Deathless (8 page)

The tossing and turning was a self-perpetuating thing, she knew. Something woke her up, and then she fretted about what it might have been, which kept her from falling back asleep. It was a vicious cycle. Not being able to sleep might be a blessing in disguise next week, when she’d be studying for finals, but not now. She needed to shut off her thoughts.

Bradley had taught her a breathing technique to help her sleep when she was younger and troubled by her mother’s increasingly strange behavior. Rave used a similar breathing thing to learn to control his fire. She didn’t know if it would work here, but she had nothing to lose.

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose, holding the breath for just a moment before slowly exhaling. She counted each breath on the exhale, starting with one hundred and counting backwards. Ninety-nine…ninety-eight…ninety-seven…. She remembered getting to seventy-three, but no further. By then, sleep had claimed her again.

She was walking through a patch of unfamiliar woods. The night was dark, with a quarter moon providing barely enough pale illumination to see where she was stepping. Dead leaves crackled under her feet, but with less noise than she expected, especially given the silence of the night. The twisted black limbs of the leafless trees seemed to be reaching for her, but whenever she looked directly at any of them, she saw only stillness.

The air was cold against her cheeks, but not uncomfortably so. She was in no hurry; nor was she sneaking through the woods. Her pace was normal walking speed. She had no sense of where she was heading in this unknown place, but for some reason, the lack of a specific destination did not bother her. Up ahead, the remains of one of the old stone walls so common to New England snaked through the trees. As she drew nearer, she saw the wall bordered an old cemetery overgrown with tall, stringy weeds. Crumbling gray headstones stood sentinel above the graves, which were scattered throughout the yard in no apparent pattern, the way they often were in old graveyards.

Something told her to stop here. Whether it was a warning to stay out of this ancient graveyard or a sense that she should wait and watch, she did not know. She found a flat rock atop one of the taller remaining sections of wall and sat down, facing inside the cemetery. Her feet dangled inches above the packed dirt below the wall. She wondered idly why the weeds did not grow right up to the stones.

After a few minutes, she became aware of a faint sound breaking the silence. She realized it was the first noise of any kind she’d heard since she stopped walking. The sound was difficult to describe, a kind of rustling, or scratching. Not the rustling of leaves in the wind—the branches were barren of leaves and there was no hint of a breeze. Nor was it the sound of footsteps. She strained to see through the darkness, trying to find a source for the noise, but saw nothing.

Slowly, the sounds grew louder. They definitely emanated from somewhere in front of her—within the cemetery, she was certain—but still she saw nothing. Even so, she was not alarmed. She simply sat and watched, waiting.

At last, the sounds became loud and clear enough for her to recognize. They were the sounds of digging. Something or someone was scraping and digging at the ground in front of her. It was unmistakable. There was just one problem, though—the graveyard was empty!

She had a brief thought that perhaps whoever was digging might somehow be invisible to her, but even that failed to explain what she heard. Not only was she alone—but there were no holes appearing anywhere in the ground. Still, the digging persisted, growing louder by the moment. She was certain now the sounds came from more than one spot in the cemetery.

Finally, a tiny movement off to her right caught her eye, but by the time she turned toward it, she saw nothing. If only it were not quite so dark. She kept her eyes fastened on the spot. A few moments later, she saw it. A tiny bit of soil popped a few inches up from the ground, like a miniature geyser of dirt. She smiled. No one was digging atop the ground—the digging was happening beneath the surface. She wondered if it could be gophers. But how was it she could hear gophers burrowing inside the earth?

She continued watching. More earth pushed upward, in several scattered places now. She kept her gaze fixed on the largest of the growing piles of dirt. There! She was certain she saw something push up above the surface. She squinted, trying to see more clearly, and gasped. This most certainly was not a gopher, nor any other burrowing animal. Reaching up out of the earth was the unmistakable shape of a human hand!

More hands pushed up from the ground, a half-dozen now. Soon, entire arms appeared…and then heads. Heads that were part flesh and part bone. A few were wrapped in rotting cloth; one wore what could only be the remains of an old-fashioned tri-cornered hat.

Leesa watched, frozen to her spot atop the wall, as six corpses climbed out of their graves. They moved awkwardly, clumsily, but moved nonetheless. They looked at each other and walked in circles, almost as if they were waiting for direction. They didn’t seem to notice her.

Suddenly, all six collapsed to the ground, like marionettes whose strings had been cut.

Leesa awoke again, the image of the corpses falling to the ground clear and sharp in her mind. Her room was lighter now, with the first gray light of dawn spilling in through the windows. She could hear muted sounds from elsewhere in her dorm—music playing softly, a door closing—as some early risers prepared to start their day. Outside, a truck beeped annoyingly as it backed up to unload its cargo somewhere nearby.

She seemed to be dreaming more and more frequently of late, but she could not remember one staying with her so clearly after she woke up. While the rotting, reanimated bodies were not a pleasant image, the dream had not really been frightening, and she much preferred it to what she had experienced earlier that night, waking up with her heart racing and not being able to recall why.

9. VIDEO CONFIRMATION

L
eesa sat hunched over her desk, slogging through her physics book, struggling to understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Her room had grown dark while she was studying, but her desk lamp provided a small island of light. Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” was playing in the background. Leesa loved the young British singer’s voice, so powerful and full of raw emotion. It was hard to believe she wasn’t even twenty-five years old yet. Leesa let her mind drift for a moment, escaping into the lyrics. She particularly liked the part about a fire starting in her heart. That was definitely a good description of how Rave made her feel—in more ways than one!

As the song wound down, she turned back to her physics book. “Uncertainty” was a fitting word for her right now, she thought. Not only was she uncertain about this whole Heisenberg Principle, but she was uncertain about so many other things going on in her life as well. Just when things were finally becoming normal with her mom and her brother, all this other stuff kept cropping up. Rave losing control of his fire, the strange phone call, her difficulty sleeping and her weird dream—all that was way more than any one person should have to deal with.

There didn’t seem to be anything she could do about those things, though, so she forced her mind back to physics. Final exams were only two weeks away. They were something under her control, at least. She just had to concentrate.

Suddenly, something gripped her tightly by the shoulders. She almost jumped out of her skin as adrenaline shot through her system. She whipped her head around to see Cali grinning down at her.

“
Sorry,” Cali said. “Your door was open and I just couldn’t resist. You were totally lost in that book. I didn’t know physics was so enthralling.”

“
You almost gave me a heart attack,” Leesa said, her heart still racing.

Cali plopped down on the edge of Leesa’s bed. She was wearing ripped jeans with tiny red sequins outlining the front pockets and a dark brown T-shirt with a gold tic-tac-toe game etched on the front. Instead of O’s, the designer had used shiny gold hearts. Three hearts formed a diagonal row from the bottom left square to the top right, with an arrow drawn through them to show hearts had won the game.

“
I really am sorry, Lees. Rule ninety-four: sneaking up on someone who hangs out with vampires is
not
a good idea.”

Leesa smiled, her body beginning to recover from the adrenaline jolt. “I don’t ‘hang out’ with them. I just happen to know one. And if I never see Stefan again, that will be just fine with me.”

“
Speaking of things that go bump in the night, did you hear about that thing in the graveyard over in Higganum?”

Leesa’s heart rate spiked again as the images from her dream came rushing back to her. Higganum was a small rural community less than ten miles south of Weston College. She hoped Cali wasn’t going to say what she thought she was going to say.

“
Graveyard?” she asked. “No, I didn’t hear anything.” She was almost afraid to ask about it, but she had to know. “What happened?”

“
It’s really freaky. Someone dug up a bunch of bodies, and then left ‘em lying right there on the ground.”

Leesa closed her eyes for a moment. She could see the images from her dream as clearly as if she were dreaming it right now.

She opened her eyes. “How do they know someone dug them up?”

Cali’s brow knit in puzzlement as she stared at Leesa. “How else would they have gotten there, silly? They sure didn’t climb up out of the graves themselves.”

I hope not, Leesa thought. I really and truly hope not.

Cali saw the concern on Leesa’s face. “Oh, no…you’re not going to tell me zombies are real, too, are you?”

“
No, of course not,” Leesa said. “At least not as far as I know, anyway. It’s just that I had this weird dream last night. Some bodies pushed themselves up out of the ground in an old cemetery.”

“
Really? That’s definitely freaky, especially with this story today.”

It was much too freaky, Leesa thought. But if vampires existed, and volkaanes, why not zombies? She was definitely going to have to ask Rave about it.

“
In your dream, what did they do?” Cali asked. “Once they got out of their graves, I mean?”

“
Nothing, really. They stumbled around in circles for a few minutes, then fell to the ground. That’s when I woke up.”

“
It’s six-thirty. Turn on the TV. Maybe we can catch something about it on the news.”

Leesa grabbed her remote and switched on the television. The local news was just coming on. They had to sit through a boring story about some possible corruption in the state house, but then a jumpy video of an old graveyard, probably taken from a helicopter, filled the screen. It was still light out in the video, so it had obviously been taken earlier in the day.

“
There’s a strange story coming out of Higganum today,” the neatly coiffed, gray-haired anchorman began. “Police are investigating an unusual act of vandalism in one of the town’s old cemeteries.”

The picture switched to a live shot of a reporter on the scene. Bright klieg lights lit up the graveyard behind her. A green knit ski cap pulled down over her blond hair showed how cold it was outside. Her foggy breath was visible on the television as she spoke. Still, she looked remarkably fresh and perky.

“
Here’s what we know so far,” she said. “Sometime last night, someone dug up six bodies here at the old cemetery. Police aren’t sure if this was simply a thoughtless act of vandalism, or perhaps the work of grave robbers searching for valuables. All the graves here are well over one hundred years old, so it’s doubtful thieves could have found much of value.”

The camera panned over her shoulder to the graveyard, focusing on several very old headstones. Leesa looked closely, but no bodies were visible from this angle. The news director had probably decided that a pile of rotting corpses was not proper dinnertime fare. Either that, or the authorities had already covered them up.

The reporter continued speaking. “Police are puzzled by several strange aspects to all this. Earlier, I spoke with Detective Dave Sanderson.”

The picture reverted to a daylight shot again, and the mustachioed face of a good-looking man in his late thirties or early forties filled the screen.

“
We have no real leads at this time,” he said. “We’re asking for the public’s help. If you know anything about this brazen, disrespectful act, please call the number on the bottom of your screen. There are no signs of any heavy equipment having been in the cemetery, so we know the perpetrators had to be here a long time to dig up so many graves by hand. This is a pretty out of the way spot, but we’re hoping someone driving by saw something unusual here last night.”