Page 29 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)

Twenty-Nine

For a productive tomorrow, sleep with powdered orris root and dried dill sprinkled beneath your bed.

Spells, Charms, and Rituals, Tempest Family Grimoire

Every one of my neurons sparks with magic upon entering Falling Rock Forest. It feels exactly like the old comfort of settling into a pool of research needed to draft a scene. Contentedly spending hours learning the particulars of a small throwaway detail, like why over a thousand bones were found in Ben Franklin’s basement, or the history of Victorian postmortem photography.

“I’ll give you a cat’s-eye marble or a charm that fell off a dog collar. It’s the smoothest charm you’ll ever run your fingers over. And I can find any imaginary thing you like.”

I brush my fingers along Morgan’s wrist, and he reflexively curls his hand into mine. “Do you hear that?”

He listens. “Cicadas?”

I shake my head. “It’s that voice again.”

Diamonds left behind by a late-afternoon rain shimmer on the low stone walls running the forest’s edge, so timeworn that they’ve broken down in places to allow passage in and out. One has only to step inside, and the earth changes, Moonville becoming something much more like Villamoon, teeming with veiled possibilities.

“I don’t hear anything,” he tells me.

Trees creak and brush, welcoming us. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go , they breathe. I get the impression that they want to show me something.

Morgan pulls out Dottie’s crude map: BBW, Cave, Trestle, Falling Rock Triangle . “Which way? Wish your grandma had included a compass on this thing. There are loads of trestles in these woods, I bet. Any of them could be the trestle on the map.”

“…any imaginary thing you like. I have a real nose for them. Whether it’s a lemon pie with buttercream frosting, or a pony with six violet spots, or a one-armed chair that sings you to sleep, I can locate exactly where it’s hiding.”

As if in a daze, I follow the voice.

The moss carpet is thick with bluebells. Bioluminescent gold plants border a path that leads deeper into Falling Rock, igniting the gloam like a million settled cinders. “Invisible things are my specialty.”

The voice stops. I test every direction, but it seems that the invisible person who knows how to find invisible things no longer has anything to say.

“I don’t understand,” I whisper. “Who is that?”

“And why can’t I hear them?” Morgan swings around, his eyes enormous. “What if you’re like Aisling? What if you can hear ghosts?”

My jaw drops. “Whoa. Maybe?”

“This is excellent. I brought the Surefire—” He goes digging in his bag for Aisling’s traffic light.

“Hang on. If I can hear ghosts, then why have I never heard Grandma? Or…now that I think about it, I only ever hear voices when I’m in the woods.”

We grab for each other’s hands in excitement at the same time. “Brays!”

“You can hear spirits of all the people who died in these woods,” he says, awestruck. “That’s so creepy.”

“It is creepy,” I agree cheerfully.

“Good for you! What do you hear now?”

Crickets. Toads. I step carefully over the leaves, pleased by their dry crunch, stopping now and then to kick a half-buried stone out of the earth. Half-buried stones have always bothered me; I’m the same way with seeds in lemon wedges, watermelon slices. I can’t focus till I’ve picked them out.

Morgan holds the Surefire up, its yellow lens glowing gold through the fog, curling along, striking upon a bright white surface. “Do you see that?”

Morgan’s response is barely audible. “It’s a ghost.”

We’re paralyzed, just watching. The ghost remains stationary. “Should we try to get near it?” I ask him quietly.

He nods, already slinking forward.

A dry twig snaps as I step on it, but still the ghost does not turn or flee. We’re riveted. And squinting quite fiercely. Morgan removes his glasses so that he can see better. We reach the ghost at last and—

“Oh.”

It isn’t a ghost at all, but a tall blue-gray monument. “A grave,” I say.

Morgan lifts a foot off the ground, studying beneath him. “There’s another one down here, too.” A flat tablet grown over with vines. “Shit, is this poison ivy?”

“No, poison ivy’s got three leaves. Leaves of three, let it be. ” I indicate the number of lobes on this plant. “Five.”

We clear fallen leaves away, uncovering more graves. “Those are called fieldstones,” I tell Morgan, squatting to brush dirt off a couple rounded markers half-embedded in the dirt. “Only one’s got an inscription, and it’s too weathered to make out. Quite old.” But a marker nearby is still readable: Mary Hiermann, Wife of Isaac . Isaac is likely buried next to her, but his epitaph is harder to discern, its sandstone layers sloughing off.

Morgan taps the Surefire. “We come in peace, Mary and Isaac. If you’re haunting these grounds, will you please touch the green light?”

“Aim that back over here, will you?” I ask him, reaching for the Surefire. “I want to read all of these.”

He walks without paying attention to where he’s going, stare firmly locked on the green, yellow, and red lenses. None of them light up.

I scrape a rust-colored lichen from a headstone with my fingernail. “Look! Caloplaca saxicola. And a chest tomb, too. Caved in, which isn’t a surprise. I wish I’d known about this place—I would’ve come now and then to take care of it. Used to do that in the other graveyards when I was a teenager.” I gingerly probe the headstones, careful not to pull the vines lest I pull out bits of headstone along with them. “These are limestone,” I go on, enthusiasm mounting. “You see how the inscriptions have gone flat from weathering? That’s acid rain for you, and the moss and lichens, which are eating calcium right out of the rock. There are white and black lichens, too, but personally, I love these orange jewel lichens, they feel crumbly when you run your hands over them.” I demonstrate.

“When I die, I want a Viking funeral,” he declares. “I don’t want to be put underground.”

“I’d like a mausoleum in the shape of a skull.”

“You would.”

I happily survey the middle-of-nowhere cemetery. “Zinkers! What an amazing find. Zinkers were a trend in the early 1800s and late 1900s, cast zinc being a cheaper alternative to marble. They actually hold up better than marble, which can turn black from chemical staining, but people thought they were tacky so they were phased out. Monument salesmen advertised these as ‘white bronze’ even though they didn’t have any bronze in them.” I tap each side of the obelisk, delighting in its hollow pangs. “The plaques are removable, so that you can add names or change the epitaphs easily.”

I move along, spotting a small headstone for somebody named Alafaire , with a lamb carved on top. Lambs denote the graves of children. It isn’t uncommon to find multiple very old graves for infants from a single family, and for only a few, if any, of the children to have made it to adulthood. Before vaccines and modern medicine, the child mortality rate was so high that parents sometimes didn’t give their babies names until they were older and more likely to survive. Just two hundred years ago, in the age of the industrial revolution, forty percent of children died before their fifth birthdays.

“The most durable type of headstone is granite,” I inform Morgan, “which is why that’s what you tend to see used nowadays. But in my opinion, there’s nothing like old limestone with a name you can barely make out, dissolved by time. Just imagine all the history these people witnessed.” I drag my palms over the lichens as I walk, back bent so that I can see better. “We need to come back tomorrow when the sun’s out. I want to take pictures. Do you see the headstone over there that looks like a tree stump? That’s called a tree stone. With how small it is, and the tree limbs cut so short, it likely symbolizes a life cut short. I’ve seen much taller ones, twice my size, like real trunks with ivy and flowers carved on.”

I turn to ask why he’s suddenly gone so quiet, but he’s knelt in front of a grave a short distance northwest of me.

I join him. Headstone iconography is fascinating, generally symbolizing peace, eternal rest, religion, et cetera. I see a lot of doves, angels, torches, hands clasped or praying. Olive branches. Celtic knots.

There isn’t any of that on the headstone Morgan’s studying, but rather a circle formed from the words This Is Where . Below that: Romina E. King. Aged 68 years, 4 months, 22 days .

There is a grave at her right, the stone too devoured by vines and tall stalks of purple flowers to make out a name, and another grave on her left. Delphine Orchid King-Cattery. A shallow indentation in the earth indicates that a body used to lie there, but has since been removed. Four other headstones finish off the row: Ellis King, Mairie Lark King, Axel and Briar Yoon, peregrine heygate. There are no birth or death dates, only years lived.

Peregrine was a hundred and four when they died. A spider crouches in the V of Mairie’s Sleep Well, My Beloved inscription, eight legs sticking out.

I can’t feel my hands or feet. “This,” I manage softly, my voice a wobble as I touch the engraved letters of Romina’s name, “is the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Total coincidence,” Morgan assures me quickly. “I mean, it has to be. Our Romina is alive and young, and these tombstones look like they were put here at least a century ago.”

“Right.” I can’t look away from it.

“ Plus , she’s not married to Alex, so her last name isn’t King.” He coughs. “Yet.”

“Right.”

The red lens of the Surefire flares to life, pulsating in a familiar rhythm. I touch a finger to the carotid artery in my neck, counting the beats. Not quite a match—my pulse is faster. I measure it against a pressure point in Morgan’s wrist, which doesn’t match up either. The Surefire is certainly imitating contractions of somebody’s heart, but whose heart that might be remains uncertain.

“A ghost is using your device as their heartbeat,” I say without emotion. “Hm. You don’t see that every day.”

Morgan goes quite still. “Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we get the fuck out of here?”

So we promptly get the fuck out of there, not relaxing until the Surefire’s red lens has stopped palpitating.

And soon, I’m following voices again.

“ We’re lost ,” a young male is saying. “ We’ll never get back home. ”

Morgan clicks open his voice recorder, his thumb jamming a button. “What are they saying?”

“Shh.” I strain to listen.

“ Have you seen my father? ” the boy asks. “ The wolves will be out soon. We’re stranded. ” He fades off, and then it starts again: “ We’re lost, we’ll never get back home. Have you seen my father? The wolves will be out soon. We’re stranded. ”

I twist my braid into an anxious knot. “Terrible,” I mutter. “This is terrible .”

“What?” Morgan wants to know. “What do you hear?” He plays what he’s just recorded, but all that crackles out of it is dead air and the hush of our breathing.

“It’s the people. They don’t know they’re dead.”