff at the grocery store parking lot just down the road from the cemetery gates. They had never really liked Geoff to begin with.
Jesse did, though. A lot. He was tall and smart—even if he didn’t make good grades in school—and he was cute, at least that’s what all the girls in his class said. They especially liked his dark blond hair and deep blue eyes. Jesse did too, though he wouldn’t even think of telling Geoff that. The fact that they were friends at all was incredible, even if it was nearly inevitable, since Geoff had moved just down the street from him last summer. The little bit of mischief that Geoff caused in town was just for fun and didn’t hurt anyone. They hadn’t even broken any of Old Man Carter’s gnomes, though Geoff had accidentally chipped one once. But it wasn’t actually broken.
And they hadn’t pissed on it.
“Then we can just piss on his grave.” Geoff answered the question of the shovel impatiently. “If you could have heard what my grandpa said about him, you would want to give him a dose of his own medicine too.”
Jesse may not have heard what Geoff’s grandpa had said about Jacob Palmer, but he had heard what his own grandpa had said. His grandpa remembered the man too, and he had even told Jesse that Mr. Palmer would have been his teacher his next year at school if he hadn’t gone crazy that day. Grandpa had even shown him a picture of Jacob Palmer from the newspaper that had run after everything had happened. It had been the most recent portrait taken at the school where he taught, though his wide tie, heavy-rimmed glasses, and slicked-back hair made him look kind of creepy. Kind of scary too, but the picture had been in black and white. A lot of black and white pictures looked creepy, even the ones of Jesse’s own family. Mr. Palmer hadn’t looked like someone who would kill his own family, though, even if Grandpa said that looks could be deceiving and Mr. Palmer had always been a little on the shady side.
“I bet he’s over there.” Geoff had stopped between two hulking monuments topped with what were supposed to be angels. They honestly looked more like demons, crouching on the top of the marble slabs like that. At least they did in the moonlight and shadows. Maybe they wouldn’t have looked so sinister in daylight, but Jesse was sure he would still feel like they were peering down at him.
At least they were dedication monuments instead of headstones, although it was too dark to read the writing carved into the surface of each one. Jesse’s dad had told him they had once served as the gateposts for the entrance to the cemetery, before the actual gates were installed and these were moved to the back. The monuments nevertheless signaled that they had reached the end of the cemetery property, and Geoff was pointing to an overgrown cluster of brush just a little ways on the other side.
“You think he’s buried in there?” Jesse whispered disbelievingly. It was true the cluster of brush was set off by itself in the short field behind the cemetery, and it was round enough to be—possibly—hemmed in by a low fence or wall, but it was also thick enough that there was no way they were going to be able to tear through it to see if some sixty-year-old grave was hidden inside.
“Seems like the perfect place, don’t you think?”
It did. Jesse would admit that much, even though doing so set his nerves tingling from more than the shadowy headstones of the dead looming behind him in the dark. If he moved just a little to the side, which he did as he shifted to stand closer to Geoff, he could see—maybe—the pale stone of a statue or something set in what had to be the center. But Grandpa had said that Jacob Palmer’s grave had been unmarked, just a hole in the ground, which was more than Palmer had actually deserved, to be honest. At least as far as Grandpa was concerned. Jesse too for that matter. If anyone ever killed Jesse’s family….
“It’s him. It’s gotta be.” Geoff’s voice had grown quiet, though his eyes had somehow grown brighter in the white light of the moon. Jesse saw that much for himself when he turned his head to look at him, and then he saw Geoff’s teeth.
“Come on. Let’s give that batty old man what he has coming!”
Geoff was moving then, and Jesse was forced to trample the brittle undergrowth between the gateposts and the circle as he tried to keep up. He was just glad he didn’t fall. Geoff would call him more than a scaredy-cat then, and he didn’t want Geoff to think he was clumsy.
The circle was bigger than he thought once he was up close, but Geoff didn’t seem to notice, and the glee that filled Geoff’s smile as he began to pull the brush and branches away would have been a little scary if Geoff hadn’t been his friend. It was kind of scary anyway, so Jesse turned to the brush directly in front of him instead. It would take forever to pull enough away to actually get through it, but Geoff wasn’t being careful or slow, and so Jesse wouldn’t be either.
Not that either of them did any good. The rattle of overgrown brush and the crackle of dead leaves and dried sticks grew louder as the sheer thickness of the brush made Geoff impatient, and Jesse heard Geoff mutter more than once as the tangled mess proved harder to clear than Geoff wanted it to be. Vines had wrapped through the thick bramble at some point during the last sixty years, and the roots were too deep to be pulled by merely yanking on them.
“Fuck it,” Geoff hissed suddenly, drawing Jesse’s wide eyes toward him as he shoved the brambles back in place. Jesse had heard the curse before, of course. His dad had said it a few times, but mostly it came from his Uncle Pete. He had never heard Geoff say it before. But there were probably a lot of things Geoff said and did that Jesse had never heard or seen him do before. Geoff was from the big city, after all, not from the small town of Miller’s Creek like Jesse.
“Let’s go around to the other side,” Geoff said then, turning to Jesse with his smile gone and face pinched, though his eyes still almost glowed with determination. “It may be thinner on that side. Come on.”
Jesse let go of the thick vine he had been pulling on as Geoff began marching around the circle, and he flexed his fingers as he followed willingly, though more slowly. November nights were cold in Indiana, and digging through the dead brush made his hands hurt. It also made him wish he had thought to bring gloves, but he hadn’t known what Geoff had intended to do when he had asked Jesse to meet him in the parking lot. He had thought Geoff would want to go move the gnomes again, or maybe needle Jesse into knocking on someone’s door and running away. Or go back to the cave by the creek, where they had gone the last time they had snuck out at night. Jesse wasn’t sure he’d liked what Geoff had wanted to do at the cave—what he had wanted Jesse to do, really—but he had thought about it, a lot, afterward and had already decided he would do it this time.
Only there wasn’t a this time; Geoff had brought him to the cemetery instead.
“A-ha!”
Geoff’s triumphant shout stopped Jesse short, and he saw the handful of branches and vines Geoff had pulled free—completely free, not only the tops while the roots remained buried.
“I knew there would be a way in there somewhere!”
More branches and brush came loose and Geoff tossed them away and immediately went back for more. He knew Geoff expected him to help, but there wasn’t really room for both of them in the small space Geoff was creating. There wasn’t much room beside him either, though Jesse began pulling branches of his own close by, albeit slower and more carefully than Geoff was doing.
“Should we really be doing this?” Jesse asked again, tugging a handful of brush loose but hesitating before tossing it aside. “I mean, it’s not like he’s alive to know that we’re going to, you know, piss on him. And we could get into trouble.”
“Stop being a chicken!” Geoff snapped, though he was too out of breath from his efforts to sound really angry. “It’s just the grave of some sick old man—”
His terrified shriek made Jesse jump back, and the handful of brush Geoff had yanked free fell from his fingers as Jesse stared wide-eyed at him—and he realized in horror that a second scream was echoing from the tangled thicket.
Then Jesse saw it. A dark, dense shadow rose out of the growth, blacker than the night in the cemetery, stretching tall and ominous to tower over them. The crack and crackle of dead growth grew louder as the shadow lurched forward, and Jesse fought the urge to bolt as it raised its arms to capture or kill them—kill Geoff, who suddenly seemed to rear up himself as the shrill cry of the monster overrode any other sound in the cemetery.
The shrill cry that sounded horrifically like words—
“Go away! Leave me alone! Get out!”
“Geoff! Run!”
Jesse’s voice was high and terrified as the monster bearing down on Geoff spurred him into motion. He threw himself forward and scrabbled to grab Geoff’s coat, but a sharp thrust of Geoff’s elbow knocked him aside. Leaves and branches crunched under him as he fell, but Geoff was already gone when he reached again, lunging toward the shadowy terror, screaming as he charged.
“Fuck you, Palmer! You deserved worse than what you got! I’m not scared of you even if you are dead!”
“Geoff! No!” Cold ground and brittle leaves scraped under Jesse’s hands as he scrambled to grab Geoff and pull him back, but his scream was drowned out as the monster shrieked again.
“Leave me alone!”
And then was overwhelmed by the furious rage in Geoff’s voice as he plowed forward.
“Die, you monster!”
Jesse shouted again as he covered his head with his hands, and he squeezed his eyes closed as the rattle of the brush added to the sound of every strike Geoff made against the shadow.
Though Jesse didn’t understand until later—not until after the police, the ambulance, and his own parents had filled the small clearing behind the cemetery—that the sounds of the strikes were not the unholy battle of mortal against shadow.
They were the sickening sounds of flesh against flesh.
And the blood that smeared the dirty body at Geoff’s feet was warm and wet, and very, very real….
“YOU’LL LIKE Attingwood,” Jesse’s father said again, the matter-of-fact calmness of his voice sounding forced as he kept his attention on the books he was packing into the small, sturdy carton by his knee. “The schools are good, and the football team is one of the best in the state. They were in the running for the state championship last year, remember? And you won’t be the only new kid at the school, so you’ll make friends soon enough.”
Jesse said nothing in answer, and he didn’t get up from the sealed carton he was using as a makeshift chair as he stared at the countless other boxes stacked in their living room. Their house had never been fancy or rich, just ordinary, with flat white siding and neighbors on either side, with more neighbors across the street and in both directions down the road. Neighbors that had once been friendly and sociable, and who had hired Jesse last summer to mow their lawns or wash their cars and gave him a little extra money to add to his allowance.
They wouldn’t hire him this year, though. He wouldn’t even be here for them to hire when summer fully came.
What had happened last November had made sure of that.
It had begun the morning after he had gone to the cemetery with Geoff. That was the day all of them—Jesse, his parents, and everyone else in town—had learned that the old man had died. The homeless old man who had been huddled in the overgrown brush behind the cemetery had lived there, as far as the police could determine. He had probably been more terrified than Geoff or even Jesse himself when they had pulled away the branches and vines that had surrounded his home.
It had gotten worse the next week, after Geoff Meyers had been admitted to the children’s psychiatric hospital in nearby Bartlesberg before being moved to a psychiatric asylum in a different part of the state the week after that.
Then the simple life Jesse had known in Miller’s Creek had ended once and for all the day the asylum’s staff had found Geoff Meyers hanging in his room, with the makeshift rope he had created from his sheets still around his neck. It had been only days after his admission.
That was the same day the residents of Miller’s Creek had turned their attention fully toward Jesse Ellis.
The local authorities had never held Jesse accountable for what had happened that night in the cemetery, but it didn’t stop nearly everyone in Miller’s Creek from thinking he was responsible anyway. Even now, months later, the neighbors still shunned him and his parents, both in the neighborhood and in the town, and the football coach at Miller’s Creek High School had already found a reason to make him ineligible for the team next year. Grades, so the coach had said, and he hadn’t been entirely wrong. Jesse’s grades had dropped to nearly failing after that night in the cemetery. His father’s job had suffered as well, with the machine shop where his father worked claiming lack of business as the reason for his father’s cut in both pay and hours, though Jesse had never seen the shop idle.
And so it was time for a change.
That was what his father had said after he had searched for and found another job in Attingwood, hundreds of miles away from Miller’s Creek and considerably larger than the small, rural Indiana town that had been Jesse’s home. The Meyers family—Geoff’s family—had already left Miller’s Creek, with Geoff’s “drunken father” and “whorish mother,” as Jesse had heard them described, having vanished within weeks of their son’s inadvertent killing of the old man, and then purposeful killing of himself. The residents of Miller’s Creek would no doubt be glad that the Ellis family was leaving as well.
“Attingwood won’t be a bad place,” his father went on, reaching for more of the books that lined the shelves on the wall. “Your mother is looking forward to a change of scenery too. You’ll see. It’ll all work out.”
Jesse couldn’t be sure about the last part of his father’s words, but he didn’t doubt the part about his mother. It wasn’t only the males of the Ellis family that were being shunned by the town. His mother had had to bag her own groceries at the one tiny grocery store in town since before Christmas, and to carry them to their car herself, even when it was raining or snowing.
Even when there was ice on the ground.
“Let’s take a break for lunch, you two,” his mother called then, stepping into the doorway between the living room and the kitchen and eyeing Jesse and his father with a kind, though regretful, look. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail suitable for the work of packing, although the sturdy gloves she’d worn as she cleaned while she packed were gone.
“I made those sandwiches you like, Jesse,” she added a moment later, settling her gaze on her son. “Ham and swiss, smothered with the deli’s special mustard.”
The deli counter at the local grocery store was the closest thing to an actual deli the town had, but it did offer one specialty that Jesse had never thought he’d have to give up. The special mustard made and sold by Mr. Denton was thick and brown and heavily peppered—and something Jesse had thought he would eat the rest of his life. And his mother had continued to buy it even after the store’s owner had stopped giving her the freshest batch made in his cluttered and dingy prep area, and even after the owner had more than doubled the price—at least for Mrs. Ellis.
A hand fell on his knee as his father pushed himself up, and the brown eyes that matched Jesse’s own were understanding. “Come on, son. The movers will be here soon, and this may be the last meal we eat in this house.” He grinned beneath his dark, graying beard. Then his father moved away, following the promise of food and vanishing into the kitchen on the heels of his mother.
Jesse sighed but slouched over his knees rather than moving himself, and instead let his gaze drift out the living room window to the street, and then to the house on the other side.
The house over there was as ordinary as his own, with a shabby arrangement of shrubbery lining the slat-board siding and one thick tree in the center of the front yard. Not like the tree that sat in Jesse’s backyard, with branches sturdy enough to hold the tree house his father had promised to help him build this summer. The branches of the neighbor’s tree were thinner and weaker despite the big trunk, and they hung lower than Jesse’s tree—low enough to keep the ground directly underneath dark and lifeless, even though spring was just beginning to turn the rest of the grass green. Jesse was surprised to find that he would miss the neighbor’s tree after they moved, maybe even more than his own. He would miss his neighbors too, even if they did shy away from him now. He would even miss Whiskey, another neighbor’s ratty old dog that barked at everyone who passed its owner’s house, though he rarely left the porch to truly take issue with intruders. And there was Mr. Wilson’s rickety old truck that could be heard for what seemed like miles, and Mrs. Wilson’s home-baked apple pies, which she sold at what passed for fairs in this town, and—
The sudden movement in the shadows near the trunk of the tree across the street stopped the list of things he would miss once he left them behind, and Jesse straightened with a sense of curiosity as the unmistakable figure of a man stepped around the wide base. He hadn’t known his neighbors had visitors today. There weren’t any additional cars in the broken asphalt driveway, anyway. Not that everyone who made a visit in this town drove, of course, but most of them did. And even if the shadows of the overhanging branches hid the man’s face, Jesse was sure he would have recognized nearly everyone in Miller’s Creek without needing to actually see their face to do so.
He didn’t recognize this guy, though.
Or at least he shouldn’t have.
His heart began to pound harder in his chest as the figure stopped and leaned a shoulder against the rough bark of the tree trunk.
The build and shape of the long, wiry body were familiar, and the jeans and beaten leather jacket were ones he was sure he had seen before. Just like he was sure the shirt beneath the jacket was a faded red plaid, that the cuffs were ragged and threadbare, that there would be a hole under one shoulder and another on the opposite elbow. Even the missing button near the collar was clear and bright in his mind as the legs that slowly crossed at the ankle created another strikingly familiar pose.
The tingle of sweat on his palms made Jesse curl his hands into fists as he became certain the other was watching him, and he somehow knew the motions were deliberate as the figure slowly uncrossed his legs. Then he felt his lungs seize as the guy across the street pushed up from the tree and moved to stand in front of it. Even from a distance, he knew the guy hadn’t blinked, and Jesse slid his own gaze down as the light caught the movement of the other’s hand.
His breath caught as the figure pressed his palm to the thick, heavy bulge under the denim at his crotch.
His fingernails bit into his palm, yet Jesse couldn’t look away from the scene across the street, couldn’t tear his gaze away from the hand as it began to move… and couldn’t stop the sharp bloom of fear inside him knowing the figure on the other side of the window watched him just as closely. Fear bled into terror as Jesse forced his gaze up, and though distance and the solid pane of glass separated them, he saw the tongue that slipped out to brush the other’s lips, saw the fingers at his crotch curling as his hand moved a little higher…. And he saw the dark light filling the other’s eyes as he caught the button of his jeans and popped it loose.
Jesse had seen it all before. That night in the cave, days before the cemetery and the old man’s death, weeks before Geoff had taken his own life in the sterile room that had been intended to help him. Jesse had seen it only seconds before Geoff Meyers caught the zipper of his jeans and slowly slid it down amid the shadows of the rocks, mere heartbeats before he heard the words Geoff had whispered in the sudden heat trapped between the cold isolation of the cave and the solitude of winter…. The same words he heard now as the image across the street blurred into the ghost of Geoff Meyers, with his hand moving to caress his bared cock.
“Kiss it for me?”
JESSE BOLTED upright. His eyes were open, wide though unseeing, and he swept his horrified gaze around him as the battering of his heart seemed to vibrate throughout his body. His skin was cold and yet prickled with sweat, but the room around him was still and silent, for all that it was cast in the pitch-blackness of night. A scratch on the glass beside him made him jerk his head to the left, and he stared at the spotted, flat pane of the window beyond the flimsy curtain as the hazy shape on the other side grew slowly into a low-hanging branch he recognized. The quiet click of the refrigerator’s compressor turning on shot another bolt of terror through him, though the familiar hum that followed sent a flood of relief as the moments continued to tick by. Slowly—so very slowly—the blackness faded, and little by little the shadows solidified into the familiar furniture of his bedroom. The chest, the trunk, the chair that had become his catchall: everything he knew should be there. Only the things that were supposed to be there.
At last he remembered to breathe.
It had been a dream—albeit a terrifyingly familiar one, and one he hadn’t had in years. One he struggled to let go of, though the details remained crisp in his mind.
He had had dreams like this before, years before—and for years after that winter when he had still been thirteen and living in the rural Indiana town of Miller’s Creek. High school counselors had been the first to do what they could once he had moved to Attingwood, but professional help had been inevitable—and much more effective. The dreams had become less vivid over time, had become less threatening as he grew older, and were few and far between by the time he had graduated with honors.
Then a college major in journalism with minors in photography and liberal arts had kept him too exhausted for dreams of any kind, while classwork combined with part-time jobs had kept him too busy for appointments with psychiatrists, therapists, or even medical doctors once they were assured that his sleeping and eating habits had returned to normal. His first experience at sex—in the room of the dorm’s residential advisor near the end of his second semester—had ended pleasurably and without nightmares, and coming out to his parents had been without drama. Jesse couldn’t have asked for a better reaction, and he had put an end to his therapy sessions for good that summer.
Yet all the counseling he had endured went out the window in the time it took to remember Geoff Meyers’s name.
God, it had been fifteen years since that night in the cemetery—fifteen years. Years Jesse had spent getting his life back to normal, putting his past behind him, and finding his future in doing the work he loved in the downtown office of the Attingwood Journal. That first experience in the dorm room in college had even gotten him past the wall Geoff Meyers had built in his mind concerning sex—proving that what Geoff had intended to be Jesse’s first time was nothing more than a piece of the past that had no bearing on his life now.
So why did he feel the same crushing sense of fear now—fifteen years later—that he had felt that night behind the cemetery in Miller’s Creek? That he had felt in the cave days before they had found that brush-buried circle just past the old gateposts? Why did he remember Geoff’s name, when the cemetery, the deaths, the funerals were long since over and done?
The slow opening and closing of his eyes didn’t give him any answers, but the growing familiarity of the sounds of his apartment returned a sense of reality to his scattered thoughts and memories. And with reality came the awareness that the chill on his skin was from more than the reemergence of an age-old nightmare. The brittle air of winter on the other side of his window had slipped in despite the barrier, but with the specter of Geoff Meyers still so vivid in his mind, the thought of leaving the security of his bed to grab a sweatshirt sent a different kind of chill through him.
The blankets would do for now, and he lay back slowly and pulled the heavy wool up to his chin as he settled against the cold sheets. Sleep was long gone, and without a casual hookup in the bed beside him, there was nothing to distract him from the lingering disturbance of his dream. His own hand wouldn’t be enough—a simple fuck wouldn’t have been enough—even had his body been anxious for more than the expunging of old ghosts.
But it wasn’t, and it was late enough that even the comfort of another body warm against his own was lost to him tonight. And maybe it was better that way, at least for now. For tonight.
Mere habit made him turn his head to the bloodred digits on his bedside clock.
Jesse jerked upright as the sickening recognition slammed his heart hard against his ribs. 12:07 a.m., Wednesday, November 6.
Seven minutes after midnight.
Seven minutes into the morbid anniversary—fifteen years to the day—of when he had watched Geoff Meyers commit unintentional murder in the cemetery of Miller’s Creek.