“Maybe I’ll go,” I said with a vacancy in my tone. My head was somewhere else: rocks, crashing deep blue waters, an animal skull, and silver-gray eyes.
Monday’s head whipped to the side, eyes widened. “Oh, you gotta go. You need to get out and be a part of this town, or everyone will think you’re a flatlander.” She snapped the carrot in half without looking. “My friends wanna meet you, too. I told them you were starting here today.”
It seemed everyone already knew who I was, and I wasn’t used to this kind of attention. Sure, people always noticed me, but they kept their distance. They waved and smiled and treated me as an acquaintance. But for Monday to form a conversation with me, ask me questions, and invite me places was all surreal. I’d spent most of my life keeping to myself, focusing on nothing but my career for the last six years. I’d become a workaholic, my only friends, the dead. I prepared the corpses while confessing all my bizarre dreams to spirits. How the screams from the couple in apartment 7901 kept me up at night, fighting over infidelity, how beer pong shouldn’t be considered a sport, and the time Netflix had dropped my favorite show … Then it hit me.
Shit. I was Gramps.
“Sacred Sea …” Monday went on. “Well, the Sullivan sisters, Milo, Maverick, Cyrus, and Kane. You’re bound to meet them before Defy Day, and you’ll totally fit right in. It’s not like you don’t already belong there, anyway. Oh,” she bounced in place, an idea popping into her head, “we can go shopping after work sometime next week and find you a dress and a mask. You have to wear a mask.”
“If I’m still here, I’ll go,” I agreed upon hearing Milo’s name. At least I would know two people there, and maybe going out wouldn’t be all bad either. Milo had said Dad was once a part of the Sacred Sea Coven. My curiosity had me on the fence about diving into this world and seeing where Dad had come from, where I’d come from, and if Milo’s word about my parents being witches held merit.
My relationship with Dad had been long-distance due to his obligation to our country, and I’d respected him for his dedication to the Air Force. Maybe he kept me and his past at arm’s length for a reason, but did I want to know why?
I fell back against the tree and slid my gaze to the gravedigger, who was drinking from a water bottle under his bandana with his arm resting over the shovel propped at his side. He was slender but in shape with a buzzed head. He glanced over in our direction, unreachable behind the bandana covering his face, reminding me of the Hollow Heathens Milo and I saw the day before, reminding me of the man from the rocks—Julian.
“What about the Hollow Heathens? Do they go?”
Monday’s eyes drifted to the gravedigger as well. “They really don’t do events. But you want to stay far away from them.” She nudged her head toward the gravedigger, watching us.
He was one of them. I peeled my eyes from him and back to Monday. “Why’s that?”
“Beck’s quiet and will leave you alone. They’ll all leave you alone if you leave them alone,” Monday leaned closer to me, “but everyone knows they practice dark magic. The kind you never want to mess with and the shit we don’t touch. Sacred Sea is wholesome, but not them. River Harrison’s convinced it was them who put an evil hex on Jasper Abbott, making him go mad.”
“An evil hex,” I repeated, a humorless grin following. And the grin wasn’t because I didn’t believe in magic or witchcraft, because I’d always been open to what couldn’t be seen since I’d seen more than most, knowing the supernatural lurked behind layers of the world. But I also understood what it was like for people to see you as something different than what you were, to be the center of a town’s sickest rumor.
“Did you ever stop to think it could be just what it is…him losing it? What reason would they have to do something like that anyway?”
“To punish him for having loose lips, or at least that’s what the rumor is.” Monday suddenly stopped there when I was expecting more of the story. She bit into a carrot, and it crunched between her teeth as she hazily looked out into the cemetery. “Meet me behind the cemetery tonight at midnight. I want to show you something.”
“Why at—”
She waved her hand out in front of her. “Just meet me. You’ll see for yourself.”
It was thirty minutes before midnight, and Gramps had fallen asleep in the blue and green plaid recliner. After leaving the funeral home earlier, I’d stopped by the corner store to grab a few things, then cooked a large pot of chili, hoping the cayenne pepper would cut through his congestion and reduce his flu-like symptoms. I paired it with sweet and crumbly homemade cornbread. It had been Marietta’s go-to whenever I was sick, which was often since I never had the best immune system.
I stood over a sleeping Gramps, wearing black leggings and a large gray sweatshirt under my oversized denim jacket, ready to meet Monday behind the funeral home out of curiosity. I re-heated his unfinished tea and placed it over the side table for him in case he woke. Atop the same table, a black and white candid picture of me caught my eye. It was on this morning’s issue of The Daily Hollow. A welt formed in my chest, and I tilted my head to read the headlines.
FALLON ‘MOONSHINE’ MORGAN
RETURNS TO WEEPING HOLLOW AFTER TWENTY-FOUR YEARS, POSSIBLY HOARDING SECRETS.
Article written by: Milo Andrews
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Milo? I lifted the loosely folded-up newspaper, rolled it, tucked it into the back of my leggings, and dragged the wool blanket over Gramps before taking off to the garage.
The houses on the east side of town were beautiful, traditional coastal homes, all distinct in shades of corals, sea-foam greens, and Gramps’ egg-shell blue. Except at the end of the street and atop the highest point of the cliff. It was there where the deteriorating mansion stood, a deserted, black house plagued by nature and neglect, with broken shutters, overgrown brush, and vines crawling up the bone-like structure like poisonous veins.
I circled the square’s roundabout going ten miles per hour as townies raided the sidewalks under the polished half-moon. At this hour, all the shops were open. Candles flickered inside lanterns behind the glass storefronts, and jack-o-lanterns smiled from atop the rails of the gazebo. Residents drank from silver goblets, and little girls wearing colonial dresses with ribbons in their hair frolicked to eerie tunes spilling from speakers rooted under the gazebo's eaves, the heart of it all.
People laughed and mingled as if it weren’t an ordinary Wednesday night.
Milo sat over a bench with a girl at his side. She was running her long fingers up and down his collarbone inside his stretched shirt, and seemed younger, eighteen maybe, with dark brown hair.
Seeing him caused the lump inside my chest to reappear, reminding me of the newspaper headline tucked at my back, inside my waistline. I had to confront him, and with ten minutes to spare, I turned the scooter around and didn’t stop until the wheel bounced off the curb in front of the gazebo. A group of tipsy teenagers jumped back as if I was going to run them over, and I kicked the stand free.
“Milo!” I shouted with the newspaper clenched in my fist. “What the hell is this?” My temper flared.