Vera Gallow's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Vera meant to find the map man. She did not reach the fountain. The fog thickened on the road, and her own thoughts pulled her back to one thing. The watch. It had stopped the night she died. Jacko held it. If any object still carried that night, it was that. She turned east, toward the graveyard, instead. The cemetery gate hung open. Leaning stones broke the mist. Jacko stood among them with a knife, cutting a length of rope from a fresh grave. He coiled it without looking up. "You left your post," he said. "Things below must be lonely." "I need the watch," Vera said. "Show me what it holds. The night I died." Jacko kept coiling the rope. "It's not a storybook. It stopped. That's all it shows." "You've wound it thirteen years." She stepped closer. "You know more than the time it keeps." He set the rope down. He studied the locked door on her brooch. "I know whose grave I dug. I don't give that away for asking." "Then name your price." Vera's hands were steady. "Guests offer me gold. I never take it. I'm offering you something now." Jacko tilted his pumpkin head. "I don't want gold." He pointed the knife past her, toward an empty plot near the fence. Bare dirt. No stone. "That one's yours. Dug for you, never filled. You walked back before I could close it." "I know," Vera said. "You told me." "Then stand in it." His voice stayed flat. "Lie down in your own grave. Let me see if you still fit. Do that, and I'll let the watch speak." Vera looked at the pit. Pale mist curled along its edge, soft and glowing faint. She did not understand the price. She did not ask. She climbed down into the open grave and lay flat against the cold dirt. Jacko knelt at the rim. He drew the watch and pressed it into her palm. The mist above the grave gathered. It took a shape she knew. A woman. A lantern swinging from one hand. The figure walked, and Vera walked with her, back inside her own dead eyes. She saw the fountain at night. She saw the red-marked map crushed in her fist. She saw the woman with the lantern wave her forward, kind and smiling. She saw a second figure step from the dark behind her. She felt the blow land on the back of her skull. The watch in her living hand struck the stone and stopped. Vera sat up in the grave, gasping air she did not need. "Two of them," she said. "The map man led me. A woman with a lantern waited. Someone else struck me down." Jacko nodded once. He did not help her up. "Now you know there were three. You only came back for one." Vera climbed out of her grave, the watch closed tight in her fist. Her killers had names. She meant to learn them all.