Scared To Death

Everyone thinks that walking around a cemetery is pretty creepy, but more than anything I find it comforting. The names, the lives behind the names, the perfect place for a budding writer to go for inspiration.

The sun had set already when I was startled away from the page of my notebook by the sound of leaves rustling nearby. I couldn’t tell how long it had been since the sun had set, but the motion of writing on the pages continued long enough that as soon as I realized it was dark, I realized I was hunched over the pages so that I could make out what they were saying on the cloudy night. I pulled out my phone so I could look around for the leaves that had moved to get me out of my writing trance and saw only the glint of a small rabbit’s eyes before my screen went dark.

I gathered my things quickly and made my way towards the main gate. I don’t think I’d ever stayed that late, but at the very least I had always been able to leave through the unlocked front gate.

The locked iron bars surprised me. The loud clanging as they rattled sent some small animals running while some birds took squawking to the air. Despite the racket it made I pushed on the gate again, the noise angry and aggressive in the quiet night. Again it didn’t budge, this time my attention brought to the large old padlock attached to the outside of the fence, keeping the regular riffraff out. But keeping me in.

I looked up at the tops of the fence, black points like spears standing sentry. The slick black bars were an impenetrable adversary to my cute black flats. My phone showed me darkness, and when I tried to turn it back on, to revive it, a sad red bar merely blinked back at me before the screen returned to blank blackness.

I began to walk the perimeter of the cemetery, looking for any possible weak spots that would allow me access back to the living world. I took my time in the darkness, in part because I wasn't sure I was even going to find anywhere that would let me out, in part because I wanted to watch my step as best I could in the darkness, careful not to step on anyone's heads, toes, or torsos. The perimeter wen back much further than I thought, taking me to deeper and older parts of the cemetery that I hadn't even realized existed. The moon occasionally peeked out between the clouds, allowing me brief glimpses as the names and ages of those that I passed. Those headstones towards the back of the cemetery were smaller, harder to read in the passing light, and it was easy to know that these headstones had to date well into the 1800s.

In this part, what was worse than the realization that the chances of me accidentally stepping on someone were higher, was the realization that even back here the fence stood tall and pristine, not letting down its guard to allow any passersby to sneak in, even though the back edge of the cemetery butted up against a small woods, the fence the defining edge between the wild of the woods and the untrimmed branches of the-

The untrimmed branches. The trees back here grew thicker and closer together, and provided me my best chance of escape. I still hadn't worn the proper shoes for scaling the bark of any of the large oak trees that grew back there, but there were no other options and it didn't appear that my rattling on the front gate had attracted any attention from any kind of groundskeeper or person walking past. The massive tree in front of me still posed my best bet, despite the branches not starting for at least 20 feet up. As long as I could get up there, safely shimmy down a branch to get to a branch from another tree - or at least get myself to the end of a branch that would drop out on the other side of the fence - and hopefully drop safely to the ground without breaking too many things, I would take that as my option. I began walking around the tree, looking for anything that would provide any kind of hand or foot hold, and screamed when I rounded the tree to see the dark outline of a person standing there.

"Climbing the tree isn't going to work the way you want it to."

I jumped back, hiding behind the trunk of the tree, back pressed against the bark, trying to catch my breath. When I gathered up the courage to look again, whoever it was was still standing there. "Sorry, didn't mean to scare you. I promise, I'm just as real as you are." I flinched back behind the tree trunk again, steeling myself to face the person on the other side of the tree, grasping my unhelpful phone in my hand as a makeshift weapon for if they got too close. I peered around the trunk again to see them still in the same spot, as though this wasn't the first time this had happened. "You can call me Mara."

I straightened up, coming back around the tree to face the dark form of Mara. "I'm Beth. What are you doing here?"

She pointed across the way, towards the opposite side of the cemetery, where further down some houses stood, windows darkened for the night. "My home is just down the road from here, and so sometimes I come to hang out around the cemetery. I've been doing it since I was little, so it doesn't really creep me out anymore. What are you doing here?"

"I come here to write sometimes, since it's nice and quiet and there's usually no one around to distract me. I was trying to write something for a class I'm in, and I was stumped on names, so I came down here for some names to borrow. I found some and just got really into what I was writing - a scifi murder mystery thing - and just didn't notice how late it'd gotten. I tried the front gate, but it was already locked, and I don't know if there's another way out, so. Any tips?" I looked at her with a quiet desperation in my eyes, figuring if anyone was going to know how to get in and out of a cemetery that wasn't using the main gate, it would be the girl who said she'd been coming here since she was little.

"Well, it'll be a little easier with a light. Why don't you use your phone that you've got in your hand?" She gestured toward my hand and I flinched back as her hand moved towards me, and she paused for a moment and then took a step back, sensing my discomfort.

"It's dead."

"Not the only thing dead around here," she joked. I didn't laugh. "Sorry, bad habit. I think I've got mine with me...." She slung a back off her shoulders where I hadn't seen it, causing me to take a few more steps back, the distance between us now uncomfortable, but she seemed to understand. She dug around quickly before pulling out a heavy duty flashlight and flicking it on. "We can still walk around and check, even though I'm sure this place is almost as safe as Fort Knox." She was still mostly in shadow, but I could tell that she had her hair braided in pigtails, bright red lipstick contrasting against her pale face and dark eyes, dressed in plain yet nice enough clothes - nicer than anyone hanging around a graveyard past sundown had any right to be wearing. I looked down at my shabby getup, my black skinny jeans and tank top with a red flannel thrown over the top, my hair likely in some kind of state by this point. "There, that's better."

I didn't respond, didn't really do anything. The whole situation felt weird and off, as though someone had changed the filter on how things were supposed to be. I gestured towards the last few rows before we reached the backmost fence. "After you." She shrugged, not arguing with the suggestion, and walked forward. I followed fairly closely behind her, but not close enough she could whack me in the head with that large, heavy duty flashlight. While the cemetery had seemed creepy while I was by myself, there was something off putting about another person being there, the potential for danger somehow having multiplied greatly. We reached the back corner of the fence and took a turn to walk alongside it. After a few minutes in silence, I couldn't stand it anymore and decided to try a conversation. "So.... Know anyone buried here?"

She turned her head to look back over her shoulder at me, smiling far wider than anyone had a right to when talking about dead people. "Oh, plenty of people. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents, great uncles, cousins twice removed, neighbors, the people my grams saw in the store every day at 2:30, I know most of the people in this cemetery. And if I didn't know them before, I made up some kind of story for them. As I said, I’ve been hanging out here since childhood. What made you think of a cemetery as a place for a writer?"

I sighed, knowing that if I was less tired I would come up with a better, more clever answer, but settled for the truth. "I saw a tweet that suggested it."

She stopped where she was and turned around. "A tweet?" She was unable to contain her laughter, bursting out, the sound harsh against the quiet night. "That's what led you to getting trapped in a graveyard overnight? A tweet?"

I couldn't help but chuckle at her laughter. "I mean, also some books I read but yeah! A tweet! It was something like ‘try writing somewhere new, somewhere you won’t get caught up in the rest of the world.’ I'll be writing a strongly worded thread in response once I find the person that suggested it because now I'm stuck in a cemetery at night!" Mara laughed even more at that, my outrage about being stuck in a cemetery overnight clearly funny to her.

Her ringing laughter stopped the moment we heard something hit the metal fence, the clang of whatever hit it louder than her laughter-turned-short-scream. The next moment we saw a rock fly between the bars, between us, thudding to the ground off to the side of us, rolling up against some crumbling headstone, the rock blending in perfectly with the other parts that had broken off. We looked at each other, and I could tell that she was thinking the same thing, that if that rock was thrown, there was someone who had to have thrown it, and clearly they're not exactly feeling friendly.

“Who the hell is in there?” The voice came from the same direction that the rock had been thrown from.

We looked at each other for a quick moment and then started running, no easy task on the disorganized edge of a cemetery in the middle of the night with the only light coming from a bouncing flashlight. We weren't sure how far we ran, or how far we needed to run to get away from whoever was throwing rocks at the bars, but eventually as Mara looked out through the fence she tripped on a headstone. Since I was running close behind her, I didn't have time to react to keep from falling on top of her. "Oh my goodness I'm so sorry, excuse me, I'm sorry" we both were saying as we tried to detangle, keeping as quiet as possible since we still didn't know if we had lost whoever had been throwing things.

"Okay. Should we keep walking the perimeter and risk someone following us and trying to kill us? Or do you want to just cut through the middle of the cemetery and give up on looking for somewhere to get out? Because honestly I've looked on that side plenty of times and never found anything."

"Do you often get rocks thrown at you as well?" I was brushing some dirt off of my knees as I asked.

"Well... No. But do you want to risk that?"

"Not… really, let's go through the middle, what a lovely idea." I let the sarcasm seep into my voice as an attempt to mask the fear that lingered just below it. She smiled in response and began to lead the way in between the crumbling headstones back towards those that were still held together.

We took our time, letting Mara tell me about the various people that she knew or knew about, and while some of the stories seemed completely made up, she told each story so well I couldn't tell where the truth might've begun and the fiction took over. We found a bench somewhere near the middle of the cemetery that we sat on when we got tired of walking. Eventually we reached a point where we were just sitting, both exhausted and waiting for the first wisps of daylight to come over the horizon.

We must’ve dozed off there, because the next thing we knew the gate was clanging open and we could hear voices. I gently pushed at her shoulder. “Mara, I think they’re unlocking the gate.” She woke up a bit groggily before realizing what I was saying, and immediately woke up fully.

“The caretaker knows me, he’ll make sure we don’t end up in any trouble.” Mara started off towards the front gate with renewed vigor, leaving me to catch up.

“How much trouble would we even get in? It’s not our fault he locked us in.” There was something that felt off. There were clouds in the sky threatening rain, but nothing really stood out as super different.

“Well, technically it would be trespassing. But he’ll look at me and just say ‘Mara,’ in a kind of disappointed voice and I’ll say ‘Leo’ back in the same if less intimidating disappointed voice and then he’ll let us out.”

Leo the caretaker wasn’t up to much, just getting the gates open as Mara and I got closer. He didn’t seem to look up at as at all, which seemed weird considering Mara was practically bouncing up and down. “Leo! Hey, Leo!” She shouted at him. She slowed down a bit so I could catch up. “He can’t always hear super great.” She said to me, but I stopped when I noticed a few of the newer graves. “Leo! Are you ignoring me? I know last time I said I would stop, but you know how things happen sometimes.”

“Hey Mara?” She ignored me as she kept walking closer, the bubble in her step being slowly replaced with something more hastened, more concerned. “Mara!”

She ignored me as she walked right up to Leo, who was still ignoring her. “Leo, seriously dude, what the-” She went to put her hand on his shoulder and it passed right through.

I looked back down at the headstones in front of me. There was a screeching in my ears, not unlike squealing tires. A metallic crash as I realized that I hadn’t been doing anything before I was working here in the cemetery yesterday.

Because I was looking at one that said Mara Sofia Stevens, 7/23/1997-10/3/2019.

And I was looking at one that said Bethany Abigail Valencia, 10/3/1996 - 10/3/2019.

What a birthday I must’ve had.