Ghost Hand Read Online Free PDF

gripping it and rattling it exactly the way I had. He rattled it again, harder. He might still give up. Just because he wanted in the cemetery didn’t mean he was after me. Maybe he’d come to visit a dead relative. At night. In the dark.
    The hands stayed and were joined by a triangular wedge of black jutting between the bars near the ground. It was the toe of his shoe wedged against the bottom bar of the gate. He was going to climb over. Shit! I hadn’t thought of that. Time to get moving.
    I got up as quietly as I could and took off along the dark little trail that skirted the wall. He wouldn’t guess I’d come this way, unless he was some kind of professional tracker. Or he could see in the dark. Or the blades really were calling to him. Any of those and I was screwed. I thought about ditching the blades, but now that they were loose inside my backpack, that would mean tossing the whole thing. There was stuff in there I needed, like my phone and my homework, not to mention that I’d bought the backpack myself, searching long and hard for it on the internet. Besides, how could the blades have anything to do with the guy chasing me if they’d come from inside Passion?
    I ran a little further, then stopped and listened. No footfalls behind me. No sound of someone pursuing me through the brush. A feeling of elation came over me. I’d done it. I’d lost him. Let dark creepy stalker-man wander around in the cemetery all night, he wasn’t getting what he wanted. Whatever that was.
    Following the hidden trail along the wall was not as easy as it had been when I was ten. First, I had been much shorter then. Second, I hadn’t remembered it being so snarly and bumpy and annoying. Already I had almost been brained by low-hanging branches twice, not to mention there was a small rock in my boot, digging painfully into my foot. I had no idea how long it had been since I’d left Emma’s, but I probably wasn’t going to make my mother’s deadline unless I broke out into the clear.
    The blades had quieted to a bare tremble. I wasn’t even sure I was still hearing them. Maybe it was just the memory of hearing them, an echo in my imagination.
    I came around a bend in the path and tripped on a root, flailing forward. I grabbed for the wall with my left hand, skin scraping against stone, and managed to keep myself from falling flat on my face.
    “This is stupid,” I hissed when I’d regained my balance. My hand was stinging like crazy, and I could see just enough to know it was oozing blood. “That’s it,” I pushed my way between two bushes and walked out into the dappled moonlight of the open cemetery.
    Dark, stumpy silhouettes of tombstone, like sleeping dwarves, rose from the ground all around me. Down the hill toward the cemetery road, several large stone crosses jutted above the rest like King and Queen. Up the hill to my left was the boxy slab of an aboveground sarcophagus, the same one my dad and I had picnicked on. I knew exactly where I was. It was an older part of the cemetery, but just down the hill and across the road was the section where my dad was buried. I could cross that way toward the south gate and home.
    I stood, listening. I could see most of the cemetery, and I didn’t see any sign of the Dark Man. No moving shadows. No sound but the sigh of the wind and the rustling of the leaves. Even the blades were silent. Still, it would pay to keep out of sight as much as I could.
    I made my way down the hill, ducking from shadow to shadow, weaving between gravestones. I crossed the road under the dark canopy of an overhanging elm. Again, I waited and watched. Then I crossed into the grass and limped the few paces to my father’s grave so I could remove the rock from my boot. The only thing to sit on, other than wet grass, was Melva Price’s headstone, 1938-1999, Beloved Mother and Wife, now in God’s hands. I sat on it. I always sat on Melva; she didn’t mind.
    My father’s grave was just a grassy mound