together with his sons, Howard and Carl. He ' d met his wife, Marcia, in high school, fell in love with her instantly, and had never been with another woman. Never even considered it. He was active in the Golgotha Lutheran Church, and in the local Lion's Club. He never smoked and rarely drank. James was a man of gentle humor, and his spirits remained high, even in the final stages when the cancer ravaged his body.
He passed away in a sterile, bland room at the Hanover General Hospital. James and Marcia were holding hands when it happened. He gave her one last squeeze, whispered that he loved her, and then he was gone. His family laid him to rest in the cemetery; he was buried in a gorgeous mahogany casket, beneath a black marble stone with gold lettering that proclaimed him a loving husband and father. George Stevens's death was more sudden and less peaceful. He drowned in the old abandoned quarry located halfway between Spring Grove and Hanover on the summer of his fourteenth birthday. He 'd been swimming there with friends, and earlier, they'd shared their first beerpisswarm Michelob, stolen from one of their older brothers. There were rumors that the old quarry was haunted; that the remains of a mining town still stood at the dark, murky bottom, and the spirits of the townspeople still lurked in the waters, waiting to drag unsuspecting swimmers beneath the surface. Will Marks, his voice slurred by the beer, had told them about how he 'd seen a figure under the water oncea boy their age, pale and bloated. George didn ' t believe the story, so when Will Marks dared him to dive down and see for himself, he did it, egged on by his friends and the warm, fuzzy feeling with which the beer had left him. He leapt from the tire swing and into the inky depths, unable to see anything, plummeting ten feet before striking his head on an old refrigerator that someone had thrown into the quarry. Even underwater, he heard his own neck snap.
It was the last thing he heard. His friends pulled him out of the water, but he was already dead, and they never found out if George saw the ghostly aquatic townspeople or not. Cathy Luckenbaugh, a bright, cheerful twentyone year old who was loved by everyone who knew her, had spent the Christmas holidays with her family and was on her way back to the Penn State campus when a drunk driver crossed the yellow lines on Route 30 and hit her head on at seventy miles per hour. Part of her went through the windshield. The other half, everything from the abdomen down, remained inside the car. Her death was quick and relatively painless, despite the severe trauma. Cathy had been studying English literature, and hoped after college to get a job as a teacher, and to marry her boyfriend, Ken Bannister, whom she ' d met the previous semester. Her family buried her in the Golgotha Lutheran Church Cemetery, near her aunt and grandparents. Ken married another girl he met after college. Many years later, Cathy ' s image was used in a television commercial for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Damon Bouchard started stealing when he was eight. His first heist was a pack of baseball cards from the Spring Grove newsstand. By the time he was twelve, he 'd been busted twice for shoplifting. Two times being caught versus the hundreds of times he'd done it? Damon was happy with those odds. He graduated to breaking and entering, did a brief stint in York County Prison, and died two nights after his release. He'd just come from a meeting with his parole officer, returned to his third floor apartment, passed his neighbors on the way up the stairs, watched them pull away from his kitchen window, and broke into their apartment. In the dark, he 'd tripped over the cat and fell face first into a glass coffee table, slicing his head and throat to shreds. He'd felt the blood gush from his wounds, as well as his mouth and ears, and his last impression was one of anger, wishing he
'd had time to kill the stupid cat. Damon' s longsuffering parents buried him next to their plots. They rarely visited his grave.
Britney Rodgers was five when her father started climbing into her bed at night, and seven when he smothered her with a pillow to keep his awful secret. Her mother had died while giving birth to her, and her only friend had been her stuffed rabbit, Mr. Bun. Her father said it was her duty. At night, while he grunted and sweated above her, reeking of booze and sour sweat, Britney would hide Mr. Bun 's face beneath the pillow so the rabbit wouldn't have to see. Britney' s father buried her body in the woods behind their house, and the police found her four days later. She was given a proper burial next to her mother. A police detective made sure that Mr. Bun accompanied her into the ground. Her father was killed during the Camp Hill prison riots, and was buried in a potter ' s field near Harrisburg. The detective who arrested him visited his grave every year on the anniversary of Britney 's deathand pissed on it.
Raymond Burke lived a long, full life and died in his sleep at the ripe old age of eightyseven. His wife of sixtytwo years, Sally, had passed away three months earlier, and as far as Raymond was concerned, he died with her on that day. They 'd never had children, or even a pet, and he felt totally abandoned. He' d never been by himself, and didn 't know what to do. The house was too quiet, and the silence amplified his loneliness. After Sally's funeral, he' d gone home to wait to die, cursing each morning when he woke up alone instead of finding himself with her, until the morning when she finally was. They were buried side by side.
Stephen Clarke was thirteen when he first had sex with the family dog, Trixie, and fourteen when his older brother Alan found out about it. Their parents had been gone for the day, dining with another couple at the Haufbrau Haus in Abbotstown. Alan walked into his brother' s room without knocking, only to find Stephen sitting naked on the floor, his back against the bed and his legs spread. Trixie was between them, busily licking peanut butter off Stephen's erect penis. Disgusted, embarrassed, and enraged, Alan had threatened to tell their parents as soon as they got home. Stephen pleaded with him, but Alan refused to listen.
As his parents pulled into the driveway, Stephen ran to his parent 's bedroom, unlocked his father' s gun cabinet, pulled out a Winchester 30.06, loaded one round into the weapon, put his mouth over the barrel, and squeezed the trigger. He was buried in the cemetery, and in the years immediately following his death, his family visited his grave with a mixture of grief and unspoken shame. Eventually, they stopped visiting. A car ran over Trixie two years after his death.
The moon shined down upon their graves.
The dead kept their silence; kept their secrets. Young and old, good and bad, innocent or guilty, loved or unloved, it didn't matter what they' d done in life, how they 'd lived it, or how they'd ended. In death, they were the same. In death, they found rest beneath the newer portion of Golgotha Lutheran Church Cemetery.
Something else was in the ground, too. Something that was not dead, yet not really alive. For years, it had slept beneath the soil in the old portion of the cemetery at the bottom of the hill, the section where the names and dates on the cracked tombstones were faded and covered with moss. The forgotten area, where the dead received no visitors (other than the caretaker), because all those that remembered them were dead, as well. The creature slumbered beneath an old granite marker with an even older symbol carved into the stone. Both the symbol and the creature were ancient. The creature in the ground had no name, at least none that it could remember. None of its kind did. They were low things, cursed by the Creator long ago to dwell beneath the surface; white and wiggling like carrion worms. Not the Great Wurms, like Behemoth and his ilk, but low things; condemned to dirt and shadow, condemned to walk and breed in darkness, condemned not even to feast off the rich lifeblood or the warm, stillliving flesh of the Creator ' s beloved children (the way the others, the Vamphyir and the Siqqusim, did), or to act as the planet ' s antibodies like the ancient race of subterranean swinethings had done during times of world strife. His race was not smiled upon by Him like the angels and small gods were, nor did they enjoy the autonomy and freedom from His gaze the way the Thirteen did. No. His kind were condemned to feed on the cold, rotting corpses of the dead the scraps from the Creator's table. Warm flesh was forbidden to them, and they could only shred it with their claws, empty it of blood and organs and wait for it to turn rancid. The Creator's commandment was that they not taste warm blood or flesh. They could slay, of course, in selfdefense or just sheer malice. But they could not feast upon the living. They were cursed to eat carrion, commanded to clean up after death.
There was no air in the subterranean prison, but the creature did not need to breathe. It wished, at times, for death, but death would not come. Its kind were impervious to the weapons of man. Guns and knives meant nothing to it, other than a temporary wound, which would soon heal. It could have slashed its own throat with its claws, but that would not have ushered in oblivion. Only the sun 's rays could destroy it, and the sigil kept it from reaching the lightkept it from doing anything but lying there. The thing was a ghoul, and quite possibly, as far as it knew, the last of its race. It had been nearly two centuries since it had encountered another of its kind, and that had been on another, faraway continent. Its loneliness simmered inside its clammy breast.
The ghoul had no idea how long it had lain there, imprisoned and unable to move or to feed, bound by the symbol on the gravestone above it, trapped by magicks now forgotten, by sigils borrowed from books of power like The Daemonolateria and The Long, Lost Friend, mystic symbols copied and etched by men long dead, men who 'd lain moldering, turning to dust and bones in nearby graves, rotting in peace while it halfslumbered in boredom and despairand suffered from an overwhelming hunger. Realistically, the imprisonment hadn 't been long, not by the ghoul' s standards. One hundred years. Maybe a handful more. A blink of the eye for its kind, but the hunger had made it seem longer.
