Free Summer's End by Lisa Morton Page B

attic. I could see
just enough of them to make out a few details: An out-of-fashion cut of hair, a
nineteenth-century uniform, a woman’s dress from the 1940s. Some of them moved
slightly, wavering as if they were underwater. It was hard to tell how much
awareness they possessed, but a few seemed to be murmuring. I could hear their
voices, but too faintly to make out any words.
    I watched them for a while
before I rose to move among them. They didn’t react…nor did I. There was
nothing frightening about them; if anything, they seemed…sad. Stuck. How many
of us feel like this in our lives: Drained, trapped, unaware? Death should be
different, but perhaps it was just an extension of life.
    As I walked through them, I saw
a change happening, slowly: As the sky darkened, they brightened. Colors faded
in on their clothing and skin; some took tentative steps.
    And they began to notice me.
    I wasn’t sure when the first
pair of faint eyes locked with mine, but I knew that they followed me as I
walked by. More began to track me. A small, wizened woman in a shawl stretched
out a veined arm as I passed.
    I realized it was night now,
and that was why they had changed, become slightly more substantial. I still
felt no menace from them, but I did wonder how it was possible that night had settled
in at the cemetery and I hadn’t been asked to leave. Didn’t they lock up
graveyards at night? Wouldn’t they have at least noticed my car, even if they’d
somehow missed me?
    I considered trying to find my
car, seeing if I could leave, but I still didn’t have what I’d come for. I’d
walked out now from beneath the oak tree, and thought perhaps I should return
to it.
    Somehow I’d lost my bearings,
and everything looked different in the gloom of night. Was that my tree
ahead…or was it that silhouette against the sky behind me? The figures around
me now were almost all Asian, some dressed in obsolete robes, and some in the
loose-fitting clothing of nineteenth-century railroad workers. I also saw
westerners here and there, but they didn’t look like those I’d passed in other
areas of Evergreen; these people were noticeably poor, with gaunt frames and
threadbare garments of another age.
    Potter’s Field.
    I remembered something I’d read
about Evergreen: That it had once housed L.A. county’s Potter’s Field, where those
too impoverished or just too forgotten to be buried elsewhere had been
interred. But it wasn’t just the transients and addicts and outlaws who rested
there. Back in the nineteenth century, L.A.’s ruling whites had refused to
integrate Chinese into their graveyards, and had charged the immigrants to be
buried with the indigents. Now their spirits stood side by side, taking no
notice of each other, proving that intolerance died with living skin.
    A colder breeze caused me to
tremble, but it wasn’t just the temperature—that wind was tinged with something
else, the mental equivalent of the smell of rotting meat. Then I saw the
spirits being pushed aside by some greater mass. Something was flowing up out
of the ground of the Potter’s Field, something that was far blacker than the
night sky. Even the dead were distressed now: I saw mouths open in soundless
horror, hands upraised to ward off whatever it was that came.
    What the fuck was I seeing? I
ran down possibilities: An unidentified murderer or rapist who’d been interred
in the Potter’s Field, an accumulation of the misery the poor had suffered
while alive, before the answer came: Surely this could only be Bal-sab. The
black cloud was exactly what Mongfind had described, and a sense of immense
hunger radiated from the heart of the thing. I turned to run, with no clear
direction except away from it. My legs moved as if in a dream, they pumped
furiously, my heart hammered, but my forward momentum was slow. Perhaps running
through ghosts dragged on me, or Bal-sab had the power to pull me towards him.
    I knew he would be on me in
seconds; reason was