ABOUT FIVE MINUTES later, it occurs to Hadley that he just might be lost.
This is, of course, terrifying for a great number of reasons. If it was anywhere else—like a mall, or maybe a little resort on some remote but well populated island—and if it was any other time—preferably when the sun wasn't just a memory of a memory—then Hadley probably wouldn't have been half as scared as he is now. But this is a graveyard, and the sun is a memory of a memory, and it is nearly midnight, and Hadley is lost.
Apart from fear, the other emotion Hadley's experiencing is anger. How can a graveyard, as huge and sprawling and magnificent as this one, not have any signs? Who designed this place? Why do all the fucking tombstones look the goddamn same? Would it have killed David to give him directions?
"Fucking piss and shit bitch fuck," Hadley mutters, as he circles what might be the same spot for the eighth time. "Motherfucking Christ and his disciples on a boat. Fuck."
I want you to get back to the car. Sure, sure, easiest thing in the world. Completely doable.
Hadley glances at his watch. 11:48 PM. He can't see himself getting out of this labyrinth of stone in twelve minutes. Hell, he doesn't even see himself leaving in an hour.
He looks around despairingly, as if doing so will show him a way out of here. There's nothing different about this place than the one he was in a few minutes ago—this is because he's in the exact same spot, but he doesn't know that—and his stomach sinks. There's a cluster of trees in front of him, a little far off, offering a few graves shade from the cold light of the moon. And there, standing by one of the graves, is a person, their back turned towards him.
A ghost, he thinks, his heart in his mouth.
The person turns their head to look at him.
He doesn't move. He's not sure if he can.
They step out of the dark shade of the trees, and Hadley sees that there's no ghost. Only a woman—more girl than woman really—who can't possibly be much older than Hadley. She has a lovely face, but there is something distinctly colorless and washed out about her. A watercolor impression of a person. There are flower petals clinging to her coat. Her hair is so pale that it is almost white, and it's tied up in a way that brings forth images of Hadley's long-dead great aunts in family portraits.
"Hello," she says, and it startles Hadley. Her voice is—he doesn't know how to explain it—it's full bodied. Too heavy to belong to a ghost.
"Hey," he greets back. "I'm lost."
"I know," she says. "It is written all over your face."
She is a slight woman. Her huge coat does nothing to help that fact, the hem hanging well past her knees, making her seem smaller than she already is. She moves a little more towards Hadley, leaving behind a trail of petals. Her boots crunch the snow beneath. Ghosts don't make sounds. They don't leave footprints.
"I can show you the way out of here," she says, "if you want."
"Can I trust you not to kill me?" he asks.
She smiles, and her teeth are small and white and charmingly crooked. "Look at me," she says, gesturing at herself. "I am small. You are big. If I tried to kill you, all you would have to do is lift your arm and you would have stopped me."
She has a slight accent—he can't quite place it. Icelandic? Norwegian? Eastern European, definitely.
"And you trust me not to kill you?" he says. "I could be an axe murderer."
"Axe murderers do not wander graveyards looking lost and scared. Also, you do not have an axe."
He feels a grin creep onto his face. "Fair point."
"And you are too pretty to be an axe murderer," she says, plucking a petal out of her hair. Her hands are small and pretty, like the rest of her. "Although, I think I am not to judge by a cover."
She seems trust-worthy enough. Besides, he doesn't have much of a choice if he intends to leave this confusing place.
"Alright, strange lady," he says, "lead the way."
She nods, like he's made a wise choice, and he feels weirdly gratified. She moves past him, not glancing back to see if he's keeping close behind her. Which he is. She walks like she knows the place, winding through the cemetery with purpose. Hadley stops walking. She stops, too. She turns around and looks at him, her head tilted at an odd angle, like she's looking at a particularly challenging puzzle.
"You have stopped," she says. "Is something wrong?"
"I'm just wondering," he says, feeling his chest tighten. "Why you're here."
"I come here often," she says, "I know the graves better than most."
The moon is full, and under the cloudless and uninterrupted night sky, Hadley can see everything.
"Which one is yours?" he asks.
She doesn't even blink.
"Are you sure," she says, the words slow in her mouth, "you want to know?"
Her gaze is startlingly frank, honest. Hadley doesn't look away.
"Yes," he says. "I do."
She puts a hand on his cheek. It's like being caressed by a block of ice. "Come with me," she says. "And I will show you."
David, the car, the blood on the snow—all of this seems distant now. Unimportant. If there's ever been a night for answers, Hadley thinks, this is one. And if there's ever been a key to those answers, Hadley knows he's looking at her. There is an instinctual familiarity to her. Like he's met her before, known her before he was even born. This is why he trusts her.
This is why he says yes.
"Show me."
They walk deeper into the cemetery. He glances at his watch. 11:49 PM. This is not possible—they've been walked much, much longer than a minute—but Hadley knows that things are different, now. In a dream, there are certain things that should not be questioned, even though you do not know them. In a dream, time is a plaything, to be moulded and reshaped and twisted. And what is reality now, but a dream?
"It is nice," she says, breaking the silence, "to meet someone like me."
"Like a ghost, you mean?"
"No, no," she says, tapping her chin. She thinks over her choice of words. "Not a ghost. Ghosts are dead. You are simply lifeless."
"Dead," he corrects. Her words don't hurt as much as they should.
"Not dead. No. Dead is a thing. It is something you are. You are not dead. You are not with life. You are not anything."
"And what is life?" he asks, slightly amused.
"I am not a philosopher," she says. "But, I think it is a state of being. Something you miss when you are dead. And you, you've been missing it."
"Missing as in lacking, or missing as in longing for emotional proximity?"
She blinks. Hadley can see the gears in her mind turn. "Both. I think. Come, not too far now."
Hadley weighs over the words of a not-quite-dead woman. They unsettle him, not because they're strange, but because he knows they're true. Life, as far as he's concerned, is something that happens to other people.
They stop under a birch tree.
"When I was alive," she says, "On nights like these, my sister would tell me that the ghosts would come out. We would both be sitting inside, curled up, next to a fireplace. Heat warming us. Yes, heat." She presses a hand to her throat. Swallows. She lets her hand hang at her side. "The heat on a hot summer day. The heat of touch." She closes her eyes, and Hadley can see her bones.
He says nothing. He wraps his fingers around her corpse-cold wrist. She sighs.
"You are a moron," she says, her eyes still closed, "but you have a good heart. That is why you are a moron."
Her wrist is so, so cold, it bites at his palm. He doesn't let go.
"Who are you?" he asks.
She slips her wrist away from his hand, and opens her eyes. Now that he looks closer, he sees that they're a strange shade of blue, a sky barely clouded over.
"Your friend asked me that, also," she says. "Last time he was here."
He frowns. "David?"
"That is his name. Yes."
"Why don't you go talk to him?"
"Because the first time I was around him I felt more alive than I had done in years," she says, her voice wavering. "And if you are like me, feeling alive is the last thing you should be feeling. I should have not felt the sun. I should not have felt the ground under me. I should not have felt blood in my body. But I did. And when he left, I was miserable."
"So," Hadley says, "is that why I can see you? Because of him?"
"A little bit, yes. Also, because of you. It is why I brought you here."
When he glances down, he sees a tombstone, barely more than a mound of rock, powdered with snow. He kneels down and brushes some of the snow away.
He nearly keels over when he reads the name.
The epigraph is faded, and so is most of the name, but the first name is distinct, every letter stamped out in stone. Catherine. The first name. His mother's name. Hadley lets the wind rattle out of his chest. He looks at it, for a good, long while.
"Who are you?" he asks, again, standing up. He doesn't look at the woman. "Have we met before?"
"I don't know. No. I do not think so. I would have remembered," she says, "if we had met."
"So why bring me here?"
"You wear your mother's name like a cross. It is plain for all those who can see."
And Hadley remembers, suddenly, the morning back in Duchess's house, something from another lifetime. The smell of a musty home. Duchess's narrowed eyes. Shame about your mother. She said that.
"I didn't realize," he says. He turns to look at her. "Catherine."
"That is me, yes. I am not Hungarian, not like your mother. And I am not as cruel as her. At least, I do not think so."
"So it's just coincidence?"
"Yes," she says. "Coincidence. A trick. We share the same name, but we do not share the same fate."
"It's more than that," Hadley says. "It has to be."
She shrugs, and the gesture looks all wrong on her. "Who knows? There is much I do not remember."
There's more he wants to ask her, questions he can't put into words. So he doesn't. He stays silent, wiping the snow off of him.
"You are empty," she says, "and that is a rare thing in people."
"Gee," he says. "Thanks."
"You think it is a bad thing. It is not. You do not understand what a gift it is, to be hollow," she says, moving towards him. "You do not understand what others will do to you, once they get their claws on you."
Claws. Not hands.
"Be careful," she says. "They will come, and not all of them will be like me."
Her body is close to his, but there is none of the heat that comes with proximity. She kisses him. It's a chaste and dry kiss, and her mouth feels like a feather, in how soft its touch is. A wave of cold washes over him; the good and cleansing kind.
"For good luck. You will need it, I think," she says, pulling away. "It is all I can give you."
"Thank you," he says, his eyes lowered. There are no more flower petals on her coat.
"You are welcome. And I am sorry. When it is all over, come find me. You will know where to look."
He is going to ask her what she means by that, but she is gone. The air where she used to be is warm, and Hadley steps into it. He breathes it in. It smells like daisies.
There were terrifying nights, awful nights, nights that never seemed to end, and then there were strange nights. They weren't nights that had something funny happening, or something weird. They were nights that were fundamentally wrong. The evening at the pier was a strange night. Tonight, too, is a strange night. Hadley thinks that there might be more coming.
It's 11:56 PM. Hadley knows where he's supposed to go. He walks, his feet carrying him to his destination. The knowledge of the path he takes comes from nowhere, like someone's planted it in him. He'd know his way around, even with his eyes closed.
He stops five rows away from Kevin Hall's grave. David is bent down on one knee, talking to a small boy. For all intents and purposes, the boy looks alive. From where Hadley's standing anyway. He isn't washed out, like Catherine. What he is, is dead. Utterly and irrevocably dead. It's stamped all over him, like a mark.
Hadley watches David offer up his bloody and bandaged hand to the boy. The boy doesn't even recoil at the sight of it. Hadley's too far off to make out any of their conversation, but there's a few words exchanged. When the boy opens his mouth to say something, the air stirs itself. David shakes his head. Says something. The boy closes his eyes. He places his tiny brown hand in David's own.
And just like that, Kevin Hall is gone. David gets up. He hasn't looked at Hadley.
"Are you just going to stand there?" David says, loud enough that Hadley can hear him.
"Depends!" Hadley half-yells. "Is it safe?"
"This is a graveyard. Not a minefield. Get over here."
Hadley does just that, while David turns around and kicks up snow with his shoe, piling it on top of Kevin Hall's grave.
"I thought I told you to get back to the car." David gives a little mound of snow a ferocious kick, blowing it off onto the pattern-of-blood-with-impossible-geometry on the ground.
Something about the sight of ice laced with blood distresses Hadley, so he joins David, dispiritedly covering up the strange red mark with more and more snow.
"I got lost."
David gives him a look.
"Listen," Hadley says, "I don't come here often. I'm not a fucking expert on how graveyards work."
"You couldn't just go back the way we came?"
Hadley points half-heartedly at David. "I'm not good with directions."
"Are you good with anything?" David asks, making a face at Hadley.
Hadley bends, picks up some snow with his hand. "I am good at one thing."
"And what would that be?"
"This."
He flings a snowball at David, as hard as he can. It hits him right in the face.
David wastes no time on insults—he ducks the next snowball Hadley throws at him, and with impressive speed, grabs some snow, and chucks it at Hadley. It isn't a snowball, but it is a distraction, and the next shot he takes at Hadley is true to his aim. David laughs, and Hadley takes the opportunity to hit him with another snowball.
There are no ghosts, no graves, no strange women lurking in the shadows, no blood, no curses—just the moon and the stars and David and the fierce joy bubbling under Hadley's skin as he laughs, ducks, and tosses snowballs at David. It's remarkable, how quickly the world shifts with one gesture.
It's equally remarkable, how quickly it shifts back.
The sky above them shimmers, like wind blowing over a still and clear pool of water. For a fleeting moment, reality stretches out so thin, it becomes permeable.
David freezes up, his hand above his head, still clutching a snowball. He isn't looking at Hadley. He's looking through him.
"We have to go," David says, blinking rapidly at the ground. He lets his hand fall. "We have to leave. Now."
"Why? What's wrong? David—"
"Now," David snaps, and then, then it hits Hadley.
A stench. The smell of rotting meat, of flesh, of blood, of sex, of gasoline, of fresh sheets, of a hundred things all at once—a layer upon layer of odor, so strong that Hadley gags, so strong that his eyes start watering up.
David is gripping Hadley by the elbow, pulling him towards the cemetery gates. Hadley doesn't remember walking this far, nor does he remembering allowing himself to be led by David. All there is that unbearable stink, which doesn't go away even after Hadley starts breathing with his mouth. It's forcing its way into him, his mouth, his nose, it's almost tangible.
Everything gets substantially darker. Not pitch black dark. More like a cloud passing over the sun. Only, there is no sun, and there are no clouds.
They are not alone. Something is behind them.
no, there isn't.
yes, there is.
Don't look back.
Something is behind him.
Something old and familiar, something carrying the rot of years with it, something that shouldn't be. It's closing in on them. The hunger coming off of it is palpable. It's seeping into him and his bones, tainting him, ruining him. Getting right down to his core. An ancient hum, a growl, rolling through the darkness like thunder. It gets closer, breathes onto Hadley's neck. Its breath is sweet, a language of scent that Hadley is acquainted with. Where has he heard the words before?
I know you.
Focus. Don't breathe. Keep walking. Eyes forward. Run. Move. Don't look. Don't look. Don't look. Don't look.
He doesn't.
Of course he does.
What he sees is nothing. What he sees is a darkness so thick and impenetrable it might as well quantify as something else. He closes his eyes and he opens his eyes and there is no difference and he thinks he's gone blind, he thinks he isn't meant to see these things and this is mind's way of protecting him, he thinks he's died and bound to roam this void for eternity, he thinks—
He's sitting in his car, his hands on the steering wheel. There is no smell, no creature lurking right in the corner of his eye. The only thing in his peripheral vision is David, who is clutching his head with his hands. His bandaged hand has been soaked through with blood.
There's snow on the back of his neck. Hadley reaches out with a shaky hand and brushes it away.
"Drive," David croaks out. He's shivering violently; Hadley knows it can't be because of the cold.
Hadley wants to puke. "What was that? How did we—"
David slams his wrapped fist onto the glove compartment, leaving a smear of red.
"I said," David says, his voice brittle, "drive."
Hadley drives.
***
a/n: mmmmmm im hongry...meesa wanna EAT
you know. at one point i had like a folder full of facts about characters i was SOMEHOW gonna weave into this story but at this point m like...oh dude chill? which i feel is representative of my life in general. also god im so hungry.