Free Summer's End by Lisa Morton Page A

resting
here, no shining beacons of Hollywood history, but Evergreen was home to many
of L.A.’s more interesting historical figures. A tall, white monument marked
the plot of the Lankershim family; Isaac Lankershim had once had a town named
after him, until that town was renamed North Hollywood in 1927.
    I strode across the lawn, and
was saddened to see patches of dying grass and headstones that had literally
fallen in disrepair. A few graves were clean and well kept, testament to
longstanding families that still honored their dead.
    I passed the quaint,
cobblestone cottage that would be opened for funerals, and elaborate granite
memorials that were taller than I was. In some places, the headstones were so
crowded together that it was hard to see ground beneath them. I passed a stone
angel I’d shot thirty years ago, and saw it was now missing most of one
upraised arm. 
    The oak had been significantly
trimmed back, but it was still there, providing a surprisingly lush green
canopy for those resting beneath. The sun was slanting in from the west now,
but there were still areas beneath the oak hidden from light, perhaps
permanently. The ground was spongy here, and I sidestepped around a large gray
mushroom cropping up from the cracks in a plaque that marked an 1892 burial.
    I didn’t know what I was
looking for, really, so I searched for a place to sit. There were no benches in
this area, and I finally opted for a small patch of dry grass without a marker.
Was it nonetheless a grave, one for which the marker had crumbled or been
removed? I offered a silent apology to the resident beneath me, if that was the
case.
    I’d picked a spot in the sun,
but the day’s autumn warmth faded quickly, even as the sun’s light did not. I
shivered once, wondering why the temperature was dropping when sunset was still
hours away.
    The first tiny nudge—it wasn’t
truly a physical sensation, but I can only compare it to that—came then. I
turned, expecting a visitor or a guard, but there was no one to be seen nearby,
just a few distant joggers on the path that encircled the cemetery. A leaf,
perhaps, that had fallen from the tree…
    It happened again, this time
feeling more like a small puff near my ear, like a sentient breeze trying to
whisper its secrets. Then I remembered something from Mongfind’s book about
contacting the dead:
    “The new Druid will experience
the initial attempts by the dead to reach us as the smallest of touches or
sounds, or perhaps a movement half-glimpsed when nothing’s there…those with
experience, though, will understand that the dead are anxious to communicate,
and that we need only open ourselves to them.”
    Open ourselves to them...I
wasn’t sure what that meant, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. Weren’t
close encounters with death at the heart of most great horror fiction? I’d
certainly written about it myself dozens of times, everything from a story
about a haunted bookstore [20] to flesh-eating zombies [21] .
Again, I had to ask myself how much deeper I wanted to explore the real version
of my fiction.
    Yet I felt no fear about this
potential meeting. Perhaps it was the gentleness of the approaches to me; there
was something timid about it. Maybe the ghosts were more afraid of me.
    And I hadn’t come here to
parlay with spirits; I was in search of a tool. But I had no idea how to go
about finding what I needed; perhaps one already dead would know how to help me
deal with a Lord of Death.
    It was, paradoxically, too
bright to see them, so I closed my eyes.
    Whether what took place was
dream or reality or trance or some other state, I can’t say.
    It was:
    Gray, as if all light and color
had been leeched from the world. And in this gray realm were gray people…hundreds,
thousands, of them. They were dim—not translucent, not see-through shades with
faint blue glows, not cheap movie effects, but rather like someone you’d
glimpse from a distance standing in an unlit corner of an