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.
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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