It was the nicest day we’ve had yet this year, and so of course Jude and I went outside. Me and Jude are the same type of girl. We don’t really come alive until the earth does. We’ve been hibernating the long cold months away, waiting for this first breath of spring, letting our legs get furry and our skin grow pale. But when today dawned, bright and clear, we both knew it was the day we had been holding our breath for. So we broke out our flashlights, our rubber boots, our cigarettes and our best devil-may-care attitudes, and we did what we had been talking about doing all winter. We went to Greenwood Cemetery to explore the Catacombs.
We live in this festering boil of a factory town that’s supposed to be one of the most haunted places in the Midwest. No joke, like they do haunted tours and everything. I don’t really buy into all that. The summer we graduated high school my friends and I went through this phase where we fancied ourselves ghost hunters. We pretty much just trespassed a lot, broke into a few abandoned buildings with flashlights and tape recorders and somebody’s mom’s Polaroid camera from college, searching with the single-mindedness of teenagers for evidence of the supernatural. We spent a lot of nights in graveyards and decaying farmhouses, crouched around an Ouija board. The town I lived in back then was more of a minor Midwestern pimple with a bar and a post office and not a whole lot else. I remember this one time we were playing with the board on the steps of this supposedly haunted theater attached to the local high school, and a cop rolled up and asked us what we were doing. Somebody managed to stuff the board under their shirt in time, so we told him we were just hanging out since we were too young for the bars and everything else was closed. The cop made a big show of checking all of our ids, then told us to clear out, advising us that if we wanted somewhere to hang out late at night, we might try to the parking lot of the 24 hour WalMart supercenter on the outskirts of town. He wasn’t being sarcastic, either. That was the kind of entertainment we had available to us. So we spent a lot of time screwing around chasing spirits that we never caught. I never saw, heard, or experienced anything in the least bit magical or creepy or even out of the ordinary. Others in the group insisted they did, but these were also the kids who were most likely to get yelled at for moving the planchette, so I took it with a grain of salt.
By the time I moved here two years ago, I was firmly entrenched in my skepticism. My sister, whose couch I surfed for the first year I spent here, was full of local spook stories about the cemetery and the park land surrounding it. She was going through this really new agey Wiccan spiritual phase at the time, and I could see the glimmer of true belief in her eye when she talked about Greenwood. One night, when we were getting drunk on her porch to the tune of Mike’s Hard something or other, she told me about a time she had gone there with some friends well past midnight on a dare. She swore up and down that she got possessed. The way she told it, she was present, looking out through her eyes, but she wasn’t in control of her own body and all she could do was watch helplessly as some force directed her hands up to lock around her friend’s throat. She regained enough control to tell the girl to walk on the other side of the white line painted down the center of the bike path, saying that she would be safe as long as she didn’t cross over that line. They made it out of the park that way and none of them ever spoke of it again. My sister seemed to have forgotten all about it the next morning, and I didn’t bring it up. I just kind of brushed it off. My sister is the type to move the planchette and then convince herself that it moved on its own.
But all the same, there are stories.
The cemetery is huge and sprawling, laying claim to a rare hilly area that butts up to the shore of the lake. Greenwood and the whole west end are built on top of an ancient Indian burial ground, as the stories go. When the spring rains come, the lower bits flood and the whole place becomes a muddy, waterlogged swamp. Years ago it flooded so bad that it broke open a ton of mass graves from the 1800s, and the town woke up to an army of skeletons drifting in the streets. It’s one of Greenwood’s most often told legends, and yet no one ever seems to know what was done with all those nameless, floating corpses.
The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the thermometer read a balmy 70 degrees. We’d had a nasty bout of snow and ice for the last few weeks, like the last death rattle of winter before it gave up the ghost. Jude likes her sleep even more than I do, but this morning she came crashing into my room around 8 am with a massive mug of coffee and a sound that might have been a Confederate war shriek, or possibly a Klingon mating call. You can never tell with her. I’m pretty sure our neighbors hate our guts. I never hear a peep from any of their apartments.
“IYIYIYIYIYIYIYIYIIIIII!” She howled, slamming the cup down on my nightstand with a slosh of hot coffee before sweeping open the curtains and yanking off the covers. “The sky’s awake! The sun is out! Good morning, starshine, the earth says get the fuck up!”
“That’s not how it goes,” I mumbled, trying to crawl under my pillow and away from the brilliant sunbeams lancing through the window. The pillow was promptly snatched away too.
“Come ONNNN, lazybones!” Jude griped, buffeting my head and shoulders with it. I groaned wordlessly in protest, curling into the fetal position in an attempt to escape the hammering freight train that my best friend and roommate turned into when she wanted something.
“Dude, I got maybe two hours of sleep last night,” I muttered into the mattress, stubbornly keeping my eyes clamped shut. “I had to pull a double shift because my replacement didn’t show up. Can’t this wait?”
“Who didn’t show up?” Jude asked, suddenly all interest. She flopped down beside me, wrapped up like a loud, prying burrito of selfishness in my blankets. “Was it Madison? Was she too busy banging the new bartender in the back office again? Oh my god, what a dumpster fire. Can you believe her? Tell me EVERYTHING.”
I opened my eyes and glared at her. Jude knows my policy on bringing work home with me, and on gossip in general. She beamed innocently back at me, annoyingly fresh-faced and clean with her short, bubblegum colored hair standing up in rat’s nest that somehow always managed to look good. In contrast, I had gotten home from my waitressing job last night too tired to do anything but kick off my shoes and topple into bed. My face felt dry and stiff, I could feel crusted eye gunk gluing my eyelashes together at the corners, and my mouth tasted like I had been French kissing an ash tray with a debilitating drinking problem for several hours.
“If I get up, will you go away so I can shower and wake up without you screeching in my ear?” I asked her.
Completely unfazed by my grumpiness, Jude rolled off the bed, shed the bedclothes with a speed worthy of Britney Spears about to show the world her jewel-encrusted thong, and took off running down the hall. I heard her scream a strident morning greeting at our cat in the living room and smiled in spite of myself. Jude and I are enough alike that we get along like a house on fire, but our differences are what really make the friendship. Without her to light a fire under my ass, I’d probably be twenty pounds heavier and a lot more dissatisfied with my life.
I took my sweet time in the shower, soaking my hair with too much conditioner and letting the fragrant steam cleanse my pores of a long night of shitty tips and spilled beer. I even ran a razor through the winter coat I had been cultivating on my legs. The single life is nice. I stayed in there until I was pretty sure I had scrubbed off the entire top layer of my skin. That was when the water started flickering from lava-hot to freezing, telling me that Jude was getting impatient and turning the kitchen faucet on and off. I wish I would have stayed in there until all the hot water ran out and I was a shivering block of ice. I wish I had never let Jude bully me out of bed.
But because I didn’t know any better, I got out. I dried myself off briskly and rummaged through the bottomless pile of maybe clean/probably dirty laundry in the bottom of my closet until I found a pair of shorts, a t shirt I didn’t mind dirtying and some long black socks. Jude was sitting on the kitchen counter with the Bandercub in her lap, chugging what I’m sure was probably her third or fourth cup of coffee. When I walked out of my room, she immediately slid down, sending the cat flying.
“Look at you, stems,” She grinned, giving me an exaggerated once-over. “I’m sure the ghosts and demons will appreciate you shaving your legs for them.”
I just rolled my eyes. Jude believes in this stuff a lot more than I do. She claims that the women in her family have a “touch of the sight”, whatever that means. She told me she used to see crazy stuff when she was a little kid growing up in one of the neighborhoods bordering Greenwood. Fairy lights on the hill, eerie green flames on the bike path that ran right past her house, shadows crawling across the yard, that sort of thing. She’s been trying to get me to go down into the Catacombs pretty much since we met, seeming not at all concerned by my complete lack of interest.
We slammed around the apartment for a few minutes, looking for working batteries and engaging in a steadily escalating back and forth about what was going to happen once we got down there.
“You’re gonna pee,” Jude told me, cracking open the back of the remote. “A rat or like a squirrel or something is gonna run over your foot and you’re just gonna pee all over yourself. And the squirrel.”
“That’s either a slow-ass squirrel or a lightning fast piss.” I said. “Is it hanging out on my foot trying to catch a paparazzi upskirt shot, or what? And what is it doing underground in the first place? Squirrels are aerial creatures, everybody knows that.”
“Squirrels don’t swim, idiot.”
“I said aerial, not aquatic. Idiot.”
“Well, hopefully this squirrel actually is aquatic, or else it’ll drown in your raging ocean of pee.”
“Oh my god, I’m not afraid of squirrels! Who the hell is afraid of squirrels?”
“Holly, it’s okay to admit your fears. That’s an important first step to facing them.”
“I’m not afraid of squirrels.”
“This is a safe space, Holly.”
It was about a quarter to eleven by the time we actually made it out the door. Our apartment building is on the west end of town, about a fifteen minute walk from Greenwood Cemetery. Jude had stuffed a bright purple knapsack with enough supplies to last us until the second coming of Christ in the event that we should get lost down there, which she repeatedly assured me was not going to happen. I jammed my phone and my cigarettes into what little space there was left in one of the knapsack’s pockets and settled for carrying my flashlight. Our galoshes made cheerful squelching noises in the mud as we walked through the grass that lay between us and the tree line that signified the edge of Greenwood property. The last remnants of dirty snow were disappearing fast in the shadow of the trees. The air smelled sweet and young and green. Jude grabbed my hands and twirled me around until both of us were laughing and breathless and dizzy. Birds sang in liquid harmonies from the branches as we neared the borderline. The trees were still naked and leafless. They looked like skeletal, many-fingered hands reaching up towards the sky. I shivered a little in spite of the sunny warmth. Luckily Jude didn’t notice.
She led the way. Once we passed the boundary and entered the cemetery itself, it was like a blanket of quiet dropped over us, muffling all sounds except for those made by our feet. No more birds sang. You couldn’t even hear the traffic in the distance. We walked past scattered monuments and headstones that seemed to be placed with no rhyme or reason. The further in we walked, the stronger the cold feeling in my chest became. I was nervous. Not that I’d ever let on. But the Catacombs are a mystery. It’s the weirdest thing, honestly, because you’d think that with Greenwood being on so many “top ten most haunted” blogs, somebody would have latched on to the fact that there’s a network of underground tunnels beneath the cemetery and, according to who you talk to, a lot of the town. But a quick Google search reveals little to no information. Nobody seems to know why they exist, what their purpose was, or why they haven’t been closed off.
You’d also think every kid that grew up here would have been down there a hundred times. Smoked their first joint, drank their first beer, touched their first boner. You’d think, but again, you’d be wrong. Jude is the biggest daredevil I know and while she has been down there, even she hasn’t gone very far. The one time she went was when she was a lot younger, like grade school younger, with a childhood friend who was the son of the former groundskeeper. She’s wanted to go back ever since but she’s afraid to go too deep by herself, and no one our age is interested in Greenwood anymore. That’s kid stuff. And like I said, even they don’t have the balls to go down into the tunnels.
Speaking of balls, as we were walking back towards the entrance to the Catacombs, Jude pulled a large ball of wine-colored yarn out of her knapsack, dislodging the fat blue crochet hook that was lodged in its heart. The hook bounced off a gravestone with a metallic clang and tumbled to the ground.
“Is that my yarn?” I asked her, stopping dead in my tracks.
“Yes it is. That’s my crochet hook that just fell out of it.”
“That’s weird, what was your crochet hook doing in my yarn?”
“Jude. I specifically remember buying that yarn. I was going to make my sister a hat with it for Christmas.”
“Christmas was four months ago.”
“Well, you see, Jude, the thing about Christmas is that it comes around once a year.”
“Oh my god, Holly, you’re the worst. It’s just one ball and you have a bajillion more that you never even do anything with. I’ll buy you another one. I’ll buy you TWO other ones.”
I sighed a sigh of long suffering and bent over to pick up my crochet hook.
“What do you need my yarn for anyway?” I asked, attempting to slip it into my pocket and cursing as I realized I had put on the only pair of shorts I own with those idiotic fake pockets where the top is sewn shut for no good reason. I stuck it in my sock instead.
“It’s a clue,” She said, her tone indicating that I had asked a stupid question.
“What, like, Colonel Mustard in the Catacombs with the ball of yarn?”
“No, dummy, it’s like Thesis and the Minotaur. The king’s daughter gave him a ball of string called a clue, and he tied it to the doorpost before he entered the Labyrinth so he wouldn’t get lost.”
“You mean Theseus? A thesis is the central statement of a college paper. But solid idea, either way.”
“Okay, smartass. Go pee on a squirrel. Come on, we’re almost there. The Hollow’s just down this hill.”
Hell’s Hollow is what the locals call the area near the entrance to the tunnels. I know, it struck me as being a little melodramatic too. It’s just this dip in the ground at the bottom of the hill where the remaining Civil War graves are. Accounts differ on how it got the name. I’ve heard everything from it being a former lynching spot to it being a portal to hell. Depends on who you ask. That’s the problem with Greenwood, everyone has a different story but nobody ever seems to know for sure. We clambered down the steep incline between dilapidated headstones that stuck out of the muddy ground like stumps of rotten teeth. Most of them were so worn with age that you couldn’t even make out the inscriptions anymore. Looking at the exposed tree roots and washouts, it was easy to see how a good heavy rain had wiped out most of these graves. The only thing I couldn’t figure out is why anyone would think a spot like this would be a good place to bury folk in the first place.
As soon as we hit the bottom of the hill, we both shivered. It was noticeably colder down here. I’m sure the temperature drop caused by the elevation change played into a lot of the stories about the Hollow. Ghost hunters love to talk about cold spots. It’s one of the few things most can agree on as a signifier of spiritual activity, and they all like to conveniently forget what they learned in science class about warm air rising and cold air sinking. All the same, I rubbed my goose-pimpled arms and felt uncomfortable.
We crossed the open grass of the Hollow and picked our way up a small undergrowth-covered ridge, slipping and sliding in the muck, grateful for our rubber boots. Thin branches caught at my clothes and dragged against my face like they were trying to hold me back from what I was about to do. I wanted to let them. The feeling in my chest was closer to full blown panic now, and my heart was beating about a mile a minute. I hated to admit it, but I was scared to go down there. I mean, I was really scared. And listen, I’m not a puss about this stuff. Like I said earlier, I’ve spent many nights in graveyards. I’ve broken into some truly creepy places searching for a genuine scare and found them all lacking. But now, climbing up towards the rounded silhouette of the entrance to the Catacombs, I was flooded with real fear. Fight or flight instinct. I could feel my hands trembling. I could taste the dryness gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth.
Jude ducked under a spot in the fence around the graveyard proper where the wire had been pulled up, then turned and held it aside for me. I paused, taking in the sight facing me. The churned up mud and leaf litter, the wire-twisted metal fence post hanging loosely out of the earth, Jude’s candy pink hair ruffling in the slight breeze. Her eyes, that particular mercurial shade where you can never quite decide if they’re blue or green, were a silent challenge. I stood there, hovering at the edge of this adventure we had spent so many dark, snowy nights plotting.
And, god help me, I stepped through the gap.
Our chattiness from before had evaporated somewhere in that muddy uphill slog. As we approached the beehive-shaped concrete dome, the feeling was less that of two friends about to go exploring an abandoned underground tunnel system and more what I imagine hangs in the air of an operating room just before the first juicy red incision is made.
“Help me lift this,” Jude commanded, dropping her backpack on the ground and fitting her fingers into the grating of the heavy cast iron cover that sat on top of the dome.
I obediently crossed to the other side and followed suit. The metal was rusted red, ice cold and insanely heavy. It looked really old. The pattern was different from other sewer grates I had noted around the cemetery on our way in. It was weirdly intricate and somehow reminded me of those circular Aztec calendar stones that had everyone convinced the world was going to end a couple of years ago. We lifted it laboriously up out of its indentation and slid it to one side until it dropped with a loud thud onto the ground.
The draft of cold damp air that blew up into my face was almost too much for me. It was like looking down into the gaping maw of an open grave.
I stood there nervously shifting from foot to foot, checking the batteries in my flashlight while Jude leaned over the hole and tied the end of the borrowed yarn to the top rung of the ladder. When a burst of canned music split the stillness, we both jumped and giggled sheepishly at each other. Jude backed away from the entrance, digging frantically through her knapsack in search of her battered flip phone. That thing is years out of date and the only ringtone it has is an off-key version of Fur Elise. It’s not a hipster thing. She went through three expensive smart phones in the last year before she got sick of shattering the screens on the floor, gave up and went old school. She fished it out just before the last discordant note sounded and flipped it open.
“Hello?........Oh my god, Caleb! Hi! Holy hell, I haven’t talked to you in forever! How are you?”
She turned away and began pacing like she always does on phone calls, her face lit up with a huge smile. I rolled my eyes, but the normalcy of it helped lessen the tightness in my chest. Caleb was her best friend as a kid. He was the one she used to go exploring all over Greenwood with. I’ve never met him. They don’t hang out anymore and haven’t in years, but her voice still lights up when she talks about him. From what I’ve gathered they were both lonely, kind of weird kids who didn’t really have friends aside from each other. I was glad he was calling, for Jude’s sake as well as for the respite it afforded me from the impending downward journey. I knew she missed him. I poked idly at the entrance while she chattered. The coating of concrete had begun to chip away in spots, revealing worn red bricks beneath, some of which were split and crumbling. I pulled a loose chip of brick right out of it and hoped that the tunnels themselves were in better condition.
“Ready?” Jude said right behind me, startling me. I turned around. Her face was pinched and sour.
She shook her head distractedly.
“Caleb. I don’t know. He never calls me anymore, and the one time he does, as soon as I told him what we were doing he told me to go home and forget about it. When I laughed he got mad and hung up. I don’t get it.”
“He told you not to go down in the tunnels?”
“Yeah. He was always really creeped out by them. We found like this dead animal down there back when we were kids, and he swore up and down it was a human body and made us leave. That’s why he would never go with me again.”
“That’s….comforting. Wow.”
“Relax. It was just a dog or something that fell in and got stuck. I felt bad for it but it definitely wasn’t a dead person.”
I watched her hoist herself up onto the lip of the hole, look down and take a quick determined breath in and out. Then she swung down and began descending. When she vanished from my line of sight, I remembered how to move my legs and stumbled forward to peer down after her. Her neon hair was a bright spot in the darkness. She was already nearly to the bottom.
“Come on,” She whispered, a hollow echo of her insistent cry in the sunlit peace of my bedroom that bounced off the brick and dank earth below. I wished, suddenly and desperately, that I was back in my warm bed, safe under my covers, far away from this hole. It reeked of polluted rain and writhing earthworms and tangled roots that had never seen the light of day. And beneath that, something darker, something heavier and……meatier, almost. I shivered violently.
Then I climbed ungracefully onto the perch Jude had just left, awkwardly banged my knee on the cement, and stepped down into the dark.
My pulse thrummed in my ears. The rough, cool metal of the ladder bit into my palms. Between my feet I glimpsed the top of Jude’s head like a streak of day-glo spray paint among the shadows at the bottom. The sudden chill of being below ground turned the dampness under my arms to ice.
When I made it to the bottom, Jude’s hand found mine. I found some relief in the fact that hers was just as clammy.
I nodded, hoping it wasn’t a lie. The wavering beams of our flashlights danced up and around us, and I finally took a look around. We stood in a tall, narrow shaft just barely big enough the two of us to crowd together at the bottom of the ladder. We stood ankle deep in scummy, stinking water. A short brick archway led into the dark on either side.
“Right or left?” I asked. There was an embarrassing tremble in my voice.
That’s what I remember. Descending from the shy spring warmth to the dead, yawning darkness. My best friend’s hair gleaming beside me, her sweaty hand in mine. The cold fingers of terror clenching tight around my heart. That’s all I remember.
When I opened my eyes, I didn’t know where I was.
You know that overwhelming sense of dread that strikes you when you wake up somewhere that’s not your bed from an unintended nap in the middle of the day? Multiply that by a thousand. Everything felt wrong. The light was thinner and weaker and coming from the wrong direction, the air still sweet-smelling but far too cold for short sleeves. My back was pressed up against something hard and rough and convex, and I was sitting crosslegged on damp ground that had thoroughly soaked through the seat of my shorts. For a crazy second I thought I was falling, and my arms lurched out wildly to catch myself.
I looked around uncomprehendingly. I was leaning against the beehive, bathed in the deep honey glow of a sun that was about to set. I stared blankly at it until its brightness hurt my eyes, and then looked away and scanned my immediate surroundings with its dark afterimage still floating on my retinas. In a neat little pile next to me sat my phone, my flashlight, my mangled pack of smokes and a dirty, debris-coated ball of wine-red yarn. Across my lap lay a long stick. Well, stick is the wrong word. This thing looked more like a wizard’s staff. I reached down and turned it over. Lightweight for how big it was. Probably pine. It was slightly crooked in several places, patterned all over with the paths of hungry worms. It was completely naked of bark, and one end had some odd rough cuts hacked into it. They looked purposeful, but not in any identifiable way. I could almost see faces in it, many little twisted leering ones with the knots and nubs of worn off branches peering out between the wormtrails like beady eyes. The deepest cut looked unsettlingly like a grinning mouth. There were damp, deep crimson splotches on it. They looked like blood. Nothing else has that indefinably vivid undertone.
I looked at my hand wrapped around the staff. What was under my nails looked like blood too.
A soft, wet sound echoing up out of the darkness below, bouncing gently off the walls of the downshaft inside the beehive at my back. Like the noise a fish makes breaking the surface of a pond to snap up a bug. Like the noise a foot would make, being lowered gently down into the lingering puddles on the tunnel floor, trying to be silent, trying to sneak. All my senses snapped into high alert. I waited, hearing nothing but the thumping of my heart.
There it was again. This time it sounded closer.
A wave of relief washed over me when the thought hit me. It had to be Jude. She loves to scare me. She's forever jumping out from behind doors and cackling when I leap straight into the air and cuss her out.
But then why were my hands bloody? And why couldn’t I remember how I had gotten back up here?
The light was fading fast. The sun dipped behind the trees, nothing but dying embers shining through the interlocking branches now. It was insanely cold now, way too cold for March. I could see my breath fogging in front of me.
“Jude?” I tried to say. My voice died in my throat, swallowing itself.
“Jude!” I cried, forcing her name out, forcing it to be loud enough to chase away the doubt creeping up my spine. “Is that you?”
Silence. I was listening so hard that the backs of my thighs were clenched, my hands curled into fists with my nails cutting into my palms. I tried not to breathe in case I missed it. Please be her. Please.
Splash. Splash. Splash-splash-splash-splash –
They were definitely footsteps and they were fucking running, slamming through the shallow water, echoing through the brick tunnel, and coming up fast. For one long horrible moment my entire body locked up. I was frozen in absolute terror as the footsteps raced towards the ladder that led up to where I sat. In that moment of paralysis, some tiny, detached part of my brain coolly informed me that the feet that were making those noises were far too big and heavy to belong to my best friend.
That wasn’t Jude down there.
My eyes lit on the round iron grate lying on the ground next to me. I stumbled to my feet. My legs felt like wet noodles, like I hadn’t stood up in a week. I don’t know how I did it but somehow I managed to lock my fingers into the grate and lift it up out of the mud, my muscles screaming in protest. The splashing was right below me now, and beneath that I could hear this horrible wet gurgling noise, like heavy, phlegmmy panting. The splashes turned into scuffling against metal. It was climbing the ladder.
With one last burst of adrenaline I heaved at the cover and swung it up onto the top of the beehive. It clanked into place and I threw myself backwards seconds before something pounded furiously against it, over and over and over. I was sobbing. I was too terrified to even scream. In a moment of complete and utter irrationality, I bent over, scooped up the staff, the ball of yarn and my phone, turned tail and fled. I ran every step of the way back home. The whole journey was just a blur of streetlights and sidewalks and passing headlights. I must have looked absolutely psychotic, hauling ass down the sidewalk while clutching a giant stick for dear life. I nearly had a nervous breakdown when I reached my front door and realized I didn’t have my keys, but when I tried the handle it swung right open. I dropped everything right inside the door and made a beeline for my room, leaping into my bed like every boogeyman in every bedtime story was hiding under it. The shaking didn’t stop. It still hasn’t stopped. After an hour or so I got my shit together enough to wrap myself in a blanket and go to the living room, flipping on every light along the way. My hands were trembling so badly that it took me three tries to plug my phone into the charger, and four to light a cigarette. I let the ash fall uncaring onto the carpet as I waited while my phone powered up, flashing through the load screens. When it finally turned back on, I stared at it. That couldn’t be right. But it was. I checked on Google. I flipped on the tv.
Jude and I went down into the Catacombs five days ago. She woke me up on Saturday morning. When I turned on my phone it was Thursday night. I lost five and a half fucking days.
And guys, I can’t find Jude.
Her room is untouched. It looks exactly like it did when we left, down to the same bra hanging out of the top dresser drawer. Her rubber boots are still gone, her keys still missing from the hook. I’ve called and texted her over sixty times. Her phone is on but she doesn’t answer. All I have is a stick, a ball of string, blood under my fingernails and the memory of something climbing up out of the darkness at me, hammering on the lid I slammed down over it just in time.
I can’t go to the police. What the fuck could I even say?
I don’t know what to do. I think I’m losing my mind. I think I blacked out and murdered my best friend in the tunnels underneath the cemetery – or that something else did. Or worse, that it didn’t and I locked her down there with it. I’ve been hovering all night on the edge of a panic attack as I type this out. I don’t know where else to turn. I don’t know what to do.
Edit: I chickened out. I couldn't do it. I went to the police. I got all the way to the top of the steps, reached out to open the door, looked through the glass at the disinterested woman behind the plexiglass partition at the front desk, and I panicked. I've watched too many crime shows. My hands burned with imagined traces of blood. The staff hidden in the back of my closet throbbed like a splinter in my brain. I walked away as casually as I could. I went down the street a few blocks until I found a payphone and called the non-emergency line. I left an anonymous tip pretending to be someone who lived on the hill overlooking the cemetery, telling the operator that I had seen flashlights and heard screaming by the tunnel entrance last night. I tried to convey a sense of urgency, but the woman just sounded bored. I'm sure they get noise complaints about kids traipsing around Greenwood after hours all the time. It's just as well. When I got back home a few minutes ago, the front door was wide open even though I knew I had locked it behind me. Nothing was out of place until I checked Jude's room. Her window was open. Evenly spaced splotches of mud led across the floor from the windowsill to the bed. The bed itself was rumpled and unmade last time I looked at it, but clean. Now the comforter was smoothed out and perfectly made, although it was filthy. I pulled it back. There was more mud on the sheet, along with bits of dry leaves and a couple of smears of blood. There were also three short pink hairs on the dirty pillow that I'm positive weren't there before. The whole room reeks of rot and decay. It's the same smell I remember wafting up from the tunnel. And when I went to close the window, I saw a bit of wine red yarn knotted around an old nail that was sticking out of the frame. The yarn ran outside, down the wall of the building and across the yard before disappearing in the shrubbery. It led straight towards the cemetery. Fuck. Now what?
