The Wight's Roses

I've heard said that second chances are hard to come by, but I know exactly where mine is.

The draught sits in a small burgundy-colored vial, on a stone shelf in my burial chamber, next to my mother's amber necklace, and my grandmother's polished skull.

The witch who gave it to me in the 17th century lived in a thatched cottage not far from where my barrow sits.

We struck up a friendship, as witches and supernatural creatures sometimes do.

Though it's been centuries, I recall the warmth of her hand as she thrust the little glass bottle into mine.

The stars were jewels in the thick night sky.

"This will give you back your humanity," Rosie whispered, looking for some emotion in my dead eyes.

Perhaps I should have drunk the potion there and then, but instead I waited, thinking there would be a better time, that I'd know the right time when it came.

*****

Most nights, I emerged from my tomb and headed through the field to meet my friend at the house, and sit round the fire, quietly talking until she grew tired. Then I would sometimes linger, watching the rise and fall of her chest as she slept, and enjoying the twinkling of the embers among the ash. It was the most beautiful part, I thought, just before the fire died out completely.

And then one night I found her, limbs bruised, hazel eyes open, hanging from the willow tree, impaled to the trunk with an iron rivet, to ensure she could not become a walker-after-death like me.

*****

The cottage was shunned by the superstitious villagers. Over the next two hundred years, it fell gradually into disrepair, like a living thing.

Alone I wandered the fields at night. I became familiar with the silent white-faced barn owls and the insistent song of the skylark. Before sunrise, I returned to my ancestral barrow, where I'd buried her in the earthen floor. I slid the large stone slab in front of the entrance, and settled myself upon the great boulder where I would approximate sleep, waiting until the sun went down again, and I could roam freely under the indigo sky.

*****

I've picked up the vial on occasion, turned it in my hand to see the liquid tilt within. The bottle feels warm, like her hand did the day she gave it to me. Then I place it back on the shelf with my mother's necklace and my grandmother's skull.

*****

After a while, I ranged closer to the growing village on my nightly wanderings. The stone houses on the outskirts were small and quiet, with low white fences and cottage gardens that brimmed with jumbles of roses and delphiniums and marigolds. I sometimes snipped a pink rose or two to bring back to her grave.

I had also begun the habit of picking up newspapers, which were often discarded on a bench or lying in the street.

In the early hours one night, at the very end of summer, I recall the church bell tolled three as I strolled back home along the deserted lane, smelling the bunch of roses in my hand, and I suddenly thought, Yes, I'll finally do it! Perhaps I'll sell some of my less treasured items and get work as a writer, buy a little cottage and grow roses and tend to them each day in the sunshine!

I opened the paper as I walked along under the gibbous moon. A new murder in Whitechapel, gruesome in a way that, it seemed to me, only humankind could devise.

As always, the roses wilted in a few short days.

*****

Another century later, workers came and rebuilt the cottage in the modern style, and within a fortnight, a new witch had moved in.

"Hellooo? Barrow-wight?" I heard her call early one morning. The air was still hazy with lingering night and I'd not yet settled in for my rest. "I'm June, your new neighbor!"

I peered out. The woman was not young, but she had a kind, round face and a laughing smile. Her family had owned this land for generations, she said, and she'd been fending off the archaeologists for a decade. "After I'm gone, they'll come," she said. "Then what will you do?"

Perhaps then it would be time to drink from the vial. Take my few portable memories with me into my new human existence, leave behind my ancestors' bones to be catalogued and analyzed. And Rosie's remains, too?

*****

On warm summer nights, June and I sat and talked on her brick patio. She would drink her gin and tonic while I leaned back in an old reclining lawn chair.

She bought me my own rose bush. She ran electricity out to her garden shed and set up a television for me. She laughed when I fumbled with the remote control and marveled at this modern window into the wider world.

When June grew sick, her niece came to care for her. The funeral was yesterday I think. Soon the niece will close up the house and go back to the city and I will be alone again.

Tonight I decided I would finally take the potion.

I turned on the television one last time and flipped through the sitcoms, the infomercials, the news. A child got shot; a bomb exploded in a crowded market somewhere far from here; impassioned people were protesting in the streets again. I didn't notice why or where.

I switched it off and stepped outside into the fresh, still night air.

I held up the vial to the moonlight and it glowed burgundy, like the color of my friend's bruises when I pulled her limp body down from the willow, and the color of the roses that bloom outside my tomb.

I won't drink it after all. I'll wait a little longer.

Or maybe, tomorrow, I'll simply walk out into the sun.