The cemetery in daylight should have been less menacing—sunlight streaming through oak branches, well-tended paths winding between markers of various ages, the quiet dignity of stone angels watching over the departed. Instead, I felt like an intruder in a place that had suddenly changed its rules without posting notice. Even the air felt wrong against my skin. It was heavy and too warm for the early hour, like breathing through a wool blanket soaked in someone else’s cologne.

  After depositing Martha Wilson at her sister’s house with a promise to “resolve the situation”—a promise I had no idea how to keep. I had driven straight to Fresno Memorial Gardens. My rational mind insisted this was merely to confirm she was delusional before I skipped town altogether. The knot in my stomach suggested a different motivation: fear that she might be telling the truth.

  Birds should have been singing. That was my first conscious observation as I walked the winding path toward the eastern section where Martha had described performing her ritual. No birdsong, no squirrels chattering, no insects buzzing—the cemetery had the perfect stillness of a photograph, as if the entire place were holding its breath.

  I found Richard Wilson’s grave easily enough—fresh flowers from the funeral still bright against the dark soil. The headstone was exactly as Martha had described: polished granite, his name sharply etched, dates marking the boundaries of a life reduced to a simple mathematical equation. 1902-1965. Sixty-three years summarized by a hyphen.

  What wasn’t right was the ground before the stone. Not disturbed, not dug up—there were no mounds of displaced earth, no evidence of shovels or tools. The soil apparently completely undisturbed, smooth and settled. But when I knelt to examine it more closely, I realized what I was seeing: the ground had sunk inward, as if compacted from below. A perfect coffin sized depression, like the indentation left in a mattress after someone gets up.

  I pressed my hand against the soil, half expecting it to be cold. Instead, it was unnaturally warm, like a fever in the earth. And beneath my palm, I felt nothing solid. It felt like I imagined quicksand felt, a hole that would drag you under if you let it.

  My mind scrambled for explanations. Cemetery robberies happened occasionally—medical schools sometimes paid for fresh cadavers, and certain unsavory types were happy to provide them. But this wasn’t a grave robbery. There was no disruption of the soil layer and no tool marks at all.

  “Impossible,” I whispered, but the word had lost all meaning in the last few hours.

  I remembered the other two mourners from the diner—the guilt-ridden son and the suspicious father. If what happened to Martha was real, then they might have experienced something similar. Or, if they were utterly normal, I could safely skip town and assume Mrs. Wilson was attempting to reverse con me somehow.

  I found the grave of Thomas Wilson’s father in the newer section near the western wall. It was the same phenomenon: undisturbed surface soil, but a subtle depression indicating emptiness beneath. The ground here was warm too, almost hot to the touch, and when I pressed down, my hand sank into the soil far more easily than it should have, as if I were pushing against a taut fabric rather than packed earth. My subconcious mind provided awful images of something down there grasping ahold of my hand and pulling me in.

  My heart pounded while I made my way to the final grave. Harold Vasquez’s son had died three years ago and the stone had weathered enough to have lost its polish in places. But the ground before the tombstone showed the same impossible characteristics—a depression in otherwise undisturbed soil.

  Three empty graves. Three rituals performed with bone talismans I had sold with empty promises that had somehow, horribly, been fulfilled.

  I noticed something I missed at Michael Vasquez’s empty grave—a thin residue coating the headstone, like dried condensation, but with a rusty tint. I touched it with my fingertip, then jerked back when I recognized the substance—blood. Not fresh, but recent enough to still be tacky in places.

  “You begin to understand,” came a familiar gravelly voice from above. “Finally.”

  I looked up to see the raven perched atop Michael’s headstone, its glossy feathers catching the sunlight. Its feet were stained dark red, confirming my suspicion about the blood.

  “What did I do?” My voice emerged as a whisper. “What the hell did I do?”

  The raven tilted its head, regarding me with an unnerving intelligence. “You spoke an invitation without understanding its meaning. You opened a door that’s been waiting to be opened since before your grandfather’s grandfather drew breath.”

  “That’s impossible,” I insisted, though the word had lost all conviction and meaning. “It was a routine I made up. Nonsense Latin and theatrical gestures!”

  “And yet,” the raven gestured with one bloody foot toward the empty grave. “Results.”

  I ran both hands through my hair, and struggled to process what I was seeing. I was talking to a bird in a cemetery above an empty grave. “But how? I’m not… I don’t have any special powers. I’m just a con man, a master of the flimflam. A sidewalk sorcerer with a silver tongue and a thief’s timing. I sell grief in pretty bottles, hope in dirty envelopes, and sometimes—if the mood strikes me—I even let people believe I’m something holy. But I’m not. I’m a magician with no magic, a preacher with no gospel, a ghost who never died. I don’t talk to spirits—I talk around them. I don’t channel the dead—I just know what the living want to hear. And I give it to them. Wrapped in feathers, bound in string, dusted with just enough inscense to make it feel like closure.”

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  “Sometimes the truth hides in plain sight, dressed like a lie.” The raven’s eye gleamed with what might have been amusement. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that folklore might contain actual folk wisdom? That rituals performed for thousands of years might have some basis in reality?”

  “You’re saying I accidentally stumbled on a real ritual to… what? Raise the dead?”

  “Not raise them,” Raven corrected. “Call them. Invite them back into a world they no longer belong in. And they came, trailing the grave dirt behind them, wearing bodies that remember how to move but have forgotten why.”

  The raven hopped closer, its bloody talons leaving faint marks on the stone. “Didn’t bother to see if what you said in the diner was true, did you? Some truths are called folklore because their truth is hard to swallow.”

  It made a sound then—a dry, crackling noise that I realized was laughter. Not human laughter, but the mirth of something ancient watching human folly repeat itself across centuries.

  “This is…” I couldn’t find the words. Crazy? Horrifying? Beyond comprehension? Bananas?

  “Real,” Raven supplied. “This is very, very real, Rodney Holmes. And now you have three dead things walking in bodies that should be rotting, whispering secrets they’ve gathered from the other side, traumatizing the living who were foolish enough to call them back.”

  I thought of Martha Wilson, trembling in my motel room, describing her husband’s wrong movements, his whispering of secrets she’d never told. I thought of the other two mourners, facing similar horrors of their own making—of my making.

  “Fuck me,” I whispered. “What have we done?”

  Raven cocked his head to the side, one ink-black eye glinting like a hole punched through the world.

  “We? No, my dear fraud—we didn’t do anything. You sold doorways to the desperate. I just watched the hinges scream.”

  He hopped down from the headstone, talons clicking on the dry grass like a metronome for judgment.

  “You didn’t bring them comfort. You brought them invitations. And now the guests have arrived—unasked, unwashed, and full of teeth.”

  He looked at me, really looked at me, like I was a story halfway told and already going badly.

  “So, the question isn’t what have we done, Rodney. The question is: how much of you will be left by the time you fix it?” Then, quieter. “Assuming you even try.”

  I turned to leave. My mind reeled with implications I didn’t want to face. Three empty graves. Three rituals. Three things that used to be human now walked among the living with borrowed flesh and impossible knowledge. My skin felt too tight, like a suit I’d outgrown, and my breath came in short, sharp bursts that didn’t seem to fill my lungs all the way. I needed to get out of this place, away from the empty graves and blood-stained headstones, somewhere I could think—or better yet, drink until thinking became optional.

  The main path curved gently toward the cemetery gates. A hundred yards of crushed white gravel that suddenly felt like the longest walk of my life. I kept my eyes fixed on those gates—wrought iron twisted into decorative patterns that looked less like art and more like warnings in a language I couldn’t read. I just had to get to the car, I told myself. Get to the car, drive away, figure out what to do next—maybe drive more, maybe back to L.A.

  Three steps down the path, a cold sensation bloomed between my shoulder blades—the unmistakable feeling of being watched. Not the casual observation of a passerby, but the focused attention of a predator considering its options. I slowed, fighting the urge to run. Running attracts pursuit; I’d learned that lesson early in life.

  Instead, I turned casually, as if simply appreciating the cemetery’s landscaping. That’s when I saw it, standing at the edge of a copse of cypress trees thirty yards away. A human silhouette, one too still to be alive, too solid to be a trick of light and shadow.

  The figure stood with unnatural rigidity, like a photograph of a person rather than a person itself. It wore what appeared to be a dark suit. The fabric hung oddly on its frame, as if the body beneath had somehow shifted since being dressed. But it was the face that froze the blood in my veins.

  Its eyes were sewn shut—not metaphorically, but literally stitched closed with thick black thread that formed X patterns over each eyelid. The stitches weren’t medical or neat, they were crude, almost ritualistic, like something from a culture that feared the dead might see their way back to the world of the living. A futile precaution, clearly.

  Despite the sealed eyes, I knew with bone-deep certainty that it was watching me. Its mouth hung open in a perfect O, like a silent scream or an expression of eternal surprise that revealed teeth that seemed to be too white and far too numerous for a human mouth.

  Most disturbing of all, it was mouthing something—lips moving around that fixed, open orifice, forming words I couldn’t hear but somehow recognized: my name, over and over. Rodney. Rodney. Rodney.

  I jerked my gaze away. My heart hammered against my ribs in an a desperate attempt to escape. My feet moved of their own accord down the path at a pace just shy of an outright run. Don’t look back, some primal part of my brain insisted. Don’t acknowledge it.

  Human curiosity is stronger than most survival instincts. Twenty yards from the gate, I glanced over my shoulder.

  The figure wasn’t there. The space between the cypress trees stood empty, not even a lingering disturbance in the air to suggest it had ever been there.

  I finally exhaled. My hands were shaking. Hallucination. Stress-induced vision. My guilty conscience painting monsters were there were only shadows. I’d nearly convinced myself when the whisper slithered into my mind.

  You called. We answered. Don’t run.

  The voice wasn’t audible—not a sound my ears detected, but words that appeared fully formed in my consciousness, bypassing my senses entirely. The voice was cold, damp, like words spoken by a mouth filled with grave soil. And it wasn’t alone; beneath it, I could hear other whispers, fainter but equally inhuman, a chorus of dead things speaking in unison.

  I bolted for the gate. Fuck pretending to be calm, I ran. The gravel crunched beneath my panicked stride, too loud in the cemetery’s unnatural silence. Each footfall sounded obscene, a violation of some unspoken rule. The gate seemed to recede as I approached, a visual trick that only heightened my terror.

  When I finally reached it, my hands shook so badly I could barely operate the latch. I threw myself through the opening and stumbled toward my car, fumbling with the keys, dropping them once before I amanaged to jam the right one into the lock.

  Inside the Stingray I slammed the door and locked it, as if metal and glass could keep out something that could speak directly into my mind. I started the engine with a roar that seemed to disturb some covenant of silence, and peeled away from the curb, tires squeeling in protest.

  The cemetery receded in the rearview mirror. It looked perfectly ordinary and peaceful in the morning light. No figures stood at its gate. No mouths moved in silent speech. But the whisper lingered in my mind, a phantom sensation like the memory of pain after a wound has healed.

  You called. We answered. Don’t run.

  I drove faster, eager to put distance between myself and Fresno Memorial Gardens, but the growing certainty that distance no longer mattered pressed against me like a physical weight. Whatever I had accidentally summoned wasn’t bound by the rules I understood. It knew my name. It had my scent, and for some damned reason, it considered me as much its summoner as the three grieving morons I’d swindled out of six hundred bucks.