8. WALKING DEAD
A FEW NIGHTS LATER, Leesa lay awake in the darkness. The glowing blue numbers on her digital clock told her it was 3:42am. The soft blue glow reminded her of Rave’s fingertips when he let his fire show. The thought of Rave was comforting, but she could still feel her heart beating in her chest, faster than normal for someone who had just been sleeping. She did not want to be awake, didn’t need to be awake, but something had dragged her from her sleep. She had no idea what it might have been.
Lying on her back, she looked and listened, straining to penetrate the darkness for any sign something was amiss, but found nothing. Her room was certainly dark enough to invite sleep. Thin starlight outlined her windows and leaked into the room, not bright enough to show more than the barest outlines of her furniture. The night was peacefully quiet—she had seen movies where a nervous character would say it was too quiet, right before disaster struck—but such scenes always took place during the day or earlier in the evening, never at this hour. Such silence was normal for this time of night. Nor could it be the temperature affecting her sleep. It might be freezing outside, but she was comfortably warm under her down comforter and electric blanket. No, everything was fine. She could find no good reason not to be soundly sleeping.
So why was she lying here awake in the middle of the night? More importantly, why was her heart racing?
She wondered if she had been dreaming, if perhaps a nightmare of some kind had snatched her from the arms of sleep. A bad dream would account for her elevated heart rate. But if that were true, she could not recall what is was.
This was not the first night she had found herself lying awake. Her sleep had been increasingly restless for some time now, but she did not know why. Rave losing control of his fire could not be it—that had happened only a few days ago. Nor could it be the phone call from the man who claimed to be her father. Her trouble sleeping predated that as well. She wondered if it had anything to do with Stefan’s bite. He had withdrawn his fangs at the first taste of her grafhym-tainted blood, but maybe a bit of his vampire essence had seeped into her, causing a part of her to want to roam the darkness, rather than sleeping soundly through the night.
The idea seemed far-fetched, but was it any more unbelievable than being bitten by a vampire in the first place? She could ask Rave about it; maybe he would have some idea whether it could be true. And maybe she could ask Dr. Clerval, her Vampire Science professor. He knew more about vampires than any human she knew. If she ever saw Stefan again, she could ask him, too. Who would know more about this than a vampire?
The tossing and turning was a self-perpetuating thing, she knew. Something woke her up, and then she fretted about what it might have been, which kept her from falling back asleep. It was a vicious cycle. Not being able to sleep might be a blessing in disguise next week, when she would be studying for finals, but not now. She needed to shut off her thoughts.
Bradley had taught her a breathing technique to help her sleep when she was younger and troubled by her mother’s increasingly strange behavior. Rave used a similar breathing thing to learn to control his fire. She didn’t know if it would work here, but she had nothing to lose.
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose, holding the breath for just a moment before slowly exhaling. She counted each breath on the exhale, starting with one hundred and counting backwards. Ninety-nine…ninety-eight…ninety-seven…. She remembered getting to seventy-three, but no further. By then, sleep had claimed her again.
She was walking through a patch of unfamiliar woods. The night was dark, with a quarter moon providing barely enough pale illumination to see where she was stepping. Dead leaves crackled under her feet, but with less noise than she expected, especially given the silence of the night. The twisted black limbs of the leafless trees seemed to be reaching for her, but whenever she looked directly at any of them, she saw only stillness.
The air was cold against her cheeks, but not uncomfortably so. She was in no hurry; nor was she sneaking through the woods. Her pace was normal walking speed. She had no sense of where she was heading in this unknown place, but for some reason, the lack of a specific destination did not bother her. Up ahead, the remains of one of the old stone walls so common to New England snaked through the trees. As she drew nearer, she saw the wall bordered an old cemetery overgrown with tall, stringy weeds. Crumbling gray headstones stood sentinel above the graves, which were scattered throughout the yard in no apparent pattern, the way they often were in old graveyards.
Something told her to stop here. Whether it was a warning to stay out of this ancient graveyard or a sense that she should wait and watch, she did not know. She found a flat rock atop one of the taller remaining sections of wall and sat down, facing inside the cemetery. Her feet dangled inches above the packed dirt below the wall. She wondered idly why the weeds did not grow right up to the stones.
After a few minutes, she became aware of a faint sound breaking the silence. She realized it was the first noise of any kind she’d heard since she stopped walking. The sound was difficult to describe, a kind of rustling, or scratching. Not the rustling of leaves in the wind—the branches were barren of leaves and there was no hint of a breeze. Nor was it the sound of footsteps. She strained to see through the darkness, trying to find a source for the noise, but saw nothing.
Slowly, the sounds grew louder. They definitely emanated from somewhere in front of her—within the cemetery, she was certain—but still she saw nothing. Even so, she was not alarmed. She simply sat and watched, waiting.
At last, the sounds became loud and clear enough for her to recognize. They were the sounds of digging. Something or someone was scraping and digging at the ground in front of her. It was unmistakable. There was just one problem, though—the graveyard was empty!
She had a brief thought that perhaps whoever was digging might somehow be invisible to her, but even that failed to explain what she heard. Not only was she alone—but there were no holes appearing anywhere in the ground. Still, the digging persisted, growing louder by the moment. She was certain now the sounds came from more than one spot in the cemetery.
Finally, a tiny movement off to her right caught her eye, but by the time she turned toward it, she saw nothing. If only it were not quite so dark. She kept her eyes fastened on the spot. A few moments later, she saw it. A tiny bit of soil popped a few inches up from the ground, like a miniature geyser of dirt. She smiled. No one was digging atop the ground—the digging was happening beneath the surface. She wondered if it could be gophers. But how was it she could hear gophers burrowing inside the earth?
She continued watching. More earth pushed upward, in several scattered places now. She kept her gaze fixed on the largest of the growing piles of dirt. There! She was certain she saw something push up above the surface. She squinted, trying to see more clearly, and gasped. This most certainly was not a gopher, nor any other burrowing animal. Reaching up out of the earth was the unmistakable shape of a human hand!
More hands pushed up from the ground, a half-dozen now. Soon, entire arms appeared…and then heads. Heads that were part flesh and part bone. A few were wrapped in rotting cloth; one wore what could only be the remains of an old-fashioned tri-cornered hat.
Leesa watched, frozen to her spot atop the wall, as six corpses climbed out of their graves. They moved awkwardly, clumsily, but moved nonetheless. They looked at each other and walked in circles, almost as if they were waiting for direction. They didn’t seem to notice her.
Suddenly, all six collapsed to the ground, like marionettes whose strings had been cut.
Leesa awoke again, the image of the corpses falling to the ground clear and sharp in her mind. Her room was lighter now, with the first gray light of dawn spilling in through the windows. She could hear muted sounds from elsewhere in her dorm—music playing softly, a door closing—as some early risers prepared to start their day. Outside, a truck beeped annoyingly as it backed up to unload its cargo somewhere nearby.
She seemed to be dreaming more and more frequently of late, but she could not remember one staying with her so clearly after she woke up. While the rotting, reanimated bodies were not a pleasant image, the dream had not really been frightening, and she much preferred it to what she had experienced earlier that night, waking up with her heart racing and not being able to recall why.