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| Photo By Natesh Ramasamy |
found her headstone without any trouble. He'd been here often enough at all hours of the day and night and the larger-than-life Valkyrie standing over her grave was hard to miss. Almost ten years, he'd waited. Moving her to this decrepit place only a week after her death so that she was the youngest body here. He'd taken every precaution. He knew the chant. He was ready.
The fresh graves gave him pause. They had new angels on their headstones. This wasn't part of the plan. They were three rows away from her but that didn't matter. They were new. The bodies fresh. He wrung his hands. He didn't have another cemetery as old as this one anywhere nearby. And he wasn't going to wait another ten years for her spirit to settle in a new place.
His watch beeped once.
It was time. Now or never. He could do it, even with fresh bodies in the cemetery. He'd just have to be careful. Charlie stood at the foot of her grave and opened his hands over the earth. He began to chant.
Charlie thought he saw the moon flash. There was light in the cemetery that hadn't been there before. It condensed in front of him. Her. She tucked her hair behind her ear and turned toward him with that smile he remembered. She was here. Transparent, colorless, a spirit young enough to remember life but old enough to stay dead. Charlie's throat tightened. She was still so beautiful. He wiped tears from his cheeks and tried to clear his throat. His voice was raspier than he expected.
"You look great." She didn't say anything. Charlie tried to smile at her but it was harder than he expected to finally see her and be unable to hold her. "I- uh.. I bring you flowers every week." He made a little gesture at the base of the statue.
She turned to look at put her hands up on her cheeks. She bent, her transparent hands cupped the fresh buds and she made a show of smelling them. Could she smell them? He hoped so. "There's a new middle school down the block, now. Tommy's got kids there. We- uh... we do regular dinners together-- aw, hell, you already know all this." He could see it in her face, that light, indulgent smile she had that said she knew what he was going to say and didn't mind just because she enjoyed hearing his voice. Charlie's throat thickened up again and he had to look up at the sky to keep the tears in. "I miss you," He said. "God, I love you so much."
He brought his eyes back down and froze half-way. There was a stone angel climbing up the back of the Valkyrie, her face set in an eerie expression of serene reflection. A second angel walked around the base of the Valkyrie, he held a stone sword. The new spirits had risen, young enough to remember life, and too fresh to not want it back. Charlie stumbled back a step. The swordsman angel leaped forward, the weapon singing through the air like a heavenly chorus. Charlie only just avoided it. The sword sunk into the dirt of an older grave, disturbing the spirit.
Charlie searched for her but she was gone. The swordsman advanced. The angel on the Valkyrie jumped. Charlie turned and ran. He fell headlong over a low headstone and scrambled up to his feet. The angel landed in front of him. The swordsman advanced from behind. Charlie put his hands up and tried to remember the chant for putting a spirit back down in the grave but all he could think of was how much he'd screwed this up, how he'd never see her again.
Something stone moaned hugely behind him. The disturbed spirit, no doubt. Charlie wanted nothing to do with it. He said a faint apology and ran to the side, across graves and flowers. He heard the two angels follow, dragging the old spirits up with them. He couldn't get out this way, he realized. They'd driven him to the back corner. Charlie spun in place just in time to see the Valkyrie descend from the heavens. She screamed like wind and her sword, twice as big as any other statue in the cemetery, came down on the swordsman angel with vengeful wrath. The stone angel crumbled beneath her. She spun and cleaved the second angel clear in two.
Then Charlie heard her voice. Her voice. It came to him on far away wind and when he heard it, the sound made him cower. "RUN!"
Charlie ran. The Valkyrie- his Valkyrie- destroyed any spirit that followed him.
