An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [21]
"Grave robbers," she said.
My heart lurched. I'd heard of grave robbers. At school the girls joked about them. All the girls in school boasted that they knew of someone whose relative's body had been robbed from the grave. But I never believed it. I thought it all talk. "Here?" I croaked. "In Washington?"
Annie gave me a look. "Especially here in Washington," she whispered. "Because of the war. Doctors have just come to realize how much they don't know about the human body."
I nodded, and Annie pulled me behind a tombstone that had an avenging angel on top of it.
"We have to do something," I told her. "We can't let them take my mother!"
"Wait." She got down on the ground and crawled around the tombstone to get a bit closer. I watched and waited. I was trembling, more from anger than fright. I could hear the soft but distinct digging sound coming from Mama's fresh grave, the plop-plopping of soft earth.
They were trying to dig up my mother!
I gulped back a sob.
"Hush!" Annie ordered fiercely.
I hushed. She was a distance from me now. Then, having satisfied herself that she'd seen enough, she crawled back.
"They look like children," she said. "They can't be grown-ups. They're too small. They must be children out on a lark."
"Children? A lark? What children do such a thing?"
"I don't know, but Washington has changed with the war. Come on, we're going to stop them."
"How?"
She had a plan. I would circle around to the left of them and she to the right. "We'll scare them off," she said. "We'll make them sorry they ever drew breath."
We parted.
No sooner had I taken my first step, with shaking limbs, than a sound pierced the night.
"Whooooo! Whooo! I'm a-coming, Lord, I'm a-coming."
It was a lonely, soul-searing sound, half-animal and half-human. At first I thought Annie had made it. But in the next instant she was back beside me, clutching me so close I thought I'd die.
"Annie, what is it?" Fear ran through me, a cold river of fear, the kind that settles in your lungs and drowns you.
Annie pointed. "Look."
Did I dare? I did, and fair trembled at the sight.
There, in a far corner of Christ Church cemetery, rising above a large granite cross of a tombstone, there was a white figure—rising, rising, from behind the cross.
"Whooo! I'm a-coming, Lord, I'm a-coming." And it did come, out from behind the giant granite cross, with arms, or whatever they were, upraised.
"Annie," I whimpered, "it's a ghost."
I must give Annie credit. To my everlasting shame, I really believed it was a spirit unloosed on the world. Annie didn't. She was too practical, too unbelieving, too disdainful of everything to hold with spirits, unloosed or otherwise.
"Ghost, my father's nightshirt," she said. And her voice was so edged with distrust, with anger, that I clung to the wonderful sanity of it.
"What is it, then?"
"Someone who's outflanked us." Annie sometimes talked army talk. She got that from Alex. Usually she annoyed me with it, but now I thought it most reassuring.
Still, we clung together and watched as the "ghost" made its way around the headstones, whoo-ing and calling upon the Lord for all it was worth, going right toward the grave robbers. Or children. Or whatever they were.
There was a sudden clattering as they dropped their tools, a screaming and a scrambling as they ran through the cemetery toward the gate, leaping over headstones, running around them, tripping and recovering themselves, the ghost in pursuit.
Annie laughed. Then I did. My laughter was more with relief than anything, I don't mind saying.
"That'll teach the little varlets," she said. "Oh, how I wish I'd thought of it."
At the cemetery gate the "ghost" had taken off its sheet and was waving long arms at the intruders. Its whole angular body agitated as it waved the sheet that had covered it.
"You, Spoon, you, Mole, go elsewhere for your subjects! I'll have you hauled off to county jail if you put in an appearance here again. Go to Potter's Field! Go to Harmony Cemetery. Let decent people rest in peace!"
The voice had familiar clear rich