Ghost Hand Read Online Free PDF Page B

without a marker, and I tried to quell the surge of anger I always felt when I saw it. My mother had refused to buy a tombstone. She hadn’t asked my opinion. She’d informed me, “We don’t need anything to mark his grave. That’s not him.” So, all there was to indicate Stephen Black’s place of rest, to declare his time and existence on this earth, was a small stone provided by the cemetery that said G42. G for the cemetery section. 42 for the number of the plot. Just a letter and a number so they wouldn’t dig him up by accident, or bury someone on top of him. My dad was nothing but a bingo call.
    But not for much longer. I’d been saving for two years. Not for a fancy headstone—those ran in the thousands of dollars and dad wouldn’t have wanted anything like that anyway. But I had picked out a simple, etched granite headstone for only fifteen hundred dollars, and I was almost there. My mother thought I was saving for a car.
    “Hey dad,” I said softly, bending over to unbuckle and loosen my boot. I tried to do it quickly, but they weren’t exactly designed for easy removal. “Today pretty much sucked,” I told him, still glancing around nervously. “My hand went all weird, reached into Passion Wainwright, and pulled something out.” I yanked my boot off, tipped it upside down, and shook out the rock. “And I think someone was following me, so I have to get moving.” I said, pulling my boot back on.
    In my backpack, the blades began to tremble. Leaves crunched behind me, and suddenly a hand was on my face, slapped across my mouth, smashing my lips into my teeth. Two muscled arms closed around me, and someone pressed against my back, grinding my pack into my shoulder blades. A warm huff of a voice in my ear said, “I won’t hurt y—” and before I could even struggle, I was yanked backwards off Melva Price’s headstone.
    When I hit the ground, it wasn’t ground. Something writhed under me. Not something. Someone. The Dark Man had found me and was gripping me so tightly I could barely breathe, and yet he seemed to be the one convulsing and choking, and gasping for air. I tried to roll away, to kick him, to extract myself from his clutches. Instead, we rolled down the slope of Section G, his body smashing mine into the earth numerous times before our momentum was halted by an abrupt crash into something hard and prickly.
    The world was dark and spinning. I couldn’t breathe. All the air had been pounded from my lungs. I opened my mouth, gulping like a fish. When I opened my eyes I thought for a moment that a tree had somehow fallen and landed on top of me. But it wasn’t a tree; it was one of the huge hedges that divided the various sections of the cemetery. And it hadn’t fallen on me. I had rolled right under its carefully manicured edge and been stopped by its thick trunk, which was now digging into my side. I was facing the dark, upper interior of the hedge, a lower branch poking my left cheek, grinding into my teeth and gums. I tried to push it away, but I couldn’t lift my hand.
    My captor’s grip had gone slack, the two of us so tightly wedged under the bush I could barely move. It wasn’t lumpy ground beneath me. It was him. Pinned under me. But he wasn’t moving. He was still, very still, though I could feel the rise and fall of his chest, even with my backpack wedged between us. Maybe he’d been knocked out during our downhill tumble. Whatever. It didn’t matter. Now was my chance to get away from him.
    I pulled my face back from the branch and turned my head. I could see a small strip of cemetery from under the hedge. There was my dad’s grave and the bottom portion of Melva’s headstone. Beyond that was home, safety, normalcy.
    I tensed my muscles and tried to squirm out from under the bush, but I couldn’t find any leverage. Maybe I could position my arms and hands against the trunk and push myself out. I squirmed a little more, trying to clear obstacles from around my hands