Dead Man's Midnight

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I am.”

I sighed. This was a conversation we had repeated many times before. I could read both sides of the script, a one-woman show. I carried on, “There are better things to be doing with your time, Taylor. You could be doing something constructive.”

“I am.” She shrugged, and her matter-of-fact voice floated flatly over her shoulder to me on the chilly dusk.

“Wandering around in the dead of night?”

“Not wandering. It’s a deliberate investment.”

“I’m going to end up here no matter what, in the end. So don’t waste the life I do have looking ahead at it!”

“You think it’s wrong to ponder death?” She finally stopped slinking in and out of the shadows cast by the crooked trees that towered from the other side of the stone wall. She’d reached the gate, and the fingers of one hand interlaced with the wrought-iron weaving. Though I could see my breath with every word, and fog hovered in the hollows, her arms were bare. Her skin was pale, so pale, and it was a long, thin arm that stretched out to the looming gate.   

“I don’t want anything to do with death. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to be here,” I stammered. 

“I know.” She looked at me through the grey moonlight. Her eyes were dark, and watched me from behind rings of black eyeliner. “Then leave. I can go on alone.”

The seemingly simple statement’s untruth beat from deep beneath the surface.  She pushed on the gate. It rattled and swayed, but did not open. Her fingers flashed in and out of the latticework and shadows, searching for a latch, a spring, or a lock. She found one and it clanged formidably in the damp twilight. 

I looked up, up the towering latticework of wrought iron vines to the ornate spikes at the top of the gate, which poked at the space under weary scrollwork that read “Greywood Cemetery.”

Taylor reached up, her white fingers with their black nails meshing into the gate high above her head.

“Come on, don’t do that.”

She ignored me. I wish I could do as much to her. She pushed off the ground, and the dirty rubber of her sneaker tips burrowed into the latticework, finding toeholds, digging into the black bouquets that melded together at the petals with their blushes of rust.

At the top she swayed, one thin leg swung over, past the hedge of spear tips, one leg dangling down on my side.  “Come on Jacquie!” She grinned. “Don’t be a scaredy cat!” The other leg went over, and she was shimmying down into the shadows, on the dead man’s side of the gate. 

I wondered what would happen if I just walked away. Turn around. One step in front of the other. You can do it. My car was 100 yards down the road; if I looked hard, I could glimpse the prismatic surface of the headlight. I weighed it in my mind, in my tired feet. If I just walked away from this moronic outing, what would happen? A sleepless night and a grey morning, probably. I wondered if, if I left Taylor here, I would see her again. It was an intriguing thought. 

But my will was not that strong. I can’t cope with the dirty work of confrontation. Instead, I trek the paths that stronger wills plot for me. So now, it was my own fingers, with their cracked nails and imbedded dirt, that wound around the bars.  I tested the gate’s strength against my own weight, and started the treacherous creep up. The rasping wail of ancient metal protested and the gate rebelled against every movement, trying to sway from my sweat-slicked grip. 

Perched high above the ground, I teetered. For a moment, I was on top of the netherworld, frozen between the realm of the living and the dead. My left leg swung toward the town, a few miles out, on the other side of the valley, laying like lichen on the soft rise of the foothills. Lights, warm as the wink of a jack-o-lantern, shone through the fog. Not even a glow remained on the horizon; stars beaded the blackness where the cloud cover wore thin. And my right leg toed the cold, tremulous air of shadows and swirling mist. A brown leaf, withered as a shrunken head, lost its hold on a branch and spiraled through the air. A draft drifted it up and down and across my leg, as though weighting the scale on the side of fog and shadows.

I heaved myself over and rattled down. A soft thump blessed my ears as my sneakers met the weed-matted dirt. I dusted off, automatically, and looked around. The scraggly terrain rose and fell softly, rolling in timid gradations, but working subtly upward to a hill at the far end of the graveyard. The scattered silhouettes of headstones sent the gloom deeper black at intervals.

“Taylor?”

She emerged from the warped bark of one of the black trees.

“Come on.” 

“Where?”

“Find a good place to sit.”

Our steps fell silent as drizzle on the dirt. Soon, though, a cracked pavement found its way up from the earth to meander under my feet. Carefully, I picked my way through its brokenness. The mist hung heavy here, and as we progressed past headstones, the bright, heavy moon lost its influence. Soon it was only phantom glimmers of light, and some careful toe-testing, that allowed me to step without stumbling. 

The path curved a feeble hook to the right, but to the left, a hollow in the side of the slope appeared, and held out its trailing arms of earth. Taylor dropped to her knees, and her hair swung like silk strands over her shoulders as she felt the ground, the patchy grass and the damp moss. A hunched headstone loomed only a few feet away, and it looked as though Taylor were paying homage to it.  She eased back into the hollow. She drew her knees to the lace ties at her chest, and the scuffed toes of her sneakers muzzled each other.

I eased into the hollow. The crunch and crack of disturbed leaves made me flinch. My coat kept me from feeling the texture of the moss that I leaned back against, but I could feel the coldness of the earth. It seeped into me, and my body heat out of me and into the earth.

I sighed, and my breath’s ghost drifted up to join the fog.

“It’s not so bad here,” Taylor retorted. “I could get used to it.”

I refused to answer. Nearby, catching a rare streak of moonlight, white moths fluttered around a long and leafy weed; they bobbed in ellipses, their wings beating a silent frenzy of pale blurriness. Settling leaves sighed, and a spider crept across the arch of the nearby stone. 

Taylor relaxed back and wrapped white arms around herself, fingering her jutting shoulder blades with the tips of her black-polished fingers. “This one’s nice. Peaceful. You feel it?”

“Sure.”

“You scared?”

I searched for words, sputtering on the chilly air. I hated it there, but not because of the spookiness of the place, or the dubious existence of the restless dead. I hated sitting there because the whole escapade was just too bizarre.  It shamed me to participate; I wanted to leave and pretend I had never been there.

“I could stay here all night,” Taylor cooed. 

“Don’t.”

She lay back, sinking away into the murk. “You think you can handle staying here forever?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid of death?”

I didn’t reply, but not because I didn’t know how to answer. We’d had this conversation a hundred times: over dinner, on long, meandering walks that managed to become heavy with melancholy, during reps at the gym, at work. “I need to stop,” I begged aloud. “I can’t live this way.” 

I had always been meticulous and forward thinking. My fixation on being one step ahead of the future had been both lauded and laughed at, but it was a trait that served me well: good grades, good social standing, and now, a good job. But somewhere along the line, the navigation system went haywire, and I started looking far, far ahead, way past the things people mean when they say “Think about your future.”   I realized one day six months ago that I had developed a habit of sitting in claustrophobic spaces. Compulsively clawing at the earth started up soon after. And little by little, I found my life swallowed up by things I didn’t want to do: scouting graveyards (Taylor’s idea), visiting undertakers (Taylors idea), and crashing the occasional funeral (definitely Taylor’s idea). So much of my waking life now (and the better part of the sleeping bit, too) was saturated with the awareness that I am mortal. And the more I tried to bury this morbid obsession, the deeper I sunk in it, and the more say Taylor got.

She continued on, only a voice now, “I’ve heard that you fear what you don’t understand. So if we understand what we fear the most… If we prepare properly, then there will be nothing to be afraid of, right?” I’d heard this whole spiel before too. Then she said, “We’re going to stay.”

“Stay?” I choked.

“Just for the night.”

“No!”

“We’ve got to.”

“No. No way. I’m leaving.”

“Then leave, like I said.” 

And at that horrible moment, I thought I might just have the will power to do it. I hesitated. “But if I leave… you’ll just drag me back to another cemetery, another night, won’t you?”

I knew the silence meant I was correct. Ultimately, I had no choice. The matter would just rot into another exhausting fight I would quickly lose.

 So this is it, I thought, my heart pounding in my clammy skin as the reality of my lot set in.  My first taste of forever. But maybe that taste will help me get things sorted out, so I can go back to living.

“I think it will,” Taylor said.

“How long will the night be?”

“Endless.”

I woke up. The mist roiled thick and heavy around me. Splotches of darkness, blacker than the night, made a lacy pattern in the ether. The dark forms moved, hovering in uneasy ellipses like the moths. I stared. There was no noise. I did not move, or breathe, or think.

I woke again. It the world was indistinct, and grey, and chilly wet. The growing light revealed a slug oozing up the corner of the headstone. The sun was coming. I shouldn’t be found here. I was trespassing, after all.

I gave my heavy, freezing eyelids a few moments more of rest. When I looked again, the grey had receded even more in favor of a lightening sky.

“So. You satisfied?” I grumbled. 

Taylor shrugged, her glossy hair clinging to her shoulders like a vampire’s cape. I looked at her, and felt the welling loneliness of knowing that an echo was the only voice calling out your name.

“Well, we can go, I guess,” I said, not sure if I should be proud of myself for spending a night with the dead, or ashamed for it. I eased up, blowing hot air on my numb hands. 

“Yup.” 

“You do know, I would never have done this? It wasn’t my idea...” I let my flubbed words fade out.

“Yup.” She looked over at me, knowing and sympathetic behind her blackened eyes. “You know my name’s not Taylor, right?”

“Yeah.” I knew. It was Casey. I also knew that Casey looked like this eight years ago; who knew how the real Casey looked now? She’d moved junior year, and I hadn’t heard from her since.

Halloween morning broke blue and foggy over the dead trees and brown valley. I was alone.

I tripped stiff and weary along the wandering path. Now and then, I kicked at the drifts of curling yellow leaves. Though dew slicked, they scattered in satisfying sprays.

I heaved myself up and over the film of cobwebs at the top of the gate. The metal did not groan, the hinges did not shudder to jostle me off, as though the cemetery guardian had accepted my presence. Or as though it were all too glad to ease my departure.

The twisted trees, more brown than black in the morning light, grimaced from over the wall, lining my walk to my car.

At home, I stripped off my wet clothes and collapsed into bed for some precious final hours of sleep. But I did not sleep. I lay awake and weary in the dawn.

“Hey there,” Taylor said.

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I am.”