Turn

27

Virginia wound around the corner and came face to face with the enormous wrought iron gate. It was slightly ajar, as if to invite her in. She couldn't help but feel like that was just the kind of subtly melodramatic clue that Tracey would leave in her drunken fervor, a kind of poetic invitation for someone to come find her. She thought, or rather hoped, Tracey wanted someone to find her and wasn't trying to hide. With a sigh, Virginia stepped through the gate and into the eerily silent cemetery. She always liked cemeteries, and it was rare to find someone else who found peace in them as well, but she thought Tracey liked them for a whole different reason. Virginia believed she could never feel alone in a cemetery, whereas all Tracey wanted out of being surrounded by the dead was to feel totally alone.

The moon overhead cast a silvery glow on the rows of dissimilar tombstones as she shut the gate behind her. The path was mostly dirt with a few small rocks that bit into her bare feet as she walked, desperate to find her friend. She looked down every row to her left and right, checking to see if Tracey had decided to huddled behind one of the monuments. Some gravestones were simple, rounded at the top, like the traditional ones, and others were concrete blocks set into the ground, only rising a few inches with a name and date inscribed. Some were fancier, looking like chess pieces or ornate displays to honor the person or a family, and as Virginia moved further back, they got older.

"Tracey?" she called, her voice sounded like a yell in the silence of the dark. She lowered her voice. "Tracey?"

Continuing down the lane, she saw a large mausoleum to her left, casting an eerie shadow from the moon overhead, engulfing a few graves that had been placed near it. She walked quickly by it, something about its visage sending chills through her entire body. Or maybe it was the wind that had begun to pick up and whip a slightly chilled air over her bare arms and through her long hair.

"Tracey, this is crazy! If you're here, come out please!" begged Virginia.

She had never been afraid of the dark, never feared the dead, but at that moment, she was somehow frightened by where she was. Virginia was now conscious that under each headstone was a soul, dead but not gone. As she got further back, the stone markers gave way to wooden ones, with crude inscriptions burned or carved into them. Ones made of stone were there as well, but they were crumbling just as the wooden ones were rotting and decaying. Virginia stopped in front of one monument, stone almost as tall as she was, where the name had all but faded away except for a C and an A. The date of birth was still clear however, reading 1734.

Turning on her heels, she called out once more: "Tracey!"

But there was no answer as her words rang out through the silver-lit night. As Virginia peered across the cemetery, her eyes found the mausoleum once again, and she caught a slight motion from behind the shrubs that surrounded it.

"Tracey?" she called and started to walk toward the motion, then stopped. It had to be Tracey, right? Who else could be in a cemetery at that hour? "A crazy person, that's who," she mumbled an answer to her internal question before starting her walk toward the mausoleum.

She turned to pick her way across the grass, stepping lightly over graves and more than likely walking over a few bodies. Virginia remembered when they had gone to her grandmother's funeral when she was only nine. By that time, she had been visiting Virginia's grave for years and thought she knew a great deal about cemeteries and the dead. But she had walked, head held high, holding back tears, across a dozen graves before her mother caught her by the shoulder and hissed into her ear that it was disrespectful to walk over graves. Her mother had asked how she would feel if someone walked all over her grandmother.