Tap, tap, tap. 

I stirred. 

Tap, tap, tap. 

I sat up in my bed.

          “Jjjaaakkee!”  Tess called from below my window.

          “Woah!”  I rubbed my head.  I’d had that dream four times in the last month.  Each time I had it I was pulled farther into the earth.  Something inside of me told me that if I had it again the earth just might open and swallow me up.

          “Jjjjaaaakkkee!”

          I opened my bay window and called down to the same cousin from my dream.  “I’ll be right there.”

          Besides being my cousin, Tess has lived across the street from me all of our lives.  We are four months apart…which makes us both thirteen.  We live in the country but that doesn’t mean we don’t have our share of excitement.  We make an amusing combination.  I’m tall for my age with sandy hair and hazel eyes.  Tess’ thin with brown hair and deep blue eyes.  I tease her about being the last girl left in our class to develop.  This never amuses her.

          I live on a vineyard and she lives in a walnut orchard.  We both have large, two-story houses.  Mine overlooks our huge pond.  About a mile or so down the street is the cemetery from my dreams.

          Row out on our lake, heading to the spillway, where the south fork of the Mokelomne River feeds into the lake, I tell her about my dream.

          “I had that dream again.  The one about the undead attacking us.”  I said.

          “How many times does that make it?”  She counts on her fingers.  “Four right?  Isn’t it four?”

          “Four!  It can’t be one more.”  I stopped rowing.

          Tess shook her head.  “It absolutely can’t be one more.  No way.  Or you’re a goner!”

          Tess dreamed that she was going to get into a car accident five times.  The day after the fifth time she had the dream she was in a car accident so now she has this theory.

          “Yeah, so you say.  I just don’t like the dream.”  I started rowing again.  The summer air from just a week ago was now crisp.  The shadows were longer.

          “It could just be that you’re nervous because of the people in your guesthouse.”  Tess took the ores and rowed for a while.

          She was talking about my dad’s cousin and his wife who were staying with us for a while.  I never knew they were still alive until they showed up last week.  Dad said they where old when he was a kid.  He told me that they have a house deep in the Massachusetts woods and that when he used to visit them as a kid he heard voices and saw strange things.  He said he thought that it was haunted.  He was excited to have them visit so she could ask them about it.  Their names were Grace and Ben.  They smelled like mothballs.

          “Nah, they seem harmful enough.”  I said.

          “The ghost thing…maybe it bugged you and triggered your dream.”

          “I thought you lived by your five times theory.”

          “It’s just a theory,”  Tess said as she grounded the boat and we hopped out.  “Let’s go to the cemetery and find out.”

          She knew I hated it there…but she always insisted.  She loved charting old stones.  Tess is a girl of many interests…graveyards is her weirdest.

          “Let’s go.”  She said and was running through the vineyard before I could stop her.

          “Tess!  Come on.  Let’s just fish.”  I called but it was too late.  I sighed and followed my friend through the vineyard, under the fence to the Simeone Winery property and then down Valley Road to Steiner Road.  We lived on Steiner Road but way up.  This way cut off about a half a mile.

          “Tess!”  I called

          “Don’t be such a wimp.”  She looked back at me, finally stopping to let me catch up.

          Tess is the spunkiest and most stubborn girl I know.   She also has about a zillion interests…mysteries, ghosts and graveyards topping the list.  She can’t resist a good mystery, reading or living one, and she can’t pass up a graveyard.  Well, actually there’s one graveyard she has to pass up.

          See, beyond the “Valley Cemetery” she does her gravestone rubbings.  Gravestone rubbings are when you talk a piece of paper and rub it with a pastel or wax crayon to get the words off.  She likes to find out whom the people are and if they have any living relatives.  Anyway, in back of the Valley Cemetery and through a mangle of live oaks and manzanita there’s another, older, cemetery – only we’re not allowed to go to it.

          Once upon a time, the two cemeteries were actually one large cemetery.  In the 1950’s they discovered that the middle part was a sacred Indian burial ground before it was a cemetery for pioneers.  The government took it over from the community and then the Native Americans took it over from the government.

          They were supposed to dig up the graves and move the people.  Only my dad said that they didn’t actually go to the trouble, or expense of digging up the graves – that they only moved the headstones.  Then they moved this really old, scary man to the huge house that used to be a mausoleum to guard the property.

          Tess says its haunted.  She would die, no pun intended, to get rubbings from the moved headstones that sit across the field and behind a very large, very locked gate.

          Inside the gate of the Valley Cemetery was very different than in my dreams.  There was no fog, no looming darkness and no crunching leaves.  The sun was bright in the cloudless morning sky.  The air was crisp – not choking.  And the fallen fall leaves were soggy with dew.

          I followed Tess as we made our way to her first usually spot.  A boy named Johnny who had died in 1703.  He was the earliest grave here.  We wondered why a boy named Johnny was in this part of Northern California in 1703.

          “Hello, Jo…”  Tess stopped in mid-sentence.  “Did you hear that?”

          “What?”  Then I did hear something.  A gravely, grinding noise coming from the forbidden burial ground.  “What is it?”

          Tess slowly hopped the tombstones to move closer to the noise.

          “Let’s just go,”  I said.

          “Shhhh,” she motioned me to follow her.

          “Great, here we go again.”  I picked up a stick and begin hopping stones towards the noise.

          “Look,” Tess pointed to the old abandoned house.  There was a flicker of light coming from one of the dust-covered windows.  It was hard to see in the daylight but the grove was shaded by a tangley forest of overgrown trees and unmaintained brush.

          A shadow dashed from the burial ground to the rusted gate of the second cemetery.  “Something’s there.”  I whispered.  “Let’s go.”

          Tess dropped to her stomach and wiggled under a break in the fence.  “Come on.”

          “Not go there!”  I said.  “Go home.  Let’s go home.”

          It was too late, Tess was already disappearing into the shadows.  I sighed and, once again, followed her.

          For the past fourteen years Tess had been getting me into trouble.  I had a feeling that this was going to be no different.

          The shadow moved again.  I glanced at the house.  The light was gone.  When I looked back so was the shadow.

          I caught up to Tess.  “Whoever it was is gone.  Come on, we’re not supposed to be over here.”

          Tess was at the fence to the oldest part of the cemetery.  “But we can be in there,” she said.

          “Technically, but no one ever goes there because you have to pass through here first.”  I reasoned.

          “Whoever belonged to that shadow was here.”

 I was getting more than a little nervous.  “Let’s go fishing or shoot some hoops or something.”

“Jake, we can’t pass this up.  We’re here.  In fourteen years we’ve never been here.”  Her eyes sparkled with excitement.

I shivered.  The crisp air was chilly under the shade of this forest.  The earth was soft under my feet.  For the first time I looked around and saw old wooden markers, circles of stones and piles of dully-colored pebbles scattered about the ground.

“This place is creepy.”  I said as I followed Tess to the rusty gate.

The gate was rusted shut from years of neglect so we climbed it.  I did not feel better to be on this other side of the fence.

“Wow!”  Tess exclaimed as she moved to the first headstone.  “Look at this date, 1730.”  She got out her paper and crayon.  “I don’t have a date this early from California.  I didn’t even know anyone but Native Americans were in California in 1730.

“Did you not sit behind me in fourth grade…here…in California?  You know, the year that we studied about Father Serra and his missions being set up in 1769.  Did you think he just materialized?”  I quipped.

“Oh yeah.  And that Cabrillo guy, didn’t he sail to San Diego in the 1540’s or something.”  She went to another headstone.  “Maybe there are more.”

“His last name’s Tilley, like yours and my mom’s, Jake.”  Tess was getting excited.  I could hear it in her voice.  “Maybe he’s related to us.”

“Along with the thousands of other Tilley’s here and all over the world.  Not really an uncommon name, you know.”

I must admit that the thought intrigued me as well.  So much so that I almost forget that I was supposed to be afraid to be in this part of the cemetery.

A breeze had begun to blow but it didn’t rustle the trees.  That’s weird, I thought.

          “Hey, Jake, look at this.”  Tess was not hovered over a headstone  but rather looking at something moving along the soggy dirt.

          Tess Smith’s hobby passion number 2 – bug collecting.  She picked up a stick and let a black beetle with red spots climb aboard.

          She held the stick out to me.  “Do you know what this is?”

          “A bug,” I smiled.

          “No, an American burying beetle,” she said engrossed in the bug

          The breeze grew stronger, but the trees still weren’t moving.  I remembered that I was scared.  “Can we go now?  You can bring your new friend.”  I asked.

          “You don’t get it.  This is a rare, endangered bug that is only found on the east coast – here and in Canada.  The ground is right for it.  They like soft ground to dig in – usually under forests.  They don’t like light.  How’d you get here little guy?”  She asked the bug.

          Tess pulled a jar out of the pack she usually carries.  It was a baby food jar with ice pick holes in the lid.  She dropped the beetle in and then tucked it away.

          I turned to go back to the gate when it caught my eye.  A cave of sorts with an opening carved out of a large granite bolder.  It looked carved, but then it looked like maybe it was natural too.

          “Hey Tess?”  She looked up.  “Come look at this.”

          Her eyes followed my gaze.  “Whoa, a cave, how cool.  Let’s explore it.”

          I grabbed her arm.  I am the guy after all.  I am the guy and I’m older.  It’s my job to take care of my younger friends – especially this one who has a habit of getting into trouble!

          “We’d better have a look at the county maps first.  What if it is an abandoned gold mine – with deep pits and decaying rooms.

          The valley we live in is about five miles from California Highway 49 smack dab in the center of gold country.  Our fields, and towns, are littered with dangerous old mines and pits and holes that are way unsafe.  Some of them are natural, some were dug by miners in the 1840’s and were reinforced by boards and beams that are rotting and falling apart making them more than a little dangerous.

          As we came nearer, I realized what an awesome cave it was.  Definitely not manmade because it was granite as far as we could see inside.   We could also hear running water.

          “I bet there’s one of those underground granite lakes inside there,”  I said.

          Tess cupped her hands and called inside.  “Hellloooo.”

          Tess could be a real geek sometimes.

          “Hellloooo.”  She did it again.

          “Let’s go,” I said.

          Then, from inside the came, a low screech pierced the air.

          We stared at each other.

          “I’ve never heard anything like that before.”  Tess whispered.  “A coyote,  maybe.”

          I swallowed.  “That doesn’t sound like any coyote I’ve ever heard of.”  Now I was thinking about my dream again.  Why did she have to mention coyote?

          It called again.  A long, low screech echoed out from the depths of the cave.

          We exchanged glances.  What could it be?  A hurt dog?  A bird?

          “It must almost be time for lunch.”  Tess said quietly.  “Maybe we should go home.”

          “Yeah.  Probably.”  I turned to head toward the gate.  But stopped when I heard a sort of fluttering noise.  From beyond the cave.  It grew louder and louder. 

          I looked up at the sky as Tess pulled me down.  “Don’t!”  I hit the ground as a large shadow swooped over us.  It was angry, with glowing red eyes and glistening pointed teeth.  It hissed as it began its attack.

Go to Chapter 3