Chapter 1

My father bought my entire family’s cemetery plots all at once; he never explained why, or even how. We’d never been rich, and a purchase like that certainly isn’t cheap, but he did it.

Well, I’d say all of us at once, but that didn’t include me; that’s how I know I was an accident. I was the fourth child of my family, born five years after my older sister, and, maybe not wanting me to be left out, for reasons I cannot comprehend and with money I did not know we had, my father bought my cemetery plot.

Though, as I said, I am five years younger than my closest sibling, and that plot wasn’t bought until I was older, so the time difference was over ten years, and none next to the family were available.

I can’t complain, though; the plot my father bought for me sat at the top of a middling hill in the cemetery, a beautiful view of those sprawling granite blocks and effigies as they collect themselves at the edges with the sky behind them, under a mulberry tree that fruits every summer.

I’m not much for plant science, but I’ve been made aware that the type of mulberry tree planted next to my grave is a long-lived one, some reaching over five hundred years.

Can you imagine that? Being buried next to something that is older than you, and will remain older than you until you can be no older, then continue even farther.

Most people have to search for dread; it is an emotion not easily found by accident; one has to think to have dread, and so most manifestations are purposeful, not for me though. Since I’ve been able to name the concept, I’ve felt a dreading contempt for that Mulberry Tree

I like to visit it sometimes, my plot; it is an area filled with nothing but the promise of death at some point in the future. Many can die in ten years, so the area surrounding my family’s resting place has filled in quite nicely, but mine is fresh, so fresh that nothing but that damn Tree sits adorning it.

There is a bench, not on the hill per se, somewhat near it, undercutting it. I think it is a part of a larger complex for a much richer family than mine, but I’ve never paid any attention to any grave in that place, but my own, and that bench allows me time to sit and look, think, think of my life.

I’m usually alone; not many people visit cemeteries in the early afternoon, even less in a part where no graves are, so I just sit alone, sometimes eating, sometimes reading or listening to music, all the while staring at the empty plot, and the shade cast over it by that levitical Tree.

I am usually alone; that was until my last visit, when I saw a man standing, leaning against the Mulberry Tree, staring absent-mindedly at the bench where I normally placed myself.

He was a strange-looking man; his features were gaunt in most places, his skin and bone seemed to be his body’s only composition, and that skin stretched so thinly over that bone that I couldn’t tell if that pink-ish off-white hue to his manner was sunning from the bright day or the color of his skeleton leaking through the cover.

He wore black, so much it was difficult to disfigure the different pieces of clothing, from what my eyes could focus enough to ascertain I believe he was wearing a black sports-jacket buttoned to just belonw his sternum, a black dress-shirt with just enough texture to barely separate it from the jacket, slacks that extended out from under the coat, unwrinkled and uncreased, and a pair of laceless, matt black ballroom shoes, any further details were lost in the ensemble.

He stood there, unblinking, unbreathing, unmoving, staring at that bench; his eyes, light with either age or a sort of malnutrition, were not easily followed, but his posturing gave me that sense of what he had his gaze fixed upon.

I peered at the bench, seeing if anything was out of sorts enough to cause such a focused gaze, only for my line of sight to return to him, while I blinked; as I opened my eyes, they met his.

His irises were milky white, yes, but his pupils were black, black like the rest of him, infinite in some way that consumed me. I almost felt the ground fall beneath me as I looked into them; I’m not sure I’ve felt anything else like that as long as I’ve been alive.

“Do you feel your recent dreams may relate to the sense of separation from the rest of your family?” he said, sitting confidently in his comfortable-looking chair, notes in hand as I attempted to spurtter something out.

“W-what?” I asked dumbly; the moment I was lost in was most certainly not this one.

“Well, being the only family member separated like that, especially something as final as a grave, as well as some of the other incidents you’ve spoken about in previous sessions, it’s natural, dare I say understandable, to feel a sense of… isolation that may lead to dreams like these,” he adjusted his glasses halfway through his small speech.

“Right, yes, my dreams, I guess that makes sense.” I rubbed the back of my neck uncomfortably, a gesture I’m sure he understood even if it was unconscious on my part.

“Well, our time is almost up. I’ll do a little more research, and next week we can go further into the meaning of these dreams,” he checked his phone next to him; there wasn’t a clock in the room, but I felt inclined to trust him.

“That sounds great.” I started to rise, wiping off fake dust as a way to occupy my hands.

“Michael?” he tilted his head and widened his eyes. “Are you doing alright? You’ve seemed distracted our last few sessions.”

“Yeah, uh, you’re probably right. Sorry, with the redundancy I’ve been scattered a lot, looking for some work, you know,” my patting became more aggressive as I lied.

“Well, if you can, make sure to take care of yourself, write down any other dreams you have for next week, and remember the three Ts.” he pointed at me the same way an elementary school teacher would to get an answer from his class.

“Think, Thought, Think, I know.” The phrase never stopped confusing me, but the repetition sealed it into my memory to the point where, understood or not, I wouldn’t forget it.

I’m not sure if it was a dream or not; the vision of the dark-dressed man standing where my grave was going to be in due time, after his eyes spiked into mine I was home, I don’t have a memory of how I got there, but it’s also not blank, I knew time had passed, I had something of a feint memory of a memory of the journey, but to my own perceptions I had simply skipped and ended up home, worn out as if the day had happened, not in a place one would expect of waking from a dream.

That’s happened a few times in my life; I would wake up minutes to hours after something, with memories of how I got there but not having experienced them, at least consciously.

I can’t tell if I was lying to my doctor or myself when I said I knew it was a dream; I think I was hoping it was, but those other events were real; they surely happened. They were concrete and verifiable; my grandmother’s death was one; I remember being by her side, the beeping entering and bouncing around my head as her heart-rate monitor made its annoyingly consistent reports and statements; then I was sitting outside the room, my mother was crying, I remember her dying, but not being there.

I remember sticking my hand into a boiling pot; well, I remember being about to stick my hand in a boiling pot, then being in the hospital getting my arm wrapped and treated. I remember the pain but not doing it, watching as if outside my body; I even forget my motive.

Now this man in black, I remember seeing him, then him seeing me, then being home, a vague memory of simply turning around, getting on the bus, and going home; I do not remember arriving, and it does not feel like I lived those moments, only watched them until I was allowed back into my own life.

Sitting back in my apartment, having returned a few hours before from my therapy session, I found myself unnerved by the shadows. It’s not that they were new, or moving, or changed in any substantial way. I’m not sure how else to describe it, but I feel like they’re there, like they’ve always been there.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually looked into a shadow before, not expecting to see anything, not trying to parse it out as an inconvenient block in my view, but genuinely looked into one as if it were the object itself; it unnerves me as, I’m unsure how or why, I think it is looking at me as well, with that same curiosity.

Though I can only feel the burn in its eyes while I sit, curious about that.

I’d not returned to the cemetery in some time, for some reason as I put the thought of it being a dream in my own mind, that encounter had been a fictive image of my own imagining and the belief of safety washed over me, I had yet any craving to return to the place, I think I feared that man in black, somewhere in my mind at least, and I did not know how to cope if it were to occur again, if I could not write it off, how would I justify that foolishness to myself, so I stayed away.

“Have you had any more dreams since last week?” his face was open and curious.

“Yeah, I think so, yes,” I scratched my face as some dull ache formed deep in my mandible.

“Would you like to share them Michael?” he sat straighter than before as a look of inquisitive confidence stained him.

“I don’t remember them,” I replied, not meeting his gaze.

“Don’t remember them?” he questioned.

“Yeah,” I answered bluntly.

“How do you know if you dreamt anything if you don’t remember them?” he lay back in his chair; I understood he was likely to make some kind of moment out of this.

“I remember having them; I just don’t remember them. I remember the time passing while I slept; that usually only happens when I dream. When I don’t, I just close my eyes and open them to the morning,” I looked into his eyes as I spoke, trying to string my words along as best I could.

“Interesting.” he was jotting something down.

His scribbling created something of a lull in the conversation that my fast-moving mind couldn’t accept; my eyes darted to occupy myself, and I began to speak my mind for only a moment as my vision met an ashtray on the table between us.

“Why do people do that?” I asked the question with no conviction, almost as if I breathed it out instead of saying it.

“Do what?” he looked up from his pad quizzically.

“Smoke,” I said back with only slightly more thought behind it.

“Why wouldn’t they?” It was such a therapist question to ask, but I knew I had opened a door I’m not sure he would let close.

“It’s bad for you; what is it, ten minutes off your life for every cigarette smoked?” I didn’t look up as I spoke, but my mind was compiling the speech together competently enough, I’d assume.

“Isn’t that what life is? Dictation?” his voice gave off a sense of genuine interest in my thoughts. “It shortens your life, but it’s one of a few things that allows you an active choice in that lifespan, I mean.”

“So what? Smoking is life?” I met his eyes.

“Choices are life; smoking is a choice,” he nodded to his own words as he spoke.

“So is jumping off a cliff; I don’t think that makes it life,” I argued.

“You can only do it while you're alive, so why wouldn’t it be?” I squinted at his comment.

“Have you been back to your plot since the dream?” he adjusted his tie and changed the subject.

“If I leave early, am I still billed for the full session?” I patted my knees, refusing to lie on the therapy chair, sitting uncomfortably on it instead.

“Your insurance will be,” he looked me up and down, the first look of confusion I had ever seen on his face.

“Alright, it’s severance anyway,” I got up and went to leave.

“I’ll see you next week!” he half-yelled as I exited the room; I did not reply.

I spent the next few hours wandering. I didn’t want to return home, but it was the only way I knew; I only knew the buses to places I’d want to go at the times I’d want to go to them; my schedule was thrown off far too much to trust my own habits after the early departure.

I had gotten onto a bus; I don’t remember the number, I’m not sure I even looked, but the normalcy of the action drove me to it besides that.

I sat for a while before I realized the bus had stopped; looking up, I saw no one around me. The bus was dank with some old rot and entirely empty, no driver, even with the strain of my ear I didn’t hear the engine roar that was usually near deafening if one hadn’t become accustomed to tuning it out, especially with how close to the front I normally sat.

Getting off, confused but unquestioning, I raised my head and found myself there, at the start of the trail leading into my plot’s cemetery. It was almost as if the choices were made for me as I automatically began that route. The palace of pallid emotion and faded memories was composed of numerous split paths that managed to, despite all logic of functioning geometry, form a rough grid system that separated each section of plots.

My path was memorized by a system of rights and lefts. The first three I remember as they pass by the graves of some historical figure in my city, left right left.

The next seven snake their way around a cathedral complex that sits in their center; if I remember correctly, it is younger than the cemetery, having been overtaken slowly. I do not recall those turns consciously, but the muscle memory of walking the path so many times leads me despite my empty-headed state.

In the final section, there are five turns, well, six, but at the center of the sixth sits that hill; to my right was another blank plot, to my left was that bench, in my center sight is that forsaken Tree, and standing, leaning against it, that man was there, looking straight down the center into me.

He appeared more filled in; I saw him breathing. There he is; I was looking at him. He was staring at me; I did not turn. I was experiencing all of this.

My stride was slow as I began toward that center that contains him, each step calculated as it reached his radius.

His smell is putrid, like rotting meat; his breath was like concentrated acid in my lungs as I drew closer; the burning was painful, yet I remained in my motion toward him, meeting just in front of him, his gaze piercing me.

“Hello?” I said to him.

His tight skin wrapped its lips into something like a smile; he did not respond with words, but by his reaction I knew he was listening.

“Who are you?” I asked.

His smile fell, and he tilted his head. “Who?” he asked.

“Your name?”

He moved toward me; I stepped back, falling onto my backside and sliding down the hill, though his movements remained unchanged. He did not move like a person; his pale head moved first, seemingly as his void of a body followed behind it. It seemed the air died after he crossed it, and by the completion of his movement, leaning over me, bent in some sort of mocking bow, no wind blew at all.

“Ask specifically, do you wish for my head, or what follows?” he scowled in some sort of unreadable expression.

“Your name,” I repeated, as a demand rather than a question.

He made an L with his right hand, placing the thumb onto his chin, his forefinger pointing upward and resting on the tip of his nose.

“My head is named death,” he said. He turned his finger on the axis of his thumb until his forefinger touched his chest. “What follows is called Hades; I am my own rider, my own follower; do you wish to meet both?” his head tilted unnaturally in the other direction as he looked at me, questioning.

I sat in stupidifed silence at the figure before me. He watched me breathe and crawl in my skin for a few minutes before taking both arms and creating an X so his left arm was pointing to mine and vice versa for his right.

“Life is choices, for you are still alive, a choice.” I stared into his black pupils for a moment, and I was sure of my decision.

“Have you had dreams since our last session?” he sat once again in his chair, trying to hide his lack of breath; he had clearly run being late to our session.

“No,” I stated factually.

“Ah, any other updates? I know last session ended… abruptly; I was worried you wouldn’t come back. Have you been to your plot since then?” he tilted his head as he asked.

I peered at the ashtray between us. “I don’t think I’ll be going back there, well, not for a long time, hopefully.”