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.
He sees the god, and everything starts to make sense.
His guide had warned him against wandering too far from the camp at night. The mountains are full of sudden cliffs, of places where the ground waits to crumble and consume unwary explorers, of maze-like caves. Of every ten who are lost on the mountain, only three are found before winter hides their corpses for good.
"Do not lose sight of the lantern", his guide had said when they'd set up for the night, to him and to the others in the group. The others who didn't matter. The lantern was on a low pole, dim, placed according to some logic that he couldn't pretend to understand. A second lantern designated their toilet, a small pit the guide had carefully dug in the dead, rocky soil that had somehow accumulated on the dead mountain.
It stunk.
Even a small group, carrying their own water, living off calorie-dense bars and gentrified MREs, produces enough piss and shit to stink. The wind didn't help, dense and hot, climbing up the mountain from toxic floodplains far below; the sort of wind he'd hoped to escape, just for a bit, just until the trip became a memory. And that would have been okay, probably, except ...
Well, it was a matter of biology. And proximity. And shame. And the fact that one of the others was already there, squatting, groaning like they were trying to pass a brick despite the amount of fiber in the calorie bars. And he really did need to piss, but ... next to someone? Squatting down, legs spread, where they could glance over and ...
and ...
No. Impossible.
He knew that he shouldn't care so much. That he should toughen up, either learn to live with his anatomy or do something to fix it. That was what being a man was about, wasn't it? Laughing off the shame. Proudly displaying his scars. Becoming who he should have been all along.
But. Only when he wanted to. Which he didn't, not right then, not when it felt like giving up control. And going a bit further wouldn't hurt—ten feet, twenty, just enough to feel better about it. Just far enough to stumble and fall. He should have listened.
The ten thousand people who climb the mountain each year are not evenly divided through the dry season. Few climb it during the spring thaw, when snow-melt is plentiful and land-slides common; slightly more climb it during the cooler autumn months than do during summer's long, windy days. Slightly more are lost during autumn than during summer.
Of those ten thousand, three hundred are lost in a good year; close to twice that in a bad year. In a good year, ninety of the lost are found; in a very good year, most of them are alive.
Hearing this, it is easier to assume that you will be one of the lucky ones. Not lost, or lost and quickly found. He assumed this.
He could not say how much time passed before he woke. The sky was bright, a thin ribbon of blue and white so far above, splitting the dim crevasse that had consumed him. One of his legs was broken; his back was not. His skin was covered with bruises and scrapes, only just beginning to sting and ache, and stinking piss had soaked his khaki shorts and dried there, leaving them stiff and crusty; he groggily wondered if his boxers had somehow escaped that fate.
The crevasse was quiet. There was no noise to drown out his cries for help, not even when the wind whistled along its opening; nothing to stop him screaming with pain and desperation until his dry throat ached and his cracking calls faded to sobs. No help came. His eyes hurt.