"Yes," I said, straining to extract the pictures of the end of his life. He was so fresh, so recently translated into this lump of flesh that could neither act nor reason. I saw the darkness around him, the tombstones, everything like it was now: the cold, the rough ground, the upturned earth. "Oh, it hurts! Oh, it hurts! My head!" And the hole coming at me, couldn't throw out my hands to take the fall, grayness… blackness.

I was close to that blackness myself when Tolliver hauled me up and braced me against him.

"Here, open your mouth," he said, and then he repeated it. "Open!"

I parted my lips, and he pushed a piece of peppermint into my mouth.

"Come on, you have to have some sugar," he said, and his voice was sharp and commanding.

He was right. We'd found that out, by trial and error. I made myself suck on the candy, and in a few minutes I felt better. Next came a butterscotch.

"It's never been this bad," I said, my voice weak. "I guess it's because he's so new." I was worried I couldn't make it across the cemetery back to our car without a lot of help from Tolliver.

"He's absolutely gone, right? That… who stopped you—wasn't him? I did think I saw a beard."

Every now and then, we'd found a soul attached to a body. That was rare, and until this night I had thought that would be the eeriest thing we could find. Now we knew there was more.

"Clyde Nunley's soul's gone," I said, not willing to commit myself further than that. "And we should be, too." I gathered myself to make the attempt.

"Yeah," Tolliver said. "We got to get out of here."

I paused, halfway to my feet. "But we'll be leaving him by himself."

"He's been by himself for a hundred years," Tolliver said, not pretending he didn't understand. "He'll have to be by himself for a while longer. For all we know, maybe he's got company."

"Does this qualify as the strangest conversation we've ever had?"

"I think so."

"I couldn't have anyone else but you here, no one else would understand," I said. "I'm so glad you saw him, too."

"And that's never happened before, right? You've never mentioned anything like that."

"Never. I've known when souls were still attached to the body, and I've wondered if those would be ghosts if they didn't detach. I've always wondered if I would see a ghost sometime. I've always been a little disappointed that I haven't, in a way. Oh my God, Tolliver. He saved me from falling right into that grave on top of the corpse. The first time I see a ghost, and he saved me."

"Were you scared?"