Fragility

6 Venture up to Maine

The drive to Copp's Hill Cemetery is about fifteen minutes for me. I have driven up north on Charter Street as I have to make a loop around a few blocks to make sure I am not followed by the black suits from BOI. Once I felt safe and no one is following me, I made a quick pit stop at a gas station and filled the tank, along with taking extra fuel I have in a canister in the trunk.

I never liked the looks of old cemeteries, and Boston has plenty of them. Copp's being the oldest. The first corpse they threw in it was back in 1659. Copp's was the kind of place at dark in the late hours of the evening you'd want to avoid. It didn't help matters that there were tales of old witches from back in the Salem Witch Trial days who would have their magical rituals here, trying to summon the devil and give offerings of child sacrifices, tainting the burial grounds in something sinister. Whenever I had to come up to Copp's, it was mostly solving grave robbing cases. Last one was three months ago; a geriatric by the name of Edward MacGavin tried to dig up nearly three-hundred-year-old corpses and see if he could sell off antique jewellery so he could have something to support him in his retirement.

I finally made it to the east gate entrance of Copp's Hill Cemetery. The place always looked spooky at night driving up to it. The cemetery is walled off by an old stone wall that is chest high; anyone can really climb over it. The entrance has two lamp lights guarding it, and sitting right there on the sidewalk is Rudi and his cousin, who is taller by three inches. Both seem cold, trying to warm themselves up. Rudi wore his brown leather jacket and a scarf, and black leather gloves on his hands. I honk my horn at them, and they quickly rose up from where they sat and came to my car.

"You're here, good! Let's get going! Been freezing my ass off here," Rudi opens the back door and lets his cousin in, carrying another duffle bag.

"Enzo, I'd like you to meet my friend here, Detective John Lancy. Johnny, my cousin Enzo just got here from the old country." Rudi introduces me as I look back to Enzo, a Sicilian youth of seventeen years of age, who has brown eyes, freckles, and curly dark brown hair.

"Hi John," He says in a shy manner, speaking the best possible English he can in his Italian-accented tone. Rudi gets into the front seat and slams the door.

"Okay, let's get moving," Rudi orders as I drove away from the entrance of Copp's Hill Cemetery.

The drive to Portland took all night, one-hundred and eight miles. I drove through what seemed to be endless darkness in the seaside country and far up the north coast in the middle of the boneyard. No sensible ship's captain would venture on up to here, as there are many rocky hazards and narrow fjords that a ship of any size could be wrecked or run aground on a reef. There is not a small town or hamlet built for miles upon these forsaken forested coastal hills, only a highway that was recently built four years ago, connecting Massachusetts with Maine.

As I drove, a light snowfall blanketed the highway. Rudi and Enzo slept soundly in my car, hardly stirring awake, even when I stopped to refuel the car at 2 a.m. as it snowed. Places like these, out in the middle of nowhere, in the cold dark, give me the spooks. It gives me a foreboding feeling as I refuel my car that anything can jump out at you from the darkness and drag you into their lair, hidden in the woods and tall grasses that walls off the highway.

Didn't help matters much that I felt I was hallucinating or gone bat shit insane. I was driving up to a highway sign, covered in snow, at 3:33 a.m. and right under the sign, the Ghost of Emma Lewis, covered in her blood and staring at me. Her body, pale as the snow, floated above the ground before my sight, with dead blue veins all over her ghastly figure. Her horrific features illuminate by my car's headlights, which shine right off her black eyes and made them flare up with a glow of golden yellow, then burning embers. As I came closer to her, I swerve my car on the highway to avoid getting any closer to that thing. That ghost, or whatever the hell it is, raised its right arm and points a sharp finger at me as I drove right past her.