Free Ghost of a Chance by Bill Crider

The only things left were a couple of flower arrangements and some random white petals on the ground.
    The night air was damp and cool, and it settled on Rhodes like a shroud. He got back in the car and toured the whole cemetery. There was nothing alive there, not that he could see. If he hadn’t seen those running figures in the clearing earlier in the afternoon, he would have been tempted to dismiss the teens’ story out of hand.
    As it was, he didn’t. They might very well have seen someone. He just didn’t know who.
    Or what. For all he knew, there really were ghosts out there. It was certainly the right kind of night for them.
    After a little more than half an hour, Rhodes still hadn’t spotted anyone or anything. No one else had driven through the cemetery gates or even passed by on the street, so Rhodes decided to go back to the jail.
    He was about to head for the gates when he thought he saw something move out of the corner of his eye. He stopped the car, got out, and turned his flashlight in the direction of the motion. The beam showed only immobile stones, but down at the bottom of the hill, a dark and shapeless shadow darted between a couple of sooty monumentstopped respectively by a soldier and an angel with widespread wings. The shadow was moving faster than any human being could possibly run, Rhodes thought.
    Rhodes yelled, “Hey!” but got no response, so he began to run down the hill, dodging trees and the larger tombstones and hurtling over the smaller ones, his shoes squishing into the wet ground when his feet landed and sucking out when he picked them up.
    Even with the bad footing, he was moving awfully fast, thanks more to the slope and to gravity than to any natural athletic ability. But for just a moment, he felt almost like “Will-o’-the-wisp” Dan Rhodes, who’d returned the opening kickoff of the football season for a touchdown.
    But it was only for a moment. He’d almost reached the bottom of the hill when he was distracted by the whooshing sound of wings over his head. He glanced up, caught a quick glimpse of what he thought was most likely an owl, and the toe of his shoe caught on the top edge of a stone. The next thing he knew, he was flying through the air, though not exactly with the greatest of ease.
    He didn’t have much time to be uneasy, however, because he hit the wet ground in full stretch. The flashlight flew out of his hand, and he slid forward for several feet before coming to a stop when his head connected with a tombstone. The blow sent a sharp pain down his spine and made his skull feel like an egg that had been cracked against the edge of a cast-iron frying pan. Little lights sparkled in front of his eyes.
    He turned over on his back and lay there for a while, thinking that he was too old to be jumping tombstones, even low ones, and that he’d gotten what he deserved.
    Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe there was more to come.Maybe the ghost or ghoul or whatever was roaming around the cemetery at night would come along and do to him whatever it was that ghosts and ghouls did.
    What did they do, anyway? Rhodes couldn’t think of anything.
    But if they didn’t do anything, why were people afraid of them?
    He couldn’t answer that question, either, and he realized that his mind was rambling. He shook his head to clear it and wished he hadn’t. Now he knew how Humpty-Dumpty felt.
    He sat up and looked around for the flashlight. It was lying about ten feet away, its beam shining along the ground and revealing nothing at all.
    He took a deep breath and stood up, putting his hand on top of his head to see if there was any bleeding and also to make sure nothing fell off.
    Nothing did, and there was no bleeding, though he could feel the beginnings of a lump. He retrieved his flashlight and pointed it toward the bottom of the hill.
    There was nothing there, not that he could see. The question was, should he go down and investigate with his head hurting the way it was?
    Of course