From the Dark, Book One

Lights in the graveyard

“The what?”

“I said it. You heard it.”

Two teenage boys were in a car. They, along with the third member of their party sitting in the back, had been out looking for some fun. They hadn't found much.

“Well, maybe I did hear it but I can't believe you said it.”

“Believe it, my boy,” said the second one, Brad. “There's nothin' doin' around here. Nobody's out.”

“Yeah, well, that's what we get for going out like this on a school night.”

“You know, Chris, it looks like you just don't want to have any fun tonight. Maybe Jerry and I will dump you and go ourselves.”

That didn't go over too well with Chris either.

“And we are going to do what at the cemetery?” he said giving in.

There it was again. That word. It was the second time it had been said and it kind of hung there heavy in the air. At least Chris thought it did.

“I don’t know,” said Brad. “We can challenge the ghosts to come out for some mano-a-mano or something.”

He boxed the air with his fists.

“Hand to hand combat?” said Chris. “Are you serious?”

“Don’t tell me you actually believe in ghosts?” said Brad with a laugh.

“I don’t know that I believe in them,” said Chris. “And I don’t know that I don’t believe in them. All I know is that there are things that happen we just don't understand—things we can’t explain. They happen whether people want them to or not. And these things don’t turn out all that well in the end for some of the people involved in them. There's yelling and screaming and sometimes people wind up dead.

“So maybe we should be a little more respectful of certain things in case there are, well, things out there that might need to be respected, you know.”

“You've been reading your mom’s National Enquirer again,” said Brad punching Chris in the arm. “Two headed babies, aliens in the backyard and ghosts in the cemetery.”

Jerry, in the back, laughed.

“You’ve got too much of that stuff in the head, bro,” said Brad. “And all that studying you do? It can’t be good for you either. It’s just affected that brain of yours, dude.”

He thumped Chris on the head with a knuckle.

“You’re not only a geek but a dork. ‘Maybe we need to be respectful of things ‘cause they need to be respected.’ That’s just plain stupid.”

He emphasized both syllables of the word “stupid” and glanced back at Jerry.

Jerry was still laughing. His shoulders were shaking and his head was bobbing but there was very little sound. There never was much of a sound when Jerry laughed.

“Okay,” said Brad laughing himself, “if you're too scared to go then drop us off at my car and we’ll go without you. We don’t want to go with someone who’s gonna run off screaming when he hears a cricket in the grass.”

That they would leave him and do something without him was Brad’s most telling point. It always was and now he had made it twice.

“I’m not scared,” said Chris backing off. “I just don’t think that, that…”

He looked from one to the other of the other two. Brad was tapping his foot on the floorboard of the front seat. Chris could hear it thumping.

Jerry was in the back seat behind Brad. He was still shaking and his head was bobbing with laughter. For him, it was all just too funny for words.

It looked like if he didn’t cave, they would go alone. And what would Chris do then? Go home? That wasn’t what he wanted to do either.

To cruise a graveyard was not something he would go out of his way to do. But they were going to go without him and he didn’t much like that either.

“Okay, okay,” he said changing his tone. “Let’s go.”

“Took you long enough,” said Brad. “But first we gotta stop by the store to get some…things.”

Brad looked back at Jerry. Jerry had stopped laughing and was trying not to start again. He wasn’t successful and turned his head to hide it.

“We’re going to need some…some…things for our little trip, so we need to stop at a store. Any store. A WalMart will do if there’s one around.”

There was one close so Chris drove to it. When they got there, he pulled into the lot and parked in one of the spaces.

“You stay here,” said Brad to Chris. “We’ll be back.”

Both he and Jerry laughed as they got out and walked away.

Chris sat in the car and waited.

Fifteen minutes later, the other two were back and hopped into the car.

“Let’s go Chrissy boy!” Brad said. “We got everything we’re going to need right here.”

He tapped the bag he was holding.

“It’s all here and it’s in the bag.”

Brad emphasized every word and he and Jerry laughed. It was a good joke to them but Chris didn’t see what was so funny about it.

They drove to the older part of city. That was the part that was settled first many long years before.

The City Cemetery was there. It had been called the City Cemetery for no other reason than that it was the city cemetery—the only one in the city for many years.

The original settlers had buried their people there and those graves and the graves of their descendents now filled it.

It wasn’t the only cemetery now—there were a number of them scattered now around the city—but it was the first and it had expanded from what was originally a small plot to its present size.

It was the largest in the city.

But, even though it was the largest, that didn’t necessarily mean that it was used all that much anymore. The fact is that it wasn’t. Any new burials were at the other, newer cemeteries around town. This was so perhaps because of better marketing—the newer ones were businesses set up for profit but the City Cemetery was a public enterprise maintained by the city. They didn’t advertise at all.

Or perhaps it was because it had been used for so long that it was mostly filled up. It was an old cemetery and generations of residents had been buried there.

Whatever the reason for it, this cemetery, the City Cemetery, the oldest and largest in the city, was rarely used.

Oh, occasionally, some older person died who was one of the surviving relatives of someone already buried there. And they would be buried with their family members in the old family plots or family crypts. But these relatives had all died off for the most part and there were getting to be fewer and fewer of these funerals.

In fact, there hadn’t been one for a few years.

But the cemetery was still maintained though not as well as it had been in its heyday. The fact was that it was not much of a revenue generator for the city anymore and the budget had been cut to the bare bones as a result.

The boys pulled up to the cemetery entrance. It was wrought iron and it curved overhead. The name of it was wrought in twisted metal into what looked like an ancient script.

A city of the dead. That's what Chris thought of as they looked in. It was like one of those ancient cities of the dead he had read about. It wasn't that old, not nearly, but that's what he was reminded of.

But it seemed that old. To these boys it seemed that old. To see it through the entrance like that was for them to go back in time a long way back. The wrought iron, the old entrance, the crypts they could just glimpse through the entrance. It was an ancient place to them. And that made going in at night all the more something they would do on a dare.

Though there was an entrance, there were no gates now to speak of. Maybe there had never been any but if there were they were gone. Now there was only a bar that could be lowered into place across the entrance. But that was hardly ever done anymore. The bar mostly stood up out of everyone's way. This left the cemetery open to anyone who wanted to come in, to cars, to people on foot, to anyone.

That had never been much of a problem there, though, because people never really came by the place anymore anyway. There just wasn’t much cause to come there what with no funerals to speak of. It wasn’t likely anymore that much of anyone would be coming by to visit a close relative. The close relatives were mostly all dead now.

And it wasn’t as if they needed to close up the place to keep teenagers away who might just want to cruise around the place for thrills. The teenagers in town didn’t make it a destination very much either, not even on a dare. They didn’t because it was just too old, too creepy for even them. If the urge took hold of any of them to bait the spirits of the dead in some way—for whatever reason the young have for doing such a thing—they chose the more modern cemeteries to do it in.

The fact is that no one ever really came to the old City Cemetery anymore.

“So now what?” said Chris as his headlights illuminated the area within the entrance. They could see some old crypts shining brightly in the light.

“We go in!” Brad said slapping him on the back of the head. “What else, stupid!”

He and Jerry laughed.

Chris drove in. He cut the headlights as he passed the entrance though. He didn’t know if there was a caretaker there or if there was anybody else for that matter, but he didn’t think it would be a good idea to call attention to themselves if they could help it in case there were.

With only the parking lights on, he drove into the cemetery.

The road forked just inside the entrance. The main road went on straight ahead. To the right, however, another road veered off. It seemed to go in the direction of the fence line.

“The one to the right looks like it might take us around the cemetery,” Chris said. “The other one goes straight in.

“So, which way?”

Brad looked at the main road and then at the other.

“Well, I don’t know!” he burst out. “It’s not my cemetery!”

He thought that was a clever one. And Jerry shook again with his mostly silent laugh.

To purchase this book, go to From the Dark, Book One