Midnight Voices

Lavinia Dolameci

1832–1869

Her pulse quickening, she groped the ground around her and found more stones, all of them laying flat, all of them covered with a layer of decomposing vegetation.

And all of them bearing names. Names, and dates.

Elena Conesici

1821–1863

Gheorghe Birtin

1824–1867

Mathilde Parnova

1818–1864

Parnova! Tildie Parnova? Then the other names began crashing through her mind:

Elena Conesici… Helena Kensington.

Gheorghe Birtin… George Burton.

Lavinia Dolameci… Lavinia Delamond.

She dug more frantically now, digging her fingers deep into the earth, tearing it away as she searched for more of the ancient grave markers.

Now the scent was beginning to boil up out of the ground, and as it grew stronger and stronger it reached deep into her memory and tore the scars from every wound that had begun to heal during the last five years. The stench of death nauseating her, she dug still deeper, her fingers bleeding, her nails tearing, until at last she found the gravestone she knew was there.

This gravestone, though, bore not only a name, and a date of death, but a portrait as well, a portrait cut as perfectly as the angels that had been carved into the arms of the wooden wedding chair and the demons that had been concealed by anyone who sat in it. Caroline recognized the person in the portrait instantly, for his eyes were every bit as dead in stone as they had been in the flesh of the man she had married.

Anton Vlamescu.

Anthony Fleming.

As the chill of death settled over every cell in her body, Caroline rose from the ground above her husband’s empty grave and turned away, but even as she started away from the empty clearing, she could feel eyes still watching her.

The eyes of the demons in the trees above.

And the eyes of the dead, who no longer dwelt in the graves below.

“No,” she whispered. “It won’t happen. I won’t let it happen!” The cold of death suddenly transmuting into the heat of fury, she reached down, grasped the headstone that had once stood over Anthony Fleming’s grave, and raised it high over her head. “No!” she howled, and this time the word erupted from her throat, resounding through the forest as she hurled the grave marker downward and smashed it onto a granite bolder. The headstone shattered into a thousand pieces as her single scream of rage died away.

The forest fell silent, and when Caroline looked up once more, the trees were empty.

The demons, and all they represented, were finally gone.