Rap Once for Yes

"Uh oh," said Sarah, pointing into the cemetery where a few flashlights could be seen, "looks like we weren't the only ones with this idea."

"Don't worry," Joey said, "that's not where we'll be going anyway."

"Where are we going?" asked Katie.

"You'll see."

Everyone had remembered a flashlight, so there was no trouble navigating through the unlit headstones under the old trees. We startled a couple of high school kids making out behind one of the bigger monuments, but once they saw we were moving on they ignored us. The moon was full that night, casting the area outside the beams in a silver light. It was more pretty than creepy, really. I said as much.

"You'll see," Joey said again. He was eating this stuff up.

We trekked through the silent cemetery, and Joey showed no signs of stopping. It wasn't long before I realized what he meant about the light. We were headed to the oldest part of the cemetery, a heavily wooded section that jutted off at ninety degrees to the fence around the main boneyard. The original church had burned down hundreds of years ago. The old graveyard and its low stone wall were all that remained.

The trees grew close together, and their canopies tangled up to make a dense, rattling roof. Enough dried up leaves remained on the trees to block the moonlight. It was a different world under those trees.

Joey walked directly across the uneven ground of the plots to a large stone with a flat top. He set his backpack down on top of it and started unpacking. He handed me a thin blanket, which I unfolded to make place to sit.

Bill's flashlight doubled as a lantern. It was suddenly possible to see our surroundings without shining a spotlight on them. This outing was getting cozier by the minute.

I looked at the engravings on the headstone, thrown into sharp relief by the lantern, and all my feelings of coziness disappeared. "Gerald Peltier," it said, "1804-1847. A Wise Man."

I jumped up and ran to the other side of the stone with Joey. "What the hell are you doing?" I whispered sharply.

"What?"

"You said you scouted this place. You picked Gerald Peltier's tombstone on purpose? Are you insane?"

"The man died nearly two hundred years ago, Seth," Joey said slowly, like he was talking to a little kid. "I'm sure the Butcher of Bingham was put to rest a long time ago."

Joey and I had both learned about Peltier as part of our extracurricular studies. He'd been a necromancer, like Joey's Master. No one recorded exactly what set him off, but he began to raise the dead and tried to use them to take control of the town. Hundreds of people had died before one of the Sheriff's deputies had managed to shoot him. He was the only bad wizard our state had ever produced.

And Joey wanted to have a seance on his grave.

"Look, man, I just think it's pushing our luck," I said. "Let's move to another grave. Maybe at the very back of the main area."

"I said he's been gone to the Beyond for ages. Jim's great grandfather saw to it. Being this far from the new graves means we won't have to worry about getting swamped. Peltier's just for atmosphere."

I sighed and walked back around the stone. I'd just have to hope that Joey knew what he was talking about. The little circle of light didn't seem welcoming anymore. I felt like I was trapped in it, and its brightness meant I couldn't really see what was coming for us on the outside.

Katie had set up the board, so I tried to focus on the Ouija experiment. I concentrated on expanding my senses, so I could see any supernatural forces at work on the pointer or the board. Katie and Bill took the first turn. Once they were both settled, the pointer started to move in a gentle circle.