PUSHING DAISIES: CHAPTER ONE
He had visited countless cemeteries and places rumoured to be haunted in search of paranormal activity, but none had ever been quite like the one he found himself in that night.
It was an old, abandoned cemetery on the outskirts of the village. The headstones were crooked and cracked, and the weeds grew tall around them. Ancient oaks and twisted willows cast long, eerie shadows across the uneven ground, their gnarled branches reaching out like skeletal fingers. A thick fog clung to the earth, muffling sound and adding an air of mystery to the already unsettling atmosphere. The once grand mausoleums in the background at the far end of the cemetery now stood in decay, their stone façades crumbling and overgrown with ivy. The distant hoot of an owl echoed through the silence.
It was the kind of place that gave him the chills, no matter how used he was to seeing it as part of what he did – to get a glimpse of what happened after death. He had heard rumours of strange happenings in this cemetery. People had reported seeing apparitions, hearing disembodied voices, and of feeling an overwhelming sense of dread. As soon as he heard these stories, he knew he had to investigate and that was what brought him cross country. He was always on the road, travelling from one destination to the other, and he was not one to stick around, being in one village for more than a day was one day too many. Some might have said that his soul was restless, and usually, when they did, he only smiled.
Above, the sky was a tapestry of purples and oranges as the sun set, with scattered clouds adding depth and drama to the scene, reminding Thursday that even the most beautiful moments required a touch of darkness to make them more memorable.
The little forgotten cemetery sat on an elevated hill and the view was beautiful. He could see across fields and hills all the way to the horizon and the setting sun. He took a deep breath as he stepped through the tall rusty gates. The smells of fermented moss and decay filled him with a sense of belonging.
As the sun dipped below the horizon and it became a whole lot darker, he walked among the headstones drawn to the farthest corner of the cemetery. The oldest, most forgotten part. The thick blanket of fog covering the ground parted as he stepped through it. The air was thick with an eerie energy, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. This was the first time that he had ever experienced the prickly sensation at the back of his neck that he had heard described by others, but he pushed on, determined to uncover whatever secrets this place held.
It wasn’t long before he heard a faint whisper.
He stopped in his tracks, listening intently.
At first, he could not make out what was being said but as he got closer to a particular headstone, the whisper grew louder. He approached the headstone cautiously, his heart pounding with excitement in his chest. As he got even closer, he realized that the whisper was coming from beneath the ground. So, the rumours were true? Coming this far north was worth the effort. He felt a nervous, giddy feeling bubble up from the pit of his stomach. A faint smile tugged at his lips, despite the chill creeping up his spine. His breath came in quick, shallow bursts, and he fought the urge to laugh out loud, caught in a strange mix of excitement and fear. Sometimes rumours were just that – rumours, and he was usually disappointed at the end of a long night when he had neither heard a ghostly voice nor seen a spectral apparition, and unless it was his imagination tonight might not be like other nights.
He looked up at the giant oak trees and the weeping willows. There was no wind, so the whispering noise he had heard was not the rubbing of leaves against one another in a slight breeze.
He knew what he had to do. He had done it so many times before. Reaching into his bag he pulled out his equipment. He rested his EVP recorder on the dry, cracked ground in front of the crumbling gravestone, and asked, “Who are you,” hoping to capture a response but not really expecting an answer as was the case so many other times when he had asked the same question in other haunted locations.
He waited a moment and then retrieved the EVP recorder from the ground. After he had rewinded the tape a little, he listened to the playback, holding the device close to his ear. To his surprise, he received a response almost at once. The voice was soft and ethereal, but unmistakable. It sounded like a woman’s voice, and it seemed to be answering his question. It was without a doubt direct, intelligent communication with someone in the spirit world. When he had asked the voice who it was, it responded with a name: Margaret.
He asked Margaret, “How did you die? Do you know you are dead?” As he asked the second question, the wind abruptly whipped a gust of air around him so hard that the tails of his long black trench coat flapped in the wind behind him like crow’s wings. The whisper from beneath the grave grew more urgent, more insistent, louder.
Suddenly, the whispering stopped.
There was no wind.
The air grew cold, and he felt an icy chill tickle down his back like a million ghostly fingertips playing chopsticks on his spine. He felt a dark presence, a malevolent force and then there she was. A ghostly figure, pale and translucent. Her eyes were sunken and dark, and her hair hung in tangled strands around her face but what struck him the most was the expression on her face. It was twisted in a snarl of anger and hatred.
He tried to back away, but to his horror found that he could not move. It was as if he was frozen in place. He did not know if it was fear that kept him from moving or something the apparition was doing to him. This was the first time he was lucky enough to have such a close encounter with a ghost. To see one. Not just seeing a movement from the corner of his eye, but to actually be able to see the ghost’s features, to actually see her with his very own eyes and not something in a video that could be debunked as the wind or a moth or a myriad of other explainable things.
The ghost drifted closer and closer; her eyes fixed on his. He could feel her cold breath on his face, and he knew that he was in danger.
And then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. The cold air dissipated, and the ghost vanished.
The eerie silence that followed was broken only by the sound of his own shaky breaths.
A voice, a few gravestones over, called out to him and he thought with panic that the ordeal was not yet over. He had investigated a lot of most haunted places, but never had such a deep fear permeated his entire being – from the depths of his soul to the tippy tip of each strand of his hair. He stumbled and barely managed to keep his balance as he twisted around in the direction of the voice.
A girl was sitting on a grave on the fringe of a circle of pale-yellow light from one of the Victorian-era lamps that dotted the pathway snaking its way through the cemetery. Her back was leaning against the headstone behind her, and her legs were pulled up to her chest. She had a daisy pushed in the fold of her ear and the white petals were stark against her dark hair. All around her hundreds of daisies grew from the ground and it looked as if she was sitting on a carpet of little white flowers. She was watching him with an amused look on her face. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re a ghost hunter.”