“I don’t know. Shut up and listen. Mrs. Lanier found out her husband was being held in Fort Warren, so she crossed the water one stormy night on a flimsy boat with nothing but a small pistol and a pickaxe. When she reached the fort, she whistled a Southern song her husband knew well.”
Sinead whistled a soft tune. Hearing it in the dark graveyard, surrounded by the dead, made me shiver.
“Her husband repeated the whistled notes.” Sinead whistled again, repeating the same—
—tune. I was whistling to myself, the same tune from that night, when we had first entered the cemetery.
“That way,” I said with certainty, leading Kane to a small path. “Sinead used to scare the hell out of me with ghost stories when we walked here. Whenever we entered the graveyard, she always had a new ghost story to tell. I was only fourteen, and those stories sounded so real…” I smiled, shaking my head.
“My sister and I used to tell ghost stories to each other some nights,” Kane said. “She would fall asleep straight away afterward, but I’d stay awake for hours, too scared to sleep.”
“Did you hear the one about the lady in black?”
“I don’t remember.” His voice suddenly became slightly colder. Perhaps he realized he had forgotten to hate me for a few seconds.
“This woman entered Fort Warren with a pickaxe and a—”
—pistol. That’s all she had,” Sinead said. “She managed to wiggle through one of the cell windows, and with the help of the Confederate prisoners, she began tunneling with her pickaxe.”
Fog was starting to gather on the ground, wisps of it curling around the gravestones. I hefted the pack on my shoulder and stuck my hands in my pockets. All my attention was focused on Sinead and her story.
“But Mrs. Lanier got caught, and when the guard went for her, she raised her pistol and fired. Unfortunately, the pistol was old, and in bad shape after her long travels in terrible conditions. It exploded in her hands, and a shard lodged in the brain of the man standing next to her, killing him instantly. That man… was her husband.”
You knew the scary part of the story was coming when the person telling it lowered their voice to a hoarse whisper. I wanted her to stop. I wanted her to carry on.
“She was hanged for her crimes, in the black robes of a traitor, and with the knowledge that she had killed her own husband.”
Sinead’s voice took a strange tremble, almost as if she had scared herself by telling the story.
“Not long after the hanging, people began reporting strange experiences they had in the Boston graveyards. They could occasionally hear a quiet sobbing, accompanied by a steady clunking. Almost as if someone was endlessly trying to dig a tunnel with a pickaxe nearby. And then people began sighting a strange figure. Dressed all in black, hovering above the ground. And she was whistling an eerie Southern tune.”
She whistled the tune again. Somewhere, in the fog, I could almost imagine the tap-tap-tapping of a pickaxe. I shivered, telling myself it was because of my wet clothing and hair.
“Shhh,” Isabel suddenly hissed at us. She stood alert, her eyes unfocused, listening to things we couldn’t hear.
“What is it?” I asked.
Isabel was the main reason we had managed to survive on the streets. Every so often she would stop to listen, or to stare at a pattern in a pile of street garbage, or at a strangely shaped puddle. And then she’d say something like, “We can’t go to the shelters tonight. It would end badly.” Or “There’s a restaurant with a blue sign somewhere close, and there’s lots of food in the garbage bin behind it.” Or “There’s a predator nearby. We need to move west, to keep away.”
We always followed her advice. She had an uncanny ability to see things we couldn’t, to catch glimpses of the future, see the truth in random patterns. She said this ability ran in her family.
“We need to move to the—”
—left.” I pointed, and strode past a large weeping willow.
“It’s getting dark,” Kane said.
“We’re nearly there,” I muttered. “There should be a statue of a woman.” I looked around.
“There’s one.” Kane gestured.
“That’s it!”
It was gray and intricately carved. A woman with curly hair, one hand raised up high, fingers splayed. She wore some sort of cloth shirt, its folds and curves all sculpted to make it almost seem as if its touch would be soft, silky, instead of hard and cold.
I approached it, circled around it, and peered at the—
—road, where a single light shone. A security guard, probably. He walked down the path, shining the beam of his light around him, coughing every two or three seconds. The light cast in all directions, and I was worried that at any moment he would point it at us.
But he didn’t. We stood still behind the statue of the standing woman, and he stalked past, his cough puncturing the silence.
Now that I was motionless, I realized how hungry I was. We hadn’t eaten since that morning. We had some food—Sinead had managed to earn thirteen dollars playing her guitar, and I’d scammed ten more from passersby. We’d bought a few pastries and some cheese. But just as we were about to eat, Isabel had become tense and said we should keep moving. So the pastries and cheese all went into Sinead’s huge backpack, and we walked on. Thinking about them now, my stomach rumbled. It was a low, growling sound, loud enough to wake the dead, not to mention the security guard only ten yards away. I clutched at my abdomen, pressing it, hoping to muffle the sound, my heart pounding hard. Would he hear it? Would he chase us?
But he kept walking. By my side, Isabel and Sinead were stifling giggles as my stomach kept growling and humming like some sort of cartoonish motorcycle. Finally, its rumble stopped, the security guard none the wiser. He kept coughing, getting farther away. After a few minutes we could hardly even hear his coughing, and we all relaxed.
“God, Lou.” Sinead snorted with laughter. “What do you have in there? A lawnmower?”
“Shut up.”
“You should do street shows! We’ll hold a mic to your belly.” She raised her hand in a theatrical gesture, the other pointing to my stomach as if holding an invisible microphone. “Come closer, ladies and gents, come listen to the rumbling-belly woman. Not too close, kids! She’s so hungry, she might eat you up!”
“I’m Lou’s ravenous tummy!” Isabel boomed. “Brrrrrm-brrrrrm.”
“It has more pitch,” Sinead corrected her. “It’s like… brrraaw-merrrrow-wowowow.”
“Flee, mortals, Lou’s belly is coming! Rrrrrooooom-broooaaaaw.”
“Is it an earthquake? A volcano? No! It’s Lou’s tum-tum! Wrrrrrr-rrrraw-brawawaw.”
They were walking side by side, making outrageous groaning and roaring sounds, intermittently collapsing into helpless laughter.
I rolled my eyes, fighting to keep a grin off my face. “Idiots.”
We were walking into a deeply forested area. The tombstones around us seemed older, some broken, mold and moss covering their surface.
“Come on.” Isabel sounded excited. “It’s not much farther. Over here.”