Free D by George Right Page A

closer to the gate, he got an additional reinforcement to his fears.
    It was one more dead bird. A swan, like those populating city ponds and Sheepshead Bay. It was impaled on several rods of the cemetery's fence, piercing it through. Feathers, once white, were stuck together with blood and cadaveric putrilage, shabby wings and the semi-decayed neck hung powerlessly downwards. The rotted head had fallen off and lay near the foot of the fence with a wide open blackened beak.
    No "No entrance" sign would have dissuaded Tony from entering more convincingly. But still, choosing between a dead swan and a live maniac with a hatchet... Tony hastily ran in the gate and turned into the first lateral walk, and then–into a narrow passageway between a crypt and a marble angel. Hunkering down, he hid.
    All was silent. Indeed–silent, as a cemetery... Probably the maniac had lost his trail or not followed him here at all. Logan re membered some scraps of a horror film in which, contrary to the most widespread genre cliches, the cemetery was the safest place, since the evil spirits could not pursue characters there because of its consecrated soil. Certainly, Tony had never before believed either in evil spirits, or in consecrated soil... But he hadn't believed either in USPS trucks driven by fans of cutting out livers and other body parts.
    Fans who could not be stopped even by a broken skull.
    Tony waited a little longer, then, trying not to make a sound, slowly stood up, noticing for the first time the discomfort of his right foot being wet and clad only in a sock. He did not dare to go back; such a big cemetery for certain had more than one exit.
    He carefully moved along a passageway between tombs, fearfully looking around. This whole place made the heart sick, and the darkness and fog, which were getting even denser, did not add enthusiasm at all. The cemetery was old, very old. It did not resemble an active one–at least, one where somebody looks after tombs. Gravestones and monuments were decayed, fissured, fouled with dirt and some wet muck–more probably a mold than a moss. Many slabs and stone crosses were dangerously tilted and looked ready to fall. It was almost impossible to discern inscrip tions, especially in the dark, but those which Logan nevertheless managed to read confirmed the antiquity of the burial places: the beginning of 19th century, the middle of the 18th, even one thousand six hundred-and-some years, combined with the obviously Dutch surnames...
    But the worst of all were the statues. At first, Tony paid at tention only to their condition, as pitiful as all the rest here–fouled, lop-sided, collapsing. Here a stump of a broken off hand stuck out, there a hole of a broken- off nose blackened, and here a long-ago fallen head had grown into the ground. (Tony shuddered, almost having stepped with his unshod foot on a face poking out of the earth; at first it seemed to him that it belonged not to a sculpture at all.) But then he began to look closely at faces.
    No, these were not the muzzles of demons. Silent sculp tures represented figures quite traditional for old cemeteries: angels, grieving maidens in long gowns, and sculptural doubles of the dead towered in the fog. But the expressions! These stone faces were not grieving at all. Angels grimaced in mischievous triumph and twisted their mouths into mocking grins of sadistic pleasure; faces of maidens wore expressions of all kinds of perversity and corruption and, moreover, they were mostly not maidens, but dissolute old women, and the older and uglier their faces were, the more lusty and obscene. Faces of sculptures and portraits on headstones, representing those buried under these stones, were disfigured by eternal horror and pain.
    And even worse–Tony could not shake the growing sensa tion that all of them were continuously looking at him. Looking from all directions. No, stone heads did not turn when he passed by, he did not see and did not hear any