At night, all you could hear were the voices of the dead. The long–gone, the recently–gone, the unremembered; every voice in the graveyard made themselves heard in the dark hours of night. A horrifying thought to many, I’m sure, but I’ve been caretaking these grounds for so many years that most of the voices just fade into the background, silent as the gravestones they’re buried under.
When I was younger, I’d ask questions of the spectres that haunt the graven rows and eventually I learned most of their stories; some told more than others. Some, I wasn’t happy for having asked. There’re more than a few killers who were never caught under these stones, and they’re not the worst of the lot, I can assure you of that. But there’re more than a few good folks around, as well. A few of ‘em I even helped move on. Well, I assume they moved on, I don’t actually know what comes next—if anything comes next—and neither do they. They just…disappear, if some unknown grocery list of things is finally checked off.
I’ve asked other grave–tenders about this, and it seems that the lot of us are cursed to be the ones nearest to the truth. We stand in the places closest to death but can never know it; we can only ever watch others grasp it and vanish before they can tell us what lies beyond that final veil. It used to bother me, but, like the voices of the dead rabble, I’ve deadened myself to it. Hardened myself to it. As though I, too, am a gravestone.
A silent watcher. A warden of souls. The stone monument that stands and remembers that these people were ever here to begin with.
Colin Sostar is a current Masters student within the Department of English Language and Literature. His personal and academic interests revolve around the fields and fandoms of fantasy and science–fiction literature. He is currently in the process of writing his own fantasy novel.
