A bird no one could name cackled in the dark of the night. Light moved as though alive, rolling along the dusty ground. Somewhere near by, rocks pounded one against another, in a slow, mournful beat.
Or were those bones?
The old church had burned down to a shell almost a decade before. The locals had stripped it before then. Whatever they left behind could not be holy. Over time, that even encompassed the dead.
The dead resented it. The more the villagers disparaged the dead, the more trouble grew in the area. Trees died outside the boundary. Dead lawns spread out from the graveyard. Shadow creatures ran at night -- things that were not wild cats or howling dogs, but somehow the worst of both.
Houses went up for sale. Others were simply abandoned. The dead soon outnumbered the living. No one on either side knew how to change the situation.
The town finally drew what it needed most—a ghost hunter. This one was already dead, which made the work easy. She walked into the bar at the tail end of a vicious storm and looked the locals over. They weren't the type to make trouble on purpose.
So she went to look for trouble among the dead.
"Can you help us?" an old woman asked as Kit came through the gate. Others gathered. No, these ghosts were not creating the trouble, either. Nonetheless, Kit felt a malevolent spirit in the area. A strong one -- but she could not see what it might be.
"What is over there?" she pointed ahead and squinted slightly.
"People who died in the epidemic in 1901," a man answered. He had the aura of a schoolteacher. "They have always been quiet."
"Not now," Kit replied. She could even see the trouble now -- a young girl sitting in the weeds and hissing at anything that moved.
A feral ghost.
