Free Hallowed Ground by David Niall Wilson, Steven & Wilson Savile Page A

scheduled for the morning, early, before dawn’s first light.   It was hot near Saguaro on the best day – it would be an unpleasant ceremony if they allowed the sun to rise before they laid her to rest.
    In the cool of the evening, the scent of the cut lilies and the wreaths and garlands of flowers stacked around the coffin permeated the air.   A light breeze blew in the front door on its way through the rectory in back.   In the morning, the pews would be full, and Amazing Grace would shake the rafters.   Benjamin didn't plan to be there to hear it.
    He had propped open the coffin so he could see her face.   One last look.   She was so still and quiet he could have believed she was carved of porcelain if he hadn't held her warm, supple body in his arms days before.   She was smiling.   Her expression spoke eloquently of serenity and peace.   But how could she be at peace?   How could there be any serenity now?   There was no calm; there was only violence and its ghosts.   The rest, the tranquility, the notion of peace, they were all lies, and above all else in the world, Benjamin despised lies.
    A whisper of cotton broke the silence.   Benjamin didn't look up from her lips.   He knew what he would see, and he wasn't ready.   What, not who, he thought, tracing a finger across her cold cheek.   Soft footsteps padded across the wooden church floor.   The lilies and wildflowers gave way to a darker scent.   Moments later, a pair of very pale hands rested on the rim of the coffin.   He still didn't look away from Elizabeth's face, he didn’t need to.
    "You are sure that this will work?" Benjamin asked without turning.
    "If you doubted," a soft, husky voice replied, "you would not be standing here, waiting.   You would not take the chance of letting someone see us alone."
    Benjamin said nothing.   He had nothing to say.
    "You have the money?" she asked.
    Now he looked up.
    "I have your money, witch.   See that you earn it." There was no aggression in his voice, only a deep well of hurt, despite the harshness of his words.
    The woman he knew as Jeanne Dubois gazed up at him with deep, unblinking brown eyes.   He met her gaze, but found it unyielding as granite.   After a few moments he looked away.
    She turned, and started toward the front door of the church without another word.   Benjamin gently lowered the lid of Elizabeth's coffin, rested his hand on the wooden surface for just a moment, and then followed the witch into the deepening twilight.   As they stepped into the churchyard, he looked up and down the deserted road.   There was no one moving at that hour, nor was there likely to be, but he still looked.   And he listened, because what he could not see he might well hear.   Sounds had a peculiar way of travelling in the dark.
    Jeanne Dubois was not the kind of woman a respectable man should be seen alone with.   The shame of it would be that much worse with his fiancé only two days dead and still not in the ground.   The church rested up against the outer edge of Mission Ridge, one side overlooking the sloping valley that held the town, the other cresting a deep, narrow gorge.   Jeanne turned away from the town and crossed the church yard toward the slope and the cliff beyond.   Her feet crunched on the gravel, adding an earthy tone to her passage.
    The rear of the church was a graveyard.   Ancient, canted stone crosses and rough-hewn monuments sprouted like broken teeth.   The graves were well tended, even those that had toppled or had their stones broken.   Some bore fresh flowers.   Jeanne walked through them without glancing right, or left.   Benjamin was forced to hurry his steps to keep up.   He did not dare look at the blooms in case they had withered at her nearness.   He chided himself for being a fool – but he still did not look.
    The climb down to the gorge was rough.