The Woman Between the Headstones

The cemetery was the fastest way home from the late shift, and after a couple of years you stop finding graveyards spooky. It is just quiet ground and a shortcut.

I first noticed her on a warm night in spring. A woman in a long grey coat, standing a few rows off the path, head down at a headstone. Mourners are not unusual, even at night, so I nodded the way you do and kept walking.

She was there the next night. And the next. Same grave, same grey coat, same bowed head. After a week I realized I had never once seen her arrive or leave — she was simply there when I entered the gate and gone when I looked back from the far side.

The night it changed, I slowed down to read the stone she stood over, curious who she came for. As I got close she lifted her head, slowly, and looked directly at me. Her face was calm and completely ordinary, which was somehow worse than any monster would have been. She held my eyes for what felt like a full minute. Then she looked back down at the grave.

I did not run. I walked, fast, and did not look back until the gate. When I did, the row was empty.

The next day, in daylight, I found the grave. The name meant nothing to me. But the dates did the math I did not want to do: the woman buried there had died at exactly the age I was that year. I take the long way home now, along the road, under the streetlights.