“I’m sorry, Nik.” He meets my eyes, regret tugging down his eyebrows. “I’ll look after you. I promise.”
“I know.” I hold his gaze and steady my breathing. If there’s anyone I trust to take care of me, it’s Marek.
We finish up, storing our refuse in the backpack, and start on our way again, this time following our footsteps. Marek checks his phone frequently and realizes where we went wrong. “We should be there soon.”
“What’s that?” I stop and point at a pile of crumbling stone. “It looks like a grave.”
“It’s not a grave.”
“I want to see.”
“Nik, we’re running out of daylight.”
“It’ll just take a minute.” I trudge through snow to look at the stone. I realize that it’s surrounded by a circle of pine trees, here in the middle of a deciduous forest. The sun has now sunk behind the forest and it’s dim and shadowy here. I can just make out engraving on some of the stone. “It’s a headstone,” I say weakly. “Whoa.”
He treks in after me. “I did read something about a cemetery somewhere around here. A witch’s cemetery.”
I whirl around to face him. “A what!”
He grins. “Witch’s cemetery. This must be it.”
I spin back around to the headstone. “A witch is buried here.”
“There’s no such thing as witches.”
My eyes fly open wide. “Are you kidding? Of course there is!”
He sighs.
At that moment, an eerie noise reaches our ears. A kind of squealing noise in the distance. In the darkening distance.
My heart flips over. I let out a little squawk and jump at Marek. He grabs me.
“What was that?” I yelp. “Oh my God. Marek!”
He holds onto me. “I don’t know. Just an animal.”
We hear it again. “It sounds like a horse,” I say shakily. “A tiny, high-pitched horse neighing. Are there horses around here?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Fuck! It’s the ghost of the witch!”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts either.”
“We have to get out of here!” I tug at his jacket. “Come on!”
He doesn’t argue with me, and we both make haste down the path at a run, which is even harder than walking in the snow. My boots now weigh five hundred pounds but my panic gives me the adrenaline rush I need to keep going.
I have to give Marek credit, he holds onto my gloved hand the whole way, shortening his steps so I can keep up with him as we run from ghosts. Then I start to laugh. Out of breath, I stop running and Marek stops, too, and then he’s laughing with me and we’re both nearly falling down in the snow we’re laughing so hard. I have to wipe tears from my eyes and we lean on each other.
“Oh my God,” I wheeze. “We are so bonkers.”
He shakes with laughter. “You’rebonkers. I was trying to tell you there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“You ran with me!” More giggles flood helplessly from inside me.
“I was saving you from the tiny horses.”
