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Back Gallows Hill Save as PDF
Chapters (45)
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A man stepped out behind the woman. His thin face was sagging and gaunt and tallowy. He’d lost the jacket from his gray suit, and the shirt was stained and tearing at the seams.

Andrew said their graves at the cemetery had been dug up. The bodies removed.

It wasn’t vandalism.

Margot’s face was wet. She hadn’t realized she was crying until salty tears dripped from her chin. Even in death, the hill wasn’t going to let her parents go.

Her mother, Maria, moved first. Swollen ankles shuffled her closer. Arms rose, dirt-caked fingernails reaching for Margot’s face.

“I’m sorry.” Margot closed her eyes as a sob broke out of her. She wasn’t going to run. And she wasn’t going to fight. She couldn’t. Not anymore. This night had extracted more from her than she’d thought she was capable of giving. More than she could endure. She was done.

Spongy, cold fingertips touched Margot’s throat. She quivered but didn’t recoil as she waited for the bite of nails digging into her flesh.

It didn’t come. Her mother’s thumb trailed over her jaw, wiping back the tears.

Margot keeled over, howling cries breaking out of her. She hadn’t cried during their funeral. But she made up for it now. The small traces of what she knew about them combined into something achingly bittersweet. How the curse had chained them to the hill. What they’d sacrificed in sending her away. How, even now, they were denied peace. Those thoughts mingled with the pain forged through years of loneliness, years of believing she hadn’t been wanted, until she couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t do anything except wail.

Arms encircled her, holding her up. They were as cold as the grave. Her mother was solid in the wrong ways and soft in the wrong places. She smelled of mildew and fetid water and formaldehyde and rot.

A second set of arms moved around her, stiff, too heavy. These corpses were wrong. Bad, Witchety would have called them. But Margot leaned into them, clinging to them, and in that moment, she had never wanted anything more.

Faint panting sounds echoed from her feet. Clementine, the golden retriever, paced around them.

Stiff, clammy fingers trailed over Margot’s hair. Her mother pulled away first, and Margot tried to hold her there, to not let her go, but when her father also released his grasp Margot raised her head to look at them.

Their broken, sallow faces could not even smile at her. Their lips had been sewn shut. That was wrong, Margot knew; she’d seen them in the viewing room. The mortician had wired their jaws closed, and he’d tried to stitch the eyes shut as well, but he hadn’t sewn their lips. That was only for the convicts, the ones who had been hung.