Ghosts of Halloweens Past

Chapter 1

The energy in the cemetery was changing. Rose could feel it. She wasn't sure what it meant, couldn't tell if it was positive or negative. Possibly neither. But the edges of her existence tingled from it, the spirit equivalent of goosebumps. Something was definitely different.

She roamed around the grounds, as she did every night, confined to the limits of the iron gates by the curse. Tonight, though, her roaming was with a purpose. She was testing the energy, seeing if she could feel where the shift had an origin, if it had one. The energy didn't sway no matter where she wandered. It didn't rise or fall in intensity. It just was.

The only change in energy was the darkness that radiated from the tomb that had always been there, the source of the curse. It was an entirely different feeling than the shift in the rest of the cemetery and she steered clear of it's vicinity. If she got too close, the darkness would root. Her soul would go mad and become something else. She wasn't sure if the something else could return to who it was before, if those dark things could cross over from this physical world if the curse was ever lifted, but she wasn't willing to find out.

"Look out!"

Rose whirled. A dark thing, with barely any shape, oozing with darkness and despair, lunged at her. The walkway lamp overhead burst into light. The demon thing dissolved with a shriek as light poured down around it. Rose stared at the empty space where the dark thing had been. It shouldn't have been able to come this far from the tomb.

Eddie appeared beside her. "Rose," he said. He didn't have to say anything else. The look on his face matched what she was thinking. They had been stuck before, stagnant for hundreds of years from the curse, unable to leave the cemetery or cross over. But as long as they didn't go too close to the tomb they were safe from the darkness that would consume their soul. If the dark things, the demons, whatever they were, could roam farther from the tomb now, they were in danger. If the darkness reached them, they might never cross over. Whatever was changing was affecting the curse, too.

Eddie drifted to a tree across several rows of headstones. Rose followed. They waited and watched the tomb and the dark things that wandered in and out of it. Other spirits gathered with Rose and Eddie, sensing the change as they had.

"Their reach is expanding. How?" asked Margaret. She was an older woman, both in the sense of her age at her death and how long she'd been here. She'd been here nearly as long as the tomb had, one of the first to be affected by the curse.

"Don't know," Eddie answered, still staring ahead as a dark thing inched farther from the tomb. It stopped several feet out and glided back and forth along an invisible barrier like a caged animal, hungry and wanting.

"It must have something to do with the energy," Rose said. "You feel it, don't you?"

Everyone agreed.

"What does it mean?" she asked. She hoped someone would say it was the end of the curse, that they would finally be able to cross over and start a new life in a new, physical body. But she knew that wasn't it. If the curse was ending, the dark things wouldn't be roaming farther. They would be retreating, or disappearing, the opposite of what was happening.

No one had an answer.

Eddie turned his head. "Rose, your visitor is here."

Rose had been dead over a hundred and fifty years, her family long gone. She hadn't had a visitor for decades. No one in this cemetery did. A body hadn't been buried here since 1872 and the world had moved on. There was no one left to remember them.

Nick showed up one night dressed in a rumpled suit with a bouquet of roses, drunk and crying. He had meandered through the cemetery aimlessly until collapsing under the tree across from Rose's grave. He laughed when he saw her headstone, a single, pitiful laugh and threw his bouquet on top of her plot. "Roses for Rose," he had said and choked into another fit of tears.