Ramblings from Apalapachia...

My latest cartoon for @GuardianBooks.

This is what will happen when I die if I am good.

You find a girl crying next to a grave. “What’s wrong?” You ask. She cries harder. “Nobody came to my funeral.”

Night watchman at a cemetary isn’t the kind of job most people want. I’ve always liked it, though. It’s pretty peaceful, most of the time, which is nice. Sometimes I get to chase off teenagers or would-be occultists or obnoxious drunks, which is fun. There’s a lot of entertainment in a good chase, at least for me, and scaring the crap out of them is fun too.

Sometimes it gets sad, though.

It was my first walkthrough of the night when I saw the girl weeping beside the grave. It happens sometimes, and I never chase them. The cemetary is for the dead and the grieving. They’re always welcome here.

I went over to her, careful to keep the grave between us so I wouldn’t scare her. “What’s the matter?” I asked gently. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

She shook her head, still weeping. “No-one came to my funeral,” she sobbed. “No-one at all.”

I checked the stone. She’d been about seventeen. An age of strong emotions and fierce resentments. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and meant it. “That’s… always hard.”

“If they cared about me, they would have come,” she wept. “This means nobody cared at all.”

“Not always,” I told her gently. “Sometimes it means that something else happened. If you like, I can try to find out.”

“Really?” She wiped her eyes. “I’d… I’d appreciate that. I’m Lucy.”

“Stanley.” She couldn’t shake hands, so I gave her a friendly nod. “Come with me, Lucy. I’ve got a laptop in the watchman’s hut.”

She followed me, drifting silently, back to the hut. I brought her in, and made two cups of tea, offering her one. “I’m not solid,” she said, her lip quivering. “I can’t -“

I showed her how to take it, the ghostly echo of the solid cup, and told her I’d learned it from the day attendant over at the columbarium. She’s Korean, and knows a lot about hungry ghosts. She sipped her tea while I opened the laptop and ran the usual searches.

I do this a lot.

Sure enough, there’d been three major car accidents between the area she’d lived in and the cemetary. There’s almost always at least one - there’s this one intersection that no exorcism, ritual purification or cleansing spell has ever worked on - and it usually helps. A lot of spirits want to know why someone they loved didn’t come.

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sterek. explicit. 56572 words.

Stiles had an insatiable curiosity. He’d gotten grounded for three months in the spring because his dad had found out he’d been hacking into the California Highway Patrol’s database – not because he was some sicko who liked looking at pictures of dead people, but he just wanted to know more. Stiles was cursed with a burning desire to know everything. He went on Wikipedia binges that lasted hours. In elementary school, he’d gotten an award for checking more books out of the library than anyone else.

But this – even though some part of him did want to know about what had happened at the house, another part of him thought it better left untouched. He didn’t need to go about his life knowing that someone had been stabbed in the kitchen or strangled in his bathroom. He didn’t. When he’d found out about the fire a couple nights back, he’d gone online and gotten as far as the headline of an article about the murders – Five dead in arson – before hurriedly exiting the page. Out of sight, out of mind, or whatever. Leave that stone unturned.

Stiles was still lost in thought when something came flying out of the woods and smacked into the side of his knee. Stiles howled in pain, his hands flying out to grasp at his knee, just in time to see his lacrosse ball go bouncing away into the grass. Someone laughed behind him, a guilty noise, and Stiles twisted his head around to see a boy around his age stepping out from between the trees.

“Sorry,” the boy said apologetically. “Threw it a little too hard.”

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