Davy winced. Yep, loser that he was, he didn’t like that kind of language. Made him feel squeamish.
“We need to get out of here,” another said. “The cops already came once and you guys are louder than a—“ He stopped speaking, breaking off to laugh. “Louder than a whole horde of screaming whores faking their orgasms!” He broke into drunken laughter again, enjoying his own joke tremendously.
“Shut up, ass,” the one who was most probably Jamesy snapped. “Come on now, I heard about this up in Savannah. Union soldier pissed off at the South moved all the headstones around at night. We gotta hurry. Before the cops come. Though, of course, don’t you go running, you sniveling dicks! My dad will get us all out of jail if we are caught.”
Davy thought about showing himself and telling them that what they were doing was wrong and disrespectful. Then he thought about the beers he had consumed—and wondered how big the guys were. He shrank down low against the gravestone he leaned against.
“Loser,” he whispered aloud to himself. Coward.
But, yeah, he didn’t feel like being beaten up on top of everything else.
He stayed still, barely breathing. Then he heard footsteps, the grass crunching near him. And then there was laughter. “Let’s move this dude. ‘Artie Hackensack.’ Who really has a name like that?” One of them demanded. “Let’s dump him over by the big sailor-shrine or whatever it is!”
They would be moving by Davy any minute.
Davy stood. He must have made noise because one of them shouted out something. “Hey there’s a twerp in the place. Let’s get the bugger—make him wish that he was down in the ground or sealed up in stones here!” The one he knew as ‘Jamesy’ yelled.
Davy jumped up and began to run. He thought he was headed toward Angela Street. There was a place there where a tomb was close to the wall. He might make a good leap out of the place.
“Cut him off, cut him off!” Someone else shouted. “The prick will call the cops!”
He started running. He passed the ‘file-cabinet’ style interments, using them to hide. He sprinted over a pile of in-ground burials. He hurtled around a long stretch of ‘wall’ interments.
The footsteps seemed to be coming from all around him.
Along with the taunts.
“Gonna prick you up, mouse!”
“You’re gonna hurt…before you’re dead!”
“Won’t have to drag you far…you’re already in a cemetery.”
“Sleeping with the ghosts—forever!”
He circled around a piece of funerary art—a praying angel. Even the statue seemed to think that he needed help.
Then, suddenly, when he thought that they were right behind him, he heard a scream.
It was a terrible, long drawn out scream of shock and terror—and then agony.
“Jamesy, Jamesy?” Someone else called.
And then Davy heard one of them say, “Shit! Shit! What the hell….”
That was broken off with another scream. It was so terrible that Davy felt goosebumps form all over him. He felt as if ice water was flushed through his veins.
He dropped to the ground by a brick-oven type tomb. Shaking.
And then he saw…it.
At first, he was convinced it was a person. Perhaps a cemetery-vigilante. But, a person….
He laid low as it came forward.
It was of average height…a nun!
A nun! Except that….
The nun was dead. The flesh was rotted away so badly from the skeletal face that it was really impossible to tell the sex of the thing in the long black robes. Scabs covered what flesh was left. The eye sockets were enormous. The mouth seemed to be frozen in a massive and open O.
Somehow, Davy kept from screaming.
And somehow….
The thing walked by him.
It just kept going. And going. And disappeared behind a stretch of monuments.
Davy stayed frozen for what seemed like hours. Then he moved at last. At first, he was shaking so badly, he couldn’t even walk. Then his strides became long, and then he was running.
The tomb that would allow him to leap over the wall was near….
He tripped and went flying. He rolled, wincing from the pain of his fall. He tried to right himself and then he froze again.
A corpse was before him. A corpse with wide-open eyes and a ripped open neck. Blood streamed over the ground beneath him, crimson against the moon-lit white of a tombstone slab.
***
Danni looked curiously around the Victorian parlor of Colby’s historic home; she loved the architecture, the bay window, the crown molding—they all seemed to give the house tremendous character. She’d always loved the old—probably because her mom had died when she’d been so young and she’d spent so many years traveling with her father—collecting.
Even though she hadn’t actually known what they collecting at the time!