Page 78 of Stalked By Shadows
The waning full moon was beginning to edge between the clouds, and everything was silent. No birds or bugs that I could tell, which seemed odd. I didn’t really feel anything unusual, just the humid night air and worry for Micah. And I wondered about Jared and a possible ring. It seemed like something out of a movie. Silly almost.
On the ride over I’d Googled the most recent burial in St. Louis Number One. It had been a woman who had passed. She’d been fairly old, in her nineties, and long widowed. Nothing about her obituary screamed of spooky rituals or Hoodoo—the real word according to Micah for what Marc and Mary had practiced—paranormal vibes. She sounded like someone’s grandmother, ordinary, though somewhat long-lived, and normal.
“Normal is relative,” Micah had pointed out. “And being someone’s grandmother doesn’t mean she wasn’t some sort of practitioner. Lots of practitioners are people’s mothers or grandmothers.”
“True,” I agreed. “However, I’m more inclined to think it was something the other tour guides did.”
“I wonder if Abigail knows anything,” Micah said.
“Who?”
“I think you met her briefly,” Micah said. “The same day you met Marc and Mary. They were usually together. Though Abigail is much younger than them. Abigail is Mary’s niece. Though I don’t think they were close. More a business relationship. I remember Abigail telling me once that Mary took her in as a teen and she had been working for her ever since.”
“She’s already been questioned by the police,” Lukas said. “Claims she knows nothing.” Only his comment made me look at him because it sounded detached, careful, like he knew more than he was sharing.
“Claims? But maybe was on video near the cemetery?” I deduced.
“Maybe,” Lukas shrugged. “She did have access like the rest of them did.” He wouldn’t look at either of us or answer any questions during the rest of the drive.
At the cemetery I wondered about some of the legends I’d read while researching Micah’s garden monster. “What about wraiths?” I asked Micah in a half-whisper. “Could a wraith have taken Sarah?” Did he believe in cryptids? Or simply that something spooky haunted his garden? Maybe he was humoring me and all my paranormal research by letting me put weird stuff in his garden.
He glanced my way and shrugged. Curiosity about the unknown did not make someone an expert, I was beginning to understand that. “I think legends are a way for humans to explain to each other the unexplainable. How much truth there is in them, is unknown, but someone at some point experienced things that created the legends. And legends only become legends through repetition. Does that mean it happened a lot? Possibly, or it was a really good story that people didn’t mind repeating.”
“More likely a way to scare people into staying out of trouble,” Lukas grumbled.
“Like modern police work?” I asked him. “Because how many people fear the police now instead of trusting them?”
He glared at me.
“I know it’s not your fault. Stating a fact.” And being back at the cemetery made me mad with the reminder that I’d almost been shot after falling down and hitting my head. “Ruling through fear has never meant the betterment of societies.” I knew that from experience while working in the Middle East. People hated and feared us, though we were supposedly ‘protecting’ them. In truth, we were there because of a war propagated over oil reserves and money. Some of the soldiers were die hard believers that we were protecting our country by destroying other people’s lives. But I’d known many who knew the truth, though by the time I’d realized it, I’d already been halfway through my second tour.
Life did have a way of changing us. Not better or worse. Different. I looked at Micah who was walking close to the wall, hand tracing the white concrete, face tense with concentration. He felt something. I knew that from the set of his shoulders and his focus on the wall. And I knew it gave him a war of emotions as to what to feel about this sensitivity that he’d developed after his disappearance. Did that mean he wasn’t still Micah? I didn’t think so.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“Cold,” he said. He glanced my way. “Are you hot?” Like when we’d been standing in Mary’s entryway.
“No,” I told him. I didn’t feel much at all right then. “I mean nothing that the weather can’t account for.” The evening was warm and soupy. The scent of rain on the wind and the buzz of cicadas dancing through the night like a frenzy of earthen melody reminding us the city was seconds away from nature.
He frowned, but continued walking, hand on the wall, feet carrying him toward the main entrance. We rounded the corner to the gate and I had to glance twice at the door, which was closed, because it looked like it was encased in dancing shadows even though there was no moving light nearby.
Micah shivered. Was he feeling those creepy crawlies again? He went to the door and turned the knob, I think expecting as Lukas and I likely did, that the door would be locked, only it wasn’t. The knob turned and the door creaked open.
“No,” Lukas said, shaking his head. “I fucking hate this town and all the vandals. Let me call it in. It’s supposed to be locked.”
Micah barely spared him a glance before shoving the door out of the way and heading inside. I frowned, and followed.
“Alex,” Lukas hissed.
“What are you going to do? Arrest us? I’m not letting him go in there alone. Do you know anyone who knows this cemetery better than him? He probably has some of the names on the graves memorized,” I pointed out.
“Most of them,” Micah said.
I followed Micah while I could hear Lukas talking on the phone to dispatch, but the sound of his voice faded away. Micah veered straight toward the grave that had been open. I followed and strained to hear anything other than our footsteps and breathing. The cicadas had gone oddly silent the second we stepped inside. Too far away perhaps? There weren’t really any trees or anything other than stone and concrete inside the cemetery. Nothing for them to eat, but I thought we might hear crickets or something. Even the wind seemed to have died down. Creepy.
Was Sarah still here somewhere? The grave still had a red curtain around it and was cordoned off with yellow police tape. No one had been by to clean up the blood. It was dry and still tickled my nose with an old metallic scent. The animals and body were gone, but the entire area still felt eerie with an underlying vibe I couldn’t really pin down.
Micah didn’t try to cross the tape. Though he did examine something that appeared to be scrawled on the side of the tomb. It looked like gibberish to me.