No…He was beckoning her. She followed, toward the only place the Master could meet her.

The founders’ graveyard sat bathed in a scintillant sheen; a glow akin to freshly jostled coals. Drifting nearer to it now, Berthe could see fully (for her entire spirt was now soaked with sight) that the vault in the knoll once more sat open, but its interior held none of the hopeless darkness she’d seen on that fine spring afternoon so many years ago. Tonight, the vault was alight, a roaring furnace. Smoke billowed out of the angled entrance like a black river flowing skyward. The vault mouth seethed with flames of crimson and orange and blue.

Berthe then saw him. He was standing on what she first took to be a platform of black marble, but the closer she went it became plain that the Master was waiting for her at the head of a long black stairway of shimmering black stone. The stairs cut a zig-zag path down deep into the Earth, into the sunken kingdom where the Master held dominion.

And she was going to be with him completely, at long last.

The Master opened his arms to her. He was a silhouette against the backdrop of flame.

Berthe had nearly reached him, when a second figure leapt out onto the crossroads.

Confusion warbled Berthe’s flight. She became momentarily disoriented.

It was the opportunity the Abban boy had been praying for. Screaming a quote from Scripture, he swung at the air. Something glinted in his fist. Too late, Berthe discovered that it was a nail, newly forged by the Abban boy’s father.

Berthe, still a novice at travelling without her body, did not know how to resist him.

He drove the nail into the trunk of an ash tree that grew by the crossroads’ edge. Berthe found herself pinioned. The airy feeling that had enveloped her was pressed out. She was now smothered, stifled. The Abban boy then carved his cherished symbol of protection into the bark of the ash.

In an instant, the subterranean fire was extinguished, the vault door was shut and sealed. The Master was gone.

VI.

Berthe remained outside of her body, outside of time, but trapped. The nail rusted and the Abban family died out. Still, Berthe remained.

Her voiceless beckoning to the Master proved useless. Yet she remained.

There was nothing else for Berthe to do but strive to somehow touch that rare loner who might wander this forlorn path. Most passersby would perceive her Call as nothing more than a chill running down their spine, a symptom of daring to visit a haunted place.