Ghost Hand (#Wattys2016)

Chapter 5, The Dark Man

"Em, I'm sorry, I really have to go." I was standing under the glow of the Campbells' front porch light. I'd told Emma what I could—a very condensed version of what had happened with my hand and Passion and Marcus and the blades. Of course, she had a lot of questions. Questions I didn't have time or answers for. In the end, she'd offered to keep the blades hidden at her house until we could figure out what to do with them. But as much as they scared me, the thought of leaving them with Emma scared me even more. I didn't know what they were, or why I had them, but I knew I couldn't just dump them in my best friend's lap. And while we talked, they'd grown quiet in the bottom of my pack as if they were listening, as if they were aware and didn't want to be given away. 

"You will call me," Emma said, "First thing tomorrow we'll get together and figure this out. Are you sure you don't want me to walk you home?"

"Nah. Then you'd just have to walk back by yourself. And my mom is going to be pissed when I get there."

"Okay," she said. "But be careful, and don't do anything stupid." She hugged me and I hugged her back, still careful to keep my ghost hand far away from her.

I stepped off the porch and walked down the Campbells' front walk, looking back at Emma twice and waving.

As I rounded the first corner, the street lights of Greenfield were just flickering on. The wind was whipping up swirls of fallen leaves on the grey, shadowed sidewalks. I loved fall, especially at night. The sharp, crisp, tingle in the air made me feel better, somehow hopeful, even despite the nightmarish events of the day.

I set off down Vine Street. My house was on the other side of town from Emma's, but in Greenfield that was only a fifteen minute walk. The dark wasn't an issue. I'd been walking between my house and Emma's since third grade, day and night.

At the end of Vine, I turned onto Locust Street. At the end of Locust, I veered off the obvious street-course home and headed up Sunset Hill Drive toward the cemetery, the huge oaks that lined it burying me in their darker-than-night shadows. I often cut through the cemetery during the day when the gates were left open for visitors. They were usually locked at dusk, but it was worth a try.

Emma thought the cemetery was creepy, but it was one of my favorite places. Before my dad had died, we'd spent a lot of time there together. He'd liked to take etchings of the tombstones, or sketch stone angels, or tell me bizarre stories of death and woe to match the names and dates on the tombstones. Once, we'd even had a picnic on the top of an old sarcophagus and watched the sunset. And now that my dad was in the cemetery, how could I be afraid of it? Dead people weren't scary. They were just people; mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives and husbands. People someone loved and missed. Emma didn't get that. She'd never lost anyone she loved.

Halfway up Sunset Hill, a car approached, bathing me in the beam of its headlights. I waved as it went by, and the driver waved back. Everyone in Greenfield waved.

At the top of the hill I came to the gates of the Sunset Cemetery, huge, wrought-iron and locked up tight with a chain and hefty padlock. I gripped the bars and rattled them a little. My dad would have known what to do about my hand.

The blades started buzzing again, vibrating against my back. Why were they doing that? It was so random. I slipped off my backpack, set it on the ground, and reached for the zipper with my ghost hand.

Pain shot up my arm into my elbow and I yanked it back. What the—? It had felt like a jolt of electricity. I glanced up and down the street, an instinct born purely of embarrassment. Did anyone see that?

And that's when I saw him.

At the bottom of the hill, a dark figure was coming up the sidewalk. His head was bent, looking at something in his hand—a phone or an iPod maybe—so I couldn't see his face. But I knew the moment I saw him that I didn't know him. He wasn't just a tall man in dark clothing taking a brisk stroll through a quiet rural town at night. He was a strange man.