Charlie
fifteen
Achill swept through me, sharp and sudden.
Bat’s fingers tensed around mine. “What do you mean, her bones? She’s buried here?”
“Yeah. Over by the apple tree,” Thomas said.
I inhaled sharply. “And it’s definitely the witch? Margery Darke?”
“You know, just because someone accused her of witchcraft doesn’t mean she actually was one,” Bat said, his voice flat.
“Right,” I said meekly. “Sorry.”
Thomas straightened, brushing dirt from his palms. “There’s a small rock with M.D.
engraved on it near the tree, where the lifeless patch is.
” He paused, staring at the horizon. “For years I’ve been trying to coax something to grow over that spot.
Grass, flowers, anything. But nothing takes.
Just bare earth and stones, year after year.
” The groundskeeper’s face hardened. “Mark my words. There’s someone buried there who wasn’t meant to be.
The earth remembers. Won’t let anything beautiful grow over ugliness like that. ”
“Show us,” Bat said.
“Getting dark,” Thomas observed, glancing at the sky. “Not the best time for gravesite visits.”
“Please,” I said. “It might help us.”
He sighed, abandoning his weeds. “This way, then. Mind the brambles.”
We walked in silence, weaving between skeletal trees and overgrown hedges. The manor disappeared behind us, swallowed by shadows and foliage. My mind raced. Bones! A grave! Nothing growing there.
What would Brad make of all this? Though, he probably wouldn’t care if there was no actual ghost in sight to zap…
The darkening sky pressed down on us, stars multiplying. Soon, the apple tree loomed ahead, gnarled and ancient, its branches spread wide, already stripped of most of its leaves.
At its base, exactly as Thomas had described, a patch of bare earth stood out among the surrounding grass. Roughly six feet long. Two feet wide. And nearby, that small rock—definitely not a formal gravestone—covered in mossy grime. But I could just make out the M.D.
I hovered a few paces away as Bat dropped my hand to float closer. Without Bat’s ghostly magic, I expected Thomas to disappear from view, but he remained perfectly visible.
Right. We’d clearly just been holding hands for fun, then.
Heat crawled up my neck.
“Bones, but no ghost,” Bat said, circling the grave.
“Maybe she moved on,” I suggested.
Bat made a sceptical sound. “Violent deaths usually result in ghosts sticking around.”
Thomas nodded. “Lad’s right.”
What exactly had happened to Thomas? Drowning in a well didn’t sound very fun.
“Charlie, come here.”
I shuffled forward carefully, watching where I placed my feet in the gathering darkness.
“Can you feel that?” Bat asked.
“Feel what?”
Bat reached for my hand he just dropped and a joke about him being clingy started forming on the tip of my tongue—
I gasped.
A rush of something surged up from the grave. Profound, terrible wrongness, like touching rot.
The ground opened up beneath me.
Not physically. Worse than that. Something reached up through the bare earth and hooked into my chest, cold fingers curling around my ribs from the inside. My knees buckled. The world tilted sideways and I was falling, falling into dirt that wanted to swallow me whole.
Pressure crushed my lungs. Darkness bloomed at the corners of my eyes.
This was it. This was how I died. Dragged down into a grave that had been waiting, hungry, for hundreds of years. My mouth opened but nothing came out. No air. No sound. Just the terrible pull of the earth claiming what it thought it was owed.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t—
“Bat!” I managed to gasp out.
Hands grabbed my shoulders and yanked me backwards. We tumbled away from the grave in a tangle of limbs.
“You’re okay. You’re okay.” Bat’s voice, urgent and close to my ear. His arms wrapped around me, anchoring me to something that wasn’t the awful pull of that grave. “Just breathe.”
“See?” Thomas said. “Rotten earth. Good for nothing. Now, I need to go finish that well.”
He hobbled off into the darkness, leaving Bat and me sprawled on the grass several metres from the apple tree.
My heart couldn’t stop thundering. Sweat stuck my jumpsuit to my back despite the evening chill. Every breath felt like I had to remember how to do it—inhale, exhale, don’t think about dirt filling your lungs. “What the actual fuck was that? It was… it was like I was falling into the dirt!”
“I don’t know.” Bat himself sounded shaken, which wasn’t a good sign. He pulled me to my feet, tugging me further from the grave. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”
But I wasn’t okay. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Let’s get far away from it.”
My legs wobbled. Bat kept his arm around my waist.
He glanced at the dark, starry sky, then back at the garden. “It’s almost time now.”
“Time for what?”
Bat didn’t answer. Just kept watching the garden with an expression I couldn’t read.
The world lit up.
Light bloomed across the garden in waves of impossible colour.
I flinched, instinctively stepping closer to Bat.
But it wasn’t danger—it was light. Ghostly flowers unfurled from dead branches—roses that glowed soft pink, wisteria cascading in luminous purple curtains.
The skeletal hedges burst into silver-green life.
Vines wound through the archways, dripping with spectral jasmine that filled the air with phantom sweetness.
My jaw dropped.
Where moments ago there’d been only decay and shadows, now an entire garden blazed with ethereal beauty. Trees that had stood bare now bore leaves of translucent gold. Flowerbeds I hadn’t even noticed erupted in riots of blue and white and crimson light.
“It’s alright,” Bat said quietly, his arm still firm around my waist. “Just Thomas’s garden. The real version.”
I stared, heart still pounding but slowing now. Gradually. The beauty didn’t completely erase what I’d just felt, but it… helped. Gave me something else to focus on besides the memory of cold earth and crushing pressure.
“Beautiful, right?” Bat’s voice was soft.
“It’s…” I couldn’t find words. “Yeah. Beautiful.”
The garden Thomas tended all day. The plants that looked dead in sunlight. This was what he’d been caring for. What he’d been trying to preserve through decades of patient, invisible work.
My throat tightened.
“Come on.” Bat’s fingers squeezed mine. “Let’s get even further from that grave.”
I didn’t argue. My legs felt steadier now, but I still kept close to Bat as we walked. The path glowed faintly underfoot—moss and mushrooms releasing tiny motes of light like fireflies.
Pretty. Safe. Away from that horrible patch of earth.
The path opened onto a small clearing.
A pond stretched before us, its surface smooth as black glass.
Lilypads floated across it, their flowers luminescent white.
More trees surrounded the water, their branches hung with dozens of windchimes.
Each one rang out in the gentle breeze, creating layers of sound that wove together into something almost melodic.
Haunting. Otherworldly.
I stood at the pond’s edge, transfixed, as my chest finally loosened.
The windchimes sang. The ghostly flowers swayed. Bat’s fingers were laced with mine, and I focused on that—the solid reality of his hand, cold but there.
“I forget how lovely this area is,” Bat murmured. “Thomas put the windchimes up decades ago. Said music should be everywhere, not just in the piano room.”
One chime rang out clearer than the others, a pure crystalline note.
Bat turned to face me suddenly. “Dance with me.”
“What?”
“Please.” His brown eyes fell impossibly wide, rimmed with smudged black eyeliner. “I haven’t danced since I died.”
Part of me wanted to say no—wanted to go back inside, away from gardens and graves and whatever the hell had just tried to pull me underground. But another part…
“Bat, I—”
“Please, Charlie.”
The puppydog eyes were lethal.
I crumbled. “I don’t really know how—”
But Bat was already placing my left hand on his shoulder, holding my right in his. His other hand settled at my waist. “Like this.”
He led me into a slow, awkward approximation of a ballroom dance. My feet stumbled over his. I stepped on his trainer twice. But Bat didn’t seem to care, just smiled and corrected my footing gently.
His body pressed close to mine, but gave off no warmth. Strange, that. I should’ve been cold, dancing in this weather with a ghost without a jacket. But somehow I wasn’t. Just… held. Swaying to windchimes under spirit-flowers and stars.
“I bet you never danced like this when you were alive,” I said, thinking of the YouTube video. Bat jumping around on stage, wild and uninhibited.
Bat laughed. “Never. Wasn’t exactly invited to fancy balls.” He spun me clumsily. “So you’ve got to indulge me in death.”
I let out a theatrical sigh. My feet still stumbled occasionally over his, but we’d found a rhythm of sorts. Inelegant and imperfect.
He spun me in a dizzying circle. Then he said, “Tell me about yourself, Charlie Hayes.”
I blinked, the question catching me off guard. Simple words I’d heard dozens of times in bars and clubs from flirty strangers making small talk. But they sounded different on Bat’s lips. Like he genuinely wanted to know about me.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” Bat said. “Start wherever you like.”
I let out a breath, watching it mist in the cold air. “I’m the king of bad decisions, mostly.”
Bat laughed. “That’s a hell of an opening.”