Tobias won’t talk. Won’t peek out from his shell. The acid isn’t helping, I can tell. I don’t want to know what personal horror movie is projecting across the inside of his skull right now.
But I don’t care. My world is me and Silas. My hand in his. He’s leading me along, always my guide. I don’t know if my feet are touching the ground anymore. I could be a balloon, for all I know. My arm is a string and Silas is running through the cemetery while I whip in the wind.
“Here we are,” he says, stopping before a mausoleum that seems to be some bizarro cross section of Masonic and Egyptian architecture. The concrete is covered in kudzu—nope, scratch that. It’s spray paint. I have to squint to make out what’s scrawled across the vault. Even then, the warped words don’t want to keep still long enough for me to read them. All I can make out is— RISE, REVENANT OF RICHMOND, RISE!
The gate to the tomb should be locked—shouldn’t it?—but Silas pries it open no problem, hinges giving in with a rusted wail that echoes throughout the rest of the cemetery.
“No fucking way,” Amara says. “I’m not going in there. There are spiders!”
“Then wait outside,” Silas says. “You’re on lookout.”
The mausoleum swallows Silas right up. Tobias ducks his head in next, as if he’s Silas’s lost shadow, careful not to clock his noggin against the top of the doorway.
Wait for me, I imagine Silas’s shadow saying, wait for meeeee!
Amara looks at me. At this point in our friendship, the two of us have perfected our psychic abilities, communicating with one another strictly through brain waves.
Are you really going to do this? she asks with her eyes, her voice coming in loud and clear in my head.
I, uh…guess so? We’ve come this far, you know?
The fuck, Erin? She’s not pleased, clearly. For real?
Come with me!
No, no way.
Fine. Party pooper. I duck into the mausoleum and immediately feel the drop in temperature. The chill is thick. It seeps through my skin, reaching deep, all the way to the bone.
I have a quick minute to myself while Silas and Tobias plot together and Amara confronts the massive expanse of slumbering corpses just beneath her feet outside.
I do what I always do in moments like these: I pull out my Sharpie from my pocket and find a free spot on the wall. The inhabitant of this mausoleum will forgive me one small indiscretion, considering the countless others who have already thrown up their own graffiti. Couples have scribbled their names: PAUL + HANNA 4-EVA. A few rudimentary pentagrams. Loopy-lettered tags: ZOMBI. LONG LIVE VIDEO FAN. GHOSTBUSTAZ.
My contribution is relatively simple in comparison:
ERIN IS HERE
Present tense. Not past. I’m leaving a little part of myself behind. I’ll always be here.
“Jesus, it’s freeeezing,” Amara squeals behind me. She can never be alone for long. She knows this, I know this. Silas definitely knows this. She can’t stand being by herself. She slides up next to me and threads her arm through mine, shivering. “Miss me?”
“Always,” I say. The two of us hunch together in our ringside seats to Silas’s séance.
“Everybody sit in a circle,” he says.
He’s brought candles. Of course he has. His backpack is like a one-stop shop for all your supernatural needs. He pulls out the appropriate paraphernalia and gets to illuminating.
“I’m not sitting on somebody’s grave,” Amara snipes—and for once I don’t disagree with her. I can hear the chitinous limbs of insects flexing all around us. Some mile-long centipede is winding up my leg and it won’t stop, no matter how many times I try swatting at it. I’m coming for your cooooch, the centipede utters as it rounds the bend. Coochie-coochie-coooo!
“Come on,” Silas says, snapping me out of it. “Mr. Pool won’t mind.”
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“Ever hear of W.W. Pool? Some call him the Richmond vampire, but that’s just bullshit. He’s really a revenant.”
Amara’s snort reverberates through the tight confines of the crypt.
“Sorry,” she says. “What’s a…a reve-whatever…”
“Revenant. Someone trapped between the living and dead.”
“Poor him,” I say, my focus drifting to the liquid-like shadows cast by the candles. I don’t feel any wind but they certainly seem to be flickering from some external force, rippling outward.
“Give me a hand,” Silas says to Tobias while running his fingers along the crypt’s marble shutter.
Tobias hops to it without protest. “Yeah, okay.” It’s the most I’ve heard him talk all night.
Silas says help me break into this tomb.
Silas says help me dig up this grave.
Silas says…
“Um,” Amara starts, “what’re you doing?”
“I just need to get his tongue.”
“I’m sorry, what? Come the fuck again?”
“They say if you can cut out a revenant’s tongue, you can speak to the dead.” Silas says it so matter-of-factly, as if this is the most normal thing in the world.
“Nope,” Amara says. Her voice bounces off the mausoleum walls. “Goodnight, I’m out.”
“A little too late to back out now, don’t you think?”
“Are you kidding? You never told us we were gonna be chopping off crusty body parts!”
“Would you have come if I had?”
“Hell no!”
I watch from the sidelines as Amara and Silas continue to bicker.
“And why exactly did we have to drop acid for this?” Amara asks.
“Why not?” is Silas’s answer. Always his answer. “It helps with the spiritual connection. There’s somebody I want to talk to.”
His mother, I think. Silas doesn’t say her name out loud. He doesn’t have to. We all know she passed away when he was nine years old. He freely shares that she’d been in a car accident, but I’m the only one who knows Silas was buckled in the backseat when a sixteen-wheeler smashed into their Toyota Matrix on the interstate. Silas told me about their vehicle spiraling through the air, how he lost himself in the vertigo of the moment, how he remembered watching his mother’s hair whip around, fanning around her face as her neck twisted…and twisted. Suddenly they were staring at each other, his mother’s bloodshot eyes peering into the backseat through the gap in the headrest, her chin perched between her shoulder blades. Her spinal column had curlicued to the point of near decapitation. The only thing keeping her head physically attached to the rest of her was her corkscrewed skin.
Not that it stopped her from talking. She looked so confused. She didn’t understand what was happening to her. She was already dead by then, but she was still talking to me. Telling me everything was going to be all right. That I was going to be okay. That she loved me.
Silas walked away from the wreck without a scratch. A miracle, he said. That’s when he started believing in ghosts. Always chasing after his mother.
The mausoleum wall has crumbled along the corner. All it takes are a few swift kicks administered by Silas’s heel for it to give away. The rock disintegrates, exposing a casket inside.
“Fuck this,” Amara moans. “Fuuuck this so muuch.”
“You take that side,” Silas instructs Tobias. “Just help me pull.”
The boys are busy busting out some Podunk Dracula or whatever the hell Silas called him, leaving me and Amara to wig out. We both know this is fucked. Amara doesn’t need to convince me, but she’ll blame me because she can’t blame bulletproof Silas, and of course she’d never blame herself.
My attention drifts toward the mausoleum entrance. To the dark pressing in.
“…Guys?” Nobody pays attention to me. “Guys!”
“What?” Silas asks. “What is it?”
“Ghosts” is all I can say as I point to the doorway. The cemetery is full of them. Orbs of light wash over the graves. They’re drawing near. Floating our way.
“You see them too, right?” I whisper. “Please tell me you see them.”
“What are they?” Amara asks, awestruck.
“Run,” Silas says.
Silas says…
Silas says…
Silas grabs my wrist and yanks. My arm snaps taut before the rest of my body is whisked out of the tomb. I can’t look away from the balls of light bouncing through the rows of graves, the ghosts stretching their spectral bodies out farther and farther.