Andrew Klavan - The long way home

"Just standing there. Just staring up at me," I said.

"Who?" said Josh.

"I don't know. Someone out in the night. In the cemetery."

"There was someone in the cemetery staring up at you?"

"Yeah."

"That's terrifying," said Josh. "I mean, that's… that's terrifying. I mean, it's terrifying. Isn't it?"

I nodded.

"I mean, isn't that terrifying?" said Josh.

"All right, man," said Rick. "I think we all get that it's terrifying."

"I wanted to make sure it wasn't just me."

"It's not just you." Rick moved his flashlight over the graveyard. The wind rose, the trees bending and creaking. We stood together, staring, as Rick's beam picked out a headstone, an obelisk, and then the mourning woman making her eerie gesture to the darkness. But there was nothing else in the graveyard now. No figure lurking in the deeper shadows. "Is it possible you could've…?"

"Imagined it?" I said. "I don't think so, bro. I heard it first. I heard this… this kind of groan."

"A groan?" said Josh, his voice breaking. "What do you mean, a groan?"

"I mean, like a… like a low groan, like, 'O-o-o-oh.' Like that."

"That is so terrifying," Josh murmured.

"Then I got up and came to the window. And when I looked out… I only saw it for a split second, but it was definitely there. A figure. A man, I think. With this kind of weird, white face…"

"A weird, white face? A weird, white face? What does that even mean?"

"It means a weird, white face, Josh. Like it… I don't know. Like it didn't have any features."

"How could it not have features? What kind of face is that? If it's a face it has to have features. Otherwise, it would be terrifying. Right? I mean, isn't that…"

The words caught in his throat as the wind became even stronger and the whisper and creak of the branches grew louder and under that whisper-yes, there it was again: that low, dreadful groan as of a man in pain.

Rick and Josh and I fell silent, gaping at one another with open mouths.

"Did you…?" Josh tried to say.

Rick and I nodded. We'd heard it too.

We turned toward the window, all three of us. All three of us shone our flashlights through the broken glass and out over the deep darkness. The darkness shifted and whispered with the night wind.

Before I knew I was thinking it, I heard myself say, "We have to take a look. We have to go out there."

"Right," said Josh. "Because we're not frightened enough. Because there's still a slim chance my hair won't turn white and I won't spend the rest of my life locked in a padded room cackling uncontrollably. Go out there? What are you talking about? Are you crazy?"

"I saw something," I said. "Someone-something-I don't know. We have to go and find out what it was."

"Why? We could stay here instead. We could not find out. It could be, like, an unsolved mystery."

But Rick understood. "That's the project," he said. "We came here to prove this place isn't haunted, that that's just a local superstition. If we don't investigate, we won't really know."

"I can live with that," said Josh. "Really. I'm strangely content just as I am."

"Yeah, but we're the ones who have to give the report," I said. "The whole point was to force Sherman to give us an A by doing something too cool for him to ignore. If we don't follow through, it won't happen. You can stay here," I told Josh. "But we've got to take a look."

I knelt down to tie my sneakers. Rick did the same.

"Oh, I can stay here," said Josh. "In the haunted house. Alone. By myself. Thanks. You're too generous. No, really." He knelt and tied his sneakers, too, muttering to himself the whole time.

It's funny-I mean, funny as in strange-in these last few weeks, I'd faced so many dangers, and I'd been afraid, more afraid than I like to think about or say. But I don't think I've been as fearful, before or since, as I was that night Rick, Josh, and I went out into the graveyard behind the McKenzie mansion.

We crept downstairs, our shoulders bumping together as we followed our flashlight beams down a long hall toward the back of the house. We came into a bare room lined with old, broken cabinets and shelves. It must have been the kitchen once. As we stepped in, we heard pattering footsteps. Small, furry bodies dashed out of sight as the light came near them.

Our beams picked out a door. We moved toward it.

When we stepped out of the house, we stopped and stood stock-still, all three of us. Inside, our flashlights together had seemed almost bright, lighting our way easily. Here, though, the night felt vast around us. It seemed to swallow the beams and drown them in nothingness. We stayed where we were. We stared. We were afraid to move away from the house, afraid if we got too far from it, we would not be able to escape back inside.

The trees moved and murmured above us. The sky seemed dizzyingly far away. The dark seemed dizzyingly deep.

"All right," I said. But I didn't step forward.

"All right," said Rick. But he didn't move either.

"This is terrifying," said Josh.

We stiffened, listening. There was a fresh rattle of dead leaves as the wind blew them tumbling over the earth in front of us. The sound made us lift our flashlight beams over the sparse grass and shine them in the direction of the noise.

One beam-Rick's, I think-touched on a white stone-a headstone-the headstone nearest to the house. There was the graveyard, barely twenty yards ahead of us.

It seemed until then that I'd forgotten how to breathe. I remembered now and drew in a deep breath.

"All right," I said again.

I started moving forward. Josh was to my left, Rick was to my right. They started moving, too, just behind me.

As we advanced, our flashlight beams trembled over the small field of stones. I was aware of an awful sense of suspense as I waited for the terrible moment when one of the beams would pick out the figure with the gleaming, featureless face.

Then, suddenly, Josh's beam fell on the statue of the mourning woman. Even though I knew it was just a statue, the sight of her up close like that was still a shock. She seemed to float out of the darkness at us like a ghost. I could make out her face now, the staring, empty eyes, the parted, fearful lips that seemed about to whisper, "No. Don't go." And her hand, that gesturing hand… You could almost sense the presence of the dead spirit she was trying to hold on to. You could almost see it moving away in the black air before her.

Josh saw the statue and stopped in his tracks, gaping up at it. I heard him swallow hard. He kept his flashlight trained on the woman's face, as if he couldn't force his hand to move.

I took one look at her, then looked away. Still, I could feel her staring down at me with those cold, marble eyes as I kept walking toward her, kept walking toward the place where I'd seen that other figure, the weird, faceless presence.

The mourning woman loomed over me as I got closer and closer to her. Then, a few feet away from her, I stopped. It was too much. Her presence was too eerie. The dark beyond her was just too deep. The possibility of coming upon that featureless man I'd seen staring up at me was just too real. I was afraid to go any farther.

I was about to announce that there was nothing there. About to turn back.

But then I spotted something-something lying on the ground. My passing flashlight picked out a little patch of white. I moved the beam around until I found it again.

"Look," I said.

My friends closed ranks around me. Their flashlight beams joined mine. We stared down. There was a dry branch lying in the leaves just on the far side of the statue, just a few feet away from the statue's base. The stick had snapped in half and the white core of it stood out against the brown background of the dirt and leaves.