By daylight the graveyard occupies barely a block of flat land, hemmed in on all sides by cracked asphalt and slow urban decay. The houses whose windows watch it have seen better days; their paint is peeled, their scrubby yards are littered with detritus, and if ever a new car parked in one of their driveways it would surely become old before its time. There are places in the world where money pools and stagnates, but this is not one of them: leeches have crept into its foundations, gobbling up everything they can and returning nothing.
Holly didn't grow up here, exactly, but she grew up walking past the graveyard to the corner where the school bus stopped. She didn't like the graveyard much, during the days. None of the children did, but their unease grew at night, papered over with the autumnal bravado or curdling into fear when the winter sun gave them no choice but to walk past it. Hers did not.
Many places are different at night. Basement shadows writhe with urgent malice, stairs stretch and grow, the certainty of their steps fading to prayers; forest paths tangle themselves into hungry mazes. The graveyard stretches, its sad rows of untended markers giving way to marble battalions, the tiniest quirks in its flat surface descending into hidden valleys ringed with crypts, its few sad trees remember what it was like to be forests ...
During the day the graveyard's center is marked by an obelisk, erected near the city's founding to honor the life and death of one of its more forgotten founders. A carved angel weeps at its base, her wings folded around her so tightly that they almost become a dress. The obelisk is still visible at night, a vast pillar rimmed by moonlight, buried so deep within the graveyard that no one could reach it before the dawn yet visible from everywhere within its iron fences.
Once, when Holly was fifteen and as brave (or foolish) as any fifteen-year-old ever was, she sat beside the obelisk as the sun set and the graveyard changed around her. It was a warm summer day, and nothing bad ever happened in summer, not in the stories her parents told (the rumors that filled her high school had a much more realistic idea of what sort of things can happen to a girl alone in the summer, and perhaps if she'd listened closer to them her life would have been much more boring), and besides that she had mace and a whistle and the night was short.
She watched as the last light faded from the sky, and as the last gleams disappeared from the obelisk's peak, and then, as the stars began to fill the sky, she watched the carved angel shake out her wings and climb the obelisk. She was so slow, so careful; no part of her ever touched the light, and her touches left no mark upon the marble. Holly hardly breathed through it all, terrified and enraptured, eyes greedily drinking in every motion, the way the angel's stony feathers fluttered in the wind, the way starlight dripped down her body's curves—
Something happened when the angel reached the sky, and Holly lost her against the night. Even now she's not sure how to describe it: whether the angel became the night, or climbed through into another place, or simply pressed so closely against the obelisk's peak that Holly, so far below, couldn't tell the difference between them.
After wearing out her flashlight's battery wandering the graveyard's endless pathways, Holly had no choice but to sleep inside it that night, huddled on a hard stone bench. When she woke in the morning everything was exactly as it always was by daylight: small, diminished, forgotten. She got into so much trouble with her parents—and her mother gave her an awkward, unwanted, and totally unnecessary talk about the Dangers of Boys after grounding her for a month—but it was worth it to know a bit more about the world's truth.
Holly met the witch in college. They were both taking the same class, a 200-level seminar on the theory of applied eschatology. Not really Holly's thing, but she'd been baited into the subject by the week her freshman philosophy course spent on the subject, sandwiched between a week on applied onomasiology/semasiology and the end of the semester. Most of the rest of her class had checked out, rightly assuming that such an obscure branch of theory would only manifest as a single question in their finals, but Holly had been enthralled by the lecturer's digression on graveyards as becoming-places rather than ending-places, that being a theory which had gained some (thoroughly academic) prominence at the time, and found space in her schedule for the seminar before she thought better of it.
Once the seminar started, in an ancient building whose several ghosts did nothing to keep away the sticky summer heat, she had plenty of time to regret her choice. It really wasn't her thing. A deluge of theory with next to nothing that seemed useful to Holly; nothing that helped her understand the world, nothing that seemed useful.
She really should have dropped the class, but she was stubborn, and there was the witch. It was a year or two ahead of her, taking the class (it told her, once they started talking) as a chance to chill out and approach stuff it already knew from a different angle, and it habitually wore one of the most beautifully distinct bodies that Holly ever saw on any of the university's many witches—not because it was inhumanly beautiful or simply inhuman, like so many witches are in the early days of their power. It was simply human, marked only by its marble eyes and