Jeremy Flynn had been Brad’s partner when they had both been forensic divers for the police department. He’d been Brad’s best man at their wedding, and through everything, he had never lied to her, remaining her friend as well as Brad’s. And Brad was right. Jeremy would have revealed Damien as the fraud he was.
After lunch, Mary announced that she was ready for some actual history, so they headed toward one of the town’s famous cemeteries. It struck her as a poignant place, and she couldn’t help the tears that filled her eyes.
“What’s the matter?” Brad asked.
“Nothing. I was just thinking,” she said.
“Well, let’s get out of here,” he told her. “It’s this place that’s making you sad.”
No, it’s not really the cemetery, she thought. It’s that man, Damien, and the things he said.
“I love you, you know,” he told her.
She looked into his eyes. “I know. And I love you.”
She was shaking slightly; she knew he thought she was too easily frightened.
“I’m going to look at a few more of the graves, read some of the stones,” she told him. She squared her shoulders and walked away from him with quick steps, pulling a small guidebook out of her purse and calling out to him, “I’ve been reading about this. The garland symbolizes victory in death, and the winged hourglass is for the swiftness of passing time. Skeletons and skulls are for mortality. These angels are for heaven, and these ones here are for little children.”
Brad seemed to be getting into the spirit. He was standing by a stone several feet from her. “There’s a hooped snake on this one. What’s that for?” he asked.
“Eternity,” she informed him.
He walked down the path, putting more distance between them, and found an aboveground tomb. He sat down on it, watching her. “Hey, my feet are starting to hurt. How about we find a nice happy hour?” he asked.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to sit on someone’s grave,” she warned him. A broken stone seemed to beckon her from its spot by one of the huge trees that punctuated the cemetery. The tree’s expanding roots had broken through several of the nearby stones.
“Hey, don’t go too far,” Brad called to her, lying back on the stone tomb and staring up at the sky. “People are leaving. We don’t want to wind up locked in here.”
“We’ll be fine,” she assured him.
As she walked toward the stones, she felt the breeze pick up. And, she realized, darkness was coming. Fast. And with it, though she hadn’t felt or seen any sign of fog before, a silvery dew thickening the air.
She walked more quickly, stepping past the tree to get a better look at the stone that had caught her attention, and stopped dead.
Someone had cleaned and re-etched the stone, which dated from the late sixteen hundreds. It looked almost exactly like dozens of others. There was a death’s head at the top, and scythes and hourglasses along the borders.
And then she noticed the name.
Mary Clare Johnstone.
Her name.
Her name exactly.
She felt something clutch at her throat, and weakness swept through her. She went down on her knees and placed a hand on the stone, as her dizziness grew worse.
From somewhere, she could hear laughter. Children having fun. Mothers calling out to them. Husbands speaking to their wives.
She closed her eyes against the sight in front of her and saw the hill and the tree. The tree with the skeletal branches and the hangman’s noose.
And the woman, dangling at the end of it.
The mist swirled around her in a fury, and she heard laughter again.
Damien’s laughter…
His face rose before her.
He was there. He had her hand, and they were standing on a hill, with the wind sweeping around them.
His laughter was…evil.
He couldn’t be real; the hill couldn’t be real. But she could feel the wind against her legs, the earth beneath her feet and the chill of descending night.
“And now you’re mine. Playtime, my love,” Damien said.
His laughter came again, blending with the wind.
1
Rowenna saw scarecrows.
They stood above the cornfields, propped on their wooden crosses, and from a distance their faces were blank and terrifying.
The cornstalks grew high, marching toward the horizon in their neat rows seeming to stretch on forever.
And then, like sentinels, rising in a line and towering over the tall stalks that bent and waved in the cool breeze, stood the scarecrows.
She felt as if she were drifting through the corn, borne on the breeze, as the mist settled down over the cornfield, a dark blanket against the burst of beauty and light. She was looking down from above, almost as if she were a camera, coming into focus.
She dreamed, but she fought it and came so near to waking, struggling against the nightmare, against the threatening whisper in her mind.
Light…She needed light. Needed the spectacular beauty of the autumn colors to drive away the creeping darkness.