“A graveyard’s cross stood before a hobo. Clouds were gathering in the skies, enveloping the moon – the last source of light in this ominous hour. Maple leaves, red and yellow as seen in the daylight, but all black in the gloom of night, were streaming in the cold autumn wind like mourning banners. The hobo stood there, a shovel in his hands and threw frightened sights at a dark eldritch figure that hovered above him.
‘Start digging,’ said the figure in an ominous raspy voice.
The hobo trembled with fear, but he didn’t dare to disobey the dark figure. The blade of his shovel sunk into the moisture ground of the grave, and soon the first lumps of soil flew in the air. The dark man watched his work, smoking a cigarette, whose smoke enveloped his features. The night was cold, and death permeated the air. The shovel hit something hard – a coffin. The hobo leaned down and after some more minutes of a hard work, he lifted the casket up.
‘Open it,’ said the dark man.
‘W-what?’
“I said: ‘OPEN IT!’”
I closed the book and put it back in my bag, as the bus approached my station – the good ol’ Rasperville. I rose impatiently and walked out, looking forward to see my brother again.
As I remember, we used to be close with Peter as children – to the point that some kids would call us “that couple of inbreeders”, at which we always laughed. Even when we grew up, and parted our ways, we would still keep in touch through e-mails and phone calls.
A week ago, a weird thing happened: Peter stopped answering my calls and seemingly ignored my mails. I called some of his friends, and I was stunned to find out that he had left his job for no reason and apparently had isolated himself from the rest of the world in our parents’ house. Their story got me concerned, and Friday evening I took a bus to Rasperville.
On my way, I hoped that all my worries were nothing, but an overreaction. I expected to see him alive and well, as I tried to find an explanation for my brother’s strange behavior. “He left his job, because he got a new one,” I kept telling myself. “As for the phone calls, well, maybe, he’s just too absorbed by some new project, and forgot to charge it. Yeah, sure, this is what happened. It’s okay, Gina, don’t treat him like a baby. There’s nothing to fear.”
If you keep repeating something in your head, you start to believe it. Therefore, once I came to his place, I was completely calm, and as I rang at the door, I couldn’t expect anything, but him – pale, unshaven and uncombed, but alive. He would groan at me for shoving my nose into his business and preventing him from his work, but I would be fine with that. At least I would know that nothing had happened.
However, his home was empty. I walked from a room into another, but I didn’t find any trace of life, except for flies who found themselves a haven in the kitchen full of unwashed dishes. Panic started to grasp me – I even decided to call the police. But as soon, as I took out my phone, another idea rose in my mind.
I decided to call him again.
It was still possible, even very possible, that he had just gone somewhere – shopping, or whatever he used to do while living on his own. I dialed up his number, and in a few seconds I heard a familiar tune. It was coming from inside the house, and at this point something jumped inside me. I followed the sound and entered a small room in the back of the house, where I discovered that the cell phone tune drifted from a small cabinet in the corner. I opened it to see the phone sitting on a pile of clothes which clearly concealed something. Something meant to be found.
