Read Online Deathless by Scott Prussing - Free Book Online

help her sleep when she was younger and troubled by her mother’s increasingly strange behavior. Rave used a similar breathing thing to learn to control his fire. She didn’t know if it would work here, but she had nothing to lose.
    She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose, holding the breath for just a moment before slowly exhaling. She counted each breath on the exhale, starting with one hundred and counting backwards. Ninety-nine…ninety-eight…ninety-seven…. She remembered getting to seventy-three, but no further. By then, sleep had claimed her again.
     
    She was walking through a patch of unfamiliar woods. The night was dark, with a quarter moon providing barely enough pale illumination to see where she was stepping. Dead leaves crackled under her feet, but with less noise than she expected, especially given the silence of the night. The twisted black limbs of the leafless trees seemed to be reaching for her, but whenever she looked directly at any of them, she saw only stillness.
    The air was cold against her cheeks, but not uncomfortably so. She was in no hurry; nor was she sneaking through the woods. Her pace was normal walking speed. She had no sense of where she was heading in this unknown place, but for some reason, the lack of a specific destination did not bother her. Up ahead, the remains of one of the old stone walls so common to New England snaked through the trees. As she drew nearer, she saw the wall bordered an old cemetery overgrown with tall, stringy weeds. Crumbling gray headstones stood sentinel above the graves, which were scattered throughout the yard in no apparent pattern, the way they often were in old graveyards.
    Something told her to stop here. Whether it was a warning to stay out of this ancient graveyard or a sense that she should wait and watch, she did not know. She found a flat rock atop one of the taller remaining sections of wall and sat down, facing inside the cemetery. Her feet dangled inches above the packed dirt below the wall. She wondered idly why the weeds did not grow right up to the stones.
    After a few minutes, she became aware of a faint sound breaking the silence. She realized it was the first noise of any kind she’d heard since she stopped walking. The sound was difficult to describe, a kind of rustling, or scratching. Not the rustling of leaves in the wind—the branches were barren of leaves and there was no hint of a breeze. Nor was it the sound of footsteps. She strained to see through the darkness, trying to find a source for the noise, but saw nothing.
    Slowly, the sounds grew louder. They definitely emanated from somewhere in front of her—within the cemetery, she was certain—but still she saw nothing. Even so, she was not alarmed. She simply sat and watched, waiting.
    At last, the sounds became loud and clear enough for her to recognize. They were the sounds of digging. Something or someone was scraping and digging at the ground in front of her. It was unmistakable. There was just one problem, though—the graveyard was empty!
    She had a brief thought that perhaps whoever was digging might somehow be invisible to her, but even that failed to explain what she heard. Not only was she alone—but there were no holes appearing anywhere in the ground. Still, the digging persisted, growing louder by the moment. She was certain now the sounds came from more than one spot in the cemetery.
    Finally, a tiny movement off to her right caught her eye, but by the time she turned toward it, she saw nothing. If only it were not quite so dark. She kept her eyes fastened on the spot. A few moments later, she saw it. A tiny bit of soil popped a few inches up from the ground, like a miniature geyser of dirt. She smiled. No one was digging atop the ground—the digging was happening beneath the surface. She wondered if it could be gophers. But how was it she could hear gophers burrowing inside the earth?
    She continued watching. More earth pushed upward, in