“There’s whole families buried here,” Lucky muttered. “This is the worst.”
“Look,” Scout told him, dragging him across a small plot of headstones to the plaque, where he began reading out loud.
Industrializing the South came with a terrible human cost. The MorganStar company, worried that taking care of its employees would cut into its profits, allowed them to live in squalor, to the great shame of the Morgenstern descendants. This graveyard is dedicated to the faithful employees who lost their lives in the cholera epidemic of 1873, and the Morgenstern family rededicates itself to serving the greater public good on this day, June 15, 2017 A.D.
“Huh,” Lucky said. “That’s pretty recent. I wonder which descendant got that attack of conscience.”
“I think Callan,” Scout murmured, looking from his phone to the plaque. “He’s the youngest, a little older than we are. Kayleigh says he’s the one who keeps intervening for employee rights when she works the resorts. I’m betting he’s the one who made sure the graveyard was kept up—it’s apparently been restored—and made all the promises and stuff.”
Lucky shrugged. “Go millennials.”
Scout laughed and then sobered, looking around the graveyard.
Lucky seemed to catch his mood because he started looking around too. “What are you seeing?” he asked, eyes narrowed. The place was set in a two-acre clearing, and the graves were fairly close together. The clearing was bordered by trees, all of them fluttering with Spanish moss, so there must have been tributaries or irrigation ditches behind them. The yard itself was mostly sunny, but Lucky felt an abundance of… shadows.
Pale, insubstantial shadows that seemed to move, not with breeze or clouds or….
He shuddered and looked back at Scout. “Are we surrounded by ghosts?”
“Yup,” Scout said, seemingly unfazed.
Lucky was very, very fazed. “Oh, the things I wish I didn’t know.”
“They’re different than the ones in the spirit trap,” Scout said analytically. “These ghosts are… they’re like memories and dreams. There’s an occasional dark one—” Scout grimaced and stepped aside while the sunny green strip to his left turned just the tiniest bit browner. “—but mostly, there’s….” He smiled wistfully. “There’s a lot of people remembering their best moments here. Families holding babies, young lovers, stolen kisses.” He saw something else that caught his eye, and he looked even sadder. “And struggling against injustice.” He gave Lucky a look that went many miles deeper than any pain Lucky had ever felt for himself, or even someone he loved, like Auntie Cree or Scout. “There’s a lot of sorrow in the world, Lucky. We need to remember to hold on to the sunshine, okay? Remind me of this place if I ever start to forget.”
While Lucky was still grappling with that, one hand to his chest while he sought for some means to comfort the man by his side, Scout’s expression lightened.
“Oh, hey. What have we here? C’mon!” And with that he grabbed Lucky’s hand and hauled him across the grounds. Lucky’s view went from clouded with shadows to full-on theme park, and he could only be grateful Scout was bobbing and weaving like the spirits or ghosts or memories or whatever they were would feel solid upon impact.
“Scout,” Lucky cried, mostly hoping to make him go a little slower, but Scout, hell-bent on his destination as always, kept going. Lucky was faced with either letting go and losing the experience of doing this with Scout, or holding on.
He held on.
Eventually their pell-mell dash ended at the corner of the estate, right before the manicured green of the yard faded into the darkness of trees and a wildlife preserve that Lucky hoped housed the happy, fluffy kind of wildlife and not the scaly, hungry kind.
For a moment, Lucky stood, panting, clutching Scout’s hand and watching the movement of the shadows thrown by the Spanish moss as they danced across the lawn.
Then he held a little tighter to Scout’s hand as he realized that the sun was behind clouds and there were no shadows.
“Look at them,” he said in awe.
It was a little like a parade. People, old and young, caught between their best and worst memories, moved between the darkness of the trees and the brightness of the cemetery. Lucky watched a young man holding a little girl by the hand simply stroll into the light, pointing something out to the child as she skipped excitedly. The young man was wearing breeches with suspenders and a newsboy’s cap. He could have been her older brother or even her father, and she looked at him adoringly. Their image flickered out, and Lucky watched the same young man, on his knees, doubled over and retching, crawl into the darkness of the trees.
He realized that the spirits he’d seen weren’t static, stuck in one moment of their lives, but transitory, much like human experience itself, shifting from the best and the worst and the peaceful and the frantic, as easily as shifting from the shadows to the sun.
He stared helplessly at Scout, wanting a breath, a minute, to make sense of the great spectacle of the dead, but Scout was looking into the eyes of a handsome young man who seemed very familiar.
He was midsized by modern standards, about Lucky’s height, which probably made him fairly tall by the standards of his day. Young—early twenties—in knee breeches, suspenders, and a striped shirt with a collar, he wore a battered newsboy cap and held a leather satchel slung around his shoulders.
Unlike the other specters floating between darkness and bright, this one seemed to remain stable. There were occasional flickers. He went from hale and healthy to peaked, with sunken eyes and starveled lips, and from smiling to grieving, but much of his life seem to have been spent with the quiet, steady-eyed gentleness he was currently regarding Scout and Lucky with.
“Hullo,” Scout said, smiling warmly at the young man. “You must be Tom!”
Tom’s face—and he was a good-looking lad, with a cleft in his chin and dimples in his cheeks—split into a smile.
“Islanders!” he said, the word aching with relief. “Oh please, tell me you’re from the Drift!”
“We are,” said Scout, that tender smile still in place. For a moment, Lucky was jealous of a man who’d died at least a hundred and fifty years ago. “Or we’re new to the Drift, but we love it already.”
