Free Whistling Past the Graveyard by Jonathan Maberry Page A

simple—less complicated—but they weren’t stupid. How he wished he could have stayed.”
    Granny closed her eyes for a moment, remembering Hack. Remembering pain. Remembering the horror of that collapse, and all the things that died that day. Those men, her love, this town.
    “Is something wrong?” asked Joshua.
    She opened her eyes and rocked back so she could look up at him. “Wrong?”
    The moan cut through the air again. Louder still.
    “I suppose you could say that nuthin’s been right since that mine collapsed,” she said, and Granny could hear the pain in her own voice. Almost as dreadful as the pain in that moan. “Close your eyes again and listen to that sound. Don’t tell me what it ain’t. Listen until you can tell me what it is.”
    Joshua closed his eyes and leaned once more on the rail, his head raised to lift his ears into the wind.
    After a full minute, he said, “It sounds like a person…and that clinking sound…that’s definitely something metal.”
    She waited.
    Joshua laughed. “If it was Christmas, I’d say it was Old Marley and his chain.”
    When Granny did not laugh, Joshua opened his eyes and turned to her.
    “That’s from the—”
    “I know what it’s from, son. And it ain’t all that far from the mark.” She sucked in some smoke. “Not a chain, though. Listen and tell me I’m wrong.”
    He listened.
    “No, you’re right. It’s, um…sharper than that. But the echoes are making it hard to figure it out. Almost sounds like a bunch of little clinks, almost at once. That’s why I thought it was a chain; you know, the links clinking as it blew in the wind.”
    “But it ain’t a chain,” she said, “and it ain’t blowing in the wind. Ain’t echoes, either.”
    There was a stronger gust of wind and the moan was much louder now.
    Joshua pushed off the rail and walked down into the yard. He stood with his hands cupped around his ears to catch every nuance of the sound. Granny dropped her cigarette butt into the empty coffee tin and lit another.
    The moaning was so loud now that anyone could hear it. So loud that anyone could understand it, and Granny watched for the moment when Joshua understood. She’d seen it so many times. With friends, with her own daughter—who screamed and then ran inside the house to begin packing up her clothes and her babies. She hadn’t come back.
    Granny had seen a parade of people come through, stopping as Hack had stopped, wanting to say goodbye. Only one of them ever came back. Norm McPhee wandered back to the mountains after spending the last fourteen years in a bottle somewhere in Georgia. He came back to the holler, back to Balder, back to Granny’s yard, and he stood there for an hour, his eyes filled with ghosts.
    Then Norm had walked into the woods, found himself a quiet log to sit on, drank the rest of his bottle of who-hit-John, took the pistol from his pocket, and blew his brains all over the new blossoms on a dogwood tree.
    Granny smoked her cigarette and wondered what Hack Tharp’s grandson would do, because she could see his body language changing. He was slowly standing straighter. His hands fell slowly from behind his ears. His eyes were wide, and his mouth formed soundless words as he sought to speak the thoughts that his senses were planting in his head.
    He turned to her. Sharp and quick, but his mouth wasn’t ready to put voice to the thought that Granny could now see in the young man’s eyes.
    “I can hear them,” he said at last.
    Them.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “It’s not just one sound, and it’s not an animal. There are a lot of them.”
    “Yes,” Granny said again.
    Something glistened on Joshua’s face. Was it sweat?
    “Granddad said that forty-nine people died that day. Mostly men, a few kids.”
    “Yes,” she said once more.
    “All of them digging down in the earth,” said Joshua, and his voice sounded different. Distant, like he was talking to himself. Distant, like the wind. “All of them,