After Sam and Thane had settled their affairs with Herr Voelker and transacted their business with one Jake Moore, Curless and his lean, lanky nephew set off toward the labyrinth of cow trails and short dirt roads that would take them to the site of the phantom grave promised to all of Elfi Linder’s victims. The men walked wordlessly a while in the fading crimson sunlight, their strides slightly out of synch, the only sounds not made by the ambient wildlife were the creaks and chinks of their gear and attire. Curless had suspended the borrowed lantern from his belt with a short brass hook, its rhythmic creak and soft whomp against his coat being the loudest noise they made. When they rounded a bend onto a footpath that turned to the west, they noticed that their sounds were the only ones they did hear. That was when the young giant stopped abruptly and signaled his uncle to halt.
“It’s getting’ right dark. Maybe you could light that lamp?”
“I’m waitin’ till we get nigh there, Sam. We may need that light for a while.”
“And we’re diggin’ her a grave, right? See if she’ll get in it?”
“That’s the idea,” Curless answered. “If she’s the type of haunt I think she is, offerin’ to right the wrong done to her ought to get her to settle down. Ought to.”
“Pretty sly, buyin’ a grave for yourself on their land,” Sam commented in an appreciative tone. “Slyer still, that story about wantin’ to be buried in town, comin’ back here to die all.”
“Oh, that part’s not a story,” Thane protested. “I do intend to die here. Just not anytime soon. And what I do with that plot between now and then is my business. What happens tonight? That’s all on when that ghost shows up. She seems to always kill on that night after, just a question of when.”
“That’s the hard part to take, Uncle Thane,” Sam acknowledged. “The way she said it, she could come anywhere, anytime she wants tonight and …kill me. Least Lily’s safe.”
Curless spat on the ground and levelled his narrowed eyes at his sister’s son like gigs at a frog. “The way I figure it, haints and demons and such only got power if you let them have it. Through fear. Lily’s safe and so are you, if you keep your heart. Your own spirit. How’s your scripture?”
“Reckon I remember some of what my folks and the parson taught me,” Sam answered, smiling just enough to lighten his countenance.
“How did the Lord go before the children of Israel after sundown back in them times in the wilderness?”
“Well, uncle, by day he was a cloud, by night a blaze of fire,” the younger man replied. “Genesis 13:21, if I recall.”
“That’s right. And that’s what we’re countin’ on tonight.”
***
The Littig Cemetery was a generous parcel of land in for such a tiny town, marked off by a black iron fence barely over two feet tall with only a single latching gate. A few scrubby live oaks dotted the perimeter, and the graves were all modest but well-tended in appearance. Under the starry Texas sky of springtime, with the lights of the hamlet for which it was named in the distance, it certainly could pass for the site of irenic repose for the mortal remains of the people there interred. But on that particular night, the illusion of starlit tranquility was broken by the light of a single lantern and the sound of a spade cutting into the sandy earth. Samuel Bowen completed the outline of a new grave, six feet by two, paused and leaned on his shovel. He and the shovel formed the center of a circle with a radius of some five feet. His uncle Thane, walked along that perimeter, pouring oil from the small flask he had obtained from his barkeep friend onto the earth until he completed the circle.
“How much you want me to dig?”, Sam asked.
Thane tilted the oil flask upright and stopped it shut. “That should be enough. Now we just wait. See how this Elfi Linder likes this grave we’re preparin’ for her. You done well, Sam. Now just stand beside me and keep your mind on a prayer or on that verse I mentioned earlier. I’m goin’ to invite her to come and parley.”
“Invite her to whut?”, Sam exclaimed as he walked to stand beside Thane.
“Parley,” Curless repeated, and Sam thought for a moment he saw the letters on his uncle’s coat shimmer in the starlight, and started when Thane Curless’s voice, louder than the young giant had ever heard it, rang out across the final resting places of ex-slaves and freedmen. “Elfi Linder, Elfi Linder, Elfi Linder, I call you here to your rest by the name above all others.” The strange letters on his coat flashed like silver in the starlight. Sam let his jaw drop open at that, then collected himself enough to look this way and that, in the case that this remarkable summons might just have an immediate effect.
For several moments, as the two men stood in the circle of anointed ground surrounding the outlined grave, the chirp of every cricket, scuttling sound of little creatures unseen in the grasses and somnambulant wildflowers, and the “who cooks for you?” call of a barred owl in a nearby tree, seemed eerily magnified. When all of those sounds faded and a wind from the south gusted across the terrain, Thane and Sam heard the sound of a chill voice rattling some words too soft and low to be discerned in the hiss of the nighttime breeze. Staring out into the night, they descried a vague shape, just lighter than the surrounding air, approaching from the direction of Hogeye, moving with a speed and smoothness that was altogether unnatural. The air stopped moving, the night dropped into a pit of silence, and the shape, now clearly recognizable as a dark-skinned woman, attired in a plain but well-sewn gray and brown dress as women of comfortable estate would have been a generation past. Her face was comely, the two men saw, but in those eerily unsubstantial eyes, there was an unmistakable, raging malice. When she reached the iron fence, she appeared to pass through it without hindrance. Before she could draw any closer, Thane muttered “You are my fire by night,” just loudly enough for Sam to hear him.
