Of the Trees(2)

Cassie followed as Laney wove through the stones, knowing her route by heart. The grass that rose was beaten back by their sneakers. Laney dropped her bag and bent over it, pulling a dark blanket out. Silently handing two corners to Cassie, they stepped back from each other, spreading the blanket ten yards behind the Gray Lady’s headstone.

“It’s the perfect night for this,” Laney said, her voice low as she sat down on one corner of the blanket. Excitement tinged her words, and Cassie thought she would have squeaked if she had allowed herself enough volume. But she wouldn’t; she might scare the ghosts away. “The boys better get here soon.”

It was the first time the boys had been allowed to join them in the cemetery. Ryan Buckner and Jon Sutkowski had teased the girls about their secret for so long, always bugging Cassie and Laney to let them join. Laney had been hesitant, this secret obsession of hers too sacred to share with others. She had invited them when the girls had gone to check out the remnants of an old, abandoned jailhouse that someone had told them about. They all had to trudge through the woods to get to that one, too. The boys always came with them at Halloween when they’d hit every haunted house and corn maze they could find. The four of them had been friends for years, but not nearly as long as Cassie and Laney had been.

Laney Blake was the first friend Cassie ever had. They were neighbors, playmates from the time their mothers had brought them to story hours together, back when they couldn’t even spell their own names. They had countless rides on the bus, classes, sleepovers, and vacations together. Cassie and Laney were inseparable, and that was why Cassie was always asked to come along, begged to indulge the ghost chases and midnight hikes through the woods; Cassie couldn’t say no.

There had been a time when Cassie was just as obsessed as Laney was; when the goblins and elves and ghosts were all real for her, too. But it had been a long time since she really believed any of it.

Part of her felt that these cemetery trips were a last ditch effort, one last strong pull by Laney to tug Cassie back into belief. Laney had researched and read and pestered the local librarians about the story surrounding Gray Lady Cemetery. She was firm in her conviction that this legend—finally, this—was the real thing. Laney was convinced that all she had to do was pick the right date and the right time, and so Cassie had been dragged out to the cemetery, time and time again, told forcefully to keep her voice down and all lights off, and made to wait.

“What time did you tell them?” Laney asked, a bit of anxiety leaking into her voice.

“Before midnight,” Cassie answered. She pushed strands of her auburn hair from her face. Her fingers felt for the smooth case of her phone in her hoodie pocket. She hit the home button, lighting the screen, and was just able to glimpse the 11:42 on the screen before Laney slapped at her.

“No lights!”

Cassie rolled her eyes, though in the darkness, Laney couldn’t see. She shifted on the blanket, stretching her legs out in front of her and brushing away the stray grass strand that stuck to her calf.

“So, what’d it say?” Laney asked, her voice quiet again. Cassie laughed.

“I thought you didn’t want any lights.”

“Well, it was already on,” Laney argued, grinning as she knocked shoulders with Cassie. “So, what was it? It’s midnight already, isn’t it? They’re gonna mess this up.”

“No, they have fifteen minutes,” Cassie said. “I thought you were sure it would be at one thirty, though?”

“Oh,” Laney said, shrugging, “well, midnight or one thirty. There were conflicting articles. Someone thought midnight because that’s when Lizzy first left her house, another guy thought later because that’s when she would have been caught in the storm. I figured, why not both?”

Cassie hummed in response. She stifled a yawn and laid back on the blanket she shared with Laney, watching the dark sky. The ground was lumpy and uneven. Her body tilted toward her friend. Laney leaned back, her elbows bent to hold her torso up, her gaze fixed on the empty patch of grass surrounding the tombstone.

The air was heavy, saturated with the scents of wet grass and the pulp of crushed ferns. Crickets echoed across the space, trills of noise bouncing off the trees. Cassie twisted on the blanket and looked behind her, scanning the pale line of the dirt road as it vanished into the tunnel of darkness.

Ryan and Jon would be driving. Jon had snuck out with his dad’s car. The dirt road that stretched behind the graveyard was terrible, filled with potholes and rivets that had been formed by bad weather and low maintenance; the girls should be able to hear the car before they even saw the headlights. Cassie lay back again, shifting a bit to get off a rock that lodged itself under her spine.

It was strange, Cassie would note later, that the first change she registered was the stiffening of her friend’s spine, the jolting of Laney’s muscles as her shoulders locked, and the tightening of her neck. That is what first caught her attention, but it was the bobbing light in the tree line that drew her eye to the forest. Then her own muscles tightened as her lungs froze midbreath.

Laney jumped to her feet as Cassie skittered back, dragging the blanket beneath her until her fingers were digging into damp grass and dirt.

“What are you doing?” Cassie hissed as Laney took off toward the light. It was moving deeper into the woods.

“Get up! I’m not missing this!”