“Is…is he going to be okay?” I’m not really concerned about Tyler’s welfare—I’m not—but I’d expected him to look more like, well, himself. A great big bear of a teenage boy, briefly bedridden, gathering the strength to jump right back into his life. Not this wasted bundle of bones and sickness.

  “That depends on how you measure ‘okay,’ I suppose.” The owner of the voice is a middle aged woman in pale pink scrubs. She takes the flowers from my hands, apparently able to sense that I can’t bring myself to move. “Is he going to live? At this point, the prognosis is good. His folks have paid for the very best care, and he’s got a strong will. He’s stubborn. Stubbornness counts for a lot in cases like these. But is he ever going to walk again? Throw a pass or kick a ball or anything like that? No, I don’t think that’s likely.”

  “Oh.” I pause then, frowning. “Should you be telling me this?”

  “A pretty little thing like you only sneaks into a hospital with a bunch of flowers for two reasons: love or hate. I read the papers. I know which one it is.” The nurse looks over her shoulder at me as she sets my roses down amongst the rest. “She won’t rest any easier if you kill him, and neither will you. Are you sticking to the rules? Do you drive her home when she asks you to?”

  My throat is a thin straw through which only air can pass. I squeak a few times, trying to speak, and finally settle for a nod.

  “That’s good. Have you tried to kiss her?”

  I’ve dreamt about it. That isn’t the same thing. I shake my head.

  The nurse nods approvingly. “That’s good. That’s real good. It’s not safe for a girl like you to be kissing a girl like her. There are consequences, when the living love the dead. Now I’m going to ask you one more question, and I’ll thank you to find your voice, since your answer is going to determine whether or not I call for security. I’m assuming you came here to kill this boy. You can go ahead and correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s not my question. Are you still planning to try?”

  “N-no, ma’am,” I manage. “He shouldn’t be alive when Jenny’s not, but it’s not my place to change that. I guess the worst thing I can do to him is leave him alive.”

  “Good girl.” She smiles at me, and then glances meaningfully to the clock above the door. “You’d better hurry if you want to pick her up on time.”

  I want to stay and ask her what she knows about ghosts, how she understands my arrangement with Jenny…who she’s been driving home. But she’s right; the sun will be down soon, and if I want to make it to the cemetery, I need to go, and I don’t really want to be here, in this room where time is rotting on the vine. So I turn and run, leaving the hospital, leaving Tyler to his own living hell, and it’s not until Jenny is sliding into her place beside me that I really wonder what that nurse knew, or why she asked if I’d been trying to kiss my girl.

  I go back to the hospital the next day. The nurse I met in Tyler’s room isn’t there.

  Somehow, that’s not really a surprise.

  SEPTEMBER

  School starts up again in an explosion of cheerleaders and football players wearing orange and green uniforms and smiles like they just won the universal lottery. It’s freshmen slinking in the halls and sophomores seeming suddenly easy in their skins, it’s juniors with their chests puffed up with upperclassman pride and seniors smiling beatifically, rulers of their small, time-delineated kingdom. It’s all so stupid, and there was a time when I would have loved it. I would have been walking in formation with the rest of the cheerleaders, Jenny by my side, and we would have been queens of the world. Homecoming last year was supposed to be our grand declaration of love, and by now, everyone would have been used to the idea that we were together. We could have had one perfect year of high school, me and Jenny, Jenny and me.

  Instead, I’m just another nobody at the edge of the crowd, wondering why this ever seemed to matter. All the memorials to Jenny are gone, and there’s a whole new class of freshmen who never knew her, and will never know that they’re supposed to miss her. Summer has restored the campus, sweeping its ghosts away, and now I’m the only one who’s haunted.

  I don’t know how long I can live like this.

  I’m still dwelling on that when it comes time to pick Jenny up again; she slides into the car, all vanilla and moonlight, and asks, “Well? How’s senior year?”

  She still loves the idea of the future we crafted for ourselves, back when we were lying on our backs behind the tumbling mats, hands entangled, and both of us were breathing. I shake my head and start the car. “Same shit, different semester,” I say. And then, because the question is burning me, I ask, “Why am I not allowed to kiss you?”

  Jenny is silent.

  “I mean, I get to drive you home. I know you’re solid. I’ve touched your hands and seen you hold things. So why can’t I kiss you? What makes it so wrong to want to kiss my girlfriend?”

  “I’m dead, Leigh.” Her voice is the whispering of wind among the gravestones, barely audible, impossible to ignore.

  “So what? You’re still my girl. I’m not giving up on you.”

  “I’m dead, and you’re not.”

  I’ve thought about changing that so many times. “And?”

  “And if I kissed you, it would…” Jenny sighs. “Everything dies, Leigh. Everything. But some things make you die faster.”

  “Like kissing dead girls?”

  “Like kissing dead girls.” Jenny reaches over and touches my hand, gentle as a promise, cruel as a prayer. “Homecoming is next month. I’ve been buried for almost a year. Don’t you think it’s time you let me go?”

  I don’t answer her because that question is every answer I’ve been seeking for the last eleven months. “I think it’s time that something changed, yeah,” I say, and we drive on.

  OCTOBER

  My tuxedo still fits. Grief either bulks you up or slims you down, and I guess I’ve gone for the latter—too many days when I couldn’t bring myself to eat, too many nights spent crying until I threw up. It was a little snug when I wore it the first time and now it’s a little loose, but I look okay. I think Jenny will appreciate it.

  “Are you going to homecoming?” asks Mom when she sees me coming down the stairs. She sounds surprised and maybe a little hopeful, like this is a sign that things are changing for the better.

  “Yeah.” Homecoming isn’t tonight—it’s always on a Saturday, and it’s only Monday now—but this is the anniversary of Jenny’s death, and I don’t feel like correcting my mother. I finish descending the stairs and press a kiss against her cheek, sweeter than a note left on my dresser, crueler than an explanation. I don’t think there’s any way to explain what I’ve decided to do. “Don’t wait up, okay?”

  “I won’t,” she says, relief plain on her face. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

  “It’s a surprise.” My new boutonniere is already pinned to the front of my tuxedo. I figure Jenny doesn’t need a corsage—she still has hers from last year—but I bought her daisies, just to make the symbolism clear.

  “Have fun tonight.”

  “I will.” I should feel bad, I know I should, but I can’t. There’s nothing for me here, and I still have to keep my promise. I have to finish driving Jenny home.

  I pull up to the cemetery just as the sun is starting to go down, and Jenny’s there, my Jenny, in her dress like moonlight. She gasps a little when I get out of the car and she sees me in my tuxedo. That’s what I was hoping for, that moment of shock, when she’s too busy staring to react as I stride toward her, the daisies held out in my hand.

  “These are for you,” I say, pressing them into her hands. She takes them—she’s solid, she’s solid, because she’s holding the flowers—and is still looking at them when I lean forward and press my lips to hers.

  She still tastes like vanilla lip gloss, but there’s something else there, something dark and sad and dry as dust. She pulls back, eyes wide and filled with dismay. “Do you know what you’ve done?” she demands, and I do know, I do know what I’ve done.

  So I smile and say, “Too late now,” and this time when I kiss her, she doesn’t pull away. We’ll get into the car soon; I’ll drive her home, and this time, when whatever happens, happens, I won’t survive. That’s all right. That’s what I wanted.

  I made her a promise, after all. I promised that I’d get her all the way home.

  * * *

  Jenny, darling Jenny, there is no need to explain,

  I have seen your lonely graveside, I have waited in the rain,

  And I’ll do as much for my true love as any lover known—

  Though my family will grieve me, I’ll be driving Jenny home.

  On…The Unquiet Grave

  The Unquiet Grave is Child Ballad 78, Roud #51. Child wrote that, like Sweet William’s Ghost, it sprang from the belief that excessive grieving for the dead would disturb their repose.

  Child quotes many traditions that believed too many tears or too much mourning by the living would hurt the dead. In Scotland there is a story where a sister cried night after night for her brother. He finally appeared and reprimanded her for the “extravagance” of her sorrow and its “rebellion” against the decrees of Providence. He told her that every tear made him cold and weighed him down. Child also cites a story in the Grimm records of a child coming to its mother and asking her to stop her tears because they make him wet and he cannot sleep. She stops and he later returns to inform her he’s now dry and at peace.

  In what is the strictest ban against grief, Child wrote that the ancient Persians forbid weeping for the dead. It was against the express command of the Almighty and as such was a heinous sin and caused the dead to be trapped in a river, where they constantly experienced the “agony” of drowning.

  The plot of the ballad has someone (male or female) mourn on the grave of their love for a year and a day. At the end of that time, the dead love appears and asks why they are not being allowed to rest. The mourner requests a kiss good-bye to which the corpse replies that their breath smells foul and if you kiss me you will soon join me. (1)

  The Unquiet Grave has been sung by the British folk band Lau, by Ween, as well as by Joan Baez, Kate Rusby, Bobby McMillon, and The Dubliners. Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote several arrangements for the song.

  1) Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads Vol. 2. Mineola: Dover, 2003.

  HOLLOW IS THE HEART

  By

  Simon R. Green

  Bradford-on-Avon is an old town, in an old country. Sick and feverish with centuries of history. And some things older than history. Older, and more foul.

  My name is Jason Grant, and if there were any justice in this world, you’d already know my name. My books would be everywhere, my name on everyone’s lips, and my face on all the chat shows. Instead, I make a precarious living researching dubious articles for partwork magazines, and generally hacking it out for pitiful returns. I grub about for work wherever I can find it, cranking it out by the yard to pay the bills. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything just to satisfy my soul.

  I did write a whole bunch of novels and screenplays, but nobody wanted them. I was a journalist, once, doing my bit for a small but respected local paper, the Wiltshire Record and News. But that was then, and this is now. I finally have a story worth the telling. A story to prise open the eyes of the world, and make them see things in a whole new way if only I dared submit it. It has been made very clear to me that silence and obscurity are the price of my survival. But I’m not sure I care anymore.

  It all started when I made one last attempt to get my old job back.

  I sat in the outer office of the Wiltshire Record and News, waiting to see the editor. Being calm and quiet and not making any trouble, playing the part of the prodigal son and the penitent return. Returned to the scene of my crime, like a dog to its vomit, to beg a few crumbs from the editor’s table because my cupboard was bare, and I was getting hungry. My old boss, Samantha Walsh: editor, publisher and Conscience in Chief of the local weekly rag. There was no way in hell she was ever going to give me my old job back, I knew that. But if I could just get my foot in the door, hold her attention with some fast talking... I might yet walk out of here with a story assignment. Do a good enough job, and it could lead to regular work. And I wanted that.

  Not a staff position, obviously, but a local stringer with local connections is always going to be a useful asset. The odds were stacked against me. I couldn’t have blotted my copybook more thoroughly the last time I was here if I’d pissed in the printer’s ink.

  I sat politely on my fiendishly uncomfortable visitor’s chair and glowered at the clock on the wall. The editor was deliberately keeping me waiting, to make sure I understood my place in the scheme of things. That I was not needed, or even welcome. Everywhere I looked in the outer office, something old and familiar looked back at me. It was as though I’d never been away. The same dreary old fittings and furnishings, cheap but durable. The carpet worn thin from people pacing up and down as they waited to be summoned into the inner sanctum to learn their fate. Dusty plastic venetian blinds at the windows, cutting the sunshine into strips. The same framed front pages proudly displayed on the walls; names and faces and news from a time when people actually read the paper to learn what they needed to know. Significant stories and excited headlines, forgotten moments from the county’s past, going all the way back to the First World War

  I sat forward in my chair and stared at the floor. So I wouldn’t have to look at anything else. There had been a time... when this had felt like home.

  There’s nothing like visiting an old haunt to make you feel old and unwanted. The surroundings might not have changed, but I had. I look back at the person I was then, and I barely recognise him. I looked at my reflection in the long mirror on the other side of the room. A man in his late thirties who looked older. Thinning hair and a hard-used face, more than a little scruffy. I should have shaved before I came out or at least found the time to force a comb through my hair. But it had been a long time since anyone cared what I looked like, including me.

  The door to the inner office opened suddenly, and the editor glared at me. As though I was the one who’d kept her waiting. She nodded briefly as though she didn’t trust herself to speak, then turned around and stomped back to sit behind her editor’s desk. Her place of power. Leaving me to trail into the inner office after her and shut the door very quietly and politely behind me. Being careful not to slouch. She always used to yell at me when she caught me slouching. There was a time I could have got away with it, but not now. I sat down on the bare wooden chair set out before her desk piled high, as always, with papers overflowing her In and Out trays. She just sat there and waited for me to speak. Because, after all, I was the one who wanted something from her.

  Samantha Walsh was middle-aged with prematurely grey hair and deep lines etched around her eyes and mouth. She dressed neatly and conservatively, in a way that didn’t so much ignore fashion as bypass it completely. The ultimate authority figure, the iron hand in the iron glove. Who’d spent so much time occupying the moral high ground, it was a wonder she didn’t get nose bleeds from the altitude. I was amazed she could even see us poor mortals down below. The editor fixed me with her usual steely gaze, and I gave her my best respectful smile.

  “Hello, Sam. Been a while, hasn’t it...?”

  “It’s Ms. Walsh to you, Grant, and don’t you forget it. You have no friends here. And sit up straight. You make the place look untidy.”

  So that was how it was going to be. I sat up straighter, squared my shoulders, and did my best to look like a professional. The editor sniffed as though reluctantly giving me credit for trying.

  “All right, Grant. I read your e-mail. You haven’t forgotten how to grab a reader’s attention, I’ll give you that. So against all my better judgment, I’ll admit I’m intrigued. Hit me with your proposal, but make it quick and succinct. I’ve got a paper to run and a deadline to meet. Just because we’re a weekly, it doesn’t mean I’ve got time to waste on the likes of you.”

  “You’ll like this one,” I said, doing my best to sound confident. “I’ve got a new local take on a very old legend. A story that used to be on everyone’s lips, in this town and around, that no one has talked about in centuries. I stumbled across this particular piece of local history while looking for something else, which is always the way. I was doing research on a story for Hidden Worldz magazine. A story that will not be appearing because the magazine had the bad manners to fold before I could hand it in. Or get paid. Do you remember the old story of the Hollow Women?”

  “Refresh my memory,” said the editor. Which was her way of saying that she didn’t, but was prepared to listen.

  “Women who can only be seen, and only appear to have substance, from the front. If you look at them from the back, they’re just an empty, hollow husk. A shell of a woman, no depth to her at all. The old legend tells how they prey on young, unattached men. They win the men’s hearts and then break them, seduce them and make a child with them to continue their own kind... and then disappear. Always girl children... never been a Hollow Man. These women were predators, giving every appearance of being human. But inside they were empty, emotionless, inhuman.

  “Obviously, this was designed as a moral warning for young men back then. Don’t go off with strange young women or there might be unfortunate consequences. Avoid shallow types, stick with a real woman and make a commitment to home and family.”

  “Funny how, in these old stories, it’s always the men who have to be warned, and the women who are presented as the villains of the piece,” said the editor.