The Burning

something bigger than himself, that there was a reason for him to have embarked on this journey-and a reason he was here in Selby right now.

He followed Crescent to its end. A row of tall trees, their upper branches swaying ominously in a wind that had not made it down to the ground, lined the cross street at which Crescent terminated, and instead of turning left or right on the other street, Dennis continued walking forward. Something led him through the trees, where he found, not the forest he'd been expecting, but what appeared to be the beginnings of a new housing development. There were trees at the edges of the open space before him, but they'd been cut down and bulldozed into deadfalls, and the dusty acreage ahead had been completely sheared of all vegetation.

He paused for a moment to take it all in, then pressed on, walking through deep-tread truck tracks, past color-coded stakes, until he reached the far opposite end of the nascent subdivision. This was the line to which the wilderness had been pushed back, and he climbed over a pile of debris, then passed between trees and overgrown bushes, until he came to the purpose of his journey, the reason he had been led here.

It was a graveyard.

At least he assumed it was. But there were none of the ritual accoutrements usually associated with ceme- teries. No tombstones, no crosses, no mowed grass, no clearly delineated grave sites. There were only occasional irregular mounds within the unmarked open space, and a few intermittent boulders that could have been randomly deposited rocks but appeared to him to have been deliberately placed. Dennis stood at the periphery of the small clearing. An effort had been made to hide this burial ground, to make it appear to be nothing more than an ordinary plot of land, and he wondered why.

The nearby elms were still swaying to a wind he could not feel, and the morning sun had not yet risen over the tops of the trees, keeping the graveyard in slightly darkened semishadow. It was creepy and he wanted to leave, but he stood his ground, sure that he was supposed to learn something here, to take something from this.

What was it with all this mystical crap lately? There was absolutely no objective reason for him to think that he was meant to do anything. Yet he did. Deeply. And he had no idea why. He would have ascribed it to the fact that he'd been alone and on his own for the past few weeks, but the belief had been with him since the beginning of his trip, was, in some strange way, the reason for the trip.

He thought of that mountain monster in his dream, that giant behind the wall of smoke.

He was afraid to move forward, he realized, afraid to actually step into the graveyard. To do so would be blasphemous. He knew it instinctively. He felt it in his bones.

Bones.

Whose bones were here? Dennis wondered, looking over the untamed plot of land. And why had so much effort gone into hiding this little cemetery? He forced himself to walk into the shadowed clearing, bracing

himself for a psychic assault that never came. He stepped gingerly over one of the disguised mounds, stopped and bent down in front of a crooked rock protruding from the earth. Was there writing on the speckled gray surface? He squinted, looked closer. If there had been, the characters had long since been weathered away, because he saw nothing save the natural roughness of stone, the generic pores and cracks that made it look like every other rock around town.

He had a sudden urge to dig down under one of the mounds, to see what was under there.

He had a sneaking suspicion it would not be human.

The trees stopped moving, the high wind dying, and the sun emerged from above the elms, a crescent sliver of light like the crack of a door opening onto the shadowed ground below. Dennis stood. He had missed his chance. Whatever he was supposed to have learned or taken from this place had not been imparted to him. That window was closed.

He walked slowly back the way he had come, wondering whether the hidden graveyard was scheduled to be razed and graded. Despite all of the work going on around it, the small plot of land and its barrier of trees and bushes had remained untouched until now, and Dennis found that ominous. It was as though a protective force field had been set up around the site to keep destruction at bay.

On the other side of the bulldozed brush, workmen had arrived and were starting up tractors and Caterpillars. No one stopped or questioned him as he made his way across the cleared ground to the road, and he continued his exploration of the town, walking up and down residential streets, discovering a topless bar in Selby's industrial district, buying a Coke at a mom-and-pop grocery store located next to a boarded-up dairy. Selby was bigger than he'd expected and more varied than it appeared from the highway, but no matter where he went or what he saw, the makeshift cemetery remained on his mind, a nagging image that refused to be dislodged from his brain.

Still, he was determined to learn about his temporary home if for no other reason than to talk about it with Cathy at some later date when they could both look back on this experience and laugh. So after a quick Jack in the Box lunch, he got in his car and drove in the opposite direction of the new development and the hidden graveyard, passing a cluttered hodgepodge of thrift stores, auto dealers, beauty salons and churches.

Selby's lone radio station was an automated country channel that seemed to play the same songs in the same order on a continuous twenty-four-hour loop. The motel owner kept it on in the office all day and all night, and if Dennis had to hear Tim McGraw one more time, he was going to break that damn radio and throw it through the fucking window.

He sorted through the CDs in his car, wishing he'd brought along more. It was strange how his musical requirements had changed on this trip. The recent rock CDs and downloads he'd listened to endlessly in his bedroom back home had quickly lost their luster, and the music he craved was quirkier, more individualist fare. One CD he wished he had now was a self-titled release by Brigit's Well, a classically trained Celtic duo. He'd bought it at an Irish festival a few years back, after hearing the two women perform, and though he'd listened to it only sporadically since, the haunting tunes had stayed with him, and at odd times he found himself thinking about the music.

Like now.

The buildings thinned out. He passed a lumberyard; the fenced lots and downscale offices of plumbers, roofers, construction companies and tree trimmers; and a sprawling junkyard filled with endless rows of cars, bikes and other wheeled vehicles, before the city was replaced with farmland.

A nice place to visit, he thought.

But he wouldn't want to live here.

It was still early afternoon when he returned to the hotel. He tried calling some of his friends back in Pennsylvania, but none of them answered, and after leaving voice mail messages, he dialed his mom's number. Cathy was still at school-he'd call her after dinner-but it was still nice to talk to someone from the real world, even if it was only his mother.

He spent the remainder of the afternoon watching reruns of old comedies on TV, losing himself in the mass media of the larger culture in order to keep from thinking about the smallness of the town in which, for the moment, he lived.

He was scheduled to work at five in the morning, the beginning of a thirteen-hour shift, but he could not sleep, and sometime after midnight Dennis found himself walking down the sidewalk carrying a flashlight. He tried to pretend he was simply out for a stroll, attempting to tire himself out so he'd be able to sleep, but the truth was that he had a specific destination. And he knew exactly what it was.

The graveyard.

Bulldozers and heavy equipment had been hard at work during the day on the land adjacent to the street, but as before, the forest beyond the deadfall was untouched, and the hidden cemetery was exactly the same as it had been earlier this morning.

Protected

He could not help wondering about the site's improbable survival, and the thought sent a chill down his spine.

The mounds looked different at night, more uniform, less random, darkness smoothing out the distinctions, making the place look more like a regular graveyard. There were shadows here now, shadows created by the moonlight that had no obvious source and that moved stealthily around the edges of the clearing even in the total absence of wind.

Only ...