Rendezvous
It was just past eleven at night when Linnéa found herself walking past the graveyard. She had passed it by without the slightest interest many times before, but this time she was drunk, and tired, and faintly on edge, and something about the ancient, rotting stones arrested her attention. She stopped near the gate and leaned against the iron fence, each of her leather-gloved hands clutching one of the blunt-tipped, black-painted spikes that topped the barrier. For a few seconds she stared into the tenebral gloom, trying to discern what it was that had drawn her gaze. Then, with a sudden electric chill down the spine, she saw it.
Near the back fence of the little plot was a very old, very gnarled oak tree, its trunk half-cleaved by a long-ago lightning strike, its branches weighted with fatigue, a vast hollow gaping near the ground between gray-tinged lips of bark. From behind the tree, illuminating its grotesque aspect, shone a faint white light.
Linnéa peered at the phenomenon and subjected it to silent interrogation. A lantern? A candle? A phone? Ball lightning? She never saw anyone in this cemetery, and the light was not marred by any movement-suggesting shadows.
She went to the gate, to whose metal poles was fastened a weathered sign forbidding entry after sunset, and tried it; it was open. She surmised that obedience to the sign was enforced entirely by the honor system; it was a shame her intoxication had lowered her inhibitions enough for her to conduct this dishonorable investigation. She headed for the tree, her tread hesitant, her high-heeled black boots crunching on the frozen earth. Something cold landed on her cheek—she peeled off a glove and touched the skin, but found only water. White specks began to drift down from the heavens. She refocussed her attention on the tree and found the light unchanged.
As she approached the spot, though, she noticed something odd. When she had stood at the fence, the light had appeared to shine from directly behind the trunk. Now she was twenty paces away, facing the tree from a different angle, and it still seemed to her that the glow came from directly behind. It had moved—Linnéa immediately imagined a man waiting in the shadows, holding a phone or a flashlight, keeping hidden from her but not too hidden. She groped in her purse until her fingers found the small canister of pepper spray nestled at the bottom, then gripped the weapon tightly.
Her steps were slow and measured as she closed the distance to the stooped old oak. She was ten paces away, then five, four, three, two… she stopped and leveled a piercing, suspicious gaze at the mottled, light-framed trunk. The light had not moved, and it had neither grown nor diminished in intensity. A chill breeze from the west heralded the approach of a greater gale, and the snowfall was thickening. Linnéa brushed a few white clumps from her pale brown hair.
She took the pepper spray out of her purse, clicked the safety off, and held it ready. Then gradually, cautiously, she began to creep around the tree, holding her breath, expecting every moment to see some sinister, dilapidated man crouching by the swollen roots.
No such creature appeared. Instead, as she continued, Linnéa grew more and more puzzled, as no matter how far she went the light still seemed to come from a point directly opposite her own position. Soon she stood behind the tree, at the spot from which the light had issued when she had been standing at the fence, but the light had moved a hundred and eighty degrees, now seeming to originate near the gray-lipped hollow that Linnéa knew faced the front of the graveyard.
“Think you can get away from me, hm,” she murmured. “I’ll catch you.”
She rounded the tree very quickly and fixed her eyes on the hollow.
Nothing.
But… what was…
The snow was falling at a good rate now, big wet flakes piling up on the worn tops of the tombstones. A threadbare sheet of feathery white cascaded through the air in front of her, blown in ripples and flurries by the rising wind, the clumps of frozen crystal moving at considerable speed.
In one particular spot, just in front of the hollow in the trunk, about level with Linnéa’s head, the flakes were moving more slowly, as if retarded by an invisible counterbreeze. They paused, glistened brightly as if reflecting light from a source she could not identify, then continued on their downward trail, languid, their headlong progress towards the ground arrested for a foot or so before the wind snatched them back. What resulted was an oval-shaped silhouette suspended in the air.
“What are you?” Linnéa whispered.
As she watched, entranced, the phenomenon spread, forming first a larger oval suspended beneath the first, then four twisted cylinders of floating snow, two growing from the larger oval’s top, two sprouting from its bottom. When she realized that the shape being formed was a human figure, she took a step back, and the canister of pepper spray slipped from her fingers and landed on the ground with a soft noise.
The unseen upward wind that kept the snow within the bounds of the figure strengthened until the figure filled out, forming a featureless head, a torso with two hemispherical lumps near the top, arms with fingerless hands, and legs with toeless feet. The snow-made feet rested on the ground, and the thing stood exactly level with Linnéa, swaying and shimmering as the snowstorm continued to feed it.
The light reflecting off the snowflakes within the figure strengthened, but this luminosity did not manifest independently of the flakes or outside the figure’s bounds. The clumps of snow began to join together, floating in place, sending out little translucent filaments that looked like something between silk and ice. Fingers began to grow from the hands, toes from the feet, hair from the head. Linnéa stayed very still, staring at the creature, her impulse to run fighting a strange desire to reach out a hand and touch the suspended snow.
Just as features began to etch themselves on the head’s blank front, a veil of white gossamer materialized out of the air and descended over the nascent visage. A similar material blossomed from the being’s upper chest and flowed over the rapidly solidifying body, covering arms, legs, breasts, abdomen. Soon all but the glowing white hands and feet were shrouded in a thin layer of ethereal opacity. Strands continued to sprout from the top of the head until the apparition sported a full complement of shoulder-length hair.
The upward force that had sustained the early stages of the manifestation dwindled, then vanished entirely, but the creature remained, rocking almost imperceptibly back and forth. The surrounding curtains of snow now blew through the being at full tilt, disappearing into the white expanse and coming out unaffected on the other side. The thing’s growth ceased, and Linnéa found herself looking at a woman made of icy white light, its face hidden behind a veil, its body hidden behind a gown, its hair glittering with diamantine liquidity.
It cocked its head a little, regarding Linnéa with apparent curiosity.
Then, all at once, it lost most of its light and fell to its hands and knees, its body wracked with a powerful spasm. Linnéa took another step back, but somehow her fear lessened, and she felt pity for the creature come upon her. It was now pewter-gray, the creases in its garments shining with dim silver, and it crouched nearly motionless on the snow-carpeted dirt, its head hanging.
Linnéa stepped towards it and knelt down, peering at the veil that hid its face.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, her voice quiet.
The being lifted its head until the impression formed in the veil by its nose told Linnéa that it was looking right at her. The two gazed at each other for long moments, and an odd tingling sensation ignited in Linnéa’s head, spreading down her spine and making her shiver with something that was half-warmth, half-cold.
Another spasm, less severe than the first, sent a tremor through the apparition, and it extended its right hand in the direction of Linnéa’s face.
“What’s wrong?” she said. An inexplicable tear threatened to spill from the corner of her eye. She reached out with her own hand and touched the creature’s fingers—they were solid things, and they sent a pulse of that warm-cold tingle up her arm. She held the thing’s hand in a light grip, and it curled its fingers around hers. Then she squeezed, and all at once her fingers closed on air. She withdrew her hand, confused, and after a moment poked at the ghostly digits. They were solid again.
“I suppose I have to be gentle with you,” she told the being.
It returned its hand to the ground but made no verbal reply.
“Who are you?”
It cocked its head, as it had done before the first spasm. A third quake, barely perceptible, ran through its body, and its light dwindled by the faintest measure. Linnéa studied the veil.
“Do you mind if I look beneath?” she asked the creature.
It stayed still, almost frozen, making no indication that it had understood.
“Well,” she said, “do something if you don’t want me to.”
She stretched out her hand and traced the veil with one finger. The material scarcely seemed to be there—she had no idea what sort of substance could compose it. For a few seconds, she hesitated, an obscure sense of dread tickling the back of her brain. Then she extended her other hand, grasped each lower corner between a forefinger and a thumb, and gently raised the barrier.
What greeted her was her own face, but broken, marred with great jagged cracks as if it were a porcelain statue that had been hammered into chunks and then repaired with slipshod kintsugi. The pewter-colored flesh glowed with a tarnished luminescence, the cobalt-blue eyes—a shocking escalation from her own unremarkable blue-green—leaked tears like quartz stalactites, the lines of breakage oozed trickles of dark gray fluid. The face as a whole, distorted though it was, still projected an aspect of pain, of sorrow, of irrecoverable loss.
Linnéa scrambled backwards, crabwalking away from the creature, then fell roughly in the snow. The wind had risen to quite a pitch, and the snow descended thickly, so that the thing was half-obscured even though it crouched but ten paces away from where she now sprawled. She climbed to her feet, turning as she did, closed her eyes, and rubbed the lids vigorously, breathing hard and feeling the frigidity of the night invade her lungs.
“No,” she said. “Not funny. Not that. Didn’t see that.”
She stopped, opened her eyes, and stared hard at the snow-capped gravestones in front of her.
“I’m going to turn around,” she told herself, “and I’m not going to see it.”
She turned around. The creature was still on its hands and knees by the tree, its veil cast back over its hair, its awful travesty of her own face gazing up at her with a look of reproach.
She ran. She couldn’t see far, and the cemetery was a maze, and she tripped once over a withered bunch of flowers, but the exit was fairly close, and inside a minute she was dashing out the opening and, eyes closed, grasping the gate and wrenching it shut.
“Should’ve listened to the sign,” she moaned, still holding the closed gate, as if to keep some other entity from undoing her work. “Should’ve listened to the fucking sign.”
For long moments, she stood there, nerving herself. Then she snapped her eyes open and searched the graveyard with frantic sweeps of vision.
No light. Just weathered stones and falling snow.
The old oak loomed dark and unaccompanied.
Linnéa sagged with relief, let go of the gate, and resumed the walk back to her dormitory. There had never been anything in there, she assured herself. Someone had spiked her drink at the party, and her addled brain had conjured up the apparition. She would benefit from lying down once she was in her room, to sleep off the effects of the drug and guard herself against further mental disturbance.
She had just finished constructing this story when a car skidded off the slippery road and struck her at high speed, smashing her face to pieces as it snuffed out her life.