Page 392 of Phobia
Tombstones, many of them. A woman in black, hunched over a grave, rocking back and forth. She raised her head to the heavens and opened her mouth. Her grating scream rang up to the clouds.
Then a man appeared. Tall with dark skin, dressed for a funeral. He stood over the woman from behind, whispering something.
He looked up, straight at me. His eyes were wild, like those of a rabid animal.
The woman pushed her long blonde hair from her face. Her green eyes were smudged with tear stains.
“Rosalie!” I called out. And the vision fell away like stone crumbling from a dilapidated building.
***
I arrived at the cemetery near Rosalie’s home, hoping this was the place from my vision. I could already make out repetitive moaning in the distance and knew that Rosalie was nearby.
There she was, just like I had seen, huddled over a headstone next to a tree on a miniature hill that overlooked the rest of the graveyard. Her head was down, and her hair covered her face from view.
I neared and put my hand on her hunched shoulder. She jolted from my touch, revealing her grief-stricken face.
“He’s dead,” she sobbed.
I took her into my arms; her body was shaking like she had caught a chill despite the sweltering Caribbean sun blazing overhead. Gingerly, I pressed my lips to the top of her head. “Tell me everything, sweetheart.” I didn’t know who the man who had beckoned me in the vision was, but I assumed he was the one she spoke of.
“Bastien is dead.” Her voice trembled as she cried into my chest.
“Shh, it’s going to be okay,” I said, trying to console her.
“I made him up. I’m crazy.”
“Was this the man you told me about? The one you didn’t know much about?”
Her head nodded against me.
“But you spoke to him, didn’t you? And he spoke to you?”
She pulled away from me and rubbed away her tears. “I found his grave.”
My eyes focused on the headstone before us. This Bastien had been dead for nearly one hundred years. What on earth was going on? “I saw him.”
Her pretty green eyes widened. “You did?”
“He led me to you in a vision.” Crazy or not, I had seen Bastien, too, and he’d clearly been trying to get me to come here to see Rosalie. I didn’t think she had imagined as much as she thought she had.
“I don’t understand.” She began to sob harder than before, her body tremoring with agitation.
“It’s okay. Maybe we don’t need to understand anything yet.” I was betting that she had somehow reached through to the other side and the spirit of this Bastien person was messing with her mind as a joke. Spirits sometimes had the strangest sense of humor. “Why don’t you come back to my shop with me? I’ll make you some tea and we can think this through.”
She nodded again through her tears.
I helped her up and held her elbow to steady her.
“Oh, wait.” I bent down to pick up something on a string next to the headstone. “Don’t forget your necklace.”
Rosalie’s eyes widened at the corded black leather. There was an extremely sharp horn charm on the end. I had seen these before. They were used by magical priests.
“It’s his,” she whispered.
“What?”
She let out a squawking laugh out of nowhere. “This is Bastien’s necklace!”
