“It’s the third time,” Walter said.
“Third grave turned up.
Fresh ones.
I called the cops twice.
They came, looked, wrote it down.
Nothing changes.”
Cole counted the headstones in the row.
Eleven.
Two of them sat over disturbed earth.
Walter smelled like cigarettes and fertilizer, and the cemetery he kept sat off Highway 65 in southern Missouri, low fence, flat ground, nothing between here and the tree line but wet grass.
“When was the last one?”
“Tuesday night.
I came in Wednesday morning and the Holloway boy’s grave was open.
Dirt everywhere.
The casket was cracked.”
“They take the body?”
“No.
Just moved things.
Ate something.
I don’t know what.
There were marks.”
Cole scanned the fence line.
Chain-link, low, easy to hop.
No lights on the far side.
“You see anything?”
“No.
I’m not here at night.” Walter lit a cigarette with shaking hands.
“I’m not supposed to be here at night.”
“You are tonight.”
Walter didn’t argue.
They sat in the groundskeeper’s shed from nine to midnight.
The old man brought a thermos of coffee that tasted like it had been made three days ago.
Cole brought the hatchet and a salt canister and the notebook where he’d written the niche rules so far.
Spirit: true name, iron, consecration.
Ghoul: decapitation, salt the body, burn it or bury it deep.
The shed smelled like mildew and bag lime, and through the slat window Cole could see the row of graves going silver under a half-moon that kept slipping behind clouds.
He didn’t have a machete.
He had a hatchet from a hardware store in Bolivar that had cost him fourteen dollars he couldn’t afford to spend.
“What are we waiting for?” Walter asked.
“It to get hungry.”
“And then what?”
“Then I kill it.”
Walter drank his coffee and didn’t ask how.
At 12:47 a.m.
It wore a dead boy’s face.
Pale skin, dark hair, jawline sharp enough for a yearbook photo.
It landed in the grass, straightened, tilted its head like it was listening to something Cole couldn’t hear.
Cole moved.
Twenty yards of wet grass between the shed and the fence, and he covered them in silence hatchet low, salt canister in his other hand.
The ghoul turned its head.
It smiled with the dead boy’s mouth.
Cole’s feet stopped before his brain caught up.
Then the smile widened and the ghoul lunged.
Cole got the hatchet up but the blade caught shoulder instead of neck.
The ghoul screamed a wet, choked sound and Cole went down under its weight.
Rot and old meat and something worse underneath, filling his nose and mouth.
Its teeth were too long.
Its hands were cold.
Stronger than anything wearing a dead boy’s skin had a right to be.
Cole kicked and rolled and got the salt canister between them.
He twisted the cap and dumped half of it across the thing’s chest.
It hissed and recoiled and Cole swung the hatchet into its knee.
Bone cracked.
The ghoul went down and Cole brought the hatchet down again, into the back of its neck.
Once.
Twice.
The third swing went through and the head came off and the body kept twitching for another five seconds before it stopped.
Cole sat back in the dirt, breathing hard, and for a few seconds the only sound was his own pulse hammering somewhere behind his eyes.
His hands were shaking.
Blood on the hatchet, on his jeans, across the grass in a wide dark spray that looked black under the half-moon.
The groundskeeper was standing by the shed, pale and frozen.
“It’s dead,” Cole said.
Walter didn’t move.
Cole stood.
He picked up the head by the hair and carried it and the body to the open Holloway grave.
He dropped both in and poured the rest of the salt over them.
Then he walked back to the shed and found Walter’s cement mix in the corner, four fifty-pound bags stacked under a tarp.
“I need those,” Cole said.
The old man nodded.
They mixed the cement in a wheelbarrow with a garden hose and poured it into the grave on top of the body.
It took all four bags and an hour to set, and the groundskeeper didn’t speak the whole time just held the hose where Cole pointed it.
When it was done Cole smoothed the top with a shovel and stepped back.
“That’ll hold it,” Cole said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
He lit another cigarette.
“What do I tell people?”
“Tell them you poured a footer for a bench.
Tell them whatever you want.
It’s not coming back up.”
The groundskeeper stared at the grave for a long time. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
Then his eyes found Cole.
“You do this a lot?”
“No.
Second time.”
“Jesus.”
Cole washed the hatchet and his hands with the hose.
The blood came off the blade easy.
It didn’t come off his hands as fast.
He scrubbed until the skin went red and then he stopped.
The old man handed him two hundred dollars from a lockbox in the shed.
“I can’t,” Cole said.
“You can.
I’m not explaining this to my boss and I’m not sleeping until I know it’s gone.
You made it gone.
Take it.”
Cole took it.
He got in the truck and drove north.
The hatchet sat on the passenger seat, still damp.
He could smell the cemetery on his jacket and in his hair and under his nails.
Somewhere past Sedalia he pulled into a truck stop with a single sodium light buzzing over the pumps and opened the notebook on the dash.
Ghoul.
Decapitation required.
Salt the body.
Bury it under something permanent or burn it hot.
A hatchet works if you swing it enough times.
Hesitation gets you killed.
He closed the notebook and put his head against the steering wheel.
He’d been awake for three days and he could feel it in his teeth.
The coffee hadn’t helped.
The adrenaline was gone now and all that was left was the nausea and the shaking and the smell of rot that wouldn’t leave.
The dead boy’s face stayed with him the smile, the tilt of its head, the half-second where something behind those stolen eyes had recognized what Cole was and found it funny.
And the hesitation.
That one frozen heartbeat where his feet had chosen wrong.
He started the truck and kept driving north because Fort Dodge was four hours away and he didn’t have anywhere else to be, and moving was better than sitting still with the smell of grave-dirt baked into his clothes and the taste of old coffee turning sour at the back of his throat.
The sun came up over flat fields.
He didn’t stop to watch it.
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TL;DR —
Silver / $6 / 10 ahead
Gold / $9 / 15 ahead
Platinum / $15 / 20 ahead, no weekly wait
That’s it.