Graveyard Shift

by M.L. Rio

Two of the others had beaten her there. She knew them by their shadows: Tuck, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, was always first. Beside him stood Hannah, who put her hood up at the first rustle of autumn and didn’t take it down again until May. Oddly, though, they weren’t talking. They stared down at the ground in stony imitation of the graveyard angels, without the blank unblinking eyes or patchy beards of lichen.

obelisk, they looked up and she looked down and realized that what they were actually staring at was a hole in the ground. Edie stared, too. “The fuck is that?” Hannah took a long drag. “The fuck do you think?” The hood cast her narrow face in shadow, blacked out both her eyes. Of the other Anchorites, Edie liked her least.

“It wasn’t here last night,” Edie said. “Duh.” Hannah let her mouth hang open, smoke spilling out. She lifted one foot and knocked the peak off the little mountain of dirt at the edge of the hole. Edie peered down into the darkness. Hairy, gnarled roots poked out of damp earth cobwebbed with white threads of mycelia.

“Maybe they do if they’re trying to keep it real quiet,” Hannah said, with ghoulish gravitas.

Unbothered

“Me-yow,” he said, and

“That obvious, huh?” she said, undeterred. “Everybody’s lost interest in the Hostile Incidents.” He could hear the capital letters. Wondered if she’d coined the term herself or simply gave it her editorial stamp of approval.

door open, DANGER be damned. The hinges groaned, and a shaft of watery moonlight threw itself down the aisle like a silver carpet. “Coming?” Edie asked. He saw no way around it, silently cursing her for being so curious and himself for

Their footsteps were muffled by a century’s dirt and decay on the flagstone floor. The echo bouncing back from the modestly vaulted ceiling warped and wobbled, as if they were two scuba divers walking underwater. Edie tugged her gloves off to better navigate the touchscreen on her phone. The flashlight was more like a miniature floodlight, blooming through the dark of the nave until it climbed the wall behind the

October, the cold cut to the bone. “What’s he doing?” “Shh.” He held his breath, watching and waiting for—what? The dark figure below lowered the bag from his shoulder. Like a sinister, necromantic Santa Claus. “He’s, uh, unloading.” “Unloading what?” The

Goo dialogue style

They stayed low, watching in stricken silence as the gravedigger’s shadow advanced along the wall, then slipped out of sight behind the Drewalt obelisk. His footsteps were slightly uneven, with a hitch and a scrape, a hitch and a scrape. The man in the flesh emerged, dragging a shovel

Tuck opened his eyes to try to mime at her to Stop, just fucking stop! but when he did, she wasn’t touching him. Wasn’t even close. Still

He jiggled his leg, but it only climbed faster. He snapped and grabbed the rat to fling it off, but it squealed like a piglet and bit at his fingers, and the crunch of the shovel suddenly stopped. The gravedigger straightened up. Tuck sat still as a stone, hands closed fast around the struggling rat, squeezing its tiny head in his fist to stifle the squealing. It gnawed and scratched against his grip, and he would have screamed if not for Edie, who’d stuffed her loose glove in his mouth. He ground his teeth into the leather. The gravedigger’s head turned again—this way and that. Listening. Hearing nothing but the nocturnal rustlings of the Anchorite’s backyard. The breeze through the dead oak leaves, the occasional uncanny titter of the screech owls that lived in the tree trunk. The distant guttural noise of car engines on Azalea Street. He lowered

Great tension

Head like a soft, rotten walnut in the hollow of his palm. One foot twitched feebly, and he almost threw up in his lap. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Edie gasped again, but this time he wasn’t even startled, his whole nervous system blue-screened and blank. “I do!” she said. And the

“Let’s think, who’s up at this hour and would just jump at the chance to join Mystery Inc.?” Tuck sighed. “Oh, no.”

Good Segway

had been buzzing against his butt cheek like a swarm of fucking bees since they walked into the bar. Thirty unread messages,

he could replace the empty glass with a full one and the gravedigger might not even notice. Like Indiana Jones, trading a sack of sand for a priceless golden icon. “We had a Hostile Incident, a couple of days ago.”

with “Two South Campus Dormitories Closed for Structural Damage.” Only at the very bottom of the article did she find what she’d been looking for: C. burranicum. Several students had been quoted on the unpleasant enervating symptoms of exposure and the inconvenience of their forced evacuation, but one had other concerns: “‘C. burranicum is an endemic species—it doesn’t grow anywhere else,’ according to sophomore biology major Wes Tucker, who was forced to leave his room on the fourth floor of Coblin Hall. ‘Killing it would be like, mycological genocide.’” A link in the article footer produced

Hannah drove a battered black Toyota that had been pulled apart and put back together so many times it constituted a philosophical conundrum. Was it still the same car she’d bought for a song ten years ago? For the last decade it had been her only constant companion. Friends and lovers came and went,

up trying, tired of being tired, tired of telling people she was tired, tired of being bombarded with imbecilic advice about how to be less tired. Have you tried a warm bath? Warm milk? Herbal tea? Reading before bed always works for me! No, shit-for-brains, she wanted to say—and sometimes did, I’ve only been trying to sleep since the day I was born, and googling

Unlike them, Hannah had adapted to the liquid elasticity of the after-midnight hours. Oncoming headlights bent at impossible angles; neon refracted off windows and windshields. Every shadow stretched and warped, like reflections in a fun house mirror. Laughter, music, the whole human imbroglio half smothered by

When she climbed out of the car, her skin seemed to tighten in defense against the cold. She

Her face stung like he’d slapped her. Heart rattling in her ears. She was never lost for words; words spilled out of her without pause, flowed from her tongue and her fingers and her keyboard as fast and as fluidly as she breathed. But how many times had her internal word processor gotten the better of her better judgment? “I—” she blurted. “Sorry. I’m sorry. You’re right. Sorry. I’m—I’ll be back, I’m just going to take a break. I mean, you don’t have to stay. Sorry.” That seemed to be the only word she could say now, sorry.

She ran her fingers through the roots of her hair. Rubbed her eyes. “Shit,” she said softly. She owed

She cocked her head. He dropped the mop. “Thought I might pop in for a nightcap, but if you’re entertaining…” “If I pour you a drink, will you shut up?” “Can’t drink and talk at the same time.” “Then belly up.”

Good dialoguw

little grin, running one fingertip around the rim of her glass. He’d rarely seen her so playful, and it was always dangerous when Hannah showed her teeth. “I left him on the north side of town.” “Was he still in one piece?” He didn’t quite understand it—the venom in her voice, her more-than-usual loathing of Tom Kinnan. Most people were beneath her notice, never mind her disdain.

The effect of the phrase was worth the sleepless night, worth the half hour Tamar had been standing around the stairwell in the cold. Lockley’s eyes widened, then narrowed; her mouth opened, then closed. Tamar couldn’t help thinking how much more amusing it would have been with her enormous glasses on, but no matter. In an instant she’d smoothed her ruffled exterior, expression as cool and placid as a pond frozen over in winter. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”