It was dark, and oddly chilled for a summer night in July. As we loaded into the van, we all made sure our seatbelts were tight aroubnd our waists. Logically and legally it was superfluous to have so many of us squished into just one vehicle, but none of the other children minded either, we were all shaking with fear, though we said it was just because we were excited. Our strong leaders, Mary and Patty, the moms, were sitting in the front of the car quietly as we drove down the dirt road out of the campsite and into the night. Driving slowly through the dirt roads, quietly passing houses few and far in between, the gravel rumbling beneath the tires, we waited. We were going to visit the glowing gravestones. Some people say there’s something special in the stones that make them glow brightly at night, others say that the childrens ghosts come out at night to play, and they are visible from the road beyond the fence. But some people say that the gravestones glow only on the nights when the children who lay underneath them were murdered.
The car came to an even darker road, further off the path of dim lights, and we turned on to it, driving even slower now. The children were silent, waiting for the voice of authority, the screech of the wheels to tell us we were there. And it came. A dead stop in the middle on the night, pitch black. The lights in the car had turned off along with the engine. We had to wait for our eyes to adjust, but that didn’t keep us from searching. Out of the dark, I saw them first. The ardent stones, as if they were floating above the ground. The graveyard far enough away that we couldn’t read the names of the children burried beneath, but close enough to make our hair rise on the back of our necks.
Just as we were getting used to the stones and recovering from the first wave of fear, it happened. Out of the dank ditches on either side of the car came bodies. Screaming terrible noises of death and pain, cringing in the fresh air outside of their graves, there was a flash of light and their skeltons shown through their flesh. The car started shaking, one had climbed on top of the car. We could hear them as if they were dieing again, a horrible painful death. And we drove away into silence once more.
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