Everything We Never Knew by Elizabeth Wilder

Author:Elizabeth Wilder [Wilder, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parkes Publishing
Published: 2022-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

27

Nat

That night, the last and only night before the hunt, Nat could not sleep. He stared up into the gloom that pervaded the bedroom. Even while the shadows held unseen menaces that never used to be there, or that he'd simply never noticed, the darkness felt soft against his skin. He let himself sink into it, press in to its velvet warmth. Tomorrow, he thought, twenty-four hours and I'll be getting ready to leave here, to go out there.

Although he couldn't see them in the blackness, he could feel the spread of headstones and the dead they marked. Nat thought of all the scary movies he'd ever seen, ghost stories that he'd read or heard and wondered if they were true. Did the dead rise at night to stroll about the cemetery, unknown to its curators? He tried to imagine what the zombie dead would do, night after night and on into eternity. Chat with their neighbors, catch up on the latest worm gossip, or perhaps play a game of hide-and-seek among the grave stones? And if they did rise, what would they do to those who disturbed their gathering, to those whose hearts hadn't yet stopped, whose veins still coursed with hot blood instead of dank, pooling liquid? Would they be jealous of the living, would they try to steal back into life by snatching at his and Dee's breath, taking it for their own? Or would they even notice the interlopers?

That would be the worst thing, maybe, to meet with the apathetic dead. Then we couldn't figure things out, he thought, pulling the covers up to his ear as he rolled onto his side, not if we can't find anyone or anything. If there aren't any ghosts at all.

The boy didn't know what to hope for. Hunting ghosts, and then finding one or some or an army — he shuddered and pulled the covers up still higher. But if there was nothing, if all he and Dee discovered was the silent stillness of the graveyard beneath the stars and moon, quiet as it had always been, then they could draw no conclusions, and all his trembling and tenuous hoping would have been for nothing.

And would that mean I've been making the whole thing up all along? That I've just been imagining it? That there really are no such things as ghosts and I'm just crazy? He couldn't tell if he felt disappointed at the thought, and that made the contents of his stomach churn all the more. But we've got to try. I've got to try to see her, to ask her why.

He wanted an answer, wanted her to tell him, and if he had to wake all the dead in the cemetery to get it, well then, that's what he would do.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow night.

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