Sales only ramped up as the week slipped into the weekend. Yesterday, Saturday, was not only our craziest day of the week for sales but also — joy of joys — delivery day from our biggest supplier. I’d stayed at the shop until nearly midnight unpacking new books, rearranging candles, hanging bundles of dried herbs from the ceiling rack, and fiddling with our new line of essential oils. By the time I got home, it was beyond late and I was beyond exhausted. Still, bone-tired or not, I hadn’t slept well. I hadn’t slept well all week. My chateau-chic bedroom, which once felt like my safe haven against the world, was now full of memories that attacked with a vengeance every time my eyes slipped closed, Graham’s voice on constant replay in my head.
You didn’t seem upset about me kissing you when your tongue was in my mouth and you were moaning under my hands.
They got to taste something that always should’ve been mine.
I’ve been patient for years, waiting for you to drop your guard.
He was haunting me. Even in sleep, even in dreams, he was there. Inescapable.
I’d awoken early this morning, slipped on my running shoes, and headed out on my typical four-mile loop, the same one I ran every Sunday. The route brought me from my neighborhood out to Salem Willows Park, which jutted into the Atlantic at the eastern tip of town. In the summer, the area was bursting with life and sound and color. But the attractions were closed for the season — the carousel quiet and still, the arcade abandoned, the food shops shuttered. The beach was deserted, a barren stretch of coarse sand and rotting seaweed. Even the harbor had begun to empty out as boats were hauled and stored for the winter in yards across town.
I felt like the only living soul in the world as I jogged back homeward, following a disjointed path that snaked along the waterfront. It was still quite early. Too early for commuters or tourists to be out and about on a sleepy Sunday, even in the heart of downtown. I had the streets to myself as I jogged up Charter Street and slipped through the black gate into the The Old Burying Point cemetery.
The graves here were old, dating back to the 1600s, and they looked every bit their age, coated with fuzzy green moss, slanting at odd angles, crumbling at the edges. A handful of larger tombs lined the perimeter, housing notable figures from Salem’s past. Many of the names were illegible, their letters worn into nothingness by the elements, but others were still chiseled clearly in the stone, including one Jonah W. Graves, a prominent judge during the Witch Trials… and Graham’s direct ancestor.
I rolled my eyes as I passed by it. There was a certain irony in the fact that I was purportedly descended from one of the witches his great-great-great-grandfather condemned to an untimely death.
Fitting, really,I thought, pausing to catch my breath beneath a huge, gnarled ash tree, its leaves a riot of red and orange and yellow.Even our ancestors were sworn enemies. We never stood a chance.
A cramp stitched through my ribs, making me fold nearly in half. Panting through the pain, I began to stretch — shaking out my tight muscles, flexing my shins against the trunk of the tree, lifting my arms high overhead until the tension ebbed out of my system. A psychoanalyst would probably have a field day with the fact that in the moments I felt most alive — lungs on fire, muscles spasming, heart pounding in my veins — I liked to surround myself with the dead. Macabre or not, there was something peaceful about graveyards.
The sun was beginning to break through the thick cloud cover as it rose higher in the sky. Once I’d finished stretching, I walked the winding gravel paths between the headstones that jutted from the grass like crooked teeth, toward the gate at the other end of the cemetery. I wasn’t far from home — a ten minute stroll if I took my sweet time — but my mind was already outpacing my body, running through the checklist of things I needed to do before we opened at noon. Shower, pull together an outfit, blow dry my hair, eat breakfast…
I didn’t see the body at first. Partly because I was distracted, partly because, well, the only dead people I associated with cemeteries were the skeletons buried six feet beneath my feet. I wasn’t expecting to see an actual dead person. But there it was.
Thereshewas.
As soon as I rounded the final curve in the path, I spotted her sprawled across the rectangular stone slab of a crypt at the very heart of the graveyard. I jolted to a sudden stop, staring across the fifteen or so feet between me and the body, my mind trying to rationalize what I was seeing.
It’s just some sort of prank, right? An early Halloween trick, set up to scare the tourists?
Of course. It had to be. This was Salem, after all. Someone must have purchased a fake corpse and staged her here for maximum effect. Otherwise, it was a paid actor about to scare the bejeezus out of me. I was probably being recorded for a viral TikTok video at this exact moment. Any second now, she would sit up, yank the prop knife from her chest, and start chasing me around the graveyard like a zombie come alive.
My eyes narrowed on the dead — more like ‘dead’ — woman. I had no plans to become fodder for the amusement of strangers on the internet. Hauling in a deep breath to steel myself, I stepped closer, taking in some of the details. Really, it looked quite real. I was impressed by the commitment to the scene. I couldn’t see her face yet, but it was clear it was a woman. Her bare feet dangled over the edge of the crypt’s stone slab top. She was dressed in a flowy white nightgown that covered her to her ankles, the old fashioned kind I’d only ever seen in historical period pieces on the BBC, with a high neckline and frilly lace around the wrists. The blood from the stab wound in her chest was a vibrant red, seeping through the snowy fabric, pooling around her body.
Wow,I thought, dazed.That’s a lot of fake blood.
The tomb itself wasn’t particularly tall — about chest height — and it looked quite old, the stone discolored and cracked, the lettering on the side faded completely. Moving off the gravel path, I stepped onto the grass, my white running shoes crunching on fallen leaves. I was close enough now to see the silver knife was covered in glyphs and occult symbols, with a rounded pentagram at the very base of the hilt. We had some similar pieces locked away in the very back cabinets at The Gallows. Collectors items, mostly. Antique relics with ties to ancient covens.
This particular knife looked very old… and very real. Alarmingly real. So real, I couldn’t help leaning in closer to get a better look at it. I ignored the faint warning bells of alarm that had begun to chime inside my head as I came within a handful of feet of the body. I was so, so certain it was all just a prank, I’d nearly reached the ‘dead’ woman’s side before I realized… she wasn’t sitting up. She wasn’t pulling the knife from her chest. She wasn’t chasing me around the graveyard. No one in the distance was shouting, “Gotcha!” or laughing hysterically at their own antics. There were no hidden cameras capturing this moment on film.
Was it possible… that this… wasn’t a prank at all? That… this woman… was actually…dead?
Not ‘dead’ in quotation marks.
Really dead.
Actually dead.
Deaddead.
No. Not just dead,I thought, staring at the knife that pierced her heart.Murdered.
Panic bolted through me like a lightning strike, locking up my muscles and stealing my breath. I knew, quite abruptly, that this was no harmless Halloween trick. I knew it in the marrow of my bones, beyond any shadow of a doubt. There was no special effects makeup in the world that could ever look so authentically, intrinsically horrifying as the scene laid out before me.
My eyes were stuck on the knife. I couldn’t tear them away. I began to shake, great trembles hijacking my central nervous system, rocking through me like mini-earthquakes. Looking back on the moment, I’d question why I didn’t immediately pull my phone from the thigh pocket of my yoga pants and call the police. I suppose I was in a good deal of shock. At the time, though, there was no rational thought commanding my actions as I took a terrified shuffle closer to the tomb, so I could finally see the poor woman’s face.
When I did, my mind shorted into a drone of static, like a television with crossed wiring. It wasn’t just her skin, which was pale as the stone on which she lay, or her blueish lips, still parted from her final breath. It was the fact that… I knew her. I knew those owlish glasses, recognized that sleek white hair. I’d seen them only a few days ago, moving around the garden beds of her front yard.