The Graveyard

Book 651: Murder Room

by P.M. Hubbard

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Graveyards are a place for the dead, but when four teen girls decide to spend the night in one, all heck will break loose.If you asked Ellie Peterson she would say she's been a normal kid, so far. She's had the same three best friends since preschool, she has the quintessential bratty little brother, last year she had a crush on a boy and she's endured bullies just as every other middle school kid must. Ellie always thought her life was pretty boring until the morning of her thirteenth birthday. She woke up and felt weird. Like, not weird like the kids at school thought she was, but weird. Ellie tried to shake it off and go about her day as usual making her bed, finding both of her shoes and taking a shower. Unfortunately one bare foot on a wet bathroom floor changed her life forever. As soon as Ellie came to she could hear the dog's thoughts from the other side of the door. She tried to ignore the German Shepard, but the wayward spirits that kept coming into her room during the night was a different story. Ellie decided to keep her new acquired ability to herself. No one would ever believe her any especially not Erica, Sara and Sarina. And definitely not Aidan Roberts the cutest smartest boy at school. She would keep her fateful secret for months until the night in the Graveyard. Between the storm, the forces beyond her control and the thing from the woods she would not be allowed to.

Release date: August 6, 2020

Publisher: Independently published

Print pages: 256

Sample

There is an old graveyard of the Maceacherns between the road and the water where the south shore of the loch runs out in a sort of small headland. All along the rest of the
shore the road keeps close to the water, but here it cuts the corner, leaving an isolated triangle of land with the road at its base and the water on the other two sides. That is where the
graveyard is, stuck up among the rocks seven or eight feet above the level of the road. I do not know how they found soil enough to earth their dead in. Perhaps that is why the graves are marked by
flat slabs sunk in the turf and not standing stones. There are no inscriptions. There is a dry-stone wall all round, growing up out of the rocks for all the world like a miniature Cyclopean
acropolis. There is a gateway in the wall but no gate.

I know it is a graveyard of the Maceacherns, because everybody knows that, and it would not be anyone else’s hereabouts. I know little else for certain. It is impossible to date it from
its appearance, because as I say there are no inscriptions, and the stones are natural stones which were already weathered before they were used. Small graveyards are not uncommon in the Highlands,
where you had tiny communities scattered over huge areas, and the village churchyard so familiar in the south was no feature of their lives or deaths. One story is that the people buried there are
the men who died trying to resist a raiding-party of Strachans. The Strachans had come to take a wonderful red-haired woman who lived in a shieling up on the north face above the loch. She had some
fancy name, I forget what. Another story is that they are the men who resisted the redcoats when they came to burn the place after the Forty-Five and got shot down for their pains. I have also been
told that the dead were the victims of the great smallpox epidemic of the eighteen-forties, buried here by themselves from some half-digested notion of sanitary isolation. The last explanation,
being the most practical one and the most reluctantly offered, is the most probable. As in most near-primitive places, romantic happenings are rare in the Highlands, but the romantic imagination
abounds. The Maceacherns were more likely to succumb to smallpox than to resist the Strachans or the redcoats.

I used to drive past the place often enough, say once or twice a week, when I went into Kinlocheilean to shop, but I had never thought of stopping and going and looking at it. I stopped that day
because there was someone there, and I had never seen anyone there before. I stopped partly because in these parts you tend to stop, or at least consider stopping, at the sight of almost anyone,
and partly because of a feeling, also peculiar to the place, that if there was after all something of interest in the graveyard, I wanted to be in on it too. As it happened, I had cut the engine
before I came round the bend, because there was a new rattle in the chassis I wanted to identify and could not hear with the engine running. This was pure chance, but turned out to be very
important. Anyway, I ran up in neutral to a point just under the graveyard, and then I stopped the car and sat there watching the person moving about inside. I could see only her head and
shoulders. I was fairly certain that it was a girl, because the hair was very fair and cut relatively short. A boy with hair like that would probably have worn it shoulder-length and a beard to go
with it. And the face looked like a girl’s face. At least there was no beard. After a bit she saw me watching her, and came and leant her elbows on the wall, looking down at me. It was only
then it occurred to me that I had seen no other car anywhere, and I wondered how she had got there. I was still wondering this when she moved back from the wall, and a moment later she appeared in
the gateway and began walking down towards me. I opened the car door and got out. I could not just sit there and let her walk all the way down. She came on, still watching me, but without any
hesitation, and after a moment I started walking up to meet her. We were both serious but ready to be polite. I did not know who she was at all.

She was a nice-looking girl, not a beauty, but pretty with her fresh colouring, and a good mover in an active, springy sort of way. There were no romantic undertones in the thing at all. So far
as I was concerned, she was much too young for that. But I liked her before we were anywhere near each other, and I was glad I had stopped. Also, I still wanted to know what she was up to.

I said, ‘Good morning. Looking at the graveyard?’ The question was as much a formality as the greeting. I knew she had been looking at the graveyard, and she knew I knew it. What I
wanted to know was why, but I could not ask her that direct. She had as much business there as I had, and for all I knew more. She might be the last of the Maceacherns in search of her
ancestors.

She did not sound quite like it when she spoke. Her voice seemed as much southern as mine was, possibly even more, because I had been in the glen some time now, and you need to have a very
insensitive ear, or a closed mind, not to pick up some shades of the local speech. She said, ‘That’s right. It’s a lonely place, isn’t it? But very peaceful.’ She
smiled very nicely, but she was looking me over all the time, wondering about me as much as I was wondering about her. She had heard me speak too, and she would know I was not one of the real
people of the glen. I might be local gentry, because the local gentry do not use the local speech, or not to each other. For the matter of that, so might she be, but I thought if she was, I could
have placed her by now, and I could not place her at all. And her voice was not quite right for that.

I said, ‘It can be pretty wild later in the year,’ I said that deliberately, to let her know that I lived here all the time. ‘But they were used to that, presumably,’ I
said.

She accepted the information offered, but did not take it up. There was just a faint lift of the eyebrow. I thought she was an intelligent girl, who knew what she was up to, but was not giving
much away. She said, ‘I suppose so, yes.’

We had met about ten yards up from the road, but she was not going to stand there and talk. She kept on moving steadily down, and I turned and walked with her. We walked round the front of the
car, and I watched her eyes and saw them turn for a moment to the number plate. It was an English registration, because I had bought the car before I had come north. I reckoned she would know this,
because nearly all the Scottish numbers have an S in them. It would fill in her picture a bit, and correctly. She would place me as a southerner, who lived here, but had not been here more than a
few years. In a place as empty of people and as full of personal curiosity as the Highlands, she had virtually got me identified already. Anyone would tell her. I still knew nothing whatever about
her, except that she was not one of the people of the glen.

I looked round vaguely, as if I expected to find her car hidden behind a tree-stump, though of course there was nowhere you could put a car, except on the road, anywhere in sight. I said,
‘I don’t know—I’m driving into Kinlocheilean. Can I give you a lift?’

She was still as smooth as cream and as cool as a cucumber. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said, ‘but don’t bother. I’m not going on just yet.’

I surrendered, because there was nothing else I could do. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well, I’d better be getting on.’ I got into the car, and we said good-bye, and she waved
pleasantly as I drove off. I got one glimpse of her in the driving mirror, standing all by herself in that vast solitude between the grey sheet of water and the hanging pinewoods of the face. I
thought that the moment I was out of sight she would go back up to the graveyard. I thought that if she had heard me coming in time, she would have kept down behind the wall, and I should never
have known she was there. I thought that, once I had seen her, she had, by implication, got me identified and then seen me off in the best possible order. I thought she was a cool one, all right. I
still liked her, but I was a little piqued. Also I was full of curiosity. I had been in the glen too long to be wholly free of the endemic local disease.

All the same, I did not ask anyone about her. I did not mention her to anyone. I had a strong instinct not to. This was partly a natural secretiveness, which the intense, perennial scrutiny of
the glen had if anything intensified. You concealed everything, however unimportant, because as long as there were unimportant things to discover about you, the glen might be slower in discovering
things you did not want known. But there was more to it than that. I was sure I had been right in thinking that the girl would have kept out of my sight if she could, and that as soon as she knew I
had seen her, she had come down deliberately to find out who I was. In fact, she had no reason to mind my having seen her, but she did not know this, because she did not know who I was. It seemed
to follow that there was someone in the glen she did mind seeing her, whether or not she knew them by sight. I had not the faintest idea who they could be, but I knew that if I mentioned the girl
to anyone, her presence would have been heard of, in various forms, by everyone else in the glen in a matter almost of hours. And the thing was, whatever she was up to, I was on her side. I hope it
is not necessary to repeat that in this I was not just a middle-aged man being silly about a pretty girl. I had liked her, and indeed admired her, and nothing would persuade me that either my
liking or my admiration was mistaken. Whatever reasons she had for her secrecy, so far as I was concerned she was welcome to it.

She was gone by the time I got back from Kinlocheilean. I know, because I stopped the car at the graveyard and walked up to have a look. I did not stay more than a minute, because I was in a
hurry to be home. I just made sure she was no longer there, and then went back to the car and drove on.

After that I waited to see if any word of her had got round. If it had, it would have reached me sooner or later. Later rather than sooner, because I was not of the glen, even though I lived in
it, and things the rest of the glen knew at once could take time to filter through to me. So, as I say, I waited, but I heard nothing at all. The probability therefore was that she had got clean
away with it. There was one remaining possibility. This was that not only her visit to the graveyard, but my own meeting with her there, had become known. It was a remote possibility in that
setting, but anything is possible in the Highlands. There are always people around, keepers and stalkers and men with sheep on the hill, whose proper business it is to see any unusual movement on
the landscape, and who are trained and equipped to do it. If I had been seen with her, and if there was some local mystery about her, then I should be involved in the mystery, and no one would
mention her to me at all. As I say, it was a very faint possibility, and I hoped it was not true. But the possibility remained.

In view of what happened later, I must make it clear that I had not at this stage the least reason for supposing that the thing was of any real importance to anyone. All I knew was that, if she
had been seen, this rather striking visitor to the glen at this time of the year (it was long past the tourist season and already nearly winter) would be the subject of general speculation, and
that if her visit to the graveyard of the Maceacherns had been known, the speculation would have verged on the feverish. I doubt if anyone ever visited it from one year’s end to another,
except perhaps the occasional tourist with antiquarian interests or an eye for the picturesque. But I did not suppose that the speculation, even if it existed, would be any more than part of that
all-embracing interest in other people which is a large and essential part of the glen’s way of thinking.

Meanwhile I continued to speculate myself. The first conclusion I came to was that, whatever she had been up to, she had probably not been up to it alone. From the graveyard the road ran a good
seven miles east back to Kinlocheilean, and an almost equal distance to the western end of the loch, where I lived. Southward there was nothing but howling wilderness and ultimately mountains. I
did not think she could have walked from where I saw her, and certainly if she had walked either way along the road, she would have been seen by someone else. Indeed, I should probably have seen
her myself on my way back. Excluding such fantasies as helicopters or boats on the loch (almost equally conspicuous at this time of the year), I concluded that at some time after I had left her
someone had driven along the road and picked her up. The car used must have been locally unremarkable, and must have kept its exotic passenger out of sight until they were well out of the glen. The
second requirement would be easy enough, but the first raised various interesting possibilities which I did not for the moment explore. Another possibility was that they had simply waited until it
was dark. The dark came very early at that time of the year, and she would not have had long to wait. I knew she had not stayed in the graveyard, because I had gone up to see. But once she had
concluded her business there, whatever it was, she could have walked up into the shelter of the forest trees and stayed there, watching the road, until relief arrived. That at least is what I
should have done myself. It was to be presumed that the driver of the car knew where to stop for her. But the whole thing was pure speculation.

The other thing I speculated about, naturally, was what there had been in the graveyard to interest her. I had every intention of going and having a proper look at it myself, but I would not let
myself do it until I was quite sure that no word of her visit had got round. So I waited a week or so, and even then I took fairly elaborate precautions. First I drove past the place, pausing just
long enough to take a rough cross-bearing between a conspicuous tree on the far side of the loch and a high point on the northern skyline. Then I drove on a mile or so, parked the car at a point
where I could get it well off the road, and took to the trees on the north face. When I was well up clear of the road, I turned back westwards and made my way parallel with it along the face. I
could not see my shore of the loch for the trees, but I could see the far side, and could pick up my bearing easily enough when I came to it. It was rough going, and working across a slope is
always more difficult than working either up or down it, but it did not take me long. When I had my bearing aligned, I turned and went straight downhill to the road. It was perfectly possible that
nothing had passed on the road since I had parked my car, and in that case the whole manoeuvre had been unnecessary. I could have walked straight back along the road. But it was a risk I could not
take.

As a matter of fact, a car did come along almost as I came down to the road, but I heard it coming in time. I dodged back into the trees and watched it pass. I knew who it was. It was Jim
McDonach, the local builder and joiner, driving his van out west from Kinlocheilean. He had a job on at Kilstruan. I wondered what he had made of my parked car, and whether he had stopped to look
for me. But at least it had not kept him. He had left it and gone on westwards, and the next time I met him I could if necessary have a story ready to account for my car being where it was. I
listened carefully, heard no car in either direction and walked straight out of the trees and across the road.

It was the same grey, chilly weather as it had been when I had seen the girl here. You get a lot of it at this time of the year. It is not yet painfully cold, but it is extraordinarily
cheerless. A slight breeze blew steadily from the north-west, ruffling the surface of the loch and just stirring the tops of t. . .